In Argentina, Javier Milei’s Shock Therapy Is Wreaking Havoc / by Pablo Calvi

_{^{President of Argentina Javier Milei delivers a special speech during the 2024 edition of IEFA Latam Forum at Four Seasons Hotel Buenos Aires on March 26, 2024 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (Tomas Cuesta / Getty Images)}}

Four months into his term, Argentina’s “anarcho-capitalist” president Javier Milei has drastically slashed public spending and sought to suppress wages. It’s a disaster for the country’s working class and its public institutions of research and learning.

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

The week Argentine president Javier Milei reached the one-hundred-days-in-office mark was nothing short of catastrophic. Argentina was hit by two megastorms, one on March 11 and a second on March 20, both unleashing violent winds, egg-sized hail, and inches of rain, damaging factories, houses, and road signs. The storms left thirteen dead and wrought economic losses to the tune of hundreds of millions of US dollars.

Meanwhile, an ongoing epidemic of dengue fever had claimed seventy-nine lives and left 120,000 infected. And a wave of narco-violence swept through Rosario, the third-largest city in the country, after the drug cartels declared war on the mayor with a deadly shooting rampage that targeted bus drivers, pedestrians, and a parking garage attendant.

“We are missing the locust and the frogs, and we’ll soon reach the ten plagues,” Martin, a friend in Buenos Aires, joked after a couple beers. We were both standing in the kitchen late one night toward the end of March and, for a moment, his eyes turned somber. “I am going to be ok, and they are going to be ok,” he reassured me, looking at his fifteen-year-old son, who had stayed up late with us. “We have a home, and I have an income. I don’t know whether I will still be employed at the end of this month, though. But that is a different story.”

Martin is a law clerk who has worked with the same judge for over twenty years; he earned a law degree from the University of Buenos Aires and is the main breadwinner for a family of four. The radically neoliberal Milei government’s recent economic measures, which include drastic cuts to federal spending and government employment, have him and many others worried.

“I think that what [the government is doing] is a disaster,” Luis Alberto Beccaria, renowned economist and a professor at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, said. “The policies it is implementing are having a devastating impact on the most vulnerable parts of the population.” Beccaria, who has extensive experience directing the INDEC (the National Institute for Statistics and Census) and researching wages and employment, explained that Argentina’s inflation, a historical challenge, has slowed but remains in the double digits — 25 percent in December, 20 percent in January, and 13 percent in February.

But now inflation is occurring not only in Argentine pesos, but also in US dollars, which is proof to Beccaria that that Milei’s strategy of reducing the deficit through wage suppression is like “kicking the can down the road.” “Between January and February 2024, real wages have dropped around 17 percent,” he added.

In an interview on April 8, Milei referenced Jumbot, a Twitter account claiming to track online prices from the Jumbo supermarket chain, to boast about an alleged steep drop in consumer prices for March. But the Jumbot account revealed itself to be a hoax that same day.

“This account is a social experiment,” read a Jumbot tweet on April 8. “[We] never analyzed prices, nor was there a bot that tracked Jumbo’s products. But [this experiment] did serve one purpose: to show the need that many have to tout the results that reality denies them.” Luis Caputo, Milei’s economy minister, had also referenced the fake bot a week prior.

In the meantime, the actual data shows that prices keep going up in Argentina, which has led to a sharp decline in the purchasing power of wages and pensions. All this could push the country deeper into a social crisis.

Milei’s Austerity Program

Reducing government employment and public spending in 2024 Argentina — Milei’s stated goal — is a delicate matter. One in every two workers is either informal (employed outside of government oversight) or temporary, with contracts that are often at will or that only last for a year. This leaves half of the workforce in a vulnerable position, without access to unemployment benefits or any type of protection in case of layoffs.

Gustavo De Santis is a carpenter and set builder. He works for the Cervantes Theatre, the national stage and comedy theater, building backdrops and props for plays and performances. Yet for some time now, he’s been driving a cab, which is currently his main source of income. “I used to have a lot of work building stages for plays, then I worked for soap operas on TV,” he reminisced. “Now, all that has stopped, and the requests I get for carpentry jobs are dismal.”

De Santis believes that the Argentine president governs for the rich. “Nobody has money, and people are losing the little hope they had, if they had any,” he lamented.

The government’s rabid austerity is drawing criticism from many quarters. “This government doesn’t have an income policy,” House representative Nicolás Massot told me during a phone conversation. “It is allowing the markets to set exchange rates and utility rates but have frozen wage negotiations.” Once a member of PRO, the right-wing coalition founded by former president Mauricio Macri, Massot emphasized the inconsistency of a government that claims to be liberal yet fixes salaries and halts “paritarias” (the periodic negotiations of wages between unions and employers).

“In an economy with normal formal structures [unlike Argentina’s], income policies are primarily wage policies, bargained by strong unions,” Massot explained. “Argentina, with its large informal sector [including scrap collectors, recyclers, and day laborers], should consider in its income policies not only salaries but also informal wages, pensions, and social assistance — all of these items that will keep on losing against inflation.” Despite supporting some government initiatives to lower public spending, Massot has criticized Milei and his economy minister, Luis Caputo, for what he sees as their neglect of retirees and informal workers.

Since Milei took office over three months ago, public institutions such as the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), along with other national universities and research institutions like CONICET (the national commission for scientific and technological research, akin to NASA in the United States), have been in the government’s crosshairs as part of its assault on public spending.

“The president has not approved the new budget, and we are operating with the same funds approved for 2022, despite accumulated inflation of 200 percent over two years,” explained philosopher and professor Federico Penelas. “There have been layoffs, and there’s a looming threat of even more, but what’s impacting us the most is the lack of funds to cover operating costs.”

Penelas, researcher and a member of the Executive Committee for the College of Philosophy and Literature, is very concerned about the cuts. “CONICET’s research and doctoral grants were slashed in two, from 1,300 [grants] to six hundred.” The hardest-hit areas are in STEM fields. “Labs and new technologies are costly to maintain,” he pointed out.

On March 15, Penelas published an op-ed in Página 12, an influential left-leaning newspaper in Buenos Aires, warning that Argentina’s public sector is now fully experiencing Milei’s anarcho-capitalist revolution. “It is not a matter of whether the government has money or not,” he wrote. “What matters is that Milei believes it shouldn’t have any.”

Attacks on the University

As soon as the rain gave Buenos Aires a break in mid-March, I visited UBA’s Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, where I studied for five years. The school sits in the massive, refurbished building of an old tobacco processing factory, nestled in the lush neighborhood of Caballito. The school year hadn’t started yet, so the hallways were unusually quiet, with only a few dozen people walking up the concrete staircase that leads to the first floor. The walls, however, were still as I remembered them, emblazoned with red banners handwritten in black and white, advocating for abortion rights and against government austerity measures.

In front of the Aula Magna, the largest classroom in the building, I met Emilse Icandri, a junior art student wearing a red T-shirt that read “Las Rojas” (the red ones). A member of Ya Basta, an anti-capitalist college organization, Icandri was overseeing the check-in table for an open class where some two hundred students were discussing the future of the school and how to best resist the government’s attempts to defund it.

“We have sent letters requesting funds and urging that the government reconsider its plan, but we have come to realize that the institutional way is a dead end,” she explained. “It is frustrating, because our concerns are ignored, and all political factions seem to be allowing the government’s agenda to proceed unchecked.” Behind her, applause signaled the end of one speaker’s presentation, the noise blending with the sound of the rain that had started to patter on the corrugated tin roof.

A week later, I spoke to Natalia Zaracho, a former scrap collector turned representative in 2019, and reelected in 2023. Zaracho won her seat in the House for UTEP, the Union for the Workers of the Popular Economy, which represents people who live, as she once did, on the fringes of the formal economy. That day, UTEP and other social organizations staged pickets on bridges and avenues, cutting off main access points to Buenos Aires, as a response to the government cessation of food supplies to thousands of soup kitchens.

“Today there’s a palpable sense of urgency,” Zaracho began, glancing first at me and then over my shoulder. A muted television behind me flickered with the images of rows of riot police in full gear, arms locked on a street, poised for the arrival of the first column of protesters advancing into Buenos Aires from the neighboring city of Avellaneda. “We represent the new workers of the twenty-first century — those who work but have no rights,” Zaracho declared.

Behind Zaracho hangs a painting of a litter picker in a blue and yellow uniform, stacking a wall of papers from floor to ceiling. A friend, she tells me, gave her that painting on the day she got elected, a reminder of her roots, and she has kept it in her office ever since. As a child during the 2001 crisis, Zaracho learned the city by picking cardboard with her parents. Comparing then to now, she noted that social movements today are much more organized. They have spokespeople, representatives, and a powerful media presence.

