The other tragic September 11th you might not know about

Well, it's another week my company laid our small crew off. Sales are absolutely horrendous and production has flatlined at our primary account. I had to kid when I said to a few colleagues, "You mean I have to go down to that unemployment office and deal with those scuzzy scumbags?" There were two things I've decided to do on my week off: re-read portions of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and watch two films I've put off for so long, Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana. After reviewing Klein's accounts and viewing Syriana, this all hits at the heart of what I'm so fervently against -- GREED.

Here are some excerpts Klein recounts from Sept. 11, 1973:

General Augusto Pinochet and his supporters consistently referred to the events of September 11, 1973, not as a coup d' etat but as "a war." Santiago (Chile) certainly looked like a war zone: tanks fired as they rolled down the boulevards, and government buildings were under air assault by fighter jets. But there was something strange about this war. It had only one side.

From the start, Pinochet had complete control of the army, navy, marines and police. Meanwhile, President Salvador Allende had refused to organize his supporters into armed defense leagues, so he had no army of his own. The only resistance came from the presidential palace, La Moneda, and the rooftops around it, where Allende and his inner circle made a valiant effort to defend the seat of democracy. It was hardly a fair fight: though there were just thirty-six Allende supporters inside, the military launched twenty-four rockets into the palace. (p. 75)

Note: This was also spearheaded by Milton Friedman who persuaded Pinochet to adopt "pure capitalism" and President Richard Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who also supported Pinochet's overthrow to open up American companies to operate in Chile and its increasing efforts to adopt free trade. Chilean students who studied at a Catholic University in their home country had transferred to the United States to adopt Friedman's "pure capitalist" theories. Some studied at McGill University in Chicago (also the institution that conducted torture lab experiments on unsuspecting volunteers) and the University of California at Berkley. They were dubbed the "Chicago Boys" and "Berkley Boys." Thousands who were Allende supporters were promptly taken to football stadiums and executed on Sept. 11, 1973.

The Aftermath

In 1974, inflation reached 375 percent -- the highest rate in the world and almost twice the top level under Allende. (p. 79)

Immediately after Friedman's visit, Pinochet fired his economic minister and handed the job to Sergio de Castro, whom he later promoted to finance minister. De Castro stacked the government with his fellow Chicago Boys, appointing one of them to head the central bank. (p. 74)

Freed of the naysayers, Pinochet and de Castro got to work stripping away the welfare state to arrive at their pure capitalist utopia. In 1975, they cut public spending by 27 percent in one blow -- and they kept cutting until, by 1980, it was half of what it had been under Allende. Even The Economist, a free-market cheerleader, called it "an orgy of self-mutilation." De Castro privatized almost five hundred state-owned companies and banks, practically giving many of them away, since the point was to get them as quickly as possible into their rightful place in the economic order. He took no pity on local companies and removed even more trade barriers; the result was the loss of 177,000 industrial jobs between 1973 and 1983. By the mid-eighties, manufacturing as a percentage of the economy dropped to levels last seen during the Second World War. (p. 82)

Pinochet held power for seventeen years, and during that time he changed political direction several times. The country's period of steady growth that is held up as proof of its miraculous success did not begin until the mid-eighties -- a full decade after the Chicago Boys implemented shock therapy and well after Pinochet was forced to make a radical course correction. That's because in 1982, despite its strict adherence to Chicago doctrine, Chile's economy crashed: its debt exploded, it faced hyperinflation once again and unemployment hit 30 percent -- ten times higher than it was under Allende. The main cause was the piranhas, the Enron-style financial houses that the Chicago Boys had freed from all regulation, had bought up the country's assets on borrowed money and run up an enormous debt of $14 billion. (p. 85)

Syriana

Ironically, this film provides narratives of a CIA agent, energy analyst, royal prince, attorney for a recently merged oil company, and two recently laid off Pakistani migrant workers. All of their work tended to intersect each other in an increasingly demanding time for oil addiction, deregulation, and privatization. Human lives were expendible in some circumstances to maximize the oil company's profits, even despite allegations the merger was illegally handled.

After watching this film, it reaffirmed that we have our own problems in our country spreading terrorism. Defense Secretary Robert Gates reports only 4 to 5 percent of those released from Gitmo have engaged in terrorist propaganda, debunking the mythical figure of 61 former detainees by ex-Vice President Dick Cheney. All these past and recent past actions are a wakeup call for how we need to treat the rest of the world. It's safe to say that many Muslims don't just simply hate the West for their religious and idealogical beliefs; they turn to radical Islamic schools and institutions when they've said enough is enough with being occupied by an American presence.