30.000
mensen werden gevangen gehouden en gemarteld, naar schatting 5.000
mensen werden vermoord door het fascistische Pinochet regime.....
Lees
in het volgende artikel hoe Pinochet de economie vakkundig naar de
kloten hielp, zodat in 1982 de buitenlandse schuld van Chili was
opgelopen tot 16 miljard dollar, in hedendaags waarde gaat het om een
bedrag 42 miljard ('billion') dollar..... Tegen 1989 was het
gemiddelde loon sinds 1973 met 40% gedaald....... In diezelfde tijd
verdubbelde de armoede tot 40% van de bevolking..... Het aantal
mensen met slechte huisvesting was tegen die tijd ook 40% van de
bevolking, een stijging met 13% sinds het laatste jaar dat
Allende regeerde...... Het aantal calorieën dat arme mensen dagelijks
gebruikten liep vanaf 1973 terug van 2.019 naar 1.629 in 1989.......
'Gelukkig'
beeft Nederland nadat Joop de Uyl weg was, goede zaken gedaan in
Chili; 'waar een klein land al niet groot in kan zijn.........'
Inderdaad de VS heeft niets geleerd van de nasleep die 9/11 liet zien, integendeel deze grootste terreurentiteit op aarde is 'voortvarend' doorgegaan met het op grote schaal uitoefenen van terreur in landen waar het niets te zoeken heeft, e.e.a. heeft intussen aan fiks mer dan 2 miljoen mensen het leven gekost....... (al moet nog wel opgemerkt worden dat de aanslagen van 9/11 door de VS zelf zijn geregisseerd >> zie o.a. de links onderaan dit bericht....)
A Tale of Two 9/11s and the Lessons America Chooses Never to Learn
After
9/11, Bush famously asked “Why do they hate us?” The answers
might have been found on another 9/11, 28 years before, when the U.S.
in Chile took a decisive step down the road to empire.
NEW
YORK — Of apartheid South Africa’s myriad atrocities,
one of the most medieval was a system in which white settlers plied
their farmworkers with alcohol in lieu of wages. Known by the
Afrikaans word for tot, or drink, the dop not only
kept workers docile — and wages low — but, in fostering
widespread and chronic dependency, the practice bordered on
enslavement, manacling workers to their addictions and hence their
oppression.
A
progressive white South African lawyer told me that shortly after
voters of all races went to the polls to repeal apartheid in 1994, he
managed to purchase a Cape Town vineyard as part of his lifelong
ambition to create award-winning wines. His first order of business
was to professionalize the operations; so, soon after he closed the
deal to buy the vineyard, he gathered up all 15 farmworkers and
announced that he would end the dop and pay their
wages, in full.
Seven
walked off in disgust, he said.
This
story is the perfect metaphor for America in the aftermath of the
terrorist attack that occurred 17 years ago today. An entire nation
stared into the abyss on 9-11 and, like a sloppy drunk waking up in a
pool of his own vomit, saw its image reflected in the wreckage as
though for the first time. But rather than facing our demons, owning
our failures, and acknowledging the outsized role we’ve played in
the suffering of others, we simply sidled up to the bar for another
drink. Like the inebriates who walked off a South African farm, ours
is an Empire in denial and poor health, doubling down on our most
self-destructive impulses, stumbling towards an inevitable, ugly end.
In
an interview months after 9-11, Osama bin Laden warned:
The
U.S. government will lead the American people — and the West in
general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”
A
9/11 less remembered
Ironically,
if we could pinpoint the date that United States took its first drink
it would almost certainly be September 11, 1973, as General Augusto
Pinochet’s troops stormed Chile’s presidential palace. Organized
by Henry Kissinger and the CIA, the coup targeted Chile’s popular
socialist President Salvador Allende, who the Nixon administration
feared was another Fidel Castro in-the-making. As the attack
unfolded, workers in the basement of a Santiago publishing house shop
were hard at work printing what was to be the military junta’s
500-page economic plan.
