The Upside of Anger

If you have the gloomy feeling that humanity is uncontrollably spiraling down to disaster, Naomi Klein's book , The Shock Doctrine, will likely confirm your worst fears. However, knowledge is power and being informed is our best defense against the forces chipping away at the foundations of society.

The story begins with Chile in 1973, the overthrow of a popular, nationalist government and its replacement with the vicious dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Installed in power by the CIA, Pinochet undertook a radical. US designed economic programme that embodied the theories of Milton Friedman and his followers at the University of Chicago.

The public sector was eviscerated, publicly owned companies and public services were privatized, unions were broken and the economy was thrown open to foreign corporations. In just a few years, millions of middle class Chileans were cast into poverty, unemployment rose drastically and the country's resources were plundered by foreign multinationals. Those who dared to object were dragged off to Pinochet's torture chambers.

Argentina was the next target, followed by several other countries in the region. A financial crisis on Wall Street pushed interest rates to historic highs in 1980 and many developing countries, suddenly unable to finance their debts, found themselves at the mercy of the US controlled International Monetary Fund. As the price of providing desperately needed loans, the IMF demanded that countries accept Structural Adjustment Packages (SAP's) prescribing the same policies that had been so disastrous in South America.

In the following thirteen years, some seventy countries were stripped of resources and capital. These SAP's also fueled the East Asian financial crisis of 1997. As a Canadian former director of the World Bank described it, "Not since the conquistadors plundered Latin America has the world experienced such a flow in the direction we see today."

Astonishingly, the Reagan administration implemented a version of these policies in the United States. Corporations and wealthy individuals were given massive tax cuts while incomes for the majority stagnated or declined and the US went from being the world's biggest creditor nation to it biggest debtor. Emboldened by her post-Falklands War popularity, Margaret Thatcher imposed a similar policies in Britain. A newly free Poland was pressured into following such a plan in 1989.

The policies of what has become known as the 'Washington Consensus' are fundamentally anti-democratic, antithetical to the public welfare and would never be accepted by a democratic society. Ruthless and well prepared promoters at the White House and the IMF have only been able to impose them upon nations in a state of economic or political crisis.

The South American nations that first fell victim to this campaign have begun in recent years to recover themselves and are rejecting further extortion. They are once again embracing nationalist economic platforms with increasing investment in civic society.

The US government is responsible for immeasurable suffering as a result of what its adherents call "pure capitalism" and Americans themselves are are now seeing its more advanced stage, with the advent of the homeland security economy and a militarized society with a limited tolerance for civil rights, all justified by the War on Terror.

Don't think that you are safe because you live in a wealthy, democratic country with a strong liberal tradition. The sharp decline in recent years of government funding in Canada for health care, education and environmental protection has been the result of skillful campaigns waged by powerful, well-funded proponents with an aggressive agenda. Read this book. Get angry.