[Peace] Fwd: [New post] On the Other 9/11: Pinochet, Kissinger, Obama

[Carl G. Estabrook]

Sent from my iPhone

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Corey Robin <donotreply at wordpress.com>
> Date: September 11, 2015 at 9:47:24 AM EDT
> To: <galliher at illinois.edu>
> Subject: [New post] On the Other 9/11: Pinochet, Kissinger, Obama
> 
> 
> New post on Corey Robin
> 
> On the Other 9/11: Pinochet, Kissinger, Obama
> by Corey Robin
> Today is the anniversary of two 9/11's. The one everyone in the US talks about, and the one not everyone in the US talks about. Greg Grandin, who's got a new book out on Kissinger that everyone should read, writes in The Nation today about Pinochet's violent coup against Allende—fully backed by Kissinger and Nixon—and how Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is completing the work that Kissinger, Nixon, and Pinochet began. Forty-three years ago today.
> 
> The TPP includes one provision that will, if activated, complete the 1973 coup against Allende: its Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism. ISDS allows corporations and investors to “sue governments directly before tribunals of three private sector lawyers operating under World Bank and UN rules to demand taxpayer compensation for any domestic law that investors believe will diminish their ‘expected future profits.’”...
> 
> The principle behind the ISDS—that corporations have an inherent right to demand compensation for any regulation that might impinge on their “expected future profits”—is a perfect negation of a major principle of Allende’s socialist program: that poor nations not only had a right to nationalize foreign property but that they could deduct past “excess profit” from compensation for that property, calculated as anything above 12 percent of a company’s value.
> 
> Allende and his Popular Unity coalition not only seized the operations of the Anaconda and Kennecott mining companies but, once the sums were done, handed them overdue bills for even more money. On September 28, 1971, Allende signed a decree that tallied the “excess profit” owed by these companies to be $774,000,000 (as might be expected, US and Canadian mining companies, including the current version of Anaconda, are strong for the TPP.) This decree was a turning point in the history of international property rights, when Washington (which, since the Mexican Revolution, had grudgingly accepted the idea of nationalization) decided that its tolerance of Third World economic nationalism had gone on long enough.
> 
> In an October 5, 1971 meeting in the Oval Office, Treasury Secretary John Connally complained to Nixon: “He’s [Allende] gone back and said that the copper companies owe $700 million. It’s obviously a farce, and obviously, he’s a—he doesn’t intend to compensate for the expropriated properties. He’s thrown down—He’s thrown the gauntlet to us. Now, it’s our move.”
> 
> Nixon then said he had “decided we’re going to give Allende the hook.”
> 
> Connally: “The only thing you can ever hope is to have him overthrown.”
> 
> ...
> 
> This September 11th, as the Obama administration makes its final push for the TPP, it’s worth taking a moment to realize why all those people in Chile—and in Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, and throughout Latin America—died and were tortured: to protect the “future profits” of multinational corporations.
> 
> Greg's conclusion raises another issue: the why of torture. Coming out of the Dirty Wars of the 1970s and 1980s, a generation of political theorists and literary critics and journalists began to talk a lot about torture, framing their inquests around the cruelty regimes perpetrated against the "human body." The target of torture, in other words, was not a political movement or a political being; it was a bodily subject, a physical abstraction. In tandem with revelations of the rampages of Communism in Eastern Europe and China (they weren't really revelations but they got renewed attention from French intellectuals and their camp followers in the waning days of the Cold War), torture ceased to be treated as political weapon, an instrument of specific political purpose, the close cousin of war and other conventional political means. It (and its associates in evil) became a stand-in for the predations of the human condition. It was the summum malum of politics, a generalized other, an ultimate evil from which every decent person—even Admiral Mayorga—was to shrink with horror.
> 
> The further removed that writing became from the immediacy of the Dirty Wars, the less it focused on the substance and politics of those conflicts: which, as Grandin shows, were often about the particular policies and mundane interests that fall today under the rubric "neoliberalism." It's one of the many virtues of Grandin's work that he restores to our memory of those horrors the specificity of that politics. And to remind us that the house that neoliberalism built rests atop a graveyard.
> 
>  
> 
> Corey Robin | September 11, 2015 at 9:46 am | Tags: free trade, Kissinger, neoliberalism, Nixon, Pinochet, torture | Categories: Economies, Political Theory, The Right, The State, Violence | URL: http://wp.me/p5IQfX-1UO
> Comment	   See all comments
> Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Corey Robin.
> Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions.
> 
> Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: 
> http://coreyrobin.com/2015/09/11/on-the-other-911-pinochet-kissinger-obama/
> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace/attachments/20150911/3592d510/attachment.html>