Getting your Permanent Residency in Argentina

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009. Mark your calendar.

IMAS is a good idea. Help make it better. Go to the IMAS website ...or contact IMAS via email here.

The first seminar from IMAS, The Immigrant Mutual Aid Society, will meet to give US citizens the most general overview possible regarding DNI and how to obtain it. Non-English speakers will be welcomed, as well, but the proceedings will be focused on US citizens.

If you have questions regarding obtaining permanent or temporary residency in Argentina, this is a meeting that you shouldn't miss.

The seminar will be conducted by Solange Varon, an English-speaking immigration lawyer and an advocate for civil rights in many aspects of immigrant life.

Solange has helped other US citizens obtain their DNI and the focus of the seminar will be on the vicissitudes of a do-it-yourself DNI.

No questions regarding DNI will be considered "off base" nor "too personal."

This is only the first of a number of concerns directed at what it takes for non-Spanish speakers to live in Argentina without "re-inventing the wheel for themselves." The society envisions a group of volunteers to personally assist individuals through tasks that they themselves have experience in completing, those tasks both mudane and momentous.

Almost every other nationality, other than US citizens, has an immigrant mutual aid society rooted in Buenos Aires and Argentina. IMAS intends to correct that at a time when immigration from the United States has swelled to unprecedented proportions. IMAS is open to all.

I encourage you to attend. If you know of others that would benefit, I encourage you to spread the word about the seminar next month.

The actual venue is still to be announced. Watch this space. More to come.

Edward M. Kennedy, R.I.P.

I didn't want to break any news here regarding the death of the man being called the "last liberal lion." Better writers than I were being called toward eulogy. I was awake at the moment the news broke, though, and saw the first reports.

I didn't like thinking about it, to tell you the truth. We knew it was coming but I just wanted some quiet.

I remember him and his brothers better than I'd like to.

Maybe my earliest memory is from my mother shrieking from the network news of his brother John's assassination while I played at a coffee table with my recent birthday toys. Had she not screamed, I doubt that I would have remembered the moment.

When his other brother was killed, I remember a friend of mine telling me on the school bus that "Kennedy was killed." I almost spit at him that we all knew that. He had been murdered years ago, I said. "No, Bobby was killed last night." My little friend's words shocked me about as much as my mother's scream and buried the memory in my brain almost as much if not more.

That same school bus had taken us both to the same place on an earlier morning that year after Martin Luther King's assassination. The nuns in that Indianapolis school didn't know what to do with us that morning, especially considering RFK's speech from the hood of a car or back of a pickup late the night before in our little city. Despite having only one or two Black students among some 500, their fear was palpable even to me during a time when authoritarian-types didn't show fear. They just maintained their main mission of keeping us out of our parents' hair for that fateful day and hoped for the best.

Teddy's thing with Chappaquiddick and his later defeat in the primaries at the hand of Jimmy Carter didn't have the same voltage as we grew older but, as we grew even older, his status as the last of the New Deal Democrats started to burnish.

I paraphrased his words from Bobby's funeral to garner support for Democrats Abroad here during the dark days of the GWB attempt at tyranny, him reminding us all that none of us need be idealized, or enlarged beyond what we are in life but simply to be remembered as good and decent people, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

When I saw him at the Democratic National Convention in Denver about a year ago today, it really made me pause. He was in his element and among his own. We knew that he couldn't possibly last forever and, I think, that almost every person there, supporters all, had the feeling that we were witnessing him in-person for last time in our own lives.

From Argentina, I watch an America unfold that is so different from his era and my own. Like the oft-told story of the young boy that questioned his backwoods father whom he found crying on the day that FDR died and was told, "because my friend died today", I have emotions that are not easily expressed other than by tears and for reasons I cannot easily explain given the separation of our lives and years.

Liberalism and the hope that it gives us through every dark epoch probably explains it best. It's good to be here with friends both when we win and when we lose.

