Privatizing Pensions: The Transnational Campaign for Social Security Reform

By Mitchell A . Orenstein

Most Americans know of President George W. Bush’s 2005 proposals for new pension reforms to privatize Social Security, but few are aware of a conversation that took place on September 11, 1997, between then Texas Governor Bush and José Piñera, a former Chilean Secretary of Labor and Social Security. Piñera is an internationally known advocate of private, individual pension savings accounts who led the effort to replace Chile’s social security system with individual accounts in the late 1970s and early 1980s under the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet’s regime was highly controversial—as reviled by the left for its…

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