In a special session on Tuesday, the Buenos Aires city legislature voted against the creation of an investigative committee for city mayor Mauricio Macri. The mayor has been prosecuted for his role in an illegal wiretapping case.

Macri’s poltical party, Propuesta Republicana (PRO), held off a proposal by opposition legislators, which aimed to investigate the conduct of the mayor and require him to take a leave of absence from the city government.

However, the block is temporary, and PRO representatives said the party would be willing to submit to the investigation under certain “terms and conditions”.

The prosecution against Macri was brought by federal judge Norberto Oyarbide, and ratified last week in a ruling by a chamber of three federal judges.

Macri sustained his innocence and said that ex-president Néstor Kirchner is managing the prosecution in an effort to score political points. The two are seen as potential presidential candidates for the 2011 elections.

“Néstor Kirchner has no limits. Mauricio is innocent,” said Cabinet Chief of the city government Horacio Rodríguez Larreta. “The federal ruling is a political operation controlled by the ex-president.”

PRO legislator Martín Borrelli said in comments that “if necessary”, Macri will testify before the legislature. “We won’t prohibit the truth to be known, the case clarified, and an investigation opened. What we’re not in agreement with is the hurried treatment [of the case], as if dragged by our noses…” said Borrelli.

New proposals to open a legislative investigation into the wiretapping case are expected to come before the body within one month.

Former President Nestor Kirchner has been making a strong recovery since he underwent an emergency surgery for a cardiovascular condition on Sunday afternoon. Earlier today he was transferred from the intensive care unit to a general care room at the Sanatorio de los Arcos hospital in Buenos Aires. The latest medical report states that the former president’s move to general care is a positive development and that if his recovery continues to evolve in this way he could return home from hospital as early as tomorrow.

During the early afternoon on Sunday, following a series of aerobic exercises, Kirchner began to feel tingling and numbness in his left arm and left leg was taken to a hospital in Olivos, near the presidential residence. From there he was taken to Sanatorio de los Arcos for a more specific diagnosis. At los Arcos he underwent emergency surgery on his right carotid artery, responsible for carrying oxygen and nutrients to the brain. Doctors removed an ulcerated plaque from the artery.

Following the procedure, the heart surgeon who operated on the former president, Victor Caramutti, told the press that the possible causes of the ulcerative plaque “are somewhat a product of the society we live in”, clarifying these as “stress, a sedentary lifestyle, smoking and hypertension.” Caramutti went on to explain that the surgery was performed as a preventative measure to avoid more serious issues in the future.

After spending Sunday night in a private suite near the intensive care unit, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner returned to her scheduled agenda on Monday. She expressed her gratitude for “all the expressions of concern and affection” that supporters gave during the last couple of days.

With only three days to go before the votes are cast that will decide who will become a key representative in the government of Buenos Aires, scraps are ensuing in the political playground. Francisco de Narváez of the opposition party Unión-PRO gave president Cristina Kirchner the perfect opportunity to stick the knife in during a recent interview. Mr De Naráez, who only days before had berated the government’s plans to nationalise private companies stated that YPF, Edenor, Edesur and Metrogas should be back in the hands of the state.

According to former president Néstor Kirchner, Mr De Narváez changed his tune on nationalisation because “he is deperate and he knows he is going to lose” on Sunday in the elections. Mr Kirchner made the most of the opportunity to remind everyone that Mr De Nárvaez was the first to support Mauricio Macri, the mayor of Buenos Aires in respect to reprivatising Aerolíneas Argentinas, the largest domestic and international airline in Argentina. The airline was only renationalised on 3rd September 2008.

MP Daniel Scioli, supporter of the Kirchner government held only disdain for Mr De Narváez: “When he realised that privatisation plans were being rubuked, he quickly changed to being in favour of nationalisation: he only says what the public want to hear.” But Mr Scioli said that he trusted the intelligence of the public and “they would see things as they really are.”

Another candidate in the elections, Ricardo Alfonsín, son of the deceased former president Raúl Alfonsín, accused Mr De Narváez of having a warped sense of reality and a hidden agenda: “Since the majority of society have negative feelings toward what happened in the ’90s, [Unión-PRO] tries to hide the real way in which they wish to govern society.” During this decade president Carlos Saúl Menem opened up the economy and privatised lots of state owned companies, including Aerolíneas Argentinas. This served to delegate power to foreigners and rendered state control impotent.

With unclear political agendas aplenty, it seems that the public will have to work hard on Sunday to choose the candidate that sincerely upholds their values.

In times of globalisation, the great thinkers of our time say, the lives of us mortals on Earth are more intertwined and interdependent than they have ever been before. So technically, somebody’s bad news should never be somebody else’s good news. There is always an exception to any rule, though. But the question is, why does the exception always have to be Argentina?

The finances of the world – as you, maybe worried about the value of the greenbacks that give you a fairly decent life in the pampas may have heard – have gone down the road of disaster. Most world leaders were seen grim-faced at the sight of their local stocks sinking to the tune of the Wall Street woes. But one seemed joyful, even exultant at times: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Since President Husband Néstor took office in 2003, the Kirchners have earned a reputation as the financial rogues of the Western world. The truth is that Kirchner the President Husband did not himself declare the largest sovereign debt default in history, a feat performed by a gentlemen who just lasted seven days in office in the hectic days of Argentina’s last super crisis 2001-2.

But the President Husband did order a bad debt swap that included an unprecedented and somehow humiliating 75% haircut for the bondholders. And, to make matters worse, he paid off the country’s whole debt with the IMF in late 2005 so that he did not have to hear the bureaucrats in Washington telling him what to do with the country’s economy.

Now that the US government has decided to go socialist and the financial world as we knew it is to no longer exist, the Kirchners have switched to ‘I told you’ mode. President Wife Cristina took every single opportunity she was given on national TV to remind the public how right she was about the need for state intervention in the economy and how wrong and hypocritical were those guys – popularly known as ‘the markets’ – who make a luxurious living out of scribbling prescriptions in the form of economic reports about the countries of the Third World.

Oh! This is the Third World. The First World is somewhere else. Listen to the President Wife:

“The First World, which we were repeatedly told was Mecca, is collapsing like a bubble,” she says. Not without a touch of power poetry, she adds: Argentina remains firm ‘in the midst of the swelling sea’. Her punch line is: “It’s time for many of those institutions to look around and do something for themselves instead of telling us what to do all the time.”  

The subtext of President Wife – leave us alone, we know better than you about what’s best for us – might be right. Like President Lame Duck in the north, who is sticking the state nose in the sacred coffers of free markets at a time those coffers are empty, the Presidents Husband and Wife have also done a thing or two to anger the Gods of Demand and Supply.

A dragging public scandal over whether the officials inflation statistics are true to reality is just the latest paradigmatic example of a series of government intervention in the economy that ranged from the nationalisation of privatised companies to the incorporation of government-friendly business groups in backbone sectors of the economy, mostly in the energy department.

If more state intervention is the way the world is heading, the Kirchners’ heterodox economic views might as well go down in history as a certain avant-garde deed. But it probably won’t. In the meantime, the Presidential Couple should bear in mind only one political powerhouse in this globe prints the paper markets bow to. And the money-maker does not dwell in house painted in pink.