Grubstakers - Episode 113: Sebastián Piñera (President of Chile)

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

This week it's the $2.8 billion president of Chile Sebastián Piñera. We discuss the protests, his accomplished family, how he won friends and influenced people at home and abroad (laundering money for a dictator's inner circle with the blessing of the CIA), and more! The audio's a little screwy at the beginning and we are deeply sorry. As penance we will make Yogi, who had nothing to do with the production or editing of this episode, read one thousand audio engineering books.

I want to be held accountable for what I'm doing. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it was like the 9-11 of my career and certainly of making kombucha. Jesus is smart. This idea of income inequality, that always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality. In five, four, three, two. Hello, and welcome to Grubstakers, I'm Andy Palmer and I am joined by my friends and co-hosts

Sean P. McCarthy, Steve Jeffers And today we are talking about the president of Chile, Sebastian Piñera Who has been in the news, not necessarily for what he's done But more of what the people of Chile have done in response to his terrible governance. He's also, the reason we're covering him, besides the massive protests in Chile, he's worth $2.8 billion.

Yes. But for the last, I'd say, month, there have been massive, massive protests in the streets of chile millions of people involved about or at least a million uh estimates say about five percent of the entire chilean population is taken to the streets yeah so the other 90 95 loves him yeah things are going all right he uh it's it's been shown that his approval rating is at 14%. Right. His approval rating is the lowest of any Chilean president polled since the Pinochet dictatorship ended.

Yeah, he's also the first president since Pinochet to get impeached by, or to have impeachment proceedings brought against him by the Congress. Also the first president since Pinochet to have tanks proceedings brought against him by the congress also the first president since pinochet to have uh tanks rolling through the streets of santiago so another well actually that those those uh that's happened before they've had those um his his predecessor the first time she was his predecessor apparently um after a major earthquake around 2010, right before his predecessor lost, people were looting for things like food and water. And, you know, she was a socialist, but also the water cannons were turned on them. But they needed water, so that's...

Yeah, so, you know, the win-win. Right. Oh, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, an interesting statistic to start this episode off with is, according to the Wall Street Journal, the protests so far in Chile have done about 1.4 billion U.S. dollars worth of damage, which, as we said, is half of the net worth of the president of Chile. So he could pay the entire damages and still be worth 1.4 billion u.s dollars yeah yeah and he and the protests actually even now are still ongoing i think on um it was either halloween or november uh first which i guess is uh dios de muertos um there were actually because at least 20 protesters have been killed the day of the dead um there were

kind of funerary marches through the streets of santiago with people dressed in black and um marching completely silently in uh in recognition of the people who have been killed in these protests and there's also videos of um like there there's videos that just have police like leading students away and in one of them i saw they're like leading a student in a courtyard and then just shoot him in the leg and handcuff him and then sean you found another one yeah there's that video of like three cops in riot gear huddled around and you could see one of them take out coke and like sprinkle it on his arm and the other one snorts coke off his arm. And then I think another cop comes in

and then also just snorts a line. And so they're just, the Chilean cops are snorting Coke before they go wail on student demonstrators. I think it's the military actually. The military, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, because early on he... But you know, it really does suck

when you get the drip while you're breaking a student's leg. You just get that uncomfortable feeling going down the back of your throat while you're just trying to party and enjoy the moment. At the beginning of the protest, like, Pinero was calling the protesters, like, enemies of the state and shit. And now he's completely changed his rhetoric. He's saying shit like you know the

chilean people have spoken so i'm going to rearrange my cabinet and uh for some reason that hasn't quelled the protests like originally the protest broke out i'm sure most people know this um but they broke out because of a jacked up subway fare um in a system that's uh crumbling and we don't know anything about that here in new york city but basically it started with student protests and immediately they brought the clamp down on them and so then more and more people started taking to the streets it was kind of uh um uh like the square in egypt i forget the name of that square but you know huh tahir square yeah tahir square in egypt um and eventually you know the grievances because the grievances run pretty deep uh everything from their pension system which is uh it's essentially privatized social security and a lot of uh dipshit uh neoclassical economists economists will say oh well the chilean model was a massive

success america should privatize its uh pension system and as we'll find out um sebastian and largely his brother are actually incredibly responsible for the horrible pension system that's currently in place in chile um they also are uh have the highest rate of student debt i think even higher than america right um they experiment with like vouchers and shit or some form of that yeah and like another thing or two things to mention is uh more than half the population lives on less than 500 us dollars a month so you know i mean something we've talked about is like in the united states uh the billionaires here it's it's very horrific income inequality but you can imagine a billionaire in a country where more than half of the people are on less than 500 a month us

dollars is insane i think they have the second highest genie coefficient in the world maybe after mexico yeah it's yeah just i mean it's awful you know economic repression and it's been really heartening to see videos like there's some great videos going around of um you know there's these water cannon trucks and uh some protesters are just in the videos they'll climb up on top of the trucks and yank the water cannon until it breaks loose and like the water starts coming out like the top of it it's essentially just um it's not directed at anything yeah they're just disabling it yeah and you know they're throwing paint at the windshields like in one of the videos where the guy rips off the water cannon um you can see as it's driving by people are also pointing laser pointers at the

driver it's nice just like in hong kong yeah yeah laser pointers are it's that's a real fun like protest tactic that's come to um dominate but one other thing on the pensions though you were telling us andy that uh they privatized the pension system but then the military did not go over to the private pension system yeah the military that forced the pension system, but then the military did not go over to the private pension system. Yeah, the military that forced the pension system at gunpoint on the populace after the coup, CIA-sponsored coup in 1973, still has government pensions. Right. That's the great thing about Milton Friedman economics is it's best imposed down the barrel of a gun. Yeah. That's that's when people really that's how, you know, people really want it.

