On Oct 3, 4:59*pm, John Smith wrote:
On 10/3/2010 12:40 PM, Ray Fischer wrote:

...
And there is the insane hatred of the right wing fascist.

Just toss it in with my insane dislike of homosexuals and bill me later ....

Regards,
JS

you keep digging that hole ever deeper.

On Oct 3, 4:57*pm, John Smith wrote:
On 10/3/2010 2:47 PM, Nickname unavailable wrote:

...
* if you embrace fascism, do not be to surprised if you are labeled
one. you just threw the constitution into the garbage, and wanted to
kill your opponents. something that fascists, as well as marxist are
really good at.
* i see little difference between a free market economy(fascism), and a
communist economy(marxism), in either system, almost all wealth and
power ends up in the hands of a few.

To know if I embrace fascism, or not, you would first have to have a
proper definition of it ... since you are all-over-the-place in your
conception of it ... come back when you can understand I don't. *ROFLOL

Regards,
JS

who is all over the place. fascism is a conservative value. and i see
little differences between the extremes.

On Oct 3, 5:01*pm, John Smith wrote:
On 10/3/2010 12:40 PM, Ray Fischer wrote:

Definitions of fascist on the Web:

•an adherent of fascism or other right-wing authoritarian views
•relating to or characteristic of fascism; "fascist propaganda"
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

•Fascism, , is a radical and authoritarian nationalist political
ideology. Fascists seek to organize a nation on corporatist
perspectives; values; and systems such as the political system and the
economy. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist

•The Fascist (Il Federale) is a 1961 Italian film directed by Luciano
Salce. It was coproduced with France. It was also the first feature film
scored by Ennio Morricone.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fascist

•The word fascist is sometimes used to denigrate people, institutions,
or groups that would not describe themselves as ideologically fascist,
and that may not fall within the formal definition of the word. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_(epithet)

•fascism - a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical
government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

•Fascism is a 1995 book edited by Roger Griffin. It is a reader, in the
Oxford Readers series, which assembles the writings of various authors
on the topic of fascism and the far-right. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism_(book)

•Neo-fascism is a post-World War II ideology that includes significant
elements of fascism. The term neo-fascist may apply to groups that
express a specific admiration for Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism
or any other fascist leader/state. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism_(United_States)

•Fascism - Alternative spelling of fascism
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Fascism

•fascism - A political regime, having totalitarian aspirations,
ideologically based on centralized government, government control of
business, repression of criticism or opposition, a leader cult and
exalting the state and/or religion above individual rights. ...
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fascism

•hold the nation and race above all individuals, and call for a
dictatorial centralized government with single minded economic and
social policies that use suppression of all individual rights for the whole.http://www.edukits.ca/diversity/balk..._glossary.html

•Originally, a member of the Fascisti, formed by Benito Mussolini, a
political movement espousing extremely anti-democratic principles. In
the Surfing world, individuals with no regard or respect for their
fellow surfers are Fascist. ...http://www.surfingdictionary.com/Sur...tionary_F.html

•fascism - From the Latin fasces, a group of tightly bundled rods with
an axe head protruding from one end, a Roman symbol of power and unity. ....www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1451.html

•fascism - a philosophy or system of government that advocates or
exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, together with an ideology
of belligerent nationalism Father:
cidc.library.cornell.edu/Dof/concepts.htm

•fascism - Political philosophy that became predominant in Italy and
then Germany during the 1920s and 1930s; attacked weakness of democracy,
corruption of capitalism; promised vigorous foreign and military
programs; undertook state control of economy to reduce social friction.
(p. 870)
occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/stearns_awl/medialib/glossary/gloss_F.html

thanks. its conservative in nature. its anti-liberal.

On Oct 3, 1:14*pm, Nickname unavailable wrote:
On Oct 3, 11:31*am, John Smith wrote:

On 10/3/2010 9:20 AM, Nickname unavailable wrote:

* ...

More tiring obfuscation and desperation ...

Truth is, dig up an old Roman gold coin, it will still hold near the
same value it had back then ... dig up the first gold coin ever created,
it will still hold near the value it was given then.

*i am glad you brought up rome. rome was a super power till it went on
the gold standard, then it was all down hill from there. when they
used copper, they did really well. they paid their bills. once on
gold, the economy started to deflate.

You won't be digging up any dollars from then ... but it you did manage,
they would only have a collectors value ... they financial worth would
be ZERO!

*really. ever hear of the antiques market? antiques are a commodity,
just like gold.



