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In reply to the discussion: The Dark Age of Money: Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism [View all]Octafish
(55,745 posts)31. Great intellect, hers...
Pegged the Chicago School.
p91
Milton Friedman in a letter to General Augusto Pinochet, April 21, 1975
If this shock approach were adopted, I believe that it should be announced publicly in great detail, to take effect at a very close date. The more fully the public is informed, the more will its reactions facilitate the adjustment.
p93
Killing and locking up the government was not enough for Chile's new junta government, however. The generals knew that their hold on power depended on Chileans being truly terrified, as the people had been in Indonesia. In the days that followed, roughly 13,500 civilians were arrested, loaded onto trucks and imprisoned, according to a declassified CIA report. Thousands ended up in the two main football stadiums in Santiago, the Chile Stadium and the huge National Stadium. Inside the National Stadium, death replaced football as the public spectacle. Soldiers prowled the bleachers with hooded collaborators who pointed out "subversives"; the ones who were selected were hauled off to locker rooms and skyboxes transformed into makeshift torture chambers. Hundreds were executed. Lifeless bodies started showing up on the side of major highways or floating in murky urban canals.
... Even though Pinochet's baffle was one-sided, its effects were as real as any civil war or foreign invasion: in all, more than 3,200 people were disappeared or executed, at least 80,000 were imprisoned, and 200,000 fled the country for political reasons.
p96
For the first year and a half, Pinochet faithfully followed the Chicago rules: he privatized some, though not all, state-owned companies (including several banks); he allowed cutting-edge new forms of speculative finance; he flung open the borders to foreign imports, tearing down the barriers that had long protected Chilean manufacturers; and he cut government spending by 10 percent-except the military, which received a significant increase. He also eliminated price controls -a radical move in a country that had been regulating the cost of necessities such as bread and cooking oil for decades.
The Chicago Boys had confidently assured Pinochet that if he suddenly withdrew government involvement from these areas all at once, the "natural" laws of economics would rediscover their equilibrium, and inflation-which they viewed as a kind of economic fever indicating the presence of unhealthy organisms in the market would magically go down. They were mistaken. In 1974, inflation reached 375 percent-the highest rate in the world and almost twice the top level under Allende. The cost of basics such as bread went through the roof. At the same time, Chileans were being thrown out of work because Pinochet's experiment with "free trade" was flooding the country with cheap imports. Local businesses were closing, unable to compete, unemployment hit record levels and hunger became rampant. The Chicago School's first laboratory was a debacle.
Sergio de Castro and the other Chicago Boys argued (in true Chicago fashion) that the problem didn't lie with their theory but with the fact that it wasn't being applied with sufficient strictness. The economy had failed to correct itself and return to harmonious balance because there were still "distortions" left over from nearly half a century of government interference. For the experiment to work, Pinochet had to strip these distortions away-more cuts, more privatization, more speed.
... Pinochet and de Castro got to work stripping away the welfare state to arrive at their pure capitalist utopia. In 1975, they cut public spending by 27 percent in one blow-and they kept cutting until, by 1980, it was half of what it had been under Allende. Health and education took the heaviest hits. Even The Economist, a free-market cheerleader, called it "an orgy of self-mutilation .1128 De Castro privatized almost five hundred state-owned companies and banks, practically giving many of them away, since the point was to get them as quickly as possible into their rightful place in the economic order. He took no pity on local companies and removed even more trade barriers; the result was the loss of 177,000 industrial jobs between 1973 and 1983.° By the mid-eighties, manufacturing as a percentage of the economy dropped to levels last seen during the Second World War.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Naomi_Klein/Birth_Pangs_SD.html
What used to happen only overseas is coming to the old homeland.
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The Dark Age of Money: Milton Friedman and the Rise of Monetary Fascism [View all]
Octafish
Oct 2012
OP
You're welcome; but, you deserve the credit in bringing this little reported fact - a life
byeya
Oct 2012
#9
David Stockman, Pruneface Budget Director, said the wealth transfer was political...
Octafish
Oct 2012
#42
For roughly 20 years after WWII this nation built up enormous equity. Over the next 30 years
Egalitarian Thug
Oct 2012
#15
This sentence, "...uses the powers of the state to put the interest of money and the financial class
Egalitarian Thug
Oct 2012
#12
this is why the EU is failing: They put the demands of the banks above the needs of people.
librechik
Oct 2012
#17
The EU also needs a treasury and the individual nations need to be able to adjust
byeya
Oct 2012
#20
Govts need to use the military to take over banks, before the banksters buy their military, too.
WinkyDink
Oct 2012
#26
This entire thread is MUST READ stuff! ... My thanks to all of the contributors.
Bozita
Oct 2012
#32