This recently appeared at Common Dreams.

Posted by: beq | Sep 7 2007 14:46 utc | 3

links fixed – sorry, my mistake

Posted by: b | Sep 7 2007 15:12 utc | 5

Don’t forget new Orleans and the Ninth Ward

Posted by: ralphieboy | Sep 7 2007 16:07 utc | 7

excellent film short

Posted by: annie | Sep 7 2007 19:45 utc | 9

what annie said (#9) of #8.

Posted by: beq | Sep 7 2007 23:09 utc | 11

It is possible to read all of Klein’s essays and conclude as Tangerine appears to that despite the repeated injustices (too mild a word really because we are talikng about the deliberate opression of hundreds of millions of individual life existences, so those existences can never reach their potential) the corporate capitalists are too strong and too well organised, while the oppressed are so fragmented and so weak, that humanists are condemned to chip away at the edges.
As we chip away we ameliorate a little of the worst pain but in doing so we diffuse the pressure build up and in that way enable the machinery of oppression to trundle on a bit further.
Thinking that pre-suposes that everything will remain pretty much the same. Any flick through history tells us that this is not so. The assholes have the momentum at the moment because they started hungry and keen. That won’t last and as things get worse for the millions outside the ‘circle of protection’ they get so much better for the protected elites that those elites become fat, spoilt and lazy.
The last attempt at throwing off the shackles failed because nationalist instincts allowed those who fight to end oppression to favour one group of oppressed over another. The result was the newly liberated evolved into oppressors themselves. It took a couple of generations but it happened, and that provided the opportunity for greed heads and mainchancers to exploit the chink and drag dog eat dog home once more.
The reasons are diverse and we can condemn the previous efforts for racism or selfishness but really a century ago when the initial moves were being made to free the oppressed whitefellas, the structure and systems just weren’t in place to take all the people with them. The ignorance was real but it wasn’t neccessarily deliberate.
The re-imposition of tight borders which Klein writes about in her fortress piece, is an acknowledgement by the corporatists that keeping the factory and cannon fodder separate and ignorant of each other is seen as an essential control for maintaining supremacy. Those controls won’t have the spirit of Homeland Security in 2002 staffing them forever. As well – as the interweb has shown throughout the Iraq atrocity, people can inform each other despite the best efforts of the elites. Sure we can expect that there will be various efforts to restrict that, but the genii can never be put back in the bottle. There will never again be a time when the oppressors can completely cut an area of action off, whether it be New Orleans during Katrina, or Gaza during IDF ethnic cleansing.
Of course that isn’t the really critical information. I mean we do need to know what is really happening in those places but mostly the best we can do with that information is learn from it to ensure it isn’t repeated, and educate with it to gather more support.
And that is the real task of this period which may last longer than most of us are likely to live. We must consolidate and educate, ensuring all the while that no pockets of humanity are left out, that way we won’t be divided and played off against each other as amerika is trying to do in Iraq. I suspect that will fail in Iraq anyhow. People can’t be kept seperate anymore, any Iraqi has more in common with any other Iraqi than he/she does with any invader, and that is starting to show.
But it’s not just about beating the oppressors next time, they must stay beaten and part of that will be ensuring that no opening is left for them to return through.
Anyone who does the math can see that there is enough to go around, but not enough for everyone to be greedy. That is not a new thing, there is never enough for everyone to be greedy cause greed is driven by the need to have more than others.
On the other hand thus far the secure ‘home of the elite’ groupings such as North America and Europe still have poor people who feel they have a good deal more than the poor in nations outside of the circle.
Those people are seduced with the unlikely to be fulfilled promise of an invitation to the club, at the same time as they are terrified by the threat of ending up like the poor outside. The wake up will take time and need education by experience – a task which will become easier as the greed and indolence of the elites erode the carefully calibrated differences between being a pauper inside the tent and being a human outside it. As that occurs ‘quaint’ notions such as international comradeship and solidarity between all will resurface. Except this time, all will be all, not all white people, or all citizens, or the current fav division by the assholes, all xtians.
There are a mob of other obstacles – some which we know from history, such as the danger of letting one person or clique acquire too much power and some that haven’t been confronted before, such as taking everyone along means the fight will be much tougher and longer. Although the existence of billions of people outside the ‘magic circle’ eventually bought the gains for those inside it undone, it was european imperialism, including the pressure valve of amerika, which created the room neccessary for the rich to make concessions while still holding on to much of their wealth. That won’t happen next time, the fight must be to the death.
Klein doesn’t go quite far enough back when she hoists Friedman as the super asshole bogeyman who ignited the resurgence of steal till they stop breathing capitalism, it was Friedrich Hayek Friedman’s professor at Chicago who served as keeper of the capitalist flame through the years of Keynsian economics, that should be held resposinble for this return to greed and fear.
Just as what Hayek and Friedman brought with them was in many ways more extreme and oppressive than what came before, (pre Keynsian capitalism lacked the systems to truly screw over every living human) what humanity creates after the fall of corporate capitalism will be much freerer and fairer than the Keynsian period. For example we must ensure that personal freedoms are protected.
The was a calvinist moralty about the old socialism which needlessly aggravated individualists. Few social ills are repaired by reducing personal freedom. They are fixed by repairing systemic shortcomings in our society. The second way takes much longer so a politician of whatever stripe will always find it easier to be seen to be doing something if he/she legislates now rather than repairing then waiting.
However there is no point in trying to change the tyres on a bus that is still being constructed, most of us can viscerally comprehend that a movement that brings all of humanity with it could not/should not be run from a single centralised point anyhow.
If we take a lesson from Iraq and concentrate on points of similarity which unite us rather than points of difference that seperate us we will move forward that much sooner.

