Amazon Death Rattle

by Robert Hunziker / September 20th, 2024

The Amazon rainforest is in deep trouble. Labeling it a “crisis”, however, seems too hackneyed and not descriptive enough because the devastation is beyond description.

The magnificent rainforest is morphing into a tinder box that’s trapped in the worst drought of all time. According to MapBiomas, an all-time record amount of land is charred and smoldering as 180,000 fires this year, over 50,000 current, light up Brazil, potentially threatening major cities Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

An estimated 20% of the Brasilia National Forest burned just last week.” (ABC News, 9/10/2024)

What’s happening in the Amazon may strike people as routine fires that news outlets have been covering for years. Nothing could be further from the truth. Historically, there’s nothing routine about this. Today’s fires are an unnerving example of a trend that is unique to modern-day society. Historically, over millennia, the Amazon rainforest did not experience massive take-down wildfires that incinerated all life forms.

“The Amazon evolved for millions of years without fire… its plants and animals lack the necessary adaptation….” (Source: Amazon Rainforest Fires: Everything You Need to Know, College of Natural Resources, North Carolina State University, September 23, 2019)

Making matters far-far worse than any previous fires and a chilling new development: “Almost half of the fires in the Amazon burned pristine forests, according to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. That is far from typical. It means fighting deforestation in the Amazon is no longer enough to stop fires. This matters because it shows that the fire-control practices in some of the world’s most biodiverse places are not working. And that threatens myriad forms of life, including us.” (Source: “The Fires That Could Reshape the Amazon”, The New York Times, September 17, 2024)

From Canada to Siberia to Brazil the world is on fire. When forests burn, they emit CO2. Therefore, wildfires convert carbon-sequestering trees into CO2 belching monsters in competition with gas-powered automobiles. This is global warming feeding on itself.

As a result, forest fires are getting worse. Burned-out forests in 2023 topped all previous years by a record-smashing +24%. “The latest data on forest fires confirms what we’ve long feared: Forest fires are becoming more widespread, burning at least twice as much tree cover today as they did two decades ago.” (Source: The Latest Data Confirm Forests Fires Are Getting Worse, World Resources Institute, August 13, 2024)

Global warming has turned lethal. In Brazil, a drought that began last year has become the worst on record, according to national disaster monitoring agency Cemaden. “In general, the 2023-2024 drought is the most intense, long-lasting in some regions and extensive in recent history, at least in the data since 1950,” according to Ana Paula Cunha, a drought researcher with Cemaden. (Source: South America Surpasses Record for Fires, Reuters, September 13, 2024)

According to Rachael Garrett, Professor of Conservation/University of Cambridge: “Deforestation of the Amazon has led to a reduction in rainfall in Brazil, throwing the ecosystem off balance and causing a loop of drought and devastating wildfires now impacted by the worst drought in memory.” (Source: Brazil Experiencing Record-Breaking Wildfires as Persistent Drought Affects the Amazon Rainforest, ABC News, September 14, 2024)

Global warming has become more than the mighty Amazon can handle, turning charcoal black, smothering smoke. This one-and-only world gem directly influences global hydrology from the cornfields of Iowa to the crest of the Tibetan Plateau 15,000 km away; it is literally at the heartbeat of the planet and suffering, in early stages of a massive die-off. Loss of the rainforest will bring a different world, a foreign world that nobody wants to recognize.

“According to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), there were over 65,000 fire hotspots by the end of August 2024—the highest number for this period since 2005.” (Source: 2024 Marks the Worst Year for Amazon Fires Since 2005, Rainforest Foundation, 2024) Worse yet, of the fire hotspots, over 38,000 were recorded in August alone, an increase of 120% compared to the same month last year with 17,373 fire hotspots.

Since time immemorial, healthy rainforests don’t burn. Fires in healthy forests do not turn catastrophic. They remain low intensity and stay close to the ground, removing debris, small trees, and woody shrubs in the understory. The Amazon rainforest, when healthy, is shrouded by misty fog in a warm climate with lots of rain, up to 260 inches per year. But global warming has taken that description away. Recurring droughts are killing the rainforest, setting the stage for massive wildfires. NASA claims droughts come so frequently that large regions of the rainforest no longer recover. This is not normal. In a word, it is frightening.

