The European Nightmare

Things are getting a little too interesting in Europe.  The European bailout deal with Greece, dictated by Germany and the big banks, is getting some very bad reviews.

Writes Suzanne Moore in the Guardian: "By infantilising Greece, Germany resembles a child who closes its own eyes and thinks we can not see it. We can. The world is watching what is being done to Greece in the name of euro stability. It sees a nation stripped of its dignity, its sovereignty, its future."

John Cassidy in the New Yorker called it "an agreement that is perhaps the most intrusive and demanding contract between an advanced nation and its creditors since the Second World War."  He characterized it as a Greek "surrender" to the demands made principally by Germany and its allied banks,"at great cost to the country’s [Greece's] political sovereignty, the political landscape of the continent looks different, and not a little ominous."  The headline on the article reads "A Humiliating Deal for Greece."

In general, these articles support the basic pattern which N. Klein exposed in The Shock Doctrine, in which entire nations are forced into policies and debt that enriches the rich, the banks and big corporations, at the expense of the 99% and the nation as a whole.

It has been contrasted to the forgiveness of German loans after World War II that enabled Germany to prosper.

The new and perhaps most unsettling element is the role these articles attribute specifically to Germany and its Chancellor Merkel.  Cassidy's article ends: "But if what happened over the weekend doesn’t quite amount to a coup, it has nevertheless been a ruthless display of power politics on Germany’s part and a chilling reminder of the remorseless logic of a monetary union dominated by creditors and pre-Keynesian economics. In the words of Paul De Grauwe, a well-known Belgian economist who teaches at London School of Economics, a “template of future governance” of the eurozone was written over the weekend: “Submit to German rule or leave.” In the years and decades ahead, Germany may discover that many Europeans would prefer the second option."

According to the New York Times:"The strict terms of the deal imposed on Greece by fellow members of the eurozone on Sunday inspired hundreds of thousands of comments on social networks deriding the agreement as the equivalent of a coup against the left-wing government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras."

An unsigned editorial in UK's Telegraph also refers to the deal as "nothing less than national humiliation. The country that quarried the foundation stones of Western civilisation is now humbled, forced to impose more austerity measures and allow billions of euros of state assets into an internationally-controlled trust because its creditors do not trust its politicians to keep their promises. All this only days after the Greek people clearly voted against austerity as a condition for international bailouts."

Later this editorial also puts its finger on the nature of the crisis precipitated by the deal itself: "There is a certain bleak irony to the Greek agreement. Europe has gone to extraordinary new lengths to stop the integrationist project falling apart, yet never has that project looked so unstable and unsustainable as it does today."

There is more turmoil to come as the government of Greece will debate accepting these terms.  But at first blush this looks like the most serious challenge to what had been the most hopeful international project of the past 100 years or more: what Jeremy Rifkin called "the European Dream": the peaceful, democratic unification of Europe, previously the center of centuries of war, culminating in the two most destructive wars in human history.

Update/Last Word: In a Washington Post piece entitled "Greece has surrendered but Europe loses too" Matt O'Brien begins: "At least they still get to call it Greece." 

It Did Happen Here

Today I heard several people on TV--reporters and officials--refer to the alleged plot to explode a bomb in Washington that would kill the Saudi ambassador as "unprecedented."

Well, not exactly.  It may be unprecedented because this is an ambassador, but a bomb did kill a prominent foreign statesman in Washington, as well as an American as collateral damage.  The current plot involves an American citizen.  This earlier plot may well have involved the American CIA.

It was a car bomb in 1976 that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffit. Orlando Letelier had been an official in the Salvador Allende government in Chile, an elected government with broad public support but an openly socialist democratic agenda. Entrenched political and corporate interests didn't like it much, and the Cold War heat was on such suspiciously non-capitalistic regimes. Allende was assassinated during a military coup in 1973, that brought the now notorious dictator and ruthless murderer, General Augusto Pinochet to power.Over the next decade Pinochet and his secret police turned “disappeared” into a verb. Thousands of Chileans over the next several decades were disappeared by his secret police.

