Naomi Klein: Bush as the undertaker of the free market's false promises to ordinary Americans.

[marmar]

from The Nation:



Disowned by the Ownership Society
Naomi Klein


Remember the "ownership society," fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? "We're creating...an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah." Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker.

Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market--a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension--they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic.

It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan--"hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down.

So what to do? It was Margaret Thatcher who pioneered a solution. The effort centered on Britain's public housing, or council estates, which were filled with die-hard Labour Party supporters. In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to buy their council estate flats at reduced rates (much as Bush did decades later by promoting subprime mortgages). Those who could afford it became homeowners while those who couldn't faced rents almost twice as high as before, leading to an explosion of homelessness. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080218/klein

[malaise]

1. Naomi Klein rocks

Great read - she nails it.

K& R

[applegrove]

5. Yes she does. So that is what sub-prime was all about.

[librechik]

2. What a durty, rotten political scam. He said that to get elected

then turned the wolves loose in the mortgage market!--They should have timed the balloon better, until sometime after Nov 08. Then these morons wouldn't even know how they were had until W was gone.

"I voted for W! he got me my home!--sorry, we can't go in--the bank foreclosed last month."
Just so he could win an election.

Sorta like Iraq--all that bluster and expense and loss of lives--just so an unpopular Bush could boost an off-year Congressional election into filibuster-proof territory. The rubes fell for all that jingo and snake oil like a box of rocks.

What craven idiots so many of the American people are!

[pretzel4gore]

3. we are...

if reading 10 thousand books and living for 1/2 century has shown me anything it's that- the cops who beat you are also the ones who risk life to save you and your cat. Lying is so easy, that believing lies is almost a sign of maturity in our beloved western culture (the beatniks, hippies and weirdo intellect/eggheads of course took on the Truth, yelling darn the torpedoes!)...possibly Jesus was really talking to the rich/powerful in the 'last days' of planet earth in order to warn us that, well,.... it's in the book, the book. Capice? And is easily understood by the downtrodden, the overworked, the scared and lonely etc- so please stop pretending there's a big secret to surviving as an individual, as a species, or as a global entity. something to do with love. 'Freedom lies in being bold' the saintly Che once said (though robert frost might have said something similar, yeah sure) 'Men learn by suffering' was ancient Greek wisdom according to Gibbons in 'Rise/fall/Roman empire'...does that mean we (humanity) haven't suffered enough?
Yep, that's exactly what it means...

[Elspeth]

4. Listen to what they say and watch them do the opposite:

That is how to predict this bunch.

Free market capitalism = monopolistic control by a few huge global corporations
Ownership society = massive foreclosures in a scheme to create a nation of renters
Spreading democracy = Destroying and looting states for their resources

"Clear Skies Initiative" = Law allowing pollution
"Our way of life" = The corporate way of life: Consumerism, constant and unstoppable consumption, which eventually leaves real people depleted

Universal heathcare = Forced purchase of overpriced private-sector insurance

Etc, etc, etc.

[Solly Mack]

6. K&R

[Blue State Blues]

7. K&R N/T