New right-wing government cedes Argentina’s sovereignty to Wall Street

Argentina’s new right-wing president, Mauricio Macri, pledged to put an end to the country’s sovereignty, and on that he has been true to his word. The capitalist principal that windfall profits for speculators is the raison d’état for the world’s governments has been upheld.

Or, to put it in a different way, the government of Argentina will again be allowed to borrow on international financial markets — so that it can borrow money for the sole purpose of paying billions of dollars to speculators.

Argentina had been one of the few countries that refused to bleed its population to pay off odious debt under the 12-year husband and wife rule of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández. Their left-wing populism has been overstated — they left capitalist relations untouched and at best merely tolerated the movement of recovered factories — but they did consistently put the interests of Argentine working people ahead of international financiers. The election of the right-wing President Macri has put an end to that, along with his introducing the repression that austerity requires.

Entre Rios province, Argentina (photo by Felipe Gonzalez)

Argentina’s difficulties have a long history. The fascistic military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 laid waste to the Argentine economy while unleashing horrific human rights abuses, and subsequent civilian governments sold off state enterprises at fire-sale prices while imposing austerity until the economy crashed at the end of 2001. Upon assuming office, President Kirchner suspended debt payments that would have impoverished the country. He offered to negotiate with bond holders, 93 percent of whom ultimately agreed to accept 30 percent of their bonds’ face value.

There were holdouts, most notably two hedge funds that waged a 15-year battle to extract the full value of the bonds, even though they bought them from the original holders for a fraction of the price. These two funds leading the holdouts were NML Capital, a subsidiary of Paul Singer’s Elliot Capital Management, and another hedge fund, Aurelius Capital Management. Mr. Singer, the type of character for which the term “vulture capitalist” was coined, is notorious for his scorched-earth tactics. At different points, he had an Argentine naval training ship seized in Ghana and attempted to seize Argentina’s presidential plane. His dedication to extracting every possible dollar regardless of cost to others was nicely summarized in 2011 by investigative journalist Greg Palast:

“Singer’s modus operandi is to find some forgotten tiny debt owed by a very poor nation (Peru and Congo were on his menu). He waits for the United States and European taxpayers to forgive the poor nations’ debts, then waits a bit longer for offers of food aid, medicine and investment loans. Then Singer pounces, legally grabbing at every resource and all the money going to the desperate country. Trade stops, funds freeze and an entire economy is effectively held hostage.

Singer then demands aid-giving nations pay monstrous ransoms to let trade resume. … Singer demanded $400 million from the Congo for a debt he picked up for less than $10 million. If he doesn’t get his 4,000 percent profit, he can effectively starve the nation. I don’t mean that figuratively — I mean starve as in no food. In Congo-Brazzaville last year, one-fourth of all deaths of children under five were caused by malnutrition.”

Buy low, demand very high

He’ll make a windfall profit off Argentina as well. The “special master” who presided over negotiations between the holdouts and the Argentine government — a veteran corporate lawyer who specializes in representing financiers and banks opposed to regulation — announced that NML Capital, Aurelius Capital and two other big hedge funds will receive 75 percent of the full principal and interest demanded by the holdouts. How big of a profit will this be? Only the funds themselves know for certain, but the lowest public estimate is a profit of nearly 400 percent.

Even that lowest estimate likely understates the profit. Bloomberg News reports that Mr. Singer will be paid $2.3 billion, or close to four times the $617 million in principal his firm holds. But as he likely paid only a small fraction of that principal, his profit is likely far greater. A Columbia University researcher estimates that NML Capital will receive $620 million for a portion of bonds for which it paid $48 million in 2008. That’s nearly a 13-fold profit in six years! As former President Fernández remarked when refusing to pay anything more than the 30 percent to which the other bondholders agreed, “I don’t even think that in organized crime there is a return rate of 1,608 per cent in such a short time,” adding that Argentina would not “submit to such extortion.”

President Fernández was referring to the profit Mr. Singer would have reaped had she given in to his full demands. She was speaking in a national address following two U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 2014 that upheld U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa’s ruling that Argentina is not allowed to continue to pay the bondholders who agreed to accept 30 percent (or “haircuts” in financial parlance) until it reached an agreement with the holdouts. The Supreme Court also ruled that federal courts in the U.S. can order sovereign countries to hand over information on their assets to speculators. In other words, U.S. law, wielded to generate windfall profits for the most greedy, was decreed to apply to other countries, as if they are not sovereign.

The Kirchner-Fernández governments refused to yield their country’s sovereignty, but President Macri took office promising to pay off the vulture capitalists. Not only was Argentina’s ability to determine its own policy at risk, but the very concept of debt relief has been put in danger. The bondholders who agreed to take 30 percent made the calculation that something is better than nothing, and it enabled Argentina to recover from a severe economic crisis. The Kirchner-Fernández governments consistently offered the same deal to the holdouts. But now that the holdouts extracted so much more, will those who accepted the earlier deal now demand the same 75 percent given to the holdout funds? If they do, will they seek to enforce that after-the-fact better deal in the courtroom of Judge Griesa, who consistently showed himself biased in favor of the vulture capitalists?

Consider the assessment of two United Nations officials, Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, the U.N. independent expert on the effects of foreign debt on human rights, and Alfred de Zayas, the the independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order:

“A settlement would validate the type of predatory litigation that has been on the increase during the last decade. Such deals will make it more difficult to solve debt crises in a fair, timely and efficient manner by emboldening and rewarding the behavior of those who refuse to participate in debt restructuring efforts. These are no good news for attempts to solve debt crises in a timely and human rights sensitive manner.”

