Date:      Tue, 26 Jan 1993 12:18:06 est
From: "John Covici" <covici@ccs.covici.com>
Message-Id: <2b657258.ccs@ccs.covici.com>
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
Reply-To: "John Covici" <covici@ccs.covici.com>
To: uunet!css.itd.umich.edu!pauls@uunet.UU.NET
Subject:   Can Economic Policy be Based on Christian Principles:? part 3
Status: RO

The following series is taken from Executive Intelligence Review V20, 
#5 and is the cover story of that issue.  For further information on 
EIR, please contact me by Email.

Menem claims that usury 
is Christian 

by Cynthia R. Rush 

Argentine President Carlos Menem announced with
much fanfare during the first week of January that he
intended to dedicate the second half of his term in office
to a ``preferential option for the poor.'' Explaining that
the economic policies that he and his finance minister,
Domingo Cavallo, had applied over the past two years have
``stabilized'' the economy, Menem reported that
significant funds were now available to combat poverty and
show a more ``humanized'' side of capitalism. Close to $2
billion will be allocated, he said, for an ambitious
social plan to feed and employ the poor, provide medical
services, take care of the elderly, set up new businesses,
and rebuild cities. The amount of money allocated is
``historic,'' Menem crowed, claiming that no other
Ibero-American nation can match it. 
   Has the Argentine President had a change of heart,
after slavishly implementing the International Monetary
Fund's (IMF) policies over the past two years? Hardly.
What worries him and his Anglo-American sponsors, is that
the physical and human devastation wreaked by those
austerity dictates, which he and his finance minister are
committed to continuing in an even more draconian fashion
in 1993, are creating political problems as well as a
potential for social unrest. 
   Menem's hopes of being reelected to the presidency in
1995, and obtaining congressional approval for the
constitutional amendment which would make that possible,
could be jeopardized by growing popular disgust with his
policies and his government's rampant corruption. Even
more, his extremely unpopular government--polls place his
popularity at an all-time low--could well be ousted, as
was that of Collor de Mello in neighboring Brazil. For the
past six months, Menem and Cavallo have found themselves
repeatedly having to respond to charges that government
policy is insensitive to the needs of the poor. 
   Any objective observer might conclude the same thing.
Across the economic spectrum, Argentina is a disaster. The
renewed outbreak of cholera in the country's northern
provinces, where Menem's own health minister asserts that
many agricultural workers ``live like dogs'' and
``slaves,'' is the best reflection of that. A decade of
IMF austerity has wiped out sanitation infrastructure in
metropolitan Buenos Aires, a city of 10 million
inhabitants, such that 6 million have no potable water,
and 3 million live below the poverty line. 
   At the end of 1992, the country was shaken by reports
that 500 retirees had committed suicide during the
previous year, in despair over the fact that they could
not subsist on a pitiful average monthly pension of $150,
when monthly expenses are five times that amount. There
are constant reports of adolescent suicides, and growth of
the AIDS and drug-consumption epidemics. 
   Industrialists and businessmen cannot stay afloat
under the burden of prohibitively high interest rates--in
some cases 50% annually--high taxes and debts, and no
access to credit. Thousands of small and medium-sized
businesses have gone bankrupt. Agricultural producers, the
economy's mainstay, have organized repeated protests over
the past several months to demand a solution to their
sector's crisis. The flood of imports which has poured
into the country as a result of the government's
free-trade policy produced an unprecedented $2.5 billion
trade deficit in 1992, compared to 1991's surplus of more
than $1 billion. 
   The only people doing well are speculators and hot
money operatives. In a 1991 report, the United Nations
agency that monitors drug trafficking reported that
Argentina has become a major drug money-laundering center. 

