By: Dianne Post
Date: May 21st 2026 | Substack
Shock and awe was the horrible label Bush W put on his attack on Iraq. At the time, Kirstin Sinema was one of the NLG organizers who established a 24-hour protest on the corner of 24th and Camelback and we attorneys took shifts being there for legal backup. I got the 3 a.m. shift. Those were the days, huh!
I had also heard of the shock doctrine from the Naomi Klein book of the same name about the economic policies of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School (of Economics). Me and economics don’t go well together so I’ve never tried to wade into it much. Little did I know, until I read the book recently, how much I did know and in fact experienced.
My first two years in Moscow, (1998-2000) was when their economic system tanked and the ruble went from was 500 rubles to 1 dollar to 1,000 to 1. Imagine your money being worth half tomorrow. How much would that hurt you? Could you pay your bills? Could you buy groceries? Or gas?
Poverty exploded. I saw old women on the streets of Moscow selling religious icons to eat. Children in the underground walkways begged for food. Actually they were begging for money for the men who had trafficked them, but I gave them food instead because they could quickly eat it and the men couldn’t beat it out of them. Bananas were their favorite. I saw people living outside in Norilsk, the northern most town in Russia in the Arctic Circle. They slept under buildings that had heating ducts coming up from the ground. I do not know how they survived.
What Russians told me was that if this was democracy, they didn’t want it. I tried and failed to convince them this wasn’t democracy but gangster capitalism. One lawyer I had hired who lived in St. Petersburg and who went to law school with Putin said that before they had money but nothing to buy. Now there is lots to buy, but they have no money.
In one of the many workshops I did, I had gotten a PowerPoint from somewhere and taught the Russian women lawyers about the scam of “structural adjustment” which basically was rich countries ripping off poor ones after a disaster (real or engineered), impoverishing the population, and then making them pay the aid back, which had been ripped off by corrupt rulers, for decades after. That is what Naomi Klein calls Disaster Capitalism in her book The Shock Doctrine but I didn’t know that then. She talks about how we lost Russia and it is precisely what I lived through.
Then in 2003, I had been hired by one of the Beltway Bandits to go to Iraq after the invasion and work on violence against women issues. I was thrilled to go and couldn’t wait to get back on the international scene. But as the days progressed, the DC firm treated me worse and worse. They didn’t answer my questions, they got me documents or orders (get shots, get photos, get doctors certificate) at the last minute and insisted I have it done the next day which often was impossible. I learned long ago that your procrastination is not my emergency.
They couldn’t explain what I was to do or how I was to do it. That was fine with me because if I have no direction, I can do it my way. But then they explained that I had to live only in the Green Zone and could never even travel out of it but to go to and from the airport. I said how in the heck was I supposed to work with women in Iraq from inside the Green Zone. They responded that certain people would be selected to bring to me. Ah, No. I know what that meant. American stooges, grabbing the money, not the women doing the actual work.
But then they tossed on the final straw – I had to live in a house that they had assigned me – with 8 men. I said, “Are you out of your mind? No way am I living in a house with 8 men? You cannot be serious! You want a 56-year-old lesbian to live in a house with 8 young men! Not on your life.” And that was the end of that job. I lost a friend over it because she had recommended me and then I refused. A different friend of mine did eventually go and it turned out as expected. She never got out of the Green Zone and never met an Iraqi, and she was truly terrified that they would not her leave ahead of her scheduled time. We came up with a plan to spring her and she escaped.
Klein talks about both Russia and Iraq in her book and confirms my experiences. She reminds us that before neoliberalism, our society was based on compassion, empathy and trust. That social order had to be reversed for disaster/gangster capitalism to prevail as it does today. You remember Musk saying empathy was a weakness and a danger, the steady drumbeat of untrustworthy elections which has been disproven repeatedly, and the absence of compassion in ICE and this regime.
