Chile — Repression Reaches Levels Similar to Pinochet Er

After completing an “emergency mission” in Chile, European Parliament Members Miguel Urban and Idoia Villanueva on Wednesday reported that this South American country suffers repression levels similar to those seen in the last three years of the Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990).

Besides preparing a mission report, the leftist MEPs wrote an open letter adressing Federica Mogherini, the European Union (EU) High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

They ask that the EU requires President Sebastian Piñera to halt the repression of citizens and ask for explanations about the actions carried out by the Army and the Police.
Urban and Villanueva recalled that the EU and Chile signed an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), which contains a “Cause on Democracy”.

This binding instrument contemplates that the bilateral trade deal can be suspended if Chile does not respect human rights....

Internationalist 360º
Chile: Repression Reaches Levels Similar to Pinochet Era

Chile: The poster boy of neoliberalism who fell from grace — Branko Milanovic

It is not common for an OECD county to shoot and kill 16 people in two days of socially motivated riots. (Perhaps only Turkey, in its unending wars against the Kurdish guerilla, comes close to that level of violence.) This is however what Chilean government, the poster child of neoliberalism and transition to democracy, did last week in the beginning of protests that do not show the signs of subsiding despite cosmetic reforms proposed by President Sebastian Piñera.

The fall from grace of Chile is symptomatic of worldwide trends that reveal the damages causes by neoliberal policies over the past thirty years, from privatizations in Eastern Europe and Russia to the global financial crisis to the Euro-related austerity....

Global Inequality
Chile: The poster boy of neoliberalism who fell from grace

Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

See also

FAIR
The Revolution Isn’t Being Televised - Media uninterested in protest movements around the world

Alan MacLeod

The Neoliberal Ghost of Pinochet Is Finally Being Exorcised from Chile — Paul Antonopoulos

More than 46 years of initially military imposed neoliberalism has finally exploded into widespread frustration, protest and violence. This neoliberalism culminated in 2017 with twelve businessmen, among them Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, monopolizing at least 17% of the national GDP, demonstrating the huge gap in wealth equity. There is little doubt why the latest protests have exploded violently, with 18 dead so far – Piñera had declared war on his own people to protect his lucrative monopoly racket.

It is without surprise he had declared war. The aggressive neoliberalism that has dominated Chile since the 1973 Chilean coup d’état when socialist President Salvador Allende was killed and eventually replaced by neoliberal Augusto Pinochet, with the backing and blessing of U.S. President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, the CIA and the so-called “Chicago Boys” neoliberal economic team. 

Although the so-called communist threat was defeated in Chile, it was not until 1990 for the kinder face of neoliberalism to return to the country, with the first democratic election taking place since the coup. The return to democracy had not meant any differences to the economic system....

The pernicious globalist model was applied and deemed a miracle because of significant GDP growth. However, this is only to the benefit of shareholders and private companies and does not reflect on the average Chilean experience. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Gini coefficient value, a method to measure wealth distribution, stood at a record 0.50 in 2017, one of the highest inequality coefficients in the world....

Neoliberal propagandist Enrique Krauze Kleinbort – accused of the coup attempt to overthrow Mexican President López Obrador – proclaimed that Chile was ‘the role model’ for Latin American economic growth. If the inequality is considered a ‘role model,’ it shows that the oligarchs of Latin America have not realized a growing trend of violent opposition to neoliberalism, as the recent case in Ecuador demonstrates....

This is not "turbo-capitalism," but neo-feudalism.

Global Research
The Neoliberal Ghost of Pinochet Is Finally Being Exorcised from Chile
Paul Antonopoulos

How Economic Concentration and Crony Capitalism Led to the Chaos in Chile — Daniel Matamala

The signals of unrest in Chile mounted for years amid corruption scandals, rising inequality, and new monopolies. The tax increase on public transport that sparked the protests was only the final straw.

ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
How Economic Concentration and Crony Capitalism Led to the Chaos in Chile
Daniel Matamala | Host of 360 and CNN Prime at CNN Chile

Matias Vernengo — Venezuela is about to explode

The Empire at work. Is history about to repeat?

Al Jazzera — Opinion
Venezuela is about to explode
Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, Bucknell University

See also

Naked Keynesianism
Lula da Silva is a political prisoner. Free Lula!
Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, Bucknell University

Robert Parry — George H.W. Bush, the CIA and a Case of State Terrorism

GWH Bush, terrorist sympathizer and enabler, when he was CIA chief? (Vladimir Putin had a fairly minor role as a KGB official.)

