NPR: Chile's fast growing economy due to Pinochet's free market reforms!

[AP]

Anyone hear this story on Morning Edition today?

It was kind of shocking. It tried to be balanced, but the message was clear: the poor suffer when economies grow. Tough. Communists don't get it and might fuck up the project. They'll make economies shrink just so the poor don't suffer.

To make this argument, they have to ignore why the economy shrank under Allende (Nixon cut off aid and told Wall St to stop doing business with Chile -- he made the economy "scream") and when Pinochet came into power the flood gates of American taxpayer money opened. (What economy wouldn't grow with billions of dollars flowing in as a reward for taking a sharp turn to the right?).

NPR's argument also depends on ingoring a few things that have happened since 2001 -- specifically, that the neoliberal bubble burst (in a way that, at the time, progressive writers said proved the Chicago Boys were very wrong) and that anti-neoliberal reforms have been bringing Chile back.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4659772

[K-W]

1. The horrible ignorance that gets passed off as economic analysis.

Its just tired old myths.

[LuPeRcALiO]

2. I guess sucking up to the Pentagon wasn't good enough

Now they have to suck up to Wall Street too. Sad.

Next: why privatizing SS is good for you!

[4morewars]

3. NPR has been compromised

"Good times" my ass ! I knew they were through when wal-mart became a sponsor.

[redqueen]

4. I quit listening to that drivel a long time ago.

Liberal my ass.

[catzies]

5. Thanks for posting that. I needed the link!

I came in at the end of the story and want to listen to the whole thing, and now I don't have to hunt for the link.

[Skink]

6. Did Tucker Carlson contribute to the report?

[catzies]

15. I don't know. I didn't hear the whole thing in the car

and I haven't listened at the link yet.

Besides I thought Tucker Carlson was on PBS, not NPR?

[Bok_Tukalo]

7. Toward the end of the piece

they said the fastest growth came in the 90's when the socialists took over and started to harness the free market a bit; even going so far as to interview a new "Chicago Boy" going to school in the US.

It was clear from the story that the Chilean success was not due to free market anarchy but using free market principles for capital flow.

[denverbill]

8. What a load of garbage.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=16&row=2

SAO PAULO - Cinderella's Fairy Godmother, Tinker Bell and Senator Augusto Pinochet have much in common.

All three performed magical good deeds. In the case of Pinochet, he is universally credited with the Miracle of Chile, the wildly successful
experiment in free markets, privatisation, de-regulation and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds have spread from Santiago to Surrey, from Valparaiso to Virginia.

But Cinderella's pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. The Miracle of Chile, too, is just another fairy tale. The claim that General Pinochet begot an economic powerhouse is one of those utterances, like "Labour's ethical foreign policy," whose truth rests entirely on its repetition.

Chile can claim some economic success. But that is the work of Salvador Allende - who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.

In 1973, the year the General seized the government, Chile's unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernisation, 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.

<snip>

[trebizond]

12. that's a terrific article that sprang to mind as soon as i read the OP

NPR are indeed peddling garbage- and shameful, stomach churning garbage it is too when you consider the misery Pinochet's abominable regime inflicted on his people.

[JHB]

9. Pinochet left in 1990...

Odd how it isn't taken as proof that he was wrong, and it's the things done after him which improved things, or the possibility that being crushed under a fascist bootheel creates a lot of room for growth once freed.

And they'll still blame Bill Clinton for all bad news here.

[Julius Civitatus]

10. Welcome to the new NPR, or rather "GOPBS"

[kenny blankenship]

11. Somebody tell NPR that Chile had (before Pinochet) over 100yrs democracy

And that Pinochet hasn't been in power for 15 years!

[LuPeRcALiO]

13. "the wildly successful experiment in ... privatisation"

I think I see the "story" here:

FDR bad, Augusto Pinochet good!

Social Security bad, privatization good!

Sponsored by Animal Farm Inc. and the Corporation for Public Bamboozling.

[LuPeRcALiO]

14. I meant to reply to denverbill's Greg Palast story

up above, sorry about that