Experiments In Struggle
Dan Katz reviews The Take, a film by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein In the early 1990s Argentina’s government under Carlos Menem carried out IMF instructions and pegged the local currency, the peso, to the dollar in order to check inflation. State owned banks, publicly owned utilities and airlines were privatised. Later in the 90s the economy went into recession. The new government of the Radical Party borrowed from the IMF and, in return, made cuts in health and education spending. In 2001 the GDP was $97 billion and the debt stood at $240 billion. At the end of 2001 Argentina defaulted on its...