Paying debt through taking on more debt

The Macri government has now committed itself to paying $6.4 billion to the holdouts. How will it pay for that? By borrowing. Argentina had been blocked from borrowing in international credit markets, and as part of the deal will be allowed to borrow in those markets again. Judge Griesa’s injunction against resuming payments to the 93 percent of bondholders is also to be lifted. (That was enforceable because Argentina paid its debts to those bondholders through the Bank of New York, which was prohibited by the judge to pass through those payments under pain of legal penalties. Alternative routes through non-U.S. banks are difficult to use because of U.S. control over the global financial system.)

The deal also requires that the Argentine parliament reverse a law that blocks the country from offering any deal to holdouts better than terms agreed to by others. President Macri’s Let’s Change bloc does not hold a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, but picked up votes from the Peronist opposition to effect the necessary legal reversal this week. The Senate must still vote, but the expectation has been that the bill would have an easier time there.

The Puerto Madero district of Buenos Aires. (Photo by Juan Ignacio Iglesias)

Why is President Macri ceding his country’s sovereignty? Right-wing ideology of course plays a significant role here, but it is also self-interest. While the military dictatorship was conducting a reign of terror against Argentines that ultimately led to hundreds of thousands murdered, “disappeared,” tortured, kidnapped, arrested or forced to flee into exile, Mauricio Macri and his family were adding to their wealth. (Remember that this régime had the approval of Henry Kissinger and was blessed by David Rockefeller, whose loans financed it, with his infamous statement that “I have the impression that Argentina has a regime which understands the private enterprise system.”)

The Macri Society, or Socma, the family business, had close ties to the dictatorship. TeleSUR English reports that Socma “directly benefited” from the dictatorship:

“In 1973, prior to the 1976 military coup that ousted the civilian Peronist government of President Maria Estela de Peron and installed a dictatorship, Socma owned seven companies. When the dictatorship ended 10 years later, in 1983, the Socma corporate empire had expanded to 46 companies. Among Socma’s dozens of companies were various businesses that benefited the Macri family economically by providing services to the dictatorship regime.”

The new president, a director of the family conglomerate from a young age, is opposed to an Argentine parliamentary decision to launch an investigation of people and businesses that participated in the military dictatorship’s crimes, TeleSUR reports. La Nacion, a conservative Buenos Aires newspaper that backed President Macri, the day after the election published an editorial calling for an end of efforts to seek justice for the dictatorship’s victims, denouncing the quest for justice as a “culture of revenge.” Perhaps to emphasize this, the president has appointed as the new secretary for religious affairs Santiago Manuel de Estrada, who served as secretary for social security during the military dictatorship, which presided over severe reductions in wages and living conditions to go along with its death squads and torture facilities.

A monopoly for press backers, repression for opponents

Argentina’s biggest media conglomerate, Clarín, also backs President Macri, and no wonder: He has already moved to eliminate Argentina’s anti-monopoly law, which restricts the number of TV, cable and radio licenses a company can hold at one time, so that a handful of corporations can completely control the mass media. Such laws have precedent; for example, U.S. communications law long restricted anyone from owning more than 14 radio stations and seven television stations until overturned during the Reagan era. The Macri government is moving swiftly to silence opposition — it has forced a popular radio broadcaster, Victor Morales, off the air. According to the Buenos Aires Herald:

“ ‘I’m being kicked out because this company needs government advertising … No radio in Argentina can survive without government ads. They can’t mess with Macri,’ said the journalist.”

Demonstrations against these developments have already taken place, as have a public-sector strike against massive layoffs, demonstrations against the new government’s anti-protest law and protests against the imprisonment of Indigenous leader Milagro Sala. A total of 25,000 public workers have been dismissed as part of the Macri government’s austerity policies, and a new “security protocol” enables indiscriminate arrests and restricts the press’ ability to cover such events, opponents say. A coalition organizing against these new repressive policies states:

“The new protocol implies that every protest is now a criminal offense, and empowers the Security Forces — the same forces that played an active role in Argentina’s last military dictatorship — to allow or forbid any protests. The criminalization of protests violates several judicial decisions that state the right to demonstrate supersedes any occasional traffic problems that may be caused.

This year, on the 40th anniversary of the military coup in Argentina, the Mauricio Macri government has begun a campaign to eliminate an essential human right — the fundamental right to protest and demonstrate. With this new protocol, the government will try to prevent workers from protesting against redundancies or demanding salary increases, or mobilize against power outages and mining projects. This protocol openly defies the constitutional rights of the Argentine people as well as international treaties on human rights.”

Ms. Sala, imprisoned for the past two months, was arrested after protesting the policies of a provincial governor aligned with the president. She was acting in support of an organization she heads that provides social services. Parliamentarians, civil organizations and human rights campaigners across South America have denounced her arrest as political, and the United Nations has called for an explanation of her continued detention. The Buenos Aires Provincial Commission for Memory has issued this statement:

“Organizing collective action does not mean ‘inciting crimes,’ a massive demonstration is not ‘public disturbance’ and to oppose a government decision is not ‘an act of sedition.’ They are all democratic freedoms.”

They should be. But not when a right-wing government is determined to impose the rule of capital, or, in the case of the Macri government, to be a willing subaltern of international capital. The logic of the rule of financiers can only lead to not only intensified austerity, but increased repression.

Speculators circling Puerto Rico latest mode of colonialism

Puerto Rico’s governor may have said the commonwealth’s debt is unpayable, but that doesn’t mean Puerto Ricans aren’t going to pay for it. Vulture capitalists are circling the island, ready to extract still more wealth from the impoverished island.

You already know the drill: Capital is sucked out by corporate interests that pay little in taxes, budget deficits grow and speculators swoop in to take advantage, leaving working people holding the bag. Already, the Puerto Rican government is considering imposing an 11 percent cut to Medicare and Medicaid for 2016 and more than 600 schools may be closed in the next five years on top of the 150 already closed by budget cuts.

To ensure more austerity, a group of hedge funds hired three former International Monetary Fund economists to issue a report on what Puerto Rico should do. And — surprise! — the report, released this week, says to lay off teachers, cut education spending and sell public assets to provide money for hedge funds.

