In article
,
Gunner wrote:

On Mar 18, 7:40*am, Bill who putters wrote:
In article ,



Angry? then quit posting such dribble and learn to address your
paranoia and the rest of your esteem issues in a different manner and
on a different forum. Your eco-fringe propaganda is getting as bad
and as inaccurate as his and has nothing to do with the act of
gardening.

You don't show that the article is "dribble".
You don't show that Bill is "paranoid" or has "esteem issues".
You don't show that the article was "eco-fringe propaganda".
You don't show that you understand when a post is tagged "OT",
that it will be "Off Topic".
You don't show anything, nothing at all, except poor toilet training.

You don't seem to understand that everything is connected, just like in
a garden, e.g. soil and sky are connected.

You don't seem to understand that gardeners are people too.

If you don't want to read "OT" comments, skip them.

If you don't want to read Bill who Putters, kill file him, as I have
with you.

Capisce!


P.S.S. Since we are off topic any way ;O)

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

http://www.amazon.com/Shock-Doctrine...ism/dp/0312427
999/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300208360&sr=1-1
(Available at better libraries near you.)

In a strange coincidence, the Tiananmen Square massacre took place on
the same day as Solidarity's historic election sweep in Poland‹June 4,
1989. They were, in a way, two very different studies in the shock
doctrine. Both countries had needed to exploit shock and fear to push
through a free-market transformation. In China, where the state used the
gloves-off methods of terror, torture and assassination, the result was,
from a market perspective, an unqualified success. In Poland, where only
the shock of economic crisis and rapid change were harnessed‹and there
was no overt violence--the effects of the shock eventually wore off, and
the results were far more ambiguous.

In Poland, shock therapy may have been imposed after elections, but it
made a mockery of the democratic process since it directly conflicted
with the wishes of the overwhelming majority of voters who had cast
their ballots for Solidarity. As late as 1992, 60 percent of Poles still
opposed privatization for heavy industry. Defending his unpopular
actions, Sachs claimed he had no choice, likening his role to that of a
surgeon in an emergency room. "When a guy comes into the emergency room
and his heart's stopped, you just rip open the sternum and you don't
worry about the scars that you leave, "he said. "The idea is to get the
guy's heart beating again. And you make a bloody mess. But you don't
have any choice."57

But once Poles recovered from the initial surgery, they had questions
about both the doctor and the treatment. Shock therapy in Poland did not
cause "momentary dislocations," as Sachs had predicted. It caused a
full-blown depression: a 30 percent reduction in industrial production
in the two years after the first round of reforms. With government
cutbacks and cheap imports flooding in, unemployment skyrocketed, and in
1993 it reached 25 percent in some areas‹a wrenching change in a country
that, under Communism, for all its many abuses and hardships, had no
open joblessness. Even when the


192 THE SHOCK DOCTRINE

economy began growing again, high unemployment remained chronic.
According to the World Bank's most recent figures, Poland has an
unemployment rate of 20 percent‹the highest in the European Union. For
those under twenty-four, the situation is far worse: 40 percent of young
workers were unemployed in 2006, twice the ELJ average. Most dramatic
are the number of people in poverty: in 1989, 15 percent of Poland's
population was living below the poverty line; in 2005, 59 percent of
Poles had fallen below the line.58 Shock therapy, which eroded job
protection and made daily life far more expensive, was not the route to
Poland's becoming one of Europe's "normal" countries (with their strong
labor laws and generous social benefits) but to the same gaping
disparities that have accompanied the counterrevolution everywhere it
has triumphed, from Chile to China.

The fact that it was Solidarity, the party built by Poland's blue-collar
workers, that oversaw the creation of this permanent underclass
represented a bitter betrayal, one that bred a deep cynicism and anger
in the country that has never fully lifted. Solidarity's leaders often
play down the party's socialist roots, with Walesa now claiming that as
far back as 1980 he knew they would "have to build capitalism." Karol
Modzelewski, a Solidarity militant and intellectual who spent eight and
a half years in Communist jails, retorts angrily, "I wouldn't have spent
a week nor a month, let alone eight and a half years in jail for
capitalism!"59

For the first year and a half of Solidarity rule, workers believed their
heroes when they were assured that the pain was temporary, a necessary
stop on the way to bringing Poland into modern Europe Even in the face
of soaring unemployment, they staged only a smattering of strikes and
waited patiently for the therapeutic part of their shock therapy to take
effect. When the promised recovery didn't arrive, at least not in the
form of jobs, Solidarity's members were simply confused: How could their
own movement have delivered a standard of living worse than that under
Communism? "[Solidarity] defended me in 1980 when I set up a union
committee," one forty-one-year-old construction worker said. "But when 1
went to them for help this time, they told me that I have to suffer for
the sake of reform."60

About eighteen months into Poland's period of "extraordinary politics,"
Solidarity's base had had enough and demanded an end to the experiment.
The extreme dissatisfaction was reflected in a marked increase in the
number of strikes: in 1990, when workers were still giving Solidarity a
free pass, there were only 250 strikes; by 1992 there were more than
6,000 such protests.61 Faced with this pressure from below, the
government was forced to slow down


SLAMMING THE DOOR ON HISTORY 193

its more ambitious privatization plans. By the end of 1993 ‹a year that
saw al-
most 7,500 strikes‹62 percent of Poland's total industry was still
public.62

The fact that Polish workers managed to stop the wholesale privatization
of their country means that as painful as the reforms were, they could
have been far worse. The wave of strikes unquestionably saved hundreds
of thousands of jobs that would otherwise have been lost if these
supposedly inefficient firms had been allowed to close or be radically
downsized and sold off. Interestingly, Poland's economy began growing
quickly in this same period, proving, according to the prominent Polish
economist and former Solidarity member Tadeusz Kowalik, that those who
were ready to write off the state firms as inefficient and archaic were
"obviously wrong."

Besides going on strike, Polish workers found another way to express
their anger with their onetime allies in Solidarity: they used the
democracy they had fought for to punish the party decisively at the
polls, including their once-beloved leader Lech Walesa. The most
dramatic trouncing came on September 19, 1993, when a coalition of left
parties, including the former ruling Communists (rebranded Democratic
Left Alliance), won 66 percent of the seats in parliament. Solidarity
had, by this time, splintered into warring factions. The trade union
faction won less than 5 percent, losing official party status in the
parliament, and a new party led by Mazowiecki, the prime minister, won
just 10.6 percent‹a resounding rejection of shock therapy.

Yet somehow, in the years to come, as dozens of countries struggled with
how to reform their economies, the inconvenient details‹the strikes, the
election defeats, the policy reversals‹would be lost. Instead, Poland
would be held up as a model, proof that radical free-market makeovers
can take place democratically and peacefully.

Like so many stories about countries in transition, this one was mostly a
myth. But it was better than the truth: in Poland, democracy was used as
a weapon against "free markets" on the streets and at the polls.
Meanwhile in China, where the drive for free-wheeling capitalism rolled
over democracy in Tiananmen Square, shock and terror unleashed one of
the most lucrative and sustained investor booms in modern history.
Another miracle born of a massacre.

-----

Bush's 3rd term: Obama
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_vN0--mHug
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyE5wjc4XOw