I’m reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine right now.

For those who don’t know, The Shock Doctrine follows the history of Milton Friedman and The Chicago Boys’ implementation of neoliberalism throughout the world. Milton Friedman—and all of the ensuing economists trained at the University of Chicago tasked with saving the third world from public goods and an organized workforce—waited (or in some cases, created) a “crisis moment” in many countries, ensuring that the populace would be too in shock to notice the sudden privatization of services, depletion of the social safety net, and implementation of economic reforms that ignored the needs of the people or perpetuating what had previously ensured prosperity in favor of economic competition and profits for the corporate, or political-corporate elite.

The people notice it later—they notice when years later they are still reeling, wondering what went wrong and why there is a massive income gap between the rich and the poor, and why “the rich and the poor” is better described as “the elite and everyone else.” In these cases, the elite isn’t living lavishly as everyone else lives modestly—the elite is living in palaces as “everyone else” lives in shanty towns.

Many know that they are angry, and many protest as soon as they find the language to articulate their feelings. For those who protest, the police crack down, saying that they deserve to be arrested, interrogated, tortured, disappeared, and killed for showing dissent.

The economic elites—the harbingers of privatization who play their big money game and argue that it is for the greater good—continue to the next country, with no remorse or accountability. If someone tries to hold them accountable, they lie and say that this phase is only temporary—when there is no proof of recovery whatsoever.

I can’t help but think about rape—particularly as told through the story of Dominique Strauss Kahn.

Dominique Strauss Kahn was the chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—last year, while in New York City, he raped a hotel maid. “The Maid” as she came to be known was Nafisatou Diallo, a black immigrant woman from Guinea. She had experienced sexual trauma in the past. The story was that he forced his penis into her mouth while she was cleaning his room, and—by a fluke—she reported the incident to one of her coworkers when he returned to the hotel to get his cell phone, which he had left.

The story erupted into an international scandal—indicative of each and every flaw that the French and American media and public commit when discussing a rape case. In France, the French media acted as though not just Dominique Strauss Kahn, but the entire country of France was a victim of this terrible crime—not blaming DSK, but blaming the American media for acting like it was a news story whatsoever. In the United States, after months of media and deliberation, the courts decided not to hear the case—because there was enough evidence that Nafisatou Diallo had lied.

This was just the official grievances—as we all know, it is the microaggressions that are truly indicative of cultural tendencies.

In the United States, an acquaintance of mine said, “Why would he rape a maid? He has the money for a high class hooker.”

While I see his logic, he failed to understand that this was not a crime about sex—this was a crime about violence, this was a sexual urge that was violently expressed and like many victims, Nafisatou Diallo was not chosen for any reason other than the fact that she was there in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There were thousands that responded to the media, eating up every story that the New York Post published about her alleged past as a prostitute, or any lie that she had ever told. As if prostitutes are immune from rape and anyone who has ever lied is assumed to be lying at all times.

It is a combination of the dynamic between a powerful white man (a financier, no less—and chief of the IMF) and a powerless black, immigrant woman, the response placing the onus and blame on the victim rather than the perpetrator, and the ultimate lack of justice or accountability whatsoever that brings me back to neoliberalism. Like Nafisatou Diallo—like every rape victim who’s resistance has been silenced or repressed with fear—many of these countries never gave their consent to be made over, to have privatization implemented, to have the IMF or the corporate elite take what they wanted in that moment because that country was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and leave the people reeling, wondering what happened and realizing that they could do nothing to nullify or fix the enormous violation that has just been permanently engraved in their collective history.

The vast majority of rapists are serial rapists—their victims are a string of individuals reeling from this psychologically traumatic experience of violation. Milton Friedman, the Chicago Boys, and the entire history of neoliberal implementation as implemented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George W. Bush are a series of economic rape cases—imposing themselves uninvited, institutionalizing fear and violence for their own gain in that moment, and having enough of a sick obsession and thrill from this process that it is repeated, time and time again, ignoring the screams of resistance to institutionalize corporate, disaster capitalistic neoliberal policies without the consent of the people.