by Chris Hedges

[Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.] 

What would Milton Friedman have said?

Commentary by Raul Sohr

(Ed. Note:  Raul Sohr, a columnist and guest foreign affairs analysist at several TV stations, has some interesting observations on how some folks are spinning Chile’s recent earthquake tragedy. Is the relative strength shown by Chilean buildings during the quake a result of Milton Friedman’s free market principles?  Or, quite to contrary, did Chile’s structures fare well in spite of Friedman’s free market ideology?)

By Javier Fuenzalida

(Ed Note: Javier Fuenzalida is professor of economics at Chile’s Universidad Finis Terrae. This private university, begun in 1988, affiliated with the Catholic Church’s Legion of Christ in 1999.

(There were no private universities in Chile until General-cum-President Augusto Pinochet, influenced by the free market thinking of the so-called “Chicago Boys”—young Chilean economists who had studied in the US and UK, many of them, like Mr. Fuenzalida, at the University of Chicago with Milton Friedman—allowed them to start in 1981. Now more than 70 percent of Chilean university students are in private universities.

(So far even the best of the private universities don’t have the prestige of the traditional state-supported universities. Prof. Fuenzalida’s article appeared in Chile’s business daily, Estrategia.)

By William Alexander Yankes

No Latin American novel of magic realism has ever described a transfer of presidential power suddenly rocked by a strong earthquake. But this happened March 11, 2010 in Chile.

The first woman president of Latin America elected to power on her own merits, Michelle Bachelet, was handing the symbols of the highest office to her right-wing successor, Sebastián Piñera, when the earthquake hit.  The transfer of power marked yet another radical pendulum swing, from a nominally socialist regime to the conservative right.

By Juan Gabriel Tokatlian

The former speaker of the House of Representatives in Washington, “Tip” O’Neill, captured the reality of daily political life in the United States - and everywhere else - in a phrase that justly became famous: “All politics is local.”

When applied on too great a canvas, however - perhaps according to the principle “all foreign policy is domestic politics” - it is a perilous guide. Washington’s approach to Latin America, under Barack Obama as much as his predecessor George W Bush, is a case in point.

It is evident that external and internal politics are intertwined and that today most issues are “intermestic”; that is, simultaneously international and domestic in ways that link multiple official and non-governmental actors with different power-attributes and power-interests.