And don't wait too long or it will take more than two bucks to get a British Pound, thanks to Greenspan's influence in understating inflation and keeping interest rates too low.

Saddest thing is that Greenspan got an $8,000,000 advance on his rag.

For a detailed and mind-blowing expose' on the reasoning and intentions behind the neocon's invasion -- and their unplanned, however protracted, occupation of Iraq -- take the time to read Naomi Kline's superb article ( www.harpers.org/archive/2004/09/0080197 ) that appeared in Harpers in the fall of 2004. It connects-the-dots in a way that offers the reader an insight that no other author has offered since.

As Ms. Huffington highlights, it's part of a larger body of work that just published in the USA (and several other countries) last week. I highly recommend that you read The Shock Doctrine very soon, even if means putting other things aside. This book has received resounding reviews already, and will no doubt be one of the biggest tipping-points in the movement for economic and social justice.

Howard Zinn says the following in his advance review: "Naomi Kline is an investigative reporter like no other. She roams the continents with eyes wide open and her brain operating at full speed, finding connections we never thought of, and patterns which eluded us. This is a brilliant book, one of the most important I have read in a long time."

I predict that The Shock Doctrine will cause shockwaves in the conservative community around the world. It's a breath-of-fresh-air in the stale acidity we've been forced to inhale the last seven years, decade, or even twenty-to-thirty years or longer. Make a point to read it. It's that important.

If you'd like to view the debate between Mr. Greenspan and Ms. Klein (Democracy Now!), link to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUj4WFpFY4c . Mr. Greenspan sure backpedals regarding his now-infamous statement about the reason we went to war in Iraq.

Naomi Klein is such a rare treasure, a wonderful combination of courage and intellect. She has not only the determination to pursue the truth in the dynamics of her subjects but also the talent as a writer to explain those (extremely complex) themes in terms that are easily understood by a lay readership.

She's also gorgeous.

Fifty years from now, her name will be held in higher esteem than many of the current icons of journalism.

jj

I'm looking forward to reading Klein's book. But a more interesting comparison might be of her work with Robert Reich's new book on capitalism. Anyone read both?

Forgive me for mispelling Ms. Klein's last name in my previous post.

Sorry.

A Stunning and Well-Researched Indictment of Friedmanian Neoliberalism, September 26, 2007
By Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
Naomi Klein's THE SHOCK DOCTRINE is a stunning indictment of American corporatism and institutionalized globalization, on a par with such groundbreaking works as Harrington's THE OTHER AMERICA and Chomsky's HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL. Comprehensive in its breadth and remarkable for its well-researched depth, Klein's book is a highly readable but disturbing look at how the neoliberal economic tenets of Milton Friedman have been implemented across the world over the last thirty-plus years.

The author's thesis is simply stated: that neoliberal economic programs have repeatedly been implemented without the consent of the governed by creating and/or taking advantage of various forms of national shock therapy. Ms. Klein asserts that in country after country, Friedman and his Chicago School followers have foisted their tripartite economic prescription - privatization, deregulation, and cutbacks in social welfare spending - on an unsuspecting populace through decidedly non-democratic means. In the early years, the primary vehicle was dictatorial military force and accompanying fear of arrest, torture, disappearance, or death. Over time, new organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank were employed instead, using or creating impossible debt burdens to force governments to accept privatization of state-owned industries and services, complete removal of trade barriers and tariffs, forced acceptance of private foreign investment, and widespread layoffs. In more recent years, terrroism and its response as well as natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis have wiped clean enough of the slate to impose these Friedmanite policies on people too shocked and focused on recovering to realize what was happening until it was too late.

According to Ms. Klein's thesis, these revolutionary economic programs were the "medicine" necessary to bring underdeveloped countries into the global trading community. Ms. Klein argues her case in convincing detail a long chronological line of historical cases. Each chapter in her book surveys one such situation, from Chile under Pinochet and Argentina under military junta through Nicaragua and Honduras, Bolivia under Goni, post-apartheid South Africa, post-Solidarity Poland, Russia under Yeltsin, China since Tiananmen, reconstruction of Iraq after the U.S. invasion, Sri Lanka after the tsunami, Israel after 9/11, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Along the way, she lets various neoliberal economists and Chicago School practitioners speak for themselves - we hear their "shock therapy" views in their own words. As just one example, this arrogant and self-righteous proclamation from the late Professor Friedman: "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - producs real change...our basic function, to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

What the author makes inescapably clear is that the world economic order has been largely remade in Milton Friedman's image in the last few decades by adopting programs that would never have been democratically accepted by the common people. Military coups, violence and force, wars, induced hyperinflation, terrorism, preemptive war, climate disasters - these have been the disruptive vehicles that allowed such drastic economic packages to be imposed. Nearly always, they are developed in secrecy and implemented too rapidly for citizens to respond. The end results, as Ms.Klein again makes clear, are massive (and too often, continuing) unemployment, large price increases for essential goods, closing of factories, enormous increases in people living in poverty, explosive concentration of wealth among a small elite, and extraordinary opportunity for rapacious capitalism from American and European corporations.