A high-end collaboration of 80 scientists claims trees in western and southern Amazon face serious risk of dying because of global warming-induced droughts. (Source: Amazon – How Will it Cope with Drought? University of Leeds, April 26, 2023)

“Wildfires in the Amazon are choking swaths of Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador with smoke leading to evacuations, school closures, canceled flights and a dire threat to plant and animal life in the region… An estimated 20% of the Brasilia National Forest burned just last week.” (Source: ‘Out of Control’ Fires Ravage the Amazon Region, ABC News, September 10, 2024) This is so far beyond normal that it doesn’t even compute.

“The fires in California or the fires in Europe, those aren’t the same as the fires in South America. There’s an enormous difference — the loss of biodiversity,’ says Guillermo Villalobos, a political scientist focusing on climate science at Bolivian nonprofit Fundación Solon. ‘Forests like the Amazon are historically tropical forests, meaning they’ve never burned, they’ve never coexisted with the fire. This is terribly tragic for the ecosystem and the world. The Amazon is in its worst state of the last 50 years.” (Ibid.)

The statement “tropical forests never burned” tells a horrific tale that is impossible to ignore. Human activity has lit a devasting scorching change to nature that’s sparked by the advent of CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels, which causes excessive global warming, which is crushing the Amazon rainforest with recurring droughts that NASA says repeat so often that the once-mighty forest no longer recovers, no longer regrows. If fossil fuel emissions continue at current rates, the rainforest is destined to die. And the world will change like the remaking of a Hollywood science fiction film.

Science fiction writers have written stories about dying planets, like Dune, where inhabitants of the planet Arrakis wear “stillsuits” that recycle body moisture. Interestingly, Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel was one of the first to take environmental concerns seriously and became a rallying point for the environmental movement of the late 1960s and 70s.

Now, fifty years later, fiction like Dune turns real right before our eyes. But where’s an environmental movement as strong, as effective, as pro-active as the 1960s and 70s on progressive legislation protecting the environment? It’s disappeared.

Alas, in the face of raging forests fires around the world, we’re going backwards on environmental protections, for example, the Supreme Court is stripping environmental legislation of the 1960s-70s: “The Supreme Court is effectively axing a major component of the Clean Water Act, rolling back 50 years of wetland protection in a declaration of war against nature by changing a word in the text of the Clean Water Act. Seldom, if ever, will repercussions of a Supreme Court decision be so far-reaching and detrimental to life for the planet. It’s a dagger strike deep into the heart of the world’s most significant life source. Justice Samuel Alito “changing the text of the Clean Water Act” is guaranteed to bring forth much, much worse flooding, especially along coastlines as sea levels rise from global warming; it’ll engender new sources of pollution of streams and lakes and bring on huge losses in biodiversity and crush the beauty of nature displaced by concrete, asphalt and development. Most importantly, aquifers depend upon wetlands for replenishment.” (Source: Supremes Declare War on Wetlands, May 29, 2023)

According to the Sierra Club: “The Supreme Court’s decision will open millions of acres of wetlands—all formerly protected by the Clean Water Act—to pollution and destruction.”

Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh took exception, “scolding” Samuel Alito for “taking liberties with congressional law.” (Ibid.)

Stop CO2 emissions. Stop deforestation.

We’re methodically killing the planet. The planet cannot count on life support coming to its rescue. Hmm, the planet is life support.

But life support is burning.FacebookTwitter

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Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.

The true cost of protecting the Amazon and who should pay

Holly Young

09/24/2024S
DW

The world’s largest rainforest is battling deforestation, drought and record wildfires. Where is the money to save it coming from?

When the Amazon burns it has an impact far beyond its own boundaries

Image: Edmar Barros/AP/picture alliance

While deforestation rates fell by nearly 50% in 2023, the Amazon continues to battle critical threats.

In recent months, it has suffered a devastating drought and record wildfires, which release large amounts of planet-heating greenhouse gases. Fire alerts are 79% higher than average for this time of year.