Posted by: Debs is Dead | Sep 8 2007 0:16 utc | 13

Naomi has a pretty impressive body of work for someone as young as she is. I don’t see her as principally an intellectual though; she is more an excellent popularizer of ideas, a fine writer, and a damn good reporter.
She, and her family, have very solid ties to the mainstream Canadian left. Whether that makes her a gatekeeper or not is debatable, depending on where you draw the line. For me, the line is between those who believe that the system — capitalism — is broken and can be reformed, and those who feel it is structurally unworkable; and to a lesser extent between those who are willing, and brave enough, to publicly talk about the fact that governments do kill their own people, in addition to “others” — a situation whereby 9/11 was but one noteable example of — versus those who won’t discuss internal violence.
I have seen NK straddle both sides of that debate, and in all fairness, the “internal contradictions” of her personal situation must be at least as complex as the “internal contradictions” of the system which we exist under, namely, capitalism.
We all have out own particular personalities and foibles, no matter how absolutist our politics or religion is, and Naomi is about as much of a mall-shopping JAP (Jewish American Canadian Princess) as I can imagine a radical being. Estee Lauder comments are not out of place for her.
But, in the larger scheme of things, personality is relatively unimportant. Though my own personal pantheon of heros continually increases, I would still rank Klein in the top 10 in terms of reporting skills, her books, and most importantly, her ability to reach out to a larger audience in a clear and understandable manner, and preach successfully beyond the choir — not an easy task at all.

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 8 2007 7:16 utc | 15

The Guardian carries an excerpt of Naomi Klein’s book: The shock doctrine

One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, “Uncle Miltie”, as he was known to his followers, found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. “Most New Orleans schools are in ruins,” Friedman observed, “as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity.”
Friedman’s radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans’ existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions.
In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.
…

Posted by: b | Sep 8 2007 10:24 utc | 17

Annie, re Naomi Klein, my criticism is sincere but puzzled. i don’t quite understand where it can go. what it helps. i see too much compromise. but then, who am i, perhaps blind, etc. i have given ‘no logo’ as gifts, to selected ppl, and aimed no too badly, it stirred. something jars. as i tried to exemplify in my post. i did say i thought she was super smart and i admired her, or whatever praise along that line.
and yes I prefer Antonia Juhasz by a long shot.
the bush agenda
of course one can’t please everyone. that is not the point. the point is whether one is sincere and fighting with the pen for a better world, or doing something different, surfing the waves..

