On November 10, 1976, I was hauled off stage at the LBJ Library for protesting the CIA Director William Colby and University of Chicago economist Arnold Harberger who were participating in a symposium on Latin America.
Our leaflets, calling for the protest, criticized the CIA’s involvement in the 1973 military coup in Chile and described the economic policies of Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger that were being implemented, with dire consequences, by the dictatorship.
The symposium convened only seven weeks after the horrific Assassination on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. of former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier, and his colleague Ronni Moffitt. Several of us carried a banner onto the stage while others called for a moment of silence to honor Letelier and Moffitt.
We were taken to jail and were bailed out by midnight. It was a small price to pay. The commotion at the event brought attention to a Chile solidarity movement that continued to grow in Austin and around the world. Our Austin Committee for Human Rights in Chile was active until democracy returned to Chile.
As a U.S. citizen, I was focused on the U.S. role in the coup. I wasn’t paying as much attention to the economic policies being championed and tested under the dictatorship. Those same neoliberal policies, came home to roost with the election of President Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain. We’ve now lived for decades with the results of reverence for global markets and privatization of public sector services. We’ve witnessed the result as wealth has been shoveled into the hands of billionaires. So what did these Chicago Boys unleash?
A recently released book by Sebastian Edwards explores the legacy of the Chicago Boys in Chile. The book, released in English in 2023, has just been released in Spanish in Chile. In English, the title is The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism. The cover features the Chilean economists who were trained in Chicago by Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger.
Translated into Spanish and published in Chile, the book carries a different subtitle, El Proyecto Chile: La Historia De Los Chicago Boys y el Futuro del Neolliberalism. [The Chile Project: The History of the Chicago Boys and the Future of Neoliberalism.]
Chilean journalist for El Mostrador, Andres Cabrera, reported on the author’s response when asked about the change in subtitles – downfall v. future. The author responded that it was a “truco de marketing.” [A marketing ploy.] Of course. How appropriate to have the invisible hand of marketing frame your ideas –even market your ideas -- with contradictory subtitles.
Managing economic policies through the market is foundational to neoliberalism. Clearly, the vampire of neoliberalism is still alive in Chile and the publisher thought they could sell more books talking about the future than about the downfall.
Those of you who have seen the Chilean film El Conde will recognize the vampire reference.
El Conde, released in 2023, features Chilean dictator August Pinochet as a 250-vampire. He’s a friend of Margaret Thatcher in the movie. The film won an Academy Award for cinematography. In his black cape, Pinochet is a memorable vampire.
Neoliberalism is a term commonly used in Latin America and much of the world. A toll road, a privatized water system, a privatized electric grid. These are among the features. Still, the dust-up over the dustcover of the book about the Chicago Boys made me take a harder look at the legacy of Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger and the Chicago Boys they trained.
The article in El Mostrador about Edwards’ book made reference to David Harvey’s work on neoliberalism and The New Imperialism. “Accumulation by dispossession” is the term Harvey uses. He describes the way neoliberal capitalist policies result in centralization of wealth and power in the hands of the few by dispossessing both public and private entities of their wealth or land. What guides the policies? Four practices, says Harvey: privatization, financialization, management and manipulation of crises, and state redistributions.
Friends, it is not the eagle that has landed. It is the vampire.
What do the billionaires want? A greater concentration of wealth. It is their lifeblood and their animating desire. Nothing is safe from the vampire teeth. Change the tax code to benefit the wealthy. Deregulate to further benefit those amassing profits. Take the meager resources of public schools and direct them into private hands through school vouchers. Carve out more insurance profits from Medicare through Advantage programs. Convert defined benefit pensions to 401ks. Let financial institutions feed on the interest from education loans. Take public lands and make them available for mineral and oil extraction. Create fake crises (immigrants eating dogs) and manipulate the real ones (climate change is a hoax). Privatize Social Security and the postal service.
What began in Chicago didn’t stay in Chicago. The Chicago Boys were embraced by the Chilean dictatorship in 1973. In the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher embraced the same ideas. Trump and his billionaire boys club are lauding the actions of President Javier Milei of Argentina who recently fired 24,000 government employees.
The result of these policies is rampant wealth inequality. A deeper data dive in the World Inequality Report shows that “the bottom half of the population owns 2% of global wealth, while the top 10% owns 76% of it. The top 1% owns 38%. The trend lines aren’t in our favor.
We may be in for a few variants of neoliberalism via Trump-imposed tariffs, but the domestic policy structure is likely to prevail. Elon Musk recently posted on X an interview by Milton Friedman with the original Chicago Boy listing government departments that should be scrapped. Musk added this comment: “Milton Friedman was the best.”
The vampires have landed.