So sure, the recent spate of articles about Obama's "refinement" of his Iraq pull-out plan is a sign that today's journalists are hardly any better at political coverage than they were in 2004. If it's a slow news day, some phony scandal must be puffed up to fill all that airtime and column space. But Obama's very real flip-flop on the FISA bill opened the door to this whole meme.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Let the disappointment begin!
Obama backs the FISA bill "compromise." As Kevin Drum points out, it's not just the immunity for the telecom companies that makes this a bad bill.
I suspect this is just the beginning of many progressives' disenchantment with Obama. It will only get worse once he's in office. Especially in domestic policy, Obama is far more centrist than progressive. In foreign policy I think we can look forward to some real changes, but in domestic policy I'm not expecting anything revolutionary. Which is too bad, because the country could sure use it.
I suspect this is just the beginning of many progressives' disenchantment with Obama. It will only get worse once he's in office. Especially in domestic policy, Obama is far more centrist than progressive. In foreign policy I think we can look forward to some real changes, but in domestic policy I'm not expecting anything revolutionary. Which is too bad, because the country could sure use it.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Stay at home
Not that I think world travel, per se, is a bad thing. But this is a bad idea: Obama considering world tour ahead of August convention. A quick tour won't shore up his foreign policy credentials--it will just give the GOP and the media an excuse to talk about how skimpy they are. (Even though all the people with the right credentials were totally wrong about Iraq.) Moreover, the election won't be decided on foreign policy issues. The economy is circling the drain at the moment. Obama should just stay home and talk more about domestic issues. How many people are more afraid of Islamofacism than of losing their job or not being able to pay their bills? Finally, the McClatchy article speculates that Obama would receive a warm welcome in Europe. Maybe, but that won't do him any favors in the election. It will just feed the meme that he's an elitist, more foreign than American. Forget it, Barack--just stay at home.
P.S.: In fact, you might consider a special tour of the Midwest, where the flooding has been terrible.
P.S.: In fact, you might consider a special tour of the Midwest, where the flooding has been terrible.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
The Shock Doctrine
I have a new favorite book. After months of letting it languish on my list of books to read (it was published last September), I finally got around to reading Naomi Klein's masterful synthesis of the last several decades of global history, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. If I could get everyone to read just one book to understand the origins of our times and our present-day problems, this might be the one. It is not, as I had initially assumed, merely a book about how greedy companies swoop in to take advantage of natural disasters and wars to rake in the contracts (as they have done after Hurricane Katrina and in Iraq, two of the central case studies in the book). Instead, it is a much more wide-ranging book, taking the reader on a grand tour of economic misery, human rights abuses, and elite opportunism since the 1970s: from the horrors of Pinochet's Chile (and much of the rest of Latin America) to the failed economic promise of post-Apartheid South Africa, and from the suppression of democracy and elite looting of national assets in post-Soviet Russia to the Asian economic meltdown of the 1990s.
The common thread linking all of these disparate cases is the application of the now-familiar economic "shock" strategies of the Chicago School and Washington Consensus--privatization, deregulation, and emasculation of social spending--in conjunction with the suppression of democracy and human rights. She relies on a rich metaphor (in some cases, actually a direct connection) comparing the use of "shock" therapy on individual mental patients and political prisoners to the economic "shock" of imposing these strategies on stunned citizenries. Although Klein is a journalist, not an academic scholar, her work is a tour de force of systematic and rigorous argument, with extensive documentation (and interview data) and many of the most damning statements quoted directly out of the mouths of the proponents of Chicago-style economic shock therapy themselves. It is also extremely engaging and well-written. Although some of the cases she sketches were somewhat familiar to many of us already (such as the horrors of Latin America's "dirty wars" and the inside dealing of lucrative contracts in Iraq), nevertheless I was riveted from the moment I started reading the book to the end.
