Is it me, or there's no news? Real news I mean, not those things you get to watch on TV. Check this:
- Power cuts to homes and industries continue. The government continues to deny they're part of a crisis. Here in Rosario, the head of the power company EPE said, just like that, that things will be OK in about 10 years, "though we'll begin to notice changes in just 2 or 3 years".
- The company also unveiled a project to educate schoolchildren about power conservation, using cartoons, with a hero named "Superwatt" and villains called e.g. "Frigoman" (a fridge) and "Dr. Derrochón" (Dr. Waster). OK, that could qualify for the "weird news" section, but the pathetic incompetence of EPE is definitely not news.
- INDEC is being reformed, but the government continues to say that the inflation figures were OK all this time despite the insultingly obvious tampering they've suffered since at least January. President Kirchner now says there's a lobby of big financial groups who want inflation to rise so they get more profit from the inflation-indexed bonds they bought. No news here either: deny reality, blame someone else, invent conspiracies.
- The dollar-peso exchange rate went up a notch yesterday, and everybody was suddenly hysterical, as if the world was about to end. Almost instantly, the old money people warned that they might be forced to raise the price of beef. No news. The aristocracy that has owned most of Argentina's productive cropland and pastures since their ancestors slaughtered the Indians that lived in them back in the 1880s has always found reasons to charge more.
- Politicians are playing musical chairs again, each one fearing he or she will have no place in the list of winners and will have to get a real, decent job until the next election. Boring!
Stumble it!