And so. So these the fare increase was was going to be like three percent. Right. But he actually recently said he capitulated at least on the fares. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, people haven't stopped because, you know, once you get this. Yeah, that was just like the, what is it? The tip of the iceberg. Yeah. Yeah. But let's talk about Sebastian Pinera.

He was born in Chile in 1949. He was the son of Jose Pinera Carvalho, which my girlfriend, who actually, she was going to be on this episode because she's fluent in Spanish and knows a lot about South American politics, but she couldn't make it because of a family thing. But shouts out to Gabby for helping with the research on this. Yeah, she learned Spanish shortly after her family moved to South America in 1945. She's Jewish. Oh, okay. south america in 1945 she's jewish um she uh but she explained to me that 1939 is what you're saying a lot of these uh you'll see like people in south america they'll have like uh like sebastian pinera you know his last name is pinera but then after that name there will be uh another name and apparently that's their mother's maiden name. Yeah, where the fuck do they get off?

Two names is enough, people. You get two names and you get an initial. That's it. So his dad basically founded the Christian Democratic Party. It was one of the co-founders in Chile. And then around 1965, some Chilean left-wing newspapers were able to get a hold of some CIA documents from the Santiago. I think it might have been the Santiago. All of my sources were pretty much run through Google Translate for this. So, it was a bit difficult to piece together the exact context. Like Iran-Contra would be translated to Iran-against.

But yeah, Andy, you were telling us you found a bunch of different sources of where his wealth came from, from leftist newspapers that were shut down by Pinochet. Yeah, like El Ziglo, which is a left-wing newspaper. But they got a hold of some CIA documents in 2009 when Sebastian Pinera was running for president for the first time. Right. Or at least was running for president the first time he successfully became president and uh the documents indicated that starting in 1964 yes uh his father was working uh as an accomplice for the cia like it was listed in the actual cia documents and uh for those who haven't listened who who aren't familiar with a certain part of chilean history with the cia or haven't listened to our uh episode with uh jake flores um also about a pinochet guy uh julio

ponce larue uh in 1973 a democratically elected socialist uh salvador allende was deposed in a CIA-sponsored coup. We can even go before that. It kind of starts with, in 1970, Rene Schneider was the chief of staff of the Chilean military. He was a general. And he said, essentially, there were calls for the military to overthrow Allende in 1970 when he was first elected yes and so he said no the military is going to be apolitical we are not going to overturn democracy and then the cia

had him assassinated yes they literally paid i think 50 000 us dollars to his assassins and he was taken out yeah so he was killed for doing the right thing it's a very tragic story yeah and there's there was a whole um like there's a whole list of like steps that the CIA went through because and this is, you know, this has come out in the church committee and, you know, multiple sources that the Nixon administration and the CIA did not want a democratically elected socialist in, well, anywhere, because that would, you know, strengthen the image of socialism, that if they had a successful democratically elected socialism, that would spread socialism, which of course would undermine business interests. And so, the first, when Allende was first running for president, the CIA had what they called their tier one operation which was just to undermine him at the um quote unquote democratic level the first plan was to essentially either find a way to force him to drop out and um get his opponent elected right or uh just get congress to not

recognize his election. They have that form letter they sent to Martin Luther King Jr. and they just changed his name to Allende. We know about the affairs. You should do the right thing for your family and kill yourself. So the Tier 1 plan didn't work. Allende immediately won uh was very popular and so their next plan was to try to destabilize them so they first tried that first coup um and this is where uh uh panera's brother kind of come or not brother his father his brother comes in later his father

kind of comes into the picture because his father was working with the cia from 1965 and it's well established that once allende took power the cia uh and they and after they kind of couldn't get that first coup to go through what they decided they had to do was destabilize chile right um to the point where it uh the right-wing parties felt that it would be necessary to support the military in a coup operation. And so, what they did was, in Nixon's words, make their economy scream. And one of the things they did is they actually ran money to a lot of professionals, kind of business owners, to support them as they did capital strikes and professional strikes. And so, you know, these are kind of well-off, upper-middle-class people,

and the CIA is paying for them to go on strike to destabilize the Chilean economy. And I don't think it's a big stretch to say that if his father was working with the CIA at that time, that he was not involved in those operations um i mean i don't think it's a stretch to say he was involved in those operations yeah but counterpoint it is nice to see the cia supporting a strike fund this reminds me of uh like the manager strikes of the state oil companies in venezuela yeah in like 2000 which i'm sure the cia had nothing to do with um you know completely

different this is a grassroots organization yeah yeah it was bottom up over there so following allende's uh ousting basically they bombed the presidential palace uh stormed it and after giving a very good final speech um saying you know how he he believed in the people of Chile and how, despite all of these, you know, all this that's happening, he supports the workers and everything. And yeah,

it was a little awkward though, because he had to end it by saying, oh, I guess I'm getting the light. And then the orchestra started playing and then you heard a gunshot. Support my Patreon. There's a guy in the back holding his phone up. I gotta go.