“We stand united and strong, and I can’t fathom our movements putting up with this kind of starvation program for much longer,” she said.

_{Pablo Calvi is the author of Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism and an associate professor at Stony Brook University. His work has appeared in the Believer, the Nation, and Guernica magazine.}

Housing Vouchers Won’t Solve America’s Homelessness Crisis / by Robert Davis

_{^{A homeless man at an encampment in Denver, Colorado, on September 25, 2023. (Helen H. Richardson / MediaNews Group / The Denver Post via Getty Images)}}

_{Housing vouchers can help people afford shelter. At the same time, they exclude millions of eligible people, open vulnerable tenants up to exploitation by property owners, and empower bad landlords. To end homelessness, we must move beyond the voucher system.}

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Jennifer Burbank became homeless after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020. She lived at a transitional housing facility for a few months before moving to a shelter run by the Volunteers of America (VOA) branch in Denver. But over the last two years that she’s lived in the shelter, Burbank says she has been discriminated against on the basis of her diagnosis.

First she lost her right to privacy when one of the shelter workers revealed her disability status, Burbank told Denver’s city council in October. Then, she told Jacobin, she lost her right to fair housing after the VOA used a loophole in the Emergency Housing Voucher rules to discharge her because she needed to stay at the hospital after she received chemotherapy treatments.

Now, Burbank and her cat are sleeping on Denver’s streets again as they wait for a spot to open up at a local transitional housing facility. “I’m trying to transition into this other kind of housing, but I’m not being afforded the same rights as other shelter residents,” said Burbank, who called the housing system a “biased and hostile environment.”

Burbank’s story is emblematic of the problems with the housing voucher system, which is full of loopholes that allow private landlords and shelter operators to essentially cast aside people with complex housing cases.

Every week, Denver shelter residents tell the City Council about property owners discriminating against people with different kinds of housing vouchers. Some have complained about roach-infested buildings and properties that don’t meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Others have complained about landlords harassing them until they vacated their homes.

Altogether, these issues speak to the inadequacy of America’s housing voucher system when it comes to ending homelessness. Even though vouchers can help someone find shelter for a short period of time, the supply is limited and the vast majority of people who apply for them do not receive one. When prospective tenants are successful, vouchers only address recipients’ lack of housing and leave voucher holders on their own to rebuild their social networks and sense of community, two factors that experts say are primary causes of homelessness in the first place. Finally, voucher programs leave all the power in the hands of private-property owners, who take advantage of tenants’ vulnerability to get the outcomes they want.

“There are a lot of predatory landlords and property owners going after people with vouchers and using the fact that we’re poor to abuse us,” said Ana Gloom, an organizer with the advocacy group Housekeys Action Network Denver.

An array of state housing voucher programs apply to specific groups like military veterans or people experiencing mental health challenges. But the most common type is the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV), also known as Section 8. Under the program, participants choose any rental housing that meets the requirements, and a local public housing agency pays a subsidy directly to the landlord. There are roughly 2.3 million people across the country who rely on HCVs to afford housing, although more than 10 million qualify for assistance according to figures from the White House.

The Biden-Harris administration has made expanding access to housing vouchers a key part of its strategy to end homelessness in America. The American Rescue Plan Act included additional funding for 100,000 HCVs, and another $5 billion for 70,000 Emergency Housing Vouchers. The 2023 budget also included funding to extend vouchers to youths aging out of foster care and extremely low-income veterans for the first time in US history. All of these efforts come at a time when the latest federal snapshot count found there were more than 653,000 homeless people across America in 2023, which is the most ever counted.

While vouchers undoubtedly expand access to shelter, some experts say vouchers are still an ineffective way to end homelessness.

First, there is no guarantee that someone who receives a housing voucher will be able to attain housing. For instance, the Denver Housing Authority only selects 600 to 800 people out of the 30,000 applications it receives for housing vouchers each lottery cycle, the Colorado Sun reported. Nearby, in Boulder, the Boulder Housing Authority selected just 350 people out of a recent applicant pool of more than 2,200.

