Socialist Progressives

We should let Argentina be a cautionary tale.

Being 10,000 miles away as it is, it's probably one of the most unfamiliar of the Western Hemisphere countries. Yet we share a number of similarities:

*Both countries were founded by Free Masons (Argentina, 40 years later). Many of both countries' presidents have been Masons as well.
*Argentina had no official slavery and few black people; but like the U.S. South, Argentina's North had over a million Amerindians in slave-like conditions as recently as the 1940s harvesting cotton, tobacco, peanuts, citrus, lumber.
*Both initially grew along their eastern seaboards, expanding westward in the late 19th century by way of railroads and running roughshod over native peoples.
*Both were then reshaped socially and economically by a massive wave of European immigration from 1880 to 1930 (Argentina's immigrants were primarily from Italy and Spain, whereas U.S. immigrants at the time were from all over Europe).

Fast forward to 1975. Argentina had the largest percentage of middle class households and the best-paid, most unionized working class in Latin America. The country was nearly self-sufficient industrially and in energy, and was well on its way toward development.

A severe political crisis had struck, however, as well as spiraling violence from extremist elements. The conservative elite, who had only grudgingly accepted the changing Argentina, decided not to let this crisis go to waste and arranged a military coup the following March to reshape the economy to their liking (the appointed dictator confirmed this many years later).

Over the next 7 years, real wages were halved, unions were crushed, the tax burden was shifted downward, finance was deregulated, "free trade" decimated local industry, and credit and homeownership were put out of reach to most. Fortunes were made overnight by the connected and quickly stashed away in tax havens.

Of course, unlike the U.S. Argentina couldn't "print" trillions of dollars to paper over the losses and bad debts - plus they had less to fall back on to begin with. And thanks largely to years of IMF-supported austerity-and-privatization policies, things then went from bad to worse.

Did Argentina recover? Eventually - but only after many of the pro-labor, pro-industry, pro-regulation policies advocated by Bernie Sanders were adopted from 2003 onward by the late Néstor Kirchner and his colorful wife Cristina Kirchner. They revived unions and collective bargaining, jobs returned, real wages almost doubled, pensions and the public health insurance option were recovered, access to mortgage and consumer credit was restored, and industry and small/medium business was encouraged.

They managed all this over the objections of the "business press" as well as the local elites themselves (who made more money than ever anyway!). Their proxies in the media eventually prevailed though, and Argentina narrowly elected a neocon profitizer last November. He's been ruling by decree ever since, and sure enough living standards are already declining.