#2 – Yes – and the odiousness of the “Chicago Boys” is not ipso facto that they “believe” in a free market, but that in whatever country they’re given the chance, they destroy democracy, industrial safety law, & socialism for individuals, while oddly enough never getting around to cutting off that corporate socialism.

Posted by: Cloud | Aug 22 2008 20:44 utc | 3

cloud@3
for me the chicago boys are essentially war criminals. their words led to deaths, direcly. & they knew it. & that was what was different with right wing ‘thinkers’ since the 60’s is that they possessed a bloodlust. right across the board. in economics, clearly but in the human & social sciences. science itself became the baby of the right’s ideologues – quite clearly in the nuclear arms contol but also in other areas. it did not surprise me at all that the ‘creationist” tried to make an alliance with some of these ideologues – with their paltry effort ‘intelligent design’
what appears as success – the fact that while they protect their elites – they have practically destroyed infrastructure, almost irretrievably. i know new zealand for example has tried to heal it’s country after the chicago school piussed all over it (debs is there so would be clearer on whether they have been able to do that)
the ‘success’ of the chicago boys is held together by fear & we now have plenty of evidence of their concrete failure, in concrete terms. what is happening in latin america is a direct result of the systematic plundering initiated under them
they have no long term. therefore they are amnesiacs. & they are served well by a mass media – that makes remembering in any practical & fundamental sense, a crime
the kind of govts & business kept afloat in this bloodbath – have established as their base inequality of opportunity & for that alone they belong where khodorovsky is, in jail
i guess, what mystifies me though, even acknowledging their greed – they do not plan in any real sense, they are very vulnerable to any shift in the economy or of world events. they are not quick to transform. they learn nothing from necessity. there is no real risk, or initiative or experiment. in the english speaking world – their one industry towns that they have laid waste is still, still after all these years – a level of self destruction i can barely comprehend – even with the most profound understanding of marx
& as you sd cloud & shown in juan’s post – these pigs absolutely love the public trough (carmakers in australia have only existed because of public subsidy yet these cretins are the first to atttack the poor for any just demands that make for subsidies)& are parasitic to it & always have been –
in fact, they like big govt but only if it is for them

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 22 2008 21:55 utc | 5

But . . . but . . . but . . they’re ‘Murcan cars, dammit! So whatever subsidy they want, or double whatever subsidy they want, can’t ever be too much. Its not as if the market wouldn’t eventually reallocate that “resource”. Sure, a few thousand very well paid UAW workers might have to cut back on their very American consumer lifestyle while those resources find their way into infrastructure rebuilding and the like. But, I guess, it all depends on whose ox is being gored. BTW I don’t underestimate the downstream effects of the crumbling auto manufaturing market in the US; but you pays now or you pays later.
And we sure would want it to be the upper management of the big three, would we?

Posted by: DonS | Aug 23 2008 0:37 utc | 7

I’m not in Australia at the moment so am unsure of what the current subsidy is for but I expect it is the usual “car industry tax” that Australian car makers put on governments with union connections. The “Button Car Plan” which was what the taxes by carmakers on the government in the first term of the Hawke Government was called, cost a lot more than $50 mill.
Basically Austrlia’s population can’t support a motor vehicle manufacturing industry but Australia is a wealthy country (would be a lot wealthier if Gough Whitlam had been able to buy back the farm in ’72 but that is another story) and chooses to keep a percentage of it’s population occupied with building cars in uneconomically small numbers. The people subsidise that and no one really minds although the cover story is a little less honest about it. In this case the subsidy is being camoflaged with the Kyoto Protocol cover story since Australia has just signed the protocol far too late to matter, but it has finally signed it. I would be very surprised if Toyota is the only company with it’s hand out for a kickback from the new Oz govt. But since amerika’s population is large enough to support a car manufacturing industry I’m not sure the two situations equate.
AS for NZ, the people have re-acquired a few of the assets which were given away to corupt business ‘tycoons’. They had immediately flogged them off overseas at considerable profit and buying them back was not an inexpensive exercise.
As Talleyrand or Metternich or one of those old buggers said about 1815 or so, as he looked at Europe after Napoleon had dealt to the old ways; “You can’t turn back the clock”.
This country will never be the safe and friendly co-operative society that it once was. Too many peeps have been brainwashed into the self-obsessive me me me culture. It will take generations of deprivation before peeps relearn that “no man is an island” the hard way. That was the lesson our forebears had brought here 150 years ago. Next time will be much harder of course. People tend to forget that much social change in the North and South was the direct result of the rapid expansion of “us whitefellas” across the planet which had relieved the competitive pressure between all of “us”.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 23 2008 7:12 utc | 9

Note how we consider throwing another $30 Billion to the auto industry rather than thinking about it has just one of the possible transportation methods. What would a $30 billion loan facility do to rebuild and transform the passenger rail network on the east coast to modern fully electric system? I’d imagine it would have many times the benifit for the common good.

Posted by: DC | Aug 25 2008 18:31 utc | 11

DC #11–
A good point.
When looting-out and the rewarding of failure take precedence over damage mitigation and amelioration in the face of crisis, you know that thoroughgoing system failure is in the cards. The current bailout moves–as so many recent financial actions–are a sure token that as the environmental and resource crises of the 21st century unfold, the US will be going straight to the bottom.

Posted by: Gaianne | Aug 25 2008 19:00 utc | 13