Does God exist?

I don't like translating my own writings, so I won't subject you to a translation of my review of ¿Dios existe?, whose core is a public debate between then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the atheist Italian philosopher Paolo Flores d’Arcais (which, as far as I know, hasn't been published in English). The book in fact doesn't deal a lot with that ancient, ever-present topic, but has more to do with the mode of the affirmation of God by the believers and how it relates to the grounding of moral principles and the law.

Deep stuff, especially for one (like me) who has never studied philosophy. I'm missing most of the references that the author takes for granted... But I think I'm getting it, mostly. This guy Flores d’Arcais has some very clear ideas and he knows how to convey them. This unlike Michel Onfray, who's fascinating but excessively florid and elliptical (I just finished a book by him about the Cynics, by the way), and very, very unlike the one contemporary atheist philosopher I've read within the Anglo-Saxon materialist tradition, Daniel Dennett. Popular English-language atheistic thought is, understandably, almost completely devoted to refuting Protestant fundamentalism and creationism, on one hand, and denouncing the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism on the other — and it all seems a bit shallow and pointless after a while. I've been overexposed to that lately (I'm still trying to finish Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which has very engaging ideas on the origin of design). So for me Onfray and Flores d’Arcais are a door into a different world of thought.

I'll leave you with something to get an idea of what Flores d’Arcais thinks about religion in the public sphere, his Eleven Theses Against Habermas. The condition he sets for a pluralistic democracy are echoed in the arguments he presents in the book — namely, that all of us, believers of all faiths and nonbelievers alike, must renounce to claim that we have reasonable, unassailably objective grounds for our principles, because such a thing does not and cannot exist.

Expensive, those principles (by Martín Caparrós)

What follows is a translation of an article by Martín Caparrós on today's Crítica Digital (Caros, los principios) about the sweeping tax and capital smuggling amnesty proposed by Kirchner's government and currently being discussed in Congress. In dire need of fresh funds, Cristina is basically offering criminals a free pass to launder their money in Argentina, and inviting all those Argentinians who illegally sent their undeclared foreign currency abroad to take them back without paying taxes, dropping any legal investigations under way. [For some more background, see the American Task Force coverage.] Caparrós, once a leftist militant, again voices his disappointment with this supposedly progressive government, whose true leader (Néstor Kirchner) famously said he would never agree to check his principles at the door of the Casa Rosada.

The good thing is that we now at least know how much they're worth. Or rather how much they believe they're worth. (It may be, if anything, as in the classical sudaca joke about the best business deal: buy an Argentinian for what he's worth, sell him for what he thinks he's worth.) We now know, I was saying, the price. They're not cheap: they must believe their principles are better than they look — and they're charging a lot for them. The savings repatriation and tax moratorium proposal, which Congress began discussing yesterday, is that: a price label. They were supposed to have some principles: equality before the law, opposition to financial capitalism, a "new tax culture", a push towards some [wealth] redistribution by the State, an insistence on justice being made despite [purposeful] oversights. All of which crumbles when the government tells those who took away the money, those who evaded taxes, that there's no problem, that everything's forgotten. For a handful of dollars: various economists reckon that, on the best scenario, five percent of the Argentine capital that escaped might come back — that is, some six billion. That, if anyone believes them and brings in the bucks, which isn't a safe bet at all. With luck, the State could recover 10% of that 5%, some 600 million, and at the same time, of course, take advantage of the modicum of reactivation that money could bring to our economy.

That's what their principles are worth. Or rather the price of shitting on them: if you laundered money, if you evaded taxes, if you forged your bills to take home your "10% commission", don't worry, we'll fix it; and if you were in jail, you can now go home. If you stole 10 kilos of beef from the butcher's on the corner, or 80 pesos from some boy on a dark street, then no, this deal doesn't include you. Evading taxes is not stealing from one person — it's stealing from all of them, from the State which should spend that money on schools and hospitals for everyone, or at least for those who don't have them. Tax evasion is robbery worse than any other robbery: it's robbing those who have the least. These are the crooks this law wants to spare: the big crooks, the shirt-and-tie ones, the friends.

That's why this law is a full stop: a point of no return. If they pass it as it is, they won't ever again be able to speak of their principles: they will have sold them, under the excuse of a crisis that didn't exist days ago. A bit expensive, it's true: as in that bad joke.

