Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, should be required reading by every American. This book has really shook me up. It's done a major surgical restructuring of my brain-- the way I look at the world, at politics. That's because it puts things together, adds things up, explains patterns-- malignant patterns, the way the US, the CIA, corporations and monstrous totalitarian dictators have operated. It ties these despicable creatures and crimes to neocon globalist, free trade philosophies.
One other book that really reached me was Sinclair Lewis's IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, which describes how the US is taken over by fascists. I keep a 1935 copy of it in view on my computer workspace. When I saw the book SHOCK DOCTRINE, the cover looked familiar. But I let it go. Then, I glanced, while holding SHOCK DOCTRINE in my hand, at my copy of IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. I realized how similar the covers are. I'm dying to find out if this was intentional or simply a serendipitous visual accident.
I'm not finished reading the book yet. But already, it has touched me so deeply-- I have to write about it.
The SHOCK DOCTRINE shows you the "grids of power" within the "matrix" that corporate monsters have been operating within for decades, applying the neocon wetdreams of war criminal Milton Friedman, who took his economic theories and encouraged dictators and thugs to apply them fully, with the use of mass murders, tortures and disappearings. He made a science of it-- a science he was proud of, that the US and even major foundations funded and supported.
The world has been subjected to these ideas, and they have been promoted as brilliant, necessary ideas for the evolution of commerce. Instead, they are monstrous, horrific, terrible ideas that serve not humans, but corporations.
As I've said before, since the beginnings of the genre of science fiction, since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, writers have described the creation of monsters by humans-- monsters that turn on humans and kill. Some go beyond killing a person to killing whole groups, towns, cultures. Some literally terraform the earth, changing it so it supports the monster, at the price of human life. Some of these monsters enslave humans. Some destroy the earth or lay it to waste, so humans can no longer survive on it. Arnold Schwarzenegger played a terminator, then a rebel terminator, from a computer/robotic group that was attacking and attempting to destroy humanity.
I believe that this monster-- this terminator invention has been prowling the earth, destroying cultures, killing and enslaving millions. It came into existence several centuries ago, and now it has reached it's most powerful form ever.
I'm talking about the corporation. Small businesses can be quite benign. But the biggest transnational companies can be dangerous inhuman behemoths, capable of the most horrible atrocities.
The most powerful nations have signed on the the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and other similar globalist organizations that pave the way for these corporate behemoths. These organizations are run by un-elected, often anonymous people who can make decisions and decrees that are forced down the throats of people who think they live in democracies.
Klein's book is a huge best-seller, printed, off-the-bat, in seven languages. It lays out and documents massive crimes by Americans, by the CIA and by foreign subsidiaries of US-based corporations, including General Motors, Ford, ITT. Yet we see so little coverage of the book in the mainstream media. That's no suprise. They are part of the problem, and why I've morphed my language from calling them the lamestream media, which suggested failure to report and do the job, to corpstream media, which suggests intentional killing of the truth, in collusion with the massive corporations that control the mainstream media message.
The main story Klein tells is that the US has helped dictators, in dozens of nations, to create chaos and confusion using military coups, torture, mass killings and horrific repression of free speech and protest. They use these criminal actions to: -take over a country,
-drastically reduce government services,
-reduce or eliminate laws and regulations that regulate corporations,
-take national resources that belong to the people and sell them off, privatizing them, to corporations-- things like water, forests, schools, roads, armies
-destroy the middle class to take away their power.
They do these things to implement Milton Friedman's free trade, globalist theories as taught and promoted by the University of Chicago School of Economics. Friedman and his acolytes would consult with the worst of the torturing, murdering dictators, encouraging them to go ever further in destroying the middle class, in eliminating protections against corporate abuse. These University of Chicago economists are heinous criminals. They deserve nothing less than imprisonment in the darkest places, like Guantanamo. And with them, the heads of the corporations that have helped support these dictators, that have informed on union leaders-- they too belong in prisons for aiding and abetting torture, murder and, how would you describe destruction of nations, "nationocide?"
Naomi Klein calls this "disaster capitalism." The USA, often through the CIA, aided, even initiated, by support and advising and encouraging the dictators, some of the worst anti-democratic administrations. The USA engineered some of the stupidest coups that ended up creating some of our worst enemies. They do this without congressional support without "we the people" voting on these incredibly important decisions. And they lie and lie and lie to us, through the media through false testimony, false reports, totally fabricated news... that the corpstream media sells and flogs the public with until the dictators are seen as being the good guys and the democratically elected progressives are seen as dangerous socialists or communists who hate America.
They're doing it now with Chavez in Venezuela and the drums will start banging louder for the progressive leaders in Bolivia and Brazil as well. The right wingers, the fascists in the CIA, the corporatists-- they really hate the idea of the spread of democracy by the people. What Bush has sold and pushed has not been the development and birth and natural emergence of democracy. He has been selling the "shock doctrine" version of "disaster capitalism" forced "democracy" that is not at all real democracy.
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