Their canon, Our canon

Completely brilliant article today in the NY Times on what radical conservatives are reading these days -- and how these writings are showing up in the speeches and plans of Republican candidates and office holders.  I highly encourage you to read the whole article, Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts by Kate Zernike.  So what are crazy Republicans reading these days?

"The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich Hayek (1944)
"The Law" by Frédéric Bastiat (1850)
"The 5000 Year Leap" by W. Cleon Skousen (1981) 

Like the bible of modern conservatism, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, these books are basically conservative porn made up of fantasies about a return to the 19th century when white men still ruled the planet and everyone else took orders from them.

But the article got me thinking about what a progressive canon might be and what foundational texts should inform our movement.  And it was harder to come up with a list of foundational books than I imagined.  I've come up with a few (none by economists by the way) but I'd welcome any additional suggestions from you in the comments below. 

I think every good progressive should read:

The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen
A People's History of the United States by  Howard Zinn
No Logo by Naomi Klein
Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

But what's interesting about each of these books (and this is a self criticism more than anything else) is that they are all long on what is wrong with conservatives but short on what we would do if we were actually in power.  Derrick Jensen has the most brilliant analysis of modern culture that I've ever read but his remedy is for us to return to being hunter gatherers (which is a nonstarter for most people).  Howard Zinn would have us kill fewer people in wars of aggression (always a good idea) but as far as I know, he doesn't necessarily provide a comprehensive political program for how one might achieve a world at peace.  And Naomi Klein (in Shock Doctrine) provides a robust defense of Keynesianism, which is great, but I gotta figure that ultimately progressives should be fighting for more than just a return to Keynes. So anyway, if you have a chance please list what books you think should inform the progressive canon in the comments below (no sign in required -- but haters, as always will be deleted). 

Naomi Klein on the Wall Street Bailout

Naomi Klein was on the Rachel Maddow show tonight talking about the current Wall Street bailout and all of the problems therein.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

As always -- Klein captures the problem exactly -- the Obama administration wants to be Keynesian when it comes to the stimulus package -- which is great -- while also continuing crony capitalism for Wall Street -- which is disastrous.

Naomi Klein on China and the Olympics

Naomi Klein continues to be one of the great public intellectuals of our time (hat tip to Firedoglake for the link):



Part 2. "China new disaster capitalism trough."

Part 3. "China security tech supplied by U.S. companies."

Part 4. "China's authoritarian capitalism a global trend?"

Hot Power Couples

Win Butler and Regine Chassagne: married and play together in Arcade Fire. How hot must it be to go out and rock a crowd of 20,000 people together? (Facebook users will have to click through to see images.)

















Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis: She's a journalist and author. He's a documentary filmmaker. And sometimes they collaborate on each other's projects. Totally freakin hot.

'Milton Friedman wants you to be his bitch'

When the Hubble Space Telescope was first launched there was a flaw in the big mirror in the telescope and so for a few years all the photos came back blurry. So NASA sent a repair mission and they corrected the mirror and suddenly the pictures came back crystal clear.

That's how I felt reading Naomi Klein's new book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. For decades the mainstream media (and academia too) have presented us with a blurry picture about what is happening in the world. I'll give you an example: in 1973 Augusto Pinochet, with backing from the CIA, launched a military coup in Chile. Next thing you know Milton Friedman flew down to meet with Pinochet and Chile implemented a massive privatization plan. The New York Times, Washington Post and other traditional media reported on these two events (bloody coup and new economic program) as if they were unrelated events--as if we were all just supposed to scratch our heads and say, 'oh what a coinkydink.'

Naomi Klein's book fixes the flawed mirror presented by corporatist media and presents a picture that is crystal clear. Her argument goes something like this:

In the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, United States economic policy was guided by the theories of John Maynard Keynes (as implemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt). Keynes believed in a mixed economy--namely that some form of regulation and public services were required to mitigate the adverse effects of capitalism. Keynesianism led to the creation of the American middle class, the end of the Great Depression, victory in World War II, the GI bill, the Marshall Plan (that rebuilt Europe after the war), and the largest sustained economic expansion in history.