One of the first was Orlando Letelier, who in 1976 was traveling the world for the Institute for Policy Studies, and organizing boycotts and other opposition to the Chilean dictatorship. On an autumn evening in 1976, a bomb planted in his car exploded on a Washington street, not far from the White House. He was dead before he reached the hospital. A young American woman, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, his assistant, was also killed. Her husband, Michael Moffitt, was injured.

It later became clear that the Chilean coup and the murder of Allende were at least facilitated by the U.S. government, specifically the CIA. The role of Henry Kissinger was allegedly large.

It wasn’t until 2000 or so that the CIA’s involvement in Letelier’s assassination was partially acknowledged. The CIA, directed by George H.W. Bush in 1976, at the very least covered up their knowledge that the Chilean secret police did the hit. They may have been much more involved than that. Eventually a senior member of Pinochet's secret police was convicted of the assassination in a U.S. federal court.  According to Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, "The assassins had been admitted to the country on false passports with the knowledge of the CIA."



Ronni

  At the time I was the editor of a weekly alternative newspaper called Washington Newsworks, and I’m proud to say that our coverage of the Letelier assassination was more extensive that week, and holds up better now, than anyone else’s in town, including the Washington Post.

The real credit goes to Jeff Stein, who did the reporting and wrote the stories.  (This is the same Jeff Stein who until earlier this year wrote "Spy Talk" for the Washington Post.)   Just about all I did was recognize the importance of it, and I made the decision to put it on the cover and give it full play inside. In particular, Jeff’s reporting and our coverage did not buy the official line in the immediate aftermath, that the bomb was planted by leftists. It was G.H.W. Bush himself who convinced the establishment media that Chile’s Secret Police wasn’t involved. That’s why not many people know about this bit of infamous history. Letelier and Moffitt both deserved better then, and they deserve better now.

No Deal or Bad Deal

The House has voted for the avoid apocalypse deal, the Senate is expected to do the same tomorrow.  Default has been averted until at least 2013.

There are two operative metaphors in this situation, apart from the barely metaphorical extortion, hostage-taking, ransom, etc.  The first is Joe Biden's--it's Solomon's Choice.  Faced with the prospect of having the baby cut in two, the real mother saves its life by withdrawing her claim for its custody.  GOPers, led by their TPer masters, seemed all too willing to kill the world economy if they didn't get their way.  Democrats were not willing, and as Barney Franks notes, basic game theory tells you that the side that is willing to destroy everything usually gets to dictate terms.

So with this metaphor, President Obama and the Democrats got what seems to be not the worst deal, short of default.  It protects Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and unemployment insurance.  It cuts more towards the end of the ten year period, rather than now when large cuts would be catastrophic to the recovering economy (if that's what it's doing).  So maybe it's not as bad as it could have been. Or, another view is that it's no big deal--about as close to a clean debt ceiling bill as was possible.  

But apart from that, it seems like an ugly bad deal.  It looks bad for the country and bad politically.  Though revenue is supposedly on the table for consideration by the select committee, Speaker Banal has already announced that no GOPers will be appointed who will consider raising revenue.  Though there seems some out on the Bush tax cuts, it's not clear it's a meaningful possibility that even the top brackets will be raised, which seemed until now to be the only way out of a tanking economy.

And though this circus is over for now, there will be barely a pause before it starts up again: with the budget in September [update: this may be part of this deal, so maybe there won't be a budget fight after all] , with this committee from now until (literally) Christmas.  If it dominates with discussions of cuts and taxes, the lack of attention to the realities of the current economy, including and especially jobs, will remain unaddressed.  It's true that default or a drop in the U.S. credit rating would have hit the poor and middle class the hardest.  But there is reason to fear these cuts and this inattention will as well.  Most of all, if it cripples the future: both the resources to "win the future" and the ability to respond to the needs of the future--which aren't even in the future anymore.  They're here right now.  A significant chunk of the U.S. is in very bad drought!  Some of it is still underwater!  Meanwhile century's old water mains in Manhattan are breaking apart, bridges and roads are in disrepair--while millions are unemployed.