It is creepy because the audio does end with a blast which i think is a bomb blast um but so do you think he took his own life or did he die fighting intruders in the building i i it wasn't until the or did both happen i don't think he was actually shooting at intruders, but it is confirmed that he took his own life. Though the people who saw him, like, you know, they heard the gunshot and then they went into the room and he was dead with an AK-47. He was given by Fidel Castro in his hands. Apparently it had like a little gold thing that says to my friend Salvador Allendeende achieving the same uh goals by different means but the people who saw that most of them um did not confirm the story that he shot himself because they didn't want to give any legitimacy to the dictatorship which is honorable and it wasn't until about 99 that um they actually came forward and confirmed that he did in fact shoot himself um so pinochet comes into power and he uh

he enacts milton friedman uh free market reforms and it was supported by a group of people called the chicago boys uh one of whom is a fellow by the name of uh jose panera who also named after his father um who is uh he went to harvard he's sebastian's brother and um so he i guess he didn't go to the university of chicago but everyone calls him a chicago boy um saltwater economics yeah and he became the head of the department of labor and mining and while there he was the architect of uh privatization of a bunch of the um privatization of the pension system uh which we mentioned earlier which is now a big source of the strikes um he was also he weakened unions by making it so they go oh shit freshwater economics sorry oh is there it's a term for oh for you versus you know by the lakes oh Chicago

um I think northwestern a couple others yeah while we're doing corrections I think Chile has the second highest GNA coefficient in the Americas is not in the world. But it is very significant income inequality there. And it's below Mexico but above the U.S.? I believe so, yeah. It is just above the U.S. And so, while he's implementing these reforms, you know, there's the union reform, which weakens unions to essentially make it so that people can only negotiate on the company level. They can't have like national union negotiations. I'm actually quite surprised that unions were able to survive the coup.

There's this great quote on Wikipedia, which was given by one of the economists, Paul Craig Roberts, who is known as the father of economics and uh he noted that uh chile was the first country in the world to privatize social security panera played the key role privatizing the pension system would have been enough to earn panera his place in history but he also saw the privatization of health care that's right which is just like the most this man could have already retired at the top. Yeah. He knew he could go higher. Fucking Jordan.

Three rings back to back. He also privatized water. Pinochet privatized water. Yes, yes. Which, you know, it makes it really expensive to spray water cannons at earthquake survivors when it's not considered a public good. He knew the people were thirsty.

Thirsty for change. They have to, like, take the fucking, what do you call it, the mountain, the Polish spring bottles, the plastic, and load them up in the water cannons because there's no public utilities to fill them with. Arrowhead. Yeah. The fucking CG water. utilities to fill them with arrowhead yeah or they start they start loading up with poland spring and it's like all right then they run out of that and it's arrowhead and they're like oh fuck this just like the fucking purest water to get aggressively sprayed with when you're trying to do a peaceful demonstration aggressively sprayed with when you're trying to do a peaceful demonstration.

Well, so the pension reform system that he implemented is especially interesting, because this is a big part of the protests. It had mandatory 10% contributions from workers, and no mandatory contributions by employers. And essentially, after Pinochet took power power and this was implemented um it was like people who were on the government pension system already were like heavily pressured to switch over to the private system and then every new person who joined the workforce had to go on the private system where again there was a mandatory 10 contribution um and then the uh heavily pressured by the military loading their guns yeah it they um just like uh they go into every fucking government bureaucracy and then they point at a helicopter that starts its rotors you mean yo you mean price signals

what's that those are those are just price signals so oh yes that's right that is the fucking efficient there's a lot of information in prices well it is like seeing a helicopter revving up it's like the fucking helicopters pinochet used to kill those people were covered with like pepsi ads and shit it's all privatized it is funny to see the uh protests in chile and you know the country's covered with advertisements like america so there's right you know people starting fires in the streets and in the back you see big signs like compact hui well it's worth talking about which is you know chile and hong kong are the two things libertarians and uh various right-wing economists always point to

as their major success stories. Yeah. And, you know, like I've tweeted about this and people push back like, oh, you know, Hong Kong or Chile, that's not real libertarianism. But it's like, OK, there's no existing actual perfect libertarian model. Yeah, because that would collapse even faster. Right. But this is what you all point to this is what milton friedman and john stossel made their videos about they talked about the chilean miracle they talked about absolute horseshit they talked about hong kong and it's like oh look your two case studies are both fucking falling apart yeah whereas like you know people on the left like they're not going to say norway or finland are socialism it's social democracy But this is what we point to as, hey, this is the closest that we've gotten.

