Many people are familiar with the fact that 9/11 is a date of great sadness not just for the people of the United States. It was on September 11th, 1973 a military junta funded and supported by US intelligence and military agencies overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile. The military junta that took power, headed by General Augusto Pinochet, instituted the economic policies developed and promoted by American economist Milton Friedman. These policies could only be described as transnational corporatists extremism, and in pursuit of these policies tens of thousands of Chileans and many foreigners were tortured, murdered, and disappeared by the Pinochet regime. Often lists of these suspected "dissidents" was provided to Chilean dictatorship by American intelligence and military agencies. The torture methods used by the Chilean military and secret police were taught to their commanders at the School of the Americas and in-country by US military advisors.
Of all this, there is no doubt. Between the criminal forensics of mass graves in Chile (and around Latin America), recently released CIA documents, and evidence presented against Henry Kissinger it is clear that the coup in Chile would not have happened but for the US supplying intelligence, funding, planning, and diplomatic cover.
The story of Allende standing, defiant, at the doors of the La Moneda, the Presidential Palace in Santiago is well known. What is less known is how the popularly elected government of Salvador Allende and his coalition of centrists and leftist parties became paralyzed as the economy crumbled. Only after this had been accomplished were the corporatist in America and their rightest and military allies in Chile able to sway the middle class portions of public against the government they had voted for, and stop the progress the Allende government was making.
In his book Allende's Chile: An Inside View, American economist and advisor the Allende government, Edward Boorstein describes how American business interests directly, and the American government indirectly through our intelligence agencies sabotaged Chile's economy and government. There is documentary evidence that the CIA and US business interests bought members of the Chilean legislature to block Allende's agenda and, notably, intentionally interfere in the regular funding and functioning of the government. They funded strikes by truckers and other non-unionized sectors of the economy. After over three years of the interference and sabotage the stage was set for the coup. This is how the American shadow state functions. Why do we think they give our lives more value than that of Chileans, Iraqis, Indonesian, Iranian, Palestinian, etc. etc.?
I am not suggesting there will be a military coup in the United States, but these intentional efforts to destabilize the economy and interfere with the ability of government to function seems to be an intentional power grab by what I would refer to as our "shadow" state. That is the institutionalized parts of our government that is acting on behalf of the top 1%+, in furtherance of an extreme capitalist/corporatist agenda worldwide through illegal, corrupt, and immoral means, regardless of who is in the executive, controls the legislature, or is chief justice.
Whether coup or slow creep these people are the "invisible" hand, and it is reaching for even more power and wealth. Control and access to resources is the basis of wealth, and the basis of power. They are one in the same. We need a land redistribution movement, a movement for community sufficiency, a movement away the ever growing web of corporate and government control. As the institutions of government and transnational capital merge into one entity, it is the world's 1%'s "economic freedom", as Friedman would have called it, that will make the rest of slaves.