"No Logo" was a fine book for someone as young as Klein was when she researched/wrote it (upper 20s if I recall correctly). Not perfect, but definitely worth reading. I look forward to this new book and hope it gets wide exposure among those who read and think about such things.

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...was reading and quoting No Logo here (Spain) some years ago. I think I even saw t-shirts. So yes, it was mainstream.

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A word like "Market" ('free or not) or "Capitalism", especially here in the USA is, as Klein mentions, "part of the air we breathe". Each word does work, very hard work; and we're a lazy lot, we'd rather let words do all the heavy lifting while we go on 'about our busy-ness', working, playing and buying.

The word 'market' has a history, any text from any period will usually utilize the concept in some context or other. By now, this word has become co-extensive with the word 'Universe' or 'Cosmos'. Thus, it can be approached from the stand-point of Physics or, alternately, from the standpoint of Theology. It's a handy dualism indeed!

I'd like to see a 'debate' between Mind and Body, or perhaps Soul and Body. Now there'd be something to see!

Here in the USA, there would be the Forum (maybe an auditorium, an academy, or a television or internet site), plenty of bleachers and access (well guarded and kept nice and orderly too) and the "Teams". Each of them would marshall their forces, their arguments, their logics, their analysis and present them cogently, diligently, FORMALLY. The audience and the Judges (now who might they be?) would pay close attention, mark their score-cards. At the end, there would be a WINNER! One of the two teams would have won the debate, received their Gold Ribbon, having lauded both sides for the excellent display of talent, rhetorical strength.

Debates do not really occur in the USA. Here, the objective is not truth or reality; it is winning. Ask Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin or Lou Dobbs or any of them). For, while everyone goes home happy, excited, impressed with the Great Debate experienced recently, the conditions of existence of the whole thing remain EXACTLY AND PRECISELY the same.

But at least we were entertained and informed for a while.

After all, thinking is only an activity like any other; it can be directed toward confronting or toward avoiding reality. While Nero debated with his fiddle, it all crumbled.

Priests and Patriarchs (whose interests are not always celestial) as well as bankers and investors all are happy with things: the Numbers are happy, the Words are happy. All is best in this best of all possible worlds.

Now we're just waiting for the great Unification Theory worked out between Stephen Hawking and the Theologians. Then we'll no longer debate; we'll be the WINNERS. The best thing is: we didn't need to do a thing; the Words and the Numbers did all the work for us. The Market is both God and Cosmos, and this USA is its center. All we have to do is bow and pay our tribute, occasionally paying a visit to the Circus. Can't forget to offer a sacrifice here and there -- that's how the gods keep us safe and secure in our blessed House of Being.

Klein's work will be ignored here, including the footnotes. If there's anything we despise, it's being un-comfortable in this land of plenty.

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Naomi Klein's book is a taboo only because the whole history of class rule, since its 5000 plus years of patriarchy, which began with male-class relations of women, chidren, and household slaves from war as chattel slavery has created class theory, while claiming falsely a social theory. All class ideologies have both demanded servility and allegiance to a false social claim, that their societies represented all, when in fact they represented its clas elites. That is the definition of class ideolgy.

The first attempts at social theory was the utopian attempt to graft democracy onto existing patriarchal class relations, slavery, by the Ancient Greeks, and Plato's, Republic, while correctly describing all forms of civil society, as class forms, with the empirical terms of oligarchy, plutocracy, did not realize, without a social theory, class theory and elite theory, that even the Republic and its tyrants were themselves class Republics morphing into class dictatorship, and finally class Empire. Plato did not realize that grafting democracy onto class relations would reproduce gaps, contradictions, that required explanations, social theory, and the result was the creation of "noble lies", class myths, i.e. class ideology. Plato, acutally came up with a cave-shadow analogy, reconstructive mechanism, a methodology that was used by Marxists, and is used today by theoretic physicists, to come up with a reconstructed universal theory, a posteriori, indirect, inverted mechanism. Plato's social methodology was much more advanced, yet he was not able to apply this reconstructive process and instead reproduced an unintentional class ideology.

I say unintentional class ideology, because Plato, and the middle classes represents the failed outcome, deformed middle class, with its class ideology, that comes from its subordination to oligarchy, and thus this class mechanism, as a historical relationship, has carried on to other class societies like Feudalism, and Capitalism. The social theorists, that is the social Liberals of the Enlightenment, sought through the Age of Reason to come up with universal laws, macro economic theories, classical deductive explanations on how to achieve such a just social system, which was opposed to the Feudal class order and its class hierarchy, the Catholic clerical elites. Then the revolutionary Liberals, while contradictory in their class attitudes, tried to come up with a social theory whose agency was none other than a fully developed middle class, which would not be subordinated to an oligarchy, as the class mechanism has reproduced since patriarchy.

However, no one came up with a complete social theory on how to reconstruct a social class, along with its social mechanism, because the failure to take into account the class forces on a global level, instead subordinate, corrupted and reproduced the same class structure, class mechanism, with new clothes under capitalism, once the commercial classes, and later its industrial classes, once again corrupted its middle layers, into class elites, with their class ideology, apologists for oligarchy. Both national revolutions, and by inference all revolutionary national democratic revolutions have and will fail, and the creation of Napoleon and Stalin, represents parallel failures, class outcomes, expressions of deformed middle layers, who were subordinated either internatlly by capitalist forces, or externally by global class forces. That failure in strategy, social theory, and reclamation of revolutionary ideology in both the Enlightenment, and Socialist revolutions must be addressed today, if we are ever to dismantle class hierarchies, that help feed all oligarchies. The shock troops are none other than the deformed middle classes who have historically deformed social theory that ultimately fails, which they then blame on the revolutionaries themselves.

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You make some excellent points, Naomi. I aim to get a copy of your new book and read it. I particularly liked the following quote from your final paragraph: "a mixed economy that has an essentially controlled economic model but that has room for diversity within it and has these social guarantees. " If you ever have the chance, I suggest you take a look from this perspective at Japan, where I have lived for the past 30 years or so. I have never been to the U.S., and after seeing "Sicko" earlier this month, I have come to the conclusion that I never will, but just taking health care as an example, there is plenty of competition here between clinics and hospitals, and consumers have a completely free choice about where they will be treated - we have no such thing as HMOs - but virtually everyone is covered by the national health insurance system and there are safety nets, and my personal view is that the system works well. And I think you could, broadly speaking, say the same about education - of course, there is parental choice, but there is a basic national curriculum. And so on.Maybe one day I will understand why Americans are so rabidly anti-socialist.

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Crisis has long been seen as an opportunity to be exploited, as far back as the ancient Chinese and up to Machiavelli. Communists and anarchists have long loved using the 'shock doctrine' to scare the state (think of terrorism, strikes, vanguardism and revolutions).

The greatest failure of Shock Doctrine as a tract of insight and a roadmap to democratic socialism is its ahistoricism. If we view the US’s behaviour in Iraq through a very narrow lens, then it is of course easy to be disgusted with the catastrophe that has unfolded and the rank greed of so many. And we should always be disgusted with death and war.

But that this war has been done with shock and awe is not an original observation (and there are plenty of books now on the privatisation of war etc.).

And if we look at the broader history of aid and overseas wars, then a different picture emerges. If we go right back to the Marshall Plan in Europe, this massive grant and loan package was implemented in Europe by the private sector. The European private sector used this aid to buy the latest in American technology and services to re-build at great speed. In Japan, that day’s equivalent of Microsoft and the Silicon Valley’s ingenuity was applied to the country’s reconstruction, and created the industrial success story we know now as Japan Inc.

Europe’s democratic socialist states – the Nordic countries, the UK, France, West Germany – all prospered post-war because of this aid and because they could divert their once enormous defence costs into human development: health and education. All under the American hegemon.

After WWII, Canada also did the same, but much later than the UK (they introduced universal healthcare in the late 1960s, long after the UK introduced its National Health Service in 1948). In fact, Canada was a late comer to democratic socialist tendencies and only under the reforming Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau. Canada’s tolerance of high levels of homelessness and people dependent on food banks these days, would also shock most Europeans.

