Michael Gallagher

Malcolm (Bruce Perry) <> In Gods Name (David Yallop) <> The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins) <> Last Words (Piaras F. Mac Lochlainn) <> Paddy's Lament (Thomas Gallagher) and more.......The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. If you read no other political book in your life, reading this will open your eyes in a way no other political book will on how extreme the greed of capitalism can be and why the capitalist system cannot be reformed and must be abolished. <> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_therapy_(economics) <> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine <>

<> EXTRACT from The Shock Doctrine: chapter 12 <> THE CAPITALIST ID <><> .....On the day I went to visit Jeffrey SACHS in October 2006, New York city was under a damp blanket of gray drizzle punctuated, every five paces or so, by a vibrant burst of red. It was the week of the grand launch of BONO'S (Product) Red brand, and the city was getting the full blitz. Red iPods and Armani sunglasses loomed from billboards overhead, every bus shelter featured Steven SPIELBERG or Penélope CRUZ in a different red garment, every GAP outlet in the city had given itself over to the launch, and the APPLE store on Fifth Avenue was emitting a rosy glow. "Can a tank top change the world?" asked one ad. Yes it can, we are assured, because a portion of the profits was going to the Global Fund to FIGHT AIDS, TB and malaria. "Shop till it stops!" BONO had produced, in the midst of a televised shopping spree with OPRAH a couple of days earlier. <><> I had a hunch that most of the journalists wanting to talk to SACHS that week would be looking for the superstar economist's view on this fashionable new way to raise aid money. After all, BONO refers to SACHS as "my profesor", and a photo of the two men greeted me as I entered SACH'S office at Columbia University (he left Harvard in 2002). In the midst of all this glamorous charity, I felt like a bit of spoiler, because I wanted to talk about the professor's least favorite topic of all, one that has prompted him to threaten to hang up on reporters mid-interview. I wanted to talk about Russia and what went wrong there. <><> It was in Russia, after the first year of shock therapy, that SACHS began his own transition, from global shock doctor to one of the world's most outspoken that, in the years since, has put him in a conflict with many former colleagues and collaborators in the orthodox economic circles. As far as SACHS is concerned, he isn't the one who changed - he was always committed to helping countries develop market-based economies bolstered by generous aid and debt forgiviness. For years he had found it possible to achieve these goals by working in partnership with the IMF and the U.S. Treasury. But by the time he was on the ground in Russia, the tenor of discussion had changed and he came up against a level of official indifference that shocked him and pushed him into a more confrontational stance with Washington's economic establishment..... <> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs <> Make Poverty (and rich hypocrites) History - Bono....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eih_ybKdVXU