The translation is free; the links are mine. Caparrós employs a few local references that may not be obvious unless you live in Argentina: the use of sudaca as a self-effacing slur; the soundbite por una nueva cultura tributaria ("for a new tax culture") which the Federal Tax Administration uses to advertise its fight for citizens' fiscal responsibility (which this moratorium turns into a mockery); the diego or "10% commission" — an euphemism for bribery; the expression punto final, which compares this obscene pardon for the wealthy to the law that halted investigations of the dictatorship's crimes. It just came out and I felt I had to share.

Musketeers of redistribution: Guillermo Moreno

This is the third and last installment of my translation of the Crítica Digital article titled Los mosqueteros de la redistribución ("The Musketeers of Redistribution"), which shows how the Kirchner administration has failed to redistribute income, which they claim as their main economic goal. This time it's about the worst offender in many respects, Secretary of Commerce Guillermo Moreno. This is what the article says about him:

In theory, his mission was to keep inflation from diluting the purchasing power of fixed-wage workers and retired citizens. The price agreements that he signed with companies at the beginning ceased being complied with long ago, except for [the statistics bureau] INDEC, where Moreno draws the lines of his private world.

Of course I've already written about INDEC and its ridiculous, obscenely faked figures of inflation, which the government continues to defend as true. Moreno is de facto leader of INDEC, which used to be a purely technical organization, fairly independent from the national government and thus trustable, until Néstor Kirchner decided he didn't like reality and let Moreno appoint his minions in places of power there. And that's not all.

[The manipulation of INDEC's figures] is a well-known story. Less known are [Moreno's] practices to favour concentrated companies, consolidating monopolic or oligopolic markets. For Moreno, competition is [a subject] for textbooks. He has always chosen commanding phone calls and verbal agreements with the major actors in each economic sector (cereal producers, mills, supermarkets, dairy companies, food companies, etc.) over transparent regulations that might discourage [the formation of] concentrated structures and encourage competition.

The removal of José Sbatella from the leadership of the National Commission for the Defense of Competition, key to the enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, is the culmination of that process. Sbatella, a professional with a long career, ruled against the Cablevisión-Multicanal merge, which two of Moreno's deputies in the Commission approved on the last day of Néstor Kirchner's term; Sbatella also set conditions for other multi-million [company] purchases in the food sector, which were not taken into account.

Guillermo Moreno is the kind of official that any sane administration would get rid of as quickly as possible, preferrably offering him (as compensation) a trip to some faraway land. Cristina Kirchner's unspoken excuse for keeping him is that everybody in the opposition and the major media is asking for Moreno's head, so firing the guy would be interpreted as a sign of weakness. I can understand that, but it also shows quite plainly that Cristina cares more for an appearance of overwhelming power and firm determination than for doing her job well despite her personal pride.

Moreno is a wrench in the most sensitive part of the economic machinery; the more he stays, the more difficult it will be to restore the credibility of the government regarding inflation and their goal of reducing poverty. Right now we don't know how many poor people there are in Argentina, but we know for sure they're many, many more than Cristina Kirchner and Guillermo Moreno would admit.

Musketeers of redistribution: Ricardo Jaime

Continuing with the translation of the Crítica Digital article titled Los mosqueteros de la redistribución ("The Musketeers of Redistribution"), about the subsidies granted by the Kirchner administration.

The second musketeer of redistribution is the Secretary of Transport, Ricardo Jaime. During the first semester of the year, subsidies to transportation (urban buses, trains and subways) reached AR$2.66bn, up by 71% compared to the same period last year.

Néstor and Cristina Kirchner (for all practical purposes, it's all one open-ended presidential term) have channeled billions into subsidies for public and private companies, with almost complete freedom to alter the budget and without oversight, so these figures are important. They usually say they need freedom to redistribute the income collected by the state so that it reaches the poor, but in fact all that money and all that freedom gives a few people a huge amount of power. Unsurprisingly, they've been using it to benefit the companies.

Subsidizing public passenger transportation is not an Argentine invention. And there's a consensus that such subsidious mostly benefit the lower-income rung of society. However, here we have doubtful criteria for assignment of subsidies, [which are granted,] in the case of bus companies, on the basis of sworn statements without control over cost structures, and in the case of trains and subways, over cost structures that are inflated by companies linked [to the main ones] as suppliers.

