The New Yorker Profiles Naomi Klein: “This is a progressive moment: it’s ours to lose.”

[kpete]

The New Yorker profiles Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein:

Outside Agitator
Naomi Klein and the new new left.
by Larissa MacFarquhar

....................

Klein first formulated her thesis in 2004, when she was reporting in Baghdad and noticed that Paul Bremer’s goal seemed to be to establish a perfect capitalist state in Iraq while its population was still reeling from the “shock and awe” bombing. Then she noticed that soon after the tsunami in Sri Lanka the coastline that had been inhabited by fishermen was being sold off to hotels. Then she noticed that Friedman had suggested taking advantage of Hurricane Katrina to replace New Orleans’s disastrous public schools with charter schools. The pattern was striking. But now that a shock had shaken Washington itself, something slightly different seemed to be going on. On the one hand, the initial reaction to the economic crisis followed her theory—the shock (the bank failures and the market’s nosedive) had inspired the government to attempt to seize unprecedented power (seven hundred billion dollars with no strings attached), claiming that in such a crisis everyone should simply trust it to do the right thing, even though the actions it wanted to take would seem to enrich the wealthiest at the expense of everybody else. That was the textbook part. But the plan wasn’t working. Constituents wrote thousands of outraged letters, and bloggers wrote about how this felt familiar, like the aftermath of September 11th, and how the bailout was the economic equivalent of the Patriot Act. It was just as she had written at the end of the book: memory was shock’s antidote. (Another difference, of course, was that the government wanted to enact not Friedman-style reforms but the opposite: enormous interference in the market. Still, since the point of this interference was to bail out banks, this difference did not strike Klein as of much importance.)

“Americans remembered that they thought Rudy Giuliani was their daddy after September 11th, which was why they’re a little less inclined to say that Paulson and Goldman Sachs were going to take care of them this time,” Klein told the audience at the Bloor Cinema. “I think actually their biggest mistake with the bailout was how short it was. It’s just two pages and three paragraphs, and so the weirdest thing happened: people read it.” Everyone laughed. “It sounded like a coup.”

She went on, “It’s worth thinking about what the right has been doing for the past thirty-five years as a counter-revolution that has been waged against our victories.” The New Deal is usually told as a history of F.D.R., she said, but we don’t talk enough about the pressure from below. Neighborhoods organized, and when their evicted neighbors’ furniture was put on the streets they moved it back into their homes. It was that kind of direct action that won victories like rent control, public housing, and the creation of Fannie Mae. The other thing that’s important to remember, she said, is that the organizers were a threat—of socialist revolution—and it was that which allowed F.D.R. to say to Wall Street, “We have to compromise, or else we’ve got a revolution on our hands.” Now, these market shocks are opportunities for the same reason that the crash was in the thirties, because we are seeing the failures of laissez-faire before our eyes. “It’s time to say, ‘Your model failed,’ ” she said. “This is a progressive moment: it’s ours to lose.”

more at:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/08/081208fa_fact_macfarquhar?currentPage=all

[Karenina]

1. Bingo!

[patrice]

2. I have heard people reject NK's axiom on the grounds that it is too much of a Conspiracy and it's

essentially paranoid.

I think you'd have to be completely ignorant of American History to say that there are NO economic currents in the U.S. that now, or ever, CONSCIOUSLY and intentionally work(ed) to take advantage of the human resources at their disposal. Even just a very few such forces, especially if sufficiently wealthy, CAN have major impacts for their goal$. Especially when operating within an environment of the emergent financial instruments referred to as derivatives, they'd be like massive layers of bubbles on top of bubbles on top of fundamental turmoil. So, yes, I do buy into the proposition that there are PEOPLE whose entire function is purely for one purpose and one purpose ONLY - to take advantage of Others.

But to respond to criticisms that this is tooooooo much of a Conspiracy, I think we need to also point out how much of how this works off of the financial momentum that drags so many people, conscious or not, along with the Friedmanites, so you see things like - for example - "become your own dog-grooming franchisee" instead of people opening their own independently owned dog-grooming shop, becoming this or that kind of franchise and thus participating in whatever financing it was that produced the franchise opportunity, instead of creating their own "wealth". So, to such people, America IS the "land of opportunity" and NK is a paranoid conspiracy theorist. Dog grooming is just one example (I saw recently) of how so many, who disavow the claim that there are those who are out to take advantage of them, un-wittingly contribute to the forces that implement that INTENTION.

[judasdisney]

5. So you're saying "there are no historical conspiracies"?

Watergate, Iran-Contra, BCCI, Enron, Gulf of Tonkin, Operation AJAX, Tyco, the U.S.S. Liberty, the U.S.S. Maine, I could go on and on and on and on.

"Too much of a conspiracy"?

Have you read her book?

There's nothing controversial in it. Chile was overthrown with aid & assistance from the CIA & Nixon White House? Undisputed fact. University of Chicago Neocon economists went to Chile and used it as a radical capitalist laboratory? Undisputed fact. Thousands were rounded-up in Chile, tortured & killed, and hundreds of thousands were rounded-up and killed across Latin America in a CIA-aided program called Operation Condor? Undisputed fact. Was there a profit? Undisputed fact.

Is it a conspiracy to say that profit was a motive?

Is it a conspiracy to say that Neocons have enriched themselves in the wake of natural disasters, political disasters, terrorist incidents & economic meltdowns?

Is profit a motive? Is that a conspiracy?

If you don't believe in conspiracies, then you don't believe in history.

[patrice]

6. "you're saying" ? Please re-read my post.

I am saying that that is what people say when I talk to them about NK's book. Similar to their reactions to 9/11 theories, anything that suggests a conspiracy is dubious to many people. They find fault with the "conspiracy theorist" more readily than they look objectively at the historical fact. They, not I, refuse to believe that there is intent behind the actions at issue. Their explanation goes something like, "Shit happens."

[lib_wit_it]

3. Workers Occupying Chicago Factory is, I hope, the first of the headlines indicating, yes, revolution...

is possible. Enough with the Friedman shit.

This moment should be called ours to win. I'm naturally a pessimist, but I want to have hope now.

[malaise]

4. Lovely read

Thanks.
K & R

[regnaD kciN]

7. A few problems...

The other thing that’s important to remember, she said, is that the organizers were a threat—of socialist revolution—and it was that which allowed F.D.R. to say to Wall Street, “We have to compromise, or else we’ve got a revolution on our hands.”

1) There ain't no more U.S.S.R. The "threat of socialist revolution" was given basis by a large, socialist nation that was actively trying to spread its system of government. Now, not only is that nation gone, but it has thoroughly discredited the ideology. Back then, years before the McCarthy "Red Scare," there were many open, unashamed advocates for American Communism. You'd be unlikely to find a single one outside the lunatic fringe nowadays; not from fear of persecution, but from fear of ridicule. Even the one major "Communist" nation -- China -- appears more and more like a far-right fascist system, with government and military power involved in supporting big business. If there's going to be a "revolution" in the U.S. anytime soon, it won't take the form of a conversion to socialism, but rather anarchy and civil war, more likely leading to a breakup of the country into various, warring regional "nation-states," such as (ironically) what happened to the Soviet Union twenty years ago. The end result of most of those was a series of dictatorships squabbling with one another. Do we really want to turn into an amalgam of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and so on?

2) 1984 took place twenty-four years ago. Revolutionary uprisings were much easier to pull off before the rise of the "Homeland Security" state. As it is now, you've got pretty much unregulated government surveillance (plus the technology to track and listen in on virtually anyone through control of cell phones and long-distance listening devices), imprisonment without trial, and a domestically-based military with vast numbers of effective crowd-control measures. It would be relatively easy to brutally crush the first sign of an uprising, in the name of "making an example" of them. Think "Tienanmen Square" and its aftermath (whatever happened to the Chinese "democracy movement" thereafter?), and you won't be far off.

3) "E Pluribus Unum" replaced by "Every Man For Himself." What would have been the final objection to a complete -- and I mean armed -- class war carried off by the haves against the have-nots in the '30s was that, in the end, we were "all in this together." The American workers who needed to be catered to -- however reluctantly -- via the New Deal were the ones who built and bought the products for the upper class. If the working class of the '30s were to simply disappear, the moneyed class would have been largely lost. But, now, with the globalized economy, that moneyed class is having its products made in India and China and largely sold in overseas markets. As long as there are enough "service workers" for medical care, transportation and domestic work, there would be no problem for the ruling class in instituting a "final solution" for the troublesome American worker.

I agree that this is a "progressive moment," but it is so because, for the first time this millennium, we are about to have national leadership that isn't made up entirely of far-right "true believers." But, if they act, it will be because of positive pressure from us, not the fear of a socialist revolution if they don't comply.