Sept. 21, 1976, former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, his
American assistant Ronni Moffitt and her husband Michael were
driving to their office at the Institute for Policy Studies in
Washington.
As the car entered Sheridan Circle, a bomb went off beneath
Letelier’s seat, tossing the vehicle into the air and causing it
to crash in front of the Irish Embassy. Michael was able to
crawl out through where the rear window once was, Ronni stumbled
away with a shard of shrapnel lodged in her carotid artery and
Orlando had his legs blown off.
Only Michael
survived.
The killings
might’ve just been excused as another instance of political
assassination on the streets of a world capital had the culprits
not been dispatched at the behest of a cadre called the Chicago
Boys — then it was time for a cover-up.
See, the Chicago
Boys weren’t members of organized crime: They were economists,
trained in and by a coterie from the University of Chicago,
whose main goal was to enact the theory of a man named Milton
Friedman.
You may have heard
of Friedman, the Noble Prize-winning intellectual whose
Capitalism and Freedom is a primer in free-market
fundamentalism; what you may not know (and most ’06 obits failed
to reveal) was that the man and his minions backed the play of
Pinochet even while he was murdering and torturing millions.
Why? Because Friedman’s radical fundamentalism needed a shocked
populace in order to sneak through undetected, and there’s no
populace more shocked than those in a country that’s just
suffered a coup.
Chile’s
so-called “miracle” is just the first instance of extreme
free-marketeering cited in Naomi Klein’s damning diatribe,
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Holt
$28). From there she tracks through Iraq (you think “shock and
awe” was a coincidence?), post-tsunami Sri Lanka (as the
privateers claimed the beachfront), New Orleans after Katrina
(where public works stay shuttered and charter schools rise)
and, of course, 9/11, when Bush and Co. used the stun brought
about by terror attacks to launch “the creation of the disaster
capitalism complex — a full-fledged new economy in homeland
security, privatized war and disaster reconstruction tasked with
nothing less than building and running a privatized security
state, both at home and abroad.”
It’s a scary
thought, having our safety and security, our schools, our sewers
and our grids taken out of the hands of government and put into
the pockets of the multinationals, whose main purpose, after
all, is all about the bottom line. But privatization is a fact.
Sadly, it’s a fact
that has no basis in any humane reality. What happens when
another massive disaster strikes? Will the poor be rescued only
after those who can afford the tab? Will the poor be rescued at
all? And if every catastrophe masks a fortune, won’t it be in
the fortune hunters’ best interests to provoke more
catastrophes?
Friedman once
wrote: “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real
change.” Well, if Klein’s Shock Doctrine is any
indication, we’ve got ourselves a real crisis, and the best way
to begin to change it is by being informed. Read up, read in and
read on. ’Cause like the lady says: “Information is shock
resistance.”