The Amazon has shrunk by the size of France and Germany in the last four decades, according to a report this week, with researchers noting an "alarming increase" in forest land cleared for mining, agriculture or livestock farming.

Scientists fear up to half the rainforest could hit a "tipping point" by 2050 due to unprecedented stress from warming temperatures, extreme drought, deforestation and wildfires. They warn crossing this threshold could intensify regional climate change and risk the Amazon becoming permanently degraded or turning into savanna.
Who should pay for the Amazon's protection?

The vast rainforest is not only a source of immense biodiversity, its trees and soil store the equivalent of 15-20 years of CO2 emissions and help stabilize the Earth's temperatures.

As such, Jack Hurd, executive director of the Tropical Forest Alliance, which supports companies in removing deforestation from their supply chains sees a global responsibility to preserve the Amazon so it can continue to provide "goods and services for now and into the future."

Ofter referred to as the "lungs of the Earth" the Amazon rainforest spans more than six million square kilomters across eight countriesImage: AP

Although nearly two-thirds of the Amazon lies in Brazil, the vast rainforest spans eight countries, including Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.

Its forests are worth more alive and standing than cut or destroyed, according to data from the World Bank. The Brazilian Amazon alone generates an annual value of $317 billion (€284 billion), a calculation based largely on the value it holds to the world as a carbon store. This far surpasses the $43 billion-$98 billion (€38.6 billion-€88 billion) estimated value of clearing the rainforest for timber, farming or mining.

Jessica Villanueva, senior manager in sustainable finance Americas at WWF, emphasized the need for multiple actors in funding protection, "Efforts must unite all eight Amazon countries, including governments, companies, and financial institutions."
Is there a global protection fund?

The largest global fund is the Amazon Fund, set up by the Brazilian government in 2008 to raise international donations for the reduction of deforestation and forest degradation.

To date, it has received over $1.4 billion, with Norway and Germany the largest donors, although Switzerland, the US, the UK, Japan and the Brazilian-owned oil and gas company Petrobras have also contributed.Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva revived the fund when he took office in 2023 after Western donors paused contributions during the term of previous leader Jair Bolsonaro, who oversaw a sharp rise in deforestation rates.

The fund, which is managed by the Brazilian Development Bank, finances a range of projects including those related to wildfire prevention, support for Indigenous lands and conservation areas, as well as sustainable development and monitoring environmental crime. It claims it has extended protected areas of the forest with strengthened environmental management by 74 million hectares.

With more than 35,000 fires recorded in the Brazilian Amazon in the first eight months of this year, smoke has drifted to cities as wellImage: Suamy Beydoun/AFP/Getty Images

However, while the Amazon Fund is important, it does not provide the level of financing needed to fully protect the region, said Cristiane Fontes, executive director of global research nonprofit World Resources Institute Brazil.
Where else is money coming from?

In addition to the Amazon Fund there are also tens of millions of dollars going into the region largely from foundations and bilateral agencies, said Hurd, who is also a member of the World Economic Forum executive committee.

An estimated nearly $5.81 billion has been allocated to protection and sustainable management by international donors since 2013, according to a recent study. Funders include bilateral and multilateral agencies, private foundations, NGOs and companies.

Germany, Norway and the United States made up almost half of donations between 2020-2022 and private foundations, such as the Bezos Earth Fund, accounted for a quarter. National governments in the Amazon region received 30% of these funds, followed by NGOs.

While there is no readily available information on public funding figures, protection is mostly financed by public money and multilateral donors, said Andrea Carneiro, conservation strategist from the US-based environmental organization Rainforest Trust. They added there are various financing gaps, including for protection in Bolivia and Peru, as well as management funds for Indigenous territories.

Indigenous women fighting fires in the Amazon  05:20

However, gaining an accurate overview of how much money is flowing into protection is difficult, Hurd said. "You're going to see a range of estimates as to what's actually going into this, because people are counting things in different ways."

Notions of protection differ depending on whether they are dealing with Amazon land that is intact, degraded or cleared for activities like mining or agriculture, he continued. "This is not just about 'here's a protected forest that we need to cordon off and figure out how to manage,' like a national park might be in Europe or North America."

What more needs to be done?

