Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Come on, man.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

When I was faster i was always behind.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Bark louder, little dog.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

All hail the time of the bunny!

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / The shock will probably kill you

The shock will probably kill you

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How this brother keeps a Murdoch gig (via Wonkette) I’ll never know, but I need to read Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”.

The GOP is anti-democracy: With the GOP, “this whole democracy thing” is “very inefficient,” warned Klein. Republican governors are using “a fiscal crisis as a pretext to do stuff they otherwise want to do … Republicans in Michigan want to be able to unilaterally abolish your town. And how do you know when you’re in a financial emergency? Because the governor tells you … or a company he hires.”

Yes the GOP, the party of big business and billionaires, secretly hates democracy, it’s too inefficient for the rich class.

In the interview, Klein reiterated: The GOP governors’ strategy is a clear example of “disaster capitalism,” the Reaganomics war strategy that has dominated, obsessed and driven the GOP for a generation. Klein warns, “these guys have been at this for 30 years,” it is “an ideological movement … they believe in a whole bunch of stuff that’s not very popular,” like “privatizing the local water system, busting unions, privatizing entire towns. If they said all this in an election they’d lose.”

And that’s why crises are so crucial to the GOP war strategies to take over America: Crises “are very, very handy, because you can say we have no choice. … the sky is falling in.” Then the GOP governors “can consolidate power. We remember this from the Bush administration. They did this at the federal level. After 9/11, they said, we have a crisis, and we have to essentially rule by fiat.”

Reader Interactions

71Comments

  2. 2.

    General Stuck

    Republican governors are using “a fiscal crisis as a pretext to do stuff they otherwise want to do …

    Really? get outa here. No shit?

    I think they let the capitalist devil out of it’s cell, when the cas ino opened with repealing the last remnants of Great Depression bulwarks against concentrated greed and wealth in the money class, and at the same time made it legal to gamble in exotic ways with other peoples money. It whetted the appetites of the Oligarchs and their minion apostates from fiscal hell, and it will be hard to put that Genie back in the bottle, especially now with Citizens United.

    I plan to put all my nickels on pitchfork and lantern futures and ride it out in my bunker, then emerge a wealthy magnate of something. I just hope our Spaceport America here in the land of Roswell and little green men, is up and running, and I can afford a ticket.

  3. 3.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    And if that ratbastard Kain had once said he was a freemarket evangelist that favored freemarket education reform you guys would have kicked his ass up between his ears.
    So fucking what?
    its like Cole said.
    Bury your uterus at Waco or bury your heart at Wounded Knee it doesnt make a damn bit of diffwerence.

  4. 4.

    kestral

    Just finished watching Inside Job, and that combined with this is making me want to hit myself in the head with a ballpeen hammer so I won’t care about this any more. Christ.

    The sheer scope of this is… is mind-boggling. It must be what “staring into the abyss” feels like.

  6. 6.

    Lolis

    Well the good news is that people are having a negative reaction to pretty much all the GOP governors in the purple/blue states. The newest GOP guv to take a nosedive is Brian Sandoval.

  9. 9.

    Elia

    Maybe I should just read the damned book at this point. Because what’s going on in the midwest certainly fits it to a T (I know the theory but havent read the book).

    I never bothered because of this rather scathing review: http://www.tnr.com/article/books/dead-left

    Doug, I know you, too, like Chait (despite the banner flying above his copy), so you might as well look that over.

    She responded here, though: http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/09/response-attacks

    I haven’t read her response yet, will do so now.

  10. 10.

    Roger Moore

    @Lolis:
    That’s great, but let’s see if it actually affects the way they vote in the next election. It doesn’t mean squat that they’re pissed at their Rethug governor unless they make the connection that they need to vote for the other guys the next time around.

  11. 11.

    Punchy

    We remember this from the Bush administration. They did this at the federal level. After 9/11, they said, we have a crisis, and we have to essentially rule by fiat.”

    And the Lord thus brought us Wisconsin.

  12. 12.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    @Omnes Omnibus: who said this?

