Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017564
Country: Chile
Right Wing Politics
Venezuela is a strawman. If you want a glimpse of the United States' future, look at Chile
Peter Burgess
|
Date: 2024-12-21 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017564 | |||||||||
Country: Chile | |||||||||
|
Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | |||||||||
| Venezuela is a strawman. If you want a glimpse of the United States' future, look at Chile Anti-government demonstrators clash with police as they protest against cost of living increases on October 20, 2019 in Santiago, Chile. Media in the United States is obsessed with Venezuela, and corporate special interests also like to use Venezuela as a boogeyman to make people fearful of any kind of change. The story is: “Be afraid. Change is socialist. You don’t want to do anything ‘socialist’ because we will end up like Venezuela.” Others have addressed this head-on by pointing out that corruption is the real problem in Venezuela. Another way to address it is by pointing out that our country is headed in a very different direction. The United States headed in the neoliberal economic direction, or what I’ll often call conservative economics, because the term “neoliberal” confuses people. Everyone knows what the conservative philosophy is in our country when it comes to the economy. It’s more privatization, less government. This is neoliberalism. I was talking to a conservative friend recently and he said to me: “Our universities are being overtaken by communists.” I showed him the new $120 million business school building being built on our campus. I then suggested that when he could show me one campus with a $120 million Communism building, I would believe that our campuses were being overrun by communists. Of course he didn’t have anything to say because when you can show someone what’s really happening in extremely obvious terms, it makes the idea that our campuses are being overrun by communists absurd. The parallel is that our country looks nothing like Venezuela. It does, however, look a lot like Chile, which is currently experiencing riots over the inequality caused by conservative economic ideas. The New York Times had a good article this week about what’s behind the protests in Chile. They started as a response to a 4% increase in subway fares that kicked in on Oct. 6. High school students started jumping turnstiles, then the practice picked up steam under the hashtag #EvasionMasiva on social media, and police cracked down as fare-dodging became rampant. This then morphed into street protests, as it quickly became about much more than the cost of riding the subway. Below the iceberg lay the results of years of privatization efforts that began in the 1970s under the dictator Augusto Pinochet. As a picture, it looks like this: Camilacuevaszuñiga @Camilacuevaszu The protests in Chile aren't just because of the metro fare increase it's so much more than that. It transcends politics/left and right idiologies, we just want a better and fair quality of life for everyone. Our government fails to see beyond the tip of the iceberg Pls share. View image on Twitter 591 1:44 AM - Oct 21, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy 303 people are talking about this Or, as protesters said in one of their rallying cries: It’s not about 30 pesos. It’s about 30 years. The bombing of La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, during the coup of September 11, 1973. The bombing of La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, during the coup of September 11, 1973. The legacy of Pinochet and the Chicago School In the 1960s, Chile had the best health and education systems in South America. It also had a vibrant industrial sector and a rapidly expanding middle class. In 1973, there was a military coup in Chile that many believe was aided by the CIA. The armed forces overthrew President Salvador Allende’s government. During the coup, the presidential palace was bombed and Allende either committed suicide or was assassinated, depending on who you believe. After the coup, the commander in chief of the Army, Augusto Pinochet, rose to lead the new military government. With the help of Chicago School economists like Milton Friedman, Pinochet set out to remake the Chilean economy. In brief, here’s what happened: After the coup and the death of Allende, Pinochet and his Chicago Boys did their best to dismantle Chile's public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by the early 80s, Pinochet's Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-industrialization, a tenfold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns. They also led to a crisis of corruption and debt so severe that, in 1982, Pinochet was forced to fire his key Chicago Boy advisers and nationalize several of the large deregulated financial institutions. For a more in-depth summary of the changes Pinochet and the Chicago School implemented and their initial results, this summary by Orlando Letelier, a Chilean ambassador to the United States who was assassinated in Washington in 1976, is excellent. Low wages and high inequality Half of Chile’s workers earn $550 per month or less. This is why a small increase in subway fares has a significant effect on a large group of lower-income Chileans. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Chile has the highest Gini coefficient of OECD countries at 0.50. The Gini coefficient is used to measure economic inequality. The incomes of the richest 10% are around 26 times higher than the incomes of the poorest 10% of the population. This is similar to Mexico, and compares with an average of 9 to 1 in all OECD countries. Chile’s taxes are regressive. One of these taxes is the subway tax on lower-income earners who can’t afford their own transportation. Chile’s government earns less from income taxes than any other country in the OECD. The president is a billionaire The current president, Sebastián Piñera, is one of the wealthiest people in Chile with a fortune of $2.8 billion. In August he was fined for dodging property taxes on one of his estates. Privatized water Chile’s water supply was privatized in a series of stages from 1998-2004. In recent years, privatization has kept prices high and delivered poor service. There are also concerns that supply will be insufficient in the future. For example, in Santiago, Aguas Andinas has a virtual monopoly on the water supply, servicing 6 million of the 7.2 million residents. It has one of the highest tariffs in Latin America. A recent poll suggested that 74% of Chileans support returning to public ownership of the water supply. High student loan debt Chile has the second-highest costs of college education in the world at roughly $7,654/per year at public universities. It is behind only the United States. Takeaways In the U.S., we are bombarded with fear about socialism. Venezuela is used as the primary example, despite the fact that our country looks nothing like Venezuela. Meanwhile our country looks a lot more like Chile, with high levels of inequality and a huge corporate special interest movement behind ever-greater levels of privatization. Show this to the people you know and ask them what’s more likely to happen if we continue in our current direction. Ask them: Does our future look more like Venezuela or Chile? Talk to them about how what really leads to successful economies that work for everyone is democracy. David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy (ebook also available). | |||||||||