Naomi Klein's (Jan. 28) column: Why the Right loves a disaster

I remember the 1990's like it was yesterday. There was a sense of hopefulness to it all. I found a job with a small startup company in Ottawa in the mid 90's, and there were contracts with Nortel as far as the eye could see. They searched high and low for new people, and some came from as far away as India, Turkey, Russia and China. We flew west to meet heads of the mother company in Mountain View, and they said they wanted to see us Canadians on a regular basis. We were made to feel like family, and that we were going to be working hard and making lots of money for the company and shareholders, which included ourselves. Newspaper and magazine articles declared those times to be capitalism's swan song. Everyone would be an E-trader or Ameritrader. The capitalist business cycle would disappear with the new prosperity. U.S. soldiers were doing body frisks at O'Hare after 9-11. And well, then the bubble burst.

I'm not sure what comes next. I think the new populism Naomi talks about could come in the form of a revival for FDR-like solutions. I think it might not come right away in the U.S. and overflow into Canadian politics. Some babblers here have expressed something similar to what American James Petras suggests, that whatever stock market losses there are will be borne by the taxpayers and workers as usual. And I think, like some, that the time for offloading the costs of disaster capitalism is coming to a head. Workers have absorbed losses since deregulation experiments gone awry since the 1980's. Something's got to give, and it could very well result in capitalism's unintended [i]swan song[/i].

someone gave me the Shock(tm) book, and it's official:
she's the Thomas Friedman of the Left, with her endless repetitions of a sketchy trademark thesis, and then shoehorning every available fact of recent history into it, while downplaying any counterfacts;

reads like a semi-finished Master's thesis rewritten for The Nation book club

well, the Klein book is middling, and I finally pushed my way through it, but congratulate her on a lot of initiative and work;

but, for example: did the British voters know what they were getting in Thatcher in 1979?
--Yes: no shocks were needed to start large-scale privatizations and confrontations with miners, which were rewarded in the 1980s by her party being re-elected and re-elected and re-elected ...

re Friedman:
I think that standard is not too demeaning, the "shock" notion that Klein repeats endlessly recalls Friedman and his "world is flat" cliche;

(read Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree: a quite interesting and thoughtful account of how globalization BOTH integrates everything from everywhere (ie building a Lexus) and allows the local local local (ie small cultures) to hold on more tenaciously than ever (which was actually an insight first enunciated by our McLuhan 30-40 years ago ))

the point is:
the Klein book is OK, for me the thesis is pretty weak and does not hold all the elements together,
and as a book it clearly ranks in a journalism category, well below the scholarly Chomsky / Fukuyama / Huntington level of theorizing about globalization and its effects

[ 17 February 2008: Message edited by: Geneva ]

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but, for example: did the British voters know what they were getting in Thatcher in 1979?
--Yes: no shocks were needed to start large-scale privatizations and confrontations with miners, which were rewarded in the 1980s by her party being re-elected and re-elected and re-elected ...

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Nobody knew what to expect from maggot scratcher, they were used to the realively benign toryism of Ted Heath, who was consequently more left than anyone who has succeeded thatcher. In her first term thatcher did not introduce her most radical policies, the policies she did initiate led to economic downturn and massive unemployment. Half way through her term thatcher was exceedingly unpopular and would have likely gone down to defeat up until the Falklands war. Nothing like a wild patriotism, neo-colonial dreams and rule britania gingoism to boost her electoral prospects. The falklands crisis could have easily been resolved diplomatically but thatcher knew the military action would lead to electoral success and she won 1983 as a result. The tories renewed there tactics with a little cold war fear mongering and hysteria concerning labours nuclear arms policy to win in 1987, the public infighting in labour certainly helped. The tories have always been successful in manufacturing crisis for electoral success, even so thatcher never had over 44% of the popular vote.

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(read Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree: a quite interesting and thoughtful account of how globalization BOTH integrates everything from everywhere (ie building a Lexus) and allows the local local local (ie small cultures) to hold on more tenaciously than ever

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So Global Capitalism integrates everything you mean like health care, and employee rights to organize and access to education, environmental protection and clean water healthy communities, or are you saying that global capitalism increases corporate rapaciousnes that clearly benefits a tiny minority of the population of this planet? The only olive trees that are allowed to grow are those that are utilized for export markets while local people starve, any other olive trees are bulldozed over to build sweatshops for exporting cheap goods to fill the shelves of walmarts. Friedman's tedious meanderings are nothing more than freemarket triumphalism and propaganda devoid of any genuine incite or the slightest reflection on the experience of the global majority.

