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If you like Social Security, you need to know about the CIA, Henry Kissinger and Chile.
After the coup on behalf of American corporate interests in 1973*, the Chicago Boys would roll out Austerity for Chile, a model for "government hands-off capitalism," the fiscal blueprint for our present age.
One very interesting part for those following the Democratic primaries is then-President Bill Clinton's interest in the Chilean model for "privatization" of social security.
President Clinton and the Chilean Model.
By José Piñera
Midnight at the House of Good and Evil
"It is 12:30 at night, and Bill Clinton asks me and Dottie: 'What do you know about the Chilean social-security system?'” recounted Richard Lamm, the three-term former governor of Colorado. It was March 1995, and Lamm and his wife were staying that weekend in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.
I read about this surprising midnight conversation in an article by Jonathan Alter (Newsweek, May 13, 1996), as I was waiting at Dulles International Airport for a flight to Europe. The article also said that early the next morning, before he left to go jogging, President Bill Clinton arranged for a special report about the Chilean reform produced by his staff to be slipped under Lamm's door.
That news piqued my interest, so as soon as I came back to the United States, I went to visit Richard Lamm. I wanted to know the exact circumstances in which the president of the world’s superpower engages a fellow former governor in a Saturday night exchange about the system I had implemented 15 years earlier.
Lamn and I shared a coffee on the terrace of his house in Denver. He not only was the most genial host to this curious Chilean, but he also proved to be deeply motivated by the issues surrounding aging and the future of America. So we had an engaging conversation. At the conclusion, I ventured to ask him for a copy of the report that Clinton had given him. He agreed to give it to me on the condition that I do not make it public while Clinton was president. He also gave me a copy of the handwritten note on White House stationery, dated 3-21-95, which accompanied the report slipped under his door. It read:
Dick,
Sorry I missed you this morning.
It was great to have you and Dottie here.
Here's the stuff on Chile I mentioned.
Best,
Bill.
Three months before that Clinton-Lamm conversation about the Chilean system, I had a long lunch in Santiago with journalist Joe Klein of Newsweek magazine. A few weeks afterwards, he wrote a compelling article entitled,[font color="green"] "If Chile can do it...couldn´t North America privatize its social-security system?" [/font color]He concluded by stating that "the Chilean system is perhaps the first significant social-policy idea to emanate from the Southern Hemisphere." (Newsweek, December 12, 1994).
I have reasons to think that probably this piece got Clinton’s attention and, given his passion for policy issues, he became a quasi expert on Chile’s Social Security reform. Clinton was familiar with Klein, as the journalist covered the 1992 presidential race and went on anonymously to write the bestseller Primary Colors, a thinly-veiled account of Clinton’s campaign.
“The mother of all reforms”
While studying for a Masters and a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University, I became enamored with America’s unique experiment in liberty and limited government. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville wrote the first volume of Democracy in America hoping that many of the salutary aspects of American society might be exported to his native France. I dreamed with exporting them to my native Chile.
So, upon finishing my Ph.D. in 1974 and while fully enjoying my position as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University and a professor at Boston University, I took on the most difficult decision in my life: to go back to help my country rebuild its destroyed economy and democracy along the lines of the principles and institutions created in America by the Founding Fathers. Soon after I became Secretary of Labor and Social Security, and in 1980 I was able to create a fully funded system of personal retirement accounts. Historian Niall Ferguson has stated that this reform was “the most profound challenge to the welfare state in a generation. Thatcher and Reagan came later. The backlash against welfare started in Chile.”
But while de Tocqueville’s 1835 treatment contained largely effusive praise of American government, the second volume of Democracy in America, published five years later, strikes a more cautionary tone. He warned that “the American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” In fact at some point during the 20th century, the culture of self reliance and individual responsibility that had made America a great and free nation was diluted by the creation of [font color="green"] “an Entitlement State,”[/font color] reminiscent of the increasingly failed European welfare state. What America needed was a return to basics, to the founding tenets of limited government and personal responsibility.
[font color="green"]In a way, the principles America helped export so successfully to Chile through a group of free market economists needed to be reaffirmed through an emblematic reform. I felt that the Chilean solution to the impending Social Security crisis could be applied in the USA.[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://www.josepinera.org/articles/articles_clinton_chilean_model.htm
Not that this is what Ms. Clinton would do, but it bears repeating and putting in writing on the Party Platform: Democratic solutions work because they are Democratic and put We the People first.
* Kissinger ignored a recommendation from his top deputy on the NSC, Viron Vaky, who strongly advised against covert action to undermine Allende. On September 14, Vaky wrote a memo to Kissinger arguing that coup plotting would lead to "widespread violence and even insurrection." He also argued that such a policy was immoral: "What we propose is patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets .… If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat to us, e.g. to our survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.? It is hard to argue this." -- http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB437/
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Like you and me, Downwinder, the guy was a Democrat before it was cool.
Goethe’s social attitudes, like his musical tastes, were shaped in a more formal age. For Beethoven, 21 years his junior, the only true aristocrats were artists. In the mythology, his disillusionment was clinched by Goethe’s behaviour when they encountered royalty in the street, as reported 20 years later by Bettina: "Beethoven said to Goethe: 'keep walking as you have until now, holding my arm, they must make way for us, not the other way around. Goethe thought differently; he drew his hand, took off his hat and stepped aside, while Beethoven, hands in pockets, went right through the dukes and their cortege... They drew aside to make way for him, saluting him in friendly fashion. Waiting for Goethe who had let the dukes pass, Beethoven told him: “I have waited for you because I respect you and I admire your work, but you have shown too much esteem to those people.”’
SOURCE: http://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/focus/a-meeting-of-genius-beethoven-and-goethe-july-1812?pmtx=most-popular&utm_expid=32540977-5.-DEFmKXoQdmXwfDwHzJRUQ.1&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
SOURCE: http://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/focus/a-meeting-of-genius-beethoven-and-goethe-july-1812?pmtx=most-popular&utm_expid=32540977-5.-DEFmKXoQdmXwfDwHzJRUQ.1&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
The composer Luigi Cherubini compared Beethoven to an "unlicked bear cub.'
"Like to a chaos, or an unlicked bear-whelp,
That carries no impression like the dam."
— Shakespeare:3 Henry VI, act iii. sc. 2 (1595)
That carries no impression like the dam."
— Shakespeare:3 Henry VI, act iii. sc. 2 (1595)
Reading about Beethoven's measure of the aristocrats makes me glad for my politics today. Lots of voices, all free to speak their mind and each equal under the law, working toward the goal of making this life better for ALL. That is the essence of Democratic politics.
And the music. The music.
Beethoven was at the point of quitting after realizing he was going deaf. Then he realized what it was all about and moved the art of music to a new dimension.
"Whoever gets to know and understand my music, will be freed from all the misery that drags down others." -- Ludwig van Beethoven
Thus, why I fight the BFEE.
"The heart grows stronger by facing the evils of the world." -- Ludwig van Beethoven (Fidelio)
The BFEE, or Bush Family Evil Empire, is shorthand for the Powers-That-Be. They are the warmongers, the mass murderers, the corrupt secret government, the banksters, the gangsters, the traitors -- the buy-partisan War Party -- that have long used their positions of political and economic power to enrich themselves and their cronies.
Giving them a name, makes it easier to hold them in the utter contempt they so richly deserve.
How do I fight the BFEE? By telling the truth. It is what they most fear -- as it means the loss of their power and privilege.
Thanks for the thread, Octafish. 