The Colorado Division of Housing has also canceled more than 5,800 housing vouchers over the last five years, according to data obtained by Jacobin. The cancellation numbers paint a bleak portrait of vouchers’ efficacy. About 64 percent of those cancellations — accounting for 3,788 vouchers in total — were because of voluntary relinquishment, voucher expiration, or the death of the voucher holder. Only 3 percent of voucher cancellations were because a voucher holder moved on to more stable forms of housing, the data shows, casting doubt on vouchers’ efficacy in stabilizing tenants’ lives.

Housing voucher programs also include cinders of “man in the house” rules that effectively prohibit homeless people from rebuilding broken personal relationships. The rules originate from the 1960s when welfare agencies would randomly raid female-headed households that received welfare to find evidence of a man living in the home. The assumption was that such a woman was committing welfare fraud, because a working man would be able to provide for the woman and any of her children, according to an article in the scholarly journal Housing Policy Debate written by Rahim Kurwa, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Even though the Supreme Court outlawed “man in the house” rules in 1968, Kurwa said many public housing authorities still use similar tactics to try to catch fraudsters. For example, there are rules that prohibit voucher holders from allowing “unauthorized tenants” — even if they’re spouses, significant others, or family members — to sleep over.

Gloom added that she cannot smoke medical marijuana in her unit because she has a housing voucher, despite her having a doctor’s prescription. She also cannot use her rent as a bargaining chip to force her landlord to maintain the property like more traditional renters can, she added. Gloom has also voiced these concerns in front of Denver’s city council on multiple occasions, but the problems persist. “The effect of these paternalistic policies, policing, and surveillance is to institutionalize relational poverty for poor and vulnerable people,” write Kevin Adler and Donald Burnes in their book When We Walk By.

America has largely replaced its public housing infrastructure with the Housing Choice Voucher system since it was created in the 1970s. But the transition has come at a considerable cost. Not only are housing voucher programs unreliable because they require multiple agencies to coordinate entry, but they also give landlords power over voucher holders that would be considered illegal if they were used against a nonvoucher renter household. Voucher holders have almost no way of pushing back against landlords and shelter providers who unjustly evict them from their home.

Even so, the federal government has lined up hundreds of millions of dollars to flow to these landlords under the guise of ending homelessness. To be sure, vouchers are a necessary stopgap for some of the people who are lucky enough to get them, but they are a shoddy fix overall. To truly end homelessness, we need fully funded, high-quality public housing that protects privacy, encourages social bonds, and isn’t run like a prison — places where tenants can rebuild their lives without fear of slumlordism, eviction, or exploitation. As it stands, housing vouchers fall well short of the mark.

_{Robert Davis is an award-winning freelance journalist who lives in Denver. His works have appeared in Capital & Main, the Colorado Sun, and the Progressive, among many others.}

CBO Letter Sparks Warnings Over Republican Push to Trigger ‘Devastating’ Cuts / by Jake Johnson

_{^{House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) walks to the floor for a vote on Capitol Hill on October 26, 2023 in Washington, D.C. | Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images}}

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

“We cannot allow indiscriminate and harmful cuts to happen because House Republicans are incapable of doing their jobs,” said Rep. Brendan Boyle.

The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that nonmilitary federal spending could face tens of billions of dollars in automatic cuts if lawmakers fail to agree on full-year government funding bills for 2024.

Under the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA)—bipartisan legislation passed last year to avert a debt ceiling catastrophe—automatic spending cuts are required if lawmakers don’t pass annual appropriations bills by April 30. Congress is currently working under a two-tiered continuing resolution that funds government agencies through January 19 and February 2.

With negotiations at an impasse as Republicans demand lower spending levels than were agreed upon in the FRA as well as draconian anti-immigrant policies, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has suggested that he could pursue a full-year continuing resolution that would mean major cuts to key federal programs.

According to the CBO, nondefense spending would be cut to $736 billion, down from the current level of $777 billion. Military spending would take a much smaller hit, falling from $860 billion to $850 billion.

Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said Thursday that the CBO’s analysis “confirms what we already knew: Speaker Johnson’s attempt to trigger devastating across-the-board cuts is not an actual government funding plan, but another dangerous threat that would put American families on the chopping block.”

“House Republicans have governed through brinkmanship for more than a year now—first with a default threat, then a series of shutdown threats, and now this sequestration threat,” said Boyle. “Their reckless attempts to achieve steep budget cuts failed time and time again last year, and they will fail again this year.”

