It looks as if Paul.L has lost his voice for a second time.

There seems to be another poll somewhere which shows not 79% public opposition to the sell-off 86% public opposition to the sell-off.

http://news.theage.com.au/national/iemma-makes-electricity-price-promise-20080826-42om.html
But polls show the majority of NSW residents - as many as 86 per cent - oppose the sale.

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In regard to who started the Gulf war of 1990-1991, clearly Iraq was legally the aggressor. Nevertheless, there is strong circumstantial evidence that indicates that Saddam Hussein may have been set up by the U.S.

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspie.html
... But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts,
like your border disagreement with Kuwait.

- U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie to Saddam Hussein on 27 July 1990, 6 days prior to Iraqi Invasion on 2 August as Iraqi army units were moving towards Kuwaiti border.

Either the U.S. was stupid or it was consciously misleading Hussein to believe that the U.S. would not intervene if Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Also, Kuwait was accused by Iraq of slant drilling across the border into its oil fields Kuwait was selling more oil that its OPEC quota of oil was pushed down oil prices and harming Iraq's economy as it was trying to recover from its war with Iran.

Clearly there was more than one side to that conflict, and it seems to me that the invasion could have easily have been prevented if U.S. Ambassador Glaspie had spoken more forthrightly with Hussein.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War#Tensions_with_Kuwait http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Kuwait#Economic_warfare_and_slant_drilling

Dagget,

I have a life outside of OLO so just because I don’t reply to your every missive doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to say.

In relation to the privatization issue it may well be true that most people in NSW are against privatization of Electricity. There are many reasons for this, including the campaigns of the trade unions etc.

What is clear is that there is NO real desire across Australia to renationalise electricity in those markets where it has been deregulated. It is now commonly accepted across both political parties that economic rationalism has had a primary role in the success of the Australian economy over the last 30 years. It would take an irrational to even attempt to deny that.

Secondly, to attend to your ridiculous suggestion that the economic liberalism was the reason that the coup in Chile was undertaken. This was the era of the cold war. You remember the war on Communism, that great evil of the 20th century? The US made a number of decisions about the socialist regimes in the region. It backed just about anyone who was anti communist. Traditional protectionist or radical free marketeer, as long as they were not communist.

Kleins suggestion that “repression was necessary to implement Chicago School economic policies in Chile” is absolutely preposterous. The woman has NO SHAME. She will fit the facts to her argument every time. She even claims that Friedman worked as an advisor to Pinoche. This is a total fabrication. Furthermore, the claim that the Chicago boys were behind the coup is also a fabrication. The military was behind the coup and only after their protectionist/corporatist approach had yielded hyperinflation did the regime employ the civilian “Chicago boys” to realign the economy.

Some criticisms “it is guilt by association and assertion rather than proof, a weaknesses of too much of the book”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/sep/23/society.politics

Financial Times "a deeply flawed work that blends together disparate phenomena to create a beguiling – but ultimately dishonest – argument.

LRoB criticized its perceived naïveté and for conflating "'free market orthodoxy' with predatory corporate behavior."

TBC

cont,

Kissinger’s actual quote was "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." This was during the height of the cold war, and although misguided, needs to be seen in the context of a aggressively expanding Soviet Empire which was seeking to broaden its “revolution”.

You’re attempt, or rather Kleins attempt to conflate economic liberalism with neo conservatism and war mongering is a transparent and totally flawed hypothesis. Whilst she makes the case that capitalists take advantage of calamity and change. Nowhere does she adequately demonstrate that economic liberals are fabricating such disasters in order to implement their “highly resisted” policy changes.

In respect of the simple ideological differences between market and command style economies, it is clear that market economies trust people to know what is best for them and where they should spend their money. Command economies on the other hand believe that individuals do not know what is best for them and seek to take away those decisions from the individual. Which is why they routinely mutate into communist dictatorships. After all, why bother with elections if you know what is better for people than they do themselves?

In regard to Bolivia, any attempt to suggest that their experience can be understood within a narrow privatization vs socialism spectrum is naïve and fanciful. As I have already pointed out, with 2/3rds of the population making a living as subsistence farmers it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY that economic literacy has had much penetration. Furthermore, there are serious issues regarding ethnicity, nationalism, drugs and foreign control that affected the outcome of the elections.

You certainly have not come close to showing that economic liberalism is the driving force behind US interventionsism, nor has Naomi Klein. It is a fabricated and ultimately farcical hypothesis.

So much self-contradiction and so many enormous leaps of logic. I have my work cut out for me, once more. (Actually I am quite happy for you not to contribute. There are many far more interesting questions I would prefer to discuss elsewhere.)