If you've travelled by train in Buenos Aires, it should be obvious to you that the companies that provide the service aren't pouring money into it. I mean, people have set fire to train stations out of anger, due to how bad the services are. By giving money to private companies and not overseeing their investments or forcing them to give a reasonably good service, the government is an accomplice of fraud. If the Secretary of Transportation can't make sure that people aren't treated like cattle in buses and trains that he (using our money) is paying for, then he should resign.

Aerolíneas Argentinas is a completely different matter. The poor do not generally travel by plane. The decission of re-nationalizing is debatable, but valid if weight is conceded to arguments such as regional integration or economic development. What is not trivial from the point of view of redistribution is who will take on the cost. Jaime said that, if it were up to him, he would pay nothing to the Spaniards of [the Marsans group]. And he says they gutted the company, while he looked the other way for five years…

This is especially relevant now that Aerolíneas is being really nationalized. It certainly looks as if we'll be buying back a company laden with debt and with a dismal record of service, and we'll be taking care of fixing it.

There is not a successful precedent of redistribution, either, in the case of LAFSA, the state company that in 2003 took care of the employees of former companies LAPA and DINAR. LAFSA never flied and today it is in the process of dissolving itself. But in the budget there are still funds set aside to pay the salaries of 99 employees, about 10 of them with wages above AR$10,000 per month.

Empty shells masquerading as actual companies for accounting purposes are so common in Argentine history that this surprises no-one. "Enterprise ethics" is an oxymoron in Argentina. This case is also interesting because the state invokes the welfare of the workers to justify the intervention in the finances of failed companies. We're hearing this kind of thing in the debate about Aerolíneas Argentinas as well. At the risk of being accused of insensitivity, I think the state should decide whether it wants a serious company that works and can sustain itself as a flagship airline, or a mockery of an airline whose main purpose is to produce money for its workers, some of who have never done any actual work besides showing up at union meetings.

I'll be posting the last installment of this series in a few days.

Musketeers of redistribution: Julio De Vido

Long time no write, sorry. I resume the translation of the Crítica Digital article titled Los mosqueteros de la redistribución ("The Musketeers of Redistribution"), which shows how the Kirchner administration isn't Robin Hood taking from the rich to give to the poor, as they arrogantly assert all the time.

… [T]he residential natural gas fee in Buenos Aires amounts to 30 cents per cubic metre. However, four million low-income households which have no access to the natural gas supply network are forced to buy [pressurized natural gas] containers at a cost of AR$1.70/m³, that is, almost six times more. Since the devaluation [of the peso, in early 2002] the residential gas fees have been frozen; but the price of the 10-kg gas container has climbed 275%, to an average of AR$30…. [Minister of Federal Planning Julio] De Vido authorized the deregulation of the gas container market, in which [the private company] Repsol YPF is dominant, and in exchange offered the so-called "social container", which is impossible to find at the price of AR$18 suggested by the State. Even if you could get that, the price (AR$1.20/m³) would be four times that of the network gas….

That is, the government forces the natural gas companies to sell their product at ridiculously low prices to a mostly middle-class public (and gives those companies a good excuse not to invest on surveying and expanding their network to less privileged areas) and allows Repsol YPF to charge six times more to the poor who aren't reached by the network, or who can't pay for a connection to it. (Until a few years ago my neighbourhood itself wasn't connected to the NG network — when it was our turn, we had to pay something in the order of AR$700 to get the pipes into our home; the equivalent price today must be three or four times as much.)

With more concern for fiscal health… in the last weeks Cristina's government started giving signs that it will unfreeze the utility fees. The astronomical growth of subsidies would threaten the fiscal balance if tax revenue were to falter in the future. … During the first semester [of 2008] the energy subsidies alone amounted to AR$8.2 billion, 295% than the same period [in 2007]. The announcement of hikes in the power fees will be followed by the slow thawing of residential natural gas fees.

The interesting thing is that the increases follow a segmented criterion: more [percent] increase for those who consume more. According to data provided by the power distribution companies, 7% of the high-income households account for 25% of the consumption. In the case of natural gas the concentration is similar.

If progressive [as in gradual?] adjustments had been applied two or three years ago, the State would have avoided a huge transference of wealth to the pockets of the less needy. Why wasn't it done before? De Vido used to explain it was not easy to identify the bills of the higher-income households, something acknowledged as possible only now.

More about this coming soon...

Income redistribution?

