Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of Left podcast, where we remember the past and choose to repeat it.

There's a strong argument to be made that true and legitimate economic insecurity has been weaponized by right-wing populists around the world to target marginalized groups and immigrants as the

supposed cause of that insecurity, boosting themselves to power in the process. So it's always

a good time to remember the real origins of our economic troubles, the dehumanizing system

of liberalism that calculates the value of literally everything except those things

that make life worth living. And so to look back to better understand the present, sources

today include AJ Plus on Effing the Republic, Robert Reich, the Tom Hartman program, the Ralph

meter radio hour, Breaking Points, and Jacobin.

The protests over inequality in Chile are not spontaneous.

If we go back in history, we'll find a dictatorship, a group of economists, and even the CIA.

Chile is considered the world's neoliberal laboratory, because during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, it was one of the first countries in which Milton Friedman's economic

policies were applied. He was the guru of neoliberalism. This turned China the title of economic miracle.

But not all Chileans are in agreement.

We want to change this system capitalistic, a system

infermo and that has to the people agonizando.

The keys of this experiment were the Chicago boys.

They were a group of Chilean students awarded scholarships by the United States government

between 1957 and 1970 to study postgraduate economics at the University of Chicago,

the cradle neoliberalism.

There, they learned from Friedman himself.

Neoliberalism is a capitalist political model that believes in the free market.

This means that the less the government gets involved with the economy, the better.

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