This sentence begins Chicago Boys, a sort of “crazy, unhappy ending” conference that takes place in a nuclear shelter. A surreal exaltation of capitalism, consumerism and the most unbridled liberalization. The Chicago Boys were a group of economists formed in the Seventies at the University of Chicago, under the aegis of the great guru of liberalism, Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize for economics in 1976. Friedman and his followers exercised a profound influence on the economic policies of many states, the USA of President Ronald Reagan and the England of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and then from Chile to Argentina, from Brazil to Poland, from China to Russia, etc. The large multinationals have played a leading role in a process that has led to the dismantling of the welfare state, seen and fought like an infectious virus, like a gangrenous limb to be amputated. “But can a crutch walk by itself?”. No. The imposition of this type of economy has always been preceded and accompanied by coups, ruthless dictatorships, bloody street repressions, desaparecidos, and torture. Calling the great raids carried out on poor countries privatizations is an understatement. These economic policies have meant for a large part of the populations of those countries layoffs, reductions in salaries, pensions, safety nets, and social guarantees, but also an increase in alcoholism, drug addiction, AIDS, child prostitution, poverty, crime, murder, and suicide. The fact that in recent decades large multinationals have also focused their attention on raw materials, such as water, whose stock market prices have grown by an average of 30%, is not merely an economic or financial fact: a United Nations report on world poverty reveals that 4,900 children die every day due to a lack of drinking water. Our protagonist wallows (eats and quenches his thirst) in a catafalque-style tub filled with water rotten from his own waste. At his side is a Russian escort who, after twenty years of slavery, seeks redemption. Within the narrow walls of the refuge, a no-holds-barred fight is being waged between the two, a sort of paradoxical and lethal cold war, miniature in size. “Advertise the losses and privatize the profits.” The good capitalist always lands on his feet; he knows how to bring the state closer or further away (by sucking up funding or evading taxes) depending on the moment and the interests, and yet the role that the state can have in economies has forcefully returned into vogue in the States! Chicago Boys is not intended to be a museum-like reenactment of the fall of the Wall, on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, but rather an attempt to dust off a bit of good old Marx, and to remind those who for decades have operated under the motto of “A free fox in a free henhouse”, of the Greek proverb: “If you see that you are not satisfied, stop!”.
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