Regards,
JS- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

That is correct. Copper is the most necessary and valuable metal out
there. Invest in copper. Modern society is using more copper than ever.

wrote:

That is correct. Copper is the most necessary and valuable metal out
there. Invest in copper. Modern society is using more copper than ever.

Because of war. You use copper to make brass. You use brass to make
rifle cartridges. We leave trails of brass and moonscape.

On Oct 3, 11:49*pm, wrote:
On Oct 3, 1:14*pm, Nickname unavailable wrote:



On Oct 3, 11:31*am, John Smith wrote:

On 10/3/2010 9:20 AM, Nickname unavailable wrote:

* ...

More tiring obfuscation and desperation ...

Truth is, dig up an old Roman gold coin, it will still hold near the
same value it had back then ... dig up the first gold coin ever created,
it will still hold near the value it was given then.

*i am glad you brought up rome. rome was a super power till it went on
the gold standard, then it was all down hill from there. when they
used copper, they did really well. they paid their bills. once on
gold, the economy started to deflate.

You won't be digging up any dollars from then ... but it you did manage,
they would only have a collectors value ... they financial worth would
be ZERO!

*really. ever hear of the antiques market? antiques are a commodity,
just like gold.

Regards,
JS- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

That is correct. Copper is the most necessary and valuable metal out
there. Invest in copper. Modern society is using more copper than ever.

well said.

On Oct 4, 1:49Â*am, "john.whine" wrote:


http://www.counterpunch.org/grandin11172006.html
November 17, 2006
Milton Friedman and the Economics of Empire
The Road from Serfdom
By GREG GRANDIN
Milton Friedman had no idea that his six-day trip to Chile in March
1975 would generate so much controversy. He was invited to Santiago by
a group of Chilean economists who over the previous decades had been
educated at the University of Chicago, in a program set up by
Friedman's colleague, Arnold Harberger. Two years after the overthrow
of Allende, with the dictatorship unable to get inflation under
control, the "Chicago Boys" began to gain real influence in General
Augusto Pinochet's military government. They recommended the
application of what Friedman had already taken to call "shock
treatment" or a "shock program" Â* immediately halting the printing of
money to finance the budget deficit, cutting state spending twenty to
twenty-five percent, laying off tens of thousands of government
workers, ending wage and price controls, privatizing state industries,
and deregulating capital markets. "Complete free trade," Friedman
advised.
Friedman and Harberger were flown down to "help to sell" the plan to
the military junta, which despite its zealous defense of the
abstraction of free enterprise was partial to corporatism and the
maintenance of a large state sector. Friedman gave a series of
lectures and met with Pinochet for 45 minutes, where the general
"indicated very little indeed about his own or the government's
feeling." Although he noted that the dictator, responsible for the
torture of tens of thousands of Chileans, seemed "sympathetically
attracted to the idea of a shock treatment." 

Friedman returned home
to a firestorm of protest, aggravated by his celebrity as a Newsweek
columnist and ongoing revelations about Washington's and corporate
America's involvement in the overthrow of Allende. Not only had Nixon,
the CIA, and ITT, along with other companies, plotted to destabilize
Allende's "democratic road to socialism," but now a renowned
University of Chicago economist, whose promotion of the wonders of the
free market was heavily subsidized by corporations such as Bechtel,
Pepsico, Getty, Pfizer, General Motors, W.R. Grace, and Firestone, was
advising the dictator who overthrew him on how to complete the
counterrevolution Â* at the cost of skyrocketing unemployment among
Chile's poor. The New York Times identified Friedman as the "guiding
light of the junta's economic policy," while columnist Anthony Lewis
asked: if "pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile
only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some
responsibility?" At his

