The Chris Moeller Archives

The latest "shock"

In Naomi Klein's vital 2007 book "The Shock Doctrine," the author describes her subject ideology as the radical privatization of industry by government through war, torture, and disaster. Following the mid-century teachings of the influential economist Milton Friedman and his collection of academic acolytes at the Chicago School of Business, the leaders of nations create or take advantage of economic crises, wars, and natural disasters by pushing through radical, authoritarian, anti-democratic, and then, by necessity, bloody privatization reforms in their wake. To the neoliberals (or neoconservatives, as they're known in the U.S.), there's no role for democratic government on the globe except in its obligation to enforce the corporate contracts that allow crony capitalists to loot national treasuries.

The economic "shock doctrine" has taken root now all over the world. It's responsible for the rise to power of the terrorist, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, in Chile during the 1970s, the Falklands War in the early '80s, the financial collapse of the Asian markets during the 1990s, the starving and destruction of the democratic social reform movement in Russia and Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union (a kind of anti-Marshall Plan for Moscow), the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the subsequent transformation of the authoritarian Chinese Communist government into an authoritarian Corporatist government, the United States' illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and on a local scale, the move to cleanse New Orleans of its public education and public housing systems following the disintegration of the city's levee system.

The western media continues to be, by and large, complicit in promoting Friedman's distorted ideology, even when the economist is three years cold in the ground and even after Klein has exposed and so thoroughly catalogued the ideology's vast failures when put into practice. Just this morning, the New York Times editorial page endorsed a radical shock therapy for Afghanistan in the form of handing over the country's economic redevelopment to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Asian Development Bank. Translation: To give the West total autonomy in raping Afghanistan of its natural resources.

This is how the model was set up to work and you can walk into any legitimate bookstore in America and find Klein's book on the shelf-- install a dictator (in this case, Hamid Karsai), pilfer first the relief funds, then its natural resources, make the region safe for corporate expansion, and then enslave the nation in crippling debt to the West. Chile. Argentina. Bolivia. South Africa. Poland. Russia. Iraq. Afghanistan.

posted by CM @ 5:33 PM