Part One: Deja Voo Doo is Doo Doo (crossposted at montanamaven.com)
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".
I've been reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, as I mentioned the other day. It's the most horrifying book I've ever read and I'm not even done with it yet. But essentially, the point is that economists of the Milton Friedman school working hand in hand with the US State Department have been engaged in what Klein describes as extraordinarily violent armed robberies all over the globe since the 1970s. From early on, their economic programs have been referred to as aiming for shock and awe.
For all that it happens on paper and in banking transactions, economic shock and awe isn't that different from the kind Bush perpetrated against Iraq in the early days of the invasion. And it's exactly what the Coalition Provisional Authority enacted once they got hold of that country's accounts and law books.
(1) There can be no war on terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, or at most a strategy of assymetric warfare. A "war on terrorism" makes as much sense as a "war on sneak attacks" or a "war on blitzkriegs."
(2) There can be no war on terror. War is terror.
Thus, it is obvious, from a moment's reflection, that the dominant political narrative of the past six years is-and has to be-a lie.
Al Qaeda was a specific organization that attacked us on 9/11. As a non-state actor, there could be no war on al Qaeda, either. We could, however, obliterate them from the face of the earth-either the smart way or the dumb way-if we had any interest in doing so. We did not.
Since I began front-paging last weekend, I've been working off of an underlying theme-that opposition to the Iraq War-however important-is not the key to a genuine realignment, but only one part of the puzzle. I wrote several diaries about the importance of economics, and this is, in a way, yet another one of them, because it's about empire and neo-feudalism. But it moves the two subjects substantially closer together.
The thesis here is simple: We are not fighting to defeat terror(ism), but to spread it. We just want 100% market share, that's all. And until the Democrats are willing to stand up and say this, in no uncertain terms, our realignment will not be complete. So if you think stabbing MoveOn in the back was bad, we have much, much farther to go than just putting that shit to rest.
Impossible as this may seem, there is a precedent for it-the abolition of slavery. Although the Republican Party originally emerged in opposition to the political power of slave states, it was not clearly committed to abolition when Lincoln won the presidency in 1860. And yet, five years later, when the Civil War ended, so, too, did slavery. Many things came together to make that transformation possible, but the key dynamic, without which all else would have failed, was that the forces of slavery were put on the defensive, and ultimately discredited themselves, even in the eyes of a white northern power structure that was still deeply stained by its own racist assumptions. And this is the key for us as well-we must place the forces we face on the defensive, and do so so decisively that they, too, ultimately discredited themselves, even in the eyes of those in high places who share certainly deeply-held prejudices in common with them.
I take as my text a recent story on Alternate that updates a story that Project Censored selected as the #1 censored story for 2002-2003-a story for which I was one of five people who wrote about it.
Love it or hate it, MoveOn's BetrayUs ad caught people's attention. It took a stand. It said something deeply contradictory to the conventional wisdom. Powerful reversals of conventional wisdom are absolutely vital for brining about a political realignment.
Here's another powerful example-a short film (just under 7 minutes) summarizing the argument in Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, Klein argues that "free market" ideology is so wildly unpopular that it has only been possible to impose it by force, when the political will to resist is disabled by shock. She draws a direct parallel to the development of shock treatment, and its exploration by the CIA as a tool for brainwashing and reprogramming.
The Shock Doctrine Short Film
A Film by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein, directed by Jonás Cuarón.
[Yes, Virginia, I've been asked to frontpage on the weekends.]
While I dared to dream of a Democratic landslide last year a little earlier than most, I started talking about about realignment just the month before the election. I wrote a post, "What A Dem Landslide Could Mean," in which I argued that political realignments happen when one party wins two consecutive wave elections in the House, It always starts in the House, though the timing of the Presidential election that gets all the glory can vary. In 1896, in fact, the Republicans actually lost a fair number of seats-but nothing compared to what they'd gained in 1892 and 1894.
Yesterday, there were two posts here that touched on the issue of realignment, which made me think it was time to write about it again. Then Chris invited me to start front-paging on weekends, so the opportunity seemed perfect-even if one of the posts was by Chris, and I probably disagree with it more than anything he's posted in months. But that's fine, because Chris's post is clearly part of a thinking-through process, and what I have to contribute here is part of that same process.
The first post is Chris's "It Is Either Iraq Blurring Strategy Or Iraq Realignment" and the second is David Sirota's "1994 Redux: The Consequences of Dems' New NAFTA". While I agree with a lot of the points made in both posts, I think that both contain some errors in perceiving the nature of realignment, what it takes to acheive, and what the possibilities for it are. This post will open up that discussion, and I'll continue it in a couple of follow-up diaries this weekend.
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