Consortiums News
George H.W. Bush, the CIA and a Case of State Terrorism

Robert Parry

Yves Smith — New IMF Paper Challenges Neoliberal Orthodoxy

While the IMF’s research team has for many years chipped away at mainstream economic thinking, a short, accessible paper makes an even more frontal challenge. It’s caused such a stir that the Financial Times featured it on its front page. We’ve embedded it at the end of this post and encourage you to read it and circulate it.

The article cheekily flags the infamous case of the Chicago Boys, Milton Friedman’s followers in Pinochet’s Chile, as having been falsely touted as a success. If anything, the authors are too polite in describing what a train wreck resulted. A plutocratic land grab and speculation-fueled bubble led quickly to a depression, forcing Pinochet to implement Keynesian policies, as well as rolling back labor “reforms,” to get the economy back on its feet.

The papers describes three ways in which neoliberal reforms do more harm than good.…

Now that the wheels are coming off, the knives are coming out.

Naked Capitalism
New IMF Paper Challenges Neoliberal Orthodoxy
Yves Smith

David F. Ruccio — History will not absolve him*

The headlines (e.g., here and here) are all pretty much the same: Patricio Aylwin, who died yesterday, successfully guided Chile to the restoration of democracy.

But in the interests of real history, we need to keep in mind what actually happened (as with others, such as Jeffrey Sachs): Aylwin played a central role in the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973.…

Occasional Links & Commentary
History will not absolve him*
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

See also

Rise up at night

René Rojas — Insurgency and Orthodoxy

There is no question that Chile’s workers and poor are better positioned today than they were just ten, to say nothing of twenty, years ago. Indeed, popular forces enjoy the most auspicious balance of power since the 1973 coup that stamped out Chile’s democratic road to socialism. And Bachelet did shepherd through a series of reforms in her first year, including higher education legislation that attracted international attention.

But obtaining a firmer grasp on the prospects for emancipatory politics in Chile calls for examining both the electoral results and first-year reforms in relation to elite interests and movement strategies. Such scrutiny reveals an unequivocal preservation of bipartisan oligarchic neoliberalism, along with continued extra-institutional opposition from merging movements.....

Why is it so difficult to shake neoliberalism even after elections? Neoliberalism — the political theory based on the market state and market fundamentalism — has been institutionalized globally over the last several decades and it will take broad and deep reform to change it. This, too, will take decades unless there is global revolution, which seems unlikely. A lot of time and money went into a building a powerful neoliberal consensus. It's won't be easy to reverse it when the interest of the powerful and wealth is to preserve and extend it.

Jacobin » Blogs
Insurgency and Orthodoxy
René Rojas, doctoral candidate in sociology at New York University

Lambert Strether — False Flag?

Pushing Ukraine to the Brink Counterpunch (bwilli123). Fun read from July 9. Because it would be irresponsible not to speculate:

[A]ll Putin has to do is sit-tight and he wins, mainly because the EU needs Moscow’s gas. If energy supplies are terminated or drastically reduced, prices will rise, the EU will slide back into recession, and Washington will take the blame. So Washington has a very small window to draw Putin into the fray, which is why we should expect another false flag incident on a much larger scale than the fire in Odessa. Washington is going to have to do something really big and make it look like it was Moscow’s doing. Otherwise, their pivot plan is going to hit a brick wall.

Then again, we could be looking at opportunists taking advantage of a happy accident! That said, it does make one wonder whether the Dutch being self-sufficient in gas could have formed part of the realpolitik….

Anyone who didn't think of this before reading the Counterpunch article either wasn't paying attention or is not much of an analyst, especially based on the history of Washington and London's black ops stretching back at least to the overthrow of democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh and install at of the domestically repressive but US compliant regime of the Shah in the Iranian coup of 1953 — to which the CIA has recently admitted (Operation Ajax) and the overthrow and murder of democratically elected Salvador Allende and his replacement by US compliant dictator Augusto Pinochet. Only fools would not suspect another false flag operation to accomplish the same "dirty tricks" in the Ukraine, given that Washington and the US intelligence service were involved in the overthrow of democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych. Anyone see a pattern of thuggery here?

