Looming disaster.

Argentina court rules Milei’s labour reform unconstitutional

Court rules that the labour reform President Javier Milei tried to implement through decree is unconstitutional.

An Argentine court ruled that the labour reform President Javier Milei tried to implement through decree is unconstitutional, the latest blow to his plans to overhaul the nation’s economy. The ruling was posted on the court’s website on Tuesday.

The court had already suspended the labour reform Milei announced on January 3, following an appeal from the powerful labour union CGT. Union leaders held a nationwide strike against Milei’s reforms last Wednesday. The government could have proposed the reform via Congress, as opposed to trying to implement it through an urgent executive order, the judges wrote in the ruling.

Milei’s only recourse now is to appeal to the supreme court or push the reform through Congress. Argentina’s lower house Chamber of Deputies will hold a session to debate Milei’s so-called omnibus bill Wednesday. Milei’s labour measures centred around simplifying employers severance pay obligations and “trial periods” before a company must hire a worker to a full-time contract, among other reforms. Argentina has higher labour costs relative to worker productivity.

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Kinda wild how he can just push an unconstitutional reform, lose and then not suffer the consequences. At minimum this should call for some sort of impeachment.

Another defeat:

Another judicial setback for Milei as Court suspends repeal of 'Ley de Tierras'

Ruling signed by judge Ernesto Kreplak, responding to a La Plata war veterans centre, preventively suspends repeal of Ley de Tierras, temporarily blocking limitless purchase of land by foreigners.

More bad news for President Javier Milei. Following on from the suspension of the labour chapter of his sweeping DNU 70/2023 emergency deregulation decree, a court has now accepted an injunction and preventively suspended the president’s proposed repeal of the “Ley de Tierras’ (“Land Law”).

Milei wants to repeal the law, which would open the door to the purchase of land by foreigners without any limit. The decision was delivered by Federal Judge Ernesto Kreplak on Monday as he accepted a lawsuit lodged against the government by the CECIM (Centro de Ex Combatientes Islas Malvinas) veterans centre in La Plata, requesting that the above article be quashed as unconstitutional for repealing Law 26,737 (“The Régime for the Protection of the National Domain”) regarding the ownership of rural property.

In their initial writ, CECIM representatives had argued that "the repeal, by liberating the land market, would clear the way for its foreign and more concentrated ownership, thus bringing into crisis the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty while conditioning the availability of not only Argentine soil but also fresh water."

The judge also criticised the government by claiming that the impugned DNU "had not complied with the essential and substantial procedures nor has made use of the permanent services of legal counselling."

The norm in question regulated land ownership in foreign hands. Law 26,737, sanctioned during the Cristina Fernández de Kirchner Presidency in December 2011, established a ceiling of 15 percent of rural land in foreign hands at national, provincial or municipal level.

Based Cristina, as always.

To date, there has been compliance with this law at national level, with foreign ownership currently 6.09 percent or 16.2 million of the country’s total rural land surface of 266,707,361 hectares in foreign hands.

The potential repeal of the law had aroused a growing enthusiasm on the part of the representatives of foreign firms to invest in this country. Indeed, the head of the local branch of a well-known multinational with hundreds of thousands of hectares in the south told Perfil that Milei’s decision as enshrined in the DNU was "very positive."

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There has also been talk of the massive wave of privatizations that milei will carry out. Some state-owned companies, like YPF, will not be privatized as it is deemed illegal or impossible. However, state-owned companies such as Fabricaciones Militares (Arms manufacturer), Tandanor (Ship Building) and FADEA (Aircraft Manufacturer) are all up in the air and ready to be sold to foreign interests. This man is willing not only to sell argentinian land to whatever rich fuck, he's also willing to sell Argentina's entire defense industry, leaving us completely dependant on foreign military "aid". He's a threat to the very elements that make up this country.

He also continued to insist with dollarization, claiming that "we're very close to fully dollarizing" (As he claimed on a Wall Street Journal interview here). He's completely going for this goal, in the next couple of months we will see more peso devaluations to fully destroy this currency and make it completely uncompetitive with the dollar, forcing people to ditch the peso and buy dollars instead. This is the thing we must avoid at all costs, we simply cannot leave our entire monetary policies and economy up to the US and it's Federal Reserve. This is just pure insanity. If we dollarize, we're fucked. You can't really leave a dollarized economy, not now at least. Ecuador, for example, can't leave dollarization, if they go back to their old currency (or create a new one), their foreign debt skyrockets and destroys the economy, same will happen to us. On the other hand, salaries will be crushed. Yes, we will get paid in dollars but how much will be the minimum, 4USD per hour?

Still, I firmly believe this has the strong potential to be the shortest-lived Argentinian government in history. Things will get very heated after March, that's when the people as a whole will begin to feel the effects of economic slowdown, devaluation, almost 30% monthly inflation rates and so on. This government will not survive, not with this lunatic in charge.