Caribbean National Rain Forest of El Yunque, Puerto Rico (photo by Alessandro Cai)

The crisis has already been profitable for Wall Street as banks and law firms racked up $1.4 billion in fees from 86 bond deals that raised $62 billion for the island between 2006 and 2013 alone. Because of downgrades in Puerto Rico’s credit rating, Wall Street can demand hundreds of millions more in lending fees, credit-default-swap termination fees and higher interest rates.

What has a century of colonialism — a century of domination by U.S. corporations — wrought? An activist with the island’s Party of the Working People, Rafael Bernabe, puts it in stark terms:

“Puerto Rico’s economy has not grown since 2006. During that period, total employment has fallen by 20 percent or 250,000 jobs. Since 1996 manufacturing employment in particular has fallen by half (from close to 160,000 to less than 80,000). The labor force participation rate has dipped under 40 percent. Through firings and attrition, since 2007 public employment has fallen by 20 percent or 50,000 jobs. Migration has accelerated to levels unseen since the 1950s. …

Not only does mass unemployment result in significant migration, it also depresses wages, which consequently deepens economic inequality and insures high levels of poverty. This helps explain the persistence of the wide gap in living standards between Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Contrary to neoliberal dogma, after more than a century of a colonial experiment in free trade, free mobility of capital, and even the free movement of people between Puerto Rico and the United States, Puerto Rico’s per capita income is a third of the U.S. figure.”

Although the neoliberal clamp has recently tightened on the island, its current subaltern position is many years in the making.

A century of colonialism and the repression that goes with it

Puerto Rico’s tenure as an independent nation lasted exactly eight days in 1898, ending when the United States invaded it during the Spanish-American War. Quickly taking control of the island’s economy, the U.S. response to a hurricane that wiped out the coffee crop in 1899 was not to send aid but instead impose a 40 percent devaluation on Puerto Rico’s monetary holdings. (The source for this and the following two paragraphs is the “historical overview” page of Nelson Denis’ War Against All Puerto Ricans web site, an excellent trove of information.) The devaluation forced Puerto Rican farmers to borrow money from U.S. banks and within a decade, thanks to usurious interest rates, farmers defaulted on their loans, giving the banks possession of their land.

One of those banks was the Riggs National Bank, and a member of the family that owned the banks, E. Francis Riggs, became Puerto Rico’s chief of police. By 1931, Mr. Denis reports, 41 sugar syndicates, 80 percent of which were owned by U.S. corporations, owned essentially all of the island’s farmland. Just four of them controlled half the island’s arable land. When the island’s legislature enacted a minimum-wage law, the U.S. Supreme Court declared it illegal. An island-wide agricultural strike in 1934 was answered by Police Chief Riggs, the member of the banking family, with this response: “There will be war to the death against all Puerto Ricans.” The following years saw a series of massacres, and mass arrests and torture of independence activists, and a 1948 law criminalized advocacy of independence, with penalties of 10 years in jail and massive fines. Even owning a Puerto Rican flag was made illegal.

In 1976, the tax code was amended so that U.S. companies operating on the island would pay no corporate taxes. For the next 30 years, until 2006, U.S. pharmaceutical companies took advantage of this tax loophole to generate massive profits. Mr. Denis reports that in 2002 the combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses combined ($33.7 billion).

An independent Puerto Rico could not exploited to such a degree, so repression was particularly aimed at anybody with independence sympathies but especially leaders of the Nationalist Party. In a Democracy Now! commentary in 2010 on the 60th anniversary of the Jayuya independence uprising, Juan Gonzalez said:

“Between a thousand, two thousand people were arrested. Anybody who had any kind of political leanings toward independence or was seen as a leader was thrown into jail. And for years afterwards, it was impossible for supporters of independence to get jobs in the government. It really was an enormous repression and crackdown that occurred in the years following.”

One legacy of these decades of repression is the electoral silencing of independence advocates. Voting on the island tends to split evenly between the parties of statehood and continued commonwealth status. Mr. Bernabe wrote:

“The vote for the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (the Puerto Rican Independence Party or PIP) was less than 3 percent in the 2008 and 2012 elections. Independentistas, of course, have a far more significant presence and often play a leading role in labor, environmental, student, and other struggles. Many vote for the [pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party] in accordance with the same ‘lesser-evil’ logic that leads many U.S. progressives into the orbit of the Democratic Party.”

Education, health care cuts so hedge funds get paid

Having profited on the backs of Puerto Ricans, can Wall Street really be the solution to the island’s massive $73 billion debt? Common sense says no, but the island’s political leaders believe otherwise. Lest there be any lingering doubt about what the vulture capitalists circling their next target have in mind, a group of them issued a report this week, “For Puerto Rico, There is a Better Way,” that complains Puerto Rico spends too much money on education, even though the island spends about 80 percent of the U.S. average on a per-student basis.

The report’s three authors each had long careers with the International Monetary Fund, and they have not strayed from the IMF’s usual “one size fits all” austerity model. Although there are a couple of reasonable suggestions in the report — most notably, increasing the island’s low tax-compliance rate — it calls for much sacrifice by working people and none by hedge-fund billionaires. Among other recommendations, it calls for an increase in the sales tax, a flat income tax (always a benefit for the richest), cuts to education and Medicaid, and loosening labor laws that protect pay and vacation.

Hedge funds that own a significant part of the island’s debt have had a series of meetings with officials. But just who these hedge funds are can be difficult to ascertain. Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism reports it received “runarounds and silence” from several government officials when it requested a list of those who hold the debt and what conditions bondholders are seeking. But the Center has been able to put together what it calls “the most complete list of the companies that are getting ready to renegotiate or demand complete payment of the debt.”

Several of the hedge funds seeking payment have also held bonds issued by Argentina, Greece and the city of Detroit. Three of them — Aurelius Capital Management, Monarch Alternative Capital and Canyon Capital — have held bonds for all three plus Puerto Rico.