    My philosophy is pretty simple: nobody knows how to teach better than a teacher does.
    __
    I am not saying here that nobody should ever criticize teachers or that there isn’t a discussion to be had about good ways to teach or how to better identify bad teachers.

  15. 15.

    Roger Moore

    @Comrade Luke:
    They say it’s has only 5 bedrooms, so calling it a single family residence isn’t unreasonable. It’s a good bet that each of those “bedrooms” is actually a suite that’s larger than many single family homes, but it sounds as though it’s still designed for a single family.

  17. 17.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    @Omnes Omnibus: jaysus, mary and joseph.

    If they said all this in an election they’d lose.

    If EDK said he was a free marketeer here, you guys would have kicked his ass up between his ears.
    He only says it at the LoOG or at Forbes.
    Its the same thing.

  20. 20.

    MattR

    I don’t know how you did not excerpt this paragraph.

    “But rest assured,” continued Klein in September 2008, Reaganomics “ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done. The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalization for deep cuts to social programs, and for a renewed push to privatize.”

    OTOH – Either the author of that column has misinterpreted Warren Buffett, or I have. He seems to have read Buffett’s comments about the super rich waging class warfare to mean that Buffett supports them waging that war.

  24. 24.

    Mnemosyne

    @Elia:

    One can’t help but wonder if Chait is rethinking that review in light of the events in Wisconsin and Michigan, among other newly GOP-ruled states.

  26. 26.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    @MattR:

    Klein warns, “these guys have been at this for 30 years,” it is “an ideological movement … they believe in a whole bunch of stuff that’s not very popular,” like “privatizing the local water system, busting unions, privatizing entire towns. If they said all this in an election they’d lose.”

    If Kain “came out” as a free marketeer this blog would have rejected him. He is just like the rest of the GOP.
    Privatizing would be unpopular with the voters.
    Free marketeers are unpopular with Balloon Juice. I hope.

    /she said patiently

  28. 28.

    Elia

    @Mnemosyne: Unless he responded to her response, I’m just about ready to say I couldn’t give less of a fuck about what Chait thinks.

    I mean, he comes off as being wildly misleading in his review, by her response.

    And I get pretty bitchy and grudge-holding when I find out I’ve been lied to.

  29. 29.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    @beltane: im the cudlip.
    i thought this stuff mattered.
    it doesn’t.

    pardon me, im going to go practice with my katana.

  30. 30.

    wasabi gasp

    The shock will probably kill you

    Keep on keepin’ the glass half-full and all that, but we’re more valuable as prisoners.

  32. 32.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    @Omnes Omnibus: You hate me because I used my commas too freely, clearly. So much for the methocarbamol making me agreeable. It is making me drowsy. Please keep us in the loop on tomorrow’s goings on before Judge Sumi. I expect her to have harsh words for Huebsch, heh.

  33. 33.

    Caz

    How can you post such garbage and claim to have even the slightest degree of intellectual integrity?? I guess you haven’t explicity claimed to have such integrity, but I would expect you think you do have it, and that posting crap like this supports that integrity. The GOP hates democracy?? Which party was the one that fled the state of Wisconsin rather than engage in the democratic process? Which party started “kinetic military action” in Libya without consulting the people or Congress, and generally acts like a “constitutional” monarch? Which party pushed through a still increasingly unpopular health care law with an unconstitutional personal mandate in it when most Americans didn’t want it, and now want it repealed, without regard to any considerations of the minority party? Which party uses words like “investment” as a code word for “more government spending?” Which party came up with the fancy sounding concept of “quantitative easing 2,” which is basically just printing money and devaluing the dollar, to the detriment of all Americans?

    Sounds to me like the party which doesn’t want a democracy is the Donkey party. When in charge, they simply steamroll over the Constitution and will of the people to accomplish their progressive goals, the ultimate aim of which is to give away the sovereignty of our nation to a global, socialist, centralized government.

