(archived from Oct. 5 2007)
by Scott Creighton
By every right this President and his corrupt administration should have been impeached and then incarcerated years ago. But what do you expect from a group of people that we have, by concession, allowed to steal the White House, not once… but twice?
In Chile in 1973, when Nixon and the Chicago Boys wanted to implement the Friedman Doctrine of savage capitalism as a test case, their candidate also lost the free election to Salvador Allende and therefore they had too resort to a military coup to install the Augusto Pinochet led junta.
“Pinochet assumed power on Sept. 11, 1973, in a bloody coup supported by the United States that toppled the elected government of Salvador Allende, a Marxist who had pledged to lead his country "down the democratic road to socialism." Washington Post, Dec. 2006.
Chile was not simply drawn out of a hat in a random manner as the nation where this test case would take place. No, the ousted ruler (freely elected President Allende) had been in power for over two years and had been enacting sweeping social and economic reforms through-out the nation. He had nationalized the banking systems and monetary systems as well as the main national export; copper.
“In 1970, Salvadore Allende became the first Marxist to be democratically elected president in the Western hemisphere. In the course of his sweeping socialist reforms, he nationalized not only the copper mines but banks and other foreign-owned assets as well.” Chile: The Laboratory Test.
The copper mines had been bought up in the 60s by vast US corporations, and of course the banking systems had been held by US interests as well. So when Nixon was elected he owed some of these multinational interests some payback and since he wasn’t about to force the Friedman economic model down the throats of the American people, having then stated “We are all Keynesians now.” he threw them Chile as a sort of consolation prize.
Chile was a laboratory where they could quietly enact their plan of “a drastic reduction in the money supply and government spending, the privatization of government services, massive deregulation of the market, and the liberalization of international trade.” The resulting unstable economy was later hailed by economic revisionists as a marvelous success. As the GDP rose, so did the profit margins for the top 1% or 2% of the population that owned major interests in the country. But the standard of living for the poor and working classes dropped steadily as the wealth disparity widened.
Sound familiar?
As soon as Pinochet took power, he had no economic plan of his own. In stead, he placed on the table a plan devised at the University Of Chicago School Of Economics that would be come to be know as “El Ladrillo” or “The Brick”. Milton Friedman would later look back at the results of his Chilean test case and refer to it as “The Miracle of Chile”.
Milton’s “miracle” devastated a country while propping up a corporate structure unrivaled in Latin American history. It created a lasting oligarchy that is still established to this day. Though many reforms have been implemented since the revolts in Chili in the late 80s and the subsequent removal of Pinochet in 1990, much of the corporate privatization plans remain intact; siphoning off valuable public assets and reassigning them to a handful of powerful men.
Friedman referred to his plan as “shock economics”; the idea being that when a people are in a state of confusion or collective shock from a natural disaster or some other national crisis, then they are willing to submit to reforms that they wouldn’t normally stand for. In the case of Chili, once they had lost the election and knew they wouldn’t be able to enact the “brick” legally, the “shock” was the military take-over of the country and the subsequent brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Some miracle. Savage economic theory based on an absolute “law of the jungle” approach to social responsibility, encouraged at the highest levels of government.
Sound familiar?
All they needed was the shock that set the entire thing in motion to bring the Chicago Boys home to the grand old US of A. And they just happened to get it a mere 6 weeks after the Twin Towers were “privatized” for the first time in their 30 year history. Privatized, as it just so happens, by a long time supporter of the Milton Friedman school of economic theory and a financial contributor to the Bush/Cheney election campaign of 2000; one Larry Silverstien.
And so the “Miracle of America” is being realized and exported overseas and across this continent as we write here today. Vast, well funded organizations are working diligently to ensure the El Ladrillo becomes our collective understanding of the way things aught to be.
We were all Keynesians once; but alas, we are no more.
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