Enemy to 9/10ths of Humanity Dies

Stephen Gowans

Milton Friedman, who was instrumental in providing the intellectual justification capitalist classes needed to claw-back the reforms they had conceded to labor in the post-WWII period, has died. Friedman’s neoliberalism – the idea that enterprises and markets must be free, and if they’re not, governments must intervene to make them so -- has two bookends. The first is Chile, following the other 9/11 – September 11, 1973. That was the date Augusto Pinochet, backed by US companies, the CIA and Henry Kissinger, overthrew the leftist government of Salvador Allende (...) Thirty years later neo-liberalism was brought to Iraq, also by the gun. On September 19, 2003, Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Iraq, imposed Friedman’s ideas on a country that had been brought under US suzerainty by force. Bremer defined a bill of rights for foreign capital, including the right: to buy Iraq’s public enterprises; to own Iraqi businesses; to repatriate profits; to own Iraqi banks; to be free from barriers to trade and investment; and to pay little tax. To ensure foreign capital would also have the right to cheap labor, Bremer banned strikes in key sectors and severely restricted unionization...

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