The next book I’d like to do for our book club is Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine”. The thesis is that the Chicago-style economic right has continually used crises all over the world as a pretext to institute radical free market “reforms”; Chile under Pincochet and Russia under Yeltsin are used as examples.
Right now, the United States is going through a recession brought on largely by a burst real estate bubble that was fueled by an extreme anti-regulation “free market” ideology. There is a large federal deficit in no small part because of tax cuts to the wealthy. This pseudo-crisis is being used as a pretext to slash government spending, destroy the so-called safety net, and end collective bargaining.
You’d have a very hard time convincing me that Americans aren’t now facing just the kind of “shock therapy” that our government once exported to the rest of the world. Elia Isquire details the ways in which even the liberal New York Times and New Republic have smeared Klein.