Posts Tagged ‘bachelet’

President Michelle Bachelet gave her support Tuesday to a bill that would repeal the Copper Reserve Law. The Copper Reserve Law, a relic of the Pinochet dictatorship, guaranteed that 10 percent of all sales made by the state-owned CODELCO copper company will be given to Chile’s Armed Services.

Bachelet was flanked by Finance Minister Andrés Velasco and Defense Minister Francisco Vidal at the ceremony and the bill is expected to pass in Congress this week.

The law, initially imposed in 1958 as a 15 percent tax on mining profits, changed to a 10 percent tax on total sales from the state-run copper exporter CODELCO during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990).

Abolishing this law would “free CODELCO of the burden that… has affected the valuation of the company and its risk rating,” Bachelet said. “This, combined with the reform of the corporate governance of CODELCO, will reinvigorate it as an actor in the international mining industry.”

The law also overhauls the military finance system, and has won support from military leaders. The armed forces would receive its funding from the state general fund, rather than the current mix of general fund and copper revenues, and would be built around a 12-year plan broken into four-year segments.

“We are quite satisfied with the replacement of this law, and we believe it can give us a peace of mind in the medium and long-term,” said NavyAdmiral Edmundo Gonzalez.

Army Commander in Chief Óscar Izurieta agreed, adding, “Defense cannot be funded or planned on a year-to-year basis.”

CODELCO, which was nationalized under President Salvador Allende in 1971, is the largest copper exporting company in the world. CODELCO earned more than US$23.3 billion between 2006 and the first half of 2009, US$4.2 billion of which went to the military.

Spending by the Chilean military has at times heightened tensions with Peru, who, along with Bolivia, fought a war with Chile in the 1870s.

Peruvian President Alan García expressed pleasure with the change, according to Peruvian newspaper El Comercio, although he remains doubtful that it will provide the transparency of military spending that Bachelet promises (ST, Sept 9 ).

SOURCES: LA NACIÓN, EL MERCURIO, EL COMERCIO, CODELCO

By Daniel Zarchy ( editor@santiagotimes.cl)

Tuesday, 01 September 2009

Backed by Finance Minister Andrés Velasco and Education Minister Mónica Jiménez, President Michelle Bachelet signed a new law Monday to provide retirement incentives for workers at public universities.

The new legislation looks to “renew” up to 22 percent of the academic staff and 12 percent of the administrative staff through a bonus equal to one month’s salary paid for every year of work, up to 11, upon voluntary retirement.

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Swine flu (AH1N1) continues to plague Latin America despite early hopes that the crisis had already peaked, the Ministry of Health (MINSAL) said last Tuesday. There are 11,860 confirmed cases of AH1N1 in Chile, including 1,022 deemed serious. The virus has already claimed the lives of 96 people in Chile.

In mid July Health Undersecretary Jeanette Vega predicted a drop in the incidence of swine flu. At the time there were 40 deaths out of 10,900 confirmed cases.

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Conservative presidential candidate Sebastián Piñera’s economic proposals range from misguided to erroneous, Finance Minister Andrés Velasco said in an interview published Wednesday in the daily El Mercurio.

Velasco, one of President Michelle Bachelet’s few ministers to have held onto his job since the 2006 inauguration, and regularly the most popular member of the administration aside from Bachelet herself, defended the government’s stimulus plans and criticized Piñera’s plans as either already in place by the government, “factually incorrect” or simply “inexplicable paradoxes.”

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Today was our last day of ILP, and they surprised us with an army's supply of empanadas.

So a few things, and the first and probably most important content of this post are the results of my trip to the doc. Details to come, but the crux of it is: I do not have pneumonia, I do not have bronchitis, I do not have swine flu. What I have is nothing new, just a particularly enflamed pair of lungs afflicted with asthma, and the mixed bag that goes with that. More later.

But on to more interesting things. I spoke a bit before about the notion of “modismos,” of slangy parts of speech that we’re surrounded with. Some we’re being taught to fit in and be able to understand, and others people are starting to pick up on their own, chief among them being the dropping of “s” sounds. At the time, I couldn’t figure out why it set me off so much, why it bothered me much more than it should, until I realized the truth: I’m a word and language snob, even (especially) in English. And while I’ll drop a “brb” as quick as the next gargoyle, I’ve tried to make a strict rule of never contracting my speech so much that it makes my sentences hard to read. At times that takes the form of using punctuation for things like facebook messages or texts, and never writing a sentence like “what r u doing?” Call me an elitist if you want, I can take it. I just never saw the point of doing anything that would make compromise my ability to communicate clearly. (more…)

Hey all,

I’m a little sick, and I’ve taken the last couple of days off from school, so I figure I may as well try to do something productive while I’m laid up and update this thing. Luz and Andrea have been fantastic, reinforcing that a mom is a mom, wherever you go. Luz has been taking my temperature and otherwise taking great care of me, and has been very comforting in what could otherwise be really hard: being sick and away from everything I know.

The last couple weeks have been pretty interesting, as we’re two weeks into the Intensive Language Program. The students were split up into 5 classes, split between three levels: intermediate, intermediate/advanced and advanced, and have class for about 4-4.5 hours per day. Typically on Mondays and Wednesdays we watch something as a group for the second half of the day, and we’ve seen a (more…)