Argentina elects Far-Right Libertarian Javier Milei to the Presidency

88m3

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their economy is so fukked up apartments are probably the least of their worries but I guess it's a start

it'll probably help with the problem of warehousing in the short-term and drive rents down
 

bnew

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My uneducated guess is that it's the calm before the storm and that the inflation scared off a lot of people and so rentals are in lower demand. Over time, if the economy recovers, it will burn renters like it does in every other place that isn't rent-controlled

landlords will do what landlords do everywhere, see what the market can bear. rental rates costs will definitely increase if new housing isn't being built.
 

88m3

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landlords will do what landlords do everywhere, see what the market can bear. rental rates costs will definitely increase if new housing isn't being built.

a lot of South American cities are much more dense and built out than the US due to zoning and money laundering

they're probably on the right side of the ball supply wise

 

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Argentina’s poverty rate spikes in first 6 months of President Milei’s shock therapy​


By ALMUDENA CALATRAVA

Updated 9:46 PM EDT, September 26, 2024

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Argentina’s poverty rate jumped from almost 42% to 53% during the first six months of Javier Milei’ s presidency, the statistics agency reported Thursday, a steep rise reflecting the pain of the country’s most intense austerity program in recent memory.

The government’s finding that Argentina’s half-year poverty rate in 2024 had surged to its highest level since 2003, when the country was reeling from a catastrophic foreign debt default and currency devaluation, marks a setback for the far-right economist. So far, foreign investors and the International Monetary Fundto which Argentina owes $43 billion — have cheered his controversial fiscal shock therapy that has succeeded in pulling down the country’s monthly inflation from 25.5% last December to 4.2% in recent months.

Argentina’s inflation, now running at more than 230% annually, is among the worst in the world.

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Residential buildings are covered in color in Barrio 31, a working poor neighborhood in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina, Friday, Sept. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Bracing for negative news hours before the poverty report’s release, Milei’s spokesperson sought to deflect the blow in a lengthy press conference.

“The government inherited a disastrous situation,” Manuel Adorni told reporters, lambasting the decades of unbridled spending under Milei’s left-leaning Peronist predecessors that generated chronic inflation. “They left us on the brink of being a country with essentially all of its inhabitants poor.”

Unlike previous populist governments that kept consumer spending high at the cost of a massive budget deficit, Milei dismantled price controls, cut subsidies on energy and transport and devalued the peso by 54% in December after taking office.

The austerity measures and deregulation have marked a brutal contraction in spending power and dragged the economy deep into recession.

AP video by Victor Caivano

A political outsider who made fighting Argentina’s dizzying inflation his flagship campaign promise, Milei is betting that if his government can keep prices falling, growth will return and fuel a miraculous recovery.

Milei’s austerity measures have helped drive down the yearly inflation rate from a peak of almost 300% in April. His government’s budget proposal expects annual inflation to drop to 122.9% by the end of the year.

But the months ahead will be tricky, economists say. After its initial decline, monthly inflation has been stuck around 4% since July. Milei’s 2025 budget proposal aims for a fiscal surplus of over 1.3% of the country’s annual economic output. That would require further spending cuts as calls to restart frozen public works and boost pensions and wages grow louder.

A thinning safety net​


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Rocio Costa watches her daughter Francesca try on shoes at a second-hand clothing fair alongside her other children Almendra and Tiziano in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Of the millions who can’t clear Argentina’s official poverty level of about $950 a month in local currency for a family of four, even more have tumbled into destitution. Thursday’s poverty report showed that Argentina’s extreme poverty rate had shot up to 18.1% during Milei’s first six months as president from 11.9% in the last half of 2023.

Among those affected is 32-year-old Rocío Costa, who said the rapidly rising prices have sapped her family’s meager income of just over $400 a month. Comforts like hair-dye, soft drinks and pizza had long been out of reach, but in July she realized she didn’t have enough money to both buy diapers for her four-month-old and put dinner on the table for her family of five.

“There wasn’t even a package of noodles, there was nothing,” Costa said from her home in the capital of Buenos Aires. “The Milei government is killing me.”