You think Fukuyama has academic credibility I've seen more intelligent ideas in primary school social studies essays than the thesis of the end of history.

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What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

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In his more recent work he argues that the wonders of liberal democracy are in danger of being undone by biotechnology that will lead to unprecidented inequality as though we don't have that now. Is he for real? is this science fiction? Someone should take away his crayons before he hurts himself.

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[b]Nobody knew what to expect from maggot scratcher, they were used to the realively benign toryism of Ted Heath, who was consequently more left than anyone who has succeeded thatcher. In her first term thatcher did not introduce her most radical policies, the policies she did initiate led to economic downturn and massive unemployment. Half way through her term thatcher was exceedingly unpopular and would have likely gone down to defeat up until the Falklands war. [/b]

au contraire: nobody confused her with Heath;
for example, as a student in Paris in the mid-1970s I met an Oxford student who explained to me in great detail the actions of the notorious Tory education critic, "Thatcher the Milk Snatcher", who had urged cutting milk from school lunches as a cost-saver;

so when she campaigned and then came to power in 1979 -- remember: in a pitched battle with the miners over the future of the country --, everyone in the UK knew a hard Right turn was coming. Everybody. No secrets there.

Not surprisingly, I checked the index of the Shock Doctrine and neither the names Scargill nor Callaghan was mentioned, as if the 1979 campaign never happened.
No need to wait until 1982 for a shock (Remember Norman Tebbitt?), although the Falklands rout may have emboldened her. And yes, Thatcher had very low poll numbers, but so did Reagan in 1981-1982, yet he recovered for a landslide re-election, and not because of Grenada's fate, that is for sure.

once again:
Klein is shoehorning cases that do not fit her thesis. Chile, very interesting thesis; but UK, wrong, does not fit. MT had a mandate to turn hard Right from 1979 onwards, and her laws on "flying strikers", closed shop, union ballots, State cost-cutting, and emergent plans for denationalizations all were launched on here election in 1979.

[ 21 February 2008: Message edited by: Geneva ]

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Democracy is the right's most hated institution.

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Still, creating democracy is the pretext used by Western powers to define target nations "failed states" and invade them in the name of democracy, fund puppet parties and governments, etc. Democracy has long become the ideological alibi of imperialist attacks.

I believe that deregulation disasters around the world, and even here in Ontario, have worked to discredit the ideology since the 1980's. Thatcher was able to blame 18% inflation on Labour's excesses and deficit spending when, in fact, it was the domino effect of world oil shocks and printing money to fund an immoral war in VietNam. The issue wasn't public ownership in Britain as Tony Benn pointed out, it was a lack of investment in infrastructure as was the case in the Soviet Union with aspiring state capitalists with their eyes on the prize: billions of dollars worth of publicly-owned assets. Yeltsin, Chubais, Gaidar, state bureaucrats didn't take much convincing by Houston oil magnates and Harvard economists.

And Thatcher's Friedmanite money policies worked to drive away foreign investment as high unemployment was becoming a permanent feature of the economy. The US Federal Reserve abandoned tight money policy about four years before the Bank of England did.

And they're doing similar in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan today. If the U.S. does experience prolonged recession, the poorest Americans will fair worse than the poorest in Europe and even Asia as a result. The political will be as popular as their ability to steal and rig elections, not in third world countries as was the case during the cold war era, but right here at home even with our obsolete electoral systems in North America favouring phony-majority dictatorship. This is the last bastion of political conservatism in the western world, and the very thing which they've purported to be spreading around the world and their own extreme right-wing ideology have never been more at odds and conflicting interests.

[ 21 February 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]

OK, in 1979 there was no MINERS strike, but strikes galore of every other kind in the famous "winter of discontent" that killed Labour and brought the Iron Lady to power:
and to repeat the obvious: Everybody knew she was tough as nails and anti-union to the core, and a hard Right turn was coming. Everyone:
[url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3067563.stm]http://news.bbc.co.uk...