Catastrophes: Catastrophes, both man-made and environmental, have always been exploited by the carpet baggers. You only have to look at the debates within the NGO and charity and aid sectors to see the flagellating over the chaos and waste that always follows as the third sector rushes in to a disaster, logos ablaze. This has been going on long before Bush and the neo-cons.

Freedom: The US has long had a level of free expression that surpasses many other democratic states. The current mainstream chill on free expression in the US has not ended free expression, but instead pushed it into other places: the internet etc. Considering the country is at war, and that restrictions on freedom and the sacrifices asked of the ordinary citizen have not come even close to what was expected of people in WWII, it doesn’t surprise.

Public versus private space: All societies have this tension between the public and private. It is a misnomer to claim the US lacks public spaces and public sense of shared ownership (look at the US military as a giant welfare state), just as it is a misnomer to claim there is no sense of the private in Scandinavia, the land of Ikea.

I think the Shock Doctrine, with its slick marketing and packaging and promotion juggernaught, will do two good things: jolt people into thinking about Iraq and the disaster it is, and push people to ask some hard questions about today’s economic situation. But I think upon sober reflection, most people would say they detest the war, but love freedom and the opportunities of the market economy, and would have a hard time rolling that back.

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Comments:

1. Good point about "disaster preparedness" among political and corporate interests. They can often be more like vultures or hyenas than lions. Some people will go on all day about how every disaster is a government conspiracy, trying desperately to pin the crime on the government, when it's really not necessary. The crime of opportunism is enough.

2. Good point about the Kissinger comment. I hadn't thought of it. And you can hear capitalist ideologues use horror stories of Stalinism to scare people away from a whole list of other options, as if everyone in Sweden who doesn't like ABBA is shot or sent to labor camps.

3. Book writers sure have big heads. Americans may be too thick-headed or herd-oriented to have an intelligent discussion on alternatives to our version of capitalism. But it seems like she's using that as an excuse to shame Americans into buying more of her books.

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No use of any of the following terms:

Market Fundamentalism, Libertarianism, Minarchism, Anarcho-capitalism, or Objectivism. Just talking about "Capitalism" gets the MF/L/M/A-C/Os out calling you a Marxist. Call the ideology by name and wake people up to the source of this broken system. If you can use the terms "Social Democracy" and "Democratic Socialism", you can surely use terms to describe what we're fighting. Keep yelling about it, and keeping reminding people of just what the end result of realizing these Rothbardian fantasies would be:

Privatized police forces

No unemployment insurance

No free universal health care or free universal higher education. Ever.

No FDA, FEMA, or OSHA

No minimum wage, worker protections, or environmental protections

Tollbooths on every road.

A huge, confusing, contract laden society with endless choices and no way to sort them out. The simplest transactions could wind up being mindbogglingly complex.

No public parks, waterways, or anything else.


If the Norquistian nutbags got their way, our society would look like the Old West with skyscrapers.

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Yes, of course. By the time our Constitution was written, the prospective wealth of the North American continent was obvious. There was little disagreement about the need for its exploitation. Yes, the Pilgrims and Puritans began with land designated as a Common. But that barely lasted more than a generation.

Marcuse was one of the few in the US who got a hearing in the 70s for ideas about a socialist alternative. But he relied on the old Marxist notion that the Proletariat would provide a tear in "the seamless alliance." Instead, we saw the mass commercialization and cooptation of such a counterculture, turning the prols into a fashion. Today one can buy new clothes that already come with tears and fake worn patches.

Capitalism has proved itself a self-sustaining system. It will change only when it falls of its own excesses. Peak oil? No problem--go steal it from others. Global warming? No problem, short-term--except maybe a threat to the insurance industry. AIDS? Keeps population growth down. Capitalism pushes the suffering onto the weakest, who don't vote.

