| - There is a huge irony in a fatuous free-market fundamentalist like MN Gov. Tim Pawlenty taking his imbecile talking points to South America, which is where he's scheduled to be until Friday. That continent, especially Chile, the location of much of Gov. Gutshot's itinerary, provides a good deal of the subject matter for Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, published in 2007.
From p. 18-19:
This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story - that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies. The history of the contemporary free market - better understood as the rise of corporatism - was written in shocks. |
| Klein's taken a good deal of heat, including from progressives, for seeming to suggest that efforts at the application of the 'Shock Doctrine' worldwide were the result of some kind of overarching conspiracy. I don't buy the conspiracy thing either; I don't think corporatists are anywhere near smart enough to be capable of that. But this in no way diminishes the importance of her examination of how and why efforts to force free-market fundamentalism on largely unwilling populations have produced results so sorry, wretched, and inhumane. Chile's, among them.
One more key quote from the book for now (p.241).
Nor were these catastrophic results unique to Russia; the entire thirty-year history of the Chicago School experiment has been one of mass corruption and corporatist collusion between security states and large corporations, from Chile's piranhas, to Argentina's crony privatizations, to Russia's oligarchs, to Enron's energy shell game, to Iraq's 'free fraud zone.'
I'll be expanding on this from time to time this week. Specifically, on the loose, but significant, parallels between what the 'Chicago Boys' sought to accomplish worldwide, and what Guv. TBag's been trying to do in Minnesota. |
