watch it: “The Shock Doctrine by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein”

by MaryAnn Johanson

Tue, Sep 23, 2008

4 comments

Still reeling from the shock of the Wall Street “crisis”? Here’s why:

share and enjoy

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Alexiswi

Tue, Sep 23, 2008 2:42pm

Eye opening. I wouldn’t call myself a socialist, but I am pretty tired of getting screwed by capitalism…

Tue, Sep 23, 2008 3:20pm

The basic concept of the shock doctrine isn’t a huge revelation, but we all need these things brought back up again and again, with research like this, to remind us what happens in our country. I’ve been reading alot saying that small power changing paragraphs have been inserted into the bailout, and no one will probably notice.

joey

Fri, Sep 26, 2008 1:21am

Simply because he says it so much better than I can, here’s The New Republic’s Jon Chait:

It ought to be morbidly embarrassing for a writer to discover that the central character of her narrative turns out to oppose what she identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement. And Klein’s mistake exposes the deeper flaw of her thesis. Friedman opposed the war because he was a libertarian, and libertarian conservatism is not the same thing as neoconservatism. Nor are the interests of corporations always, or even usually, served by war.

What makes Klein’s thesis so odd, and so awful, is that in fact there is an unlimited supply of raw material, an abundant basis in reality, for the sorts of arguments that she wants to make. The last two decades certainly have seen the global spread of absolutist free-market ideology. Many of the newest adherents of this creed are dictators who have learned that they can harness the riches of capitalism without permitting the freedoms once thought to flow automatically from it. In the United States, the power of labor unions has withered, and prosperity has increasingly come to be defined as gross domestic product or the rise of the stock market, with the actual living standards of the great mass of the population an afterthought. Corporations, which can relocate nearly anywhere around the world, have used their flexibility as a cudgel against workers, who do not enjoy the privileges of mobility. Domestic policy has aggressively sharpened income inequalities, and corporations have enjoyed unfettered influence to a degree not seen in a hundred years. And the president did start a war without paying the slightest bit of attention to the country that he would be left occupying or how its people would react.

All these things are true. And all these things are enormous outrages and significant problems. It’s just that they are not the same outrage or the same problem. And Naomi Klein’s relentless lumping together of all her ideological adversaries in the service of a monocausal theory of the world ultimately renders her analysis perfect nonsense.

I’m surprised that you’re so credulous, MaryAnn. It’s not like you.