Aurelius is a notorious speculator that joined with vulture-capitalist Paul Singer to demand Argentina pay full face value on bonds bought at tiny fractions of that price. Aurelius is seeking a 1,600 percent profit on its Argentine bonds, regardless of the cost to others. The principal of Aurelius, Mark Brodsky, was previously involved in squeezing the Republic of Congo-Brazzaville, an episode in which $400 million was demanded on bonds bought for less than $10 million from a country where children die from malnutrition.

Another on the list is John Paulson, who has been busy buying up luxury properties, including spending $260 million to buy three resorts. Another billionaire, Nicholas Prouty, has invested more than $550 million so that San Juan’s marina can accommodate yachts larger than 200 feet.

Power-company ratepayers expected to pay for profits, too

In line with those speculators, a group of hedge funds that own Puerto Rico Power Authority bonds (a debt separate from the general-obligation government bonds discussed above) propose a plan that would pay bondholders 33 percent less than face value. That sounds like an offer to accept a “haircut,” to use the financial term, but those bonds are currently trading at about half of face value, so the hedge funders would be guaranteeing themselves a profit. The plan would also impose a surcharge on the power authority’s customers, so they would be paying more for electricity to guarantee hedge-fund profits.

Whether buying bonds or real estate, it is profits hedge-fund billionaires are after. Puerto Rican bonds are tax-exempt, one reason for their popularity. Extracting wealth from the island is not new, however. Mr. Bernabe of the Party of Working People, in his commentary, noted the imbalance between profits and what’s available for the common good:

“[T]wo dozen U.S. corporations extract around $35 billion a year in profits from or through their operations in Puerto Rico. Bear in mind that the total income of the government of Puerto Rico is around $9 billion. U.S. corporations benefit from the tax-exemption measures that have been the centerpiece of the government’s development policy since 1947.”

Puerto Rico is due to make $5.15 billion in debt payments in its 2016 fiscal year, which began on July 1, a total that represents more than half of its $9.8 billion budget. Given the previous experiences of Argentina and Detroit, the future does not look rosy for the working people of Puerto Rico.

It is not difficult to notice that, although it is always time for us to cut back, it is never time for financiers to cut back. The financial industry, in contrast to the mythology it loves to peddle, does not create wealth — it confiscates wealth, attempting to profit off every aspect of human activity. Attention is now focused on hedge funds’ manipulation of debt, and although that is a necessary focus, these circling vultures represent only the latest manifestation of a long history of colonialism.

Speculation for its own sake pays billions

The absurdity of the tsunami of money crammed into speculators’ bank accounts is illustrated in the fact that the 25 highest-paid hedge-fund managers vacuumed up a collective $11.6 billion in 2014 — and that was considered to be a bad year for them by the business press. Stratospheric though that total is, it is barely more than half of what the top 25 took in a year earlier.

All together now: Awwww. Yes, somehow these speculators will have to get by on a paltry average of $467 million.

Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine — one can hear their editors’ teeth gnashing at their heroes’ bitter fate — lamented that 2014 was the worst year since the 2008 stock meltdown for hedge-fund managers in announcing its “Rich List.”

City of London expanding (Photo by Will Fox)

Nonetheless, some observers might believe that these moguls earned somebody serious money to collect such enormous paychecks. But that wasn’t necessarily the case. For the sixth consecutive year, hedge funds fell short of the average stock-market performance, returning a composite average of three percent. Perhaps the 25 hedge-fund managers who hauled in the most money for themselves were better? Not really. Alpha reports that the hedge funds of at least 12 of the individuals on its top 25 list posted gains below the 2014 average.

The S&P 500 Index, the broadest measure of U.S. stock markets, gained 11.4 percent in 2014 and the benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 7.5 percent. So somebody throwing darts, or parking their money in a passive fund that tracks a major index, would have done as well or better in many cases. Despite their subpar performances, hedge-fund managers continue to receive an annual fee of two percent of the value of the total assets under management and 20 percent of any profits. The fee gets paid even when the fund loses money.

So it’s heads, Wall Street wins and tails, Wall Street wins. And hedge funders pay less in taxes. Much of their income is classified as capital gains under U.S. tax law, and the tax rate on capital gains are much less than on regular income.

Imposing austerity on others is a job never finished

What is that hedge-fund managers do to “earn” such enormous sums of money? Let us take a look. The top person on the 2014 list is Kenneth Griffin of Citadel Capital, who hauled in $1.3 billion for the year. Citadel makes lots of money through computerized high-speed trading — buying and selling securities in microseconds to take advantage of momentary price changes. Apparently allowing computers to do the work leaves Mr. Griffin with time to pursue his hobby of widening inequality still more.

Not content with the fact that his 2014 earnings are equal to the combined median wage of 26,000 U.S. workers, he contributed $10 million to an Illinois campaign that seeks to cut workers’-compensation benefits, make it illegal for employees to contribute to political campaigns through their union, abolish prevailing-wage laws and render union dues collections much more difficult. He’s also contributed millions to the Koch brothers’ war chest. Mr. Griffin’s firm also owns a stake in ServiceMaster, a company that profits from the privatization of public services by firing employees and rehiring them at lower wages.

A Huffington Post article, noting that Mr. Griffin is also a major donor to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, nonetheless reports that he believes Mayor 1% is too soft on public employees despite the mayor’s attacks on pensions and teachers. The article said:

“Griffin, alone, could fund all of Chicago’s pension liabilities for [2014] (estimated at $692 million) and still have $208 million [from his 2013 income] left to scrap by on. Yet Griffin is terribly worried that the mayor is being too soft on retirees. He castigated Chicago and Illinois politicians for not making ‘tough choices,’ blaming Democrats who control city, county and state government for not fixing pension, education and crime problems.”

