Wow... Posted This Part Earlier... Came Back To Hit Me Like A Ton Of Bricks...

[WillyT]

I know Obama's first activism came because of Mandela and Apartheid... but the implications here are profound.

What we in America don’t really fully appreciate, I think, is not just that he was elected president and what a great victory it all was, but the tremendous pressure South Africa was under from white capital, from American business, to try to restrain the reforms that they wanted to put in place. And that led to a kind of neoliberalism, which is in effect in South Africa, which has limited their ability to fight poverty, limited their ability to deal with a lot of issues, which has led to the kind of corruption that we’ve seen in many other places in the world.

From: http://sync.democraticunderground.com/10024157976

[truebluegreen]

1. Yup. I remember what happened in S. Africa was discussed in the closing chapter

of The Shock Doctrine...wherein the government was hijacked by the oligarchs.

[WillyT]

2. Yeah... And Is White Capital Resisting Reforms In THIS Country ???

Pete Petersen
Koch Brothers
Sheldon Adelson
Wal-Mart
etc... etc... etc...

[truebluegreen]

11. Without doubt.

The War on Drugs. Reforming "welfare". Not reforming immigration. Denying Medicaid expansion...all designed to keep the underclass down.

[Lifelong Dem]

3. The media focuses on something I don't

I focus on the applause Obama received after his speech. The media can lower the volume on this applause but the reality I saw was for a great man in the USA.

[WillyT]

4. "The Media"... Amy Goodman Is "The Media" ??? - We Could Only Be So Lucky !!!

[Lifelong Dem]

5. My post was just a generalization of the media overall

They suck.

[WillyT]

6. They Tend To... Yes... But NOT Amy Goodman...She's The Closest Thing We Have To Walter Cronkite...

These Days... I Trust No One More Than Her.

Plus she wasn't saying that, Danny Schecter, her interview subject, was.

[Lifelong Dem]

7. OK Willy

I don't doubt you.

[WillyT]

8. Peace My Friend...

[Lifelong Dem]

9. Un huh...

[malaise]

10. It;s the truth

For political freedom Mandela et al had to accept the debts of the apartheid era.

[socialist_n_TN]

12. And that's part of the Shock Doctrine that I could NEVER get used to......

It wasn't just South Africa as I recall from the book. The Latin American countries that underwent the Shock Doctrine were on the hook for the debts that their former authoritarian rulers took out in order to buy the means they used to OPPRESS the people.

As a Bolshevik-Leninist I would consider those debts to capital that were used to buy truncheons, tear gas, guns and bullets, and training in torture null and void.

[malaise]

13. Naomi Klein's book had a full chapter on South Africa's

Shock Doctrine. Of course the hacks in the Western Press blame the Africans for the mess made by the apartheid goons and the IMF/World Bank/Washington Consensus