[This goes hand-in-hand with SusanG's current open thread commentary on Ehrenreich's suggestion that we should blame companies and individuals instead of "the economy" for our financial woes. If you want to know who is looting our standard of living and how, read Naomi Klein's book.]
I'm almost done with The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, and it is one of the most important books I've ever read. You will literally sit there with your jaw on the floor for hours. It is absolutely as Anthony Shadid suggests, "nothing short of a new paradigm for understanding politics."
The book is a study of the Chicago School of economics and the (Milton Friedman)ite purist free-market doctrine as applied to South America, Eastern Europe, China, Russia, and now Iraq & the Middle East.
In each instance there is some factor of shock: (CIA-orchestrated) coups d'etat in Bolivia and Argentina, the rise of Walesa and the Solidarity movement in Poland, the 9/11 attacks, during which goverments quickly enact "shock therapy" economic policies while a country mourns, fears, and is looking in the political direction (because government and economics are wrongfully thought to be mutually exclusive).
The economists seize the moment of shock and awe to liquidate public assets and sell them off to the private sector, causing mass poverty, unrest, national defecits (because tax dollars fall into private overseas bank accounts and ventures), and creates a small group of billionaire multinational CEOs who monopolize the countries' wealth and markets. Dissidence is squelched by "disappearances," secret prisons, suspention of habeas corpus and gruesome human rights violations, torture, and electric shock-- which Klein claims is simply a microcosm of the force needed for these seemingly purist, "scientific" economic policies to really work.
The rise of what Klein calls the Distater Capitalism Complex took off, and never was there a better example of how collective shock can be manipulated, than in the case of Iraq, where American shock after 9/11 allowed the Bush administration to hand itself (at the cost of the Constitution and the Geneva Convention) unhindered authority to run its private, for-profit "War on Terror."
Using American tax dollars and borrowing unprecedented sums, the Bush administration depends on the public sector for soldiers and weapons. Everything else is outsourced to private corporations with little to no competition. As in before, dissidence is squelched by unlawful arrests and detentions, private-run unmonitored surveillance and offshore secret prisons, human rights violations (at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib: torture, including sensory deprivation, waterboarding and electric shocks); a newly made handful of billionaire CEOs have arisen, whose companies have/have had sitting Bush Administration cabinet members on their Boards of Directors, who see no difference between public and private ventures.
Klein has a firm understanding of Milton Friedman's doctrine, and sites from hundreds of articles, declassified government documents, and former torture victims' personal accounts to write a terrifyingly enlightening piece of investigatory journalism.
READ THIS BOOK, Y'ALL. You can order it here. I swear to the baby Jesus it's worth the $18.48.