SHOCK ECONOMICS:

Naomi Klein's new book 'The Shock Doctrine:The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" is well on its way to becoming a best seller. Klein is now on a book promotion tour that will carry her throughout the USA, Canada and many countries of Europe through the next few months. Even the ideological 'National Post' is paying her the compliment of printing excerpts of her book, albeit with equally long attacks on each of the pieces printed side by side on their pages. For more on Naomi Klein see the obligatory Wikipedia article on her as well as her own webpage http://www.naomiklein.org . The Canadian online magazine Straight Goods has recently republished an article by her entitled 'Shock Economics: 9/11 Gave the Bush Administration an Excuse to Privatize Everything'. The original and longer article is online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2165922,00.html . Here are some excerpts from the article online at Straight Goods....

"As George Bush and his cabinet took up their posts in January 2001, the need for new sources of growth for US corporations was an urgent matter. With the tech bubble now officially popped and the Dow Jones tumbling 824 points in their first two and a half months in office, they found themselves staring in the face of a serious economic downturn. John Maynard Keynes had argued that governments should spend their way out of recessions, providing economic stimulus with public works. Bush's solution was for the government to deconstruct itself- hacking off great chunks of public wealth and feeding them to corporate America in the form of tax cuts on the one hand and lucrative contracts on the other....

"Then came 9/11, and all of a sudden having a government whose central mission was self-immolation did not seem like a very good idea. With a frightened population wanting protection from a strong, solid government, the attacks could well have put an end to Bush's project of hollowing out government just as it was beginning. For awhile that even seemed to be the case....

"But far from shaking their determination to weaken the public sphere, the security failures of 9/11 reaffirmed in Bush and his inner circle their deepest ideological (and self-interested) beliefs- that only private firms possessed the intelligence and innovation to meet the new security challenge. Although it was true that the White House was on the verge of spending huge amounts of taxpayer money to launch a new deal, it would be exclusively with corporate America, a straight-up transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars into private hands...."

READ THE FULL ARTICLE at the Straight Goods site or go to the original at the Guardian newspaper (see link above)