Even if you know about the coup in Chile, even if you know about Argentina's runaway inflation, even if you know about Guatanamo, even if you knew about the CIA experiments on unwilling people with drugs and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, even if you mourned the response in New Orleans, fear the proliferation of Blackwater, revile the neocons and neoliberalism..read it anyway. Naomi Klein puts it all together in an amazing flow.
AND -- what was done to Chile and Argentina is BEING DONE TO US NOW. Privatize, build charter schools instead of public, sell off public assets, cut social spending, beef up the police -- it's all part of Milton Friedman's agenda, which he PERSONALLY counselled Pinochet not long after the football stadium massacres -- but what comes next? Massive inflation, depressed wages, high unemployment, destruction of the middle class, death lists and terror to suppress any one who opposed their policies.

The CIA paid for the 'Chicago boys' to educate young men through Milton Friedman's ideology, and sent them back to their home countries to reverse the leftwing 'developmental' ideology that threatened US business interests.

Suck all the wealth out of a country, a market, a middle class -- suck quickly, in the midst of disaster, amidst shock and awe.

The vision in New Orleans including shipping those poor people on buses destined for 'anywhere', without their belongings and with no choice in their destination. That was one of the most horrible things I've seen done by our government in full public eye to American citizens, as if they had no right to make a choice about anything. As if it couldn't possibly matter whether they got on a bus that took them to Atlanta where they had cousins or to Dallas where they did not know anyone, or to Houston where that low class woman who let Shrub loose on the country would look down her nose at them in the evacuation center and say "this all is working out pretty well for them, isn't it?" That must have been shock and awe for those people.

Will the "Massive inflation, depressed wages, high unemployment, destruction of the middle class" lead inevitably to the "death lists and terror" of resistors? I used to think that paranoia about the buildup of the mercenary and private 'security' companies -- the idea that they might be used to bring the dark acts of the CIA in Latin America back home to roost -- was a bit "over-the-top". The parallels are deeply, deeply disturbing.

Read it.