Pinochet approves of the bailout
Teacher, pupil, kid at the back of the room napping.
In an airport in Tulsa yesterday with nothing to read, I picked up a copy of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine — I had already finished my copy of Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. Little did I know that last year’s bestseller would prove more informative than the morning’s newspapers. The thesis of the book is that certain economic policies can only be imposed in the wake of a shocking event, such as a flood or a coup or a bombing, and that, if these events do not occur on their own, they must be created by the people who wish to impose said policies.
The following I found on pp 105-106:
"The situation was so unstable that Pinochet was forced to do exactly what Allende had done: he nationalized many of these companies.
…
"It’s clear that Chile was never the laboratory of ‘pure’ free markets that its cheerleaders had claimed. Instead, it was a country where a small elite leapt from wealthy to super-rich in extremely short order — a highly profitable formula bankrolled by debt and heavily subsidized (then bailed out) with public funds. When the hype and salesmanship behind the miracle are stripped away, Chile under Pinochet and the Chicago Boys was not a capitalist state featuring a liberated market but a corporatist one…a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage an all-out war on the third power sector — the workers — thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth.
"That war — what many Chileans understandably see as a war of the rich against the poor and middle class — is the real story of Chile’s economic ‘miracle.’ By 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent…if that track record qualifies Chile as a miracle for Chicago school economists, perhaps shock treatment [Friedman’s term for his theory] was never really about jolting the the economy into health. Perhaps it was meant to do exactly what it did — hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence."
Royal Alcott 1928-2008
My father Royal died a few weeks ago — that’s why I was away from the computer for a few days.
The story of my family life is, as my brother Eric says, "complicated," too much so to get into here for the time being, but while I was at my father’s house in Eureka Springs, AK the other day I snagged a couple of killer pictures of him that capture him in his prime. The first one was taken in 1947, which would make it probably his senior-year portrait. The second is him at the high-water mark of his Mad Men-era advertising career, late 50s perhaps, early 60s at the latest. He worked for Leo Burnett in Chicago, then for Art Linkletter’s production company in LA, then Foote, Cone and Belding in Chicago later on (I think that’s the order — accurate communication was never a priority in my family). I’ve never watched Mad Men, but now I feel like I should just to get to know what his life was like. The final picture is one I took of him in 1991. I’ve got plenty of things to say about him at some point, but for now let me salute a handsome devil who knew how to rock a three-piece suit.
Paul Newman
I never met Paul Newman, although I am pleased to have appeared in a movie with him.
My wife, however, did meet him, the story of which I would like to relate to you now.