Tribe.net. Local Connections Alexander http://WorldAwarenessRevolution.tribe.net/thread/85c87f42-fbf5-4c82-82ca-da18be8c02c9#6a5256e1-198d-4165-b91a-48815f5beff9 2006-03-10T23:24:47Z 2006-03-10T23:24:47Z

the former Enronization of Argentina I am posting these articles on how Argentina had economically collapsed several years ago, because I believe the Amerikan Empire is very near this too especially in the next couple of weeks as the US FED discontinues reporting M3 (March 23) and the Iranians switch from petrodollars to petroeuros. Ofcourse a US attack on Iran could add more chaos as corporatists use a nuke or "conventional" smokescreen to rob more of the masses. Just as a side note also remember Enron "owns" PGE. I believe we, Cascadians, need to know how the Argentines pulled themselves out after the economic collapse. But before we export the autonomoist movement in Argentina we need to look at what happen first. Please circulate (mass spam) the following articles to others people with URLs ofcourse: Enron's plundering of Argentina In 1990, at the height of the neoliberal privatization fever, upon returning from his visit to George Bush, Sr., Argentine President Menem received a letter from US Ambassador Terence Todman implying that eight US companies would walk away from their investment plans unless Argentina stopped favoring domestic corporations. The first company on the list was Enron. As reported in the march 2000 edition of Mother Jones, former Argentine President Carlos Menem, at that time a golf partner and buddy of the Bushes, signed off on a $300 million deal for a US gas pipeline company in Argentina. The deal involved a huge tariff and tax cut. Spearheaded by the opposition, a congressional investigation ensued and a special prosecutor was appointed to the case. Menem, exercising his supreme powers, fired the investigator and that was the end of the matter. A few years earlier, George W. Bush had lobbied heavily on Enronąs behalf. Former Raul Alfonsinąs minister of public works, Rodolfo Terragno, recalls G.W.ąs phone call, mentioning his relationship with his recently-elected dad. Terragno informed him that Enron wanted to get the gas company for 20% of itąs international commercial value. The international media attacked him for refusing to give in to Enronąs demands. Although the Houston-based corporation ended up abandoning the project when gas prices fell, an Enron subsidiary later bought into the pipeline and now owns almost a third of it. Transportadora de Gas del Sur (TGS), partially owned by Enron, delivers more than 60% of the natural gas used in Argentina through the nation's largest pipeline system (4,300 miles). In 1998, 48% of energy used in Argentina came from natural gas, a fact that tends to explain the enourmous pressure that this company exerted on the corrupted Argentine establishment through itąs allies: two US presidents, the corporate media and a US Ambassador. Found at http://www.autonomista.org/enron.htm Argentina and Enron -- Peas in a Pod by Paul Krugman LAST WEEK, the Web site SatireWire.com ran a mock news story: "Enron Admits It's Really Argentina." It was pretty funny, though quite unfair -- unfair, that is, to Argentina. Yet, the satire was more on point than its authors realized. Not long ago Argentina, like Enron, was a darling of the financial community. And like Enron, Argentina was held up as a role model, to a large extent by the same people -- Argentina's monetary system, in particular, was lauded in the pages of Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, and feted at libertarian think tanks. Why did the same people tend to admire Enron and Argentina? Because in their different ways, both the company and the country tried to turn back the clock to 1913. Both were experiments testing the libertarian credo: that the great expansion in government's role between the two world wars was unwarranted. Both were supposed to demonstrate that government activism is unnecessary, and that radical laissez-faire works. The Enron experiment was, in essence, about doing away with regulation -- regulation of prices, regulation of financial trading. Most of these regulations had their origin in fear that consumers, workers and investors would be exploited by those whom Theodore Roosevelt called "malefactors of great wealth." Enron used its political clout to create what one of its own executives called a "regulatory black hole" in which it could operate freely. What Enron's admirers believed was that experience would demonstrate fears about unregulated markets to be unjustified. Unfortunately, what disappeared into that black hole was not bureaucratic clutter but billions of hard-earned dollars, including those of Enron's own employees. Or maybe it wasn't a black hole, but rather a wormhole, and those billions of dollars emerged in some other universe -- say, overseas bank accounts. For it turns out that malefactors of great wealth do