Ironically, Bush has used Chile as an example of a country that's tried privatization. He didn't mention this was implemented in 1981 under the notorious dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. The general, with the help of the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger and the CIA, was responsible for the assassination of that nation's democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, ironically on September 11, 1973, in a bloody military coup. On gaining power, Pinochet also instituted, with the help of his American "friends," Operation Condor, a program of repression, political persecution, mass arrests, summary trials, systematic torture and "disappearances," secret executions and detention by death squads. So the big "It" happened there as well.

During Pinochet's 17-year run, some 3,000 people were executed (after being brutally tortured) and some 30,000 brutally tortured, all for the sake of ousting a democratically elected socialist with an unelected brutal military regime that supposedly would bring "free enterprise" to Chile.

There is a correlative story to this from oft-proposed democratic presidential candidate, Lyndon LaRouche, in his article "Bush's Social Security Privatization: A Foot in the Door for Fascism." LaRouche reports that stealing Social Security funds is a worldwide phenomenon. It's not only happening in Chile. Social Security and worker benefit plans are under attack in Peru as in Mexico, Germany as well as France. LaRouche sees this attack as conducted by the scions of bankrupt banking-systems to grab the large social welfare funds of their governments. The United States is obviously one of the players, which is why Bush has made it clear that his immediate, number-one target is to "reform" Social Security via privatization. In fact, Bush was the first sitting president in the 70-year history of the program to seriously propose privatization. But he had some help.

-cont.-