Shock Doctrine in Wisconsin

I am no longer skeptical.

Nothing's Shocking

The recent economic crisis in the U.S. has Naomi Klein doing a victory lap with her Shock Doctrine thesis. There's a nice long article in the New Yorker on Klein, her husband Avi Lewis, and their families. It's a good read and provides some interesting context to the development of Klein's ideas and attitudes. She's the 30s era revolutionary and anti-capitalist with the Gen-X sense of irony, skepticism, and hostility toward dirty hippies.

I'm down with the revolution and all, but I can't help wonder what sort of rarified sense of despair it takes for folks on the left to have a discussion like this about the election of Barack Obama:

“I’ve been at rallies and seen him speak, and I feel that feeling that one feels,” Lewis says. “It is thrilling. And it’s churlish not to allow yourself to be thrilled. We crave inspiration, and it’s a bleak life to always be dissecting things. But the main feeling that Obama creates in me is fear, because I see people fooling themselves. If you actually look at his policies, what they reflect is the triumph of the right-wing political paradigm since Reagan, and I think he could set things back dramatically, because for young people who are getting engaged in politics for the first time, for them to be disillusioned is very, very damaging.” Because Klein doesn’t expect much from any politician, she doesn’t spend time wishing Obama were more progressive. “I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike’s,’ ” she says. “The ‘Yes We Can’ slogan means whatever you want it to mean. It’s very ‘Just Do It.’ When you hear it, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We’re gonna end torture and shut down Guantánamo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait a minute, is he really saying that? He’s not really saying that, is he? He’s saying we’re going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He’s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the back rooms he’s making deals and signing on to the status quo. But if people don’t like where Obama is they should move the center.” To this end, Klein has been taking every opportunity to call for the nationalization of the oil companies. “It’s the job of the left to move the center,” she says. “Get out there and say some crazy stuff! And then, suddenly, it’ll seem more reasonable for politicians to take riskier positions.”

With a critique as superificial and cynical as that, she might as well work for Fox News. It's the same old worn out Chomsky, Nader line of left-wing dead end thought that argues that all politicians are the same, that you can't work within the system to reform it, while ignoring the transformational aspects of Obama's campaign and proposals. It's disappointing but not all that shocking.

Summer of the Shock

Naomi Klein does a nice job of defending The Shock Doctrine in the A.V. Club. She seems to be backing off from the idea that there is an evil THEY in control of everything, and works much harder to emphasize that powerful people are much more opportunistic in their exploitation of the little people, and that it is a sales pitch rather than a totalitarian power grab. There's no grand conspiracy just death by a thousand manipulations. Moreover, she acknowledges that sometimes it works and sometimes the people fight back.

Here's a good example:

AVC:
Arguably, we're currently experiencing a few crises—a housing crisis, an
energy crisis, a climate crisis. Are any of these being exploited in a way that fits your model?

NK: Yeah, I think with offshore oil drilling and opening up ANWAR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge], it's a pretty classic example of this deliberate strategy. It's almost like McCain has a moral responsibility now to sell these policies that would be unsellable with oil at 40 dollars a barrel, just because he can. The fact that opening up ANWAR or offshore oil drilling will have no impact on the price of oil is completely
beside the point. The point is you can sell it now and you couldn't sell it
then so you should sell it now.

The attempts by the oil companies (and the politicians that work for them) to exploit the oil crisis have been a pretty obvious political gambit. But, it still remains to be seen how far it will go because we've already seen the benefit of people driving less and switching to more fuel efficient vehicles. Conservation is working. Emphasis on new technologies is working. So we may be our own best defense against these scare tactics. She also rightly points out that if we do drill in ANWAR, there's nothing to stop the oil companies from selling the oil to whomever they like. There is no American oil:

On that Fox show, the thing that was driving me crazy was, at one point I said, "I'd like to ask you guys a question." And they were like, "And we have to go." But what I wanted to ask them was whether they're advocating nationalizing ExxonMobil, because this whole idea that we'll drill and then we'll get the oil is insane because we don't have a national oil company. Norway does, Mexico does, Brazil does, Saudi Arabia does, Iraq does! Most countries with significant oil reserves have an oil company. So if China does drill off the coast of Cuba—which they're not doing—but if they did, they could actually direct the oil back to the Chinese market because they have a national oil company. But the U.S. Government has no power over Exxon to force them to not sell the oil that they drill offshore to China. So the idea that somehow this is our oil is this weirdly nationalist concept that has absolutely nothing to do with the economic policies they so enthusiastically embrace.

Our dependence on the free market means there's no such thing as energy independence. It's just another bit of libertarian nonsense. Good stuff.

Worst Evil Cabal, Ever

Apparently, even Naomi Klein isn't too impressed with the evil neo-con geniuses who are hell bent on destroying the world.

As you may recall, in Klein's book The Shock Doctrine, she argues against the myth that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, that free markets are the natural economic expression of free societies. Instead, she contends that capitalism works best in the context of disaster, turmoil, and chaos, and that those with the most to gain (the wealthy and the powerful) seek out, foster, and, if necessary, invent crises to promote this economic agenda. That's the Shock Doctrine: using the shock of a natural disaster, or a war to exploit people when they are at their most vulnerable and unable to think rationally, maintaining that shock through violence, repression, and torture, and finally silencing critics through threats and intimidation.

Basically, everything we've seen over the last six years. Except.... Except... It's not working. As Mark Engler writes in Dissent:

Klein’s insights into the use of political shock are probing, but they, too, have limits. When the book’s chronology finally makes it up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, its argument takes a strange turn. Throughout the volume, Klein frequently invokes the “shock and awe” metaphor. Because of this, readers are led to believe that George W. Bush’s war will represent the epitome of the shock method. In fact, it is where the metaphor starts to unravel.

Iraq has been subjected to every shock imaginable. But rather than producing a state of regression and acquiescence, the onslaught has provoked intense resistance. As deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage is quoted as saying, “The U.S. is dealing with an Iraqi population that is un-shocked and un-awed.” Beyond the ethical and political implications of the botched occupation, it is just plain bad capitalism: “Bremer was sent to Iraq to build a corporate utopia,” Klein writes; “instead, Iraq became a ghoulish dystopia where going to a simple business meeting could get you lynched, burned alive or beheaded.” The author is ambivalent about the lessons. On the one hand, the corporate contractors who fled Iraq en masse had already reaped billions from government contracts, and energy companies still have their eye on Iraq’s oil. On the other hand, the crisis model has been foiled in important ways.

Which leads me to one of my pet phrases: the myth of competence. Which is to say, human beings are capable of dreaming up all sorts of nefarious schemes, invent all sorts of plots. They can try to take over the world. But, there is no evidence that they are actually capable of executing them. Most things that happen are just circumstances, luck, and coincidence. It's only in retrospect that events seem to have a plot running through them that give the illusion that history is controlled or masterminded. But when groups buy into their own ideology and try to act as if they are in control, as if great historical forces can be manipulated, they fail, and fail spectacularly.

The truth of disaster capitalism is that it destroys countries, communities, nature in a sort of blind grasping that can neither be achieved or fulfilled. Not because it succeeds, but because it can't ever succeed. And when it eventually runs out of steam, it moves on and leaves others to try to clean up after it.

That is the future of Iraq.