"Over the past two and a half years, I have seen tyranny, dishonesty, corruption and depravity of types I never thought possible ... I've seen things I didn't know man was capable of."
And that was just Dick Cheney he was talking about. You should have heard what he said about Bush! Sorry ... I kid. Gonzales did say those words and they hold a lot of truth. But, just not in the way that he intended.
Speaking of tyranny and depravity, check out the great short film, Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron (of Children of Men fame). It does a good job of showing how some leaders use the period of collective shock after disasters to ramrod through those policies that they could not get passed in peaceful times. It compares that to shock treatment and to torture and the effect those methods have on the subject.
"Only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change." -- Milton Friedman
Mr. Friedman was an advocate of using those times to push through free market policies that wouldn't stand a chance of passing during peaceful times. Guess who liked Miltie and his concepts of "privatized tyranny"? Yep - Nixon, Reagan, Bush. Milton Friedman -- the guy who once commented that "there is no poverty in America".
"The free market is socialism for the rich - [free] markets for the poor and state protection for the rich." -- Noam Chomsky
