The Try-Works

But, you should read The Shock Doctrine. I finally turned the last page not too long ago, and it never let up. The best book about neoliberalism yet, and by the time I got to the chapter about Sri Lanka and tsunami reconstruction, I was banging my head on the floor, black blood running from my eyes.

If you ain’t sold, check out this interview with Naomi Klein (conducted by John Cusack, of all people), here.

Also, Alexander Cockburn has a rather typical critique of The Shock Doctrine, here. He seems primarily to be taking Ms. Klein to task for not including every instance of capitalist exploitation and unethical business practice known to man. I heard the same theme from Ed Champion, in a really disappointing interview, here. I like Mr. Champion’s interviews a lot, but this one was thoroughly petulant, with the questions running to the borderline inane. (Can you really tie a spike in suicide rates among financial workers to economic crashes? Huh? Really? Couldn’t there have been other factors? Mightn’t their wives have left them? Their dogs died? Were they bottle-fed? And what about IBM? They did bad things too, and that was before Milton Friedman gained prominence? Doesn’t that prove that businesses are, like, inherently evil?)

Anyway, the fact that the book’s being nit-picked to death seems a good indication of its power. After all, trolling for errata is the surest indicator of a lack of substantive response to an argument.

Sound familiar?

One thing I’m finding interesting is the furiously indignant response to Ms. Klein’s work by so many. Her specific analysis is stunning, but, overall, the book is not arguing any radical solutions, not even close. Her argument, as I understand it, is for a Keynesian mixed economy. She doesn’t argue against markets, she just considers those who believe in a purely utopian free market as insane as those who believe in a purely utopian Marxist society.

And for this she’s receiving the kind of venom usually reserved for folks like Noam Chomsky and old whatsisname. That one can be painted as a bomb-throwing anarchist for proposing the private and public sectors ought not be inseparable is only evidence of how violently far to the right we’ve swung in this country.

Anyway, next on my list for current events is Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater, which seems a natural corollary. But I’m also reading Jack London’s The Road, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, Harry Crews’ The Mulching of America (still), and a book on cowboy gear called $10 Horse, $40 Saddle, so it may be a few days.

As usual, it’d be a hell of an interview if Bill Maher’d shut the fuck up.

This from Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

And that is the post September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy — the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuild bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom — the medium is the message.

In other words, what’s at play ain’t only the oil, but also the entire new market created by disaster response. Think, for instance, of all those McDonald’s opening to serve the 160,000+ troops now stationed in Iraq. Not to mention those 180,000+ mercenaries. Not to mention all the Bechtel and Halliburton employees. Then think of everything else, from building materials to toothpaste, that also have to make their way into the compounds. And think of how they get there.

And then, of course, there are the extraordinary profits being reaped by, well, all those aforementioned mercenaries. And Bechtel. And Halliburton.

And we ain’t even gotten to the oil companies yet.

And all these hyper-profits are contingent on the murder of hundreds of thousands of absolutely innocent civilians. But, hell, that’s the price of business. And we all know what kind of motherfucker we’re dealing with in those companies, don’t we?

For those few of you who ain’t figured it out from the last post, on the advice of a wise and learned friend, I’ve been real interested in Naomi Klein lately. And according to Amazon, my copy of The Shock Doctrine is in the mail right now.

In the meantime, a short movie about the book, directed by Alfonso Cuarón of Children of Men fame, can be downloaded here (medium quality) and here (high quality).

And if you can’t get enough, Ms. Klein’s handlers have been kind enough to post links to a whole feast of audio and video, here.