And Finland has like has almost eliminated homelessness. There is no homeless population in Finland. So it is just interesting to me where at the exact same moment, the two case studies for libertarian economics are falling apart in a fiery blaze of mass popular demonstrations against these systems that were both imposed by dictatorships yeah yeah and on top of that like the the whole chilean economic miracle like in 1982 there was a massive like the bottom just completely fell out of chile and their economy was devastated but even before that during after the coup and the the you know the strikes leading up to it the cia funded strikes you know hurt chile's economy and even if in the sort of intermediary periods

you know there was an increase in gdp it doesn't mean anything if people at the bottom don't get anything from it. Like when people are becoming heavily in debt, like even there was a Planet Money episode on the Chicago Boys that was kind of like, I think it was supposed to make them look good. And they did an episode of in in their series they did an episode on chile and the uh the coup and at the end of it they were like yeah all these horrible things happen like you know they talk about victor hara getting his hands crushed before he was executed um he was the guitar player chilean woody guthrie yeah they crushed his hands so that he couldn't play guitar anymore he did left-wing protest songs yeah yeah it should be noted um apparently people Chilean Woody Guthrie. Yeah. They crushed his hands so that he couldn't play guitar anymore.

He did left-wing protest songs. Yeah, yeah. It should be noted, apparently people in the protest today in Chile have been playing his music every night. Oh, yeah. Which is very inspiring. And they're also waving flags with Salvador Allende on them. But Planet Money, they mentioned that also but now they have credit cards in chile of course and it was interesting that they left this in because at one point they're you know interviewing some hack who um is going through a translator talking about you know the

the boom and the modernization of the chilean economy and the at a certain point, the translator is just like, okay, well, I'm drowning in student debt. Like, he just, like, kind of unheard of for, like, a translator to jump in and, like, you know, give their own point while someone's being interviewed for, like, international radio program right and like even then like that that guy just couldn't handle you know just spreading this bullshit when you know chile is uh has horrible inequality and poverty yeah planet money is so insufferable they made a translator break character i'm so tired of you npr dipshit classes motherfuckers like okay i'm sorry i have to say something yeah um so back to these it's like making a mime break you have to be so annoying like to make a translator lose their shit on you but npr's plan and money managed to do it yeah but yeah no i mean like you were saying andy

like it's actually very familiar to the united states though it's even a more exacerbated version because like we said they have privatized uh social security pension system they have privatized health care they have a system kind of school vouchers where they have tons of student debt tons of medical debt and you know like we've said a couple times about 50 of the population lives on 550 us dollars a month so they're just getting crushed and then you know it's it's like any other piece of austerity the minor subway hike sets off is the spark that sets off this fire and then people see all these other people in the streets and they're like okay i'm getting out there too because i'm fucking sick of this shit. Yeah. Like a slogan I think is something,

it's not about 30 pesos. It's not a, it's about 30 years. They're talking about everything that's happened since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. And of course we should mention, uh, uh,

we haven't mentioned earlier, but they're still living under the constitution that Pinochet, the military dictator put in, in 1980. So that's what a lot of the people are calling for is not minor reforms let's scrap the fucking pinochet constitution and get an actual democratic constitution absolutely and i think also part of the reason that you don't see like these kinds of protests in america which probably has the most comparable economy to chile is that uh america the um kind of powers that be have been able to sort of lift up just

slightly the standard of living for americans essentially by exploiting countries like chile um like for example the uh chilean pension systems uh they're run by these private companies called uh afps and uh two of them are owned by american companies metlife and prudential and one of the aspects of the chilean pension systems is you know they're supposed to invest your pension and you know get returns but those returns are lowered to about the level of a savings account because of all the processing fees and so of course all those processing fees they go to the executives and administrators and in the case of metlife and prudential they're coming to america it's not dissimilar from like the new york state pension system oh yeah yeah where you use large large fiduciary services of bank of big of the biggest banks to do it.

Yeah. There's lots of fees there. There's nothing similar in your 401k. Make sure to not read that small text that comes on the sheet they send you every year. But actually, you know, on your theory as to why there's no mass protests in America, I'm just spitballing here, but something that made me think about is why the Koch brothers always oppose every single public transit initiative. It's like in America,

there's no public transit. So if you want to go mass protest, you got to sit in traffic for three hours. So it actually parking space, right? It does actually undermine solidarity when everybody can't just get on the Metro and say, go to the,

the, the center of downtown and say, we're fucking sick of it. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, the strikes are more

easily broken yeah when there's no public transit for sure yeah certainly i hadn't even thought of that yeah um that's interesting um and then another uh another aspect of um well one of the aspects of this pension system is it's kind of driven a lot of the chilean workforce apparently the chilean workforce half of it works outside of the pension system basically getting paid under the table or working um uh being self-employed uh probably because they can't afford the mandatory 10 contributions to these companies um but because of that they're just people who have to work until they die which again nothing like the united states um retirement brought to you by coca-cola incorporated