Americans will not accept a change until the hurt grows to the point we can no longer tolerate it. In my city, that's coming on a lot faster than anyone might have thought when Reagan was elected. But no one ever talks seriously about revolution anymore. We prefer a police state, like Singapore, where the trains run on time. So long as our keepers clean up the zoo, we'd rather be caged than free.

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I really like the conclusions Klein makes about a Social democracy being the best system. It's the only system that keeps the wealthy and powerful in check, but it requires full participation from the people, the masses, and that has yet to be achieved because the wealthy overlords have strict control of the one institution that could serve the people's interests best: public education!

I think progressives underestimate, or possibly ignore, the power of public education to subdue debate, perpetuate and even facilitate the current "disaster capitalist" system, and prevent americans from voting for their interests. I think there is no more fertile ground for change than through public education. A popular movement to reach teachers, part of the reading public, would do wonders to create debate in the classroom, and subsequently in the next generation.

Progressives, I think, have too often looked for quick fixes to change. We are guilty of longing for change in our lifetime, which makes perfect sense. We all want to see an end to predatory capitalism and the beginning of a social and economic system that makes real the compassion and justice we americans share. But, our challenges are met with resistance from the people who'd benefit the most.

As an educational theorist (critical theory) I believe the place to effect real change is with our teachers and in our public schools. Since standardized testing became the norm in the mid-nineties, american education has become the dominant force AGAINST progressive change in america. Teachers are fertile ground for change.

Teachers are educated. They read, so they need books directed at their culture, their profession, because they are the instruments of massive change. Proof? Look at how the No Child Left Behind Act has so radically changed public education. It has succeeded in dumbing down public education by dis-empowered teachers and empowering tests and curriculum controlled by plutocratic political forces. NCLB turns students into "good workers" rather than critical citizens in a democratic society.

The backlash against testing and NCLB is happening, now. The opportunity awaits to challenge the teachers to create a system that promotes critical thought and democratic participation in governance. I can assure you no candidate for president wants a critical thinking, activist public, like, say, in France, but teachers want change. We need to help them see real democracy as the choice.

Moreover, progressives are guilty of voting against their own interests as well. Nearly every Dem is mainstream, which means to the right of center, except Kucinich. A long-term approach to change would mean voting for the candidate who best serves our interests, the american people's interests, even if it means losing a few elections. I have heard all the arguments against voting for "fringe candidates," and they are all short-term solutions to the long-term problem of change. We have to live our beliefs NOW, and vote our convictions, not in some future election. If every progressive and liberal voted for Kucinich or a Nader or Green Party candidate, change will come sooner, not later.

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Agreed the level of apathy in the U.S. and "unawareness" is probably the highest in the world.

Just the same, Jan Frel probably shouldn't use the low number of hits on AlterNet's 1.2-million-killed-in-Iraq story as a measure.

The story was widely linked to, but I didn't read it either -- not because I don't care, but because the headline said it all.

It was extremely important AlterNet publish that number, and I'm betting it made an impact far greater than the number of readers would indicate.

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In school we were practically indoctrinated to believing there was no other way than the free market system in order to be a prosperous nation. I can remember hearing it time and time again, to the point where I remember actually thinking that any alternative must be inferior. As a natural result, true ideaological discussions/debates on the free markets vs. system XYZ were ommitted from our "education". This is reason #1 why so many Americans are absolute in their defense of the free markets, and explains why they continue to support a system that ignores their own self-interests. They simply cannot entertain the thought of an alternative because their preconceived notions of what is best has the subconscious effect of dismissing all other thought as ancilliary.

In this the system has succeeded. If one didn't know better, and analyzed children's education, from K-12 in the past 25-30 years in this country, one might think that a goal of our education system was to spread propaganda about the free market system, and frown upon intelligent debate. It's a case of "it's the best because it's ours".

