Coop Scoop Special Election Edition #6 Toilet Paper Torture and Trump
How easily democracy can be sacrificed for so little. Let's not.
October 30, 2024
By Marc Cooper
October 30, 2024
I saw the Harris speech and liked it. Not going to comment on it here as you are going to be flooded with reactions from all sides and I don’t want to add to the mess. I might say something about it tomorrow but we’ll see. And I firmly believe this final week is about a gritty, arduous GOTV ground game and not speeches and commercials.
This post is about MAGA and why it gets its support and might serve to fashion some talking points for those out canvassing.
But bear with me as I start this post with an historical incident. The Chilean military coup of 1973. I was the translator for the fully democratic socialist President Salvador Allende, elected in 1970.
Most of you know the story of the September 11 1973 coup and the resulting iron military dictatorship that was imposed by Pinochet for the next 17 years. I escaped 8 days after the coup under UN refugee protection.
At the time of the coup, there was a harsh economic crisis that had been brewing for 2 years. The US had imposed a partial economic blockade. Allende significantly raised wages putting more money into the hands of workers. The economic ruling class went immediately to war with Allende. The oligarchs controlled most of the media. The center-right had a majority in congress. And while Americans freaked out over 10% inflation, in the months before the coup inflation was running at 200% or more. The wealthy had literally hoarded as many consumer items as possible to create shortages and a lucrative black market. To make things worse, the private monopoly food distribution system was in on the scheme.
The strategy worked. Basic goods disappeared from the shelves and if you didn’t have the money to buy on the black market, you had to stand in line in front of honest merchants selling goods at the normal price. Cigarettes were only on the black market. And so was, ta-da, toilet paper. The truly wealthy had boxes of it and everything else. But the middle and working classes could not afford the black market and had to stand in those lines. It was aggravating for sure.
At the time of the coup, Allende had grown in popularity since his initial election. But so had the extreme right wing opposition who had close ties with the military. Yes, there were some coupsters who were cold war anti-communists but the Allende government was the most democratic in Chilean history. Total press freedom. Total freedom of assembly. a rambunctious media, no political repression or political prisoners (one reason why I bridle when ignorant leftists claim that Chavez and Maduro were like Allende. But Allende was a democrat. They were demagogues and repressive.)
The coup was initially supported by a probable majority or near majority. It made no difference that Allende had provided a dignified wage to workers, free distribution of milk for kids, that he had nationalized Chile’s primary natural resource, the copper mines that had been owned by the US. I am not saying that Chileans were living in paradise. And though it sounds contradictory, the bottom 3/4 of Chileans were better off economically than before Allende even while having to work around the lines and the shortages.
The dictatorship solved none of those problems. Inflation was halted because the first years of the dictatorship caused a depression and wiped out national manufacturing as Pinochet used the hard currency reserves to import shiny new Chinese consumer goods and, yes, you could find toilet paper and even color TV’s if you could afford them. Unemployment soared. Banks went bankrupt. And massive popular resistance flared ten years into the dictatorship eventually leading to Pinochet being defeated in a plebiscite 5 years later. And yet, the underlying cause of the coup was the economy or better said the perception of the economy. The phantom “Chilean Miracle” economy emerged only after the dictatorship was deposed.
Fifty years later, and under democratic rule, class divisions in Chile remain very sharp. The democratic left is in power but it’s being battered by inflation (from the pandemic) and and an energized Right.
I spent a lot of time talking to the right wing when I was in Chile last year and their discourse has not budged an inch. Talk to them about the thousands Pinochet killed or disappeared, the hundred thousand he had tortured, his closure of congress, his shut down of the media, and the mass graves still being discovered in the desert. The people he had tossed out of helicopters were never recovered but you get nowhere with these ugly truths.
Today, the Chilean middle and upper middle class live very very well. They live in leafy suburbs in modern luxury apartments and veritable mansions and lack for nothing in expensive consumer goods. Their neighborhoods evoke the White suburbs of JoBurg during apartheid. And Chile can fairly be described as currently a de facto apartheid society in which the working class and the poor live in a sub world.
Some of the right wingers I talked to, not knowing my background, and me playing dumb, I asked them about the dictatorship. Some recognized (a little late) that Pinochet himself might have gone a little too far. But the most common answer I got was, Marc, you don’t know what it was like to stand in line for cigarettes, bread and toilet paper. Toilet paper over and over again. (and note most of these folks never stood in line because they were buying from and sometimes running the black market). Not a single one, not even on the more “moderate” right had any regrets that 150 years of Chilean democracy was overthrown so you could get some toilet paper more easily.
The situation we are in today in America is quite different than Chile, with one horrifying exception: the number of Americans who are ready to jettison constitutional rule because of “the economy.”
And yet the economic crisis in America is to the Chilean one what a kitty cat is to a lion. Unemployment levels are at an historic low. The stock market at a record high. Wages have as much as doubled since before the pandemic. Inflation peaked at around 15% and is now down to a normal 3%.
But prices are high, too high. And they will never go down. That is a legitimate complaint, an issue that has many fathers. And people are being really squeezed, especially in housing. But are we such a naive people that we forget the causes, especially, of inflation?
Did people forget that during the pandemic they and businesses received thousands of dollars from the government to keep them functioning? More money in circulation, more inflation. Did they forget that inflation was also caused in great part by shortages created by broken supply lines? Did they forget about the social disruption of a killer pandemic that took a million lives here that have never been memorialized. Can they tell you WHY they think Biden/Harris were responsible, what they did to cause the inflation? Do they ignore the reality that the burst of inflation was pushed higher by large corporations taking advantage by hiking prices even higher.
And, yet, millions of Americans are acting like the world was born yesterday and they are immune from outside forces that intervene in our daily lives. Do they think they are entitled to low prices no matter what? Didn’t rationing take place for years during WWII? Should we have capitulated to the Nazis because meat, coffee, butter, tires, shoes and, oh my God, gasoline were being rationed here? People made those sacrifices to stop the spread of global fascism and the Nazis.
Have they forgotten that?
And are they ready to elect a blithering idiot who is NOT a successful business genius but rather a fraud created by NBC and the fictions pushed by The Apprentice? Are they ready to elect an aspiring dictator who has NO economic plan except to impose high tariffs that American consumers, not China, will have to pay for? Have they taken the time to google the word tariff to see what it really means. And, finally, are they supporting a moron who wants to eliminate Obamacare on which 50 million Americans depend and for which he has not proposed any alternative? Are any Trump supporters able to articulate any economic measure announced by Trump that will actually benefit them (I mean, we do have toilet paper and 300 different kinds). And deporting or even trying to deport millions of “migrants” will not only provoke massive disorder but will sink the economy. Are the macho men in their pickup trucks flying Trump banners ready to pick lettuce in the heat and work in car washes drying off Teslas? Or is it simply racism in play here, as I would argue.
Most importantly, have they spent 5 minutes thinking about what sort of threat to democracy and daily life a Trump regime would mean? Or are they content to just bitch about the price of eggs?
Not all Americans are so naive or misinformed. I remain steadfast in believing that enough of us can see through the MAGA propaganda and elect Harris. But those who are now ready to abandon rule of law because of “the economy” risk learning the same harsh lessons that millions of Chileans did when they voted for toilet paper and got just the toilet itself. And one full of blood and bones. ++
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