Of course!

In reply to this comment by Boise_Lib:
Thanks!

In reply to this comment by brycewi19:
*quality

Thanks!

In reply to this comment by brycewi19:
*quality

Thanks for the promote, dft.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
*promote

Naomi Klein on MSNBC?! They're taking this shit seriously, I saw her on Democracy Now! last week usually she isn't called into big networks to discuss this stuff.

double thank you!
double thank you!

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
Obligatory Naomi Klein *quality & *doublepromote

>> ^Ryjkyj:

NO, seriously. Why is no one on the show refuting this statement? Is there something I don't know? Is this the latest bullshit that we're telling ourselves?


My understanding of the situation is if you take TARP, by itself, not the multi-trillion gift from the FED, and don't account for inflation, then the US government has more cash now than they put in.

It all depends what you mean when you say "the bailout".

We all paid in inflation for the the FED giving money out of thin air before TARP was even proposed, but nobody is even pretending to claim that we go that back, they are just pretending it did not happen.

At the end of the day TARP is a problem because it privileged banks over citizens, not because it cost tax dollars.

Congress could have simply handed $0.25T to Fannie and Freddy instead and told them to buy up all "toxic mortgages" at market rate, and then renegotiated them to keep people in their homes. We could have tippled our money, and gotten the poison off the bank balance sheets, stabilizing the banks, and benefiting the citizenry of the country.

The problem with that plan is that the big fish in the market profit from constructed scarcity, so any scarcity reducing plan like that goes right out the window.

Obligatory Naomi Klein *quality & *doublepromote

I'm on book three of the Song of Ice and Fire series. It's good stuff, even if you aren't a big fantasy fan.

I cleaned out a Borders that was going out of business, so Carthy McCormic (Blood Meridian and others), Dan Ariely (whatever his newest book is) and Chris Hedges (Death of the Liberal Class) are in the queue.

Other notealble read this year were Naomi Klein's brilliant 'Shock Doctrine' and Dan Ariely's fun 'Predictably Irrational'. 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull' was a quick but cool vintage read too.

On the TV front, I also finally got around to watching Eastbound and Down, Tim and Eric's Awesome Show (behind the times, yes, I know) and the Walking Dead. All cool shows.

Got to sleep now, driving home from MT tomorrow morning with isserkitter.

http://www.hacer.org/chile/?p=22

Naomi Klein’s disastrous yet popular polemic against the great free market economist.

In the future, if you tell a student or a journalist that you favor free markets and limited government, there is a risk that they will ask you why you support dictatorships, torture, and corporate welfare. The reason for the confusion will be Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

In a very short time, the book has become a 21st-century bible for anticapitalists. It has also drawn praise from mainstream reviewers: “There are very few books that really help us understand the present,” gushed The Guardian. “The Shock Doctrine is one of those books.” Writing in The New York Times, the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz called it “a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries."

Klein’s basic argument is that economic liberalization is so unpopular that it can only win through deception or coercion. In particular, it relies on crises. During a natural disaster, a war, or a military coup, people are disoriented, confused, and preoccupied with their own immediate survival, allowing regimes to liberalize trade, to privatize, and to reduce public spending with little opposition. According to Klein, “neoliberal” economists have welcomed Hurricane Katrina, the Southeast Asian tsunami, the Iraq war, and the South American military coups of the 1970s as opportunities to introduce radical free market policies. The chief villain in her story is Milton Friedman, the economist who did more than anyone in the 20th century to popularize free market ideas.

To make her case, Klein exaggerates the market reforms in question, often ignoring central events and rewriting chronologies. She confuses libertarianism with the quite different concepts of corporatism and neoconservatism. And she subjects Milton Friedman to one of the most malevolent distortions of a thinker’s ideas in recent history.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703411304575093572032665414.html

What Chile did have was intellectual capital, thanks to an exchange program between its Catholic University and the economics department of the University of Chicago, then Friedman's academic home. Even before the 1973 coup, several of Chile's "Chicago Boys" had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on."