This is particularly suspect in the rush to judgment in blaming Vladimir Putin and the Ukrainian "rebels," who are actually fighters in a civil war that is raging, and branding them as terrorists. Russia had no motivation to do this, and in fact, the strategy it has been pursuing is contrary to it. Nor did the Ukrainian opposition have anything to gain by it. On the other hand, there is a strong motivation on the part of both the Ukrainian government and the United States, both of which have a lot to gain in provoking Moscow to react.

Not rushing to judgment here. Let's wait for an investigation if one ever transpires. Jus' saying'.

Naked Capitalism
Links 7/20/14
Lambert Strether

Lambert documents it in The Mystery of Flight MH17: Motives, Missiles, Flight Plans, and the Media

Wonkish, but your future depends on the outcome of this. Russia is neither an Iran of 1953 nor Chile of 1973. Nor is it just another minor nuclear state like NK. The Russian military can inflict terminal damage on CONUS (military jargon for continental US).

Corey Robin — The Calculus of Their Consent

Remembering Gary Becker (et al)

Kathy also mentions this article that Becker wrote in 1997 about the Chicago Boys who worked in or with the Pinochet regime. Becker’s conclusion about that episode?

In retrospect, their willingness to work for a cruel dictator and start a different economic approach was one of the best things that happened to Chile.

No real surprise there. Many free-marketeers, including Hayek, either defended the Pinochet regime or defended those who worked with it.

Oh, what the heck, the Allies forgave all the capitalists and scientists that worked with Hitler on the Nazi war machine.

Crooked Timber
The Calculus of Their Consent
Corey Robin

Ignacio Portes — How the Left Underestimates Chile’s Right-Wing Keynesians

Chile’s caste of technocrats is smarter than what the left generally gives it credit for. The country’s post-dictatorship neoliberals, most of them inside the Socialist-Christian Democrat coalition, not only inherited the disciplined workforce of the Pinochet years, they also have read Keynes, and use his recipes all the time to escape the typical problems that the more fanatic and less pragmatic market fundamentalists create on their own economies, although they do it in quite a conservative way....

The social divide is similar to what it was in the Pinochet years (crumbs notwithstanding), but demands for reform have been successfully contained for more than 2 decades since the end of the dictatorship, and have only recently started surfacing.

And when they surface, what both the Pinochet/libertarian right and the more neoliberal within the Christian Democrat/Socialist Party coalition tell the wannabe reformers is: if we do what you want and start redistributing wealth, helping the unions and so on, all the growth that Chile has benefited from by being so friendly to international capital—all it’s given us, like boosting construction, mining and other dynamic sectors—will go away. And they are right in a sense, because the world is rigged for international capital, which can boycott any government they don’t like by simply moving elsewhere.

In this context, where national workforces are being played against each other to see which of them can serve the market more effectively, it’s hard to see how a movement of students, a couple of trade unionists and well-meaning citizens and some half-assed center-left politicians inside one country could defeat such an octopus of a system. A homeostatic octopus at that, which has the power to regulate its movements in such a way as to control and eliminate any localized effort to reduce its power. Raise your taxes, raise your salaries? How bad, we are going elsewhere then, good luck paying for all that new infrastructure and investment you needed. Behave like a good boy, do what capital says? Good boy, here, have some of my dollars, have a bit of jobs and welfare, at least for as long as the resource-extracting economy lasts or someone starts behaving better than you....

Still, all these extractive, export-based models in Latin America tend to run in the long term into the same problem: whenever the international prices for the commodities they export fall, their highly dependent economies weaken or collapse. When that happens, the masses who more or less kept quiet despite their subordinate position, placated by continued growth, find out they suddenly don’t even have an expanding pie anymore, and even worse, that their rulers are coming for a bigger share of it even if it’s now shrinking, in order to “make the economy more competitive” and re-boot it into profitability and growth, a process which makes class struggle inevitably resurface, exposing the farcical nature of the neoliberals’ harmonious depiction of society, at no small social cost.

So there might be no choice but this: to start thinking of ways of transcending national barriers to stop the race to the bottom, and instead join efforts to confront it. Neoliberalism, neo-imperialism, and neocolonialism still rule through the power of "free markets, free trade, and free flow of capital," along with the power that capital bestows on its owners.

