In a book very appropriate for these days after the tragedy, The shock doctrine Naomi Klein explains one of the theses of the economist Milton Friedman and the famous Chicago School: wait for a first-order crisis or state of crisis to occur. shockand sell pieces of the public state network to private agents to the highest bidder while citizens were still recovering from the trauma, and quickly achieve the ultraliberal reforms that they want to implement and that are not possible without a citizenry torn apart by a sudden and atrocious crisis , were permanent. In one of his essays, Friedman writes: “Only a crisis—real or perceived—gives rise to true change. When that crisis takes place, the actions that are carried out depend on the ideas that float in the environment. I believe that this must be our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and active until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
The last time in his life that Friedman was able to put this idea into practice was after Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and left 1,800 dead in 2005. The economist, idol of the liberal right, died a year later, but he had time to engineer the dismantling of the public school in New Orleans and replace it with a network of charter schools built by the state but managed by private institutions. With much greater agility than was shown to restore the electrical grid throughout the city, charter schools became a reality, thousands of public teachers were left on the streets and of the 123 public schools that were operating before the hurricane, 3 survived. Klein’s book is an extensive study of the relationship between shock and the free market and how moments of collective trauma are used to kick-start radical right-wing economic and social reforms.
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