    We’re spending $55 million per day in Libya, where no U.S. national interests are affected, and have created this new standard of “responsibility to protect” the people of the world from dictators. I guesss Syria, Ivory Coast, or Iran might be next based on this standard.

    Living the American dream is demonized, profits are made out to be evil theft, and bailouts and entitlements have no end in sight.

    Get a grip on reality, juicetards! You’re supporting the very initiatives that are destroying the very democracy you purport to value. You have everything ass backwards – either as purposeful collaboration with socialists, or via ignorance and brainwashing by the progressives, who I admit are PR genuises.

    Obama is a one term president, so hopefully we can reverse this trend of across-the-board destruction of our country in 2012.

    Troll out!

  34. 34.

    Mark S.

    @Comrade Luke:

    Here’s the best part:

    A spokesman for Milner told the Wall Street Journal that the tycoon has no plans to move into the French-style mansion in Silicon Valley.

    @Elia:

    Screw Chait. The book is worth reading (and it’s quite prophetic). I might read it again since it’s been a couple of years. That would of course necessitate finding it.

  35. 35.

    Arundel

    First-term Gov. Kasich just signed into law the ferociously anti-union bill in Ohio. I wish the HuffPo had called it that, instead of a “Union Bill”. Unlike Wisconsin, it applies to teachers, nurses and many other government workers, including police and firefighters.

    Yes, this is class war, and the Republican assault squads at the state, gubernatorial level are just absolute barbarians.

    So why oh why aren’t the Democrats hammering this home, constantly, on every platform at their disposal? The Republican governors in multiple states are ransacking, burning and pillaging, it is something extraordinary. Like, vast operations that would be comic in their audacity if they weren’t so fucking disastrous.

    In the media, on TV we’ll get Donna Shalala up against 4 Republican heavy-hitters, and she’ll basically agree with whatever they say. Unbelievable.

    Naomi Klein is absolutely correct, and thank God, or FSM for her. This is a stick-up.

  36. 36.

    Comrade Luke

    I’m not even through the opening credits of Inside Job and I want to throw something.

  37. 37.

    MattR

    @Hermione Granger-Weasley: Unfortunately you are too focused on a single tree to see the forest. You found a single bit that allowed you tie this in to Kain and ignored the fact that Klein’s real focus is on the use of crises to advance “secret agendas”.

  38. 38.

    Mark S.

    Jesus, how does this guy keep a job at the WSJ?

    Bloomberg warns: “The Kids Are Not Alright.” Worldwide, youth unemployment is fueling the revolution. In a New York Times column, Matthew Klein, a 24-year-old Council on Foreign Relations researcher, draws a parallel between the 25% unemployment among Egypt’s young revolutionaries and the 21% for young American workers: “The young will bear the brunt of the pain” as governments rebalance budgets. Taxes on workers will be raised and spending on education will be cut while mortgage subsidies and entitlements for the elderly are untouchable,” as will tax cuts for the rich. Opportunities lost. “How much longer until the rest of the rich world” explodes like Egypt?

    Heh indeed.

  39. 39.

    Elia

    I need to stop reading the criticisms of her book.

    Besides Fred Kaplan saying her depiction of the Yeltsin period is ridiculous, none of them so far have seemingly anything to say about her actual arguments but rather are vague ad hominems or, like this charming one from the liberal new york times, aggressive repetitions of capitalist cant:

    What she is most blind to is the necessary role of entrepreneurial capitalism in overcoming the inherent tendency of any established social system to lapse into stagnation, as all too many socialist countries — and some nonsocialist ones, too — have shown. Like it or not, without strong economic growth and its inevitable disruptions , there is little hope for creating the healthy middle classes necessary to sustain democracies, much less an improvement in the lot of the poor and dispossessed Ms. Klein seeks to represent. And yes, that means some people will become rich and powerful.

    This pissed me off so much I got that hot, tight feeling in the back of my head/neck which, not coincidentally, i haven’t experienced since this moment of inside job. There’s also a classic line in that review where Larry Summers is described as Friedman’s “ideological opponent.” WTF is there any way a grown man who writes about economics for the NY Times could write that sentence without just straight-up lying? It’s not possible, is it, that he doesn’t know any better….right?

