In "The Shock Doctrine", Naomi Klein
writes a chapter on the East Asian financial crisis of 10 years ago.
 As opposed to a Tom Friedman or Fareed Zakaria, she interviews the
real losers of that financial debacle, regular working people.

"A few months ago, " a seventeen-year-old
worker who sewed Gap clothing near Manila explained, "I used to have
enough money to send a little bit home to my family every month, but
now I don't even make enough to buy food for myself."

This was the summer of 1997.  The Asian Tigers crumbled in months.
 There was a wave of suicides. Klein reports that in South Korea, the
suicide rate went up 50%.  And the U.S. Treasury did not rush in to
ease the pain.  And American finance gamblers were happy to see the
Tigers fall.  That's because the Asian Tigers had kept out the
investment banks and multinational firms.  They built up their own
industries.  They kept control of their energy and their
transportation. They protected their nation and its people.  In other
words, they refused to follow the Washington Consensus aka
neo-liberalism aka Friedmanreaganrubinomics aka Free Market Flim Flam.
 And the big boys, the Chicago boys hated them for it.

What we are seeing right now today might well be what the Free
Market Flim Flammers did in East Asian in 1997.  It's the "Shock
Doctrine". For example, the IMF refused to release the money to help
South Korean financial markets unless the four main candidates for
president "would stick to the new rules if they won".  

 
Those new rules involved the typical free market orthodoxy of
privatization of national assets, deregulation, and cutting social
spending.  The vultures of Wall Street and multinationals that would
have been barred from operating in many of these countries were allowed
in to gorge on the entrails at last. GE gobbled up Korea's LG.  JP
Morgan and Merrill Lynch swooped in a grabbed huge stakes in Asian
security firms; this while farm girls were forced into prostitution and
farm boys into drug selling. This is where the term "crony capitalism" was coined.

"What few were willing to admit at the time is that, while the IMF
certainly failed the people of Asia, it did not fail Wall Street".
(Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine", Chapter 13:  Let It Burn).

But not all of East Asia fell for the Free Market Flim Flam.
 In "Financial Debacle Discredits U.S. Economic Model"  
www.progressive.org/mag/wxap092508.html

Amitabh Pal writes on September 25, 2008 and concludes.

   

The one good thing that came out of the
devastating Asian economic crisis a decade ago was that the whole
notion of having a completely convertible currency (again pushed by the
IMF and the World Bank) was discredited, since countries like Indonesia
and Thailand that had floating currencies were devastated, while
countries such as India and China that managed their currencies escaped
quite unscathed. If there's any beneficial outcome of the current
crisis here in the United States, it is that countries around the
world will realize that the financial sector is too important to be
left to the whims of a bunch of high-rolling gamblers.

Part Two:  Fixing the Plumbing and Foundation

The fix may be in and the presidential candidates been told to
follow the rules. But we should still push back with the better ideas
laying around from Dean Baker, the Institute for Policy Studies, and others. We need a two-pronged
approach.  One that addresses our houses' plumbing aka banking fiasco
and one that addresses the foundation of our house aka stagnant wages
and inequality caused by the Milton Friedman Free Market Flim Flam.

Somebody put in a hidden water pipe that drained our water and
which finally ended up backing up our sewer and sending the sludge back
up our toilets and into the house.  

So on the one hand, we have to stop the outflow of money to
what Glen Ford calls the  "banksters" and "lords of capital", and I
call the Milton Friedman Flim Flam Free Market Hucksters.  We have
to tax speculation as we have done before with the Securities Turnover
Excise Tax.   We paid for the Spanish American War with it and used in
from 1914-1966.  A 3% tax on incomes over 10 million would generate
$300 billion according to the Institute for Policy Studies.  They have
other ideas.

http://www.ips-dc.org/articles...

And on the other hand, we must address the pillars that hold up the foundation of our nation's house aka working America
aka the 90% of us that create wealth through labor and real services.
We must make things again and reward those people who make the things.
 Have we forgotten the Henry Ford principle of paying a worker enough
so he could buy a Ford car?  And that means paying cash, not borrowing.
 Remember when Sam Walton proudly proclaimed that Wal-Mart goods were
"Made in America"?  Stagnant wages forced Americans to live on debt,
but that bank is busted.  That was the biggest bank in the U.S., the
American worker.  Well, they are tapped out. After 10 years they
finally got a minimum wage increase. It's not enough.  