To prevent the Amazon from reaching a tipping point, the global donor community, public budgets and the private sector need to urgently increase their commitments, said Villanueva.

Maintaining 80% of the region within conservation areas — which would include Indigenous lands — would require between $1.7 billion-$2.8 billion annually as well as $1-1.6 billion in establishment costs, according to one recent estimate.

As public financing alone will not be enough to close the funding gap, governments need to implement financial regulations and incentives to encourage companies to move towards an economy with zero deforestation, Villanueva said. "It is imperative to attract private investors and build the capacity of nature-based solution projects to leverage private capital."

What's needed is to find ways to honor the value of standing forests and transition to a more sustainable economic model in the region, Fontes said. A recent report from the WRI highlighted that transitioning to a deforestation-free economy which includes low-emissions agriculture and forest restoration would require around 1% of Brazil's GDP per year, amounting to around US $533 billion by 2050.

Deforestation, whether legal or illegal, contributes to the land drying out and creating ideal conditions for forest fires to spreadImage: Andre Penner/AP/picture alliance

Fontes points to the potential of Brazil's Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), a proposed multilateral investment pot to preserve rainforests worldwide which would aim to raise $250 billion from countries with sovereign wealth funds and other private investors. "It's a fund that really would support Brazil — and other countries — in its transition from an extractive economy to a sustainable one."

Alongside TFFF, another long-term solution for Amazon protection can be found in the Jurisdictional Redd+ (JREDD) funding mechanism, said José Otavio Passos, Amazon director at US-based environmental organization The Nature Conservancy . Through JREDD, companies or governments provide payments to states or nations for deforestation reductions across large areas in return for verified carbon credits.

Last month, the World Bank also announced a $225 million Amazon reforestation bond, that links financial returns for investors to carbon removal from the atmosphere.

"There is a lot that the rich countries can do. There is a lot that Brazilian government can do. There's a lot that the private sector can do, and we need to do it faster. Every one of us," said Passos.

Edited by: Tamsin Walker


Forest fires rage in Brazil

Wildfires from the Amazon to Sao Paulo: While the worst forest fires in the south of the country are now under control, flames continue to rage in the north.Image: JOEL SILVA/REUTERS

Millions breathing black smoke



Last Friday alone, Brazil's state climate institute INPE registered almost 5,000 fires throughout the country. Several cities with millions of inhabitants are shrouded in thick clouds of smoke, including Manaus on the Rio Negro. In the Amazon region, 1,700 fires were counted. Many communities in Brazil have declared a state of emergency.Image: Bruno Kelly/REUTERS

Fires countrywide



Hardly any place in Brazil has been spared. Smoke stretches over 4,000 kilometers from the Amazon in the north through the Pantanal wetlands in western Brazil to the south-eastern state of Sao Paulo, one of the country's most important agricultural areas.Image: CARLOS FABAL/AFP/Getty Images


Close call



Shortly before flames reached a luxury residential complex in São Paulo, the fire on a neighboring plantation was stopped. According to authorities, fires have killed at least two people in the state, and destroyed more than 20,000 hectares of land since last Thursday. The local government is talking about damage amounting to €150 million ($167 million).Image: Joel Silva/REUTERS


Arson to blame



In the vast majority of cases, arson is thought to be the cause of the fires. Illegal slash-and-burn practices are used to create pastures for livestock and agriculture. The federal police and environmental authorities are investigating dozens of cases. Three people were arrested for arson over the weekend.Image: JOEL SILVA/REUTERS


Worst fires in 17 years



Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, was shrouded in smoke on Tuesday. The fiercest fires in 17 years are raging in the Amazon, with 60,000 counted since the beginning of the year. The entire rainforest region in South America is affected by a severe drought, which experts believe is linked to the El Nino weather pattern and climate change.Image: Edmar Barros/AP Photo/picture alliance


Record droughts



The fires are compounded by drought. Sandbanks are rising out of the Rio Madeira, a tributary of the Amazon. The river levels have been falling since the beginning of June, a month earlier than usual. Low water levels mean that villages and towns in the region are cut off from supplies and authorities fear that the current drought could even exceed last year's record-breaking drought.Image: EVARISTO SA/AFP/Getty Images