Posted by: Tangerine | Sep 8 2007 18:56 utc | 19

Why Capitalism Needs Terror: Interview with Naomi Klein

[The interview first ranges over evidence for Klein’s theory of “Disaster capitalism” in a number of countries, before this passage.]
Q: With reference to the United States, tell me what you see.
Well, what I see — if we bring it back to Friedman — is a very explicit political campaign against the New Deal. You know, he wrote that history took a wrong turn after the 1930s. There was a consensus, after the market crash, that what had gone wrong was that the market had been left to regulate itself and that was simply too brutal. The New Deal came to embody another kind of capitalism, which did much more redistribution. And it wasn’t because people were nice; there was a battle of ideas between Communism and capitalism, and in the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s and ’60s it was capitalism in a seductive phase. And so elements of socialism were inserted into this model so that a more radical version of socialism would be less attractive. I’m quoting FDR and Keynes. And that model actually was the period where you had the most rapid economic growth, but it was more fairly distributed. This was the period where the middle class really grew, not just in the United States but in countries like Chile and Argentina. And then kind of a class war was waged — a right-wing class war.
At what period?
In the U.S. it starts with Reagan. I’ve talked about the University of Chicago as an ideological and an intellectual movement but it wasn’t purely an intellectual movement, it was very heavily funded by Wall Street. And the decision to wage what was a counter-revolution against Keynesianism was about the elites of the United States being sick and tired of sharing so much of the wealth with the workers of the United States. In 1980 the gap between CEOs and the workers who worked for them was 43:1 and now it’s 422:1.
But there’s also lots of evidence that the counter-revolutionaries haven’t had much success. The United States is still very much a mixed economy, and if you look at spending on entitlement programs and Medicare and medicaid and government spending as a percentage of GDP, it’s higher than it was at the start of the counter-revolution…
But the money doesn’t go to the people. The U.S. health care system gets the money to the HMOs. Look, I don’t believe these guys are ideologues. Ideology serves as sort of a cover story to rationalize massive personal enrichment. If you look at what I call the disaster capitalism complex, the seventh most successful company on the Forbes list is an HMO that has gotten rich off treating traumatized soldiers coming back from Iraq, because Rumsfeld privatized health care for soldiers. Tamiflu — we’re talking about harmonizing disaster response with the U.S. Well, that’s a pretty scary idea because I consider the Bush administration to be an administration of disaster capitalists who make their money selling drugs for flu outbreaks and pandemics, AIDS drugs, hurricane response, like Bechtel and Halliburton. These are people who very directly become wealthy when things go really badly. I don’t think Canadians should be working with them. Whether the counter-revolution has succeeded, I think it has succeeded in opening up this incredible inequality. The situation for workers is weaker than pre-New Deal….
Do you see significant differences between how the Clinton administration behaved in these regards and the Bush administration?
There’s something uniquely naked about the Bush administration. The Clinton administration did everything it could to advance this agenda. They lopped off the arms of the state and all that was left was the core, and the Bush administration has devoured the core and turned the government into an empty shell. They’ve privatized the army and given it to Blackwater! It’s what we’re seeing now with bridges collapsing and the can’t-do state, as Paul Krugman calls it. You knock on the door of the Department of Homeland Security and the entire thing is outsourced.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 9 2007 21:45 utc | 21

The Guardian published another excerpt from the book on Monday, The age of disaster capitalism