university, the Spartacus Youth League pledged to "drive Friedman off
campus through protest and exposure," while the student government,
replicating their own version of the Church Commission hearings that
was just then investigating US crimes in Chile, convened a "Commission
of Inquiry on the Friedman/Harberger Issue." Everywhere in the press
the name Friedman was paired with the adjectives "draconian" and
"shock," with small but persistent protests dogging the professor at
many of his public appearances.
In letters to various editors and detractors, Friedman downplayed the
extent of his involvement in Chile, fingering Harberger as more
directly involved in the mentoring of Chilean economists. While
defensive, he nevertheless reveled in the controversy and the frisson
of being ushered into speaking engagements via kitchens and back doors
to avoid demonstrators. He enjoyed exposing the double standard of
"liberal McCarthyism," pointing out that he was never criticized for
giving similar advice to Red China, the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia. In
recounting an episode when a man was dragged out of the Nobel award
ceremony after shouting "down with capitalism, freedom for Chile,"
Friedman delighted in noting that the protest backfired, resulting in
his receiving "twice as long an ovation" than any other laureate.
Friedman defended his relationship with Pinochet by saying that if
Allende had been allowed to remain in office Chileans would have
suffered "the elimination of thousands and perhaps mass
starvation . . . torture and unjust imprisonment." But the elimination
of thousands, mass hunger, torture and unjust imprisonment were what
was taking place in Chile exactly at the moment the Chicago economist
was defending his protégé. Allende's downfall came because he refused
to betray Chile's long democratic tradition and invoke martial law,
yet Friedman nevertheless insisted that the military junta offered
"more room for individual initiative and for a private sphere of life"
and thus a greater "chance of a return to a democratic society." It
was pure boilerplate, but it did give Friedman a chance to rehearse
his understanding of the relationship between capitalism and freedom.
Critics of both Pinochet and Friedman took Chile as proof positive
that the kind of free-market absolutism advocated by the Chicago
School was only possible through repression. So Friedman countered by
redefining the meaning of freedom. Contrary to the prevailing post-
WWII belief that political liberty was dependent on some form of mild
social leveling, he insisted that "economic freedom is an essential
requisite for political freedom." More than his monetarist theorems,
this equation of "capitalism and freedom" was his greatest
contribution to the rehabilitation of conservatism in the 1970s. Where
pre-New Deal conservatives positioned themselves in defense of social
hierarchy, privilege, and order, post-WWII conservatives instead
celebrated the free market as a venue of creativity and liberty. Such
a formulation today stands at the heart of the conservative movement,
having been accepted as commonsense by mainline politicians and
opinion makers. It is likewise enshrined in Bush's National Security
Strategy, which mentions "economic freedom" more than twice as many
times as it does "political freedom."
While he was in Chile Friedman gave a speech titled "The Fragility of
Freedom" where he described the "role in the destruction of a free
society that was played by the emergence of the welfare state."
Chile's present difficulties, he argued, "were due almost entirely to
the forty-year trend toward collectivism, socialism and the welfare
state . . . a course that would lead to coercion rather than freedom."
The Pinochet regime, he argued, represented a turning point in a
protracted campaign, a tearing off of democracy's false husks to reach
true freedom's inner core. "The problem is not of recent origin,"
Friedman wrote in a follow-up letter to Pinochet, but "arises from
trends toward socialism that started forty years ago, and reached
their logical Â* and terrible Â*climax in the Allende regime." He
praised the general for putting Chile back on the "right track" with
the "many measures you have already taken to reverse this trend."
Friedman understood the struggle to be a long one, and indeed some of
the first recruits for the battle of Chile were conscripted decades
earlier. With financial funding from the US government's Point Four
foreign aid program and the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of
Chicago's Department of Economics set up scholarship programs in the
mid-1950s with Chile's Catholic and public universities. About one
hundred select students between 1957 and 1970 received close, hands-on
training, first in an apprenticeship program in Chile and then in post-
graduate work in Chicago. In principle, Friedman and his colleagues
opposed the kind of developmental largesse that funded the exchange
program as a market distortion, yet they took the cash to finance
their department's graduate program. But they also had a more
idealistic purpose.
Starting in the 1950s, Latin America, particularly the southern cone
countries of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, had become a laboratory for
developmentalist economics. Social scientists, such as the Argentine
Raúl Prebisch from his position as head of the UN's Economic
Commission on Latin America, expanded Keynesianism Â* after John
Maynard Keynes, who elaborated the dominant post-WWII economic
framework that envisioned an active role for the state in the workings
of the market -- beyond its focus on managing countervailing cycles of
inflation and unemployment to question the terms of international
trade. Chronic inflation, according to Prebisch and other Latin
American economists, was understood not to be a reflex of any given
country's irresponsible monetary system but a symptom of deep
structural inequalities that divided the global economy between the
developed and the undeveloped world. Volatile commodity prices and
capital investment reinforced first world advantage and third world
disadvantage. Economists and politicians from across the political
spectrum accepted the need for state planning, regulation, and
intervention. Such ideas not only drove the economic policies of
developing nations, but echoed throughout the corridors and conference
rooms of the UN and the World Bank, as well as in the non-aligned
movement's 1973 call for a New International Economic Order.
