The free market isn't free "for anybody but the contractors" who use the government as "an ATM machine"

more from naomi klein, talking about her book, shock doctrine, on bill maher...

from raw story...

"In New Orleans,it's the privatization of the school system, the public housing. After September 11th, it was the launching of a new economy in privatized homeland security, and in Iraq it's the Blackwater economy--The worse things get in Iraq, the more privatized--and profitable--this war becomes.

"So it's not about the corporations taking advantage; we expect corporations to do that. It's about the politicians who think the government should be an ATM machine and just transfer wealth to their friends in exchange for a deposit in the form of campaign contributions.

[...]

"You could call it crony capitalism, you could call it corporatism; but it certainly not the free market.

"And, the irony is,it's the free market ideology that gets used to propel this vision forward which has absolutely nothing to do with--it's not free for anybody but the contractors..."

i think most of us of are pretty well aware of what a tremendously profitable thing war is (for the right people, of course), but ms. klein delivers a valuable new way to understand the overall mechanism of HOW it's as profitable as it is... i've always claimed that the chaos and breakdown created by war offer unbounded opportunity to those whose aim is to profit from them... ms. klein not only shows how that works but also expands the concept to natural disasters, an arena that previously served to pull people together and make communities stronger, but are now being used to tear them apart so that the profiteering vultures can rush in to fill the gaps...

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