The University of Chicago enjoys an academic reputation of sterling quality with a galaxy of graduates and professors to make all but the most prestigious Ivy League schools drool with envy. Unfortunately, this university is a merchant of death which has spread misery wherever its economic principles have been coerced upon its unwilling victims.
Not only did the current US president spend time at the Rockefeller connected institution, but so did Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006), who enjoys an undeserved reputation as a free market advocate. Friedman is most famous for blending central bank monetarism with radical free market ideology, a position which until the past 30 years was a decidedly minority position in academia and government.
As an academic matter, Dr. Antal Fekete notes that the monetarist’s quantity theory of money is not fundamentally different than the various voodoo strains of Keynesian money theories. His main criticism is that both schools of economic thought use linear methods to describe non-linear phenomenon. But that is not the basis for our complaint about Friedman. We instead point our readers to the work of Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, to understand the moral depravity of Friedman and his acolytes.
The evil doctor spread a perfervid version of economics in much the same way as Karl Rove spread dirty tricks politics for George Bush, Jr. Friedman was not content with engaging opposing views with the merits of his political-economic system. Instead he focused ferociously on prescribing radical free marketism as the tonic for whatever ailed an economy. In almost all cases, he advised that shock treatment be applied to victim economies and polities to exterminate the infections he diagnosed in the patient’s system.
Klein extensively documents how Freedman built a cabal of academics who followed him in maniacal drive to force free markets down other countries’ throats. He was able to accomplish this goal with scary success in South America in collaboration with the CIA and CIA front non-profit organization the Ford Foundation.
In various exchange programs, the university gave scholarships to students from Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, who studied in the school’s economics program with the goal of returning them as brainwashed free marketers. In time, enough South Americans graduated so that they could form their own schools, or infiltrate existing departments, to teach in situ.
Before proceeding, we must understand what Friedman really meant by free markets. In the evil professor’s utopia, all markets should be entirely unregulated and free of any governmental restraint. Countries would be entirely free of tariffs, barriers, or restraints from foreign intruders entering the country to rape it of its resources.
For Friedman, freedom was a prerogative of the 1%; everyone else bows to the overlords.
During the post-war period, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil had developed mixed economies which Klein describes as an implementation of developmentalism which allowed the countries to build large middle classes and broad economic prosperity. They were noted for excluding the avaricious multinationals and colonial imperialism which had once dominated their countries.
In a series of revolutions during the 1960s and 1970s, these countries were brutally beaten into economic recidivism which brought back the colonial style governments noted for large foreign multinational corporations entries into the countries to rob the nations of their natural resources and to ruthlessly exploit their labor.
Chile stands as a poster child of the despotic Pinochet government which usurped power through the aid of the CIA and the University of Chicago technocrats who instituted sweeping reforms and repressions to create a tabula rasa for their radical free market ideologies.
Prior to the murder of Salvador Allende (1908 - 1973), the freely elected Marxist president of Chile, the Pinochet junta, populated with innumerable Chicago School economists, created a massive blue print for the new government’s economy and finances, a document known as the brick.
The CIA, conglomerates such as ITT, Anaconda, other fellow traveler multinationals, and Henry Kissinger murdered Allende and his supporters in order to install the despotic Pinochet, a man of grandiose conceits. He rounded up dissidents among the universities, labor, and poor, placing them in concentration camps in the football stadiums to murder them in plain sight as a warning to potential dissinters and to rid them of their ideological impurities. Many others were taken away in the middle of the night, never to be seen again. Thus the word “disappeared” became a passive verb.
The motivation for this destruction of humanity stemmed from Friedman and his followers who stated repeatedly, as a mantra, that the country must be “shocked” into submission to a new regime. The old ideas must be forcefully expunged. The economics department and its graduates sponsored additional revolutions in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay using similar tactics to aid the usual suspects.
These countries, which once boasted prospering economies, were reduced to third world dependency upon the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other colonizing powers for mere subsistence. Their once industrious citizens were impoverished. Ford Motor Company established concentration camps at their factories, using torture techniques learned from the CIA.
Production sank while inflation soared. Billions of dollars were taken from the country to fill the coffers of the multinational colonizers. People gave up taking the bus to work in order to buy food, necessitating arising hours before work to walk the many miles to arrive there on time.
As with Hitler, the free market ideologues brooked no opposition or compromise. Careening toward philosophical purity, they crushed dissenting views. They attempted to conquer the intellect through the sword, going so far as to destroy the master recordings of certain folk singers who represented the old culture to which the vast majority clung - similar to Mao who destroyed irreplaceable Chinese porcelains in his contempt for culture.
We will develop the barbarity of these South American regimes in future postings, but we wanted to voice in summary the moral dissipation of these intellectuoids at the University of Chicago and their Latin followers. My heart bleeds for these people and cries loudly for the sufferings they endured in the name of free markets and the Chicago School. It is a lie that education breeds civility or elevates morals.
Reference
The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein
Copyright 2010-12 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.
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