It was the Chicago School's vision of hell, the New Deal writ large
across the world stage. These ideas "fell like a bomb" on those who
had long stood against Keynesianism at home only now to see its
authority spread globally. The Chilean scholarship program was
intended to counter such a vision. "University of Chile economists
have been followers of Keynes and Prebisch more than of Marx," wrote
former University of Chicago president and State Department director
of overseas education programs William Benton, and "the Chicago
influence" will "introduce a third basic viewpoint, that of
contemporary 'market economics.'"
Students returned to Chile not just with a well-rounded education in
classical economics but with a burning dedication to carry the faith
to benighted lands. They purged the economics departments of their
universities of developmentalists and began to set up free-market
institutes and think tanks Â* the Center for Social and Economic
Studies, for example, and the Foundation for Liberty and Development Â*
funded, as their counterparts in the US were, by corporate money. They
understood their mission in continental terms, committed, as Chicago
alum Ernesto Fontaine put it, "to expand throughout Latin America,
confronting the ideological positions which prevented freedom and
perpetuated poverty and backwardness."
The program, which brought up students from universities in Argentina
as well, is an example of the erratic nature of both public and
private US diplomacy, conforming as it does to competing power
interests within American society. At the same time that Kennedy was
promoting Alliance for Progress reform capitalism, he was training and
funding the men and institutions that would constitute the continent's
dense network of death squads. At the same time that Chase Manhattan,
Chemical, Manufacturers Hanover, and Morgan Guaranty were promoting,
through the establishment of the Trilateral Commission, a more
conciliatory economic policy in the third world, they were cutting off
credit to Chile, making, in accordance with Nixon's directive, its
economy "scream." And at the same time that every American president
from Truman to Nixon was embracing Keynesianism, the University of
Chicago's Economics Department, with financial support from the US
government, had turned itself into free-market madrassa that
indoctrinated a generation of Latin American economists to spearhead
an international capitalist insurgency.
Throughout the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, though, the revolution
seemed to be forever deferred. In the late 1960s, the Chicago Boys had
drawn up the platform of Allende's nationalist opponent in the 1970
election, which included many of the proposals that eventually would
be implemented under Pinochet. But Allende won, so Chile had to wait.
In the meantime, the military junta in Brazil, which took power in
1964, had invited Friedman in 1973 down for advice, which it took for
awhile. A severe recession and skyrocketing unemployment followed.
Friedman pronounced this first application of "shock therapy" an
"economic miracle." But the generals, wisely it seems, demurred,
returning to its state-directed program of industrialization that,
while failing to curb inflation, did lower unemployment and lay the
foundations for Brazil's current economic dominance of Latin America.
Richard Nixon too, early in his first term, showed promise, but then
he raised tariffs, introduced wage and price controls and, with an eye
to the 1972 election, declared himself a Keynesian and opened up the
money spout. Nixon was an "enormous disappointment," reflected
Friedman.
That left Pinochet, not the most reputable of characters but willing
to go the distance. Chile became, according to Business Week, a
"laboratory experiment" for taming inflation through monetary control,
carrying out, said Barrons, the "most important modifications
implemented in the developing world in recent times." American
economists may have been writing "treatises" on the "way the world
should work, but it is another country that is putting it into
effect."
A month after Friedman's visit, the Chilean junta announced that
inflation would be stopped "at any cost." The regime cut government
spending twenty-seven percent, practically shuttered the national
mint, and set fire to bundles of escudos. The state divested from the
banking system and deregulated finance, including interest rates. It
slashed import tariffs, freed prices on over 2000 products, and
removed restrictions against foreign investments. Pinochet pulled
Chile out of a number of alliances with neighboring countries intended
to promote regional industrialization, turning his country into a
gateway for the introduction of cheap goods into Latin America. Tens
of thousands of public workers lost their jobs as the government
auctioned off, in what amounted to a spectacular transfer of wealth to
the private sector, over four hundred state industries. Multinationals
were not only granted the right to repatriate one hundred percent of
their profits, but were given guaranteed exchange rates to help them
do so. In order to build investor confidence, the escudo was fixed to
the dollar. Within four years, nearly thirty percent of all property
expropriated not just under Allende but under a previous Alliance for
Progress land reform was returned to previous owners. New laws treated
labor like any other "free" commodity, sweeping away four decades of
progressive union legislation. Health care was privatized, as was the
public pension fund.
GNP plummeted thirteen percent, industrial production fell 28 percent,
and purchasing power collapsed to forty percent of its 1970 level. One
national business after another went bankrupt. Unemployment soared.
Yet by 1978 the economy rebounded, expanding thirty-two percent
between 1978 and 1981. Though salary levels remained close to twenty
percent below what they were a decade previously, per capita income
began to climb again. Perhaps even a better indicator of progress,
torture and extrajudicial executions began to taper off. With
hindsight, however, it is now clear that the Chicago economists,
despite the credit they received for three years of economic growth,
had set Chile on the road to near collapse. The rebound of the economy
was a function of the liberalization of the financial system and
massive foreign investment. That investment, it turns out, led to a
speculative binge, monopolization of the banking system, and heavy
