Disaster Capitalism

2011_3_09 Disaster Capitalism

Larry O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz are now assuming that the Democrats have won the showdown with Scott Walker; they are saying that because some emails have come to light that show the governor has been negotiating with the absent 14 senators for the past few days while telling the public he won’t negotiate. According to one of the senators interviewed by O’Donnell last night they have the raw material for a compromise settlement right now; a deal could come soon.

That was great news to Rachel’s guest last night, Naomi Klein, the author of that great book THE SHOCK DOCTRINE. She was visibly elated over this latest turn of events. Here’s an excerpt from her book.

“What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of coporativism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war against the third party sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing alliance’s share of the national wealth…” (The global pattern was) an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting fueling superprofits and frantic consumerism, ringed by ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past; roughly half the population excluded from the economy altogether; out-of-control corruption and cronyism; dissemination of national owned small and medium-sized businesses; a huge transfer of wealth from public to private hands…”

The start of our recession was a crisis along these lines. The bailing out of the banks (to big to fail was the mantra) with taxpayer’s billions was one example of how the new Robber Barons pulled the wool over the eyes of the workers and the Middle Class. And who got the blame? The folks who bought the houses who should have known better, it was said, not the greedy real estate agents, who got no more than a slap on the wrists. They laughed all the way to the bank, as did their bonus-bloated brethren on Wall Street, while being immune from blame and suffer no consequences. like the homeowners did. Meanwhile all the good jobs disappeared; many were shipped over seas and people with PHDs were forced to work at McDonald’s for minimum wage or drive a delivery truck just to keep body and soul together. And now we have situation with the Tea Party advocates being top dog around the country in control in many states governments, like in Wisconsin, Ohio, Idaho and Indiana. Feeling rich with power they are going for the big prize: dumping unions, the workers’ last bastion of countervailing power. Governor Walker and others are trying to persuade the Middle Class, feeling resentment over the better deals the public sector unions have gotten for themselves (God forbid!) so those unions and their “Bosses” (what are CEOs if not Bosses?) have to be taken down a peg or two, or even better, eliminated—who needs them anymore? They are actually attacking their legitimacy, with collective bargaining in Wisconsin going back 50 years. The right wing money establishment has a master plan to dismantle unions, thus depriving the Democratic Party of election funds. Secondly, they then seek to privatize as many institutions as they can, which would greatly be facilitated with the a Republican in the White Hose in 2012, say, a Republican like Scott Walker or some other person with Tea Party values or affiliations. We now see what they want to do. As Grover Norquest phrased it, “We want government small enough to drown in a bathtub.” They want to eliminate government—all but the Military—as a viable entity. These people hate to pay taxes; they want to keep every red cent they get. They have no social conscience. Let the churches and the ERs take care of the helpless and homeless. It’s not their concern and shouldn’t have to be. Let the families of the mentally ill take care of their kin. We can’t afford that anymore; we have wars to wage. They are now showing a particular animus toward teachers who they are demonizing as inept part time workers who don’t deserve the salaries they get. They denigrate education at their own peril. They know not what they do.

Scott Walker is obviously a gambling man; he was willing to shoot the moon believing that the reaction to his so-called Budget Repair Bill would be small and feeble. That turned out to be a colossal miscalculation, which might cost him his future career. From the start the Bill was perceived as a union-busting piece of legislation, a ruse and smoke screen to cancel out most of their collective bargaining rights. It had nothing to do with budget issues. He fooled no one. As he told the person he thought was Dave Koch on the phone, “This is our moment to grab power.” Not quite; instead he awoke a sleeping giant, as tens of thousands showed up to assert their anger and their rejection of his move to depose unions in Wisconsin. He unintentionally reinvigorated the ‘monster’ he set out to destroy and his miscalculation may haunt him the rest of his life. The big moment may belong to the workers, not the plutocrats.