In her book, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE; THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM, Naomi Klein follows the road of exploitation capitalism which started in the 1970s when the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown and assassinated in a coup led by Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet was inspired by the economic theories of University of Chicago professor Milton Freidman. Freidman's theory blames government spending for the economic woes of nations which face domestic political unrest and/or the aftermath of natural disasters. His theory went (and still goes) on to say that the government should not fund anything and that the "free market" should show up as soon as possible wherever disaster strikes in order to privatize all aspects of rebuilding and, later, managing the area in question.
Klein does this by utilizing a chronological series of events in which certain areas in need of financial aid have no choice but to turn to the US backed WTO, IMF, World Bank and USAID to loan them money to rebuild.
According to Klein, global corporations circle poor countries like so many vultures, hoping for a disaster. The human toll of any disaster is irrelevant to the birds of prey. The only thing that's relevant to global corporations is that citizens of the area are displaced, much of their belongings are destroyed and there's an opportunity to rebuild the area in their image.
The Corporacracy isn't planning to control the world, it is presently controlling it through the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF and, most intricately, through global corporations. Wealthy people, international banks, in essence, loan money to poor nations to help those nations improve their financial and economic standing in the world.
The loans, however, are accompanied by a plethora of caveats that are mostly concerned with the borrowing nations' internal social policies. Consequently, the borrowers promise to work with multinational corporations to fix their internal infrastructure and economic systems. If the downtrodden nations don't agree to these caveats, they don't receive the loans.
If the borrowing nations even think about socializing any civil services, they can forget about getting a loan or expect a very costly default on the loan they've already received. The CIA more than likely serves as a collection agency. Defaults result in more than broken legs. The threat of regime change is very likely used as an incentive to keep the borrowers in compliance with the terms of the loans.
Enter the January 12 earthquake in Haiti. The fact that Haiti is a poor nation with an unstable political and economic system has been repeated ad nauseam since the 12th.
Will this happen in Haiti? As has been mentioned frequently, Haitians pretty much had nothing before the earthquake and their goal was to survive each day. They probably do not have the strength nor the will to protest any takeover of their devastated country by global corporations, most of them American and investments made by wealthy foreigners, most of them American.
As with Chile in the 70s, South Africa and Poland in the 1980s, the well planned invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the areas overcome by the Tsunami in 2004, Haiti must look like yet another opportunity to the "free market" Freidmanites of University of Chicago fame.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