borrowing. The deluge of foreign capital did allow the fixed exchange
rate to be maintained for a short period. But sharp increases in
private debt Â* rising from $2 billion in 1978 to over $14 billion in
1982 -- put unsustainable pressure on Chile's currency. Pegged as it
was to the appreciating US dollar, the value of the escudo was kept
artificially high, leading to a flood of cheap imports. While
consumers took advantage of liberalized credit to purchase TVs, cars,
and other high-ticket items, savings shrank, debt increased, exports
fell, and the trade deficit ballooned.
In 1982 things fell apart. Copper prices plummeted, accelerating
Chile's balance of trade deficit. GDP plunged fifteen percent, while
industrial production rapidly contracted. Bankruptcies tripled and
unemployment hit 30 percent. Despite his pledge to hold firm, Pinochet
devalued the escudo, devastating poor Chileans who had either availed
themselves to liberalized credit to borrow in dollars or who held
their savings in escudos. The Central Bank lost forty-five percent of
its reserves, while the private banking system collapsed. The crisis
forced the state, dusting off laws still on the books from the Allende
period, to take over nearly seventy percent of the banking system and
reimpose controls on finance, industry, prices and wages. Turning to
the IMF for a bailout, Pinochet extended a public guarantee to repay
foreign creditors and banks.
But before the crisis of 1982, there were the golden years between
1978 and 1981. Just as the international left flocked to Chile during
the Allende period, under Pinochet the country became a mecca for the
free-market right. Economists, political scientists, and journalists
came to witness the "miracle" first hand, holding up Chile as a model
to be implemented throughout the world. Representatives from European
and American banks poured into Santiago, paying tribute to Pinochet by
restoring credit that was denied the heretic Allende. The World Bank
and the Inter-American Development Bank extolled Chile as a paragon of
responsibility, advancing it 46 loans between 1976 and 1986 for over
$3.1 billion.
In addition to money men, right-wing activists traveled to Chile in a
show of solidarity with the Pinochet regime. Publisher of the National
Review William Rusher, along with other cadres who eventually
coalesced around Reagan's 1976 and 1980 bids for the Republican
nomination, organized the American-Chilean Council, a solidarity
committee to counter critical press coverage in the US of Pinochet. "I
was unable to find a single opponent of the regime in Chile," Rusher
wrote after a 1978 pilgrimage, "who believes the Chilean government
engages" in torture. As to the "interim human discomfort" caused by
radical free-market policies, Rusher believed that "a certain amount
of deprivation today, in the interest of a far healthier society
tomorrow, is neither unendurable nor necessarily reprehensible."
Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian émigré and University of Chicago
professor whose 1944 Road to Serfdom dared to suggest that state
planning would produce not "freedom and prosperity" but "bondage and
misery," visited Pinochet's Chile a number of times. He was so
impressed that he held a meeting of his famed Société Mont Pélérin
there. He even recommended Chile to Thatcher as a model to complete
her free-market revolution. The Prime Minister, at the nadir of
Chile's 1982 financial collapse, agreed that Chile represented a
"remarkable success" but believed that Britain's "democratic
institutions and the need for a high degree of consent" make "some of
the measures" taken by Pinochet "quite unacceptable."
Like Friedman, Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom,
who would rule as a dictator only for a "transitional period," only as
long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation. "My personal
preference," he told a Chilean interviewer, "leans toward a liberal
dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of
liberalism." In a letter to the London Times he defended the junta,
reporting that he had "not been able to find a single person even in
much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much
greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende." Of course, the
thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet's regime
weren't talking.
Hayek's University of Chicago colleague Milton Friedman got the grief,
but it was Hayek who served as the true inspiration for Chile's
capitalist crusaders. It was Hayek who depicted Allende's regime as a
way station between Chile's postwar welfare state and a hypothetical
totalitarian future. Accordingly, the Junta justified its terror as
needed not only to prevent Chile from turning into a Stalinist gulag
but to sweep away fifty years of tariffs, subsidies, capital controls,
labor legislation, and social welfare provisions -- a "half century of
errors," according to finance minister Sergio De Castro, that was
leading Chile down its own road to serfdom.
"To us, it was a revolution," said government economist Miguel Kast,
an Opus Dei member and follower of both Hayek and American Enterprise
Institute theologian Michael Novak. The Chicago economists had set out
to affect, radically and immediately, a "foundational" conversion of
Chilean society, to obliterate its "pseudo-democracy" (prior to 1973,
Chile enjoyed one of the most durable constitutional democracies in
the Americas).
Where Friedman made allusions to the superiority of economic freedom
over political freedom in his defense of Pinochet, the Chicago group
institutionalized such a hierarchy in a 1980 constitution named after
Hayek's 1960 treatise The Constitution of Liberty. The new charter
enshrined economic liberty and political authoritarianism as
complementary qualities. They justified the need of a strong executive
such as Pinochet not only to bring about a profound transformation of
society but to maintain it until there was a "change in Chilean
mentality." Chileans had long been "educated in weakness," said the
president of the Central Bank, and a strong hand was needed in order
to "educate them in strength." The market itself would provide
tutoring: When asked about the social consequences of the high
bankruptcy rate that resulted from the shock therapy, Admiral José
Toribio Merino replied that "such is the jungle of . . . economic
life. A jungle of savage beasts, where he who can kill the one next to
him, kills him. That is reality."

