Naomi Klein: Shocked to death

[marmar]

from the LA Times:



Shocked to death
The jolts of global economics blast people out of the picture.

By Naomi Klein
November 21, 2007

The world saw a video last week of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers using a Taser against a Polish man in the Vancouver International Airport in October. The man, Robert Dziekanski, died soon after the attack. In recent days, more details have come out about him. It turns out that the 40-year-old didn't just die after being shocked -- his life was marked by shock as well.

Dziekanski was a young adult in 1989, when Poland began a grand experiment called "shock therapy" for the nation. The promise was that if the communist country accepted a series of brutal economic measures, the reward would be a "normal European country" like France or Germany. The pain would be short, the reward great.

So Poland's government eliminated price controls overnight, slashed subsidies, privatized industries. But for young workers such as Dziekanski, "normal" never arrived. Today, roughly 40% of young Polish workers are unemployed. Dziekanski was among them. He had worked as a typesetter and a miner, but for the last few years, he had been unemployed and had had run-ins with the law.

Like so many Poles of his generation, Dziekanski went looking for work in one of those "normal" countries that Poland was supposed to become but never did. Two million Poles have joined this mass exodus during the last three years alone. Dziekanski's cohorts have gone to work as bartenders in London, doormen in Dublin, plumbers in France. Last month, he chose to follow his mother to British Columbia, Canada, which is in a pre-Olympics construction boom.

"After seven years of waiting, arrived to his utopia, Vancouver," said the Polish consul general, Maciej Krych. "Ten hours later, he was dead."

Much of the outrage sparked by the video, which was made by another passenger at the airport, has focused on the controversial use of Tasers, already implicated in 17 deaths in Canada and many more in the United States. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-klein21nov21,1,3097768.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

[opihimoimoi]

1. K&R....tasers should be outlawed.....period....

[marmar]

2. Agreed....

n/t

[sam sarrha]

3. they tased him and left the power on the whole time.. that is wrong and is torture

[Selatius]

4. "Shock Therapy" was really little more than a program of organized theft.

The same situation occurred in Russia with IMF-imposed "economic reforms."

[WinkyDink]

5. Cf., "Bush, George W."