Upset for Pinera as Chilean Lower House approves withdrawal from pensions
Chilean lawmakers in the country's lower house on Wednesday approved a bill to allow citizens to withdraw up to 10% from private pension funds, in a significant blow to the government of center-right President Sebastián Piñera.
Deputies gathered in the Chilean Congress in the coastal city of Valparaiso cheered and sang the national anthem after the result was announced. The vote was 95-36, with 22 abstentions. The bill was backed by 13 members of Pinera's ruling coalition.
Pinera on Tuesday announced cash payments to middle-class citizens hard-hit by the coronavirus outbreak to try to kneecap support for the bill, which economists have warned could cause a short, sharp shock to the country's bourse and diminish future pension payouts, already widely accepted to be too low to live on.
Chilean senators will vote on the bill in the coming weeks.
At: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-07-15/protests-erupt-in-chile-on-eve-of-lawmaker-vote-to-allow-pension-withdrawal
Scenes last night's protests in Santiago, Chile, in favor of a bill allowing a 10% withdrawal from pension funds - and against the center-right Piñera administration.
While Chile's private pension system has received plaudits in much of the western media, 30% commissions leave 80% of Chilean retirees with depleted pension accounts - thus leaving them dependent on state subsidies to cover the minimum $200 pension Chilean law guarantees.
The pension system was implemented in 1981 by dictator Augusto Pinochet's Labor Minister José Piñera - the current president's brother.
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A superb poster I followed long ago got busy and tracked him back to Free Republic to determine who he was. He showed up here daily for heated, raging looney-toons commentary until someone finally pinned his ears back and he suddenly disappeared. He used to love to boast about Chile's fabulous economy created during Pinochet's bloody dictatorship.
After making a display of himself for a while he vanished, after boasting Chile's pension system was unmatched and superior to anything else developed anywhere else. If I had paid enough attention I would have remembered what it was which scared him off!
I never knew President Piñera's brother engineered this despicable system before seeing your comments. It's amazing! It's quite a bit easier now to understand why some sources have mentioned he had been a Pinochet supporter in earlier days. I guess so! Had only learned that he had placed at least a couple of people who had worked for Pinochet within his own cabinet.
For others who haven't known about Chile's President Piñera's brother, here is a look at his Wikipedia profile:
José Piñera Echenique (born October 6, 1948) is a Chilean economist, one of the famous Chicago Boys, who served as minister of Labor and Social Security, and of Mining, in the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.[1] He is the architect of Chile's private pension system based on personal retirement accounts. Piñera has been called "the world's foremost advocate of privatizing public pension systems"[2] as well as "the Pension Reform Pied Piper" (by the Wall Street Journal).[3] He is now Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, President of the International Center for Pension Reform based in Santiago, Senior Fellow at the Italian libertarian think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni, and member of the Advisory Board of the Vienna-based Educational Initiative for Central and Eastern Europe. He has a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. Piñera is a Board Member in Chile and an active supporter of SOS Children's Villages, the largest orphan and abandoned children's charity in the world. Today, Piñera is director of the magazine Economía y Sociedad, that was relaunched in November 2016.
Early life and family
José Piñera Echenique is the son of Manuel José Piñera Carvallo, Chile's Ambassador to the United Nations during the government of President Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970). His uncle Archbishop Bernardino Piñera (100) was twice elected President of Chile's Council of Bishops. He has three younger brothers: Sebastián Piñera, a businessman-politician and the President of Chile between 2010 and 2014, with whom he has a longstanding conflict about public policies.;[7][5][6] Pablo Piñera, managing director of Banco del Estado and former member of the Board of the Central Bank; and Miguel Piñera, a musician. He also has two sisters, Guadalupe and Magdalena. His maternal lineage is of Basque descent and his paternal lineage is of Asturian descent.
Piñera graduated in 1970 as an economist from the Universidad Católica de Chile, at that time closely associated with the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago. In this same year, 1970, he began graduate studies at Harvard University. In 1972 he received his M.A. and in 1974 his Ph.D. in economics. He was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard and an Assistant Professor at Boston University. Piñera returned to Chile in 1975 as a professor of the Catholic University of Chile. He has written eight books and numerous essays and articles. He was awarded an honorary degree at Universidad Francisco Marroquin.
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Pi%C3%B1era
Thanks for the current conflict in Chile news, sandensea, and for supplying the background to give us context. Very helpful.