Naked Capitalism

Ignacio Portes: How the Left Underestimates Chile’s Right-Wing Keynesians

Yves Smith 

Luis Andres Henao — Michelle Bachelet Elected Chile President

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Chile's once and future President Michelle Bachelet has won a runoff election after promising profound changes in society in response to widespread street protests.

 With more than 57 percent of the votes counted, Bachelet has an unbeatable 63 percent to 37 percent for the center-right's Evelyn Matthei.

Matthei spokeswoman Lily Perez conceded defeat.

A moderate socialist, Bachelet served as president in 2006-2010, then ran the United Nation's women's agency.

Now she has a new center-left coalition and promises to finance education with higher corporate taxes, reduce the wealth gap, protect the environment and reform the constitution.

The Huffington Post
Michelle Bachelet Elected Chile President

Luis Andres Henao

As the Global North lurches further to the right with austerity, the Global South is running to the left.

Bill Black — Will the Chilean People Save the U.S. by Electing Michelle Bachelet?

The effort by corporate CEOs to dominate the global economy and global government is reaching the end-game stage. Corporate CEOs view government and democracy as their gravest threats and are constantly seeking to discredit and hamstring government and democratic decision-making. CEOs are particularly eager to discredit, destroy, or capture regulation and they have enlisted enormous support in both major U.S. parties and many of the world’s dominant parties for these efforts. President Obama has continued and made worse the effort of President Bush to betray our nation, our democracy, and our people through the secret, draft Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. In this first column on TPP I explain that while there is no realistic chance of convincing Obama to repudiate the TPP, there is a chance that the people of Chile will save our democracy and our national sovereignty....

Once TPP is adopted, democratic rights and national sovereignty will be extinguished by corporate power which can be exerted, again in secret, before a tribunal run by private lawyers (what I call the “plutocracy panels”) with strong conflicts of interest that lead them to favor corporate interests.

New Economic Perspectives

Will the Chilean People Save the U.S. by Electing Michelle Bachelet?
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in the Department of Economics and the School of Law

Bill agrees that capitalism as economic liberalism and democracy as political liberalism are incompatible. Government of the people, by the people and for the people is not compatible with concentrated class power, which concentrated wealth and control of the means of production results in.

BTW, in case anyone missed this, Bill is becoming the (MMT-savvy) successor to aging Noam Chomsky as the public intellectual on the left, ranging over the social, political and economic spectrum of affairs and carefully crafting and documenting his arguments. His grasp and treatment of the dimension of issues and their interrelatedness is indeed impressive.

Leigh Phillips — Chile’s Early Cybernetics: How Allende Attempted a Socialist Internet to Organize the Economy

The story of Salvador Allende, president of the first ever democratically elected Marxist administration, who died when General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the young administration in a US-backed coup on 11 September, 1973, is well known amongst progressives.

But the human rights horrors and tales of desaparecidos have eclipsed – quite understandably – the pioneering cybernetic planning work of the Chilean leader, his ministers and a British left-wing operations research scientist and management consultant named Stafford Beer. It was an ambitious, economy-wide experiment that has since been described as the ‘socialist internet’, an effort decades ahead of its time.,,,

The 29-year-old head of the Chilean Production Development Corporation and later finance minister Fernando Flores - responsible for the management and coordination between nationalised companies and the state, and his advisor, Raul Espejo, had been impressed with Beer's prolific writings on management cybernetics, and, like Allende, wanted to construct a socialist economy that was not centralised as the variations on the Soviet theme had been....

Paul Cockshott, a University of Glasgow computer scientist who has written about the possibility of post-capitalist planning aided by computing, is a big admirer of Cybersyn as a practical example of the general type of regulation mechanism he advocates: ‘The big advance with Stafford Beer's experiments with Cybersyn was that it was designed to be a real-time system rather than a system which, as the Soviets had tried, was essentially a batch system in which you made decisions every five years.’...

When the government faced a CIA-backed strike from conservative small businessmen and a boycott by private lorry companies in 1972, food and fuel supplies ran dangerously low. The government faced its gravest existential threat ahead of the coup. It was then that Cybersyn came into its own, when Allende's government realised that the experimental system could be used to circumvent the opposition’s efforts. The network allowed its operators to secure immediate information on where scarcities were at their most extreme and where drivers not participating in the boycott were located and to mobilise or redirect its own transport assets in order to keep goods moving and take the edge of the worst of the shortages. As a result, the truck-owners' boycott was defeated.