Much of the book is profoundly depressing, showing how American leaders of both political parties (including Bill Clinton), enabled economic advisors who advocated "shock" therapy to centrally influence policy decisions. The book comes down really hard on many academic experts, such as the Russian/Soviet studies scholars who simultaneously advised 1990s Russian leaders cracking down on democratic dissent while profiting themselves from investments. But by far the harshest critique is reserved for the "free-market" economists of the Chicago School of economics, who serve as the knowledge and idea brokers and keep turning up everywhere in the book. Tracing Chicago School ideas back especially to the School's much-admired leader Milton Friedman, (and implicitly to Hayek's Road to Serfdom and other libertarian wellsprings), I think her criticism of this group is convincing, and it is one those of us in the "logocracy" need to take to heart.
In the very last (brief) chapter, though, she turns to a surprisingly optimistic note, suggesting that ordinary people around the world are wising up to the horrors of "shock therapy" and offering more resistance. To my mind, reading her book and taking its lessons to heart offer a wonderful opportunity for those of us who may not be suffering the worst consequences of these ideas to educate ourselves and prepare to resist these ideas from within the belly of the beast (i.e. the world of reasonably well-off and well-educated Americans).
Clearly I am not the only one impressed by Klein's book. Her website already displays more than 25 foreign language and international versions of the book. It also provides links to several interesting reviews. My favorite was one from the San Francisco Chronicle, by William S. Kowinski. Aptly calling Klein's book "the master narrative of our time," Kowinski predicts that Shock Doctrine "could turn out to be among the most important books of the decade." Several other reviews have clever, evokcative titles--such as "Doing Well by Doing Ill" (Shashi Tharoor, WaPo), "The New Road to Serfdom" (Christopher Hayes, In These Times), and "Bleakonomics" (Joseph Stieglitz, NYT)--that reveal just how much Klein's book aims to overturn the conventional economic thinking of the last third of the twentieth century based on Friedman, Hayek, and company. This is the book to recommend to that dear friend of yours who is in danger of being seduced by economic libertarian thinking upon reading (Milton) Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, Hayek's Road to Serfdom, or anything by (Thomas) Friedman or Ayn Rand. It offers a stunning and historically grounded rebuttal to anyone who thinks that unfettered capitalism automatically leads to democratic freedom.
Of course, some will (rightly) say that Klein's "shock doctrine" pattern cannot explain everything in recent history. There will always be a few exceptions that don't fit the larger pattern. But what is most amazing about this book is how it links together so many disparate elements of recent global history into one coherent and convincing narrative. The "shock doctrine" may not explain everything, but it sure explains a lot. And it is an essential signpost in comprehending how we got into our present-day mess, so that we can work on building a better world.
The common thread linking all of these disparate cases is the application of the now-familiar economic "shock" strategies of the Chicago School and Washington Consensus--privatization, deregulation, and emasculation of social spending--in conjunction with the suppression of democracy and human rights. She relies on a rich metaphor (in some cases, actually a direct connection) comparing the use of "shock" therapy on individual mental patients and political prisoners to the economic "shock" of imposing these strategies on stunned citizenries. Although Klein is a journalist, not an academic scholar, her work is a tour de force of systematic and rigorous argument, with extensive documentation (and interview data) and many of the most damning statements quoted directly out of the mouths of the proponents of Chicago-style economic shock therapy themselves. It is also extremely engaging and well-written. Although some of the cases she sketches were somewhat familiar to many of us already (such as the horrors of Latin America's "dirty wars" and the inside dealing of lucrative contracts in Iraq), nevertheless I was riveted from the moment I started reading the book to the end.
Much of the book is profoundly depressing, showing how American leaders of both political parties (including Bill Clinton), enabled economic advisors who advocated "shock" therapy to centrally influence policy decisions. The book comes down really hard on many academic experts, such as the Russian/Soviet studies scholars who simultaneously advised 1990s Russian leaders cracking down on democratic dissent while profiting themselves from investments. But by far the harshest critique is reserved for the "free-market" economists of the Chicago School of economics, who serve as the knowledge and idea brokers and keep turning up everywhere in the book. