Honduras -- On August 21, the New York Times published an article entitled "How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got Safer," giving it about of prime real estate of the cover of the New York Times' Sunday Review. The teaser read, "Programs funded by the United States are helping to transform Honduras. Who says American power is dead?" -- an extraordinarily poor choice to justify American intervention.
The article failed to explain how exactly Honduras got that way -- following a coup (a term acknowledged by the US ambassador as shown in a Wikileaks cable) conducted by the infamous US Army School of the Americas trainees and condoned by then-Secretary of State Clinton, which allowed the continuation of much military aid. Child refugees skyrocketed with tens of environmental and other activists murdered including "Green Nobel" prize winner Berta Caceres last March. Since then, her daughter Laura has called for a halt to arms sales barring investigations (her recent DNC activism would have provided a worthy news peg.) The New York Times has long been criticized for its reporting serving US government interests, ignoring human rights violations and murders and pressure for accountability. This article was true to form. Heavily condemned by readers and media analysts, it celebrated the marginal contributions of trash cans and school uniforms, seeking to imply a transformation by ignoring the larger picture.
Brazil -- The weak response the coup has met in the US, even as the media has championed a female presidential candidate on the merits of her gender, is truly shocking. As has been pointed out by Dilma herself, it's her second coup -- the first brought repression and torture as a young woman more than 40 years ago. It's an overthrow enabled by weak economy, devoid of proof of corruption, on grounds not considered impeachable in most countries, ginned up by a biased media. Many Brazilians to regret her impeachment and protested during the Olympics, in Sao Paolo, and elsewhere. The coup was timed to allow right-wing Vice President to take over, even as a removal just six months -- rather than two months -- after her election would not. Dilma says the coup will affect every democratic organization, highlighted on Democracy Now!, which also published "In Post-Olympics Brazil, A Political Coup is No Game. The New York Times provided a less forceful and clear analysis the day after a long expected outcome, even as their endorsed presidential candidate is supposedly friendly with new leadership.
University of Chicago -- In another lead A1 article the New York Times published "The University of Chicago Rebels Against Moves to Stifle Speech," outlining their letter to freshmen which describes their lack of support for intellectual safe spaces and trigger warnings, and their policy of allowing all invited speakers on campus. (Ironically neither the campus president nor the letter author was available to discuss the letter or what prompted it).
One of the first questions for a university -- in the midst of so-called Chi-Raq zone of violence, presumably with about 1 in 5 sexually assault statistic common across US colleges (in fact, ironically the article jumps to a page describing the fallout of the Stanford swimmer's widely condemned short sentence for rape -- might be how they can be blind to the violence inherent in our society and the need to warn people of potential retraumatization? Another might be whether they intend to bring to campus all war criminals, or just American ones, as well as criminal bankers?
Even as the article cites the 1932 Communist party candidate for president speech at Chicago, major questions remain related to the school's reputation for supplying the ideas and leaders behind brutally imposed economic changes accompanied by harsh violence. It's a topic extremely relevant to discussion today so let's review a subject that escaped all examination.
The Chicago model championed by Milton Friedman with extreme deregulation, destruction of labor rights, and punishing privatization and austerity schemes has been forced on populations through extraordinary measures. About 50 years ago, staggeringly successful government-led, inward-looking developmentalism in the Southern Cone of Latin America thrived. Specifically, such policies in Chile brought strong health care and education gains, a growing middle class and rising industrial sectors at the expense of foreign corporate profits. Then the State Department funded students in "The Chile Project" -- expanded across Latin America -- that funded 40 to 50 Latin Americans at a time to attend the university, 1/3 of the graduate economics department at some points.
The so-called Chicago Boys should not have fared well in Chile, a nation where all three political parties supported nationalizing US-controlled copper mines. But after Salvador Allende's election, President Nixon ordered the CIA director to "make the economy scream." The Chicago Boys--funded over 75 percent by the CIA -- developed detail proposals. The new 80-page economic program, called the "The Brick," had 8 of 10 major authors from the University of Chicago. The CIA-funded El Mercurio newspaper printed it. During a military coup by General Pinochet, the population was "shocked" by tanks rolling down the streets and fighter jets attacking government buildings. The September 11, 1973 event followed 41 years of peaceful democratic rule. The capitalist "shock treatment" of the Chicago boys that followed was facilitated through the roundup of tens of thousands and the application of CIA torture techniques.