Fascinating post. Ahead of its time. I have long thought that something this is eventually going to be the way distribution takes place. The market system is too inefficient since it is so subject to asymmetry.

SolidarityEconomy.Net
Chile’s Early Cybernetics: How Allende Attempted a Socialist Internet to Organize the Economy
Leigh Phillips via Red Pepper UK

John Pilger — Kissinger and Chile: In an Age of Vigilantes, There Is Cause for Optimism

The most important anniversary of the year was the 40th anniversary of September 11, 1973 - the crushing of the democratic government of Chile by Gen. Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger, then US secretary of state. The National Security Archive in Washington has posted new documents that reveal much about Kissinger's role in an atrocity that cost thousands of lives.

In declassified tapes, Kissinger is heard planning with President Richard Nixon the overthrow of President Salvador Allende. They sound like Mafiosi thugs. Kissinger warns that the "model effect" of Allende's reformist democracy "can be insidious." He tells CIA director Richard Helms, "We will not let Chile go down the drain," to which Helms replies, "I am with you." With the slaughter under way, Kissinger dismisses a warning by his senior officials of the scale of the repression. Secretly, he tells Pinochet, "You did a great service to the West."...

Understanding Kissinger's criminality is vital when trying to fathom what the US calls its "foreign policy." Kissinger remains an influential voice in Washington, admired and consulted by Barack Obama. When Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bahrain commit crimes with US collusion and weapons, their impunity and Obama's hypocrisy are pure Kissinger. Syria must not have chemical weapons, but Israel can have them and use them. Iran must not have a nuclear program, but Israel can have more nuclear weapons than Britain. This is known as "realism" or realpolitik by Anglo-American academics and think-tanks that claim expertise in "counterterrorism" and "national security," which are Orwellian terms meaning the opposite.

In 2006, I interviewed Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, who ran the CIA in Latin America in the 1980s. Here was a true "realist." Like Kissinger and Nixon on the tapes, he spoke his mind. He referred to Salvador Allende as "whatshisname in Chile" and said "he had to go because it was in our national interests." When I asked what gave him the right to overthrow governments, he said, "Like it or lump it, we'll do what we like. So just get used to it, world." 

While Chile is recovering from the overthrow of Allende and the right wing is still in power, the rest of Latin America is veering left.

The world is no longer getting used to it. In a continent ravaged by those whom Nixon called "our bastards," Latin American governments have defied the likes of Clarridge and implemented much of Allende's dream of social democracy - which was Kissinger's fear. Today, most of Latin America is independent of US foreign policy and free of its vigilantism. Poverty has been cut almost by half; children live beyond the age of 5; the elderly learn to read and write. These remarkable advances are invariably reported in bad faith in the West and ignored by the "realists." That must never lessen their value as a source of optimism and inspiration for all of us. 

Truthout | Op-Ed

Kissinger and Chile: In an Age of Vigilantes, There Is Cause for Optimism
John Pilger

Remind me what the difference between neoliberalism at its worst, as displayed by Kissinger, and fascism is. One of Nixon's worst appointments and the most powerful and nefarious. When the history is written he will go down as the man that lost Latin America for the US.

Agony of Chile’s dark days continues as murdered poet’s wife fights for justice

When Joan Jara went to identify the body of her husband, Victor, she found it riddled with 44 bullets and dumped among a pile of corpses in the Santiago morgue. The poet’s wrists and neck were broken and twisted. Where his belly ought to have been was a gory, gaping void.

The memory of that grim scene soon after the Chilean coup – on 11 September 1973 – is still painful for Jara, but it is not the only cause of her grief. The prime suspect in the killing, a former lieutenant in the Chilean army, is still alive and at liberty in the US, where he has citizenship through marriage.

Now the campaign to extradite him to his homeland has taken a step forward after Pedro Barrientos Nuñez, who lives in Florida, was served notice of a lawsuit in the US accusing him of torture, extrajudicial killing and crimes against humanity 

But many of the general’s former supporters argue the events of 1973 are now misrepresented. “Political parties have demonised anything vaguely related to the military government. People talk of abuses of human rights, but that is wrong,” said Roberto Mardones, the administrator of the Pinochet Foundation, which has an exhibition of the general’s medals and books (many on Napoleon) and a mock-up of his office.

