One thing I noticed in Warsaw was the emptiness of store shelves. Through our interpreter, I asked one store keeper how I would go about ordering a toothbrush if I needed to replace mine. "We put you on our list," he told me, "and when they come in, we contact you." This is the result of central planning, a process that stifled production during the entire Soviet experiment. As I walked down street after street during our state-sponsored tour, I couldn't help but notice the empty store shelves in every shop and the scarcity of selection. I knew then that the Soviet example, as it applied to Warsaw, Poland, at least, was a total sham and couldn't survive much longer. There was no way that people would accept such a dramatic lack of goods even if their social needs were being taken care of, for the most part, by the state.
When the Polish government fell to the rising tide of civilian outrage, American Shock Doctrine worked quickly to take full advantage of the disaster felt by the Poles. Naomi highlights the events very well and explains sequentially the major steps that took Poland from a leading Eastern Bloc nation to an Eastern Bust nation.
Here, she should have contrasted with the other Eastern Bloc super power, East Germany, when they were eventually folded into modern Germany. Germany felt barely a strain when it brought in East Germany in the early 90s. Obviously, the net goals for the two events differed dramatically. Poland represented nothing more than another heaping of money into the coffers of the modern day robber barons, while East Germany was the culmination of a two-generation struggle to reunite a country. A contrasting viewpoint would have been good on Naomi's part.
Nevertheless, Naomi amply demonstrates that the country-saving Solidarity movement of Poland became an economic disaster in large part due to their allowance of Friedman's shock troops as administered by American foreign policy under President Reagan. Once that doctrine took hold of Poland's economy, the Solidarity movement was dead meat. Their overwhelming support for Lech Walesa and his group slowly ebbed during the 80s as Friedman's Shuck and Jibe drained the country of nearly all of its life-sustaining ability. Naomi's presentation is in-depth and well researched.
The Russian debacle is equally intoned. The Friedman connection is correctly focused here as well. I appreciate Naomi's demonstration of how the chronology of events superseded the hierarchy of rulers. It wasn't just that Gorbachev tried to switch from a Communist to a Capitalist system too fast, but that once the tentacles of the Shock Doctrine took hold, the real location of power could be found thousands of miles away in large skyscrapers among men who aren't even citizens of the USSR let alone speak the language. They dictate policy, full stop.
Here again, a contrast with the broken system that was the Soviet Union beforehand would have been a nice indicator of where that country was headed economically, which is precisely what gave the world financiers the foot in the door. Also, a contrast here with the economy of Cuba, a country that not only endured the collapse of its biggest trading partner, but had also endured 30 years of US economic embargo from an American system that spent more money watching the maritime activity of Cuba than it did fighting terrorism the whole time.
Mao Are you?
Of course, a study of the Shock Doctrine would be incomplete without mentioning its effects on the continent where about half of the world's population resides. Ms. Klein does a good job of exposing American hegemonic desires with her work on the late 20th Century history of the Mideast. She does a good job explaining the South Korean and Indonesian economies of the time and the false flag scare tactics used by Wall Street and the international community in order to create a crisis out of nothing with the intent of ravaging and pillaging the wealth of those Asian nations.
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