But before such a savage nirvana of
pure competition and risk could be attained, a dictatorship was needed
to force Chileans to accept the values of consumerism, individualism,
and passive rather than participatory democracy. "Democracy is not an
end in itself," said Pinochet in a 1979 speech written by two of
Friedman's disciples, but a conduit to a truly "free society" that
protected absolute economic freedom. Friedman hedged on the
relationship between capitalism and dictatorship, but his former
students were consistent: "A person's actual freedom," said Finance
Minister de Castro, "can only be ensured through an authoritarian
regime that exercises power by implementing equal rules for everyone."
"Public opinion," he admitted, "was very much against [us], so we
needed a strong personality to maintain the policy."
Jeane Kirkpatrick was among those who traveled to Chile to pay respect
to the pioneer, lauding Pinochet for his economic initiatives. "The
Chilean economy is a great success," the ambassador said, "everyone
knows it, or they should know it." She was dispatched by Reagan
shortly after his 1981 inauguration to "normalize completely
[Washington's] relations with Chile in order to work together in a
pleasant way," including the removal of economic and arms sanctions
and the revocation of Carter's "discriminatory" human rights policy.
Such pleasantries, though, didn't include meeting with the relatives
of the disappeared, commenting on the recent deportation of leading
opposition figures, or holding Pinochet responsible for the 1976 car
bomb execution of Orlando Letelier, Allende's ambassador to the US, in
Washington's Dupont Circle -- all issues Kirkpatrick insisted would be
resolved with "quiet diplomacy."
Setting aside the struggles surrounding religion, race, and sexuality
that give American politics its unique edge, it was in Chile where the
New Right first executed its agenda of defining democracy in terms of
economic freedom and restoring the power of the executive branch.
Under Pinochet's firm hand, the country, according to prominent
Chicago graduate Cristián Larroulet, became a "pioneer in the world
trend toward forms of government based on a free social order." Its
privatized pension system, for example, is today held up as a model
for the transformation of Social Security, with Bush having received
advice from Chilean economist José Piñera, also a Chicago student, on
how to do so in 1997. Pinochet "felt he was making history," said
Piñera, "he wanted to be ahead of both Reagan and Thatcher."
Friedman too saw himself in the vanguard. "In every generation," he is
quoted in his flattering New York Times obituary, which spares just a
sentence on his role in Chile, "there's got to be somebody who goes
the whole way, and that's why I believe as I do."
And trailblazer both men were, harbinger of a brave and merciless new
world. But if Pinochet's revolution was to spread throughout Latin
America and elsewhere, it first had to take hold in the United States.
And even as the dictator was "torturing people so prices could be
free," as Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once mordantly observed,
the insurgency that would come to unite behind Ronald Reagan was
gathering steam.
Today, Pinochet is under house arrest for his brand of "shock
therapy," and Friedman is dead. But the world they helped usher in
survives, in increasingly grotesque form. What was considered extreme
in Chile in 1975 has now become the norm in the US today: a society
where the market defines the totality of human fulfillment, and a
government that tortures in the name of freedom.
Greg Grandin teaches Latin American history at NYU and is the author
of the Empire's Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and The
Rise of the New Imperialism, from which this essay has been excerpted.
He can be reached at:



http://www.gregpalast.com/tinker-bel...cle-of-chile-2

Tinker Bell, Pinochet and The Fairy Tale Miracle of Chile
Published December 10th, 2006 in Articles
Chile’s former military ruler General Augusto Pinochet has died at the
age of 91 - a week after entering hospital in Santiago to receive
treatment for a heart attack.
En español
Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Tinker Bell and General Augusto Pinochet
had much in common.
All three performed magical good deeds. In the case of Pinochet, he
was universally credited with the Miracle of Chile, the wildly
successful experiment in free markets, privatization, de-regulation
and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds spread
from Valparaiso to Virginia.
But Cinderella’s pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. The Miracle
of Chile, too, was just another fairy tale. The claim that General
Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances
whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.
Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of
Salvador Allende - who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after
his death.
In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government,
Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-
market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by
40% under military rule.
In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year
“President� Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled
to 40%. Quite a miracle.
Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years
of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle
of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of
their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade
union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all
taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment,
privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.
Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the
country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression.
After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled
over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market
experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass
littered the laboratory floor. Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad
scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald
Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a
casebook study in sound economic management.� Milton Friedman himself
coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.� Friedman’s sidekick,
economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase
of what supply-side economics can do.�
It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of de-regulation
gone berserk.
The Chicago Boys persuaded the junta that removing restrictions on the
nation’s banks would free them to attract foreign capital to fund
industrial expansion.
Pinochet sold off the state banks - at a 40% discount from book value
- and they quickly fell into the hands of two conglomerate empires
controlled by speculators Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat. From their
captive banks, Vial and Cruzat siphoned cash to buy up manufacturers -
then leveraged these assets with loans from foreign investors panting
to get their piece of the state giveaways.
The bank’s reserves filled with hollow securities from connected
enterprises. Pinochet let the good times roll for the speculators. He
was persuaded that Governments should not hinder the logic of the
market.
By 1982, the pyramid finance game was up. The Vial and Cruzat “Grupos�
defaulted. Industry shut down, private pensions were worthless, the
currency swooned. Riots and strikes by a population too hungry and
desperate to fear bullets forced Pinochet to reverse course. He booted
his beloved Chicago experimentalists. Reluctantly, the General
restored the minimum wage and unions’ collective bargaining rights.
Pinochet, who had previously decimated government ranks, authorized a
program to create 500,000 jobs.
In other words, Chile was pulled from
depression by dull old Keynesian remedies, all Franklin Roosevelt,
zero Reagan/Thatcher. New Deal tactics rescued Chile from the Panic of
1983, but the nation’s long-term recovery and growth since then is the
result of - cover the children’s ears - a large dose of socialism.
To save the nation’s pension system, Pinochet nationalized banks and
industry on a scale unimagined by Socialist Allende. The General
expropriated at will, offering little or no compensation. While most
of these businesses were eventually re-privatized, the state retained
ownership of one industry: copper.
For nearly a century, copper has meant Chile and Chile copper.
University of Montana metals expert Dr. Janet Finn notes, “It’s absurd
to describe a nation as a miracle of free enterprise when the engine
of the economy remains in government hands.� Copper has provided 30%
to 70% of the nation’s export earnings. This is the hard currency
which has built today’s Chile, the proceeds from the mines seized from
Anaconda and Kennecott in 1973 - Allende’s posthumous gift to his
nation.
Agribusiness is the second locomotive of Chile’s economic growth. This
also is a legacy of the Allende years. According to Professor Arturo
Valenzuela of Georgetown University, Washington DC, Allende’s land
reform, the break-up of feudal estates (which Pinochet could not fully
reverse), created a new class of productive tiller-owners, along with
corporate and cooperative operators, who now bring in a stream of
export earnings to rival copper. “In order to have an economic
miracle,� says Dr. Valenzuela, “maybe you need a socialist government
first to commit agrarian reform.�
So there we have it. Keynes and Marx, not Friedman, saved Chile.
But the myth of the free-market Miracle persists because it serves a
quasi-religious function. Within the faith of the Reaganauts and
Thatcherites, Chile provides the necessary genesis fable, the ersatz
Eden from which laissez-faire dogma sprang successful and shining.
In 1998, the international finance Gang of Four - the World Bank, the
IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Bank
for Settlements - offered a $41.5 billion line of credit to Brazil.
But before the agencies handed the drowning nation a life preserver,
they demanded Brazil commit to swallow the economic medicine that
nearly killed Chile. You know the list: fire-sale privatizations,
flexible labor markets (i.e. union demolition) and deficit reduction
through savage cuts in government services and social security.
In Sao Paulo, the public was assured these cruel measures would
ultimately benefit the average Brazilian. What looked like financial
colonialism was sold as the cure-all tested in Chile with miraculous
results.
But that miracle was in fact a hoax, a fraud, a fairy tale in which
everyone did not live happily ever after.
******
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Armed
Madhouse�. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com
Get a signed copy of Armed Madhouse for the holidays or browse for
other signed gifts at www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org

On 10/4/2010 9:20 AM, dave wrote:
wrote:

That is correct. Copper is the most necessary and valuable metal out
there. Invest in copper. Modern society is using more copper than ever.

