Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsComplex
Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2012
I suppose Ms. Klein could have blamed the civil wars in the "Southern Cone" on General Franco.
When Jews fled into Spain in 1940, Franco refused demands by the Nazis that they be turned over.
Franco saved more Jews than any other leader except Stalin.However, at the end of WWII he asked
the Jewish refugees to leave, remembering all the Jewish leaders in the International Brigades and
the commissars who ran the Catholic killing Chekas. Some went to Palestine, but many went to the more developed countries
of Latin Ameerica. They took their politics with them and inculcated these into their children.
These politics were generally Marxist. When Ms. Klein wonders why so many of the leftist revolutionaries
in the Southern Cone were in their early 30s, the demographics of the Jewish Diaspora into Latin America
explains a lot. The Red Brigades in the Southern Cone were a real problem. I remember not going to
an international oncology conference in Buenos Airies in the early 70s because of the record of kidnappings
and ransome there. Like Franco before him, Pinochet resisted taking part in a coup. But the horrors of the
chekas were already evident, and he did what he had to do to save his country from becoming an anti-Catholic
Marxist sewer. Galtieri in Argentina had much the same motivaation. His revolution was quashed by the
imperialist Margaret Thatcher who wanted to hold onto the Malvinas islands at all cost. Pinochet's biggest
mistake was in allowing the British SAS to use Chile as a staging platform from which they destroyed three
Argentinian Exocet missiles.With those Exocet missles, the Brits would have lost their aircraft carrier and
had to turn the fleet back to Britain. Chile has the highest GDP in Latin America, due in large measure to the ideas of the "Chicago boys". I suppose Ms. Klein does not accuse Milton Friedman of being an anti-Semite, given his origins.
Think of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and you will get a good idea about what the Southern Cone might have become without the intervention of the military. Ms. Klein's ideology blinds her to reality.
However,though flawed in the Latin American context, Ms. Klein rightly describes Jeffrey Sachs's performance in Poland. I was in Poland on sabbatical trying to introduce the relatively inexpensive
Deming paradigm of quality improvement.I had a grant from UNIDO (nothing for myself), and I trained and
hired 10 Polish professors to go into ten companies and implement the Deming paradigm. Deming understood that the assets of a company include the skills of its workforce. Sachs saw to it that Poland got essentially no support to solve the poison pill problem introduced by the Soviets. Few Polish companies
built all their parts. These came in significant measure from Russia and the other Communist block countries.Poland needed to buy their suppliers or duplicate their products. Russia would accept Polish
products but refused to pay for them. Sachs, as a Jewish intellectual, never walked the production floor
as I have always done. He had clean finger nails and no empathy with the workers. His failure to gain
for Poland any significant bridge capital and his demand that all companies be sold for pennies on the dollar to Post Communist oligarchs (with capital arranged from private New York sources) succeeded in shutting down
95% of Poland's industry. The brave miners of Wujek lost their jobs. Worse, many towns in Poland had
only one factory. When it shut down, skilled workers were transformed into unemployed rural poor, trying
to eke out an existence from small family crop plots (Poland still had private agriculture in the Communist times) To become a master tool and dye maker requires around 8 years of training and apprenticeship. These people Sachs and the PostCommunist Balserowicz and the former head of the Komosmol, Jacek Kuron, destroyed
together with their families. 95% of Polish factories shut down completely. The poverty situation in Poland is still desperate 20 years after Sachs. Friedman was not a criminal. Sachs certainly was. "Commanding Heights" is little more than neocon Jewish hubris. If you destroy nations and expect to be rewarded for
doins so, you are no better than a Soviet commissar. That describes Sachs very well. A monstrous thought that he is a neocon hero. The neocons combine the worst characteristics of the Communists and the Nazis.