Wednesday, September 26, 2007

City-State Halliburton

I've come across some interviews of Naomi Klein, whose new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, debunks the assumption that free markets go hand in hand with free societies. She uses the metaphor of torture to analyze how radical free market types use shocks and disasters to create free market zones. Shock events like natural disasters, wars, and revolutions leave a population acting as though it has been tortured, left feeling weak and without a stable identity. It's been part of the Chicago School's program to take advantage of the periods following these shocks to rid a society of its social programs and regulations. They've used this scheme to destroy so-called mixed economies in order to establish pure free markets: ones in which toys are made with lead, for example, or dog food contains melamine or a private security company like Blackwater can massacre civilians.  She claims that it was utilized extensively in South America, like in Pinochet's Chile, and is now being used in Iraq. Here's a short film she made with Alfonso CuarĂ³n, the director of Children of Men.

One can make the case that the Bush administration also tried to do it in the U.S. following 9/11. Remember Bush pushing an "ownership" society? It probably isn't going away. Some days it seems the only thing that can save us from Terror are the many contractors hired by Homeland Security.

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