    Yeah I just need to walk away…just walk away, Elia

  41. 41.

    Martin

    Hey, any chance of getting Naomi Klein on board for a book club? I’ve never read her book either.

  42. 42.

    MikeJ

    @Martin: There’s actually a chance she would show up now and then if our book club coördinator would but ask. But first we have to finish our current book.

    I’d buy a copy of Klein’s book if she popped in now and then. Available as an epub makes it even more likely,

  43. 43.

    Chuck Butcher

    I’ll get excited about this shit when there isn’t a single Repulican legislator outside the Confederacy. It took 2 fucking years for the 08 smash up to be forgiven. Hardly abybody has paid any attention since year one of St Ronnie The Senile and not shit was said until the “middle” class started to get hit, just as long as callouses and sweat were involved it didn’t matter a damn bit. If the economy is half way straightened out (ie upper middle is no longer going broke) it won’t matter again. You can bet your first born on it.

  44. 44.

    West of the Cascades

    @MattR: I think his characterization of Buffett is the only thing that doesn’t ring right about the article, which otherwise is spot-on. I’ve also interpreted Buffett to be fairly consistent in saying that the rich should pay a more fair share than they do and to be simply stating an obvious truth (and being unusually candid for someone who is rich) in acknowledging the existence of a class war and saying that “the rich are winning.”

  45. 45.

    Svensker

    Wouldn’t it be fun if Caz went over to the spelunking in the ladyholes thread? ABL could use his head for…um…something.

  46. 46.

    sfinny

    Late to the conversation, but thank you to Tamara for her Thursday contributions. I’ve tried many and enjoyed them, although a few have been failures, my own fault.

  49. 49.

    KG

    The GOP’s angle here is straight out of The Prince. A crisis has always been a useful tool for those in power to do whatever they wanted.

  50. 50.

    Mark S.

    @Caz:

    brainwashing by the progressives, who I admit are PR genuises

    Ha! You had me going there for a sec, Doug.

  52. 52.

    patrick II

    Back when I read shock doctrine, I thought it was one of the most important book I had ever read. Now, since much of what she predicted would happen has actually happened, it has become clear that she understood earlier on than most of us the dangers and the mechanisms of the corporate takeover that is happening all around us. Years ago I thougt it was good. Now, with the advantage of seein much of what she said turn out I consider her to be one of the prophets of our time. It is too much for most of us to admit to, but corporate war on the people is reality and she called it early.
    Read shock doctrine and see inside job. Then go lay down long enough to recover and gain some strength and begin to live life with the understanding you are facing a relentless ruthless opponent and begin the fight for you country and posterity.

  53. 53.

    Arundel

    Patrick II- yeah, it is total class war happening right now. Full on GOP assault.

    Teachers, cops, nurses, fireman are all public enemy fat-cats now. Is there anyone, anyone in the Democratic party with the balls to loudly denounce how absurd and obscene this demonization of our friends, families and neighbors is?

    It’s gone through in Ohio, and I cannot believe how “GE Paid No US Taxes, Got $3.2 billion Credit” is news this week along with this targeting of public workers, as well as threats of government shutdown, for which Dems are being pre-emptively blamed.

    Where’s their balls, and where is my pitchfork?

  54. 54.

    Yevgraf (fka Michael)

    Interesting other notion – in the past the argument could be made that US corporate profits were making their way back into the US economy via dividends and the taxes on those dividends. That is no longer the case, given the level of diffusion of ownership via foreign sources and tax deferred investment funds. Transnational ownership of stocks in American companies could in fact be the tool needed to wedge that argument away from the anti-corporate taxers.

  55. 55.

    Xenos

    Farrell has been around for ages. I remember him as a voice of sanity back in ’97 and ’98 when the internet stock bubble was underway, underwritten by the same banks and promoted in the same media outlets that gave us the real estate bubble. for Murdoch to can him would invite a bit too much attention, I think. Like Naomi Klein, they think it better to deal with him by ignoring him.