exist, and some of them were running Enron. If Enron was an experiment in doing away with regulatory activism, Argentina was an experiment in doing away with monetary activism. Argentina returned to a colonial-era monetary system, a "currency board," which took government out of the loop. No more lurching from crisis to crisis, no more disruptive government interventions: Argentina would provide sound money, and leave the rest up to the free market. Though Argentina attracted the usual opportunists, I'm pretty sure that both the creators of its monetary system and many of its admirers sincerely believed that they were working in everyone's interest. Alas, these particular good intentions paved the road to hell. In the last few weeks, the bitter irony of Argentina's situation has become almost too much to bear. The country's monetary system was introduced in the name of laissez-faire. Now, in its desperate efforts to save that system from imminent collapse, the Argentine government has imposed drastic restrictions on economic freedom. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think that markets are evil, that the profit motive is always wrong. On the contrary, I believe that markets are very good things indeed. But the great economic lesson of the 20th century was that to work, a market system needs a little help from the government: regulations to prevent abuses, active monetary policy to fight recessions. The twin debacles in Houston and Buenos Aires demonstrate that this great lesson has not lost its relevance. ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Found at http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1212-06.htm IV Online magazine : IV338 - March 2002 Argentina Enron in Argentina Andrew Pollack Do a quick search of the Web on the terms Enron and Argentina and you mostly get either references comparing the two, or a recent satire in which Kenneth Lay claims immunity by claiming Enron IS Argentina. You might even stumble on the Mother Jones article detailing Dubya's lobbying of the Argentine government on behalf of Enron when he was governor of Texas. It turns out (not surprisingly given the extent of Enron's global interests) that Enron is very deeply involved in Argentina. Its holdings there are in Transportadora de Gas del Sur (TGS), whose website describes the company as "the leading gas transportation company in Argentina, operating the most extensive gas pipeline system in the country and in Latin America." Enron's own website says "The company serves 4.3 million customers, 3.1 million of which reside in the greater Buenos Aires area." To understand the significance of these figures it's worth noting that in 1998, 48% of energy use in Argentina came from natural gas (as quoted in a report posted by the Brazilian Embassy in Washington DC, which tracks such things because of the international pipelines being laid across countries in the region.) And here's one from MSN's 'Moneycentral' site: 'Don't cry for Transportadora de Gas del Sur (TGS), Argentina. The company delivers more than 60% of natural gas used in Argentina through the nation's largest pipeline system (4,300 miles). Formerly state-run, TGS holds exclusive license (until 2027) to transport gas from southern and western Argentine sources to distributors nearby and in the Buenos Aires metro area. TGS's gas services include treatment, processing, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) marketing; the company plans to export energy to neighbouring countries. It is also building a fibre- optic network in Argentina. The firm is 70%-owned by Compańía de Inversiones de Energía, which is jointly controlled by Perez Companc and US energy giant Enron.' That's right, Enron. TGS's own website spells this out in more detail, where it says its controlling shareholder is Compańía de Inversiones de Energía S.A. (CIESA), "which together with Pecom Energía group and Enron Corp, hold approximately 70% of the Company's common stock. The remaining 30% ownership in the Company is currently held by local and foreign investors." And who is CIESA? Again, from TGS: "CIESA is owned 50% by Pecom Energía (whose controlling shareholder is the above-mentioned Perez Companc) and 50% by subsidiaries of Enron. CIESA has the ability to direct the management of the Company, to control the election of the majority of the Board of Directors, to determine the dividend policy and other policies of the Company and to determine the outcome of any matter put to a vote of the shareholders of the Company.' TGS arose through a privatisation process of the kind which Enron has pushed around the globe. (See 'Enron: The Global Gospel of Gas', www.moles.org/ProjectUnderground/motherlode/enron.html). 'We started our operations in late 1992, as a result of the privatisation of Gas del Estado S.E. ("GdE"), the former state-owned company.' And TGS has a significant investment in telecommunications through its Telcosur subsidiary, through which it is 'positioning ourselves as an independent carrier of carriers and also offering services to large companies within our area of influence.' 