Secondary to indoctrination as a leading cause of Americans' championing of free markets is simply we've had it too good for too long. Many systems, whether they be natural, social, or economic, have inherent flaws from the outset. But the flaws are deeply ingrained, meaning it takes a great deal of energy (or in our case time) to bring them to the surface. So for many years the system is championed as a success, while all along the flaws are slowly spreading to the surface, cracking the crystal lattice infrastructure until eventually the whole's integrity is compromised by too many intersections of larger and ever more voluminous cracks. I believe the cracks in the system have reached the point where they are spreading rapidly and are physically altering the appearance of the outer shell. More people are noticing this and catching on. Problem is that for far too long the system looked just fine. And as a result we grew complacent, a little too complacent.

I'm reminded of H.G. Wells The Time Machine, where the humans of the future lived simply and freely, with all the food and necessities they could ever want. The problem with this depiction is that this lifestyle was literally and figuratively only on the surface, as they were mercilessly hunted by the sub-surface race called the Morlocks, who by no quirk of fate, were actually a creation of the human race from eons ago. It is also no coincidence that the surface humans grew complacent due to their perfect lifestlye, which required little labor, and inevitably made them ripe for the picking by the (capitalist) Morlocks.

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One way to get this debate on the table in the US would be to get it on Oprah.

But seriously, folks, give her time! I've only gotten through the first few chapters myself, as I really have been looking at the footnotes, end notes and some of the source materials. It is very, very thoroughly researched. It has none of the repetitions, stretched inferences, circular reasoning or slippery-slope speculations that are the hallmark of the writings and rantings of conspiracy theorists.

Anyone who is, for some reason, moved to mount a serious objection to any of the specific points of fact presented in this book is in for a lot of work.

It's a set-up for the neoliberals and neoconservatives to lose formal debate. Unless they really plough through the whole thing, they're going to reveal themselves to be ill-informed by comparison. And if they do plough through the whole thing, they may find themselves actually thinking about the actual issues for a change, rather than reflexively dismissing anything that isn't drummed into them by Fox News as "conspiracy theory."

They will not take on Naomi Klein, because she has done her homework, and they just want another beer: ale man, Ale's the stuff to drink for fellows whom it hurts to think!

The most brilliant thing about the way this book is constructed, it allows the architects of "shock therapy" to reveal the depth of planning and opportunism aforethought that they employed, in their own published words . Verified documents are extensively sourced. We get to watch Kissinger, Friedman and Rumsfeld hang themselves with the rope of their own free-market manufacture.

It would be delightful if their policies weren't still kicking.

You know the section of every James Bond movie where The Mad Lone Villian Genius is about to murder Our Hero in some disturbing torturous way, where he describes his Evil Conspiracy in Great Detail? This book is like a rapid-fire well-edited collage of all of them.

Two structural divergences from the James Bond standard storyline appear.

One, the Mad Lone Evil Genius never Gets Away With It -- whereas the real world in the USA has already been largely subverted by the neoliberal brand of realism at best...bigoted jingoism at worst.

Two, Evil Plans are not presented by a Mad Lone Villian Genius at a single moment of threat. These plans are presented in objective, dispassionate terms in refereed journal articles, grant proposals and planning documents by respected academics, scientists, politicians and military men.

These plans are not widely disseminated, but rather gain traction by being whispered in the ears of only the most wealthy and the most powerful--who then implement them on the pretext of some crisis, as a fait accompli.

There is no public debate. That's the point.

Bring up the topic, and disappear into the night and fog. Get tackled to the ground and handcuffed by six fat rent-a-cops who then taser you six times just for the sadistic fun of it. USA numb and dumb.

One basis on which summaries of actual conspiracies are dismissed is: "how could that many people keep it a secret?"

The remarkable thing about these conspiracies is that the co-conspirators published so many of their plans, and, through the Freedom of Information Act, many more of their publications have come to light.

All we have to do is read their braggadocio!

It's like the Nixon Tapes all over again!

Priceless!

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Dollar tanks on lower U.S. interest rates
.
Jane and John Doe must now pay to bail out the culprits.
When I gas up my vehicle I will be paying extra because the dollar's buying power has taken a hit.
The financial types that made the suspect mortgages walk off with big commissions from making the loans, packaging the loans, reselling the loans and repackaging and reselling the loans until the "Ring around the Mortgages' game came full stop.
Jane and John Doe now have to pay for greedy, shoddy asset allocations in the financial sector not only by having margins on their next loan increased but by watching the greenback crash world wide as government 'of the banks, by the banks' lowers interest rates to bail out the thieves.