drink coke fresh so i guess till you die i guess we should turn to our boy uh sebastian himself um i did just want to rehash real quick we talked about this on the jake flores episode uh about julio ponce larue but it should also be noted a big part of um ayende and pinochet and all this is land reform and land reform is a running theme in most let's say left wing verse right wing at the bottom of it because unsurprisingly um you know poor people own very little land rich people own most of the land so just for any potential communist revolutionaries out there a very smart strategy the communist uh the soviets used in eastern europe was they

would do land reform because if you give the peasantry land then all of a sudden they're loyal to you they're loyal to your party and your program and um uh just to kind of rehash what actually happened in chile here uh they were doing land reform from about 1962 it actually predated allende but allende wanted to put it into overdrive allende said they're going to expropriate all land holdings of more than 80 uh hectares so everybody with more than 80 hectares had their uh was going to in the process of having their land expropriated and then given out to small farmers in parcels. Pinochet undid that, according to Gabriel Salazar. About 30% of all expropriated land during the land reform from 62 to 1973, about 30% was returned to its former owners

during the military dictatorship. Another 5% was auctioned. But also what happened was, because of these various reforms, according to a different study, the fruits of capitalism, modernization of Chilean agriculture, due to the lack of capital or credit

to invest in their lands, many smallholders sold their lands after the land reform was over after the land reform there was a process of reconcentration of land ownership so that by 1997 the land ownership was more concentrated than it had been in 1955 so predating all these land reforms in 1955 1997 land was more concentrated in fewer hands and so that's just something to kind of emphasize where like at the at the base of all this stuff, of course, what's, you know, a materialist view of history, but at the base of all this stuff, it's, it's about land and property and

capital and power and who has it and the Chilean model has really put very few, a lot of the resources into very few hands and one of the uh most glaring uh aspects of this is that there was a law passed under pinochet in 1984 that is it's called an anti-terrorism law which is total uh bullshit and what what the law does it's been exclusively used against the mapuche indians um and who i i guess probably largely are victims of the privatization of land and so you know they've tried to occupy land like get it back and so what the law says is it treats illegal land occupations and attacks on the equipment or personnel of multinational companies as acts of terrorism and subjects those charged to both civilian and military trials moreover it sanctions the use of anonymous or

unidentified prosecution witnesses and allows for indefinite detention for people labeled as being terrorists see pinochet was all about restoring rule of law you know anonymous witnesses and how they are synonymous with rule of law it's just disgusting how like i mean the the the night even passing in 1984 it's like it's too on the nose um but yeah like the long and short of this episode is uh sebastian pinera's brother his dad was on the cia payroll the cia brother was on the cia payroll they were both on the fucking cia payroll uh they uh helped implement uh the austerity and all the privatization programs. And then he becomes a billionaire, which we'll talk about right here, as to how he becomes a billionaire by being on the CIA payroll,

being in with Pinochet, and then he becomes the president after Pinochet leaves. Yeah. And also to wrap up on Jose, he now works for the Cato Institute in D.C., which shows how much love he has for the nation of Chile that he did so much for. So, Sebastian, he's a- It's really hard to work for the Cato Institute and be a bigger piece of shit than Murray Rothbard, so kudos to him. Sebastian, he's a younger brother of jose he uh murray rothbard at least kept the market for

children in theory as opposed to this guy who actually went and implemented it in the real world and uh yeah i wonder if he met epstein ever through his cia contacts so sebastian the the So, Sebastian, the myth of Sebastian Pinera is that he brought credit cards. His life story is he also went to Harvard. Apparently, Milton Friedman did some teaching at Harvard, even though he was based in Chicago. And Pinera did kind of take some classes or study under Milton Friedman in some capacity. And then he went on to become an economist in Chile in the late 70s. And the story about how he got his wealth is supposedly he managed to negotiate getting international visa cards in Chile. in chile and uh from that he made a lot of money and sold it to santander bank or something like that and you know cashed into uh the tune of 78 million and from there bought an airline and uh

television station and you know just spiraled into a burlesconi type uh political and uh wealth lifestyle uh the reality is that in 1980 he took a job at this bank called uh banco de talca and before i go into this uh this story uh it's worth noting that he has repeatedly claimed in public that, you know, he is against the dictatorship of Pinochet, that, you know, he thinks that it was awful. And he also, he tries to spin himself now. Like, if you look up videos of him, like English language videos, he's talking about the importance of fighting climate change. And so, he's kind of a good uh case study and how disingenuous those kinds of people can be but his uh in the in the region 80s he was he became a general manager at banco de talca which is a hundred year old was a hundred year old bank at the time and while he worked there uh in 1982 the bank uh collapsed uh it when the essentially what happened is that the peso was pegged to the dollar at first it had kind of a free floating exchange rate and then uh when

pinochet first took power then they pegged it to the dollar and uh at a certain point it became evident that the peso massively dropped in value and uh relative to the dollar and they it basically took the bottom out from the chilean economy in 1983 and uh caused their their worst uh recession since the great depression and at banco de talca uh what sebastian did and it's uh where i got this was from like apparently there were uh i mentioned there were leaked cia documents uh that kind of detail some of the things but a lot of these have also been confirmed um one of them by a former judge under pinochet uh banco de talca goes under and it's uh becomes immediately evident that it had a massive fraud they what they did is they lent out 250 million dollars while the capital reserves of the bank were only 40 million dollars king and then at the same time they had

