The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

I'm still reading the Shock Doctrine ( here is a somewhat strange review of the book ) and comparing it to the textbook for the Political Science class that I just finished. I am disgusted that the chapters in the textbook that deal with Russia, China, Mexico, Developing Nations, and sections on terrorism are so glaringly incomplete. They automatically steer the reader (generally students in their twenties) towards accepting the political unrest in those places without understanding it. Divorcing the unrest from the forced economic policies that create it does the students a disservice. Something tells me that the schools using these crappy textbooks are not going to have administrators who would enable the professors to encourage their students to ALSO read Klein's Shock Doctrine.

Milton Friedman is referenced in the textbook twice, in a positive way. The IMF and World Bank are referenced in the index twice, once hilariously to the page on International Terrorism, but absent on that page. At least they mentioned that Agusto Pinochet was led by US trained economists, and Friedman hailed the Chilean economic system as "one of the world's purest capitalist systems." No mention of how that fabulously pure system needed the brutality of Pinochet's regime to become so fabulously pure and hailed as such.

Hmmmm.

Why do I have to read a book by a Canadian author to find out just how much power two institutions based in the United States have?


This says something about our education system and the corporations that seem to have an inordinate amount of control over what is taught in it, despite that fact that they pay less and less taxes to fund it.