Second on the hedge-fund list is James Simons of Renaissance Technologies. Although Alpha reported that he no longer runs his firm on a day-to-day basis and “spends a good chunk of the year on his 226-foot yacht,” Mr. Simons hauled in $1.2 billion in 2014. His firm employs physicists, others scientists and mathematicians to develop models for its computerized trading. Alas, speculation pays much more than scientific research that might benefit humanity.

Buy, strip, profit, repeat

Third on the list is Raymond Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, who took in $1.1 billion in 2014. He specializes in bond and currency speculation. Fourth on the list is William Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management, who is what the corporate media likes to call an “activist investor.” In other words, someone who buys stock in a company and immediately demands massive cuts so he can make a large short-term profit is an “activist investor” because he does this more loudly than others.

Mr. Ackman hauled in $950 million in 2014. Forbes magazine, as consistent a cheerleader for the corporate overclass as any institution, summed him up this way last year:

“[H]edge fund billionaire William Ackman has tried to destroy a company that sells diet shakes, played a prominent role in nearly driving a 112-year-old retailer into the ground [and] helped launch a hostile takeover of a pharmaceutical company in a way that the Securities & Exchange Commission is reportedly examining for potential violations of insider trading law. Now, Ackman is suing the U.S. government.”

He is suing the U.S. government because it is taking the profits from federal housing-loan programs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to recoup money used to bail them out rather than handing the profits over to speculators such as himself. Never mind that the government spent hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out speculators. Among his most recent exploits, he was involved in two separate deals that would have moved a U.S. corporation’s headquarters to Canada so that it could avoid paying taxes, savings that would be earmarked for speculators’ wallets.

No summation of hedge-fund greed would be complete without a mention of Paul Singer, another entrant on the rich list. The vulture capitalist specializes in buying debt at pennies on the dollar and then demands to be paid the full face value, regardless of human cost. Among other exploits, he has seized an Argentine naval ship, demanded $400 million from the Republic of the Congo for bonds he bought for less than $10 million and compelled the government of Peru to pay him a 400 percent profit on the debt of two banks he bought four years earlier.

The outsized renumeration of financiers is due to the disproportionate size of the financial industry. A rough calculation estimates that in 11 business days speculators trade instruments and contracts with a value greater than all the products and services produced by the entire world in one year. In other words, a year’s worth of gross world product is traded in about two weeks on the world’s stock, bond, derivative, futures and foreign-exchange markets.

Such frenzied trading, often involving high-speed computers and ever more exotic betting, has little to do with actual economic needs and much to do with extracting money by ever more imaginative needs. Such is a system that values financial engineering more than human life.

Sure billionaires deserve their money: Killing jobs is hard work

More is never enough. A few examples of the wrath of speculators illustrate the “whip” of finance capital as the world’s corporations announced their results in recent weeks.

Among the words that do not go together are “shareholder activist.” Whether a sign of the debasement of language, or that the corporate media’s myopia has degenerated to the point where speculators trying to extract every possible dollar out of a corporation is what constitutes “activism” to them, as if this was some sort of selfless activity, these are the words often used to describe wolf packs that grow ever hungrier. Not even one of the world’s biggest corporations, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, is immune.

DuPont, a chemical multi-national that produces many products that dominate their market, has racked up about US$17.8 billion in profits over the past five years, including $3.6 billion in 2014. Its stock price increased by 20 percent last year, better than the benchmark S&P 500 Index. DuPont recently sold off its performance chemicals business, and will hand out $4 billion to shareholders from the proceeds of the sale. Surely enough you say? Nope.

A hedge-fund manager — yep, one those “shareholder activists” — has declared war on DuPont management. The hedge funder, Nelson Peltz, is demanding that DuPont be broken up into two companies, under the theory that more profit can be extracted, and he is demanding that four seats on the DuPont board be given to him. So far, at least, DuPont management is resisting the hedge funder, but did announce $1 billion in cuts in a bid to pacify Wall Street. That means that more employees will pay for heightened extraction of money with their jobs. Mr. Peltz’s hedge fund specializes in buying “undervalued stocks,” according to Bloomberg, which is code for corporate raiding. It must pay well, for he is worth $1.9 billion.

DuPont chemical plant on Houston Ship Channel (photo by Blair Pittman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)

One company that has given into speculators by selling off its best asset is Yahoo Inc. Although widely attacked in the business press for having no coherent plan for growth, Yahoo did report net income of $1.3 billion on revenue of $4.7 billion for 2013, a hefty profit margin, and remained profitable in 2014. Nonetheless, Yahoo said it will spin off into a separate company its most valuable asset, its stake in the Chinese online merchant Alibaba. This is being done so that more of the profits can distributed to speculators.

If Yahoo were to simply sell its stake, it would have to pay taxes. By spinning off its holding into a separate company, there will be no taxes paid, and thus more money will be stuffed into financiers’ pockets. “The decision,” The New York Times reported, “cheered shareholders because they will directly reap all the remaining profit from Yahoo’s prescient investment.” Yahoo will also lose its most valuable asset, making the company weaker (and presumably more likely to get rid of some of its workforce), but speculators will make a windfall. That is all that matters in these calculations.

Even an Internet darling, Google Inc., is losing its Wall Street halo. Grumbling was heard when Google’s revenue for the fourth quarter of 2014 was “only” 10 percent higher than the fourth quarter of a year earlier, a slower rate of growth than in the past. For the full year 2014, Google reported net income of $14.4 billion on revenue of $66 billion. Based on these results, it looks as if Google will remain a going concern. Nonetheless, Google stock is down 12 percent since September, a sign of financiers’ displeasure.

But perhaps happier days are on their way. The Associated Press reports that a “pep talk” by the company’s chief financial officer “left open the possibility that the company might funnel some of its $64 billion in cash back to shareholders, especially if a law is passed to allow money stashed in overseas accounts to be brought to the U.S. at lower tax rates.”

