There is a country that has taken neoliberalism at a faster trajectory than the United States. Has privatization gone amok? Chile, not Venezuela should be our fear.
DailyKos contributing editor wrote a prescient piece on this that is worth reading.
Venezuela is a strawman. If you want a glimpse of the United States’ future, look at Chile
Media in the United States is obsessed with Venezuela, and corporate special interests also like to use Venezuela as a boogeyman to make people fearful of any kind of change.
The story is: “Be afraid. Change is socialist. You don’t want to do anything ‘socialist’ because we will end up like Venezuela.”
Others have addressed this head-on by pointing out that corruption is the real problem in Venezuela.
Another way to address it is by pointing out that our country is headed in a very different direction. The United States headed in the neoliberal economic direction, or what I’ll often call conservative economics, because the term “neoliberal” confuses people. Everyone knows what the conservative philosophy is in our country when it comes to the economy. It’s more privatization, less government. This is neoliberalism.
I was talking to a conservative friend recently and he said to me: “Our universities are being overtaken by communists.”
I showed him the new $120 million business school building being built on our campus. I then suggested that when he could show me one campus with a $120 million Communism building, I would believe that our campuses were being overrun by communists. Of course he didn’t have anything to say because when you can show someone what’s really happening in extremely obvious terms, it makes the idea that our campuses are being overrun by communists absurd.
The parallel is that our country looks nothing like Venezuela. It does, however, look a lot like Chile, which is currently experiencing riots over the inequality caused by conservative economic ideas.
DailyKos
Remind your conservative friends that there are better examples to describe out current state.