Sorry bud, your history is a bit muddled there. The “radicals” you point to are indeed free-market fundamentalists, every one of them – be it Pinochet (Chile), Yeltsin (Russia) or the IMF, free market ideas have been tested and continue to fail. If social liberals had any real power in these countries would their main industries be privatized? Would wealth be concentrated in the hands of 1% of the populations, with sometimes upward of 40% of the rest living below poverty lines?

There has been a clear indication through time that every attempt to enact free-market fundamentalist policies (starting with Chile and Pinochet in 1970s) has necessarily subverted democracy. A prime example is Boris Yeltsin’s outrageously violent takeover of the russian legislature after the fall of the wall – when Russia was a fledgling democracy, Yeltsin engineered the military coup with the aid of the IMF, World Bank and Washington, and russia effectively went from communist to democratic and right back to dictatorship. This was all to enable free-market reforms without the worry of public support because the military was on hand to quash any public unrest from economic malaise on the part of Yeltsin’s policies.

The few examples where yes, socialist/communist leaning parties were in power before free-market reforms (Poland, South Africa) can be traced to IMF and World Bank loan agreements. Upon securing control of governments in democratically held open elections, Solidarity (poland) and the ANC (south africa) were forced to repay the debts racked up by massive military spending by previous oppressive governments (apartheid National party in SA, soviet friendlies in poland). To rectify these debts, and continue to govern their populations, these socialist governments were forced to accept the terms of IMF loans – which always include privatizing state owned industries and utilities, removing price caps and subsidies, removing wage control and protection and disbarring unions/removing political power from unions. These are very real examples of free-market reforms subverting democracy, and each of these examples is a horror story of economic misfortune for the people living under the reforms.

Oh yes, i first picked up Shock Doctrine and could hardly put it down. As well, the Nation runs articles very frequently on this subject and they have recently published some great articles relating to the crisis we are in now.

The matter which gets me worried the most is the trend laid out in Shock Doctrine, whereby a disoriented in the midst of crisis becomes victim to “structural adjustments” or “economic reform”, considering that we may be witness to such an attempt to “free-up” our market. Luckily though, we haven’t yet seen any attempts by Obama (but really this would be the work of Summers, Rubin and Geithner) to go over our democratic processes to enact such ‘reforms’. However, this G-20 meeting this week should give us some more insight into any sorts of tricks that may be pulled…stay tuned!