I just finished reading Naomi Klein’s amazing new book The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In the The Shock Doctrine, Naomi explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world—through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

Naomi also revels how places where this “Shock Therapy” were first experimented with in the 1970’s in the southern cone, the southern most countries of South America that the shock is starting to wear off. These countries have learned the painful and torturous effects of the so called “Global Free Market”. How deregulation and privatization have caused large amounts of poverty and very small ruling class in the form of corporatism. They are seeing that it is not a choice of pure socialism on the Left or the deregulated “free market” on the Right, but a third option of democratic socialism. A new model not just where socialist parties are brought to power through elections, but also democratically run workplaces and land holdings. Markets existing alongside the nationalization of banks and mines, with the income used to build comfortable neighborhoods and decent schools – economic as well as political democracy.