DISASTER
CAPITALISM

It wasn't until the early 1950s that Canadian
psychiatrist, Dr. Ewen Cameron began to
experiment on psychiatric  patients using a
technique that came to be known as
electroshock therapy. The experiments
were funded by the United States Central
Intelligence Agency as well as the
Canadian Government.  Dr. Cameron's
theory stated that if patients with
psychiatric problems could have their
brains emptied of all prior  learning and
experience, they could then have new
information fed to them that would not be
pathological.  The shock therapy worked
only partially.  The brains of the subjects
were indeed emptied of all knowledge,
healthy as well as unhealthy, but the
experimenters were never able to fill them
with useful, healthy information.  The
patients remained in a pre-verbal, infantile
state.

Although the clinical results were
disappointing, the idea of rendering human
beings confused and disoriented
remained; eventually electroshock  
therapy became an accepted treatment in
the psychiatric community and even
though they cannot explain why or how it
works, many are convinced that it does
indeed work.

An economist, Milton Friedman, at the
University of Chicago built on the idea of
rendering a single person destabilized and
enlarged it in order to make an entire
citizenry susceptible to change by means
of shock -- not electrical shock but cultural,
political and financial shock; indeed even
environmental shock could be enough to
destabilize a country or city or indeed,
world, so that their people would willingly
change what they would not have even
considered changing under normal
circumstances.

The first national experiment with this
theory took place in Chile in 1973 with the
coup d'etat brought about by General
Augusto Pinochet.  Indeed, Doctor
Friedman went to Chile to counsel and
encourage the general as he went about
installing a completely free market
economy in that country.  The bloody
history of that country is well known with
50,000 tortured, 80,000 imprisoned,
incomes for the rich up 83% and 45% of the
population sunk in poverty.  

In 1982 Margaret Thatcher's popularity
doubled when she privatized gas, steel,
airlines and telephones, unemployment
tripled and poverty doubled.  In China in
1989 hundreds were killed, thousands
jailed and tortured when China
embraced "free market" capitalism and
factory wages were $1.00 per day.  Those
tanks at Tiananmen Square were not
occupied by heartless commies, but by
"good free market capitalists", converts to
Milton Friedman's "Shock Doctrine" or
what is also called "Disaster Economics".

Hundreds were killed in Russia in 1993
when Yeltsin attacked Parliament; as a
result 72 million were impoverished and 17
billionaires were created.  Ain't Capitalism
GREAT!!  AS a consequence of the 2001
attack on the World Trade Center Towers,
U.S. Spy Agencies have outsourced 70% of
their budgets, the Pentagon increased its
for private contractors by $137 billion a
year, and the Department of Homeland
Security spends $130 billion a year on
private contractors.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the
most privatized wars in modern history,
with 200 state companies  privatized, and a
paramilitary force equal to if not exceeding
the U.S. military force in Iraq; hundreds of
thousands have been killed.

Environmental catastrophe was the shock
that enabled free market capitalists to take
advantage of poor fisher folk after the
tsunami that killed thousands in Sri Lanka.  
The storm demolished the poor fishing
shacks they had erected on the coastline.  
When the storm was over they were
forbidden to rebuild. The property was sold
instead to large corporations to build
elaborate hotels and condos on the now
pristine beach.