Howie Klein gives us a description of Buenos Aires today. Argentina used to be proud of having the largest middle class of any nation in Latin America. But it was taken over by Generals who acted much like American right-wingers. The worked hard to make the rich more wealthy and to put the poor into ghettos in undesirable locations. When the voters became very angry at them, they then started a war against Great Britian to take back the Malvinas which the British call the Falklands. The war was lost, the Generals were kicked out of office, but things did not get a lot better economically. The economy used the prescriptions of the IMF and the World Bank and pushed towards free enterprise solutions that were attractive to international funding. The result was further reduction of the middle class, even before the Argentinian economy collapsed in the international financial collapse set off by the Southeast Asian countries in the late 90's.
This led to even more IMF and World Bank prescriptions, which led to an economy with a few very wealthy people living in gated communities and a lot of poor people with no reliable sources of income.
With that as background go read Howie Klein's post at Firedoglake.
Don't miss the references to the ranch in Paraguay that belongs to President Bush and officially does not exist.
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