The truth is that cutting federal spending is directly cutting jobs--of people employed by the government or by companies with government contracts--and those cuts have a ripple effect on the economy.  It is precisely the cuts in government spending that was the direct cause of the weak GDP just reported.  It is the primary drag on economic recovery.

The other operative metaphor is The Shock Doctrine.  Of the book The Shock Doctrine, I wrote that it may have revealed "the master narrative of our time"--words that are quoted on the paperback book cover. Once again we have proof that it has been adopted as the main strategy of the Rabid Right and the Republican party in general, no longer in other countries but right here.  This is by far the most obvious, most outrageous and probably most successful example: a manufactured crisis of potentially huge proportions, extended by seemingly bizarre political maneuvers until major decisions are forced at the last possible moment to avert the imminent catastrophe that wasn't remotely necessary in the first place.

I look back on recent posts here, and see how consumed even this blog was with this invented crisis, that has gone away, leaving behind a deal that ensures even more ugliness that must be dealt with in the coming months, distracting attention from real issues and present dangers.  So in a sense I've been suckered too.  The difference is that people in Washington are employed to deal with all of that, and I am not. 

Shock Doctrine Continued

Although she didn't advertise it this way, Rachel Maddow presented another facet of the domestic Shock Doctrine that billionaires like the Koch Brothers (and when I say billionaires, I mean brothers who made nine billion dollars--just last year) are getting their hysterical Rabid Right minions in the states to take care of, in the guise of dealing with a fiscal crisis.

(This was her Thursday program, which I was going to blog about on Friday when the transcript became available, but then...Japan happened.)

In addition to busting unions and demonizing public servants like teachers and firefighters, or on a national level trying to take government support away from the poor, the sick, the old, the arts, the closest thing we have to public interest media, to public transportation--to just about everything not entirely controlled by profit-making corporations, and just about everybody except the extremely rich--in addition to all that, the Rabid Right is going after the vote. Or more precisely, the ability of those to vote who are more likely to vote against the Rabid Right.

The short-term politics is clear. Maddow:

Republicans in 32 states are considering adding more onerous ID requirements to make it harder to register and harder to vote, which should bring down the number of Democratic voters nicely in time for the 2012 presidential election, and which should limit any electoral damage these guys might be expecting from pushing for even wildly unpopular redistribution of resources and rights away from America‘s middle class.

Which makes the long-term politics follow: further redistribution of power to the few. I think you can think of a few names for that.

I'll have more to say at a later date about all this, but I don't want this program or transcript to slip away without taking note of it.

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."

Side by Side: Shock Doctrine in Washington

This chart prepared by the Center for American Progress show GOPer proposals for the U.S. budget, which clearly mirror the Shock Doctrine efforts at the state level described in the post above. Click on the chart to make it big enough to read.

Beware the Shock Doctrine

The bail out plan offered by the Bush administration has the distinct odor of the Shock Doctrine: using a crisis to scare the country into precipitous action that will increase executive department power and benefit wealthy Republican supporters.

Its brevity alone is a red flag. Its insistence on its acts being "non-reviewable" is outrageous but fully in tune with the fascist tendencies of the Bush presidency.

Here's the full text, and I note that I'm not the only one who thought of N. Klein's Shock Doctrine. Paul Krugman in the NY Times and Sebastian Mallaby in the W. Post have already written columns against it.

But Republicans in Congress are trying to pressure Democrats to give the Bushites all they want. This is classic Shock Doctrine stuff. Democrats need to resist this attempt to panic them and make sure this plan has real oversight, doesn't further benefit the rich and penalize everyone else, and incidentally, that it will actually work.

Why Are We in Iraq

Update: This essay on the Rec list with a good discussion at European Tribune.

