Word: shockingly
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TIME: How did you come up with such a theory and what turned it into a book? Naomi Klein: I went to Iraq a year into the occupation and was researching the intersection between the shock and awe invasion and how it was supposed to have laid the psychological groundwork for [Bush's Iraq envoy]Paul Bremer's extreme country makeover that first summer. And what I was looking at, the tail end of Bremer's stay, was how shock therapy had backfired in Iraq - and by shock therapy I'm referring to the economic policies that were really seen...
...became interested in this idea of what happens to our minds when we go into a state of shock and why was this is such a powerful metaphor for both the military and the economic architects of the war. But I still wasn't sure that this was something that went beyond Iraq. When I first used the phrase "disaster capitalism" it was because I had found out that something very similar was happening in Sri Lanka after the Asian tsunami where just days after the tsunami hit the government started pushing a very unpopular privatization agenda of water privatization...
...just some twisted invention of the Bush White House. That actually there is a history. Every time there has been a major leap forward for this fundamentalist version of capitalism that really doesn't see a role for the state, the ground has been prepared by some kind of shock...
...left in Latin America, then you had a wave of military coups, often supported by the CIA, and many of these U.S.-trained Chicago boys, as they're called in Latin America, rose to prominent levels of governments - heads of the central bank or finance ministers - where the economic shock therapists were working hand-in-hand with the very real shock therapists who are in control in these countries through repressive means, including torture...
...suddenly there's a possibility for parents and teachers - for some of the poorest people in America who had been so betrayed by their government - to build the system they've always wanted, to build the housing projects that they've always wanted, and to heal from this shock by being a participant in the reconstruction. Instead of that, the trauma was actively exploited and the fact that people had been spread all over the country and separated from their families and their roots and their communities was taken advantage of, in order to turn New Orleans into this Petri...