“In 1973 citizens were desperate for change. There was a lot of hate. There were strikes, shortages of gas, sugar, matches and nappies. When the junta proclaimed on the radio that they would bring peace and stability, there was euphoria. I went out with my family to celebrate. It was like a carnival.”

The gulf between such views and those of the victims shows the difficulty of reconciliation in Chile after 40 years.

Joan Jara said the US could now help by recognising its role and supporting efforts to bring the accused to justice 

“I appeal to people in the United States to put pressure on their government to respond to our appeals,” she says. “The coup was supported and financed in part by the CIA so the American government at that time had some responsibility for what happened. I know many in the US condemned the coup and were in solidarity with the people of Chile and the victims of executions, disappearances and torture. This case is for all of us.”

The Raw Story
Agony of Chile’s dark days continues as murdered poet’s wife fights for justice
Jonathan Watts, The Guardian

Two take-aways for the contemporary US.

First, extreme political polarization and economic inequality are social dynamite that only fools play with.

Second, neoliberal intellectuals and economists have gone of record that dictatorship and fascism are preferable to  socialism as long only temporary, as Ludwig Mises said of Hitler, and prominent neoliberal economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek took the side of Pinochet's "reform" against Allende's "socialist depredation," while the US not only sanctioned the coup but treated it as a black operation in US imperial and colonial interests. This is a baseless equation of neoliberalism as a political stance with liberal democracy.

Corey Robin — The Hayek-Pinochet Connection: A Second Reply to My Critics

In my last post, I responded to three objections to my article “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children.” In this post I respond to a fourth regarding the connection between Friedrich von Hayek and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

The Hayek-Pinochet Connection: A Second Reply to My Critics
Corey Robin

The road to socialism troubled Hayek as political philosopher. The road to fascism, not so much as long as economic liberalism was maintained institutional. BTW, essential to economic liberalism for Hayek was zero collective bargaining power for labor, that is, no trade unions. If it took a dictator to do away with them, that was a feature of progress, in which all innovation is the result of intervention by great men.

If you don't already know the details, here they are.

BTW, Hayek's ideas were not very different from those of Mises:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism

Quoted in Mises and the “Merit” of Fascism by Jeet Heer at sans everything (December 15, 2007), which is also worth a read.

 Mises styled himself a classical liberal, a position which after the First World War lost its political salience in Central Europe. Amid the strife of the era, Mises hated above all else any form of working class militancy, not just in the manifestation of Bolshevism but also moderate social democracy. This led him to look with favour on some authoritarian regimes. In his 1927 book Liberalism, Mises expressed great ambivalence about Mussolini’s new political doctrine of fascism. He recognized that, of course, that fascism was illiberal and was even farsighted in seeing that it would lead to another European war. Still, Mises thought that as a reaction to communism, fascism was understandable and even admirable. 

The approval that Mises gave to Dollfuss was a precursor to the squirmy support Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman gave to the Pinochet regime in Chile. All three men were in some ways acting in consistency with the doctrines of classical liberalism, which prizes private property while being fearful of democracy. What they failed to realize is that under modern dictatorships, neither property nor any other right is secure. I like classical liberals and libertarians well enough but I don’t think they can be depended upon to defend liberty.

Unlearning Economics — The Questionable Record of Neoliberalism

Now, I suppose, is as appropriate a time as any to discuss the policies generally known as neoliberalism/free market economics: tax and spending cuts, union busting, deregulation, privatisation and free trade, and how they have fared in practice. Unsurprisingly, those on the rightdefend neoliberalism’s record. However, successes have been over exaggerated, while in cases of clear success, a closer look reveals policies which are anything but ‘neoliberal’. I’ll take a brief look at some countries or sets of countries which are commonly purported to show the success of these policies: the US & UK, Chile, Hong Kong & Singapore, and Scandinavia.

Unlearning Economics
The Questionable Record of Neoliberalism

Danny Weil — Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets in the largest protests the country has seen in decades for free education

In a lesson that should be learned here in the US, Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets in the largest protests the country has seen in decades. Chile suffered under the neo-liberal economics of Milton Friedman carried out by the brutal Chilean dictator Augustus Pinochet for close to two decades. Everything was privatized and if you wish to see how students in Chile, now facing the same austerity cuts that the neo-liberals are proposing to bail-out the one percent, are doing you can see the documentary below.

Read it at The Daily Censored (with video documentary)
Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets in the largest protests the country has seen in decades for free education
Danny Weil