TheMillerCircle.org

Today, Naomi Klein’s new book “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism“ was released. My guess is that most of you will not have quite put all of the things together that she does in her important new analysis and history of the free market economy. An early interview with her discussing the book is available through Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. The basic premise of her book is that the free market economy that was brought into democracies with Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and South American Countries, particularly Pinochet in Chile, was achieved under a carefully conceived plan designed by Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of Economics. His idol was Friederich Hayek, who wanted the government to do very little and instead have everything controlled through an open free market. But Friedman realized that the changes the free market economists wanted to impose, were rejected by most democratic societies, as destructive to their interests. Thus, Friedman devised the idea that, in order to achieve the free market economic reforms he advocated, one had to shock societies, and when they are in a massive state of “shock and awe,” whether from economic disasters, violence or natural disasters (Katrina), they were more susceptible to accept what would otherwise appear as a radical, excessive economic reform. Klein remarks that today everyone sings the praises of those who implemented these “reforms,” but she forcefully points out that very few in this country have made the connection that these reforms could only have happened with the violence that was generated to shock the culture into accepting them. Cultural shock was part of the plan for implementing market economies into the democracies that opposed them.

Klein points out that Pinochet, who is still lionized in the Washington Post (except for the violence), could not have introduced his free market reforms (through the “Chicago Boys” of Chile who studied under Friedman in Chicago) without the violence and fear that he imposed on Chilean citizens, through his murderous tactics against the left. She describes how the CIA funded the methods of depersonalization that were developed at McGill in the 1950s and continue to be applied to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
I urge you to listen to the interview with Naomi Klein and then read her book. It’s on the top of my reading list, which means it had to leap frog over many to get there. Naomi Klein wrote the definitive article about Paul Bremer’s attempt to force the free market reforms on Iraq, and how the complete failure of this tactic had much to do with the beginning of the insurgency, as Iraqis could no longer sell their own goods in their own country because Bremer’s “new economy” allowed cheaper goods to enter Iraq. We criticize Bremer for releasing the the Iraqi Army and disbanding the civil service. But his real crime, perhaps the single most dramatic cause of the current violence was his attempt to instantaneously convert Iraq into the global model of a free market economy.

RFM