Cold War IV: The Chicago Boys

There are certain things that it doesn't matter what side of the political debate you are on.

The Republicans will deny that it ever happened.

And the Democrats will deny that it happened.  Actually, they tend to say "well I don't know about that." which isn't a denial, it's just saying that they don't know their history.

The Republicans won't be that diplomatic.  They will tell you to "Go back to Russia!' when you tell them about it, because, according to them, anyone that would ever say anything about that is part of a third party that they call everyone that doesn't agree with them:

I mean they actually sort of snub it off.  They give it the classic dodge: "well I've never heard of that."  Or they become Bill O'Rielly verbally hostile.  Or they just ignore that little point all together.

Playboy, in a 2013 article, called a new-old principle in economics "Rogue Economics."  It is an old theory, but the people that are following it now are looked on as radicals, & most of them are leftists, or at least liberal.

What they are doing, these Rogue Economists are looking at economics & principles & laws & seeing what happened in history the last time that they were tried, or when a similar law was introduced, adding that real world data into their analysis.

It's considered "Rogue," because the common means of gauging future economic worlds is through statistics in a closed bubble with only one test group & no control group or analysis of past events.

Make a model. Do the Math.  Ignore the World.

For someone that is in to history, ignoring what happened in the past is completely fucking insane.  I mean, if you listen to the Libertarians, they want to return to the economic policy of the Gilded Age & don't seem to understand what the Gilded Age was like economically.

No information there.  But they defend the plan.

And the ones that acknowledge that history is something that actually happened pull out the argument:  "It might not happen that way again."

What do they say about people that do the same thing over & over again & expect the results to be different?

It just seems like common sense to maybe check what happened before, if, for no other reason, than to make a tweak here & there to avoid the same mistakes.

Otherwise you're stuck in a circle.  You put in a new battery, the car still doesn't work, so you'll go ahead & buy another new battery & are pretty certain that this time the car will start.

Today, the people that stop & think: "Hey, didn't we already change the battery?  Let's see how that worked before we change it again," are considered ROGUE.

That's considered a bad thing & that's mainly because, even in the Universities, economics are controlled by the conservatives & they all follow a principle that started at the University of Chicago & they did something really very bad, so bad that they don't want anyone else looking into it in their field.

And the University of Chicago did it because they got a grant from a man named Milton Friedman...& no, I know he sounds like a board game, but I can assure you that Milton Friedman is an actual human being & not a new version of Monopoly.

The people that did these horrible things are called "The Chicago Boys," because of the university at which they plotted their new plan.

That is Milt & he was born to a middle class family in Brooklyn, was able to go to college with the aid of the state & "entitlements" & then went to the University of Chicago & talked to a lot of very wealthy people & tried to figure out a way to take away all those "entitlements" that helped make his family rich.

You know, because he was a Capitalist & he was already helped & didn't see why anyone else deserved the same handouts.

Unfortunately the CIA heard about this new plan.

Now the CIA is a little different than economists.  The CIA is based a LOT more on actual science than economics is.  They looked at all the data that Milt & his Chicago Boys created & then they looked at the map.

Now, to be fair, the University of Chicago said:

 "We know it works.  We made one test in a tightly controlled bubble.  Nothing could possibly go wrong with it."

And Milton Friedman Said:

"No, I think we should test it.  Let's see what the CIA says."

 And the CIA said:

"Listen bitches, we're going to test this shit."

So they looked at a map of their favorite testing grounds.

And they took each country into account & found one that had an economy that rivaled most European nations & a standard of living extremely close to the United States & a strong government & they decided that this was the best possible place to test their new economic policy...before Milt implemented it in the United States.

So they used it as a testing ground, but before they could do it, they sort of needed to get the country under control.  I mean, you can't exactly walk into someone elses house & tell them how to run things.

Despite what the Bush Administration has told us.

So they undermined a democratically elected president as best they could, & it was working, they made the people hate him so much that when the next election came, they voted for a man that was even less likely to do everything that the CIA told him to.

His name was Salvador Allende & when the CIA started to try to undermine his presidency, he sort of looked & the rest of Latin America, decided that it was probably the American CIA that was trying to take over his country, so he went to the only person he knew that lived through a CIA Coup & asked for help.

And Castro said, "Fuck," because the last thing he wanted to do was tangle with another super power again, especially since he was working so hard to keep Cuba free from the Soviet Union now than he had managed to keep it free from the United States.

But after he said "Fuck," he said, "I'll see what I can do."

And then he told Allende all about that happened in Guatemala & Cuba & how the basic CIA coup d'état worked.

But, the CIA decided NOT to try the same trick a third time.  So this time they sneaked into the Chilean military & said: "who wants to be a brutal dictator & a fascist president for life?"

So Augusto Pinochet said:

"I'll do it, I'll be your bastard."

And then the CIA launched a much bigger invasion than they had done in Guatemala & Cuba.  And they remembered that Castro beat them by handing guns out to his people, so they decided that the Chilean people were a threat too.