But in the 1950s, Milton Friedman, building on the theories of Adam Smith, became influential in the economics department at the University of Chicago. Friedman and his followers distrusted Keynesianism and advocated a new form of laissez-faire capitalism with no government regulation, no environmental regulation, privatization of all government services (including social security), and unfettered free trade (no protection for domestic industries).

The Ford Foundation and the CIA were so enamored of Friedman's theories that they started a program to bring leading economists from Latin America to study with Friedman at the University of Chicago. At one point 1/3 of all the students in the University of Chicago economics department were there as a result of this program.

The problem was, Friedman's economic theories were (and are) incredibly unpopular. Any time democratic societies got a say in whether or not they wanted to implement Friedman style privatization programs, they invariably voted them down (because, in general, people don't like losing their jobs and starving to death in the name of some macroeconomic theory).

That would ordinarily be the end of the story--bad theory, unpopular, consistently voted down in democratic societies, the end.

But unfortunately, that's not the way the world (or the U.S. government) works. Instead, the CIA figured out that Friedman's economic program could be implemented, under the cover of darkness, if a shock to the system could be introduce first. So in 1973 the CIA backed a coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. As everyone from union leaders to folk singers were being tortured and executed in the former soccer stadium, Pinochet and his University of Chicago-trained economic advisers, implemented Friedman's economic theories in Chile. Similar shocks followed in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Uruguay.

Then the CIA figured out that it wasn't just military coups that could apply the literal and figurative shocks to a country--hyperinflation, natural disasters (hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes), and foreign debt would also do. Furthermore, the Internal Monetary Fund and the World Bank were used to implement these shocks--by tying any loans to the requirement that governments privatize their industries and completely open their borders to multinational corporations. So over the next several decades Milton Friedman-designed economic programs were implemented (without democratic consent) in Poland, South Africa, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, and New Orleans. The architects of the Iraq War (Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bremer) were all followers of Milton Friedman. (I imagine Bush would have been too if he had ever opened a book or gone to class.)

For some time now, I've been curious to figure out what the relationship is between violence and wealth. Apparently, Naomi Klein was curious about that too. She writes,

"Is neoliberalism [aka Milton Friedman University of Chicago style economics] an inherently violent ideology, and is there something about its goals that demands this cycle of brutal political cleansing, followed by human rights cleanup operations?" (p. 126)

Klein's 466-page, meticulously-researched answer is, YES IT IS.

A couple other things become clear to me as a result of reading Shock Doctrine:

1.) There is no such thing as "U.S. foreign policy" or the "U.S. military." Rather, U.S. foreign policy is designed and written by multinational corporations and the U.S. military is just a private army working at the behest of multinational corporations. Furthermore, the CIA is simply a private paramilitary army/death squad working at the behest of multinational corporations.

2.) In many ways, progressives of the world have been focused on the wrong enemy for 50 years. We've focused on racism and war and the environment. But these are all products of bad economics. It all starts and ends with the economics. Fix the economic system, and lots of the other problems start to dissolve too. For Klein, a simple return to Keynesian economics would probably bring stability, democracy, and the revitalization of the middle class.

I'll leave you with another couple quotes from the book:

"Despite the mystique that surrounds it, and the understandable impulse to treat it as aberrant behavior beyond politics, torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious. A tool of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability whenever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks the consent needed to rule: Marcos in the Philippines, the shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, the French in Algeria, the Israelis in the occupied territories, the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. The list could stretch on and on. The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain 'indicator species' of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections." (p. 125)

"Everywhere the Chicago School crusade has triumphed, it has created a permanent underclass of between 25 and 60 percent of the population. It is always a form of war." (p. 405)

Shock Doctrine is a revelation.

You can see a short film by Alfonso Cuaron about Shock Doctrine (here).