Because of war. You use copper to make brass. You use brass to make
rifle cartridges. We leave trails of brass and moonscape.


We can follow with a nuke, and create brass veins for the two headed,
six legged children to dig up and sell for scrap to be hammered into
indigenous plates and stuff.

On Oct 2, 3:24Â*pm, ∅baMa∅ Tse Dung wrote:
One of the many slick tricks of the Obama administration was to insert
a provision in the massive Obamacare legislation regulating people who
sell gold. This had nothing to do with medical care but everything to
do with sneaking in an extension of the government's power over gold,
in a bill too big for most people to read.

Gold has long been a source of frustration for politicians who want to
extend their power over the economy. First of all, the gold standard
cramped their style because there is only so much money you can print
when every dollar bill can be turned in to the government, to be
exchanged for the equivalent amount of gold.

When the amount of money the government can print is limited by how
much gold the government has, politicians cannot pay off a massive
national debt by just printing more money and repaying the owners of
government bonds with dollars that are cheaper than the dollars with
which the bonds were bought. In other words, politicians cannot cheat
people as easily.

That was just one of the ways that the gold standard cramped
politicians' style-- and just one of the reasons they got rid of it.
One of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first acts as president was to take the
United States off the gold standard in 1933.

But, even with the gold standard gone, the ability of private
individuals to buy gold reduces the ability of the government to steal
the value of their money by printing more money.

Inflation is a quiet but effective way for the government to transfer
resources from the people to itself, without raising taxes. A hundred
dollar bill would buy less in 1998 than a $20 bill would buy in the
1960s. This means that anyone who kept his money in a safe over those
years would have lost 80 percent of its value, because no safe can
keep your money safe from politicians who control the printing
presses.

That is why some people buy gold when they lose confidence in the
government's managing of its money. Usually that is when inflation is
either under way or looming on the horizon. When many people start
transferring their wealth from dollars into gold, that restricts the
ability of politicians to steal from them through inflation.

Even though there is currently very little inflation, purchases of
gold have nevertheless skyrocketed. Ordinarily, most gold is bought
for producing jewelry or for various industrial purposes, more so than
as an investment. But, at times within the past two years, most gold
has been bought by investors.

What that suggests is that increasing numbers of people don't trust
this administration's economic policies, especially their huge and
growing deficits, which add up to a record-breaking national debt.

When a national debt reaches an unsustainable amount, there is always
a temptation to pay it off with inflated dollars. There is the same
temptation when the Social Security system starts paying out more
money to baby boom retirees than it is taking in from current workers.

Whether gold is a good investment for individuals, and whether the
gold standard is the right system for a country, are much more
complicated questions than can be answered here. But what is clear is
that the Obama administration sees people's freedom to buy and sell
gold as something that can limit what the government can do.

Indeed, freedom in general cramps the government's style. Those on the
left may not be against freedom in general. But, at every turn, they
find the freedoms granted by the Constitution of the United States
hampering the left's agenda of imposing their superior wisdom and
virtue on the rest of us.

The desire to restrain or control the buying and selling of gold is
just one of the many signs of the inherent conflict between the
freedom of the individual and the left's attempts to control our
lives.

Sneaking a provision on gold purchases and sales into massive
legislation that is supposedly about medical care is just one of the
many cynical tricks used to circumvent the public's right to know how
they are being governed. The Constitution begins, "We the people" but,
to the left, both the people and the Constitution are just things to
circumvent in order to carry out their agenda.

http://www.tsowell.com/cv.html

http://townhall.com/columnists/Thoma...politics_versu...

gol iz godd here in moneyland

On 10/3/2010 2:13 AM, Ray Fischer wrote:
RHF wrote:
Here are the Three (3) Phases of Liberal Decay :

Fascists hate liberalism.

If true, why do *Liberals act like Fascists* and attempt to micromanage
our lives to the point that the Liberals want to tell us if and when and
how much salt, sugar and saturated fats we can eat with laws and
regulations coming from Liberals?