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First, governments must remove all rules and regulations standing in the way of the accumulation of profits. Second, they should sell off any assets they own that corporations could be running at a profit. And third, they should dramatically cut back funding of social programs.
cloaked in the language of math and science,
ravenous growth was provided by colonialism—by
rather than conquering new territory, the state itself would be the new frontier, its public services and assets auctioned off for far less than they were worth.
identified far more with Keynes than with Stalin.
By 1968, 20 percent of total U.S. foreign investment was tied up in Latin America, and U.S. firms had 5,436 subsidiaries in the region.
launched an investigation and uncovered a far-reaching conspiracy in which ITT had offered $1 million in bribes to Chilean opposition forces and “sought to engage the CIA in a plan covertly to manipulate the outcome of the Chilean presidential election.”
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which he accused of being facades for the interests of Western multinationals.
handing them all the key financial posts, including minister of trade and ambassador to Washington.56
mine Indonesia’s immense mineral and oil wealth,
“over 75 percent” of the funding for this “opposition research organization” was coming directly from the CIA.
two distinct tracks: the military plotted the extermination of Allende and his supporters while the economists plotted the extermination of their ideas.
September 11, 1973, not as a coup d’état but as “a war.” Santiago certainly looked like a war zone: tanks fired as they rolled down the boulevards, and government buildings were under air assault by fighter jets. But there was something strange about this war. It had only one side.
privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending—the free-market trinity.
Causing a recession or a depression is a brutal idea, since it necessarily creates mass poverty, which is why no political leader had until this point been willing to test the theory.
evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth.
Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil—the countries that had been showcases of developmentalism—were now all run by U.S.-backed military governments and were living laboratories of Chicago School economics.
Before the junta took power, Argentina had fewer people living in poverty than France or the U.S.—just 9 percent—and an unemployment rate of only
took beggars off the streets and tortured them in classrooms so that the local police would learn the various ways of creating, in the prisoner, the supreme contradiction between the body and the mind.”
in the absence of a system of terrorizing the public and eliminating obstacles, would have certainly provoked popular revolt.
“War on Terror” was a war against all obstacles to the new order.
December 11, 1946, in direct response to the Nazi Holocaust, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution by unanimous vote barring acts of genocide “when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part.”13 The reason the word “political” had been excised from the Convention two years later was that Stalin demanded it. He knew that if destroying a “political group” was genocidal, his bloody purges and mass imprisonment of political opponents would fit the bill. Stalin had enough support
There is, of course, no comparison in scale between what happened under the Nazis, or in Rwanda in 1994, and the crimes of the corporatist dictatorships of Latin America in the seventies. If genocide means a holocaust, these crimes do not belong in that category.
Rodolfo Walsh had written, “Nothing can stop us, neither jail nor death. Because you can’t jail or kill a whole people and because the vast majority of Argentinians … know that only the people will save the people.”
metaphors used by the military regimes in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina: those fascist standbys of cleaning, scrubbing, uprooting and curing.
In high schools, they banned group presentations—a sign of a latent collective spirit, dangerous to “individual freedom.”
Ford union reps were kidnapped in this period, half of them detained on the company grounds in a facility that human rights groups in Argentina are lobbying to have placed on an official list of former clandestine detention facilities.
collaborated with the military during the 1970s to purge one of its plants of union leaders, allegedly giving names and addresses of sixteen workers who were later disappeared,
vision of society built on values other than pure profit.
group of high-school students who, in September 1976, banded together to ask for lower bus fare. For the junta, the collective action showed that the teenagers had been infected with the virus of Marxism, and it responded with genocidal fury, torturing and killing six of the high-schoolers who had dared to make this subversive request.
This chapter in Argentina’s history has some striking parallels with the mass theft of indigenous children from their families in the U.S., Canada and Australia, where they were sent to residential schools, forbidden to speak their native languages, and beaten into “whiteness.” In Argentina in the seventies, a similar supremacist logic was clearly at work, based not on race but on political belief, culture and class.
Milton Friedman had been awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economics for his “original and weighty” work on the relationship between inflation and unemployment.
major omission, Amnesty presented the conflict as one restricted to the local military and the left-wing extremists. No other players are mentioned—not the U.S. government or the CIA; not local landowners; not multinational corporations.
torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious. A tool of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability whenever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks the consent needed to rule: Marcos in the Philippines, the shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, the French in Algeria, the Israelis in the occupied territories, the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses’ or ‘abuses’ is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simply an all-pervasive system.”
Her point was that the occupation could not be done humanely; there is no humane way to rule people against their will. There are two choices, Beauvoir wrote: accept occupation
The Chicago Boys’ first adventure in the seventies should have served as a warning to humanity: theirs are dangerous ideas. By failing to hold the ideology accountable for the crimes committed in its first laboratory, this subculture of unrepentant ideologues was given immunity, freed to scour the world for its next conquest.
states controlled even more lucrative assets that could be run as for-profit interests: phones, airlines, television airwaves, power companies.
the Southern Cone and Indonesia, he listed Turkey, South Korea and Ghana. Other success stories took place not after military coups but in one-party states like Mexico, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
early eighties, authoritarian regimes were starting to collapse around the world—Iran, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia—and many more would follow in what the conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington would term the “third wave” of democracy.
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges scathingly described the land dispute as “a fight between two bald men over a comb.”
privatized, among others, British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, British Airport Authority and British Steel, while it sold its shares in British Petroleum.
(in Bush’s case, the privatization of security, warfare and reconstruction),
torture chambers in order to advance. She had proved that with a large enough political crisis to rally around, a limited version of shock therapy could be imposed in a democracy.
extraordinary circumstances that justified her use of emergency measures and repression—a crisis that made her look tough and decisive rather than cruel and regressive.
Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones—gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus do not seem to apply.
Bolivia and its long history of colonial exploitation, the suppression of its indigenous inhabitants and the hard-won gains of its 1952 revolution,
paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance.”
Riot police raided union halls, a university and a radio station, as well as several factories. Political assemblies and marches were forbidden, and state permission was required to hold meetings.
northern Bolivia, where their movements [were] restricted.”43 It was a mass kidnapping, complete with a ransom demand: the prisoners would be released only if the unions called