With the deal last week between the Bushites and the current Iraqi government to formalize the intention to keep U.S. troops in those huge permanent bases in Iraq, and to "encourage" foreign investment (i.e. U.S. oil companies and related Bushite corporations), two prominent theories--not mutually exclusive by any means--got additional evidence for their answers as to why the Bushites began and prosecuted the war and occupation of Iraq.

One theory is Naomi Klein's in her book, The Shock Doctrine. Basically she outlines a strategy used in various parts of the world to further the goal of enriching large corporations--almost always run by or with strong ties to the folks now identified as Bushites, but who have pulled strings, or assisted their mentors in doing so, in previous Republican administrations. On Thursday she got the opportunity--the first I know of--to explain what she means on U.S. television: on a very well done segment of Countdown with Keith Olbermann. (Her theory aside, Klein should be regularly analyzing geopolitics and the news on U.S. television.) Here's what she said about Iraq:

KLEIN: Well, Iraq is the classic example of the shock doctrine. You had a military strategy that was called Shock and Awe. It was a military strategy designed to maximize disorientation. The theory was—This is a quote from Richard Armitage, the former deputy undersecretary of state, who said that the theory was that Iraqis would be so shocked, they would be easily marshaled from point A to point B.

In that moment when they were supposed to be easy to control, easy to martial, you had Paul Bremer waltz in his Brooks Brothers suits and Army beauties, the uniform of the disaster capitalists, and say Iraq is open for business, and create this sort of—an attempt to create a corporate Utopia for American multinationals.

It didn‘t work out. Then you saw the emergence of a third shock, not an economic shock, but shocks to body, the shock of torture, as they attempted to control this rebellious country. There‘s three kinds of shocks in “The Shock Doctrine,” the shock of the crisis, then an economic shock therapy program, and then, if people don‘t behave, a third shock, which is the shock of torture.

But didn't it work out? Certainly it's been messy, and so far such favored corporations as Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater have had to take their considerable piles of money and run, but could this latest agreement be the Bushite victory?

Jim Holt in the London Review of Books reverse-engineers the Iraq war and sees how this is entirely possible. First, he outlines the prize Iraq represents. That it's all about the oil isn't a news flash to a lot of people, but probably most don't know just how much oil is involved:

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

To get and keep control of that oil--even if it takes another decade or two--is the purpose of those bases, Holt suggests. He mentions that "Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions." But they are all mini-cities or walled suburbs. He refers to Thomas Ricks' reporting on one of the bases, the Balad air base: "Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks."

(Holt mentions something that I pointed out a couple of years ago--that U.S. bases in Iraq meant that U.S. bases in somewhat unstable Saudi Arabia, that so upset Osama bin Laden, could be closed--and they have been.)

But even if the U.S. and the West can't get much Iraqi oil into their pipelines for awhile, they still win because the U.S. presence deters their major competitor for oil in the world: China. Without more energy, China's economy can't keep growing at its current rate. By denying China this source, the West has a chance to weather the Chinese economic storm.

So Holt wonders: Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheney’s 2001 energy task force? One can’t know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’. One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth.

Which is why the failure to nurture a strong central government is actually success: If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East?

So if you're thinking in terms of dollars and cents--even in billions or trillions--the whole thing makes sound business sense:

The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

In fact the only counter argument Holt can muster is that the Bushites don't appear to be this smart. Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.

Yet it makes perfect sense, even rhetorically. When real politik Republicans talk about freedom, they mean the freedom of themselves, their rich cronies and supporters to loot the world unencumbered by law, morality or compassion. (It's also why they're not bothered at all about the missing billions likely used for graft and other payoffs. Or why the current rampant corruption in Iraq is of no concern. After all, China has no problem with it either in their colonies such as Cambodia. It's part of the price of business.) That certainly seems to be what the Bushites mean when they say they're bringing freedom to Iraq.

The Dreaming Up Daily Image

illustration with my review in
Sunday's SF Chronicle, by Rico
Mendez.