'Telcosur,' says TGS, 'was born at the end of 1998 in order to take advantage of TGS's existing telecommunications assets and infrastructure, as well as the upcoming deregulation of the telecommunications market, and the experience of power companies from other countries that were successful in the telecommunications business.' The 'experienced' power companies, of course, means Enron. And their success in that business was, as the Wall Street Journal recently documented, a bust - and not just because of fraud, but because of the glut in fibre-optic capacity (that is, a mismatch in supply and demand which tends under capitalism to lead to precisely the kind of fraud Enron specialized in.) But despite Enron's failures in the telecom field elsewhere, Telcosur is following its 'experience' in avoiding direct sales in favour of trading access to commodities, services, and financial instruments: 'An important difference in connection with other telecommunication operators is its independence, since it serves the wholesaling market and therefore does not compete with its customers in retail operations: switching, frame-relay, telephone services, among others.' It provides 'value added services; in other words, [it is] a carrier of telephone carriers and of large corporate users.' Telcosur is also 'installing a high-capacity fibre optic network that will link Buenos Aires, Bahía Blanca and Neuquén, the most active routes in its service area.' Enron is currently in the process of divesting various subsidiaries around the globe to raise cash, and at least one potential buyer for its Argentina subsidiary has been mentioned. That buyer is Sempra Energy International, which owns a 43-percent interest in two Argentine natural gas utility holding companies, Sodigas Pampeana, S.A., and Sodigas Sur, S.A., and which 'serve 1.3 million customers in central and southern Argentina, delivering approximately one- third of all the natural gas distributed in the country.' Sempra, a big operator in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, also owns Southern California Gas and San Diego Gas & Electric, and has just bought Enron's London energy trading operations. It's not clear if the deal will go through. In the meantime workers in Argentina are demanding the renationalisation of firms in a variety of sectors. On February 5th Argentines marched on the offices of Repsol to demand jobs. Repsol, according to the Partido Obrero, 'is the 7th largest [oil company] in the world, which has reaped fabulous profits from privatisation, and which is responsible for widespread layoffs, pay cuts and refinery closings.' If the mobilizations in Argentina continue to deepen we can expect that calls for renationalisation - this time under workers control - of the entire energy sector will deepen. And if Enron's Argentine subsidiaries are targeted that might even encourage some in the US to think about similar solutions here. Andrew Pollack is a computer instructor in Brooklyn and author of "Information Technology and Socialist Self-Management," in Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution, edited by Robert W. McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review, 1997. Found at http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/article.php3? id_article=494 Don't Cry for Bush, Argentina NEWS: George W. may not recall the names of world leaders, but when it comes to foreign affairs, he knows the value of his own family's name. By Louis Dubose and Carmen Coiro March/April 2000 Issue Texans watched with interest last winter as Governor George W. Bush was home-schooled on international affairs by former Secretary of State George Shultz and other veterans of his father's foreign- policy team. Even Carl Bildt, the former prime minister of Sweden, was brought in for a tutorial at the governor's mansion, in the hope that his recent U.N. experience in the Balkans could help Bush understand that Kosovars are not "Kosavarians" and that Greeks are not "Grecians." But no one had to prepare a prompt card to remind him who stepped down as president of Argentina in December. Shortly before Bush announced his own campaign for president, he had received a visit from Carlos Saul Menem, the right-wing leader of Argentina for the past decade. The two men retired to an Austin country club, where they were joined by Bush's father. Governor Bush had the flu, so he contented himself with riding along as the former president and Menem played a round of golf. The capitol press corps trailed along, dutifully recording the governor's cordial relationship with a visiting head of state. Unknown to the assembled reporters, however, was the story of how Bush and his family became immersed in Argentine politics. The little-known tale begins with George W. making