We had someone on the inside at Cannes. The other leaders didn't listen to her, but it's still pretty cool. More after the jump. Is there still a jump?
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/...
Cristina Kirchner, whose country looked a lot like Greece exactly nine years and eleven months ago, told a group of plutocrats at a G-20 side meeting that the world needed "a serious capitalism":
What we're living through today, gentlemen, isn't capitalism. This is total financial anarchocapitalism, where nobody controls anybody.
Argentina's December 2001 financial meltdown, which certainly differed in important respects from Greece's current situation but looks pretty similar at street level, was resolved by default: the interim presidents, first Rodriguez Saa and then Duhalde, stopped paying the foreign private debt and unpegged the peso from the dollar. It was a lot easier than Greece leaving the Eurozone--Argentina, after all, had a currency of its own--but it was still plenty traumatic for several years. But Argentina recovered, buoyed by high commodity prices (I'm not sure if that has any relevance to Greece, unfortunately) and the willingness of ordinary Argentines to endure macroeconomic hardship once they had the real assurance that their sacrifices weren't ending up in the pockets of foreign creditors. Today's Argentina has some severe social problems, but its economic problems are entirely manageable for the first time in recent or even not-so-recent history.
So Cristina Kirchner, who was just re-elected with a 53% majority against a field of miscellaneous critics (she's too radical, she's unconcerned with the poor, she's an authoritarian, she's too weak--really something for everyone), has some credibility even if the major G-20 leaders don't recognize it. (Interestingly, our own President recognized it, telling Sarkozy that the two of them had a lot to learn from Kirchner's recent re-election victory.)
From La Nacion, by no means a pro-Kirchner newspaper:
The President had abundant criticisms for European leaders who participated in the summit, like Angela Merkel of Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who are betting on spending cuts to resolve the debt crisis lashing Greece. "If we keep making 'adjustment' plans then someone has to tell me how we're going to grow the economy if there's no consumption," asked Kirchner. According to the Argentine delegation, none of the European leaders responded to her during the deliberations.
Later, during the gala dinner, Kirchner told Sarkozy that Argentina wouldn't support a tax on financial transactions--which Argentina surely wants--unless tax havens were eliminated. And she derided G-20 hand-wringing about rising commodity prices, telling the French agriculture minister that such concerns missed the point: "The real problem is the lack of regulation of world financial markers, not commodities." After all--and this is your diarist speaking--it's not straight supply-and-demand that's driving commodity prices, it's financial speculation.
Closing quote (again, this is Kirchner speaking to the assembled leaders):
For three years we've tried certain medicines and certain doctors, and the patient keeps getting sicker. Shouldn't we change doctors, change medicines, and try a new treatment?
That's why I'm a Kirchnerista.