Desperate, Costa turned to friends and volunteers and eventually secured diapers at a social assistance center and $1 second-hand sneakers for her daughter at a local parish.

“We are plugging the holes,” she said.

A jobs crisis​


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Weekend security guard Leonardo Constantino stops to pose for a portrait as he walks home with food for his family that he received from a soup kitchen in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

The runaway inflation — shocking even for Argentines who lived through years of annual inflation averaging above 50% — has forced middle-class Argentines to cut back on spending and drain their savings.

The economy has contracted 3% so far this year. Government surveys reveal that both Argentina’s vast informal jobs market and formal workforce have hemorrhaged hundreds of thousands of jobs since Milei took office.

That has put more of Argentina’s once-robust middle class in danger of sliding into poverty.

“I’m part of Argentina’s lost middle class,” said 48-year-old Leonardo Constantino. Before he lost his job six years ago, he had a regular paycheck working in restaurants and played padel, the popular racket sport, with friends whenever he could.

Finding a new job has never been harder. “It kept getting worse,” he said.

Now a weekend bouncer earning just $155 a month, he said he couldn’t afford basic household items without help from the Buenos Aires municipality.

Some months ago, he gave up his favorite hobby. The $6 padel court fee had become too much.

Sky-high bills​


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Sofia Gonzalez Figueroa and her son Emanuel stand in line outside a soup kitchen for a free, hot meal, where they walked to from home on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

For decades low-paid Argentines have navigated their upside-down economy by padding their meager incomes with government cash transfers and generous subsidies that reduced the cost of utilities, food and transport.

But utilities bills jumped over 200% for many after Milei scrapped the subsidies to trim the deficit.

For Sofia Gonzalez Figueroa, a 36-year-old single mother who last year paid $10 a month for electricity, the pain of Milei’s austerity was instantaneous. Her utilities bill skyrocketed by 830%.

Gonzalez Figueroa barters clothes for shampoo and other essentials, and uses the government’s family welfare program to buy groceries.

“It is not much, but it helps me,” she said.

Those who don’t qualify for assistance have increasingly turned to side hustles to pay utilities bills. Emilce Correa, who works 42 hours a week as a lab technician at a public hospital, picks up all extra shifts she can at far-flung medical centers. “By the middle of the month, I already have nothing,” she said.

Others have joined the growing legions of workers offering to wash car windows at red lights and mining dumpsters for sustenance.

Hungry but patient​


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Debora Paola Galluccio eats her one meal of the day from a community kitchen next to her partner Marcelo Díaz in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Débora Galluccio, a 48-year-old legal expert who lost her job in Congress during the previous administration, went from dining in restaurants to soup kitchens in less than a year.

“It’s hard, but we manage as best we can,” Galluccio said, sipping stew provided by a local nonprofit. She said she feels lucky to live in an apartment that her partner inherited. Milei’s move to relax rent-control regulations has priced most working-class Argentines out of the real estate market.

Despite it all, Galluccio — like many Argentines — seems to have accepted that the immediate pain of Milei’s economic reforms is an inevitable step toward prosperity.

Fed up with generations of crises under left-wing populists, Galluccio is giving the chainsaw-wielding radical a shot.

“In eight months he can’t fix the mess they made in 20 years,” she said.

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Felipe reaches through the door of a bakery where his parents Walter and Evelyn wait to take home discarded baked goods that the shop didn’t sell in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
 

hashmander

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Has he run the we must go through a period of pain for better outcomes rhetoric yet?
based on the article at least one of the voters is saying it for him.

Despite it all, Galluccio — like many Argentines — seems to have accepted that the immediate pain of Milei’s economic reforms is an inevitable step toward prosperity.

Fed up with generations of crises under left-wing populists, Galluccio is giving the chainsaw-wielding radical a shot.

“In eight months he can’t fix the mess they made in 20 years,” she said.
 