The Shocks That We Are Heir To

I've mentioned The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein's new book before, but now it's out in the U.S. I reviewed it in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, and this is how I began:

The connections are daring in journalist Naomi Klein's new book, "The Shock Doctrine," but the result is convincing. With a bold and brilliantly conceived thesis, skillfully and cogently threaded through more than 500 pages of trenchant writing, Klein may well have revealed the master narrative of our time. And because the pattern she exposes could govern our future as well, "The Shock Doctrine" could turn out to be among the most important books of the decade.

The rest of the review is here.

There's also a good review in the Guardian.

The Shock Doctrine

The Must-Read Book of the Year

--maybe even the decade. THE SHOCK DOCTRINE : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" by Naomi Klein has just been published in Canada, which means I can finally talk about it. I've been reading the galleys for weeks--which brings up a second ethical problem, because I've just turned in my review to the SF Chronicle, and I shouldn't scoop that. But my review won't be out for a few weeks, and I know I'm going to be blogging from the content of this book well before then.

Though THE SHOCK DOCTRINE will be officially published in the U.S. and Europe later in September, it may be in some bookstores soon. Naomi Klein is traveling and talking about it, starting today. And there's a short film about it, by Klein and "Children of Men" director Alfonso Cuaron, at the Toronto Film Festival this Friday, and she's showing it at some of her appearances.

Before I say a little more about the book, my disclaimers: I have no personal or business relationship with the author (I've never met her) or the publisher. I just think this is a very important book, and one that people should be aware of--and consider getting behind, in case corporte media ignores it (a good bet.)

Some of you (especially in Canada and Europe) probably know Naomi Klein as an activist, journalist and filmmaker, who writes for The Nation and The Guardian, often about globalization issues, and who wrote the book, No Logo as well as a collection of columns, Fences and Windows. Her writing career started in Canada, and here in the U.S. especially, she's not generally well known, and that's one reason I'm blogging on this book right now. Her interview in Publisher's Weekly said she didn't at that point have any firm media bookings in the U.S. I'd like to see that change. She deserves a hearing more than a whole lot of people we hear too much from.

As for the book, it puts together a lot of what you might know and suspect (and a lot most people missed or don't know) into a powerful framework based on a central idea that she believes has governed American foreign policy for decades, but particularly now: THE SHOCK DOCTRINE.

She relates neocon (also known as "neoliberal" outside the U.S.) economic theories of "free market fundamentalism" and the resulting economic "shock therapy" many nations endured, to the actual (and horrific) theories and practice of early actual electroshock therapy, and shows how they relate to torture, and the "shock and awe" bombing of Iraq, and an overall pattern of taking advantage of disaster or creating it, for corporate profit.

She shows for example that Iraq and New Orleans were not the result of incompetence, but examples of disaster capitalism, which requires the destruction and privatization of the public and non-profit sectors, replaced by crony capitalism. She shows that torture is not an accident, but a tool of economic and political shock therapy.

The book's web site has more information, including access to many of her sources. But the book is the thing--it's very well written, and very important. It begins with Milton Friedman and Pinochet in Chile in the 70s, and brings together most of what has happened since (in South America, Russia, Asia,etc.), culminating in Iraq and, in the U.S., the homeland security state and post-Katrina New Orleans.

This book has the potential to be Very Big. The Guardian has named it one of the ten must-reads of the fall. But it could also be overlooked--intentionally, because of its content.

Every book arrives with blurbs, but not necessarily like the ones for this book from Arundhati Roy, John Le Carre, Howard Zinn and Sy Hersh. I join them in urging you to read and support this book. It could be one of those rare books that everyone reads and talks about, and that focuses the debate, and promotes needed change.

Now that I've said all that, I'll feel much more comfortable about blogging on topics within the book, and I hope to do that--several times--soon.

UPDATE: The Shock Doctrine short film is now viewable online. On its first day of publication, the book hit #1 on Amazon Canada.