International cooperation



Brazil is not the only country affected by the fires. According to the authorities, there are currently around 22,000 active fires in neighboring Bolivia too, which have burned around 2 million hectares of land so far. On Tuesday, Brazil and Bolivia announced their intention to fight the fires in the border region together.Image: Marcelo Camargo/dpa/Agencia Brazil/picture alliance


Political setback



The fires are a serious political setback for Brazil's left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. He had promised to protect the rainforest and stop illegal deforestation by 2030. Under his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, the destruction of the rainforest reached new highs.Image: LOURIVAL IZAQUE/AFP/Getty Images

Haitian Americans: a Socioeconomic Snapshot

Algernon AustiN

 September 25, 2024
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In recent days, there have been false and incendiary claims about Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio. This has led to serious public safety concerns – including threats directed at local schools and businesses, and to national media discussions about the economic impact of these newly arrived immigrants. Some historical and socioeconomic context would be helpful.

Haitians have a long history in the United States. A Haitian military unit, the Chasseurs, fought for US independence during the Revolutionary War and were crucial to the US military victory in Savannah, Georgia in 1779. The arrival of Haitians in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in New Orleans and the lower Mississippi Valley was important in the development and culture of the region. The larger, more recent waves of Haitian immigration have been at least partially the result of French and US policies and repeated interventions that have helped to foster poverty, underdevelopment and political instability in Haiti. Today, many Haitian Americans serve as elected officials at all levels of government.

This factsheet presents a quick look at the socioeconomic status of the 1.2 million people in the United States with Haitian identities. Haitian Americans are a diverse population. Almost two fifths of them were born in the United States. While they can be found in every state, nearly half of them live in Florida. They work in all major industries, with a strong concentration in healthcare. As is fairly common with other immigrant groups, Haitian Americans appear to experience intergenerational upward mobility. US-born Haitian Americans have a higher educational attainment and higher incomes than the Haiti-born population.

Where Were Haitian Americans Born and Where Do They Live?

There are over a million Haitian Americans living in the United States (Table 1). Three fifths (60 percent) of this population were born in Haiti. Almost all of the remaining population that claim Haitian ancestry were born in the United States. A little less than 2 percent was born in some county other than Haiti or the United States.

Haitian Americans can be found in every state and the District of Columbia, but the numbers vary tremendously (Table 2). There were less than 40 Haitian Americans living in Wyoming, the state with the lowest count in the 2018 to 2022 period, while nearly 600,000 were living in Florida, the state with nearly half (46.2 percent) of all Haitian Americans. A bit less than a fifth (17.5 percent) of Haitian Americans live in New York, the state with the second largest population. Massachusetts and New Jersey ranked third and fourth respectively with 8.0 percent and 6.8 percent. These four states account for more than three quarters of the Haitian American population.

Table 2

Where Do Haitian Americans Work?

A fifth (21.3 percent) of Haitian Americans work in the healthcare industry (Table 3). Many of them are nurses, nursing aides, and other hospital workers. The second largest industry for Haitian Americans is the broad retail category. Almost a fifth (18.7 percent) of Haitian Americans are in this sector, working as cashiers, cooks, stock clerks, and a wide range of other jobs. The third largest industry category for Haitian Americans is education and social services, with 15.3 percent of them employed in this sector. Many Haitian Americans in this sector work as teachers and teacher assistants. In addition to their care work in hospital and health care facilities, Haitian Americans can also be found doing care work as home health aides.

Table 3

Haitian Americans Appear to Have Intergenerational Upward Mobility

It is not uncommon for US immigrants to experience intergenerational upward mobility. The data suggests that this is also the case for Haitian Americans. The US-born population has a higher educational attainment and income level than the foreign born. The share of the US-born population with bachelor’s and advanced degrees is more than twice that of the Haiti-born (Table 4). Nearly two fifths (37.6 percent) of the Haiti-born are low income, but less than a third (29.9 percent) of the US-born are (Table 5). About a fifth (18.4 percent) of the Haiti-born are high-income, but more than a quarter (26.9 percent) of the US-born are high-income.

In short, despite the troubling and dangerous political rhetoric that is targeting communities in Springfield, Haitian Americans have much in common with other immigrant communities in the United States.

