Now here's a quote to remember and use:
"Free-trade means capitalists rip-off huge profits without obstruction
from government regulation, be it through the absence of labor rights,
stock market regulations, or the progressive taxation of the rich."
Naomi Klein is among the brightest and most outspoken of today's
Progressives. Her recent book, The Shock Doctrine, is an important
contribution. As to her "support" of Joe Biden, folks should listen
to her rationalisation before judging her as a sellout.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/12/20, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The “New Normal” and the Shock Doctrine
https://socialistaction.org/2020/05/11/the-new-normal-and-the-shock-doctrine/
May 11, 2020
By MARTY GOODMAN
Today only 51.3% of American adults have jobs – the lowest number on
record, lower than the Great Depression. We have passed 80,000
coronavirus deaths.
But, even human suffering can make a billionaire’s eyeballs bulge when
they look at the financial fallout. Why? For those at the top able to
survive a deep crisis such as this, the playing field changes. The
system re calibrates vis a vis billionaires versus workers and one boss
against another boss through the elimination of the weakest.
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
(Picador, 2007) is an eye opening and extraordinarily potent book in
2020. Klein’s central thesis was expressed simply by Rahm Emanuel, the
one-time Chief of Staff in the Obama administration and former
neo-liberal Chicago Mayor, who once said, “Never let a crisis go to
waste.” Its meaning? As Klein explains, the corporate rulers know from
history the strategic necessity of “using moments of collective trauma
to engage in radical social and economic engineering.”
“Trauma” can be defined as either ‘human made,’ i.e., a War (Iraq), the
economic “shock” of the Margaret Thatcher/Reagan years, the 9-11 tragedy
or “natural” phenomena like the coronavirus, a hurricane or a tsunami.
Friedman famously said that in a crisis “the actions that are taken
depend on the ideas that are lying around.” For post-60’s capitalists
and their Democratic and Republican leaders, the ideas “lying around”
were his.
No matter the calamity, says Klein, tragedies are fresh meat for
corporate barons. As Trump and both parties shower the bloated big
corporations with over $500 billion in aid, virtually without oversight,
the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic confirms Klein’s Shock Doctrine thesis — but
she adds that it also can be an amazing opportunity for ordinary working
people to force changes.
In an April 6 interview with The Intercept, Klein attacked the stark
inequalities of capitalism that COVID-19 revealed, “It is more lethal
for people who whose immune systems are already weakened. African
Americans have more stressful lives because they have more stressful
jobs or multiple stressful jobs. But also because pollution is unevenly
distributed in the United States because of environmental racism, and so
this is an added irony to the fact that the fossil fuel companies are
getting their wish list fulfilled in the midst of this pandemic and
rolling back all of these controls on air pollution and water pollution.”
“Many workers are feeling their power in a way that they had not
previously and there is a realization that they are indeed essential
workers and they have been treated systematically in ways designed to
belittle the value of their labor and we are seeing work stoppages
across the economy and I think we’ll probably see more of those.”
What Is the Shock Doctrine?
Klein is so right. Her “Shock Doctrine” story began most dramatically in
our time with the free-trade ideology of the Chicago University
economics professor Milton Friedman (1912-2006). Friedman became the
economic guru of the fascistic Augusto Pinochet, President of Chile.
Pinochet murdered tens of thousands of Leftists and trade unionists
after he seized power in 1973 in a CIA-orchestrated military coup
against the elected Socialist Party government of Salvador Allende.
Amidst the horror of military dictatorship, Friedman reshaped Chilean
society with his “free-market” vision.
His reputation on the conservative Right enhanced, Friedman and his
co-thinkers, nicknamed “the Chicago School,” became some of the
ideological founding fathers of U.S. “neo-liberalism,” a modern form of
“laisse fare” or free-trade capitalism. Free-trade means capitalists
rip-off huge profits without obstruction from government regulation, be
it through the absence of labor rights, stock market regulations, or the
progressive taxation of the rich. Government ownership of services are
to be rapidly privatized, sold at bargain basement prices to corporate
crooks.
Freidman celebrated the corporate class as social visionaries. The
governmental interventionism of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and
his “New Deal” which provided social services and minimal labor rights –
after mass worker mobilization, i.e., strikes – was viewed by Freidman’s
school of economics as an outmoded relic of 1930’s liberal capitalism.
As Michal Douglas said in the movie “Wall Street,” “Greed is good.”
Ditto, thought Freidman.
The mood Friedman tapped into was a reflection of capitalism in crisis
as profit margins were being squeezed by international competition.
Capitalists shed all remaining moral hesitations, and remnants of 1960’s
altruism, in the race to bolster the “bottom line.” Naked capitalist
greed was always king, but its psychopathic, me first mantra was updated
to give it an undeserved ideological ‘gravitas’ by Friedman & Co.
Klein’s book details how Friedman’s philosophy re-configured U.S.
economic policy beginning with Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and II and,
with some modification, essentially became the reigning ideology of the
Clinton administration and, subsequent to her book’s publication, the
Obama years too.
Capitalist Theory and Practice, or, How Low Can You Go?
Klein used these amongst many examples of the “Shock Doctrine” in recent
history:
The 9-11 tragedy saw the creation of Homeland Security and the Patriot
Act’s surveillance state, both bi-partisan measures. In 2006, Bush II
signed the Defense Authorization Act, granting the president the ability
to impose the powers of marshal law. With the repressive legislation in
place came torture and indefinite detention and all the horrors of
Guantanamo, much of which was performed by private contractors. With the
repression also came the increased terror, harassment and deportation of
immigrant workers (ICE), which meant increased profits for agribusiness
and the service industry.
The Shock Doctrine or to use Bush II’s Iraq battle-cry “shock and awe”
was in full view in New Orleans in 2005, a city ravaged by Hurricane
Katrina. Encouraged by a Democratic Mayor, real estate vultures
descended upon largely African American neighborhoods intent on “ethnic
cleansing” via the gentrification of a city traumatized by over 1,500
deaths and the crass racism of Bush II. Said Richard Baker, a Republican
Congressman from New Orleans, “We finally cleaned-up public housing in
New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
The spread of Friedman’s capitalist fundamentalism was not at all
confined to the U.S. In Poland, in the early ‘90’s, following the ouster
of the corrupt Stalinist regime, the U.S. government orchestrated, with
the help of the “liberal” Soros Foundation and the imperialist
International Monetary Fund, a privatization drive that turned publicly
held economic institutions into private, often U.S. held, corporations.
The “shock” of transition threw millions into poverty, bought-off its
labor leaders and hijacked the Polish economy.
South Africa’s epic transition from official apartheid in 1994 was to a
“post-racial” neo-colonial, neo-liberal society subservient to the U.S.
dominated World Bank. That relationship was solidified by neo-liberal
deals cut with imperialism by the Nelson Mandela leadership and his
successors. The double irony was the centrality of the South African
Communist Party of which Mandela was a member. Today, the Black majority
is in some ways worse off economically than it was under apartheid,
where a white elite still runs the country. The current South African
President, Cyril Ramaphosa, is also president of Mandela’s African
National Congress (ANC) and is personally worth $450 million. South
Africans complain of an ‘economic apartheid.’
No Time to Lose Our Nerve
On the April 15 “Democracy Now!” program, Klein urged the movements for
change to seize the moment: “If there is one thing history teaches us
it’s that moments of shock are profoundly volatile, we either lose a
whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites and pay the price for decades
or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks
earlier. This is no time to lose our nerve. The future will be
determined by whoever is willing to fight harder for the ideas they have
lying around.”
Unfortunately, Naomi Klein endorsed Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders
and is apparently willing to vote for Joe Biden as a lesser evil.
Despite her ostensibly radical analysis and calls for movement building
she advocates – no doubt not the first time – that activists dive deeper
into the graveyard of social movements, that is, the Democratic Party.
Warmonger Joe Biden will not advance Klein’s vision of a just world one
single iota.
But, Klein’s first choice, Bernie Sanders is leading his many followers
back into the swamp of the Democratic Party and “Shock Doctrine”
politics. Too bad for socialists out there taking the bait, including
Naomi Klein.
For a working class alternative, cast your vote for Jeff Mackler, the
Socialist Action candidate for President!
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--
___
Steven Pinker
“It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a
designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the
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[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]”
― Steven Pinker