Ah, yes, all would be well if only multi-national corporations did not have to pay taxes. But despite the ceaseless demands by the world’s financiers for more governmental austerity, more cuts to jobs, wages and benefits, more punishment, the world can afford a raise. An Al Jazeera report by David Cay Johnston concludes that U.S.-based corporations held almost $7.9 trillion of liquid assets worldwide. That is more than double the yearly budget of the U.S. government.

The results are those familiar to all who are paying attention: Rising inequality and persistent economic stagnation as working people can no longer spend what they don’t have. Almost all of the gains in income are going to the top: From 2009 to 2012, 95 percent of all gains in income went to the top one percent. The “efficiency” that financiers demand is that ever larger cascades of money flow upward. How long will we allow this to go on?

High court rules that financiers are more sovereign than Argentina

The victory handed to speculators by the United States Supreme Court over one of the world’s larger countries provides a lesson in where power actually lies. It is not in a government building.

Two June 16 decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court elevates the “right” of hedge-fund speculators to massive windfall profits above all other human considerations. That ruling is consistent with rulings handed down by the secret tribunals used to arbitrate disputes between corporations and national governments that arise under “free trade” agreements that elevate “investors’ rights” above environmental and labor laws.

Between these Supreme Court decisions, most of the attention has focused on the ruling that federal courts in the U.S. can order sovereign countries to hand over information on their assets to speculators. In other words, the U.S. legal system has formally declared it has jurisdiction over other countries. Arrogant as that ruling is, the more dramatic development was the court refusing to hear an appeal of lower-court rulings directing Argentina to pay $1.3 billion to holdout speculators that refused to accept terms agreed to by a large majority of bond holders.

Simply put, the U.S. legal system not only declares U.S. law applies around the world, but that it will be applied to benefit the most aggressively greedy.

The Puerto Madero district of Buenos Aires. (Photo by Juan Ignacio Iglesias)

Much of the commentary on this case has attempted to reduce it to a simple morality tale of a debtor being obligated to pay back its creditors. The lead speculator in this affair, hedge-funder Paul Singer, who is trying to be paid the full value of bonds on which he paid pennies on the dollar, has tried to paint it that way.

Reality, of course, is far more complex. So first it is useful to understand the odious nature of Argentina’s debt.

Military junta uses dirty war to impose austerity

Prior to the 1976 military seizure of power, Argentina was an industrialized country with active union and left-wing movements, a sizable middle class and large tracts of arable land. But the Argentine economic elite and the multinational corporations that operated there wanted Argentina turned into a low-wage haven. Only extreme violence would be able to achieve that goal.

Upon seizing power, the military handed over economic policy to a well-connected industrialist, José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, who ruthlessly implemented a severe neoliberal program of shock therapy, backed by a savage campaign of torture, “disappearances” and killings waged by the military and two allied fascist groups. The CGT union federation was abolished, strikes outlawed, prices raised, wages tightly controlled and social programs cut. As a result, real wages fell by 50 percent within a year. Because of the collapse of internal consumption caused by this austerity, ten percent of Argentina’s workforce was laid off in 1976 alone.

Tariffs were reduced deeply, leaving the country wide open to imports and foreign speculation, causing considerable local industry to shut. High interest rates led to more foreign speculation and an overvalued currency, further hurting national production. Against this backdrop, the dirty war was intensified — initially targeting leftists, the régime quickly began to eliminate students, lawyers, journalists and trade unionists.

This was the régime of which David Rockefeller, whose loans helped finance it, famously said, “I have the impression that Argentina has a regime which understands the private enterprise system.” Further economic contraction occurred, and for the last five years of the military junta, 1978 to 1983, Argentina’s foreign debt increased to US$43 billion from $8 billion, while the share of wages in national income fell to 22 percent from 43 percent.

Civilian control and formal democracy was re-established following the collapse of the junta, but the debt did not go away.

A civilian president, Carlos Menem, imposed an austerity program in the early 1990s in conjunction with selling off state enterprises at below-market prices. This fire sale yielded $23 billion, but the proceeds went to pay foreign debt mostly accumulated by the military dictatorship — after completing these sales, Argentina’s foreign debt had actually grown. The newly privatized companies then imposed massive layoffs and raised consumer prices.

By 1997, about 85 percent of Argentines were unable to meet their basic needs with their income. During this period, Argentina’s debt steadily mounted, leading to a scheme under which the debt would be refinanced. A brief pause in the payment schedule was granted in exchange for higher interest payments — Argentina’s debt increased under the deal, but the investment bank that arranged this restructuring racked up a fee of $100 million, the latest in a series of financial maneuvers that shipped a billion dollars to investment banks in ten years.

It all finally imploded at the end of 2001, when the government froze bank accounts and the country experienced so much unrest that it had five presidents in two weeks. The last of these presidents, Néstor Kirchner, suspended debt payments. Had Argentina resumed scheduled payments in 2005, interest payment alone on the debt would have consumed 35 percent of total government spending. Kirchner announced that Argentina intended to pay only 25 percent of what was owed and any group that refused negotiations would get nothing; in the end, Argentina paid 30 percent to bondholders who agreed to talk.

Vulture capitalist seeks extortionist gains

Approximately 93 percent of bondholders agreed to accept 30 percent of the face value — 30 percent is better than zero. Argentina has repaid these on a steady schedule and Argentine law forbids giving the holdouts a better deal. Some of the bonds held by the original holdouts were bought by NML Capital, a subsidiary of Paul Singer’s Elliot Capital Management, and another hedge fund, Aurelius Capital Management. These were the two whose lawsuits reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

Including interest, the holdouts would walk off with $1.5 billion if paid in full. NML Capital, Argentine President Cristina Fernández said, would see a gain of 1,600 percent for bonds it bought for $48.7 million. “I don’t even think that in organized crime there is a return rate of 1,608 per cent in such a short time,” she said in a national address following the U.S. Supreme Court decisions, in which she said Argentina would not “submit to such extortion.”

