Read Online Year 501 by Noam Chomsky - Free Book Online Page A

economic planning and kept tight control (by terror if necessary, as at Kwangju), not only of labor, as is the norm, but of capital as well (see chapter 4.2). The achievements of the NICs, constituting an “economic miracle,” thereby illustrate the virtues of democracy and the free market. Thus the New York Times cites South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong to teach the lesson that “as an economic mechanism, democracy demonstrably works.” And democratic socialist Dennis Wrong writes admiringly of the “striking capitalist successes” of the same grand democracies “under capitalist economies free from control by rickety authoritarian governments”—correct, in that the authoritarian state capitalist governments were efficient, powerful, and interventionist, not “rickety” (in contrast, he explains, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other officially designated enemies demonstrate the failure of Marxist-Leninist dogma, no other factor in their travail being detectable to the properly blinkered eye). Washington Quarterly editor Brad Roberts writes that “Nondemocratic governments have on the whole shown themselves incapable of providing the framework necessary for economic adaptation...,” thinking perhaps of the NICs, or in earlier years, Hitler Germany—though in this case, we have to ask just what he means by “democratic,” given his faith in “the US commitment to democracy abroad” and to the “protection of human rights,” particularly in the 1980s. 39
    It is recognized that “economic miracles” have some attendant flaws. Discussing “Menem’s Miracle” in Argentina, British correspondent John Simpson notes that “The miracle is not perfect.” There are “unpleasant signs of corruption,” “large sections of the middle class have sunk without trace” while “the new entrepreneurs and the old rich” happily shop in the “expensive shops,” and there is substantial poverty. Unconstrained by the conventional reserve, James Petras and Pablo Pozzi fill in a few of the details. Since the onset of “Menem’s Miracle” in 1989, “Neo-liberal private pillage has set up a system where individual wealth depends on public decay and economic regression,” with some 40 percent of the economically active population unemployed or underemployed, proliferating shanty towns, factories closed and not replaced by new enterprises, exploitation of the state as “an instrument for personal enrichment and private pillage,” reduction of expenditures for health, education and welfare to all time lows, negative growth rates, decreasing yearly rate of investment, and declining real wages. By now, over 60 percent of the 12 million inhabitants of Buenos Aires are not connected to the sewer system, one reason for the return of diseases that had been eradicated decades ago. The “speculative economy, reinforced by a neo-liberal economic policy, which impoverishes most of the population while destroying Argentina’s internal market and productive capacity, and scarce resources has generated a Hobbesian world, a savage struggle to survive while the elite continue to reap windfall profits.” The “privileged minority whose wealth, level of consumption and standard of living have flourished” are enthusiastic about the neoliberal policies. “Menem’s miracle” also includes “privatization,” the new shibboleth, but with a twist: thus the government sold the state telephone monopoly to Spanish and Italian state corporations, and the national airline to the Spanish government airline Iberia, so that “management is merely transferred from Argentine to Spanish and Italian bureaucrats,” David Felix observes. 40
    In short, an “economic miracle,” in the technical sense.
    The proper deployment of these ideas is also illustrated in the case of