This first appeared in CEPR.

Algernon Austin, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has conducted research and writing on issues of race and racial inequality for over 20 years. His primary focus has been on the intersection of race and the economy. 

The Mess in Argentina

Walden Bello

September 25, 2024
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Photo by Sebastian Davenport-Handley

At the heart of Buenos Aires lies the lovely Calle Florida. The experience of walking through this street that is exclusively dedicated to pedestrians was anything but lovely though, since in the one kilometer from one end to the other I was besieged—albeit politely–by some 200 men and women barking, “cambio, cambio,” competing to give me the most pesos for my dollars.

It’s a seller’s market, with the “Benjamins”–$100 notes—especially valued.  When I began my walk at one end of the street, I was offered 1,100 pesos to the dollar; by the time I reached the other end, the offer had climbed up to 1,400. The online price that morning was 963 pesos. I thought I had a good deal, but an Argentine friend later told me I could have done better.

The Argentine Disease

The daily depreciation of the peso relative to the dollar is a key indicator of inflation, which everyone says is the country’s prime economic problem. The conventional analysis is that the uncontrolled rise of prices stems from the government’s equally uncontrolled printing of pesos to cover its budget deficit. Thus, the peso has lost its function as a store of value, forcing people to resort to the black market for dollars. With the private sector hoarding dollars and international creditors hesitant to lend, owing to Argentina’s having defaulted on its $323 billion sovereign foreign debt in 2020,  tourists have become a prime source of dollars for ordinary Argentines and small- and medium-sized enterprises.

The inflation rate for 2023 was over 211 percent. This was not in the order of the 3,000 percent annual inflation rate in 1989 and 1990, but as in that earlier period, inflation has resulted in the coming to power of regimes touting radical stabilization policies. In the 1990s, Carlos Menem, the populist Peronist turned neoliberal, famously imposed, among other stringent measures, the one-to-one peso-to-the-dollar exchange rate. The experiment led to chaos, with the country declaring itself unable to service its sovereign debt in 2001.

Last November came the turn of the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei, who has promised not only to make the dollar the medium of exchange in place of the debauched peso but to also lop off whole ministries of government and thousands of government jobs. His controversial but winning image during the November 2023 elections was his going around with a chainsaw to symbolize his determination to radically slim down government, which he regards as a “criminal operation.”

The question on everyone’s mind is, will Milei succeed where previous regimes failed?

Milei Wields His Chainsaw 

Milei has been in office for less than a year, but he has taken his chainsaw to the government, as he promised. He chopped off half of the government ministries, devalued the peso by 50 percent, and slashed fuel subsidies. That was just the beginning. In the teeth of bitter opposition in Congress and in the streets, he got his “Bases Law” passed, which would allow him to roll back workers’ rights, provide tax incentives to foreign investors in extractive industries such as mining, forestry, and energy, reduce the tax burden on the rich, and provide him with the power to declare a one-year state of economic emergency with special powers to disband federal agencies and sell off about a dozen public companies. In order to get the Bases Law through Congress, Milei has postponed his plans to adopt the dollar as the national medium of exchange and “blow up” the Central Bank, as he puts it, deliberately invoking an image associated with Khmer Rouge’s destruction of the Central Bank of Cambodia when they came to power in the late 1970s.

As anticipated, the austerity measures are leading to the contraction of the economy, with the International Monetary Fund, which has signalled its approval of Milei’s policies, expecting a 2.8 percent decline in GDP in 2024.  Still, according to some polls, his approval ratings are above 50 percent. “This shows that despite suffering in the short term, the people are willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt,” said the Argentine ambassador who gave me an unexpected 45-minute briefing when I claimed my courtesy visa to visit the country. Others, like radio personality Fernando Borroni, assert the president’s popularity ratings reflect not no much approval of him as rejection of the failed policies and personalities of the past.