uh the law in chile was that a bank could only lend out 25% of its capital. 25% capital ratio. Yeah. They had to keep. They went with 500% instead. Never let the Chicago school tell you that they don't believe in fiat currency. And so what they did with all this money they lent out is they created somewhere between 80 and 150 shell companies that only existed on paper and gave them almost as many as grub stakers llc almost

gave them uh completely non-collateralized loans because these companies don't exist uh they were again just on paper and then they had those companies invest in the bank sort of like the bearer bonds that we use to secure grub stakers llc exactly right now i'm holding them and i own grub stakers but if you hand i just handed them to sean now he owns it have you ever you watching the laundromat last night have you seen it sean no i haven't seen it yet oh it's like it's it's really cheesy but it's got like some good stuff in it yeah but then the ending is just the dumbest thing where meryl streep uh holding the script of the movie and uh they break the fourth wall yeah they break the fourth wall and then at the very last shot is her posing as

the statue of liberty uh which is yeah yeah like the beginning and the end of that movie were kind of disappointing yeah but i like the story yeah the story was it did it did a good job of talking about like all the fraud of the panama papers and uh it also taught me that antonio banderas uh can age he's he's old in that movie i like the idea i didn't notice because he was a b for uh nasa next for several years i like the idea. I didn't notice because he was a B for Nasonex for several years. I like the idea of grub stakers being owned by bearer bonds in a bank in the Cayman Islands. And one of our Patreon listeners figures it out and flies out to the account and then takes over grub stakers. We have to work for them.

I'm placing the bonds back in the safe. So our listeners know. So all of these shell companies, they quote, bought shares of Banco de Talca, essentially just pouring money into the bank. And it seems like part of this scheme was they would convert pesos while it still had the higher exchange rate, to dollars and then funnel the dollars into the bank.

And one of the interesting things is that the CIA documents noted that Pinochet himself had an account in the bank under the pseudonym uh jose ramon ugarte uh and from what i've been able to figure out they also another thing they did is that there were uh the central bank of chile had uh in order to kind of incentivize exports they would give certain financial incentives for companies to uh that carry out exports and so the bank also created a bunch of shell companies in panama and then recorded a bunch of fake exports to their shell companies in panama and it sounds fucked up but this is the basis of the entire current global financial system like this is how fucking amazon pays zero in federal taxes it's an open secret everybody fucking does this this is how ukraine and nigeria and take your pick of country the

elites and in chile of course pinochet and his cronies the elite smuggle millions of dollars out of the country and offshore and they fucking walk away with it yeah well what's what's especially so what's interesting is with this one is uh once everything came crashing down um as i'm sure pinochet expected because it it seems entirely clear that he knew that the pegged currency uh was about to fail um it there's no way he couldn't have known trying to like load the currency onto a helicopter throw it out and uh so the bank goes down and two of the guys who were involved in the scheme, Miguel Calaf and Alberti Dione, they serve three year prison sentences. But there's also a warrant that goes out for our boy Sebastian Pinera to get arrested. And as soon as he finds out, he flees the country and is a fugitive for 24 days

and during this time uh there are some back channel negotiations um where uh the minister of justice uh she's admitted to this uh actually recently when pinera was running for president the first time her name is uh monica uh madaraga. She stated that she was actually pressured by Pinochet to just grant him a pardon. And now our boy Pinera will claim, he claims repeatedly, he's amazing at the persistence of his ability to lie. He claims that he was completely absolved of any wrongdoing in

this case but what came out in the cia documents is that it was actually he went to the american embassy and then they found a way to shuttle him into argentina and then from argentina into mexico while the back channel negotiations were going on and Pinochet pressured the change. And what seems to be evident here is that, especially from Pinochet's account, is that once he realized that the Chilean peso was about to drop in value, you know, and completely destabilize the economy, if his inner circle, who ended up actually making a lot of money from this Banco de Talca issue, if they got economically devastated like the rest of Chile, it would destabilize his grip on power. So what appears to have happened is then they used these shell companies to convert a bunch of pesos into dollars,

funneled them back into the inner circle right before the whole thing collapsed and the cia details seem to indicate that you know they were completely if not they weren't probably weren't directing it but definitely supportive of it because you know they put pinochet into power and they certainly want them to stay in power yeah and uh well you were were saying paying off the military elites is a good way to maintain your grip on power. Exactly. They set up their own private exchange rate.

