Maybe it seems rude to talk about such matters in the context of the IMF's visit. Economic analysis is supposed to be about the peg to the dollar, "peso-ification," and the dangers of "stagflation" � not families losing homes and gaping wounds.

Yet reading the reckless advice that the international business community is hurling at the IMF and Argentina's government, perhaps a little personalizing is in order.

For weeks, Argentina has been scolded like a small child that shouldn't get desert until it finishes dinner. Despite a commitment to slash 60 per cent from provincial deficits, Argentina apparently hasn't done enough to "deserve" a loan. "The news is all on the surface," sniffs an economist from Credit Suisse First Boston. President Duhalde warns that Argentina's desperate population cannot support deeper cuts -- but some, such as the National Post, call this procrastination.

The international consensus is that the IMF should see Argentina's crisis not as an obstacle but as an opportunity: The country is so desperate for cash, it will do whatever the IMF wants, the reasoning goes.

"During a crisis is when . . . Congress is most receptive," explains Winston Fritsch, chairman of Dresdner Bank AG's Brazilian unit.

Rocardo Cabellero and Rudiger Dornbusch, a pair of MIT economists writing in the Financial Times, go further. "It's time to get radical," they say. Argentina "must temporarily surrender its sovereignty on all financial issues . . . give up much of its monetary, fiscal, regulatory and asset-management sovereignty for an extended period, say five years." The country's spending, money-printing and tax administration should be controlled by "foreign agents," they say, including "a board of experienced foreign central bankers."

In a nation still scarred by the "disappearance" of 30,000 people during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, only a "foreign agent" would have the nerve to say, as the MIT team does, that "somebody has to run the country with a tight grip." And that, with the Argentinians out of way, the country could be saved by prying open markets, introducing deep spending cuts, and, of course, a "massive privatization campaign."

It's obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to Argentina's social upheavals that such an economic dictatorship could only be enforced through terrifying state repression and bloodshed.

But there's another hitch: Argentina has already done it all.

As the IMF's model student throughout the 1990s, the country flung open its economy (that's why it's been so easy for capital to flee since the crisis began). As far as Argentina's supposedly wild public spending goes, a full third goes directly to servicing the external debt. Another third goes to pension funds, which have already been privatized. The remaining third alone covers health, education and social assistance. Far from spiralling out of control, these expenditures have fallen far behind population growth, which is why shipments of donated food and medicine are arriving by boat from Spain.

As for "massive privatization," Argentina has dutifully sold off so many of its services, from trains to phones, that the only examples of further assets Mr. Cabellero and Mr. Dornbusch can think of privatizing are the country's ports and customs offices.

No wonder economists and bankers are in such a rush to blame the victims of this crisis, to claim that Argentinians overspent, were greedy, corrupt. Of course, it's true that the political system here is contaminated with cultures of both payola and impunity. But the same financiers that happily lined the pockets of politicians and army generals in exchange for local contracts are hardly the ones who should be trusted to do Argentina's house cleaning.

Argentina's housewives have a better idea. Last week, on International Women's Day, hundreds took to the streets with brooms in hand and announced that they wouldn't clean their homes until they had swept the corruption out of Congress. Their protest was one tiny wave in a massive tide of grassroots mobilization that has already brought down successive governments and now is threatening to do something far more radical: bring in real democracy.

Following the model started by the Piqueteros, Argentina's militant unemployed, tens of thousands of residents are organizing themselves into neighborhood assemblies, connected to each other at the city and