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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