Mr. Singer, the type of character for which the term “vulture capitalist” was coined, certainly has been persistent in attempting to collect the full face value of bonds for which he paid a small fraction of that value. In November 2012, he had an Argentine naval ship impounded in Ghana after earlier plotting to seize the presidential plane and artworks that were to have been shown at a Frankfurt book fair.

Among other exploits, he has demanded $400 million from the Republic of the Congo for bonds he bought for less than $10 million and compelled the government of Peru to pay him a 400 percent profit on the debt of two Peruvian banks he bought four years earlier. His specialty is buying debt at a small fraction of the face value and demanding full payment, regardless of the cost to others, and has become a billionaire through doing so.

In the imperialist crosshairs

A series of one-sided rulings in a federal trial court, upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, favored the hedge funds over Argentina. When the appeals reached the Supreme Court, the bond holders who agreed to accept 30 percent (a “haircut” in financial parlance) backed Argentina, fearing that there would be no money for them should Argentina be forced to pay off the holdouts at full face value. The U.S. government also sided with Argentina, fearing a precedent that could be used to enable it to be sued.

The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 is supposed to bar lawsuits in U.S. courts against non-U.S. governments, but a 7-1 bipartisan majority of the Supreme Court decided that the law is malleable when not convenient. The Argentine bonds were sold with a provision that New York law would be used to settle disputes related to them, which gave U.S. courts the excuse needed to extend U.S. law to Argentina.

Under New York law, investors must be treated equally. That provision could have been interpreted to mean the holdouts would get the same 30 percent payment in installments — which the Argentine government would have agreed to had they been willing to negotiate — but instead it was used as an opportunity to give more rights to speculators.

The practical effect of these rulings is that “investors” — hedge funds with the well-earned sobriquet of “vultures” — have been elevated above a national government. This is perfectly consistent with the decisions handed down by secret tribunals like the World Bank-affiliated International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes when “investors” sue governments under “free-trade” agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The hedge funds can leverage the U.S. legal system to enforce their will over Argentina in this case because the U.S. financial system is used to make payments to the bondholders who negotiated the 30 percent agreement with the South American country. Argentina could only continue to make those payments, while simultaneously refusing to pay anything to the holdouts, by doing so completely outside the U.S. financial system, which is possible but very difficult due to the system’s global reach. Moreover, those payees within the reach of the U.S. legal system would be susceptible to being sued by the holdouts.

Argentina has consistently said it has does not have the money to pay the holdouts and continue to meet its continuing obligations to the bondholders it has been paying, another reason for those bondholders to side with Argentina against the holdouts. The next payment is due June 30 — on that date, Argentina would be in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court should it not pay the full face value of the holdouts’ bonds. But if it does so, or simply agrees to pay more than 30 percent, the holdouts would likely demand to re-negotiate to get the same deal.

Immediate conflict doesn’t negate larger interests

What to do? One possibility is to up the ante. That is the recommendation of Argentina’s counsel at the New York corporate law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in a memorandum dated May 2, 2014:

“[T]he best option for the Republic could be to permit the Supreme Court to force a default and then immediately restructure all of the external bonds so that the payment mechanism and the other related elements are outside of the reach of American courts. Argentina wants to continue paying its restructured debt. The Courts, nevertheless, have placed it in a terrible position.”

Courts do not act in a vacuum, but ultimately express the interests of the most powerful industrialists and financiers similar to any other component of a government in the capitalist system. It is certainly true that those interests are in conflict in this matter. Such a conflict is not unusual. The victory for one particular set of speculators here, however, serves to tighten the screws of austerity by further codifying the dominance of the most ruthless capitalists within the capitalist legal system.

Should the end result of this case be that all parties agree to a payment level higher than 30 percent, would the speculators on the losing side be crestfallen? Regardless of the outcome, the precedent set here provides additional leverage for speculators in future financial deals. Not even the opinion of the U.S. government, the ultimate protector of corporate interests through its intelligence and military apparatuses and “free trade” agreements, was allowed to interfere with a bid to further tighten corporate power. That is what was at stake here, not the short-term interests of this or that speculator.

For Argentina, or any other subaltern country, to rid itself of odious debt and re-orient itself toward the greater good of its citizenry rather than the profiteering of speculators, will require entirely new structures in a different economic system.

In show of power, financiers impose will on Argentina’s Navy

We know that finance capital is powerful, but that a hedge fund can impound the navy of the world’s eighth largest country is nonetheless startling.

Financiers the world over have fumed over Argentina escaping their clutches a decade ago — the example of a country refusing to acknowledge the maximization of bank profits as the central organizing principle of civilization is too scary to contemplate — but most have made their peace. Accepting that something is better than nothing, at least for now, almost all of Argentina’s creditors accepted 30 percent of the face value of the country’s sovereign debt.

Much of that debt is odious, accumulated by Argentina’s military dictatorship as it killed, tortured, “disappeared” or forced into exile Argentines by the hundreds of thousands as it imposed the Pinochet/Chicago School economic model. The rest of the debt came courtesy of the the country’s neoliberal rulers following the end of military rule, as it followed International Monetary Fund instructions into a crisis that culminated with economic crisis at the end of 2001. When Néstor Kirchner became Argentina’s fifth president in two weeks, he put an end to austerity and defaulted on the debt, ultimately agreeing to pay 30 percent to those willing to negotiate a settlement but refusing to pay anything to holdouts.

Many of Argentina’s creditors are not the financial institutions that originally made the loans; much of the debt was sold to speculators. Two of those speculators, the hedge funds Elliott Capital Management and Aurelius Capital Management, are among the seven percent of creditors who refused to agree, instead demanding full payment of the face value of the debt that they bought for pennies on the dollar. The key speculator here is Paul Singer, the type of character for which the term “vulture capitalist” was coined. Mr. Singer’s hedge fund is Elliott Capital and one of the fund’s subsidiaries is NML Capital.

