More Political Ironies to Laugh Cry About

First of all I need to point out that I totally goofed in my summary of Marcel Claude's first video. I just went back and corrected it, but here's my explicit correction: in the last video Claude explained that the Chilean government says that the richest 10% make 31 times what the poorest 10% make. Claude provided a different, more accurate figure, which I at first thought was 38x disparity. Going back and watching the video again, I realize that he actually said 88x. That's the correction I wanted to make.

And since a discussion was generated on that last video, I'd like to take a second to follow up: El Comendador argued that the top 10% vs bottom 10% measurement was a bad way to measure inequality, but that in any case the US 10/10 disparity is 65x. Well, in Chile it's 88x by the 10/10 measurement, and by the World Bank's Gini Coefficient Chile is in the .50's, which means that Chile is decidedly one of the most economically unequal countries in the world, ranking alongside several African countries and more unequal than Bolivia.

Ricardo Lagos' presidency was, simply put, devastating for the poor and working class of Chile. Here are a few key political ironies:

1. A prominent former Senator and leader of Chile's Socialist Party recently said in an interview that Lagos was the best right wing president of the century. Yet Lagos had garnered the communist vote in order beat Juaquín Lavín, the right wing candidate, in a second round of voting. Upon winning, Lagos affirmed, "I have heard the voice of the people."

2. Still, he ended up acting the part of a perfect right wing president. Business soared, business leaders professed their "love" for Lagos while joblessness increased, more than any other president before him.

3. Furthermore, inequality worsened to extreme levels. At the start of his presidency, the richest 10% were making 91x that of the poorest 10%. That shot up to 148x by early 2006, the final months of Lagos' presidency.

4. In the 1960's Lagos wrote a book about socialist economic reforms called the Concentration of Economic Power. Today, he seems to have reversed whatever socialist ideals he once held, and recently proclaimed that two of the biggest business leaders in Chile deserve his admiration, as they are the "Forgers of the Fatherland".

This is the gentleman who the Communist Party bailed out.

5. Lastly, Claude serves a dose of optimism, calling for Chileans to continue dreaming of utopia, but more importantly demand their right to build a utopia. He quotes Juan Manuel Serrat and promises that in two weeks he'll come back with another installment of "Utopian Ironies to Cry About".

Needless to say, despite his constant allusion to tears and crying, the production quality, the music, the exaggerated formality and the performance - I found myself guffawing a few times. That's okay. It makes for an entertaining watch while digesting some pretty sad statistics.