Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Perche' l'Iraq si e l'Argentina no...

Sono completamente favorevole a cancellare i debiti Irakeni (ci mancherebbe
altro!)  Ma se l'idea e' che il popolo non deve ripagare i debiti del
dittatore, che dire del debito argentino, preso tutto durante
la dittatura?   Che dire del debito dei paesi Africani, o della Russia?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4824800-103677,00.html
Why the US wants Iraq's debts cancelled - and Argentina's paid in full
The Guardian (Londdon)   Tuesday December 23, 2003
        Naomi Klein
Contrary to predictions, the doors of Old Europe weren't slammed in James 
Baker's face as he asked forgiveness for Iraq's foreign debt last week. 
Germany and France appear to have signed on, and Russia is softening.
In the days leading up to Baker's drop-the-debt tour, there was virtual 
consensus that the former US secretary of state had been sabotaged by 
deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, whose move to shut out 
"non-coalition" partners from reconstruction contracts in Iraq of $18.6bn 
seemed designed to make Baker look a hypocrite.
Only now it turns out that Wolfowitz may not have been undermining Baker, 
but rather acting as his enforcer. He showed up with a big stick to point 
out "the threat of economic exclusion from Iraq's potential $500bn 
reconstruction" just as Baker was about to speak softly.
The Iraqi people "should not be saddled with the debt of a brutal regime", 
said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. No argument here. But when I 
heard about Baker's "noble mission", as George Bush described it, I 
couldn't help thinking about an under-reported story earlier this month. 
On December 4, the Miami Herald published excerpts from a state department 
transcript of a meeting on October 7 1976 between Henry Kissinger, then 
secretary of state under Gerald Ford, and Admiral Csar Augusto Guzzetti, 
Argentina's then foreign minister under the military dictatorship.
It was the height of Argentina's dirty war to destroy the "Marxist threat" 
by systematically torturing and killing not only armed guerrillas, but 
also peaceful union organisers, student activists and their friends, 
families and sympathisers. By the end of the dictatorship, approximately 
30,000 people had been "disappeared".
At the time of the meeting, at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, much of 
Argentina's left had already been erased, and news of bodies washing up on 
the banks of the Rio de la Plata was drawing increasingly urgent calls for 
sanctions. Yet the transcript of the meeting reveals that the US 
government not only knew about the disappearances, it openly approved of 
them.
Guzzetti reports to Kissinger on "good results in the last four months. 
The terrorist organisations have been dismantled". Kissinger states: "Our 
basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed... What is not 
understood in the US is that you have a civil war. We read about human 
rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed, the better."
And here is where Mr Baker's present-day mission becomes relevant. 
Kissinger moves on to the topic of loans, encouraging Guzzetti to apply 
for as much foreign assistance as possible before Argentina's "human 
rights problem" ties US hands. "There are two loans in the bank," 
Kissinger says, referring to the Inter-American Development Bank. "We have 
no intention of voting against them ... We would like your economic 
programme to succeed and will do our best to help you."
The World Bank estimates that roughly $10bn of the money borrowed by the 
generals went on military purchases, including the concentration camps 
from which thousands never emerged, and hardware for the Falklands war. It 
also went into numbered Swiss accounts, a sum impossible to track because 
the generals destroyed all records.
We do know this: under the dictatorship, Argentina's external debt 
ballooned from $7.7bn in 1975 to $46bn in 1982. Ever since, the country 
has been caught in an escalating crisis, borrowing billions to pay 
interest on that original, illegitimate debt, which today, at $141bn, is 
only slightly higher than that held by Iraq's creditors.
The Kissinger transcript proves that the US gave money and political 
encouragement to the generals' murderous campaign. And yet, despite its 
now irrefutable complicity in Argentina's tragedy, the US has opposed all 
attempts to cancel the country's debt. And Argentina is hardly 
exceptional. The US has used its power in the International Monetary Fund 
and World Bank to block campaigns to cancel debts accumulated by apartheid 
South Africa, Marcos in the Philippines, Duvalier's brutal regime in Haiti 
and the dictatorship that sent Brazil's debt spiralling from $5.7bn in 
1964 to $104bn in 1985.
The US position has been that wiping out debts would be a dangerous 
precedent (and rob Washington of the leverage it needs to push for 
investor-friendly economic reforms). So why is Bush so concerned that "the 
future of the Iraqi people should not be mortgaged to the enormous burden 
of debt"? Because it is taking money from "reconstruction", which could go 
to Halliburton, Bechtel, Exxon and Boeing.
It has become popular to claim that the White House has been hijacked by 
neo-conservative ideologues in love with free-market dogma. I'm not 
convinced. If there's one thing the Wolfowitz/Baker dust-ups make clear, 
it's that the ideology of the Bush White House isn't neo-conservatism, 
it's old-fashioned greed. There is only one rule that appears to matter: 
if it helps our friends get even richer, do it.
Seen through this lens, the seemingly erratic behaviour coming out of 
Washington starts to make a lot more sense. Sure, Wolfowitz's 
contract-hogging openly flouts free-market principles of competition. But 
it does have a direct benefit for the firms closest to the administration. 
Not only are they buying a debt-free Iraq, but they won't have to compete 
with their corporate rivals in France and Germany.
The entire reconstruction project defies more neo-con tenets, sending this 
year's US deficit to a cartoonish $500bn, with plenty handed out in no-bid 
contracts, creating the kind of monopoly that allowed Halliburton to 
overcharge by an estimated $61m for importing gasoline into Iraq.
Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: for 
the men who rule our world, rules are for other people. The powerful feed 
ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most 
rarefied delicacy: impunity.

Che dire del debito dei paesi Africani, o della Russia?
La stessa identica cosa.
-Stefano

 a écrit dans le message de
news:9ce9c325.03122...@posting.google.com...


 la dittatura?   Che dire del debito dei paesi Africani, o della Russia?
Io credo che il debito argentino porti la firma in calce di Menem ...
Per gli altri paesi ? Certo, certo. andiamo a finire a tarallucci e vino.