                 - An elaborate fraud -
   The President's new anti-poverty program, which will
be overseen by Interior Minister Gustavo Be@aaliz, is
intended to address this wreckage--not to alleviate
poverty or provide the basis for real industrial
development. It is supposed to do what Mexican President
Carlos Salinas de Gortari has done through the National
Solidarity Program, or Pronasol: continue with the IMF's
austerity policy, but contain social unrest through a vast
social control apparatus, consisting of ``participatory''
self-help and fascist local control programs. This, the
argument goes, will allow people alienated by austerity
and corruption to feel more ``empowered.'' And, as the
{Wall Street Journal} pointed out in a Jan. 8 article on
Pronasol, it will cost a lot less, because the poor people
themselves will do all the work with picks and shovels. 
   In Mexico, Pronasol, or what Salinas calls ``social
liberalism,'' has been endorsed by some high-level figures
within the Catholic Church. In Argentina, Menem is taking
his Federal Solidarity Program one step further. Through
the involvement of Gustavo Be@aaliz, a member of Opus Dei
who is also a disciple of Wall Street's favorite Catholic
``theologian'' Michael Novak, the idea is to portray the
government's program as coherent with the social doctrine
of the church and with Pope John Paul II's encyclical
writings, especially {Centesimus Annus}. Some top figures
among Argentina's Catholic hierarchy have bought this
fraud, arguing that the government's adjustment policy
shouldn't be abandoned, but can be made more ``humane.'' 
   Be@aaliz's own writings, as well as the content of
the program he will oversee, make clear that he is merely
attempting to put a Christian facade on the Anglo-American
establishment's policy of smashing the sovereign
nation-state, to facilitate bankers' looting of
Argentina's human and natural resources. All of this is
done in the name of ``pluralism'' and ``democracy.'' 
   Beginning in August 1992, in his former position as
public function secretary, and as the creator of the
National Public Administration Institute, Be@aaliz
organized a series of conferences to publicize Menem's
alleged shift to this happier form of capitalism. Among
those brought to the country to promote the thesis were
French economist Michel Albert; former State Department
employee Francis Fukuyama, who openly advocates the
destruction of Christian civilization; Novak himself; and
Henry Kissinger. In numerous press interviews during his
late August visit, Novak raved about ``capitalism from
below,'' and pointed to the work of the Swiss-Peruvian
Hernando de Soto, as a successful example of how man's
creativity can be ``liberated'' from the encumbrances of
the ``oppressive'' state. 
   In his own book {Vale la Pena} ({It's Worth It}), a
series of essays published in 1992, Be@aaliz regurgitates
Novak's nostrums. He baldly states that ``it is essential
to lay the basis for a new humanism which allows us to
{reconcile capitalism with justice and the market with the
state.}'' That is, to achieve the impossible task of
reconciling the economic looting policies of British
colonial agent Adam Smith, whom Be@aaliz defends, with
social justice. 
   That Be@aaliz is committed to the international
bankers' goal of smashing the nation-state is seen in the
fact that in his entire book, he never once mentions the
IMF or any of the other financial agencies whose austerity
dictates have destroyed his nation over the past decade.
Rather, he repeats the litany of Novakian formulations
that the crisis has been caused by the state with
its ``damaging and discriminatory protection'' and its
``totalitarian temptations and absolutist tendencies.'' 
   Be@aaliz suggests that the underlying cause of
Argentina's crisis is to be found in Ibero-America's
culture, a not-too-subtle hint by this nominal Catholic
that the Protestant ``work ethic''--as lauded by
sociologist Max Weber--might be more efficient than the
existing predominantly Catholic cultural matrix. If the
nation is to survive, he warns, a ``new political
culture'' must be created, based on discipline and
competition, creating a more modern managerial class, and
eliminating ``special interests.'' And if none of this
manages to meet the citizenry's ``unsatisfied demands,''
Be@aaliz offers new forms of political representation and
participation intended to keep them quiet: ``intermediate
associations, cooperatives, volunteerism, housewives
leagues, and neighborhood clubs.'' 

                   - No big projects -
   Discussing Argentina's Solidarity program in the Jan.
12 daily {Ambito Financiero,} Be@aaliz stated outright
that ``state control is not sufficient. What is needed is
greater {social control}.'' 
   This is to be achieved by thoroughly decentralizing
all of the vital functions and services normally relegated
to the state, and distributing them through a network of
small, community-based operations that function
independently of each other. In his book, Be@aaliz
emphasizes that this type of deregulation will help
eliminate ``foci of corruption,'' by which he really means
political machines that might offer resistance to the IMF. 
   As for economic development, the emphasis in the
Argentine program is on {small} and {labor-intensive.}
There is no mention of large infrastructure projects or
development of scientific or technological capabilities,
which were elaborated in Lyndon H. LaRouche's 1982 work
{Operation Jua@aarez} and {EIR'}s 1983 book {Argentina
Industrial: Eje de la integracio@aan iberoamericana}
({Industrial Argentina: Axis of Ibero-American
Integration}). Be@aaliz's program calls for setting up 206
development poles, for example, to benefit 4 million
people. Yet even government officials admit that at least
11 million Argentines, a third of the population, live in
extreme poverty. 
   The economic activity in these ``poles'' will include
small farm plots or {minifundios}, micro-enterprises, and
municipal and urban development programs. The World Bank
will offer financing for infrastructure and social
programs in five provinces, to benefit 400,000 people.
Urban employment programs will reportedly provide 4,000
jobs in labor-intensive projects. No one has yet explained
how this will benefit 5 million Argentines who currently
have no stable employment.      

                 - Growing opposition -
   How successful this program may be remains to be
seen. But judging from some of the public commentary, not
everyone has bought Be@aaliz's line that it is coherent
with Christian doctrine. A column in the Dec. 7, 1992
{Pa@aagina 12} described the plan as an ``attempt to
deepen liberal policies and humanize the adjustment in
terms of Rome's social doctrine.'' But if it is
successful, the daily warned, ``it will permanently
consecrate the exclusion of no less than one-third of the
population from the benefits of modernization, in exchange
for an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power;
remove the specter of corruption from the government,
while at the same time adopting measures tending to
guarantee its impunity.'' 
   From within the church, the outspoken Msgr. Jorge
Novak, bishop of Quilmes, called the new program a mere
electoral ploy. The fact that the interior minister is a
``militant Catholic'' is irrelevant, the Argentine Novak
(no relation to Michael) said. ``This won't Christianize
the government nor improve its image.'' The economic
adjustment program, he added, ``is intrinsically
unacceptable.'' 

-- 
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com