Capitalism spills more uneconomically useful cash annually than the combined unfunded requirements of social security and Medicare. Place a one one hundredth of a percent VAT tax on non consumer capital flows so the Doe family can eat at the same trough as the CEOs and their extended family.

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No matter how insightful this book is, the American public has been too dumbed down by popular media to handle complexities. There is all this hype about junk food, but no one is paying attention to junk culture. Just as we have gotten addicted to artificial sweetners and MSG to make crap taste better, information has to be sliced, diced and spiced up to make it more palatable. Can a celebrity sex scandal be weaved in anywhere? Without a PR person to make it purdy and spin it, what real chance does it have!

Furthermore, Americans have been taught to start from the micro level to find the cause of problems. If there is absolutely no way to blame the individual, take the very next level up. Économic systems are too abstract a concept for many to handle. Tell them it is their fault the economy is going to hell cause they are 30lbs overweight (blame the victim) or that illegal immigrants are taking their jobs (scapegoating) and that is something they can wrap their minds around.

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Americans only begin to ponder having this debate when their sorry asses are in the poor house, or headed in that general direction. We didn't hear all that many complaints about our "horrid" capitalist system prior to 1999 when feel good "irrational exuberance" was pushing the market north of 11K.

The complaints slowly died away once again in 2001 when, after Bush's "Sermon on the Rubble" speech, interest rates dropped to 1% and the spending spree got going in earnest, including preparations for the greatest of boondoggles - war in Iraq. Of course liberal politicians objected but that didn't prevent them from voting for war anyway. I wonder . . . How many Alterneters took out "liar loans" and snapped up homes that would otherwise be out of reach? More than a few, I'm sure.

Furthermore, the fact that Americans are the dumbest humans on the planet, bar none, doesn't lend itself to propitious economic conditions for an extended period of time. Naomi likes to place blame squarely with the media when the homeless and downtrodden HAVE BEEN right there in front of us ALL ALONG as a reminder of our erroneous and avaricious ways. Yet, no one seems to take notice cuz this country is all 'bout "I gotsta get mine and fuck the rest" and that mentality extends to most so-called "liberals".

Klein
"The think tank infrastructure in this country is organized to leap into the chasm right away after disaster has struck. . . . I think the current economic model in America is a slow motion disaster."

Right after disaster has struck? These most imminent economic disasters have been apparent to anyone with half a brain (thus Americans are excluded) well in advance of the actual blowout. How many IPOs drew down $200+ million with smoke and mirrors between 1996-99? How many people watched real estate prices run up insanely while the derivatives market came to equal $450 trillion - that's 8 years of total global product for fuck sake!!!

I'm sick and goddamn tired of hearing about the poor, exploited American who's pure as the driven snow. Dumb asses made their beds lined with greed, now they can lie in them.

Funny, we only hear these complaints when the upper-middle and upper classes begin to be touched by unfavorable economic conditions and yet no one gave a shit about the poor when Benzos were flying off the lot. This country is pathetic. It's people are pathetic, COWARDLY, GREEDY AND STUPID. Stand up for yourselves and stop blaming Greenspan, Bernanke, Goldman Sachs and CNN. I love how everyone is pointing the finger at Greenspan lately. Did he put a gun to your head and make you take out a loan for a McMansion? Did he march you down to the bank in shackles and threaten you with death if you didn't use your home as an ATM?

The Chinese have the same exploitative institutions that we have (central bank, narrow media, etc.) and they get paid hundreds of times less than your average American yet they still manage to save 30% of their incomes. What is the overall savings rate in the US? -.01??

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Our money is centrally controlled. As such it's a system that rewards the wealthy investor and thwarts the working person's life. Until this kind of idiocy changes we will never get a debate about how the money system works. The Fed exists to aides the wealthy. This must stop.

