Forum Post: The Globalization Of Poverty And The New World Order

The Globalization Of Poverty And The New World Order

By Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research

[This is a preface to the Second Edition of Chossudovsky's book. It gives a good characterization of events over a span of time, that few people get to witness first hand.]

Barely a few weeks after the military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, overthrowing the elected government of President Salvador Allende, the military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet ordered a hike in the price of bread from 11 to 40 escudos, a hefty overnight increase of 264%. This economic shock treatment had been designed by a group of economists called the “Chicago Boys”.

At the time of the military coup, I was teaching at the Institute of Economics of the Catholic University of Chile, which was a nest of Chicago trained economists, disciples of Milton Friedman. On that September 11, in the hours following the bombing of the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, the new military rulers imposed a 72-hour curfew. When the university reopened several days later, the “Chicago Boys” were rejoicing. Barely a week later, several of my colleagues at the Institute of Economics were appointed to key positions in the military government.

While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen to ensure “economic stability and stave off inflationary pressures.” From one day to the next, an entire country was precipitated into abysmal poverty: in less than a year the price of bread in Chile increased thirty-six times and eighty-five percent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line.

These events affected me profoundly in my work as an economist. Through the tampering of prices, wages and interest rates, people’s lives had been destroyed; an entire national economy had been destabilized. I started to understand that macro-economic reform was neither “neutral” – as claimed by the academic mainstream – nor separate from the broader process of social and political transformation. In my earlier writings on the Chilean military Junta, I looked upon the so-called “free market” as a well organized instrument of “economic repression”.

Two years later in 1976, I returned to Latin America as a visiting professor at the National University of Cordoba in the northern industrial heartland of Argentina. My stay coincided with another military coup d’état. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and the Desaparecidos were assassinated. The military takeover in Argentina was a “carbon copy” of the CIA-led coup in Chile. Behind the massacres and human rights violations, “free market” reforms had also been prescribed – this time under the supervision of Argentina’s New York creditors.

The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) deadly economic prescriptions...

Full article...

http://coto2.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/understand-the-globalization-of-poverty-and-the-new-world-order/

Here is another great site that someone was kind enough to point out to me just a few minutes ago (which really could be a forum thread in it's own right). It shines a light on the multinational companies that are contributing to the campaigns of the US candidates...

List of foreign money coming into the political process here in the States:

http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/foreign-corporations-funnel-millions-us-elections-campaign-watchdogs-say