Yeah, they set up their own private exchange rate basically to hoard dollars right before the bomb fell out of the peso. Yeah, yeah. And so then that's the reason that the CIA helped our boy Pinera flee, and that's the reason that then pinochet helped him you know stay out of jail is all of that and of course because he was never uh because he was pardoned completely yeah he got to pocket all that money he made from that and that set him on his pathway to becoming a billionaire it's so great like so again the long and short of this

story is the guy who helped pinochet and his cronies steal millions of dollars got to be president because he helped Pinochet and his cronies steal millions of dollars. Exactly. And also the CIA helped. Yes. It's like, you know, again, it's not quite as bad as running Jeffrey Epstein, but they've been involved in some shady shit yeah i mean i guess you can say at least jeffrey epstein uh didn't execute 3 000 people in a month jesus christ and you know torture thousands more also he didn't kill himself definitely yeah so you know there's uh everything else i feel like pales in comparison to this just massive

fraud but like so the actual mechanism is uh uh sebastian pinera made a bunch of money off this fraud and then he used it to buy the credit cards yeah that's what like again the common article like andy was saying the common article is he brought credit cards into pinochet's chile and he's becoming a billionaire off that and that was actually negotiated by his brother it turns out and uh part of it was that american companies were able to set the regulations on how those cards were used of course again do not look into the cia connections here it is i mean like it's not surprising but it is fucked up how the cia has become and has acted as an arm of american business throughout the entire world it's if you have a country that is as privatized and as tied into business has the government and the business

as like enmeshed as america does then naturally their covert operations are going to be for the benefit of american businesses because that is the main mechanism of the american economy the ci for like developing south american countries and also the cia is just like a necessary node within the supply chain yeah yeah for a lot of businesses yeah and sean you were looking into the uh there's a cia uh former cia director yes who tweeted about it right we've offered one explanation of why there are massive popular grassroots protests in chile today as we record this but another one was offered by michael morerell, former acting director of the CIA. He was a CIA director, acting director in 2011 and also from 2012 to 2013.

He tweeted on November 1st and then almost immediately deleted it for some reason. But this is what the former CIA director tweeted. Quote, anyone who thinks the protests in Chile are driven by poverty slash inequality, as some would have us believe, need to watch this video. This is about Cuban, Russian, and Venezuelan interference. Shows the vulnerability of even a well-functioning democracy and economy to hybrid warfare. Well-functioning economy where... Democracy. Yeah.

I mean, if Jack Ryan taught us anything anything it's that venezuela is using their nukes to uh influence chilean policy i am sad that i don't get to watch the video now because he deleted that tweet oh there was a video too yes he said you need to watch this video it'll explain how you know russia is causing these protests which it's like look of course the russian intelligence agencies i'm sure are trying to do that but of course we do that shit which it's like look of course the russian intelligence agencies i'm sure are trying to do that but of course we do that shit too it's the fucking material conditions but just the fucking you have to look at the chilean agents who are subverting chilean democracy yeah as well it's also worth noting that uh michael morel he was uh director of the CIA from November 9th, 2012 to March 8th, 2013 under Obama. And

during that time, as the Syrian civil war was picking up, he was one of several intelligence officials to pressure Barack Obama to take part in a CIA operation called Timber Sycamore that was geared towards running guns to anti-Assad forces. And what ended up happening is that they just ran thousands and thousands of guns. And a lot of these guns got in the hands of a lot of jihadist organizations. And even beyond that, if a lot of these organizations, you know, they have a lot of guns, so they don't have a lot of money. They're just going to sell those guns. And there became a massive black market in the region for guns.

And it was found by some estimates that a lot of these guns, there'd be about a two-month turnover from those guns leaving the factory to arriving at ISIS. Oh, the new guns. Yeah, the new guns were all, you know, basically his scheme was arming ISIS and the Timber Sycamore was discontinued in 2017, which is about the time the bottom fell out for ISIS. I can't really comment on the operation. I do just want to say that I do like to know that we can still have badass operation names because, like, we do stupid shit like Operation Iraqi Freedom, but Operation Sick, what is it called? Timber Sycamore. Timber Sick, that's a pretty good Operation name.

Yeah. Operation Northwoods. I think we should call Grubstakers Operation Douglas Pine. Actually, I found it when I was... It's a good, like, secret weapons program name. There's a... If you go to the the twitter page on the chilean coup there's a little bar on the side where it's uh just a list of all the cia

uh coups and the most recent one is timber sycamore exactly this is why uh michael morell tweeted and then immediately deleted it because the fucking balls of a CIA director calling Chile, quote, a well-functioning democracy and economy, unquote, when it was fucking privatized to shit under the CIA's direction, it was looted to shit under the CIA's direction, and the democracy part was also overthrown by the CIA. You know, the fucking balls. And just one other thing on Michaelael morell uh just from military times he releases a memoir in 2015 and quoting from military times the uh former cia director

made a series of factual misstatements while defending the agency's harsh treatment of detainees in his recent book senate intelligence committee staffers assert in a 54 page document filed filled with filed with citations from cia records so this fucking dickhead releases a memoir which the fucking senate intelligence committee has to uh respond to with a 55 page document saying that he's full of shit because he lied about the torture program he lied about how waterboarding uh what's his ksm about how that got them all this vital information. And then they released, I think, an inspector general's report from the CIA saying that

waterboarding KSM didn't do shit. He also, this guy Michael Morrell lied to, Diane Feinstein was the head of the committee investigating torture. And he writes in his memoir about how, you know, I'm personally troubled by waterboarding, but we have to admit it's our most effective technique. When he had previously told the Senate, quote, I'm not in the weeds when challenged on specific details of the torture program. So he pretended he didn't know what the fuck was going on. He's a fucking asshole and he belongs in prison.