Ms. Klein argues that from its humble beginnings as an economic philosophy, the neoliberal program has evolved (or perhaps devolved) into a form of corporatism. Particularly in America, government under mostly Republican adminstrations has hollowed itself out, using private sector contractors for nearly every conceivable task. Companies ranging from Lockheed and Halliburton to ChoicePoint, Blackwater, CH2M Hill, and DynCorp exist almost entirely to secure lucrative government contracts to perform work formerly done by government. They now operate in a world the author describes as "disaster capitalism," waiting and salivating over the profits to be made in the next slate-wiping war or disaster, regardless of the human cost. In an ominous closing discussion, Ms. Klein describes the privatization of government in wealthy Atlanta suburbs, a further step in self-serving and preemptive corporatism guaranteed to hollow out whatever is left of major American cities if it becomes a widespread practice.

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE is truly a head-shaking read. One can only marvel at the imperiousness of past (mostly) American governmental behavior, the grievous callousness of it all, the massive human despair and suffering created for no other reason than economic imperialism, and the nauseating greed of (mostly Republican) politicians, former political operatives, and corporate executives who prey like pack wolves on people's powerlessness and insecurity. Reading this book, one can no longer ask the question, "Why do they hate us?" The answer is obvious, and no amount of hyperventilation from Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, or Fox News can erase the facts and consequences of behavior that we as a country have implicitly or explicitly endorsed.

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE proves itself as shaming of modern American governmental policy as Dee Brown's epic of 19th Century America, BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE. It is an essential read for intelligent citizens who want to understand the roots of globalization and its blowback effects on our lives.

Greenspan's accomplishments:
The Housing Bubble
Proping up the corrupt Federal Reserve & enslaving taxpayers
Devaluing the dollar
Causing a major recession if not another great depression
Saying war is about the oil too little too late
Tax cuts that favored the wealthy elite
Propogated imperialism and war
Creating greater poverty by gutting and destroying the American middle class

Klein's accomplishments:
Speaking truth to power!!!!

Yes, with Greenback, economics hits a new low in the department of the dismal: it is no longer merely dismal, but pitiful.

I've started reading Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine". I've only read about 1/3 of it so far, but, it my view, the book is a brilliant accomplishment---powerful, well-written, and meticulously-researched.

I hope that Ms. Klein receives the awards that she deserves for her masterful work.

Greenspan, "60 Minutes":

"While I was aware a lot of these practices were going on, I had no notion of how significant they had become until very late. I didn't really get it until very late in 2005 and 2006."

Greenspan, Democracy Now:

"We in the United States basically try to get mortgage interest rates up and slow the bubble. And remember, it's the bubble which created a goodly part of the problem which we have had in the sub-prime market. And we failed."

Got it? "We tried" to get mortgage rates up to slow the bubble he didn't realize was inflating in front of his face thanks to his unprecedented lowering of rates and refusal to even cast an eyeball towards the illegalities abounding on his watch. And "we" failed.

We? We? Who the f**k is we?

"Greenspan's "I was against it, even when I acted like I was for it" attempt at the irrational exhumation of his reputation is laughable but hasn't stopped the book from getting massive attention."

Massive attention is good since B-52 Bernanke is following in his footsteps. Imagine, the people in this country and around the globe might actually be on the verge of favoring reality over irrational exuberance. That would be a quantum leap for humanity. Who knows what positive changes might follow?

I think that if Ayn Rand knew how these diasaster capitalist are using her philosophy, she would turn over in her grave. Her creed was about accountability, and to the facts, and being above reproach. These idiots today abuse her virtue of selfishness and dissemble the facts, and are not responsible to the truth. And the mechanisms that would hold them to account are in their control.
I read her books and took them very seriously. I am appalled to hear some of her followers avoid her most important theories, and only use her philosophy when it suits their greedy purpose.
The point is,freedom is not free, it requires responsibility.
I have ordered Naomis book and look forward to reading it.
Have a nice evening everyone, to the best within us.

Veros

There were two other books that compliment Ms Klein's:

1. Gangster Capitalism: The Globalisation of Organized Crime

3. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy

cheese on rice ezeflyer, write a book next time.

Anyone who wants to know what these neocons have in mind just needs to read "The Project for the New American Century". Enough said!

I just ordered The Shock Doctrine.
I hope the letters are large,
My eye's are not as they once were.
I have been told that we will want to
savor this book.
It still makes me wonder why the "NEO-CONS are still unwilling to learn about the truth.

Judith, I think the only true neocons left are those making a profit from pretending their demented philosophy is anything but a return to the feudalism of the Dark Ages.

You don't have to have a degree in economics to boil down Milton Friedman's theories and Alan Greenspan's doublespeak to this: We believe all money and power should be concentrated in the hands of the few, as long as we're one of the few, and screw democracy.

The rest is candy-coating to make selfishness and greed palatable to the average conservative yokel who still buys their 'free trade' nonsense. When you have the WTO deciding what French farmers can do with their crops, or what Americans can manufacture, you don't have free trade, you have an economic system redolent of the worst features of Stalinist communism and the Roman empire.

We're heading into a world economic collapse spurred by these ludicrous neocon economic theories; as in the 1930s and the Great Depression, that's apparently what it will take to wake people up to who the oily Greenspan's and plundering Bushes really are, and what their real agenda is: plutocracy for profit and everyone else can go to hell.