Newsgroup: it.politica.pds
Titolo: Fidel denunciato...

Da un articolo di Marc Cooper su THE NATION
Pinochet's continuing prominence in Chile is more emblematic than
aberrational. His dictatorship may have been voted out of office by
the plebiscite of 1988, but it is his economic and political model
that has triumphed. For the U.S. media, the Chile story is, as always,
a neat and simple tale: Bloody dictator forced by history to wipe out
communism gets voted out and a civilian government leads the
transition to democracy while retaining a free-market economic system.
But reality is more complicated. In Chile there has been no
transition, nor will there be one in the foreseeable future. What we
are seeing instead is the consolidation of a new global model--a model
imposed here twenty-five years ago at the point of a bayonet and since
then ever more refined and better marketed. It is a model that, in
some form or another, is being proposed for all of us. "Chile is what
I call a transvestite democracy," says radical Chilean sociologist
Tomás Moulian. "She looks like a nice friendly young lady. But lift up
her skirts, and you're in for a big surprise." 
The Chilean Miracle
The New York Times recently celebrated this state of affairs by
crediting Pinochet with a "coup that began Chile's transformation from
a backwater banana republic to the economic star of Latin America,"
and the Clinton Administration wants Chile to be the next member of
NAFTA. Putting aside the fact that the pre-Pinochet "banana republic"
produced a bumper crop of world-renowned artists, scientists and other
intellectuals, including the winners of two Nobel Prizes in
Literature, the Times also got it wrong on the economy. The 7 percent
annual growth since 1986 cited by enthusiastic supporters of the
Chilean economy obscures several other less attractive figures: There
was no growth between 1973 and 1986; real salaries have declined 10
percent since 1986; and salaries are still 18 percent lower than they
were during the Allende period. One-fourth of the country lives in
absolute poverty, and a third of the nation earns less than $30 a
week. 
A recent World Bank study of sixty-five countries ranked Chile as the
seventh-worst in terms of most unequal income distribution, tied with
Kenya and Zimbabwe. To get a notion of just how skewed this is,
consider the following: In the United States--hardly a paragon of
wealth sharing--60 percent of national income goes to workers and 40
percent to capital; in Chile, 40 percent goes to workers and 60
percent to capital. The top 10 percent of the Chilean population earns
almost half the wealth. "The 100 richest people in Chile earn more
than the state spends on all social services," says Christian
Democratic Senator Jorge Lavandero. 
Chile is a case of rapid growth with little development--growth
concentrated in the export of natural resources. Neither a solid
middle class nor a well-paid working class has emerged. In the past,
Chile suffered from a chronic job shortage, and the poor subsisted on
a network of welfare and social solidarity. The new economy has
dismantled welfare and dismembered community aid while at the same
time making low-wage jobs plentiful. The result? There are just as
many poor people as ever. The only difference is that now they have to
work hard to attain even that standing. Therefore, "economic growth by
itself will not solve problems of poverty and inequality," says
Canadian economist Philip Oxhorn. "It will only reproduce them." 
Defenders of the Chilean model say these inequalities are a small and
acceptable price to pay for a system that rewards individual
initiative. "We have extraordinary success because this system was
applied without any political opposition," says Jaime Vargas, a
U.S.-trained economist who works for a private think tank. "People
know the rules of the game and have to believe in themselves. People
are not into politics and not into any groups of any kind--unions,
clubs, whatever." Chile, he says proudly, "is a world of incredible
individualism." 
Orlando Caputo, one of the best-known opposition economists in the
country, has a more clinical view: "The Chilean system is easy to
understand. Over the past twenty years $60 billion has been
transferred from salaries to profits." 

Un altro brano dall'articolo sul Cile comparso su THE NATION nel marzo
'98:
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'Consolidation of a Model' 
Strolling through downtown Santiago, one is offered a reminder of how
mesmerizing and paralyzing mass consumer culture is when newborn. In
our own case, at least American consumerism sprang up as a natural
outgrowth of booming economic development. In Chile, mass credit
consumerism substitutes for development. Worse, before 1973,
conspicuous consumption was taboo in a country still infused with a
sense of social solidarity. Television didn't arrive here until 1962.
There was no mall until the early eighties, and no fast food till a
few years later. 
Imagine the frisson the average Chilean feels today when he or she
walks the Alameda, the main downtown thoroughfare, and sees all the
world's baubles for sale on easy credit. At the entrance to every
department store, every shoe store, every pharmacy, there is the
ubiquitous young girl on a podium offering instant credit. Air Nikes?
Cash price 29,000 pesos--or twelve payments of 2,900 pesos, the
equivalent of $6. A bottle of Shalimar? Cash price 16,000 pesos--or
ten payments of 2,200 pesos. 
Sociologist Tomás Moulian points to the spread of credit to the masses
as only the latest step in implementing the neoliberal economic model.
In one of Chile's sweetest ironies, his book on the subject, The Real
Chile: Anatomy of a Myth, stayed on the country's bestseller list
through all of 1997. "What we have in Chile," he says in an interview,
"is the marriage of a neoliberal economy with a neodemocracy, a
simulated democracy. The end result is a neoliberal system defended
now by its historic Socialist adversaries. Pinochet, for his part, is
a symbol of this capitalist counterrevolution, which profoundly
changed our culture and even the capitalism we had before him." 
Moulian's thesis runs something like this: The first two years of
military rule merely reversed the Allende-era reforms, liberalized
prices, lowered salaries and subjected the working class to the now
familiar nostrums of economic "shock therapy." The Chicago Boys period
of 1975­81, shaped by Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, introduced
structural "reforms," increasing exports and creating new economic
groups indebted to international banks. A draconian labor law clamped
down on workers, and a wave of privatization (including Social
Security) atrophied the state. That phase fizzled in 1982, leading to
a mini-depression that liquidated national industry and drove half the
population below the poverty level. 
"But a sense of direction was recovered immediately," says Moulian. "A
re-ordering, a re-privatization of everything, commenced under a
neoliberal pattern. The new economic groups that emerged were much
stronger than the older ones. Not indebted to foreign capital, they
were interwoven with it. And the tremendous pools of private money
generated by the private pension funds were used to fuel these new
groups. It was the workers' money that built such prosperity for the
elite." This Chilean model, says Moulian, "anticipated Reagan and
Thatcher. Because of the neoliberal intellectual sway over the
military, Chile started out early on the road that everybody is now
on." 
He adds: "In this sense the Chilean terror was rational. This whole
model is frankly impossible without a dictatorship. Only the
dictatorship could have disciplined the working class into submission
while their salaries were lowered and their pensions used to
accumulate wealth for others. Only a dictatorship can keep a country
quiet while education, universities and health care are privatized,
and while an absolute marketization of the labor force is imposed.
Today, under this simulated democracy, the work force is too
fragmented to recover and the population is distracted by consumerism
and disciplined by credit obligations."