The eyes of a billionaire

To all appearances, the billionaire Mr. Singer is determined to squeeze every dollar out of every “investment,” and he has the means at his disposal to bring this about. Using the Internet, his NML Capital tracked a ship used as a training vessel for the Argentine Navy. Calculating its chances, NML Capital waited for the ship to dock in Ghana, then quickly went to a local court, where it successfully obtained an order impounding the ship. The ship remains stranded in Ghana’s main port, and the Argentine government had to resort to chartering a flight to bring most of the crew home; it couldn’t use an Argentine airplane under fear that the plane, too, would be impounded.

Mr. Singer has long used such tactics, according to a report in Forbes magazine, and he purposely waited for the ship to dock in Ghana because he believed it was the country among the ship’s ports of call that would most likely grant his wishes. Forbes reports that Elliott Capital had sought in 2007 to seize the Argentine presidential plane when it was scheduled for maintenance in the United States (the plan was foiled when Argentina was tipped off) and two years later plotted to seize Argentine assets at the Frankfurt Book Fair, forcing the government to withhold showing works of art.

That having the ship stranded in port might have negative effects on Ghana, a poor country, does not seem to have been of concern. The ship’s presence has greatly slowed down the ability of cargo ships to use the port, causing dozens of vessels to wait offshore in a lengthening queue, according to The Financial Times. Such delays are also costing the shipping companies and others considerable money.

But what could be more important than a speculator trading on other people’s misfortune scooping up windfall profits?

Buying (very) low, demanding (very) high

There is nothing out of character for Mr. Singer to be using such hardball tactics. In fact, his hedge fund’s strategy is to buy outstanding debt at a tiny fraction of its value and then demand to be paid in full. A report on him and the other billionaires with whom he plays, including David and Charles Koch, on the ThinkProgress blog reports:

“Singer, manager of a $17 billion hedge fund, earned the moniker ‘vulture capitalist’ for buying the debt of Third World countries for pennies on the dollar, then using his political and legal connections to extract massive judgements to force collection — even from nations suffering from starvation and violent conflicts. Singer and his partners have used such tactics in Panama, Ecuador, Poland, Cote d’Ivoire, Turkmenistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to squeezing impoverished countries with sovereign debt schemes, Singer speculates in the oil markets, a practice which can lead to gasoline price hikes.”

Among his other exploits, Mr. Singer is the chairman of the Manhattan Institute, an extreme Right “think tank” that specializes in promoting neoliberal ideology.

That affiliation is evidentially not a coincidence. Investigative journalist Greg Palast, writing for Truthout, provides some of the details of the speculator’s previous efforts to “collect” his debts:

“Singer’s modus operandi is to find some forgotten tiny debt owed by a very poor nation (Peru and Congo were on his menu). He waits for the United States and European taxpayers to forgive the poor nations’ debts, then waits a bit longer for offers of food aid, medicine and investment loans. Then Singer pounces, legally grabbing at every resource and all the money going to the desperate country. Trade stops, funds freeze and an entire economy is effectively held hostage.

Singer then demands aid-giving nations pay monstrous ransoms to let trade resume. … Singer demanded $400 million from the Congo for a debt he picked up for less than $10 million. If he doesn’t get his 4,000 percent profit, he can effectively starve the nation. I don’t mean that figuratively — I mean starve as in no food. In Congo-Brazzaville last year, one-fourth of all deaths of children under five were caused by malnutrition.”

The financier war on Argentina

The billionaire speculator has also been attempting to get many pounds of flesh out of Argentina courtesy of the U.S. federal court system. The latest in a series of thundering rulings by a senior U.S. district judge, Thomas Griesa, earlier this month ordered Argentina to pay US$1.3 billion to Elliott Capital Management and Aurelius Capital Management, the two main holdouts who refused to agree to the 30 percent deal with Argentina.

The Argentine government appealed to a higher court on November 25. That is a routine the government is already familiar with, after the same judge last year issued a ruling that the two hedge funds could seize Argentina’s deposits with the Federal Reserve. Yes, it has come to the point where even the world’s most powerful central bank can be seen as a mere piggy bank to be raided at will by financiers. Well, almost, because that ruling was too much even for the U.S. government — it joined an appeal to a higher court, which threw out the ruling on the basis of sovereign immunity.

The Federal Reserve holds money and gold owned by many of the world’s governments, and has an interest in maintaining a shield that protects those holdings from private seizure.

This was a matter of the principal of sovereignty — the U.S. doesn’t want its overseas assets seized, either — so let us hold off from celebrating the appeals court reversal too joyously. The various bilateral and multilateral “free trade” agreements that elevate corporate profit above all other human considerations, and the arbitration bodies such as the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes that improvise ever harsher rulings that become precedents for future cases, quietly lurk in the background. Not that long ago the idea that a regulation against pollution that threatens human health would be illegal because it hurts profits would have been bizarre. Yet it is now routine international trade law.

A billionaire speculator seizing a military vessel is bizarre; the billionaire’s tactics are sufficiently outlandish that, in this case, other financiers oppose his insistence on being paid in full if only because they are afraid they would not receive their own payments if Argentina has to pay him. President Cristina Fernández has repeatedly said there will be insufficient money available to continue to pay back the creditors who accepted the 30 percent deal nor for domestic social programs if full payments are made to the holdouts Elliott Capital and Aurelius Capital.

But if the holdout hedge funds’ tactics ultimately work, what is outlandish will become accepted. What will be seized next? A country’s food supply?

Financiers love to portray themselves as the lubricants of the modern economy, enabling capital to be distributed to where investment is needed. They can believe that if they wish, but there is no reason for the rest of us not to see financiers as what they are: parasites.