Milei is perhaps the most colorful and controversial personality to come of power in Latin America in the last few years. Though he is nominally a member of a right-wing party, he has no organized political base but acquired national influence through wide exposure on television, where he poured his vitriol on ideological opponents, indeed, on anyone proposing any kind of government intervention in the economy. He is an unabashed animal lover,  making sure to pay homage in his speeches to what he calls “mi hijitos de cuatro patas,” or my  four-legged children. There is nothing wrong with that, but people look askance when he claims that he talks to his dead dog, Conan—named after the comics character “Conan, the Barbarian”—through a medium.

He has professional advisers, but the person who controls access to him and is said to be the power behind the throne is his younger sister, Karina Elizabeth Milei, who has been criticized for lacking any previous experience in government and having a background in business that consists mainly of selling cakes on Instagram. Still, she has elicited admiration for her micromanagement of her brother’s successful electoral campaign, prompting some to compare her to Evita Peron and Cristina Kirchner, the wife and successor of the late President Nestor Kirchner.

Mileinomics

Milei is personally quirky, and so, some say, is his economics. His intellectual hero is the radical libertarian economist Murray Rothbard. Reading an essay by Rothbard titled “Monopolies and Competition” was for Milei an experience akin to Paul’s conversion on the road of Damascus.  “The article was 140 pages long,” Milei writes. “I went home to eat and began to read it. I could not stop reading, and after reading it for three hours, I said to myself, everything I had been teaching over the last 23, 24 years was wrong.” In addition to Rothbard, those in Milei’s pantheon of intellectual heroes are the paragons of neoliberal thinking, among them Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago.  (Milei has honored Lucas, Rothbard, and Friedman by naming his dogs, cloned with cells from the dead Conan, after them.)

It is not surprising that Milei condemns socialists, communists, Keynesians, and “neo-Keynesianos” like Paul Krugman. It is also not surprising that, like Friedrich Hayek, he considers the pursuit of social justice as a big mistake that is unjust and disruptive of the efficient working of the market and eventually leads to the “road to serfdom” by an all-powerful regulatory state.

What is unusual is that he includes a number of economists working in the neoclassical tradition in his sweeping condemnation of “bad influences.” Formerly an economics professor, he faults economic modelling promoted by the mathematization of economics for having led some analysts to the illusion that the market can lead to imperfect outcomes.

One fundamental tenet of neoclassical economics that elicits his ire is “Pareto Optimality,” which says that economic outcomes can be achieved that can make people better off without making anyone worse off. According to Milei, pursuit of Pareto Optimality by neoclassical economists has led them to the illusion that government action can improve market competition or make up for “market failure.”

Pareto Optimality, in his view, is the opening wedge that has led to the formulation and legitimation of other concepts such as imperfect competition, asymmetric information, public goods, and externalities—the solution or provision of which would require government intervention. The fundamental error of the economists who have generated these ideas is that they are so enamored with their models that “when their model does not reflect reality, they attribute the problem to the market instead of changing the premises of their model.”

Interfering with the operation of the market always has dangerous consequences. Indeed, breaking up monopolies to bring about a state of perfect competition is erroneous, since monopolies, instead of being aberrations, are, in reality, positive. “In fact, within a framework of free exchange, if a producer is able to capture the whole market, they have done so by satisfying the needs of consumers by providing them with a better quality product…The existence of monopolies in a context if free entry and exit is a source of progress, and the constant obesession of politicians to control them will only end up damaging the individuals they are trying to help.” In short, the market can’t make a mistake, and trying to rectify its supposed errors will only lead to a worse outcome for everyone.

Another classical economist that Milei has placed in the company of Marx, Pareto, and Keynes as an ideological baddie is Malthus, who held that the law of diminishing returns would create a situation where rapid population growth would not be supported by economic growth, leading eventually to general impoverishment. Milei claims that Malthus’ law has been disproven by the tremendous economic growth since the nineteenth century owing to technological advances made possible by the market, and Malthus’ only use these days is to provide intellectual support for the pro-life movement, whose advocacy of abortion and family planning he despises.

The Opposition

Not surprisingly, Milei’s hostility has been reciprocated by the women’s movement, which fears that their successful effort to legalize abortion in 2020 will be reversed by the president.