In left-wing mythology—notably Naomi Klein's tedious 2007 screed "The Shock Doctrine"—the Chicago Boys weren't just strange bedfellows to Pinochet's dictatorship. They were complicit in its crimes. "If the pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?" wrote New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis in October 1975. In fact, Pinochet had been mostly indifferent to the Chicago Boys' advice until the continuing economic crisis forced him to look for some policy alternatives. In March 1975, he had a 45-minute meeting with Friedman and asked him to write a letter proposing some remedies. Friedman responded a month later with an eight-point proposal that largely mirrored the themes of the Chicago Boys.

For his trouble, Friedman would spend the rest of his life being defamed as an accomplice to evil: at his Nobel Prize ceremony the following year, he was met by protests and hecklers. Friedman himself couldn't decide whether to be amused or annoyed by the obloquies; he later wryly noted that he had given communist dictatorships the same advice he gave Pinochet, without raising leftist hackles.

As for Chile, Pinochet appointed a succession of Chicago Boys to senior economic posts. By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet's democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America's richest people. They have the continent's lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.

Also, this is a great opportunity to mention Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine

The New Road to Serfdom
Christopher Hayes, In These Times, November 9, 2007

In the early ’80s, as Margaret Thatcher attempted to hack away at England’s substantial public sector, she found a frustrating degree of public resistance. The closer she got to the bone, the more the patient wriggled and withdrew. Thatcher doggedly persisted, yet her pace wasn’t fast enough for right-wing Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, her idol and ideological mentor. You see, in 1981, Hayek had traveled to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, where, under the barbed restraints of dictatorship and with the guidance of University of Chicago-trained economists, Pinochet had gouged out nearly every vestige of the public sector, privatizing everything from utilities to the Chilean state pension program. Hayek returned gushing, and wrote Thatcher, urging her to follow Chile’s aggressive model more faithfully.

In her reply, Thatcher explained tersely that “in Britain, with our democratic institutions and the need for a higher degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times, the process may seem painfully slow.”

The Hayek/Thatcher exchange is one of many revealing historical nuggets unearthed in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein’s ambitious history of neoliberalism. Hayek isn’t the star of The Shock Doctrine—that dubious honor goes to his protegé and fellow Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman. But Klein’s totemic, capacious and brilliant alternate history of the last three decades of global political economy can best be understood as a latter-day response to Hayek’s classic right-wing manifesto, The Road to Serfdom.

More of this review here: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/reviews/new-road-serfdom

>> ^blankfist:

But then again usually the statist idiot comment is on a video that has something to do with a failure of the statist system, so #2 is certainly not broken.

Not really. Usually you break it out for when some individual who works for the state does something against the law for him to do. There are always going to be people who break the law, or choose to to immoral things.

It might be appropriate if it was a video about someone doing something bad, then getting a slap on the wrist for it (which would actually be the system failing). But you don't like those videos, because the anger it inspires makes people want to make the system better, and that just doesn't serve your agenda. You like it better if you can take advantage of people's shock and horror over abuse of power to ram your "free market" doctrine down people's throats.

(And yes, that's a plug for Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which is available now on Amazon for $19.95 + S/H and applicable taxes, order now and you'll be able to get No Logo: 10th Anniversary Edition at half price!)

Your video, Naomi Klein on the Market Takeover of Government Functions, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Sorry brother, that's how it comes off. As for Friedman, you should check out Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine". There is a very dark side to your market fundamentalism that you are either not aware of or in denial of. Most of the post WW2 and Cold War American military conflicts have been in the name of market capitalism. You always change the subject when I bring up Freidman's thugery. Perhaps it's time for you to do some research on the history of your belief system.

(Chomsky writes about it too, since you've recently become a fan.)

Of course they believe it is "good" -- but why do they continue to believe it is "good" when the evidence mounts that it isn't???

I'll have to read that book. I like Naomi Klein.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
Have you read Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'? I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, but it explains how Milton Freidman's persuasive rhetoric was able to sell plutocracy/corporatism to susceptible segments of the public as an issue of morality/liberty/personal freedom. It's not that they are bowing down, they believe they are doing good.

In reply to this comment by bareboards2:
I had a feeling you might like this.

I am trying to get my uber Republican father, who thinks it is okay to tax pensions and wages at much higher rates than on capital income, to listen to it.

Why rank and file Republicans are so quick to bow down to capital and the rich astounds me.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
Great commentary. *promote