Category: Aggregated

On Feb. 23, Argentina’s Energy Minister Juan Jose Aranguren, former CEO of the Argentine branch of Royal Dutch Shell, promised that the Macri government intended to build the new nuclear plants—Atucha III and IV—in collaboration with China and Russia, as per 2015 agreements signed between those nations’ heads of state and then-President President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

But Monday, the state-run Telam news agency reported that 600 workers at the Atucha III construction site have received their pink slips and will lose their jobs on March 31. Although these are contract workers, they are supervisors, managers, and technical personnel whose contracts have always automatically been renewed every three months, for the past year. Facundo Ocampo, lawyer for the Union of Construction and Related Workers of the Argentine Republic (UECARA), told Infocielo that the government, and specifically Energy Minister Aranguren, had made the decision on the firings.

Moreover, Diario Popular reported Monday that 2,200 workers at the Atucha II reactor were not paid January salaries, and are also threatened with job loss. The construction union, UOCRA, is now in a “state of alert,” and its secretary-general reports that the labor situation throughout the nuclear sector is “very grave”; he anticipates problems at the Atucha I plant and at the Embalse plant in Cordoba.

President Mauricio Macri has made clear he prefers “green” energy to nuclear or even hydroelectric energy, and has filled his Environment Ministry with agents of Greenpeace and Prince Philip’s World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF, World Wildlife Fund) who spend their time attacking the high-technology agreements made with China and Russia. On Feb. 23, the daily Pagina 12 reported the announcement by Communications Minister Aguad that the Arsat-3 geostationary satellite, which was scheduled to be launched in 2019, is now “delayed, for budgetary reasons.” Macri’s government replaced the management of the Arsat company, which has built the country’s satellites, to make it more “business-oriented.” 

The government of Argentine neo-liberal Mauricio Macri has signed an Agreement in Principle by which it will pay $4.65 bn. in cash to four vulture funds which have litigated against it for years: Elliott Management, owned by rapacious multibillionaire Paul Singer; Aurelius Capital Management; Davidson Kempner; and Bracebridge Capital. The amount offered represents 75% of the judgments the vultures had won in U.S. courts ($5.9 bn.), including principal and interest as well as legal fees. Another $235 mn. will go for claims outside the jurisdiction of the Southern District of New York, Bloomberg Business reported today. But recall that the vultures bought this debt at about 30% of face value when the county was in default — i.e., they are making off with over 200% profit through the destruction of the Argentine economy.

So, the vultures which former President Cristina Fernandez had accurately labelled “economic terrorists,” and whose blackmail and financial warfare failed to break her, got their deal with Wall Street’s man Macri. The vultures came away with a 25% haircut, far more generous that the 65% one that bondholders who participated in the 2005 and 2010 debt restructuring accepted.

In a statement released Monday, Special Master Daniel Pollack cautioned that the deal is not yet completed, and that another six weeks of negotiations will be needed to settle some unresolved issues. But he lavished praise on both Paul Singer, who has waged vicious warfare against Argentina for 15 years, and on Macri, whose “course correction,” he said, “was nothing short of heroic.”

Heroic? If completed, the deal will allow Macri to issue debt and borrow on international markets—he’s already received $5 bn. from a consortium of Wall Street banks—greatly increasing foreign debt which the previous government had significantly reduced, while assaulting living standards and jobs on behalf of foreign banks and multinationals. Whether Macri can implement his plans is contingent on Argentina’s Congress overturning two laws (the Lock Law and Sovereign Payment law) which prohbit settlements of the kind he just signed; payment to the vultures must also be made by April 14, or the deal is off. Congressional approval isn’t guaranteed, as legislators from the Kirchnerite Victory Front (FpV), and its allies, are expected to put up a tough fight. 

Dr. Mahathir Mohamad Tuesday resigned from the UMNO party, which has ruled Malaysia since independence in the 1950s. Mahathir, who was Prime Minister from 1981 to 2003, and who famously stood up to the IMF and George Soros in the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, has been demanding the resignation of current Prime Minister Najib Razak for the past years, for corruption, involving a state fund set up by Razak; the loss of perhaps billions of dollars from the fund; a $700 million deposit discovered in a private Najib bank account which may have come from the fund but which Najib claims came from the Saudi Royal Family (!); and Najib’s firing of his Deputy Prime Minister and his Attorney General, because they wanted to investigate the case.

Dr. Mahahtir said he is quiting UMNO, because it is “supporting corruption” under Prime Minister Najib Razak’s leadership. “I won’t call it UMNO anymore, this is Najib’s party,” he said to the press today. “I feel embarrassed that I am associated with a party that is seen as supporting corruption — it had caused me to feel ashamed.”

He said he would not set up a new party or join any other party.

With the final results of the Iranian elections announced Monday, Feb. 29, by the Interior Ministry, a coalition of moderates and reformists has won a majority in the Majlis. The reformist candidates won at least 85 seats, and moderate conservatives, who will align with President Hassan Rouhani, won an additional 73 seats, giving the two groups an absolute majority in the 290 seat Majlis. Altogether 59 seats will be decided in a runoff election to be held sometime in April.

The moderate coalition also won a clear majority in the elections for the 88 seats on the Assembly of Experts, which will select the successor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei when he dies. The Assembly serves an eight-year term, and it is widely expected that Khamenei will have to be replaced during that timeframe. The two leading hardliners on the current Assembly of Experts—Assembly Chairman Mohammed Yazdi and Mohammed-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi—were both defeated, according to a late news report from BBC, meaning that the only hardliner re-elected to the Assembly is Ahmad Jannati, who is head of the Guardian Council, which purged many candidates from the ballots before the Feb. 26 elections.

Both former President and moderate bloc leader Ayatollah Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani and President Rouhani were re-elected to the Assembly of Experts. The reform faction won all of the 30 Majlis seats from Tehran and 15 of the 16 Tehran seats on the Assembly of Experts. The most hardline “Principalist” slate in the Majlis elections won only 68 seats, down from its 100 seats in the previous Majlis.

These electoral shifts will give President Rouhani a mandate to move ahead with the economic openings, and will put more pressure on Khamenei to accommodate to those shifts. Khamenei is historically more closely aligned with the hardliners, but he has survived in power by playing a balancing act, factoring in the public mood.

Former National Intelligence Council Middle East and Africa specialist Graham Fuller has called for the United States to launch a gigantic Marshall Plan for the South, to solve the burgeoning refugee crisis, that will see billions of desperate people flooding into the North unless genuine development is achieved.

“Fences, patrol boats, walls, checkpoints, buying off countries to serve as refugee halfway-houses, more draconian immigration laws, feel-good invective against the immigrants lurking just outside our gates—all this is fantasy, just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic,” he wrote.  Instead, Fuller calls for a full 50% of the bloated Pentagon and intelligence community budget to be put into a Marshall Plan fund.  “The problem,” he concluded, “is self-evident and multi-faceted, and no, money won’t do it all. But a couple of hundred billion ‘wasted’ in Africa and Latin America on infrastructure projects, schools, clinics, roads might actually improve things a lot more than our non-stop wars.”