We are watching the last gasps of the dying dinosaurs of
neo-liberalism aka free market flim flam as they disappear into the tar
pits.  We can be sucked in with them or we can break free.  Tell it
like it is in every paper, every bar and cafe.  If there has already
been a back room deal in the halls of congress that include the
intimidation of our presidential candidates, then our only choice at
the ballot box is to get rid of every incumbent and tell them why.  And
also to tell Barack Obama why we put him into office.

And  then pray for mercy from those we have shafted.  It's not
too late for the American people to reject the free market flim flam.  

Ah those chickens have already roosted and are crapping all over the house.

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Instead of seeing Obama surrounded by bankers like ex Fed
chairman Paul Volker and ex Goldman Sachs now Citigroup former
Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin last Friday, I wish Barack Obama
had been huddled with Leo Gerard of the Steelworkers, James Hoffa of
the teamsters, Naomi Klein author of "The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Wolfe,
"The End of America" , Nomi Prins, "Other People's Money" and Glenn
Greenwald of Salon.com.


montanamaven :: The Obama Photo Op I Would Have Preferred


Work
creates wealth and not the other way around.  Teddy Roosevelt called
for a "New Nationalism" in 1910.  He quoted Abraham Lincoln:

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if
labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and
deserves much the higher consideration."

Capital i.e. bankers have screwed this nation up big time. They've
done it before and they will do it every chance they get. Now it's not
all bankers.  There is a bad shadow banking systems based on gambling
not on lending to people who make things.
We must look to ways to clean up this mess without taking advice
from bankers.  And we need to look not to the Chicago School of
Economics which dominates the economic world. It has only led to
myopia.  We need to look at the ideas of the heterodox economic
theories.  We must listen to people like Dean Baker and Michael Hudson.
 We need to heed the wise words of economic reporters like Naomi Klein,
William Greider (The Soul of Capitalism), and Robert Scheer
(Truthdig.org).  We need to read Glenn Greenwald who shows how once
again, neo cons are trying to shock us into doing something bad.  They
shocked us into war and then the FISA bill.  Now this bailout.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/g...

Amy Goodman interviewed former Bear Stearns employee Nomi Prins and
Michael Hudson of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic
Trends last Friday:  http://www.democracynow.org/20...

Today she will interview Dean Baker and Robert Scheer.

There are abundant ideas out there. Other countries have tackled
inflation without using the old Fed formula of putting people out of
work by raising interest rates.   Dean Baker in his "The Conservative
Nanny State" explains that these countries have tried wage and price
controls with some success. (Nixon used them also to the great anger of
Milton Friedman aka Mr. Shock Doctrine.)  However, they have strong
labor unions that they use to make the bargains with the employers.
 This is another reason why we should all support the "Employee Free
Choice Act".  It will help workers in auto plants to Starbucks have a
say in the workplace and give labor its long over due seat at the head
of the table.

We the people need to keep the businesses going that employee
fellow Americans.  We should lend money to them directly and cut out
these Ponzi schemers.  Hank Paulson should not be made into some kind
of hero.  He's the flashy Hollywood Ari Gold of the Washington swamp. I
take that back.  Ari can be a maniac, but he's often right.  Paulson is
just a neo-con cultist who is trying to implement "The Shock Doctrine".
He's taken over the government and has unlimited power,  They will next
urge us to privatize social security and eliminate Medicare and
Medicaid. Welcome to Russia.

Part of me wouldn't mind seeing this mess of system totally
melt down, but selfishly I'm a bit too close to wanting to retire to
fervently wish for it. So I urge Barack Obama to take on this Herculean
task of making capitalism work for everybody by not only being the new
sheriff in town, but riding into town with a whole new posse and a copy
of "The Shock Doctrine" in his saddlebag.

I was in the middle of reading "Dear Senator Obama" by Marc Ash http://www.truthout.org/article/dear-senator-obama
and a word leaped out at me.  It was the word "inconvenient".

