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Naomi Klein's new book identifies events where multinational attempt to railroad their way into an environment of 'disaster' (war in Iraq, revolution in Chile, post-Katrina recovery in the American South) to implement deals, subsidies, and policies that would not be acceptable if the disaster had not happened.
There are some good points there but let's not over-ascribe intelligence where there is none, like alot of conspiracy theories do.
My dad works in government contracting and he's a bit schocked that the current US government rebuilding Iraq is so much influenced by ideology (and he's a Republican but he's definitely a moderate). He's told me how much problems he has with the fact the US is trying to dictate to Iraq how to run their country, especially their economy. In Iraq before Saddam's fall, nationalized companies were an important source of employment, and created needed stability so that you didn't have lots of unhappy people joining militias. But now the US is dictating to the Iraqi government based on "free-market" ideology, even if it disrupts the economy and creates unemployed people who join militias. All in the name of free-market, right-wing ideology, no matter how inappropriate.
Also in Iraq it is common to take the hottest days of summer off and for people to take the mid-day off from work. Alot of Americans over there that are new on the ground or insulated from the locals don't get this, oblivious to the fact that it is a cultural response to 130+ degree temperatures in the height of summer.
See also the reviews (amazon.com and elsewhere) of the book "World on Fire" by Amy Chua. I saw this author interviewed about the book years ago on C-SPAN. It is one of the more interesting topics I've seen addressed by serious journalists.
From the Amazon.com entry for this book:
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From Publishers Weekly [review:]
A professor at Yale Law School, Chua eloquently fuses expert analysis with personal recollections to assert that globalization has created a volatile concoction of free markets and democracy that has incited economic devastation, ethnic hatred and genocidal violence throughout the developing world. Chua illustrates the disastrous consequences arising when an accumulation of wealth by "market dominant minorities" combines with an increase of political power by a disenfranchised majority. Chua refutes the "powerful assumption that markets and democracy go hand in hand" by citing specific examples of the turbulent conditions within countries such as Indonesia, Russia, Sierra Leone, Bolivia and in the Middle East. In Indonesia, Chua contends, market liberalization policies favoring wealthy Chinese elites instigated a vicious wave of anti-Chinese violence from the suppressed indigenous majority. Chua describes how "terrified Chinese shop owners huddled behind locked doors while screaming Muslim mobs smashed windows, looted shops and gang-raped over 150 women, almost all of them ethnic Chinese." Chua blames the West for promoting a version of capitalism and democracy that Westerners have never adopted themselves. Western capitalism wisely implemented redistributive mechanisms to offset potential ethnic hostilities, a practice that has not accompanied the political and economic transitions in the developing world. As a result, Chua explains, we will continue to witness violence and bloodshed within the developing nations struggling to adopt the free markets and democratic policies exported by the West.
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See also the reviews (amazon.com and elsewhere) of the book "World on Fire" by Amy Chua. I saw this author interviewed about the book years ago on C-SPAN. It is one of the more interesting topics I've seen addressed by serious journalists.
Chua is not actually a journalist (law professor at Yale), but her thesis in World on Fire was both apt and startlingly well set out. Her more recent book is Day of Empire, and it may be even more apt, setting out a survey of the fates of empires past that have set out on paths of social and economic exclusivity. I doubt that it would be very well reviewed over in the Immigration sub-forum, but with the paranoia of nativism and other anti-immigrant sentiment swirling about, the book offers a perhaps important cautionary by putting such ideas into a relevant historical context...
Well, maybe journalistic, maybe legalistic. Her undergraduate work was in economics with the JD added on, and I think that progression is evident in her work. Methodical and constrained by the evidence, but ever focused on polishing the tenets of the case she is trying to make. Very impressive.
To get back to Naomi Klein, all those right-wing thinkers who believe that the likes of Friedman, Hayek, and Leo Strauss have delivered to them the infallible gospel of how the world really ought to work ought to screw up enough faith in those beliefs to go off and read The Shock Doctrine. The more general aspects of Klein's thesis have been covered before, but it might be informative to some to see their doctrines tested against a background of events that they are likely to be familiar with...
If we ever complete the loss of our economic independence and political sovereignty it will be to the cabal of the international finance kleptocracies looting the world. First they stole the savings of smaller countries and now they are working on us.
Read blowback" by Chalmers Johnson for several examples of how the world of international finance, under our military protection, fleeces several economies. No wonder the world despises us.
I noticed that during an interview (can't remember where now, I'm feeble) Where Naomi Klein pointed out that most of these "shocks" of the shock doctrine were due to economic causes as opposed to others. However, this one is on my to read list if for no other reason than the plausible logic that comes from the premise of the book.
Saganista, if I am not mistaken, didn't also the Straussian crowd make mention of the need for a "new Pearl Harbor" type incident in order to employ their manifesto of global hegemony?
Saganista, if I am not mistaken, didn't also the Straussian crowd make mention of the need for a "new Pearl Harbor" type incident in order to employ their manifesto of global hegemony?
I don't think we can blame that one on Strauss, but the Straussians and fellow travelers at PNAC might be directly implicated...
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