http://www.correntewire.com/reading_shock_doctrine_1Reading Shock Doctrine - 1
Submitted by lambert on Wed, 2007-09-19 09:23.
disaster capitalism naomi klein
I went to the Mall yesterday and bought a copy of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. It only took my an entire afternoon via public transportation, since, of course, buses run every hour, I suppose not to impede the tens of thousands of cars using the public roads. And the mall 1. doesn’t even have any fucking sidewalks!
Anyhow, the book is wonderful, illuminating, terrifying. You should—must—go buy it and read it immediately if you want us all to be able to start thinking strategically instead of reacting to each shock as it comes, and the next one is coming; that panting sound you hear in the dark is the wingers, waiting for it. (Despite being long, and heavily footnoted—footnotes are anti-authoritarian, since they enable you to check sources—the book is quite readable. It is not an academic work, though it is analytical). Shock Doctrine integrates all the economic and political shards of my own life since I came of age; and also integrates and vindicates many of the themes and memes and sense-making tools that we’ve been home-brewing in the blogosphere in the years since Bush seized power.
So what I’m going to do, over the next several days—or more than several, the book is long—is read TSD from front to back, and fair-use quote and annotate passages that I find especially suggestive, in a series of posts. (In the beginning, everything seemed suggestive. Even from the first few pages, the sense I had of conceptual doors opening—that I could finally take a mental walk-through of the ground plan for the Green Zone I know I’ve been trapped in—was exhilirating. Even if many of the walls are of cold stone, many of the windows are barred and high up, many of the corners are dark, and even though the sound of screaming comes from behind some of the closed doors.* (TSD’s impact is such that it makes everything else look like The Process Dodge.)
That said, pages 4-6:
The news racing around the
shelter was that Richard Baker, a prominent Republican Congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyists, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t, but God did.” Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans’ wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment. “I think we have a clean sheet** to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities.”
1.
2. I remember during Katrina remarking that the similarity between Iraq and Katrina was that both were gigantic experiments in Conservative social engineering. Klein’s book validates that intuition.
3. We need to rid ourselves once and for all, completely, of the Incompetence Dodge. The events and processes that we see unfolding in New Orleans, and in Iraq, are not in essence “mistakes” (though of course accidents happen). Rather, they are ideologically driven. They are doctrinal. And they confirm benefits on the drivers in the form of great wealth. “This is working very well for them.”
Over at the shelter, Jamar could think of nothing else. “I really don’t think of it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn’t have died.”
He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us overheard and whipped around. “What is wrong with these people…
1.
…in Baton Rouge? This isn’t an opportunity. It’s a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?
A mother with two kids chimed in. “No. They’re not blind. They’re evil. They see just fine.”
1. People of the Lie (POTL).
2. And we’re all niggers now, eh?
One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was Milton Friedman, grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism and the man credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hypermobile global economy. Ninety three years old and in failing health, “Uncle Miltie,” as he was known to his followers, nonetheless found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. … “It is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system. … New Orleans was now, according to The New York Times, “the nation’s preeminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools,” while the American Enterprise Institute, a Freidmanite think tank, enthused that “Katrina accomplished in a day… What Louisiana school reformers couldn’t do after years of trying.” Public school teachers, meanwhile, watching money allocated for victims of the flood being diverted to erase a public system and replace it with a private one, were calling Freidman’s plan “an educational landgrab.”
I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism”.
I’m going to follow Klein and call the subject matter of these posts Disaster Capitalism Theory (DCT). I think this is because Conspiracy Theory (CT) occupies the conceptual niche that DCT should occupy, but DCT outcompetes CT the barren circularities *** of LIHOP vs. MIHOP with conceptual tools that are analytically far more powerful, far more rigourous, have broader historical sweep, and fit the built record far more than CT can ever hope to. (I Cor. 13:12).
As I said: Go buy the book. It’s the perfect read for Talk Like a Pirate Day!
NOTE * Of course, behind other doors comes the tinkling of a piano, the clink of glasses raised in toast, and the smell of fine cigars. It’s a funny old world.
NOTE ** I think the “hot sheets” metaphor must be entirely unconscious.
NOTE *** That’s not to say that CT isn’t important in building the record. But a world-view that depends on conspiracies and cabals doesn’t scale far enough to explain the problems we face. We have bigger fish to fry—or corpses to bury—than Skull and Bones.
http://www.correntewire.com/reading_shock_doctrine_1
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