And then some of this happened:

And a lot of this happened:

So we targeted the Universities & killed a lot of students & professors & put the rest in a soccer stadium.  And then we rounded up all the school teachers & put them in a soccer stadium.  And then we rounded up all the journalists & put them in a soccer stadium.  And the socialists.  And the communists.  And the liberals.

And they held them in the soccer stadium until Henry Kissinger said:

"They are a threat, Kill them."

And then, because the US just made Pinochet president, he repeated the order:

"They are a threat, kill them."

So then they took everyone that the Americans rounded up & put into the soccer stadium, & they took a gun, & they put a bullet in the back of their head:

And then they started dumping the bodies down mine shafts & throwing them out into the jungle & when their families asked about what happened to them, the United States & it's puppet dictator both said:

"They must have just disappeared."

And because of that, now that Pinochet is no longer dictator for life, the families are protesting & pulling the bodies out of the mine shafts & demanding that America & Chile tell them where their loved ones are:

And then a US journalist that was living in Chile by the name of Charles Horman went to a bar in Santiago & talked to an American that told him all about the US involvement & how they were doing it to test a new economic policy from the University of Chicago.

So, they threw him into the soccer stadium as well.  And they waited to hear what Henry Kissinger wanted to do with him.

And Kissinger said:

"Kill him."

So they put a bullet in an American's head, threw his body down a mine shaft & told his loving wife that he must have disappeared.

But because he was an American & was white, Hollywood made a really good movie out of his story staring Sissy Spacek & Jack Lemmon.

And because Hollywood was making a movie, Pinochet had a man go down into a mine shaft & find a body that had been rotting under lime for almost a decade.

And then in the 1990s, Bill Clinton declassified a whole bunch of documents & you can FOIA the order that Henry Kissinger signed to kill Charles Horman to keep him form telling his fellow Americans what Milton Friedman was doing in Chile.

And because of Bill Clinton, you can FOIA all the other murder orders that Henry Kissinger signed during the September 11th 1973 Coup in Chile.

You read that right, WE MURDERED 60,000 PEOPLE IN ONE DAY!  And we did it just to test an economic policy for Milton Friedman & Associates that was made at the University of Chicago.

And by the way, that 60,000 was only on 9-11-73, it was the start of the killing.  The Dirty War followed & we started disappearing political adversaries & the intelligentsia from the bottom of South America to Guatemala. 

In El Salvador, we raped & murdered a bus full of nuns because the Catholic Church was objecting to our propaganda slogan: "Be Patriotic, Kill a Priest."

Because at the time there were Catholic Priests speaking out against all the killing & oppression.

60,000 in a single day.  By the time the Dirty War ended in the mid 1990s. the United States was responsible for 70 MILLION disappeared or slaughtered people.

70 Million.

Nazi Germany killed around 20 Million Jews & others to take over the world.

Stalin killed 50 Million to force his country to industrialize.

We killed 70 Million for capitalism.

Dwell on that for a minute.  Fuck that, dwell on that for the rest of your life.  If you are an American, like me, that blood is on your hands too.

Things like that are still going on today.

If you are not actively opposing it, if you aren't trying to get in the way, then you're just as guilty as Kissinger.

We are all going to burn in hell because we let it happen.

Moving on...

We murdered 60,000 people in a single day to test an economic theory.

So what was it?

You've heard of it before.  I'll give you a hint.

Anyone?  Anyone?

See what Milt & the Chicago Boys came up with was a way to consolidate political power into a single class of people through economics.

Chile was their testing ground.

They privatized the Post Office, they privatized schools, they broke the unions, they outsourced the jobs so that Chilean labor was competing against a global labor market, & they cut back on state based entitlements while cutting taxes to the upper class.

Does that sound familiar?

The difference between what happened in Chile & what happened in the United States was time.  In Chile they instituted the economic policy immediately.

Schools became so expensive that only the wealthy could afford them.  The middle class virtually disappeared.  Inflation went through the roof.  Demand for apartments increased & formerly owned homes became rentals & foreclosure followed foreclosure. 

Labor couldn't compete with sweatshops over seas.  Massive unemployment followed & it drove the wages down in Chile to well below the previous poverty line.

Regulations were lifted on businesses & the factories returned, this time in the form of sweatshops.  Child labor returned to Chile.  Workplace deaths rose by 70%.

Chile became a 3rd World Country over night.  Before the shift, it had a stronger economy than Germany, after the coup it had one of the weakest economies outside of Africa.

The thing is, the CIA had Pinochet do all of this over less than a five-year period.  The situation deteriorated so quickly that he was facing an out & out Revolution.

Pinochet was forced to revert back to his old Keynesian Economic policies or face an even bloodier revolution than his 1973 coup.

But he proved a point.  The test worked.  The middle class in Chile vanished & the wealth & political power solidified into the hands of the upper class.  Monopolies returned.  The rich got richer & the poor got poorer & politically disenfranchised.

It worked so well that a decade later we implemented the plan here in the United States.  Only, rather than forcing the policy over night, we took it slowly, one step at a time with the hopes that by gradually lowering the standard of living & destroying the middle class, we would not see the instant backlash that Pinochet witnessed in Chile.

They were right.

We aren't doing much to counter their plan.  In fact, a lot of us support it.

I'll leave you with this: