Shock Troops for the Shock Doctrine

On the back cover of the paperback edition of The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, I am quoted as writing (in the San Francisco Chronicle) that it reveals "the master narrative of our time." If there was any doubt that after years abroad, the Shock Doctrine has come home, it can't stand up to the coordinated attempts by Republican governors in a number of states to use the shock of budget shortfalls to further tighten the grip of their corporate masters on the American political process, as well as to further enrich their wealthiest patrons at the expense of everyone else.

This became stunningly obvious on Wednesday, with a dramatic and fundamentally dishonest power grab. While pretending to negotiate with Democrats, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his GOPer minions in the state Senate were engaged in an extra-legal and probably illegal manipulation to strip Wisconsin public employee unions of collective bargaining rights. These were the shock troops of the Shock Doctrine, using approaches imported from successful implementation abroad, previously by the Bush administration after 9-11 and now in a concerted effort by GOPer administrations applied simultaneously in many states to grab even more power for their corporate elite bosses.

There are two basic goals: to weaken unions that form the only countervailing powers versus mega business, and most directly to weaken unions that produce the only large sources of campaign funds for Democrats, so that certain corporations have a clear field to buy the politicians that will enact their agenda. A part of that second goal is to do so in time to defeat President Obama in 2012, as the Wisconsin GOPer Senate leader himself admitted.

In Wisconsin Wednesday, the Senate GOPers rigged a committee to approve separating the provision that ends collective bargaining rights from the budget bill it had been part of, and scheduled a Senate vote for Thursday. By separating it now, they ostensibly get around the need for a quorum that would require the presence of Democrats now outside the state. My guess is that this is also a ploy to trick the Democrats into coming back tomorrow, so that they can pass the entire budget bill with the union-busting provisions back in it, and eliminate the problem they have now, which is this quite possibly illegal procedure they used to separate it. But one of the Democratic senators told Rachel Maddow that they were all onto this possibility, and none of the 14 were returning tomorrow.

But this needs to be placed in the context of this broader attack, which Rachel Maddow did in the first half of her Tuesday broadcast--in quite possibly the most important 30 minutes of television this year. She detailed these simultaneous efforts in several states. Most were following the same exact script: budget cuts to programs affecting the poor, the sick, children and generally the non-rich while providing tax cuts and other benefits to corporations and the rich that added at least as much to their projected deficits as their cuts restored, coupled with attacks on union rights.

That is what's happening in Wisconsin: "That was Governor Walker‘s first priority as governor, to make the deficit $140 million worse. Not to close the budget shortfall, but to open it further over the next few years with business tax giveaways, $140 million worth."

In Florida Governor Rick Scott proposes to cut $1.7 billion from K-12 education, while sponsoring new corporate and property tax that will add at least that amount to the budget deficit. In Ohio Governor Kasich is proposing "an more draconian union-stripping proposal than even the one that‘s being tried in Wisconsin." In Michigan, Governor Snyder "is going to raise taxes on seniors and on poor people -- $1.7 billion in tax hikes for Michigan seniors and Michigan‘s poor people, and for people who want to make tax deductible donation to public universities...Governor Snyder is taking all of that money that the state will gain and he is not using it to close the budget gap. He is giving it away in the form of $1.8 billion in corporate tax cuts. He is taking in $1.7 billion in higher taxes from poor people and old people and giving it away, $1.8 billion to businesses."

Maddow continued with the Michigan example, as it foreshadowed (though she didn't know it then) the kind of approach to peoples' rights and the American system of government that Wisconsin GOPer shock troops would exemplify less than 24 hours later.

"The Michigan house has already passed and the Michigan Senate is about to pass a bill that sounds like it is out of a dystopian, leftist novel from the future. If you think that Republican governors across the country are using fiscal crisis as a pretext to do stuff they otherwise want to do, this is something I don‘t think I ever would have believed Republicans even wanted to do.

