Shock Doctrine
tags:-youtube- Naomi Klein, author of "No Logo", and Alfonso Cuaron, director of "Children of Men", present a short film from Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." http://www.shockdoctrine.com
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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Book added by: NetRunner
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070907.wshock0908/BNStory/Front/
Too much liberal spending is a bad thing, to much conservative saving is a bad thing. Too much regulation is a bad thing, and too much deregulation is a bad thing.
Reality is, that there is a fine balance between this and that. You want perfecition? Find that balance.
California is an example of rampant liberal spending with out conservative saving. http://digg.com/world_news/Will_California_become_America_s_first_failed_state
Its simple really if you want to have a welfare state, then you have to have the money to fund it. I don't mean taxes.
Now on to how I feel about being woken up in the morning with guns pointed in my face, pray, they don't take those cuffs off.
Remember that as a law officer you are dealing with a citizen, who is innocent until proven guilty. As such it is your sworn duty to treat them as a citizen, even if it is their 2nd strike.
Also, *promote
Freeing up trade has obvious economic benefits. Deregulation and privatisation of certain industries are also beneficial to an extent. It is the fringes of these topics that are debatable. How drastically should free trade be promoted? How much job protection should be offered to businesses that can't compete with foreign firms? Can or should monopolistic industries be privatised? There are certainly arguments back and forth, but to connect these ideas directly with waves of unemployment, and rising prices, is nonsense. Particularly free trade. Go over to any Asian country where living standards have risen dramatically in the last couple of decades and tell them free trade causes unemployment. You'll get laughed at.
It gets worse. How has public spending being cut by 50% in Chile, an economic policy, have ANYTHING to do with torture and imprisonment. Yes, this was under Pinochet who took power in a coup, but his social repression have nothing to do with his free market policies. To flash them on the screen and associate them is completely disingenuous and misleading.
Suggesting that Friedman was part of some kind of right wing government conspiracy is equally ridiculous. He was merely an influential academic who served as an advisor to several governmental leaders, most notably the US and held particularly uniform economic views. The fact that his policies were adopted in so many different places speaks less about his views than the lack of effective contrarian arguments being made. Yes, arguably some of his views such as that the market itself can clear up any imperfections and that government intervention serves almost no useful purpose were extreme, but that glosses over the fact that many of his views were progressive in themselves and highly beneficial to economic wellbeing if applied in moderation. The analogy that comes to mind here is blaming Darwin for not knowing about DNA when he came up with his Origin of Species.
The irony is the video is doing the very thing it's supposedly speaking out against. It's using jarring imagery or torture, to ram through its own agenda against free market policies.