The neoliberals as led by Friedman, who was tied to the Heritage Foundation, cannot govern because they do not believe in government. All they want to do is hollow out the government so nothing can get done (DOGE firing of over 100,000 employees, social security offices with one employee who can do nothing); deregulate everything; outsource fundamental governmental responsibilities (for profit prisons, Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, private schools with public vouchers), and selling off vital resources of the country to their cronies for a song (this was rampant when I was in Russia and resulted in the class of oligarchs). Russians held up their hands and said communists (this hand)/gangsters(that hand); gangsters(that hand)/communists (this hand) – same thing. We now also have the most corrupt regime we have ever had.
To carry out the Friedman plan, the Chicago Boys put incompetent people in jobs they have not a clue how to do (the current regime), eliminate regulation so corporations have free reign (eliminate EPA regulations), and brutally suppress those who rise up in dissent, (unions, the poor). Recently protesters here were sentenced to 60 years for wearing black. The plan of these gangsters is to leave 25-60% of the population in permanent poverty. Been to West Virginia or Kentucky lately?
Klein gives many examples of where and how the “Chicago Boys” (Friedman’s acolytes) did this from Chile (Friedman got a Nobel prize; we got Pinochet), to Argentina (the disappeared); Poland with the betrayal of Solidarity, South Africa with the betrayal of Mandala, Haiti, and the Philippines.
Klein also shows how this is linked to the torture (enhanced interrogation) and the “renditions” done in the Bush W. administration. Psychologists thought you had to wipe a person’s mind clean and then put in what you want. So they tried the same with the economy. Neither works that way. But if you can label our protesters terrorists (as they have started to do e.g. here in AZ naming CAIR as a terrorist group and “antifa”) then you can justify torturing them as Eastman (now permanently disbarred as a lawyer) justified torture under the Bush administration. These aren’t random steps; they are marching to a known end.
I couldn’t read much of the book at a time before I would throw it down in disgust. It reminded me when I was 22 and just moved to Florida. I sat on the lanai and read a book about the wealth gap in the U.S. Frequently, I was so angry I threw it across the porch until once I knocked out the screen.
So of course, the Shock Doctrine moved to America as Klein knew it would. In 1992, then third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot predicted “a giant sucking sound” as U.S. jobs moved to Mexico and other countries where labor was more easily exploited. That sucking sound has bankrupted many cities in the Rust Belt – now the opioid belt – the drug of despair. But that was just the warmup.
Then came Katrina – a disaster ready made for the thieves. We all saw the result of that nightly on TV. Whites waded through chest high water to find food for their families. Blacks waded through chest high water to loot food for their families. Armed white police officers and citizens on the Crescent City Connection bridge shot at Blacks seeking to escape Katrina and forced them back to the devastated city. The poor were abandoned, their homes and the Ninth Ward were never rebuilt, all the schools turned into charters, the aid was sucked away into the pockets of the rich. The current regime wants to get rid of FEMA because then all disaster aid would have to be private contractors and guess who would get that and what it would cost?
This didn’t happen under one presidency or one party. Remember the 80s? Greed is good. That came with Reagan. Trump has enriched himself at the government trough so far up to $1.4 billion at least. But like the Hunger Games, the populace must be entertained, and violence is entertainment– hence the cage fight on the White House lawn which debases the people’s house. We’ll have to ask Native Peoples to do a smudging after.
By refusing to do anything about the climate issues, and in fact making them worse by drilling and removing subsidies from renewables and canceling wind farm contracts, climate disasters are worse and more frequent. The monied class can swing in after every disaster to extract resources and impoverish people.
At the end of the movie Animal Farm, (showing now) the hero says they’ll never surrender because the only thing that’s always good is the truth. The heroine responds – and kindness – kindness is always good.
So while we have every right to be depressed today at what is going on, we should remember as we said when NOW started in 1966, the personal is political. Our depression means something is right with us not that something is wrong with us. We think. We care. That is good. A friend recently said she burst out crying at odd times and didn’t know why. I know why. When I stop crying over injustice, I’ll be no good as a fighter. We all must remain fighters though tears stream down our cheeks.