Another sector of society that feels threatened by the new government is the human rights movement. Milei is not so much the object of hostility of human rights advocates as his vice president, Victoria Villaruel, who has defended the so-called dirty war waged by the military dictatorship of General Jorge Videla in the late 1970s and early 1980s that took over 30,000 lives. Villaruel, whose father and uncle were members of the military during the dictatorship, has opposed the trials of those being prosecuted for crimes against humanity and has threatened to begin investigation and prosecution of members of the Montoneros and ERP (Armed Forces of the People) accused of “terrorist crimes.” At the rallies of the two groups representing the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo that take place every Thursday afternoon at the Plaza de Mayo, participants are warned that Milei might allow Villaruel to pursue her vendetta against the memory of the disappeared. 

The strongest opposition to Milei is the Peronist movement, which was the base of the governments of Nestor Kirchner, Cristina Kirchner, and Alberto Fernandez that have ruled Argentina for most of the last 24 years. It continues to have the support of some 30 percent of the electorate. The problem is that neither Peronism nor the rest of the opposition has a counternarrative to Milei’s, admits Martin Guzman, former minister of the economy in the Peronist government of Alberto Fernandez and currently professor of economics at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University.

Two obstacles lie in the way of the formulation of such a counternarrative. One is that while Peronism is a mass populist movement, its leaders have pursued conservative policies when in power, leading to the demoralization of the base. The second, and more significant obstacle, is that “the language and policies that animated Peronism’s working class base in the mid-20th century no longer connect with today’s young workers that are engaged in the gig economy perpetuated by savage capitalism,” according to Borroni, the radio journalist.

Milei and the Youth Vote

It bears noting that the strongest supporters of Milei are male voters in the 16-30 age group, 68 percent of whom said they would vote for Milei in a poll taken before the November 2023 elections. Argentines who have grown up in the last 30 years have done so in a country that has been constantly in crisis, besieged by inflation, recession, and poverty, which now engulfs an astounding 55 percent of the population, or 25 million people. To them, both the center-left governments of Kirchner and Fernandez and the center-right regime of Mauricio Macri were abject failures in turning the economy around, making them vulnerable to the inflammatory rhetoric of Milei during the 2023 elections.

Argentina is a proud country, but for many young Argentines, there is little these days to be proud of except perhaps Lionel Messi and the national soccer team (and even they have been tainted by a recent incident where some players were captured on video singing a racially offensive song regarding the African origins of many of those in the French national team that fought Argentina in the World Cup finals in 2022).

Destined to Fail?

Milei has promised to restore Argentina to its nineteenth-century status as one of the richest countries in the world. But it is difficult to see how Milei will get Argentines out of their economic conundrum and restore their morale as a country. His vision is that of an Argentina of the future purged by the fire and sword of radical austerity and shorn of the “political caste and army of parasites whose only objective is to perpetuate itself in power by sucking the blood of the private sector.” The measures he is taking, however, are likely to follow the well-trodden path of similar programs in the Global South and in Greece and Eastern Europe after the 2008 financial crisis, that is, continuing economic contraction or prolonged stagnation. What is remarkable is that despite the record of unremitting failures of neoliberal programs to deliver sustained growth over the last quarter of a century, there are still intellectual and political leaders like Milei who continue to embrace them. Milei is, in fact, vulnerable to the same error he accuses neoclassical antagonists of committing: that when theory and reality diverge, it is reality that is the problem.

At some point a program of vigorous government action to trigger growth, redistribute income, and reduce poverty may perhaps become attractive again and voters may turn on Milei’s counterrevolutionary economic project. “I have no doubt that Peronism will again come to power,” asserts Borroni. “Whether it will come to power as a a genuine popular movement or in the guise of a popular movement led by the right is the question.”  But the bigger question is: will such a new and improved version of Peronism be able to finally lick Argentina’s poisonous galloping inflation while promoting growth and reducing inequality?

“Other countries have been able to control inflation. Why can’t we?” one Argentine I interviewed asked in frustration. That same question is on everyone’s lips, but for the moment, people seem to have suspended their skepticism and given the mercurial Milei some slack.

Walden Bello, a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus,  is the author or co-author of 19 books, the latest of which are Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013) and State of Fragmentation: the Philippines in Transition (Quezon City: Focus on the Global South and FES, 2014).