a phone call to secure a $300-million deal for a U.S. pipeline company -- a deal that provoked a political firestorm in Argentina, drawing scrutiny from legislators and a special prosecutor. The episode marked one of George W.'s first ventures into foreign affairs, demonstrating the fundamental rule by which the Texas governor and his family conduct business: Always know that the Bush name is a marketable commodity. Bush first made his presence felt in Argentina in 1988, shortly after his father was elected president. At the time, the junior Bush's political career was just beginning -- and the political career of Raúl Alfonsín, who was approaching the end of his term as president of Argentina, was ending. Alfonsín had returned his country to civilian rule, prosecuted those responsible for human rights abuses during Argentina's rule by a military junta, and struggled to manage an economy that seemed to defy management. Determined to complete one major private-sector industrial program, he pushed for the development of a "gasoducto" that would connect Argentine gas fields with domestic and foreign markets. And he appointed his minister of public works, Rodolfo Terragno, to oversee the pipeline project. Unlike Bush, Terragno achieved political prominence the old- fashioned way: through a life dedicated to public service. A noted journalist and public official, he was forced into exile for 10 years after the military seized power in Argentina in 1976. Only after Alfonsín restored civilian rule did Terragno return to his homeland, where he went on to serve as minister of public works, a member of congress, and most recently as cabinet chief to the newly elected president, Fernando de la Rua. In 1988, Terragno was considering two proposals for the $300-million pipeline, one from an Italian firm called Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi and the other from Pérez Companc, an Argentine company working in partnership with Dow Chemical. After a year of consideration, the minister was close to making a decision when Enron, the largest pipeline company in the United States, suddenly entered the bidding. At the time, the Houston-based Enron had no experience in Argentina. It had formed a business relationship with Westfield, a small Argentine firm, but Westfield wasn't much of a player either. El Boletín Oficial -- the Argentine equivalent of the Federal Register - - reported that Westfield's only asset in 1988 was $20, its corporate filing fee. Westfield was a prestanombre, literally a "borrowed name" used to provide a domestic front for a foreign firm. Terragno was concerned that a newly formed corporation with no resources was attempting to land a contract that companies with proven track records had been working on for a year. "I had a lot of reservations about Enron because the company wasn't well established in Argentina," Terragno told Mother Jones, providing details of the episode for the first time. The minister recalls that Enron sent him "a one-page outline" proposing a price Terragno now describes as "laughable." Enron wanted to pay "something like 20 percent of the international market price," he says. "It all seemed so inadequate. Enron asked the country of Argentina to practically give them the gas." Terragno was unenthusiastic about the pipeline bid, but Enron initiated a full-scale campaign to pressure him. Pro-business newspapers attacked the minister for blocking the proposal, and Terragno recalls that Ted Gildred, the U.S. ambassador to Argentina, "called me and visited me constantly" to push the deal. Terragno wasn't concerned about the ambassador's lobbying -- that was politics as usual. "It was good that he was representing the interest of his country's businesses," he says. But Terragno found that some of the politics surrounding Enron's campaign were anything but usual. A few weeks after the U.S. presidential election in 1988, Terragno received a phone call from a failed Texas oilman named George W. Bush, who happened to be the son of the president-elect. "He told me he had recently returned from a campaign tour with his father," the Argentine minister recalls. The purpose of the call was clear: to push Terragno to accept the bid from Enron. "He was taking a moment to call me because he knew that I was dealing with this," says Terragno, adding that Bush told him that he "viewed with some concern the slow pace of the Enron project." According to Terragno, the president-elect's son noted that a deal with Enron "would be very favorable for Argentina and its relations with the United States." When a brief report on the attempt to influence the Argentine deal appeared in The Nation and the Texas Observer years later, the Bush team reacted angrily. His staff produced a copy of his day planner to show that Bush never placed the phone call, and a top-level adviser personally called reporters to dismiss the story as a fantasy by "some guy in Argentina." Bush's