An example of why I don't consider Cristina Kirchner's to be a progressive government, and why the Kirchnerist mantra about their income redistribution goal is a big lie, and why I think it's OK if the middle- and upper-class heavier consumers are charged more for utilities: an article on Crítica Digital, titled Los mosqueteros de la redistribución ("The Musketeers of Redistribution" — Minister of Federal Planning and Infrastucture Julio De Vido, Secretary of Transportation Ricardo Jaime, and Secretary of Domestic Commerce Guillermo Moreno). I translate freely:

"This year, one million families with incomes in excess of AR$6,000 per month will receive a state subsidy of AR$750/month in the form of cheap power, domestic natural gas and fuel. This is the equivalent of five social plans [welfare payments] of AR$150/month, which are still received by little less than one million household heads under the extreme poverty line."

The minimum wage has been recently raised to AR$1,200, from an earlier figure of AR$980 established in July 2007.

"We have already written about the sales boom of natural gas-powered heaters for swimming pools, of the rage in 1,000-watt searchlights for the gardens of the most exclusive closed neighbourhoods, or the growth of the market of high-end diesel cars. Since nothing is free in economics, these subsidized prices are paid by the state, which this year will give away nearly AR$20 billion to compensate energy companies."

For comparison, the federal state collected taxes for about 17 billion in March and 24 billion in July, so this is like giving away a whole month of taxpayers' money. You could argue the subsidies go to the taxpayers, only they're not the same taxpayers. Most of those billions come from the IVA (our VAT), which is 21% over most goods and services (including food), so the poor pay a disproportionate amount of it, because everybody needs food, and most of what the poor buy is food. A smaller amount comes from a profit tax that leaves ample room for evasion, and that the government doesn't even try to collect. In fact, the government is about to exempt individuals with monthly wages over AR$3,300 (single) or AR$4,500 (married with children) from the profit tax, detracting from the total collection.

The government actually benefits from the "inflation tax". Every month it proudly exhibits huge and increasing tax collection figures, which is easy when your main source of revenue is tied to the prices of consumer goods. Coupled with INDEC's low inflation rates pulled from Guillermo Moreno's ass, it lets them believe or pretend that the country is growing fast, although that plainly happens only in nominal terms.

"From the total subsidies to the energy sector, the generous Argentine State will provide this year AR$9bn to subsidize the consumption of that higher-income social group. Incredibly, there are still well-off middle-class people who complain that the State "gives away" Jefes de Hogar welfare plans, which today are received by extremely poor households mostly headed by women. The 2008 budget for the Unemployed Heads of Household programme is only AR$1.8 billion."

Yes, many in the middle class are really angry that the poor "don't work, don't pay taxes and get money from the government", while "decent hard-working citizens" have to struggle to go on vacations or change the car every few years. I've heard borderline middle-class citizens demand that the government "sends those lazy bums to work", disregarding the fact that most of them are single women with small children, or young men who have no qualifications at all. This is the state's fault, but taking away their welfare payments is not a viable remedy.

"So as to dispell all doubt regarding the magnitude of the redistribution exercised by [Julio De Vido's] Ministry of Federal Planning: the nine billion pesos devoted to subsidize the consumption of well-off citizens are well above this year's budget for the Ministry of Social Development (AR$7.6bn); they're on par with the annual budget of the Ministry of Education (AR$9.3bn); and they represent 2.5 times the budget of the Ministry of Health (AR$3.5bn)."

This was just the first part of the article devoted to the "Musketeers of Redistribution", who (as you see) wield huge power over the lives and fortunes of Argentinians, and who are accountable only to the office of the President. If and when I have the time, I'll translate another part.

Claudio Lozano on Cristina's "political naiveté"

This is a translation of an op-ed by Claudio Lozano on Crítica Digital about Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's speech. Lozano is a left-wing economist associated with the CTA labour union, former Kirchner supporter, and now a national deputy for Proyecto Sur. He speaks of Cristina's acknowledgment that the government's only mistake when implementing the mobile tax exports was the "political naiveté" of thinking that people who earn a lot of money would tolerate the state's demanding of some of that money to give to the poor. The emphasis is mine.