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Ms. Klein is real fine, but why not just mention, in passing,
that Chomsky, Bill Blum, Russell Jacoby,Finkelsein and hundreds
of Progressive intellectuals are never allowed a media
presence in the US? The media in the US
. is played "like a giant organ" by the
national security state types.... The lid is on here,
so why reduce the Klein situation to her book ? Its not, and to suggest otherwise
is to obscure whats happened here.

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First, thanks are due to Naomi Klein. Of course many other people have been saying the same thing. Adam Smith was saying the same thing when he published "The Wealth of Nations" back in 1776. It's no coincidence that that was also the date of the American revolution against British Imperialism.

More and more people are starting to understand how this works. Books like Naomi Klein's (I'm too poor to buy it right now, sorry, but will soon) bring the topic to life, but movies are actually doing a good job as well. That headline quote is right out of the recent popular film "Inside Man". Well worth watching - outstanding performances.

The point here is that the general US public is well aware of how this works. Why do you think "The Sopranos" was so popular? They just don't think they can do anything about it. They try and maintain themselves, but as soon as they obtain any real assets they are set on by the IRS, loansharks, and advertisers. Usually their own short-sighted greed betrays them back into poverty. The small businessperson who tries to play the stock market is a classic example. Nine out of ten are stripped immediately. Brokers keep their inside info for their top clients, after all.

The real brainwashed class in the United States are the self-styled elites - the middle managers of the corporatocracy. They get enough education to think that they understand how the world works. They pride themselves on the fact that they read The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. They think they understand the world, and they sneer at the 'unwashed masses' who they assume are fixated on porn and the Jerry Springer Show. It just goes to show that a little education is a dangerous thing. These people are the ones on Prozac, the ones suffering from cognitive dissonance, who know that something is wrong, but are unable to see it clearly. This is the professional class in the US - academics, managers, editors, civil servants, etc. They know if they open their mouths they'll be booted back down the food chain. They own homes, but usually have large debts - but their salaries keep them afloat - but they live in constant fear of being fired.

At the top of the food chain sit the billionaires and their eager and clever servants, who understand that their positions rely on maintaining these 'necessary illusions'. They also fight with one another like sharks over the scraps of gutted fish. There is no mass conspiracy at the top - there is a general rule that it's unwise to piss off too many of your friends, or they might all turn on you. There's also the rule that if you get your teeth in first, you'll have a better chance of swallowing your prey. That's how that works. The government's role here is to help toss gutted fish to the sharks. Condi Rice calls it 'creating constructive chaos in the Middle East'. Iraq, Afghanistan - you get the picture.

Pink Floyd described this years ago in their classic album, "Animals": Dogs, Sheep, and Pigs. In Maus, the artist Art Spiegelman referred to something similar - mice, pigs, cats and dogs. Orwell of course had his classic "Animal Farm", which concluded that "Some Animals are More Equal than Other Animals".

Of course, that all derives from the insights of our greatest founding father.

Thomas Jefferson Quote (by way of Hunter S. Thompson):
"All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God..."

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This story has only 4 Diggs. If you really think people should read this, get a DIGG account and Digg It. It's a lot faster and easier than posting a comment.

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When the hand wringing is over, and that shoud be soon this book will be a huge success. It's become part of the "shame on you" ceremony. The book will be discussed because there will be no choice. Give it time. Thanks, ANNA

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Yes Schrodinger's Cat plays a very important role when analyzing and comparing the EU with the US. Remember, the US is, and has been for a long time, a magnet for greed. This has shielded Europe from the worst of the worst for half a century now. They're too busy sucking off our blood to bother with Europe! Also, they totally control our media and we're basically enslaved. How to break out if it is complicated... it might not even be possible. The US mayhave no other choice than to simply have a meltdown... you know... the way a person's internal organs liquify when hit by a really nasty and relentless pathogen? Like that.

So looking at Europe and saying how much better they are compared to the US is to invoke a Schrodinger's Cat fallacy. It is like putting a camera over someone's shoulder and expecting that camera not to influence their behavior. It does.

If the US did not exist, all this greed would have to go somewhere. Give you three guesses where!

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