In 2000, we were a nation rushing to put hanging chads behind us. Dealing with
what really happened in Florida was inconvenient. Seven and a half years later,
we are still paying the debt.

I'm
reading Sheldon J. Wolin's "Democracy Incorporated" and he also zeros
in on Florida as either a coup-d'etat or, he theorizes,  akin to a
corporate hostile takeover.  (For more on Wolin see my posts "I Feel
Like a Change" and "Democracy is Messy, So Stop Trying to Clean It Up,
Barack!").  Wolin states:

...Congress which was once thought to be the predominant branch of
government because it supposedly stood "closer to the people," has been
demoted to a position of power comparable to that of a corporate
board.  The latter tend to be creatures of the CEO rather than the
independent supervisory power to which the CEO is theoretically
responsible.  Like a board, Congress may occasionally display
independence, especially when it and the president represent opposing
parties.  But the main point is that Congress has lost its close
connection with the citizenry....Finally, in the image of shareholders,
who wield small power over their CEOs or boards and are stirred to
protest only when dividends disappoint, so the citizenry has embraced a
diminished role.  Like shareholders they can vote out their own CEO,
the president, or their board of directors, Congress, but mostly they
want to be assured that the CEO-president is "heading the country in
the right direction".

Whether
coup or takeover, what had been a gradual move from democracy, after
Florida, became a downward spiral.  The stage for the coup/takeover was
set with awkward ballots, impossible to find polling places, voters
turned away because they had the same name as a felon,  and other
intimidations.  Then Wolin says:

Once the polls were
closed, the slanted process began: actual counting and decisions were
supervised by a loyal Republican official whose politico-mathematical
correctness was later rewarded by elevation to a safe seat in  the U.S.
Congress.  Then the high-powered legal talents and public relations
experts took over, fought the case through the Florida Supreme Court,
and appealed to the U.s. Supreme Court.  There a pliant judiciary
hurriedly produced a contorted justification for a manipulated result. 

 And here's the chilling part. 

What
was striking was not so much the highly coordinated attack on the
system of democratic elections by the Bush loyalists as the feebleness of the opposition.

Wolin states bluntly that:

A
healthy democracy would have ignited the opposition party in Congress
to denouce the coup and contest the legitimacy for as long as
necessary.  Throughout the nation there should have been massive
protests, even a general strike and acts of civil disobedience, at the
cynical subversion of elections, the one nonnegotiable supposition of a
democracy.   Instead, an illegitimate president took office amidst
scarcely a ripple of discontent.  The masters of ceremony and the media
ensure that the inauguration was made to sem like all previous ones: 
authority was transferred, continuity preserved, as the
formerpresident, whom for all practical political purposes the
Republicans had earlier destroyed, looked on:  constitutional democracy
is dead; long live the president.

And I might add that
the former vice president looked on silently and remained silent except
to mumble something about this being a nation of laws and something
about having lost fair and square.  But the voters in Broward County
had fought back and protested and screamed their lungs out.  And the
Democratic Black Caucus of Florida stood up and asked for help.
But
the inconvenient truth, the real inconvenient truth is that Gore,
Warren Christopher, and a gaggle of elites let it happen.  "Why?" I ask
over and over.  Coup or cowardess? 

And now, finally, journalists, pundits, lawmakers, other than Greg Palast, are waking up.  Marc Ash again:

We are in a bloody and endless quagmire in Iraq,
the nation's economy is in ruins and the greatest threat to freedom and democracy
comes from our own leaders.

The
change most Americans believe in is getting out of Iraq, putting big
reins on the finance guys, and stopping the gutting of our bill of
rights.  If our 4th amendment rights of privacy are gone, our jobs
diminished, our houses foreclosed or worth nothing,  we all become
prisoners trapped in fear and powerlessness and no amount of guns aka
the 2nd Amendment will change that. 

Marc Ash warns:

For a leader, principle is terra firma (solid earth). Pragmatism places one
foot on a slippery slope. Opportunism is descent. And Machiavelli waits at the
bottom.

          Choose wisely, Mr. Obama.

Why is the happening?  Who is behind this bad decision of Obama's?  Is the answer back in 2000?