Power of Choice Meets Walden Bello

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in at 2/17/2007 06:07:00 PM

This clip paints a very favorable image of Milton Friedman. He is, in effect, credited for the demise of the Soviet bloc, the spread of globalization, and the economic rise of China and India. Too, you've got to love that lovey-dovey background music.

For an entirely different take on Friedman, read the opinion of anti-globalization activist Walden Bello on his passing: "...people in the [Global] South will remember the University of Chicago professor as the eye of a human hurricane that cut a swath of destruction through their economies." Further, he charges that Friedman was the ideological father of "structural adjustment policies (SAPs), which set the stage for the accelerated globalization of developing country economies during the 1990’s, created the same poverty, inequality, and environmental crisis in most countries that free-market policies did in Chile, minus the moderate growth of the post-Friedman-Pinochet phase."

Bello concludes that because of his continued negative influence, Friedman's gravestone should, after Shakespeare, read "The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones." Ouch! Even after his passing, Friedman remains a most controversial figure.