Chile/New York: Similarities Between Occupy Wall Street and the Student Movement · Global Voices
Evan Fleischer

This post is part of our special coverage #Occupy Worldwide.
Photo by mar i sea Y on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Despite  81 million unemployed youth in the world, “Only 4.4 percent of global  income is spent on education and a fraction of that on youth  unemployment,” Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown writes in an article  called, “Give The Kids Jobs!”
This  can serve as good a tip-off as any as to why Chile is Chile. It spends 4.4% of its GDP on education, below what the UN suggests for  developed countries (7%), and why – as the President of the American  Federation of Teachers pointed out in a previous interview with the  writer – Chile’s results “have not been impressive — at least as  measured by PISA,” a form of international testing that puts them second from the bottom of 56 countries, cushioned only by Peru.
For the past five months, Chilean students have been actively responding to this, which Global Voices has documented (see: October 12th, August 10th, and more.)  As American media outlets begin to come to terms with Occupy Wall  Street (who are barrelling forward at a rapid clip), they can look at  the texture of what’s happening in a country where — unlike Egypt and  Tunisia — there is neither a Dictator nor an infrastructure gap, but  inequality, inequality, inequality.
In a blog post for the Harvard Business Review published during the first week of Occupy Wall Street, James Allworth postulated that the real choice at hand was a choice between capitalism and democracy and how the friction between the two would be resolved.
That friction — and that issue (Chile’s wealth distribution ranks among the world’s worst)  — is manifesting itself within the call for free education. As of  2009, only 27% of Chilean students who could be enrolled in educational  institutions were enrolled. No new public universities have been built  since Pinochet. Schools are funded locally, which means the quality of  the school depends on the monetary quality of the area. More Chileans  are going to Argentina for school because it’s cheaper.
Photo by rafa2010 on Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
The  end game for the middle class can either follow one of two routes: stay healthy and fine and avoid the idea of an end game  altogether, or follow what Elizabeth Warren has been tracking, most notably in The Two-Income Trap.
Though income-wages have been stagnant for the past forty years in the United States, income volatility has occurred with a ninety percent frequency for a family with two children between 1970 and 2003.
A few things constitute income volatility — and it can be found across borders.
In Chile, blogger Ricardo Acuña writes that one can pay for their groceries on their credit card in  installments. In 2009, the median income was listed at 735,503  pesos/1,570 dollars per month.
La Polar — the fourth largest retail company in Chile — had  unilaterally renegotiated credit card arrangements with 418,000 Chileans  for six years. The New York Times reports that “annual interest charges can top 220 percent and consumers cannot seek bankruptcy protection.”
The Times continues:
…  consumer debt rose by 254 percent, to roughly $34 million, between 2001  and 2008, the debt-to-income level topped 70 percent at the end of  2010, according to the Central Bank.
And  since there is no bankruptcy protection, Chileans have to worry about  falling on the Dicom, something which is — essentially — a credit  agency for people: if you have bad credit, you’ll be blacklisted from a  job and find it harder to get a loan.
The economic health of a middle class family matters. Eliminate  economic malfeasance and it is safer for the family and safer for the  country in which they reside. As Paul Krugman has noted, anything that  inflates income inequality — meaning: anything that shrinks the middle  class by widening the gap between the rich and the poor — could  seriously provoke — and be an indicator of – a financial crisis. Attack inequality and you attack risk.
Anyone familiar with the #OWS #needsoftheoccupiers hashtags will see an instant rapport when Shalini Adnani walked to the University of Chile:
A  sign at the entrance urged for help: “We Need (education): Sheets,  toilet paper, liquid soap, soap dish soap, brooms, paper towels,  deodorant, cardboard, any games, and love.”
Adnani continues:
But  as I walked inside students welcomed me with the creativity that  defined the student movement. A man dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow with  a Jolly Roger flag hanging from his belt holds my chin with the tip of  his cutlass humorously asking for identification.
…
Students  continue to educate classmates and other Chileans asking trivia  questions about Chilean history on a microphone … Enthusiastic  schoolgirls sat in a circle in a ‘literature of the dictatorship’  workshop where students partaking in strikes and occupation of schools  continued to learn and explore their interests despite the suspension of  classes … The zeal students shared for knowledge was ever-present.  Flyers for different kinds of workshops — film, environmental policy,  theater, and education itself — were topics students themselves studied  and taught each other.
In the “Acuerdo Social por la Educación Chilena,” a “Social Agreement for Chilean Education,” which was written by the students, one paragraph reads:
Esto  implica entender la educación como una inversión social y no meramente  individual, necesaria para la batalla contra la desigualdad y el alcance  de la libertad y la justicia social.
This past Sunday, October 8, The New York Times wrote:
At  this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down  that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to  create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people. On  one level, the protesters, most of them young, are giving voice to a  generation of lost opportunity.
In an interview with Harald Beyer,  leader of the student movement Camila Vallejo — explaining why the students were protesting — said,  simply,
“La democracia no se ejerce necesariamente una vez cada cuatro  años en una urna.”
Photo by Peter Woodbridge on Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
This post is part of our special coverage #Occupy Worldwide.