The Clash of Free Markets and Democracy

In North America and Europe [...] the intellectual myopia that [tortured, exiled, and assassinated Chilean Orlando] Letelier condemned so ferociously continues to restrict the perimeters of far too many of our public debates. As in Letelier’s time [during the US-backed dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet], our loudest establishment voices generally have no trouble condemning repression by foreign dictatorships or the rise of neofascism within our borders—some will even admit that there is a crisis of police violence. But very rarely are the dots connected between such troubling phenomena and the celebrated free-market policies for which Chile, under the Chicago Boys, was the earliest and purest laboratory.

And yet the connections are screaming to be made. There is a reason, for instance, why authoritarian 
China has become the sweatshop for the world: As in Chile in the ’70s, its suppression of democracy, restrictions on information, and brutal repression of dissidents create the required conditions to keep wages down and workers under control.

Similarly, there is a clear reason why mass incarceration exploded in the United States in the midst of the neoliberal economic revolution, when the welfare system has been radically eroded and the public funding of virtually all social services is under attack. It isn’t a grand conspiracy, but the economic exclusion of huge swaths of the population required some parallel strategy of escalated repression and containment (the drug war was awfully handy that way). [...] And yet, too often, we imagine that these forces can be defeated without substantive shifts in policy.

[...]

“High levels of unemployment and decades of disinvestment in black communities have led to dangerous interactions with police,” explains Dorian T. Warren, one of the authors of the Movement for Black Lives’ economic platform and board chair of the Center for Community Change. Or as Letelier put it all those years ago: “The economic plan has had to be enforced.”

  The Nation

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.