“Passing full-year government funding bills is the most basic task of Congress,” Boyle added. “We cannot allow indiscriminate and harmful cuts to happen because House Republicans are incapable of doing their jobs.”

The FRA caps discretionary federal spending at $1.59 trillion for fiscal year 2024, leaving $886 billion for the U.S. military and $704 billion for nonmilitary spending, which covers healthcare, housing, transportation, and more.

But as part of an FRA “side deal,” lawmakers agreed to an additional $69 billion in nonmilitary spending. Now, however, House Republicans are trying to ditch “some if not all of the $69 billion in extra nondefense spending,” Roll Callreported last month.

As the Senate Budget Committee stressed in a memo released late Thursday, the CBO’s analysis examines only the letter of the FRA, excluding the $69 billion side deal.

“If negotiators limit themselves to only the portion of the agreement that is in law, as many House Republicans are demanding, nondefense programs will be cut 9% from current levels and defense programs will be leaving a 3% increase on the table,” the memo noted. “CBO’s report should serve as a wake-up call that Congress must reject these harmful cuts.”

_{Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams}

Argentinians Defy Milei’s Crackdown With Mass Protests Against Austerity / by Julia Conley

_{^{Members of the Argentinian Tire Workers’ Union and other protesters demonstrate against the new government of Javier Milei in Buenos Aires, on December 20, 2023, carrying signs that read, “We say no to the increase in electricity, gas, and transport tickets.” | Photo: Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty Images}}

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

“This country’s problem is not protests,” said one demonstrator. “The country’s problem is that Milei took away 50% of our purchasing power overnight with a devaluation.”

Days after Argentinian President Javier Milei’s security minister announced that law enforcement would crack down on anyone who organizes or participates in protests that block roads, thousands of residents risked arrest and cuts to their social benefit payments by taking to the streets Wednesday night and into Thursday morning, rallying against Milei’s latest package of austerity measures.

Buenos Aires residents responded to Milei’s announcement of new anti-worker economic decrees on Wednesday by banging pots and pans on their balconies before congregating on streets across the capital and marching to the National Congress.

Protesters chanted, “Milei! You’re garbage! You are the dictatorship!” and carried signs reading, “We say no to the increase in electricity, gas, and transport tickets”—a reference to measures the right-wing president unveiled earlier this month when he announced the devaluation of the peso by 50% and cuts to public spending and energy and transportation subsidies.

The measure announced Wednesday will further intensify Milei’s austerity approach in a country where about 40% of residents live in poverty.

Milei’s decree will pave the way for state-owned companies to be privatized, mining to be deregulated, firms to strip workers of rights including maternity leave, and foreign companies to invest in rental housing and land.

Critics including former presidential candidate Myriam Bregman of the progressive Workers’ Left Front accused Milei of violating the Argentinian Constitution by bypassing Congress to introduce the new measures.

“There are so many illegalities here I don’t know where to start,” Bregman toldThe Guardian, saying the president had released a “battle plan against working people.”

Hector Daer, secretary of the General Confederation of Labor, told Telesur English that Milei’s announcement “subverts the democratic republican order and disrupts the division of powers.”

“His unconstitutionality is evident,” Daer said. “We will not tolerate an attack on social security and labor and social rights.”

Protesters also took to the streets before Milei’s announcement Wednesday, honoring the victims of the violent repression of former President Fernando de la Rúa’s administration, which cracked down on mass protests on December 20, 2001. Nearly 40 people were killed in the clashes more than two decades ago and almost 500 were injured.

The protests on Wednesday were met with a show of force by police in riot gear, but El País reported that the mobilization proved too large for security forces to quell it.

Picketing—blocking streets and highways—is “one of Argentina’s most common forms of protest,” according to the newspaper, and too many demonstrators turned out to limit the protest to only sidewalks. El País reported that people rallied in city streets without blocking “main traffic arteries” and that only two arrests were made.

Protesters said Milei’s administration is more concerned with pressuring people out of protesting than responding to the concerns of citizens who fear losing their pensions and jobs as a result of the austerity measures.

“This country’s problem is not protests,” Betina Sanchís, a retiree, told El País. “The country’s problem is that Milei took away 50% of our purchasing power overnight with a devaluation.”

_{Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.}