  56. 56.

    bob h

    Crises “are very, very handy, because you can say we have no choice. … the sky is falling in.”

    You can even precipitate them yourself, and in the sick, dysfunctional world of American politics, not even be held responsible for long.

  57. 57.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    @MattR:

    Unfortunately you are too focused on a single tree to see the forest. You found a single bit that allowed you tie this in to Kain and ignored the fact that Klein’s real focus is on the use of crises to advance “secret agendas”.

    meh. O has been known to exploit a crisis or too.
    What I took away is there is no penalty for lying.
    I clipped two sentences from an EDK post where he says completely opposite things in the body of a single post.
    His “secret agenda” is the “glorious innovation of the market”…but he never explicitly says “free market”……here.
    If he tried to argue that here people would righteously spit on him.
    My point is the conservatives/libertarians all do this. The whole fucking forest.

  58. 58.

    kdaug

    @Arundel:

    Is there anyone, anyone in the Democratic party with the balls to loudly denounce how absurd and obscene this demonization of our friends, families and neighbors is?

    Krugman.

  62. 62.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    @Omnes Omnibus: Look…I think there are only two basic kinds of conservative deatheaters. Invertor Dementors, like Breitbart and Rush, and Freemarket Boggarts like Sully and Douthat.
    The Invertors are easy.
    They shout– the left are the real racists! the left are the real warmongers!
    The freemarket boggarts are more subtle. They pretend to share values while hiding their real agenda.
    Unregulated capitalism leads to human flesh for sale in the market and other horrors. Free market solutions are antipathic to social justice solutions.
    It is not that hard.

  64. 64.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    these people are starting to pay a penalty.

    Walker et al aren’t subtle enough. They are too obvious…they overreached.
    Where is Douthat’s penalty?
    Where is Sully’s?

  65. 65.

    Hermione Granger-Weasley

    @Omnes Omnibus: not at all.
    forgive me for lecturing.

    it doesn’t relly matter anyways. You can’t change emotional beliefs with reason.

    At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.
    -Analysis of the Tyrant, the Taraza File, BG Archives

    Enough of them believe in that bukeanhayekianhumian gobbledygook to make their own reality.
    Some of them are clever enough to conceal it from the liberal sapients, some aren’t.
    /shrug

  66. 66.

    Paul in KY

    @Omnes Omnibus: I sort of like the matching of various GOP scumzoids to types of Potterite demonic beings. Goes with her current persona.

    You need an ‘expelarmis’ charm to use against her ;-)

  67. 67.

    lllphd

    go here and here and here for recent interviews w/klein on democracynow.

    (i may have listed them in reverse order; you can do a site search if you prefer.)

    it seems like it was here that i saw someone complain that klein is a terrible interviewee, but good lord, i could not disagree more adamantly. she’s articulate, sincere, and wicked knowledgable. moreover, just a couple days before reading that complaint (may not have been here; wherever), a friend and i were commenting on just how excellent we thought she was, especially the way she would look around to include all the staff in the studio in the conversation. exceptionally personable. and, she’s really on to something.

    the book, by the by, is almost three years old now.

  68. 68.

    Joe Buck

    “The Shock Doctrine” sufficed to cure one of my brothers of his libertarianism. He finally got the real meaning of the politics that he’d been sold.

  69. 69.

    rikryah

    really need to spread the word. Maddow has had her on her show, but she needs to get out there more, because she makes absolute sense.

  70. 70.

    matryoshka

    I read The Shock Doctrine some time ago, then I read Griftopia (Matt Taibbi) and Aftershock (Robert Reich), and several others not immediately available to my RAM. Having done so, the pattern of what is happening is so clear that I can’t unsee it now. Everything fits, and it’s not even a conspiracy.

  71. 71.

    anaboly

    I think, after Nixonland, The Shock Doctrine should be the book that the site reads. I had wanted to read it for a long time – just recently bought it and have been slugging through. It makes you really hate Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys.

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