Farm Strike Friday

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentine farmers will launch a seven-day strike starting on Friday that will freeze grain and beef sales from one of the world's biggest suppliers of corn, beef and soybeans, farm leaders said on Tuesday.

The strike, aimed at protesting the government's farm policy, revives a long-running dispute that has rattled local financial markets and tested President Cristina Fernandez over the past two years.

Carlos Garetto, leader of the Coninagro farm group, told a news conference that the strike expressed "producers' unrest and the critical situation in the provinces, which is growing and worsening."

I'm pissed off about...

Health care in the US.

Bagels in Buenos Aires

No fotos. You don't need them. They were picture perfect.

Lemme tell ya, the bagel girls at Bagelazo know exactly what they're doing.

I received today my first dozen ...slated for the freezer ...rather than ordering one of their treemendous bagel sandwiches. I promptly got 4 sesame, 4 poppy, and 4 onion.

My Missus and I wolfed down a sesame immediately. It was so good that we munched another sesame, this time with a great schmear of cream cheese and some smoked ham.

Lordy. What a great bagel. The sesame taste was so strong and wonderful that I suspect that they swabbed them down with toasted sesame oil. I'm sure that they didn't ...but the flavor from the usually flavorless seeds was the best I ever had in my life. That good. And this is coming from a former bagel baker.

Not only that, the dough was malty ...the way a bagel should be. Friends, yanquis, countrymen ...these are as good if not better than the ol' country.

The remaining 10 are going promptly into the freezer.

I'll let you know how they defrost and re-toast. I promised My Missus that I would remember the salmon next time!

(full disclosure: I have no relationship, financial or otherwise, with the fine people at Bagelazo.)

Update: Hee hee. I just noticed that my darlin' snarfed down an onion with tahini while I wasn't lookin'!

Argentina struggling to feed itself

"In a bid to get soaring inflation under control the government has in recent years looked to protect local consumers by manipulating prices and restricting exports of both beef and wheat.

This has pushed many farmers to join the move from cattle ranching and wheat farming into soy production, which has doubled in the last decade."

No Internet for 3 Days?

Did anybody else go without the iFix this weekend?

Last Call? ¡Dame el del Estribo!

(Fortune Magazine) -- Argentina's populist-minded government tried to tame local beef prices by banning exports in 2006 to increase the supply at home. But ranchers were furious; they rioted and blocked roads to the cities, leading prices to shoot up fourfold. Some ranchers decamped to the more liberal pampas of Uruguay, now a top-seven beef exporter. (Uruguay even stole Argentina's record for the largest barbecue ever -- 16 tons.)

Pablo Liberato, a native Argentinean who owns a U.S. beef distribution company called Gaucho Ranch in Miami, says that his prior businesses of importing Argentine beef flopped because supply and prices were so sketchy. He's since switched to Uruguayan beef, with great success. "It's a little awkward for me to say," he says, "but in Uruguay, the beef is just as good, and everything works much better, commercially speaking."

Was Health Care One of your Reasons for Coming to Argentina?

www.democracyforamerica.com and their supporters have a TV ad showing in DC and in the state of Nebraska that is debunking right-wing agents provocateur at town halls all over the old country.

The above ad appears to have cut some ice with Senator Ben Nelson D-NE who is one of too many Democratic Senators currently delaying current health care legislation in the US congress.

The group is looking for more real-life stories like the Nebraska restaurant owner. How 'bout you?

I've talked to many US expats that have told me that affordable health care was a major reason for them coming to Argentina. Some folks write me to say that it would be the main reason for a decision to come here.

Was health care an important issue for your moving to Argentina?

USA 2009 = Argentina 2001?

As I've said many times here, "the only difference between the Argentine and Yanqui economies is... that the US debt is denominated in its own currency."

I ran across this today on the intertubes ...and it's very much along those lines.

Anyone want to help me digest it?