[i] ...in 1978 Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan made the political miscalculation that would put his party out of office for a generation. Rather than hold an election later that year, he decided to soldier on to the following spring.

Thanks to the delay, his government ran into the now legendary "winter of discontent". It ran through the first three months of 1979; its effects lasted far longer.

Public sector workers were out on strike for weeks. Uncollected mountains of rubbish piled high in the cities, Green Goddesses were on the streets, and bodies remained unburied. The latter happened in one city, Liverpool, but became an emblem of the chaos inflicted on the public by the unions.

Stage set for Thatcher

It was disastrous for the government. Labour had always been able to present its close relations with the unions as an asset that allowed it to deal with them effectively; that relationship had now become a liability.

At the May 1979 election Mrs Thatcher squeaked into Downing Street with a 30-seat majority.[/i]

[ 22 February 2008: Message edited by: Geneva ]

Maggie's conservatives received 31% of eligible vote at the height of Tory popularity in 1983. She bought coal from communist Poland and pauperized a nation with Friedmanite monetarism. I think Naomi is correct about a certain large minority of Britons were sucked into believing the "property-owning democracy" pack of lies emanating from the Tory Party at the time. She was most popular when waging war on the Falklands. She put the muscle on a country experiencing financial hardship in paying debts to world banksters.

[url=http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/man/con79.htm]1979 Conservative manifesto.[/url]

eta - The first lines of the forward, written by Thatcher:

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FOR ME, THE HEART OF POLITICS is not political theory, it is people and how they want to live their lives.

No one who has lived in this country during the last five years can fail to be aware of how the balance of our society has been increasingly tilted in favour of the State at the expense of individual freedom.

This election may be the last chance we have to reverse that process, to restore the balance of power in favour of the people. It is therefore the most crucial election since the war.

Together with the threat to freedom there has been a feeling of helplessness, that we are a once great nation that has somehow fallen behind and that it is too late now to turn things round.

I don't accept that. 1 believe we not only can, we must. This manifesto points the way.

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[ 22 February 2008: Message edited by: Stephen Gordon ]

No, I thought your point was a fair one: the real test would be what Thatcher was actually saying in 1979, not our almost-30-year-old recollections. So I went digging in Wikipedia.

The 1979 manifesto is definitely a break from the past; check out the [url=http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/man/con74oct.htm]October 1974 manifesto.[/url]

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No, I thought your point was a fair one:

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I'm not sure we're allowed to agree [img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img]

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Privatisation was a theme of the 1983 campaign, and it mainly happened in the second mandate. The sale of British Telecom took place in 1984.

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That is fully in line with the point I was making that the more radical components of thathcerism came later, after 1983 an election that was called at the height of Falklands war victory party.

I'm not arguing that the thatcherites didn't have a clear agenda in their own minds, I am saying that they did not make it clear to the general public. It is again with hind site we can see the continuum as sequitorial. The general point that Klein was making is that the neo-liberal agenda clearly explicated has never been a source of broad electoral support.

NeoLiberalism is 18th-19th century economic Liberalism made new again and defined by: piracy, warfiteering, plundering the environment and labour to benefit trading companies or modern day multinational corporations.

Are there alternatives? Absolutely, and the most empowering alternatives include full democratization of the global political and economic system, or in other words, socialism. There are thousands of alternatives.

Even in '83, more Britons who did vote voted [i]against[/i] the Tories than voted for them or anything they promised or did not promise to do.

Similarly, a larger majority of Canadians who did vote voted [i]against[/i] Brian Mulroney's big blue baloney machine in 1988 than voted for them. The result was FTA a year later.

And just as frustrating for Canadian voters in 1993 was that the majority of us voted [i]for[/i] Chretien's Liberals and NDP, because the Liberals made themselves out to be the most virulently anti-Mulroney, anti-FTA and anti-GST political force. The result was NAFTA in 1994. Needless to say, Canadian voter turnouts declined in the decade of the 90's.

NeoLiberalism in North America and UK was all about forcing through deregulation and privatization in the absence of democracy.

[ 22 February 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]