Believing
himself to be a messianic figure, Pinochet put his faith in a coterie
of young Chilean advisers who had trained under Milton Friedman at
the University of Chicago’s School of Economics, the academic
vanguard of neo-classical economics. With his bloody crackdown on
dissidents, artists, college students and union leaders, Pinochet’s
repressive regime censored the press, banned labor unions and
political opposition parties, murdered an estimated 5,000 leftists,
tortured another 30,000 and handed the “Chicago Boys” – as they
came to be known – a blank check to remake Allende’s nationalized
economy, and return the country at South America’s southwestern
edge into the Empire’s orbit.
Nearly
15 years before economists coined the phrase “Washington
consensus,” and a decade before Reagan’s trickle-down policies
began dismantling the New Deal in the U.S., Chile was the guinea pig
for anti-Keynesian macroeconomic policies designed to fatten
corporations’ share of global wealth. Pinochet slashed duties on
imports, from an average tariff rate of 94 percent in 1973 to 10
percent by 1979. He privatized all but two dozen of Chile’s 300
state-owned banks, as well as utilities and entitlements such as
social security. By 1979, he had cut public spending almost in half
and public investment by nearly 14 percent. He lowered taxes,
restricted union activities and returned more than a third of the
land seized under Allende’s land-reform program.
A
woman with a tattoo of Chile’s late Salvador Allende places a
candle in front of Allende’s statue in Santiago, Chile, Sept. 11,
2018. Esteban Felix | AP
Monetary
policy was liberalized on two important fronts. First, Pinochet
allowed “hot money” — speculation on the currency market — to
flow in and out of the country without obstacle. And in 1979 he fixed
the exchange rate for Chile’s peso, requiring the central bank to
keep $1 in reserve for every 39 pesos printed. This kept the bank
from merely printing money to pay bills and curbed an inflation rate
that had soared to nearly 400 percent annually under Allende.
Pinochet’s
reforms worked like a fast-acting virus. A recession in 1975 caused
Chile’s economy to shrink by 13 percent, its greatest decline since
the Great Depression. The recovery that followed was fueled largely
by foreign cash, which poured into the country as investors gobbled
up utilities and stashed money in Chile’s currency markets. The
prices of imports fell sharply; between 1975 and 1982 the number of
foreign cars sold in Chile tripled. Domestic manufacturing shriveled
by 30 percent. Domestic savings plummeted. Wages fell, and the income
gap between rich and poor widened by a factor of 50.
By
1982, Chile had accumulated $16 billion in foreign debt — nearly
$42 billion in today’s dollars — and foreign investment
represented a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product. The
money flowing into the country flowed out just as easily, to pay
debts and bills for imported goods and through capital flight as
investors soured on Chile’s currency market. The economy had
overheated and was now in a meltdown.
With
a third of the workforce unemployed and unrest growing, by 1984
Pinochet began to “reform the reforms,” the Chilean economist
Ricardo Ffrench-Davis said in a 2003 interview.
Pinochet
allowed the peso to float and reinstated restrictions on the movement
of capital in and out of the country. He introduced banking
legislation, and ratcheted up spending on research and development
efforts through quasi-governmental institutions and other
collaborations between the public and private sectors — creating,
as one example, the billion-dollar salmon farming industry out of
whole cloth.
Still,
Chile’s economic woes persisted. By 1989, real wages had declined
by 40 percent from 1973, and the percentage of the population living
in poverty had doubled to 40 percent. The number of Chileans without
adequate housing had also climbed to 40 percent, up 13 percentage
points from Allende’s final year in office. The country’s poor
consumed 1,629 calories per-day-on average, compared to 2,019 in
1973.
Ill-fed,
and ill-housed, Chileans began to refer to the cadre of advisers not
as the Chicago Boys but as Si, Cago; Voy — which
translates to “Yes, I shit; I go.”
A
plebiscite in 1989 ended Pinochet’s rule and Chileans gradually
began to reorganize their economy. Since 1990, it has consistently
been Latin America’s strongest performer. But in its violent,
fascist crackdown on the left and its fealty to Wall Street bankers,
Chile under Pinochet presaged the entirety of the United States’
global class war against workers — in Argentina and Zambia; Flint
and Venezuela; Philadelphia to Greece; Haiti, Iraq, Ukraine,
Honduras; Russia in its post-Cold war transitional period, and South
Africa after the collapse of apartheid.