It was a bold evolution of shock therapy. Rather than the 90s approach of selling off existing public companies, the Bush team created a whole new framework for its actions – the war on terror – built to be private from the start. This feat required two stages. First, the White House used the omnipresent sense of peril in the aftermath of 9/11 to dramatically increase the policing, surveillance, detention and war-waging powers of the executive branch – a power-grab that the military historian Andrew Bacevich has termed “a rolling coup”. Then those newly enhanced and richly funded functions of security, invasion, occupation and reconstruction were immediately outsourced, handed over to the private sector to perform at a profit.
Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex – a fully fledged new economy in homeland security, privatised war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatised security state, both at home and abroad. The economic stimulus of this sweeping initiative proved enough to pick up the slack where globalisation and the dotcom booms had left off. Just as the internet had launched the dotcom bubble, 9/11 launched the disaster capitalism bubble.
(snip)
Every aspect of the way the Bush administration has defined the parameters of the war on terror has served to maximise its profitability and sustainability as a market – from the definition of the enemy to the rules of engagement to the ever-expanding scale of the battle. The document that launched the department of homeland security declares, “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon,” which conveniently means that the security services required must protect against every imaginable risk in every conceivable place at every possible time. And it’s not necessary to prove that a threat is real for it to merit a full-scale response – not with Cheney’s famous “1% doctrine”, which justified the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that if there is a 1% chance that something is a threat, it requires that the US respond as if the threat is a 100% certainty. This logic has been a particular boon for the makers of various hi-tech detection devices: for instance, because we can conceive of a smallpox attack, the department of homeland security has handed out half a billion dollars to private companies to develop and install detection equipment.
Through all its various name changes – the war on terror, the war on radical Islam, the war against Islamofascism, the third world war, the long war, the generational war – the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged. It is limited by neither time nor space nor target. From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the war on terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash-in-the-pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture.

She doesn’t go into the cronyism aspect in this extract, but surprisingly that makes her narrative even more powerful. (Well, not so surprising perhaps, now that I think of it. Cronyism is very old hat and comes with the seeds of its own destruction. The picture Klein paints here, beginning from the decades long incubation in think-tanks, is of something that could be remarkably enduring.)

Posted by: Alamet | Sep 10 2007 23:58 utc | 23

If you really follow the import of her work, Milton Friedman must be reviled as a demon 1000 times worse over than Hitler,
Agreed. I was just thinking about this today, that this entire enterprise of disaster capitalism is evil in an almost unprecedented way because it is willing to deliberately destroy entire societies, cultures, and peoples for the sake of accruing more profit for a small minority who already so wealthy that they wouldn’t be able to use all that wealth in many lifetimes. That is almost too much for me to fathom. It’s the opposite of the saying “too good to be true” — it’s too evil to be true. And yet, it is.
I really think that Naomi Klein has put together a body of evidence that shines a light on something that is extraordinary. And it truly provides the most plausible explanation I’ve seen yet for all that we have seen occur in the world since 9/11. Certainly “American national interest” in the sense that we once understood it has very little to do with it.
In this vein, lately as well I have been mulling on the notion of Nahr al-Bared as Lebanon’s 9/11 — fomented with many of the same goals in mind. It’s a hypothesis, not something I’m certain of, but I’m thinking about it. Disaster capitalism, in a Lebanese flavor. And perhaps the war of 2006 would fall into this category as well. Stir up all kinds of fears, displace and shake up established orders, discombobulate everyone, and then use that chaos to re-write all the old rules of the game — the rules that protected everyone and guaranteed a fairer balance of power. In the US, it was the Patriot Act and ultimately, a few years down the road, many of the rights enshrined in the Constitution. In Lebanon, it is more to do with the balance of power in the country between the army, the various confessional groups, and the refugees. For example, Nahr al-Bared is apparently going to be used as a pretext to eliminate the Cairo Agreement of 1969, which gave the camps a relative degree of autonomy. It will possibly be used to push an army commander into the presidency. And economically, who knows what types of measures have been pushed through in the wake of the war with Israel — I am sure a little research would turn up many. In Gaza, for that matter, it was the “coup” — people were so shaken up and furious that Hamas would “do that” that they rallied and supported the massive re-writing of Basic Laws without any of the necessary proper procedures to make this legal.
In fact… thinking about it… it’s almost like a carbon copy pattern from place to place.

Posted by: Bea | Sep 11 2007 3:16 utc | 25

The Guardian now has more excerpts from Naomi Klein’s book and a lot of additional resources: The Shock Doctrine

Posted by: b | Sep 11 2007 10:39 utc | 27