staff continues to deny his involvement, and no other media outlet ever reported on the episode, despite the high-ranking source. More than a decade later, Terragno still recalls details of the phone call clearly -- as well as his outrage. "It looked bad and it surprised me," he says. "There was this political endorsement, apparently from the White House. I don't know if George Bush the father was aware of it, or if it was only a business contact by his son, who hoped that his family name would have some influence." George W. wasn't the only Bush plying the family name in Argentina. His brother Neil had tried to funnel $900,000 in loans from Silverado Savings and Loan, where he served as a director, into a failed attempt to drill for oil in Argentina. The S&L eventually collapsed, costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion to bail out, and federal regulators banned Neil from certain banking activities. But Terragno was unimpressed by the family connections. He told George W. the pipeline concession would be awarded according to Argentine law. It hardly mattered -- Argentine law was about to change. Time had run out for Raúl Alfonsín. His party lost the election, and he left office four months early to make way for his successor, Carlos Menem. Enron, for its part, couldn't have appointed an Argentine president more favorable to its interests. A right-wing follower of Juan Peron, Menem was eager to open his country to American enterprise -- and his own lavish spending. He took to traveling with a huge entourage aboard Tango-01, his $66- million presidential jet. The Bushes took an immediate liking to him. The day after the 1989 election, Neil Bush arrived in Buenos Aires for a tennis match with the president-elect. The following year, President Bush made the first of eight trips to see Menem, becoming the first U.S. chief executive since Eisenhower to visit Argentina. Several days after the president's trip in 1990, Bush's ambassador to Argentina, Terence Todman, wrote a stern letter to Menem's minister of the economy to follow up on issues that Bush had "intended to address, but failed to do so for lack of time." Todman went on to imply that eight U.S. companies would walk away from their investment plans unless Argentina stopped favoring domestic corporations. The first company on the list was Enron, which the ambassador described as being "poised to invest $250 million" -- as soon as the Argentine government met its demands for tax breaks. Todman closed his letter by warning that the Enron decision was "extremely urgent," as the gas company would make a final decision on its investment in less than a month. Todman prevailed: Menem agreed to the company's terms, signing a presidential decree that included Enron in a national program freeing it from tariffs and valued-added taxes. Reports of the Enron deal outraged Argentines, who had supported Alfonsín's struggle to create a democracy out of what remained after 10 years of military dictatorship. Lawmakers demanded a congressional inquiry, and a special prosecutor launched an investigation. Menem dealt with the scandal in a forthright manner: Since his own justice department was looking into the tax giveaway, he simply fired the investigator. Enron ultimately abandoned the project when gas prices fell, but an Enron subsidiary later bought into the pipeline and now owns almost a third of the gasoducto. Among the subsidiary's board members is Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to former President George Bush. George W. has certainly benefited from his association with Enron. Kenneth Lay, the company's chief executive, has personally contributed $100,000 to Bush's two gubernatorial campaigns. When Bush announced in 1999 that he was running for president, executives and political action committees connected to Enron contributed $89,650 to his campaign in the first three months. Lay signed on as a "Bush Pioneer," pledging to raise $100,000. The involvement of George W. and Neil in Argentina has become something of an m.o. for the Bush brothers in foreign affairs. The sons of the former president have certainly not been shy about using their family name to enrich themselves and their friends. Jeb sold $74 million worth of water pumps to the Nigerian government in 1988. Marvin tried to sell electronic fences to the defense ministry of Kuwait two years after the Gulf War, while Neil sought contracts to provide oil-field antipollution equipment. And George W. lent his name to tiny Harken Energy to help secure a huge offshore drilling contract in Bahrain (see "Slick W.," page 48). Undoubtedly, the family name will continue to open doors internationally if George W. is elected. Last November, an airplane with Houston registry numbers landed in Buenos Aires; on board was former President Bush, who had arrived to spend the night with his friend, President Menem, 10 days before the end of Menem's final term. The two