By Cliff Montgomery – Feb. 25th, 2011
Is Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, employing a strong dose of “shock and awe” on America’s workers? It certainly seems so to Naomi Klein, journalist at The Nation magazine.
Klein has developed a thesis called The Shock Doctrine, which “explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically,” according to Klein’s website on the subject.
Through this doctrine, “America’s [so-called] ‘free market’ policies have come to dominate the world through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.”
Klein also has produced a fascinating book on her thesis.
America’s neo-conservative “economic policies–privatization, free trade, slashed social spending–that the ‘Chicago School’ and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic” in two ways, adds an insightful review from Publishers Weekly.
“Because their results are disastrous–depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth,” continues Publishers Weekly, “their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market ‘reforms’ the public would normally reject.”
Last week the journalist appeared on MSNBC, to discuss her belief that the actions of Governor Walker are the most recent examples of the Shock Doctrine at work.
