Status Updates From Doktryna szoku

"Washington has always regarded democratic socialism as a greater threat than totalitarian Communism."

"the Israeli state openly embraced a new national economic vision: the growth provided by the dot-com bubble would be replaced with a homeland security boom. It was the perfect marriage of the Likud Party's hawkishness and its radical embrace of Chicago School economics, as embodied by Sharon's finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu."

"Unlike Palestinian workers, whose presence in Israel challenged the Zionist project...the hundreds of thousands of Russians who came to Israel...had the opposite effect...On March 30, 1993, Israel began its policy of 'closure,' sealing off the border between Israel and the occupied territories."

"Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market's invisible hand. This is one area in which it actually delivers."

"When Katrina hit, FEMA had to hire a contractor to award contracts to contractors."

"A year and a half into the Iraq occupation, the U.S State Department launched a new branch: the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization. On any given day, it is paying private contractors to draw up detailed plans to reconstruct twenty-five different countries that may...find themselves the target of U.S-sponsored destruction, from Venezuela to Iran."

"There was another obstacle to Washington's privatization dreams: the free-market fundamentalism that shaped the structure of the occupation itself...In short, the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] was itself too privatized to privatize Iraq.

"The best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground," I was told earnestly by a delegate at the "Rebuilding Iraq 2" conference in Washington, D.C."