I thought I’d be prepared by the title not to be shocked by Naomi Klein’s book “Shock Doctrine,” but it keeps happening! By the way, the relationship to food and faith is in the way shocks have been used by Chicago School economists, the U.S. Treasury and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to disassemble social democracy in countries from Chile, Argentina and Bolivia to Thailand and South Korea and the resulting mass unemployment and poverty that resulted.
The bottom line is this. The IMF, the G7 countries, and heads of global investment firms in the west let Asian economies bleed during the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98 until they were forced to sell off companies at fire sale prices, privatize the public sector, and strip away labor protections. The bleeding had begun when western capital fled in panic from Asian markets without fetters. Just a couple years earlier, these nations had been pressured into dropping all capital controls. The IMF, whose job was supposed to be to step in and prevent such economic meltdowns, could have backed up the economies with guarantees, but instead sat on its hands.
I best continue this on a separate page. In case you aren’t continuing on, you should view the video below where Naomi Klein and Milton Friedman, father of the Chicago School and the Washington Consensus go at it.
And here is Naomi Klein interviewing Alan Greenspan on Democracy Now!