ITT-promoted corporate sabotage further weakened the economy which allowed Sergio de Castro and other Chicago Boys to make more reforms. By 1980 public spending had been cut in half from Allende-levels, with severe hits to health and education that prompted the usual free-market champion "The Economist" to call it "an orgy of self-mutilation." Almost 500 state owned companies were privatized in the 10 years ending in 1983, with the pain prompting former Chicago Boy Andre Gunder Frank to publish an "Open Letter to Arnold Harberger and Milton Friedman" that said the brutal economic policies could not "be imposed or carried out without the twin elements that underlie them all: military force and political terror." Eventually the public school system was taken over by vouchers and charter schools, health care became pay-as-you-go, and social security was privatized.
"Now the Chicago Boys and their plans were back, in a climate distinctly more conducive to their radical vision," writes Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. "In this new era, no one besides a handful of men in uniform needed to agree with them. Their staunchest political opponents were either in jail, dead or fleeing for cover; the spectacle of fighter jets and caravans of death was keeping everyone else in line."
In 1976, generals seized power in Argentina. They coordinated with Pinochet and like-minded Brazilians, to attack policies and institutions responsible for the uplift of the poor. Major government posts went to the Chicago Boys and price controls were lifted which sent food prices soaring, strikes were banned, and hundreds of state companies were sold, a move applauded by Henry Kissinger. Trade unions were immediately attacked to avoid strikes, and discredited by falsely associating them with guerilla movement. A full 81 percent of 30,000 disappeared were between 16 and 30 in an attempt to rid the nation of political activists of the next generation. While state violence was lower profile for greater international acceptance, there were three hundred torture centers. Half the nation's citizens ended up below the poverty line. The termed "genocide" was used by federal judge Carlos Rozanski to describe what happened in the state, despite the United Nations Convention on Genocide to not include the elimination of a group with certain political beliefs -- a position traceable to Joseph Stalin's earlier insistence and his support by other leaders who wanted freedom to target their political opponents.
Brazil and Uruguay fell too in the '60's and '70's with U.S.-backed military governments running the nations with Chicago School economic policies. Several governments collaborated in Operation Condor, which used a Washington computer system to track those they kidnapped and moved across borders for torture much like "extraordinary rendition" of the CIA more recently. In all 100,000 to 150,000 were tortured or killed in the Southern Cone. War was declared also on the dominant mass culture from Pablo Neruda's poetry to Simon Boliver with efforts often phrased as cleansing or cleanup in echoes, of the Third Reich.
Allende's U.S. Ambassador Orlando Letelier rejected the idea that there were two different projects, insisting "terror was the central tool of the free-market transformation." Similarly, Brazil's Nunca Mais report stated: "Since the economic policy was extremely unpopular among the most numerous sectors of the population, it had to be implemented by force." Simone de Beauvior wrote on the topic of excesses: "There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all-pervasive system." Klein concludes, "Just as there is no kind, gentle way to occupy people against their determined will, there is no peaceful way to take away from millions of citizens what they need to live with dignity -- which is what the Chicago Boys were determined to do."
These reforms morphed into what was used by the Chicago-Boy heavy International Monetary Fund and the World Bank -- later referred to as Washington Consensus. Countries with serious economic crises received financial bailouts only along with privatization and free trade measures, even though they were admittedly not related to stability. After commodity shocks or capital outflows resulted in skyrocketing debt, a punishing series of deregulation, privatization and austerity was forced on many countries. Even an IMF internal audit that examined structural adjustment in several Asian countries found the demands were "ill-advised" and "broader than seemed necessary" as well as "not critical to resolving the crisis."
Of course, whether through disasters or war, radical economic policies have been used elsewhere. In Iraq, a self-described "Shock and Awe" that terrified civilians was followed by the extreme shock treatment which resulted in Debaathification across sectors including medicine, engineering and teaching and prison torture. Large scale unemployment also resulted from an enforced reliance on foreign goods for consumption and rebuilding -- very different from the Marshall Plan which aimed to create local jobs and tax based for domestic social services. Was the crushing of local democratic efforts, the billions lost through no accountability, and mass privatization of war and the nation may well represent what Klein calls the "logical conclusion of Chicago School theory?" Was the two-tiered recovery system in New Orleans with mass privatization of public schools and the boxing in of South African economy such that grassroots democratic demands became truly unachievable and untenable also? She convincingly argues so: that war and disaster are now a boon for corporations.
Fortunately, there are those -- who receive very little high-profile media ink -- that challenge the purpose and priorities of our twinned economic and physical wars. There are those who see repression in trade deals, privatization, and so-called "labor flexibility," that are expanding to rob the dignity from much of humanity, while stripping them of environment and basics for sustenance. And so they continue fighting. But they deserve allies in media -- who don't just seek to promote the lesser evil -- but a world worthy of our humanity and of our potential.
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