I suggest to other users that a good guide to the credibility of a contribution is the extent to which it directly quotes the author he/she is attacking, in this case, Naomi Klein.

I have yet to find a critique Naomi Klein, which, instead of quoting her directly, attempts to put words into her mouth in order to portray her as illogical and driven by ideology rather than the evidence.

What you are trying to do, Paul.L, is throw in a few isolated facts which superficially appear to contradict Klein's case, whilst avoiding directly attacking Klein's words.

However, even at that you are wrong:

"Saenz (President of the National association of Manufacturers - generously funded by the CIA and multi-nationals) recruited several Chicago Boys to design those alternative programs and set them up in a new office near the Presidential palace in Santiago." (p70)

Klein has produced copious further evidence of Friemdan's personal collaboration with the dictator Pinochet.

Of Friedman's role in Chile, Orlando Letelier, who was later assassinated in exile by the Chilean secret police whilst the U.S. government turned a blind eye, wrote:

Friedman "was the intellectual architect and unofficial adviser
for the team of economists now running the Chilean economy".
He dismissed Friedman's defence that that lobbying for "shock
treatment" was merely offering 'technical advice'. "The
establishment of a free 'private economy' and the control of
inflation a la Friedman," Letelier argued could not be done
peacefully. "The plan has had to be enforced, and in the
Chilean context could only be done by the killing of thousands,
the establishment of concentration camps all over the country,
the jailing of 100,000 people in three years. ..."(Klein, p99)

For some years afterwards, it was not possible for Friedman to hold public meetings, because invariably someone in the audience would quote Letelier's words.

Paul.L wrote:

"Secondly, to attend to your ridiculous suggestion that the
economic liberalism was the reason that the coup in Chile
was undertaken. This was the era of the cold war. You remember
the war on Communism, that great evil of the 20th century? The
US made a number of decisions about the socialist regimes in
the region. It backed just about anyone who was anti communist.
Traditional protectionist or radical free marketeer, as long
as they were not communist."

Interesting that neo-liberal free marketeers seem to accept that the end of fighting 'communism' justified whatever means that were employed to do that (including, presumably the carpet bombing of Laos Cambodia and Vietnam and the murder of 500,000 socialists in Indonesia in 1965). However, as was revealed in Daniel Ellsberg's "The Penatagon Papers" the U.S. rulers knew perfectly well that in most of these cold war conflicts they were not fighting "communism", if by communism we mean the brutal system that Stalin brought to Russia. Rather they were fighting against popular democratic grass roots movements and often employing "communists" in order to defeat them.

A stark illustration of this was the way, at the 1954 Geneva Peace negotiations, that the Soviet and Chinese 'communists' leaned on their fellow Vietnamese 'communists' to agree to the partition of Vietnam and the imposition of an unelected dictatorship in the South even though the pro-independence Vietnamese Communist Party, as even acknowledged by Australian Foreign Minster Casey at the time, enjoyed overwhelming popular support throughout Vietnam, north and south.

A strange way to attempt to impose 'communism' on the world wouldn't you agree, Paul.L?

"clearly Iraq was legally the aggressor. Nevertheless, there is strong circumstantial evidence that indicates that Saddam Hussein may have been set up by the U.S. "

Sadaam came to power same way as did Gaddafi & a host of other islamist Regimes - via the cloak and dagger mode.

The other notorious claim is America went to war for oil. In fact, those who stayed away from the coalition, did so primarilly because of oil - as exposed in the oil scandal & France's ShIraq, who called Sadaam a good friend. America has thus far spent Billions on the Iraq war and expended many US lives, and had no problem securing oil via its normal paths. This was a war only against Islamist Terrorism - hello?!

The other notorious premise is that Sadaam had no WMD - shall we ask the Kurds?

Sadaam dished out lottery sized rewards to anyone who blew up a school bus in Israel, and went around acting like a tyrant waiting to get his hands on some serious weaponry, as was agreed unanamously by all nations and 17 UN Resilutions, which sanctioned the use of military force - and we never saw a whimper from the sanctimonious US bashers at this time. It is France which should be taken to task, and America hailed. This is true even if there was some legitimate exaggerations of the extent of Sadaam's prowess in his race to get Nuclear - the guilty here are those who remained in the shadows in silence - such as France.

Those who cling to ficticious spins are those whose resumes against the war on terror will be found to be'BLANK' - these cannot boast at all. At this time, only one's choice of action against another mad man in Iran, impudently boasting in a neo Hitler Mode, should be the issue for discussion - let the US bashers first address Iran, then examine their legitimacy about Sadaam.