The Shock Doctrine comes home
I was fascinated to read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and its gripping saga of “disaster capitalism”, which can be quickly summed up as “making money out of misery”. Born from the ideas of legendary economist and poster boy for selfishness, Milton Friedman, you basically create a situation wherein a large amount of money is needed for basic survival, and offer it- with strings. The strings include privatization of natural resources, suspension of regulations relating to business, and usurious interest rates. From the 1971 coupe in Chile to the fall of the Soviet Union, the first guys on the scene (because they generally stage-managed the event to begin with) are carrying calculators, keeping a running total of just how much is available, and how cheaply can they get it. Of course, you needn’t create the disaster- your basic Katrina or tsunami will work just fine to give the money men an in, it only matters that the society you’re attempting to rob blind be on its knees- or at least, they think they are.
Welcome to America, the firesale, 2011.
If you were to only listen to our national media, you would think this country consists of nothing but unemployed losers getting tossed out of their house. We apparently don’t have the money to fund police in Texas, or women’s healthcare in New Hampshire, heck, the entire state of Minnesota is seemingly too broke to even stay open.
Its all bullshit, of course.
Our country is grotesquely wealthy- or at least some parts of it are. Defense contractors are doing swell, and nobody running a hedge fund seems to be using WIC vouchers to get their pate’. House Republicans- who raised the debt ceiling seven times under George Bush – suddenly don’t want to pay out the money they themselves voted to spend- which sounds mighty close to dereliction of duty to me. They are abetted by Goldman Sach’s boy at the top, Barry O, who is hectoring irate Democrats to shut their yaps about chipping away at Social Security, despite the fact that Social Security has absolutely nothing to do with the debt limit, and is fully funded until at least 2036.
When I read Klein’s book, I found it fascinating to watch how countries reacted to getting raped and robbed, and wondered what America would do. Apparently, we haven’t noticed yet, since a white girl killed her baby or something. Of course, we didn’t say anything when families from the Lower Ninth Ward were loaded into buses during Katrina and scattered across country, so that developers could walk off with their property for pennies. We didn’t say much when that pasty white fuck governor in Wisconsin, with a Koch brother’s hand on the back of his head, stripped the public unions of what little power they had, and forced the state into economic turmoil simply to give tax dollars to his rich backers. By the time the recall process up there finally works, he and his buddies will be sitting pretty on the wealth of his citizens, and we’ll have yet another failed state on the flag. Doubt that will matter much to the likes of Eric Cantor, who will actually make money if the US defaults on its debt– which, to my way of looking at it, is enough to force him to step down immediately. Then again, we have a court system stocked with theocratic jackwads from Liberty U and big business buttsuckers like “Who Me, Corrupt?” Clarence Thomas, so our recourse ain’t gonna be via the courts.
There’s always voting, right? Funny how the very people most likely to be effected by this faux crisis are the very ones most at risk for losing their right to vote, funny that is, until you realize that people actually sit down and write laws to keep the elderly, the poor and minorities from exercising their most basic right in this nation. Despicable. And even if you manage to vote, what will it get ya?
Barack Obama.
Oh, it was change all right. Instead of getting fucked by the right, you get sodomized by the left. He’s not a Marxist, he’s worse- he’s a Friedman. When our nation faced a economic crisis brought about in large part by uncontrolled defense spending and lax regulations of Wall Street, what did he do? Started more wars, and tossed bags of cash at bankers. Instead of actually doing something progressive about health care, he gave us mandates- and hints at raising the benefit age for Medicare.
I drive around metro Atlanta and see cars already sporting “OBAMA 2012” stickers, and I just have to wonder…does the man actually have to come into your home and hold you up at gunpoint before you get it? The Shock Doctrine leads, apparently, to the Stockholm Syndrome.