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Argentina’s Javier Milei accused of plagiarising UN speech from West Wing​


Populist leader alleged to have ‘copied word for word’ a monologue by TV show’s fictional president Jed Bartlet
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Javier Milei (L) and The West Wing character Jed Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen. Composite: Getty, HBO

Tom Phillips Latin America correspondent

Fri 4 Oct 2024 10.04 EDT

Argentina’s rightwing populist president, Javier Milei, has been accused of plagiarising a chunk of his recent speech to the United Nations general assembly from the political drama The West Wing.

“It seems like fiction, but it isn’t,” the left-leaning Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12 reported on Friday, claiming Milei had “copied, word for word, a monologue” by the television show’s fictional president, Josiah “Jed” Bartlet.

Suspicions over Milei’s address surfaced this week when the political columnist Carlos Pagni flagged the “extraordinary” similarities between part of the president’s speech and words uttered by Martin Sheen’s Bartlet 21 years earlier. “Didn’t anyone else notice?” Pagni wrote in the newspaper La Nación, before transcribing the words of both men.

Addressing world leaders on 24 September, Argentina’s shaggy-haired libertarian leader said: “We believe in defending everyone’s lives. We believe in defending everyone’s property. We believe in freedom of speech for everybody. We believe in freedom to worship for everybody. We believe in freedom of trade for everybody … And because in these times what happens in one country quickly has an impact in others, we believe all people should live free from tyranny and oppression, whether in the form of political oppression, economic slavery or religious fanaticism. This fundamental idea must not be mere words – it has to be supported by deeds: diplomatically, economically and materially.”

During episode 15 of season four of the Washington-set drama, Bartlet tells his staff: “We’re for freedom of speech everywhere. We’re for freedom to worship everywhere. We’re for freedom to learn … for everybody. And because in our time, you can build a bomb in your country and bring it to my country, what goes on in your country is very much my business. And so we are for freedom from tyranny, everywhere, whether in the guise of political oppression … or economic slavery … or religious fanaticism … That most fundamental idea cannot be met with merely our support. It has to be met with our strength: diplomatically, economically, materially.”

The likeness between the two speeches raised Argentinian eyebrows and was attributed by one newspaper to the West Wing obsession of Milei’s chief strategist, Santiago Caputo. “Fanatical about the screenwriter [and creator of the series] Aaron Sorkin, Caputo has watched the whole of The West Wing between seven and nine times,” La Nación reported this year.

Many observers emphasised the irony of Milei – a volatile rightwinger with ties to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orbán – cribbing from a fictional Democratic president known for his even-keeled administration and progressive politics.

But politicians of all stripes appear to have sought inspiration from the Emmy-winning series. The former British prime minister Theresa May faced similar accusations during the Conservative party’s 2017 conference, although Downing Street said there was “no question of plagiarism” and denied that The West Wing was among May’s favourite US shows.

In 2020, a West Wing-watching reporter in Australia noticed that a speech given by the Labor politician Will Fowles had a distinct whiff of Bartlet. “There were a couple of phrases that jumped out at me as being very familiar … [and] sure enough when I put them side by side I realised that what I thought I had heard is what I had heard,” the journalist, James Talia, later recalled. He told Newsweek that Fowles had admitted being “a very big West Wing fan” and to paying “an unconscious homage” to Sorkin, whom he considered “one of the greatest political speechwriters we have ever seen”.

Bartlet is also not the only fictional US president to have had his words pirated. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the Argentinian politician Alejandro Torres was filmed trying to lift voters’ spirits with the words of Thomas J Whitmore, the fictional president played by Bill Pullman in the 1996 alien invasion film Independence Day.

In 2017, the Mexican politician Miguel Ángel Covarrubias was accused of poaching lines from Frank Underwood, the machiavellian president played by Kevin Spacey in the Netflix series House of Cards. Covarrubias denied plagiarism and claimed it was a deliberate tactic to provoke interest.

Five years earlier it was President Andrew Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas in the 1995 romantic comedy The American President, whose words were misappropriated by a real-life politician. “D’oh!,” Australia’s Anthony Albanese, then a cabinet minister, tweeted in embarrassment after being called out for lifting Shepherd’s lines.
 
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