common dreams

We are approaching the ten-year anniversary of some of our darkest days - September 2001 - when the “shock doctrine” kicked into high-gear. Bush started his global “War on Terror” by attacking Afghanistan with his cynically named “Operation Infinite Justice.”

We soon saw sweeping infringements to basic rights from the PATRIOT Act in the US to random round ups of thousands of “terror suspects” across the globe. Rendition, torture, Guantanamo, Blackwater, Abu Ghraib, drones and ‘collateral damage’ filled our headlines. Consumerism became a patriotic duty.

We saw the rise of a war machine beyond even the wildest dreams of the cold war era combined with huge giveaways for the financial elite. The basis was created for the dramatic austerity measures gutting investments in our future and devastating our social safety net today.

Bush’s Iraq War led to the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority and was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s excellent best-seller “The Shock Doctrine.”

Klein argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

And all signs indicate this pattern is not ending anytime soon.

But if there is hope -- and we are all optimists around here -- the progressive voices demanding that we push peace and pursue justice must be heard.

that's an excerpt from a fund-raising email from commondreams.org.

click on the link. it's worth checking out.