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He was saying 'our wealth is our PEOPLE.' He said "Chile OWES the miners and other workers" SAFE WORKING CONDITIONS.
Workers CREATE wealth, don't ya know? You can have all the copper and all the gold or all the oil or all the whatever--including plant life, animals, FOOD--in the ground or potentially producible from the ground, but if you don't have PEOPLE with the willingness, the knowledge, the skills, and often the courage and endurance, to DO THE WORK necessary to turn resources into wealth, where are you? Hm. Nowhere.
I think this was a pretty amazing statement for a rightwing billionaire politician to make. Copper is NOTHING without workers. It has NO value. It is an inert, inaccessible thing deep in the earth. It takes courageous, reliable, strong, skilled people to go get it. Without them, Chile has NO copper "wealth."
This rightwing politician has LEARNED this, personally, over this two-month ordeal, and, quite clearly--I could tell from watching him all day--was deeply impressed with the courage, resourcefulness, resilience and value of these human beings who were trapped deep in the earth. I think he was also impressed with their families, who never gave up on them, who camped out in that barren desert, refusing to leave, for 17 days, before they knew that the miners were still alive, and then for two more months of the rescue effort. We'll see if Pinera keeps his promises to them, but I personally think that he was genuinely moved and that it changed him. What I respect him most for is being open to change. All the political opportunism aside--and I grant you, there was some of that-- I think that's what happened: This political opportunity became MUCH MORE than a political opportunity, to Pinera--to him, personally, as a human being.
Maybe he won't stick with it; maybe he will. But he now has the opportunity to bridge the deep divide between the have's and have-not's in Chile, and show himself to be--unlike so many other rightwing politicians that South America has suffered--a fair-minded leader of ALL of the people. He won't be the first rich man to do that. FDR was wealthy. So was JFK. But we don't have a lot of examples of it in this era--the "era of greed" that Reagan initiated and that Bush Jr. took to its horrible conclusion: vast robbery of the poor, here and elsewhere, and a corporate resource war, where hundreds of thousands were slaughtered or maimed, to steal their oil.
I don't know why you want to diminish this insight that Pinera gained, and was able to express. Whether a country has lots of resources, or no resources, its wealth is ALWAYS its people and what they make of their circumstances. And the best government is OF, BY and FOR the PEOPLE.
Frankly, I think that our own Democratic Party leaders have forgotten this. Pinera--culturally, politically, economically--was likely to make their same mistakes, including their OBLIVIOUSNESS to the impacts of globalized "free trade for the rich" on THE WORKERS. Maybe he will not walk off that cliff, like our Democrats have done, as the result of this experience of the VALUE of the miners as HUMAN BEINGS, who ARE "the wealth" of their country.
You seem to think the other way: "Gold" IS wealth, and people are expendable. I hope that that is not what you are saying. But you seem to be. Perhaps you would like to clarify. The notion that "'Gold IS wealth" is the horror of our era, in my view. And our redemption as a democracy and as a society will only come when we realize what our only true wealth is: each other. Our material survival and recovery of general prosperity depends on this. Without human labor freely given, and our collective effort to rebuild our economy and our communities, and our nation as a whole, all the "gold-plated billionaires" and all the weapons in the world, and all the oil and other resources that our corporations and war profiteers steal, will avail us nothing. Our society will collapse. The "great American experiment" will be over. Our "wealth" has absolutely nothing to do with money wealth or resources. Our wealth is our PEOPLE.
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