Palast: Tinker Bell, Pinochet And The Fairy Tale Miracle Of Chile
MIRACLES HAPPEN
HR comment: There are some things Greg Palast - who is a hell of a good investigating reporter - can not write about - like 9/11 being an inside job by the US junta or who owns the so called 'Federal Reserve'? - without probably getting a gun to his head. So I might as well offer some further information. General Augusto Pinochet - who had me kicked out of Chile in June 1974 - in the too many following years also embezzled tens of millions of dollars. He hid them - he thought - in 128 (one-hundred-and-twenty-eight) different bank accounts, most of them in the internationally known 'Bank for Crooks & Spooks' the Riggs bank.
This far Palast can write, but not the following: the infamous Riggs Bank always was a part of the so called 'Bank of International Settlement' (BIS*) in Basle, Switzerland, and Riggs 'the fraud machine' is owned by Bank Leumi, Israel's second largest bank. So in reality the international racket of usurers took care of Pinochet's loot. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/uac5v
MIRACLES HAPPEN
Palast also and rightfully writes about the criminal behavior by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both criminal BIS institutions and part of the US junta's financial evil empire. But there was a miracle though: Brazil like Argentina was helped in December last year by president Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. He is trying to do the same as got Salvador Allende killed, and in this case saw to it that Brazil as well as Argentina escaped the garrote of the usurers, the IMF and World Bank. Both countries could pay their scandalous debts beforehand. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/vlsv9
So Palast has to avoid writing about the origin of the evil, he can't ''follow the money'' to define the crooks because than he'll be 'neutralized'. But it's criminal thieving bank managers like those from BIS and the Bank of England which decide how much the money in your wallet is worth. Chile and its suffering population is only one of the victims of their ''Global Banking''. Perpetrated via all by them managed 'central banks' of the 'The Bank for International Settlements' (BIS). ''Who controls global monetary affairs? The BIS! Based in Basle, Switzerland, the BIS is central bank to central banks. The BIS has greater immunity than a sovereign nation, is accountable to no one, runs global monetary affairs and is privately owned. This is a must-read report to understand the globalization process.'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/y6xmed
Friedman - who died in San Francisco last 16 November and not many Chileans and others mourned him - went to Stockholm in December 1976 to receive the Economy Nobel Prize from his brothers in the faith. It was a shame to give him the prize, but the Nobel Medal has a very dark backside. - [http://tinyurl.com/ym7azm]
He did not regard it as the pinnacle of his career, and said so. Which I understand - after all the criticism he got for his 'exterminating economy'. As elected chairman of the Foreign Press Association of Sweden it was my first question to Friedman which made him stop the rest of the press conference. I asked him if he remembered the interviews I did with him when he was preparing his maniacal assault with his collaborating gang of 'Chicago Boys' on that country. He was a disaster for humanity but not for the banks. So Friedman denied knowing me or ever having been in Chile, and that did it for the others too. We all knew better than those lies. Friedman was a killer, and like Pinochet - as the Chileans say those days: "The Devil has finally woken up and came to get them." From my point of view they may rot in Hell. Together with all other of the junta's collaborators. - HR
Tinker Bell, Pinochet And The Fairy Tale Miracle Of Chile
by Greg Palast
Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006 - Chile's former military dictator General Augusto Pinochet died today at the age of 91.
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.
THE MIRACLE OF CHILE
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 Communist 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 Vasquez 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. Vasquez, ''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
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, ''Armed Madhouse''. Read his reports at - Url.: www.GregPalast.com
FPF - RELATED:
* Blood Deposits and the Riggs Bank - Do not expect to find the words BIS or LEUMI in this story, Counterpunch wants to keep publishing - Weekend Edition - March 12 / 13, 2005 - Pinochet's Bank Finally Pays Up - By SAUL LANDAU and SARAH ANDERSON - Url.: http://www.counterpunch.org/landau03122005.html
* The World Bank is like the IMF (International 'Murder' Fund its called) a criminal organization - An army doesn't march on an empty stomach... - Url.: http://beirut.indymedia.org/ar/2005/03/2392.shtml
* Pinochet + FPF/HR - Google selection - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/y3yv3p
* POWERLESS JUDGES: ARE WE ENTERING AMERICA'S DARKEST HOUR? - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/t5v2l
* THE USE OF THE PHRASE 'ANTI SEMITISM' IS PURE NONSENSE - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/y8fwhf
MORE & RELATED LINKS - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/v9pjs
* Born in The Netherlands, journalist HR this far has lived and worked abroad (never in an English speaking country) for more than 4 decades for national and international media as an independent foreign correspondent. Of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the African/Arab world and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every invasion, bullet and bomb logically breeds more and legal resistance. Not only among Muslims, as the Junta Judasses claim, but in all countries surrounding the US and their junta's war machine. - "War criminals, beware!" - Url.http://tinyurl.com/y7wr67
* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information.
FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/gpr4j
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl
-0-
HR comment: There are some things Greg Palast - who is a hell of a good investigating reporter - can not write about - like 9/11 being an inside job by the US junta or who owns the so called 'Federal Reserve'? - without probably getting a gun to his head. So I might as well offer some further information. General Augusto Pinochet - who had me kicked out of Chile in June 1974 - in the too many following years also embezzled tens of millions of dollars. He hid them - he thought - in 128 (one-hundred-and-twenty-eight) different bank accounts, most of them in the internationally known 'Bank for Crooks & Spooks' the Riggs bank.
This far Palast can write, but not the following: the infamous Riggs Bank always was a part of the so called 'Bank of International Settlement' (BIS*) in Basle, Switzerland, and Riggs 'the fraud machine' is owned by Bank Leumi, Israel's second largest bank. So in reality the international racket of usurers took care of Pinochet's loot. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/uac5v
MIRACLES HAPPEN
Palast also and rightfully writes about the criminal behavior by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both criminal BIS institutions and part of the US junta's financial evil empire. But there was a miracle though: Brazil like Argentina was helped in December last year by president Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. He is trying to do the same as got Salvador Allende killed, and in this case saw to it that Brazil as well as Argentina escaped the garrote of the usurers, the IMF and World Bank. Both countries could pay their scandalous debts beforehand. - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/vlsv9
So Palast has to avoid writing about the origin of the evil, he can't ''follow the money'' to define the crooks because than he'll be 'neutralized'. But it's criminal thieving bank managers like those from BIS and the Bank of England which decide how much the money in your wallet is worth. Chile and its suffering population is only one of the victims of their ''Global Banking''. Perpetrated via all by them managed 'central banks' of the 'The Bank for International Settlements' (BIS). ''Who controls global monetary affairs? The BIS! Based in Basle, Switzerland, the BIS is central bank to central banks. The BIS has greater immunity than a sovereign nation, is accountable to no one, runs global monetary affairs and is privately owned. This is a must-read report to understand the globalization process.'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/y6xmed
Friedman - who died in San Francisco last 16 November and not many Chileans and others mourned him - went to Stockholm in December 1976 to receive the Economy Nobel Prize from his brothers in the faith. It was a shame to give him the prize, but the Nobel Medal has a very dark backside. - [http://tinyurl.com/ym7azm]
He did not regard it as the pinnacle of his career, and said so. Which I understand - after all the criticism he got for his 'exterminating economy'. As elected chairman of the Foreign Press Association of Sweden it was my first question to Friedman which made him stop the rest of the press conference. I asked him if he remembered the interviews I did with him when he was preparing his maniacal assault with his collaborating gang of 'Chicago Boys' on that country. He was a disaster for humanity but not for the banks. So Friedman denied knowing me or ever having been in Chile, and that did it for the others too. We all knew better than those lies. Friedman was a killer, and like Pinochet - as the Chileans say those days: "The Devil has finally woken up and came to get them." From my point of view they may rot in Hell. Together with all other of the junta's collaborators. - HR
Tinker Bell, Pinochet And The Fairy Tale Miracle Of Chile
by Greg Palast
Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006 - Chile's former military dictator General Augusto Pinochet died today at the age of 91.
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.
THE MIRACLE OF CHILE
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 Communist 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 Vasquez 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. Vasquez, ''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
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, ''Armed Madhouse''. Read his reports at - Url.: www.GregPalast.com
FPF - RELATED:
* Blood Deposits and the Riggs Bank - Do not expect to find the words BIS or LEUMI in this story, Counterpunch wants to keep publishing - Weekend Edition - March 12 / 13, 2005 - Pinochet's Bank Finally Pays Up - By SAUL LANDAU and SARAH ANDERSON - Url.: http://www.counterpunch.org/landau03122005.html
* The World Bank is like the IMF (International 'Murder' Fund its called) a criminal organization - An army doesn't march on an empty stomach... - Url.: http://beirut.indymedia.org/ar/2005/03/2392.shtml
* Pinochet + FPF/HR - Google selection - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/y3yv3p
* POWERLESS JUDGES: ARE WE ENTERING AMERICA'S DARKEST HOUR? - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/t5v2l
* THE USE OF THE PHRASE 'ANTI SEMITISM' IS PURE NONSENSE - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/y8fwhf
MORE & RELATED LINKS - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/v9pjs
* Born in The Netherlands, journalist HR this far has lived and worked abroad (never in an English speaking country) for more than 4 decades for national and international media as an independent foreign correspondent. Of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the African/Arab world and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every invasion, bullet and bomb logically breeds more and legal resistance. Not only among Muslims, as the Junta Judasses claim, but in all countries surrounding the US and their junta's war machine. - "War criminals, beware!" - Url.http://tinyurl.com/y7wr67
* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information.
FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/gpr4j
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl
-0-
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