Thread by @doctorow

Neoliberalism's starting gun went off on 1973, when a US- and UK-backed fascist military deposed Salvador Allende, the incredibly popular, democratically elected president of Chile.

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The coup embodied Peter Thiel's summation of the libertarian principle that "Democracy is incompatible with liberty," where "liberty" means the freedom of the 1% to amass unlimited wealth at the expense of the starving, brutalized 99%.

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The new dictator, Augusto Pinochet, was feted by Anglo-American right wing figures, including the elite of the Chicago School of Economics and their cult leader, Friedrich Hayek, who traveled to Chile to oversee a program of torture and murder as Pinochet consolidated power.

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Pinochet's program was designed to cow the Chilean people into subservience, with thousands of disappearances and human remains left in trash-bags on the side of the highway. Government thugs kidnapped opposition figures and pushed them out of helicopters.

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Folk singer Victor Jara was dragged to a stadium filled with his comrades. Soldiers smashed his guitar and fingers and then ordered him to play. As he began a defiant chorus of "Venceremos," he was shot in the head. Then, more than 40 rounds were unloaded into his corpse.

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Pinochet's most lasting legacy was the Chilean constitution, a masterwork in antimajoritarianism that takes the worst aspects of the US Senate and Electoral College and supercharges them, creating a framework for an eternal domination of the many by the few.

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In the years since, Chile - the richest country in the region - became the most UNEQUAL country in the region. That constitution was a looter's charter, a blanket permission for the wildly profitable immiseration of working people by parasitic rentiers.

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The Chilean coup and reconstruction were the prototype for the neoliberal project. In the decades since, leaders like Thatcher and Reagan - and the vast fortunes that supported them - used it as a template for policy and legislation at home.

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What's more, the Chilean model was exported to the rest of the global south through the IMF and other neoliberal institutions that used the pretense of indebtedness to create the conditions for eternal peonage for the world's majority.

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Bans on labor organizing, imposed austerity, selloffs of state industries to foreign corporations that could gouge on life's essentials - water, transport, power, even seeds - to ensure that colonial debt could never be paid off.

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A year ago, Chile exploded. A student protest movement - triggered by fare hikes in a privatized transit system - tapped into the nation's deep, simmering rage, the increasingly obvious fact of inexorable, bottomless downward social mobility.

nytimes.com/2019/11/03/wor…

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People from all walks of life took to the streets - and stayed there. The protests grew, and as they did, the facade of eternal dominance of rich over poor crumbled. The constitution, rammed through by a murdering despot, became the object of the nation's fury.

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It is a document designed to deliver legislative control to the wealthy and their lackeys, and, more importantly, to make impossible for any of that to change.

The Chileans demanded the impossible: they demanded a new constitution.

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Now, a year later, a referendum to overturn the Chilean constitution has passed with a spectacular majority: 78% (!!) (!!!!).

bbc.com/news/world-lat…

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What's more, 79% of voters asked for the new constitution to be drawn up by a popularly elected commission, rather than by the illegitimate congress installed under the rules of the constitution they have set out to abolish.

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The exact method by which the new constitution will be drafted remains to be seen, and the process could still go horribly awry.

But this is light at the end of a tunnel we've been traveling for half a century.

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The US right has embarked on its own Chilean project, with the GOP bent on creating eternal minority rule through systematic sabotage of America's democratic institutions, from voting:

vice.com/en/article/pke…

to the Supreme Court.

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Senior elected lawmakers from the GOP have started openly campaigning against the very IDEA of democracy:

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

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And yet... The summerlong uprisings, people lining up all day to vote, the record small-dollar fundraising for transformative US politicians like @AOC... There is a changing tide in US politics, and in global politics.

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The Chicago School's ideal of plutocracy was tried, and it failed. It created a world incapable of addressing the pandemic emergency, let alone the climate emergency. It made billionaires out of sociopaths. They've been shoving us out of a helicopter for half a century.

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Last year, a US-backed coup sought to depose Evo Morales, the democratically elected, indigenous socialist leader of Bolivia. Last week, Bolivians returned to the polls and delivered a landslide for Morales.

crisisgroup.org/latin-america-…

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Plutocracy declared war on the human race and the only planet capable of supporting it in 1973. Today, their first fortress has fallen. In a moment of stark terror and despair, that is cause for hope and celebration.

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Image:
Fundación GAP
flickr.com/photos/fundaci…

CC BY-NC-SA
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc…

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