Related Stories
Bleakonomics
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: October 12th, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Stiglitz-t.ht...
The Shock Doctrine is [Naomi] Kleins ambitious look at the economic history of the last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world. Disaster capitalism, as she calls it, is a violent system that ... requires terror to do its job. Extreme capitalism loves a blank slate, often finding its opening after crises or shocks. Klein compares radical capitalist economic policy to shock therapy administered by psychiatrists. She interviews Gail Kastner, a victim of covert C.I.A. experiments in interrogation techniques that were carried out by the scientist Ewen Cameron in the 1950s. His idea was to use electroshock therapy to break down patients. Once complete depatterning had been achieved, the patients could be reprogrammed. For Klein the larger lessons are clear: Countries are shocked by wars, terror attacks, coups dtat and natural disasters. Then they are shocked again by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy. People who dare to resist are shocked for a third time, by police, soldiers and prison interrogators. Klein offers an account of Milton Friedman she calls him the other doctor shock. In the 1950s, as Cameron was conducting his experiments, the Chicago School was developing the ideas that [dominate capitalist planning today]. She quotes the Chilean economist Orlando Letelier on the inner harmony between the terror of the Pinochet regime and its free-market policies. Letelier said that Milton Friedman shared responsibility for the regimes crimes, rejecting his argument that he was only offering technical advice. Letelier was killed in 1976 by a car bomb planted in Washington [DC]. For Klein, he was another victim of the Chicago Boys who wanted to impose free-market capitalism on the region. In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the war on terror was a war against all obstacles to the new order, she writes.
Note: For highly revealing, verifiable information on government mind control programs, click here.
Related Stories
Latest News
Key News Articles from Years Past