It's also worth noting that the torture program waterboarding was one of the more mild things. They routinely killed people. For instance, they would lock them in freezing conditions and then they would find them the next morning and they'd be dead from hypothermia. That's the stuff that still hasn't really made it to the general public

is how many people were just straight up killed by the CIA. But Andy, counterpoint, this is about Cuban, Russian, and Venezuelan interference. Yeah. But anything else on our guy Sebastian Pinera, future of these protests?

I mean, he's, hopefully he'll get shoved out of power and into a prison cell. How that's gonna happen, I don't know, but you know, just good luck to him. And I wish him the best in all his future endeavors.

If I were that guy, I'd be looking into a Swiss bank account and some sort of private chartered flight. He, he, oh, he was named in the Panama papers too. Of course he was.

So, you know, he's, he's definitely got a lot of money stashed away. I can't wait till, like, next month when he has to, like, flee the country and we just start seeing him in Williamsburg. Just, like, walking to do the podcast and we're like, hey, we did an episode about you last month. You want to come on for the follow-up? Yeah, he's going to be on CNN talking about how the republican solution for climate change is actually the most reasonable one so what is with this uh how exactly is he

overhauling his cabinet that's the latest thing with him right yeah at first it was saying that he was getting rid of his cabinet and then he's like i have fired 30 of my cabinet which okay so you've consolidated power. Yeah. Great. Yeah. You found the photo of him like fake helping in the earthquake, right? Oh, it's a photo of him falling down. I want to make it the picture where he's just, you know, he's climbing over some rubble and then his aid has to catch him as he collapses.

Part of like what the demonstrators got mad about. Again, he's worth 2.8 billion. And like when the demonstrations first broke out, we should mention at least 19 people have died in these demonstrations, minimum five of them killed by, uh, military police security forces. Um, but so when the demonstrations first broke out, he was eating at a fancy Italian pizzeria, which,

uh, you know, I don't know. It's just some real Guinea shit. He's also got some, you guys want to hear some Sebastian Pinara rape jokes? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So let's do a Pinara rape joke corner. This is like, he had to flee the country while Pinochet was in power to do a sold out show at Madison Square Garden as the Dice Man. Hickory dickory dock. Pina Shea's daughter was sucking on my cock.

Do you want to know what the difference between a politician and a lady is? When a politician says yes, he means maybe. And when he says maybe, he means no. And if he says no, he's not a politician. When a lady says no, she means maybe. When she says maybe, she means yes. And if she says yes, he's not a politician. When a lady says no, she means maybe. When she says maybe, she means yes.

And if she says yes, she's a slut. Another winner is, I suggested a very entertaining game. It was simple. All the women throw themselves on the ground pretending to be dead, and then we'll throw ourselves on top of the women pretending to be alive. What do you think, guys? What the fuck? Yeah. this is real this yeah these are real jokes rape jokes he told what where did he where was he saying this um it's hard to it looks like uh they were just like

from speeches or just like off the cuff this bullshit These were his old podcasts. Yeah. Jordan. We'll dug them up. He fucking ran for president. It's funny too. Cause he's got a, um, besides his, uh,

he's got two brothers named Jose and there's the Chicago boy, but the other one is just an absolute fail brother, uh, who looks like Sam Kennison now, but he's like clearly died dyed all of his hair black to try to look young but he wears like the hat has long hair and a goatee and he's a local nightclub owner and former musician like there's video footage from 1982 the time that his brothers were committing fraud and he's just on tv playing really shitty music i could so um i got one more sebastian pinera quote this is from forbes

so of course they do his best face forward quote the road to development is never paved it is full of obstacles and trap and traps it's necessary to avoid the christopher columbus syndrome where who never knew where he was going where he he got to, and the government paid all the expenses. So that's a little joke about government spending and Christopher Columbus, but also a rape joke. He also says to be able to share this development plan for the Tarpaka region, and we are going to apply the old and wise principle of the miniskirt that has to be long enough

to cover the fundamentals and short enough to maintain tension. This guy, like, like i don't know one rape joke you kind of excuse but this guy thinks about this shit a lot yeah he must have been like young and uh saw some chilean officers doing some shit or something yeah i mean he's he's definitely chile's burlesconi like no question um so except you know instead of mob connections he had dictator connections uh should be noted a un report from 2017 uh the richest one percent of chileans earned 33 of the nation's uh income i saw that and earn is definitely the wrong word there so uh i think that's uh it nearly half according to vox nearly half of chile's nine million strong workforce is now in debt so again debt overhang is like a real driver of this and uh you know i

mean it's good thing they have those credit cards i thought it was cuban agents and with that this has been grubstakers i'm andy palmer i'm steve jiffers uh i'm shampi mccarthy uh we've got a discord now so if you check us out on patreon you can hang out in the discord and uh you know andy will give you the other three hours of the Jordan Newells. I also want to thank Gabrielle Spunt, my girlfriend, for helping with a lot of this research and translating. She found the rape jokes. Andy, thank you for covering me for me because actually I wrote all those rape jokes. And then we just pretended that the Chilean president did and then assumed it's in Spanish. Nobody's going to look it up. All right. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Gabby.