I wish it were the first speech. I wish the argument of political naiveté were believable. I wish we were discussing a serious income redistribution programme while taking responsibility for the fact that in Argentina, since 2007, the economy and hunger are growing in parallel. I wish the debate of a more egalitarian relation between the Nation and the provinces were seriously undertaken. I wish we were in the presence of a government whose goal were capturing extraordinary profits to realize the proclaimed goal of "paying off the Argentinians' deficitary social account". It's a pity that it's not the case. Can it be true that they want to solve the social situation, when INDEC is under intervention and millions of poor people are deliberately hidden from view? What's the reason why the Government speaks of transferring income, and yet its social programme includes no concrete mechanism of transference of resources to families? Does the Government not know that, by just implementing a universal assignment of 100 pesos for every child, extreme poverty (hunger) would be practically eliminated among underage citizens? Does the Government know that simply by setting aside 1% of the annual GDP the issue of hunger would be solved, and with 5% of the GDP poverty would be eliminated altogether? Isn't the Fund created today a bit scarce, when we know that foreign trade taxes will bring in, this year, more than 50 billion pesos? Considering that in the last five years there's been no advance on tax reform, no advance on seizing the profits of oil, mining and fishing, and that in the case of agricultural profits this was done in a small proportion, and granting benefits that favoured the concentration of this economic sector, is today's presidential speech believable? I wish it were true. I wish it weren't just one more speech. But why do we explain what we're going to do with the tax collection above 35%? Weren't export taxes intended to redistribute income?

During five years we've heard the Kirchners and their supporters incessantly congratulate themselves on their progressivism. But nothing has been done to make this country more egalitarian. Kirchnerism has an automatic majority on both Chambers of Congress, a Congress that never refuses a command, and yet all they seem capable of doing is extracting money from one sector of the economy using the bluntest tools at their disposal. Even one of Página/12's commentators, one month after the beginning of the farmers' strike, had to acknowledge that the Kirchners' government is not reformist or progressive at all. Poverty and social inequality are much worse than they were 25 years ago, right after 6 years of a corrupt military dictatorship and a disastrous war. A huge gap still lies between the poor and rich in Argentina: the wealthiest 10% earns 30 times more than the poorest 10%, worse than during the neoliberal rule of the Menem administration. The tax system is horribly regressive: 47% of the total tax revenue corresponds to the IVA (our VAT), a tax on consumption, while you pay no taxes of any kind if you win a million through speculation or when you sell your company's stocks.

And on top of this, the president explains that the leftovers from an exceptionally high tax, imposed by the Executive branch without congressional approval, will be used to redistribute income. I mean, wasn't redistribution the main reason why they needed so much money? And if so, where's the rest of it? Because we sure can't see it anywhere.

Translating Borges

This should be directed to a new blog, but I already have too many, so it stays here. It's an English translation of the poem Las causas ("The Causes"), by Jorge Luis Borges, who is one of the very few writers whose poetry I can read all the time, and (I believe) the only poet to have earned his own space in my library. Let it serve as a break between the latest politics-burdened posts and the ones to come, and maybe as incitement for one more person to start reading Borges.

The poem is almost completely composed of literary/historical references, both external and internal to Borges' own work. If you don't know what something means, just note it down and check it out later.

The translation is entirely mine, though it was based on one I found in the net, which I believe to be also a self-made translation, in this case by someone whose first language is English (there's a telling mistake in the next-to-last line).

The Causes
by Jorge Luis Borges

The sunsets and generations.
The days and none was the first.
The coolness of water in Adam's
throat. Orderly Paradise.
The eye deciphering the dark.
The love of wolves at dawn.
The word. The hexameter. The mirror.
The Tower of Babel and pride.
The moon that Chaldeans gazed at.
The innumerable sands of the Ganges.
Chuang-Tzu and the butterfly that dreams him.
The golden apples on the islands.
The steps in the wandering labyrinth.
Penelope's infinite tapestry.
The Stoics' circular time.
The coin in the dead man's mouth.
The weight of the sword on the scale.
Each drop of water in the clepsydra.
The eagles, the auspicious days, the legions.
Caesar on the morning of Pharsalia.
The shadow of the crosses over the earth.
The chess and algebra of the Persian.
The footprints of long migrations.
The conquest of kingdoms by the sword.
The relentless compass. The open sea.
The clock's echo in memory.
The king beheaded by the ax.
The incalculable dust which was armies.
The nightingale's voice in Denmark.
The calligrapher's meticulous line.
The face of the suicidal one in the mirror.
The gambler's card. Greedy gold.
The shapes of a cloud in the desert.
Every arabesque in the kaleidoscope.
Each regret and each tear.
All those things were necessary
so that our hands would meet.