men attended a dinner at the home of Argentine banker José Rohm, where they were joined by the vice president of Chase Manhattan Bank, the director of Credit Suisse First Boston, the president-elect of Argentina and the former president of Uruguay. What was the purpose of President Bush's visit? "Fishing," says Michael Dannenhauer, a Bush spokesman. But when the Buenos Aires daily, Pagina 12, asked several of the dinner guests why the president was in town, they smiled and quietly replied, "Business." Bush's "real interest," they added, was to learn how the new government would deal with CEI, an Argentine media company whose former chief had fled the country under investigation for fraud. One of CEI's principal investors, the paper noted, is Tom Hicks, "one of the funders of the presidential campaign of Bush's son, George, the governor of Texas." Found at http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/03/argentina.html USA: Don't Cry for Enron, Argentina by Paul Krugman, San Francisco Chronicle December 12th, 2001 Last week, the Web site SatireWire.com ran a mock news story: "Enron Admits It's Really Argentina." It was pretty funny, though quite unfair -- unfair, that is, to Argentina. Yet, the satire was more on point than its authors realized. Not long ago Argentina, like Enron, was a darling of the financial community. And like Enron, Argentina was held up as a role model, to a large extent by the same people -- Argentina's monetary system, in particular, was lauded in the pages of Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, and feted at libertarian think tanks. Why did the same people tend to admire Enron and Argentina? Because in their different ways, both the company and the country tried to turn back the clock to 1913. Both were experiments testing the libertarian credo: that the great expansion in government's role between the two world wars was unwarranted. Both were supposed to demonstrate that government activism is unnecessary, and that radical laissez-faire works. The Enron experiment was, in essence, about doing away with regulation -- regulation of prices, regulation of financial trading. Most of these regulations had their origin in fear that consumers, workers and investors would be exploited by those whom Theodore Roosevelt called "malefactors of great wealth." Enron used its political clout to create what one of its own executives called a "regulatory black hole" in which it could operate freely. What Enron's admirers believed was that experience would demonstrate fears about unregulated markets to be unjustified. Unfortunately, what disappeared into that black hole was not bureaucratic clutter but billions of hard-earned dollars, including those of Enron's own employees. Or maybe it wasn't a black hole, but rather a wormhole, and those billions of dollars emerged in some other universe -- say, overseas bank accounts. For it turns out that malefactors of great wealth do exist, and some of them were running Enron. If Enron was an experiment in doing away with regulatory activism, Argentina was an experiment in doing away with monetary activism. Argentina returned to a colonial-era monetary system, a "currency board," which took government out of the loop. No more lurching from crisis to crisis, no more disruptive government interventions: Argentina would provide sound money, and leave the rest up to the free market. Though Argentina attracted the usual opportunists, I'm pretty sure that both the creators of its monetary system and many of its admirers sincerely believed that they were working in everyone's interest. Alas, these particular good intentions paved the road to hell. In the last few weeks, the bitter irony of Argentina's situation has become almost too much to bear. The country's monetary system was introduced in the name of laissez-faire. Now, in its desperate efforts to save that system from imminent collapse, the Argentine government has imposed drastic restrictions on economic freedom. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think that markets are evil, that the profit motive is always wrong. On the contrary, I believe that markets are very good things indeed. But the great economic lesson of the 20th century was that to work, a market system needs a little help from the government: regulations to prevent abuses, active monetary policy to fight recessions. The twin debacles in Houston and Buenos Aires demonstrate that this great lesson has not lost its relevance. FAIR USE NOTICE. This document may contain copyrighted materialwhose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner.CorpWatch is making this article available in our efforts to advance the understanding of corporate accountability, human rights, labor rights, social and environmental justice issues. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. Found at http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1015

Alexander 2006-03-10T23:24:47Z