Latvia’s
Economic Disaster Heralded as a Neoliberal “Success Story”:
A Model for Europe
and the US?
By Jeffrey Sommers and Michael
Hudson
A generation ago the
Chicago Boys and their financial supporters applauded General Pinochet’s
anti-labor Chile as a success story, thanks mainly to its transformation of
their Social Security into Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) that almost
universally were looted by the employer grupos by the end of the 1970s. In the
last decade, the Bush Administration, seeking a Trojan Horse to privatize Social
Security in the United States, applauded Chile’s disastrous privatization of
pension accounts (turning many over to US financial institutions) even as that
nation’s voters rejected the Pinochetistas largely out of anger at the vast
pension rip-off by high finance.
Today’s most
highly celebrated anti-labor success story is Latvia. Latvia is portrayed as
the country where labor did not fight back, but simply emigrated politely and
quietly. No general strikes, nor destruction of private property or violence,
Latvia is presented as a country where labor had the good sense to not make a
fuss when faced with austerity. Latvians gave up protest and simply began
voting with their backsides (emigration) as the economy shrank, wage levels
were scaled down, and where tax burdens remained decidedly on the backs of
labor, even though recent token efforts have been made to increase taxes on
real estate. The World Bank applauds Latvia and its Baltic neighbors by placing
them high on its list of “business friendly” economies, even though at times
scolding their social regimes as even too harsh for the Victorian tastes of the
international financial institutions.
Continue reading:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/latvias-economic-disaster-heralded-as-a-neoliberal-success-story-a-model-for-europe-and-the-us/5317675
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