But this is what they are proposing. It hasn‘t really gotten much national attention. But please, just check this out. Governor Rick Snyder‘s budget in Michigan is expected to cut aid to cities and towns so much that a lot of cities and towns in Michigan are expected to be in dire financial straights. Right now, Governor Snyder is pushing a bill that would give himself, Governor Snyder, and his administration, the power to declare any town or school district to be in a financial emergency.

If a town was declared by the governor and his administration to be in a financial emergency, they would get to put somebody in charge of that town, and they want to give that emergency manager they just put in charge of the town the power to, quote, “reject, modify, or terminate” any contract the town may have entered into, including any collective bargaining agreements.

So, this emergency person who gets put in charge of a town deemed to be in financial crisis by the governor‘s administration, this emergency person gets to strip the town of union rights, unilaterally, by their own personal authority. But this emergency person also gets the power under this bill to suspend or dismiss elected officials. Think about that for a second. It doesn‘t matter who you voted for in Michigan, it doesn‘t matter who you elected, your elected local government can be dismissed at will.

The emergency person sent in by the Rick Snyder administration could recommend that a school district be absorbed into another school district. That emergency person is also granted power specifically to disincorporate or dissolve entire city governments."

These are not the only states where some or all of this is going on. (Republicans in Idaho passed a bill the other day stripping teachers of collective bargaining rights.) But Michigan is perhaps the clearest example of where this is heading. Maddow:

"This is about a lot of things. This is not about a budget. This is using or fabricating crisis to push for an agenda you‘d never be able to sell under normal circumstances. And so, you have to convince everyone that these are not normal circumstances. These are desperate circumstances. And your desperate measures are therefore somehow required.

What this is has a name. It is called shock doctrine."

Columnist Paul Krugman was a week or so ahead of Maddow in applying the Shock Doctrine to these situations. But Maddow had something more--the person who named and described the Shock Doctrine in her book: Naomi Klein. Here is some of what she said to Maddow:

"You know, there are some policies in the ideological Republican playbook that a lot of people like: everyone likes a tax break. But if you talk about you‘re privatizing the local water system, busting unions, privatizing entire towns, things like this, if you run an election and say this is what I plan to do, you—chances are you will lose that election. And this is where crises come in. They are very, very handy, because you can say we have no choice.

You don‘t have to win the argument any more. You just have to say the sky is falling in. We have to do this. You can consolidate power."

(Recall that, for example, Scott Walker did not even mention his plan to bust unions in his recent campaign for governor. And yet this became so important that he would not pass a budget without doing it.)

"Why are they so desperate to tie the hands of unions?" Maddow asked. "Why are 16 states facing similar battles?"

"Unions are the final line of defense against privatization of the public sector," Klein said. "Unions are the ones who fight privatization of the school system, of the water system, of the power system. That‘s where the real money is."

"They really want a corporate monopoly state," Klein said. "They don't want any countervailing force balancing out the power of corporations."

Though mass protests in Wisconsin are getting the media attention--and there's likely to be a lot more in the coming days--such protests are happening in Ohio, Michigan and other states. According to Klein, this is important to defeating the Shock Doctrine. "And what we‘re seeing is that when people do fight, they sometimes win, which is a really well-kept secret, that, you know, in all the sort of mocking of protests and glib postmodern times, sometimes they win."

According to political analyst Howard Fineman, GOPers are counting on the spectre of mass protests, and even the involvement of President Obama, to energize GOPers and convince independents that Obama is leading a wild-eyed revolution (because he's Lenin the Mau Mau as well as the Hitler gangster doing the bidding of his union bosses.)

But so far, mass protests have simply expressed that people are onto the Shock Doctrine agenda, and they don't like it. That's the key to defeating it, Klein said: you recognize it and name it, and it loses its shock power. It's also important to offer alternative explanations and solutions--for example, to government budget problems: "I think the really key part of their resistance is that people are saying, you know what, if you—if you really need some money, why don‘t you go where the money is? Why don‘t you go to the people who have all the money? And putting their own proposals on the table."