A too tidy show

Events here are happening according to expectation. I had been doing some dirt shovelling and complaining, but Ruth and I agreed that dirt shovelling is an inevitable eventuality when going to the Valley. Pepper the puppy has curbed his appetite for eating poop, and thus far has not caught parvo again. Across from the barbwired fence in our yard lie some rusty cars and a stacked pile of old bricks that have cylindrical holes through them, running lengthwise. A stray kitten got stuck in one of the bricks for about 24 hours. Only its head was poking out of one end, but he was successfully chiseled out. The rest of the animals are doing ok.
In my other time I've been wasting time on the internet and making fun of Swedish word combinations (the word for future is "front time" and the word for straw is "suck pipe").
I've also been watching the PBS documentary "Commanding Heights" on Surya's recommendation. I thought it was effective in mapping out the trends of the past thirty years, but I think it glorified the Chicago school "free market" approach of economics while only giving token mention to its side effects. The documentary periodically gave mention to, for instance, the rising gap between rich and poor in Pinochet's time or the collapse of several industrial towns when Margaret Thatcher closed the mines, but the setup started to become a predictable 1) layout of bureaucratically inefficent government, and 2) here come the wonder boys from Chicago to eliminate protections, liberalise the markets, save the country and free the people.
I think the original descriptions of those stagnating countries were accurate, but the documentary mostly ignored the fact that in many countries, the predictions of the opponents of Milton Friedman and Frederich (sp?) Von Hayek's theories did come true: with many protections eliminated, the economy would grow, but social welfare services would fall through, the rich would get richer but everyone else would stay in the same place, increasing the gap between the wealthy and everyone else in the country. During the United States' economic boom of the 1980s, only 70,000 people came out of poverty, compared to the 7 million who rose out of it in the boom of the 90s. The most annoying case of this neglect came when Milton Freidman predicts that free markets will lead to free societies. Then comes the story of Pinochet bombing and overthrowing the Marxist President of Chile, instituting free market policy at Freidman's suggestion, and then being booted out of power himself nearly twenty years later. The anecdote ends tidily with Friedman gravely intoning that indeed, because Chile had put in free markets and taken away protections, the country did indeed have a free society eventually. What he didn't mention that Pinochet's demise has been attributed in part to frustration on the part of the Chilean people, after government policies, put in at Freidman's urging, did lead to a decay of the pension system, increasing income disparites between the top income brackets and the rest of the population, and a general failure of Chile's economic growth to translate into socioeconomic improvement for most of the population.
In its defense, the documentary should not have focused equal time on the competing economic approaches, as the free market policies put in by Reagan, Thatcher, etc... were the dominant historical trend of the time period covered, and also because the documentary was actually the adaptation of the book Commanding Heights, which seems to have been promoting its own argument.