The
two 9/11s 28 years apart bracket the United States’ descent into
madness. Much like the vintner’s abolition of the dop,
the downing of the Twin Towers should’ve triggered some
soul-searching in the United States, and an examination of our
accumulation of stuff through the dispossession of
other human beings. As we mourn the losses on that Indian-summer day
in 2001, what we need to contemplate is redemption, not revenge —
and how we might begin to rejoin a human community that we’ve
wronged, again and again and again.
God
Bless America. . . . and everyone else too.
Top
Photo | Chrissy Bortz of Latrobe, Pa., pays her respects at the Wall
of Names at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pa. after
a Service of Remembrance, Sept. 11, 2018, as the nation marks the
17th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Gene J. Puskar | AP
Jon
Jeter is
a published book author and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist with
more than 20 years of journalistic experience. He is a former
Washington Post bureau chief and award-winning foreign correspondent
on two continents, as well as a former radio and television producer
for Chicago Public Media’s “This American Life.”
Republish
our stories! MintPress
News is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
==============================
* Kissinger kreeg die prijs godbetert in 1973, het jaar van de coup in Chili....
** In feite werd Allende vermoord door de VS, het land dat altijd de bek vol heeft met democratie brengen........
Zie
ook:
'9/11 forum geblokkeerd, de waarheid mag niet gezegd worden........'
'9/11: de leugens over smeltend staal van de Twin Towers'
'9/11 getuigen totaal genegeerd door media (en overheid)'
'9/11 Israël nogmaals aangewezen als hulp- bij het neerhalen van de Twin Towers en gebouw 7 van het WTC'
'9/11: Al Qaida tjokvol agenten van Saoedi-Arabië, VS, Israël en Egypte'
'9/11 voorafgegaan door CIA visa fraude.....'
'9/11 forum geblokkeerd, de waarheid mag niet gezegd worden........'
'9/11: de leugens over smeltend staal van de Twin Towers'
'9/11 getuigen totaal genegeerd door media (en overheid)'
'9/11 Israël nogmaals aangewezen als hulp- bij het neerhalen van de Twin Towers en gebouw 7 van het WTC'
'9/11: Al Qaida tjokvol agenten van Saoedi-Arabië, VS, Israël en Egypte'
'9/11 voorafgegaan door CIA visa fraude.....'
'9/11: professor stelt dat WTC-gebouwen gecontroleerd zijn gesloopt, de bewijzen daarvoor zijn overweldigend'
'Pearl Harbor (7 december 1941) en de aanslagen van 9/11 hebben veel overeenkomsten.........'
'9/11 de verklaring van de VS overheid aangaande het instorten van WTC gebouw 7 is vals..........'
'911 samenzweringstheorie wint nog meer aan geloofwaardigheid......'
'911, de beurs en geschiedvervalsing.......'
'9/11, WikiLeaks, Prism en 'complottheorieën''
'911, een 'leuk' feit'
Wat betreft de agressie van de VS en de staatsgreep in Chili, zie:
'VS buitenlandbeleid sinds WOII: een lange lijst van staatsgrepen en oorlogen..........'
'List of wars involving the United States'
'VS: openlijke militaire oefening met terreurgroep in Syrië......'
'NAVO gaat VS helpen in Zuid-Amerika terreur uit te oefenen: Colombia lid van de NAVO.........'
'VS commando's vechten o.a. in Midden- en Zuid-Amerika, aldus het VS ministerie van oorlog.........'
'Chileense fascisten vragen rk kerk om vergeving voor vreselijke misdaden begaan onder Pinochet bewind......'
'De VS, een duivels imperium, dat achter haar psychopathisch moordende troepen staat??'
'De war on drugs is veel dodelijker dan over het algemeen gedacht'
'Chili 11 september 1973'
'VS vermoordde meer dan 20 miljoen mensen sinds het einde van WOII........'
'CIA 70 jaar: 70 jaar moorden, martelen, coups plegen, nazi's beschermen, media manipulatie enz. enz.........'
'CIA en 70 jaar desinformatie in Europese opiniebladen............'
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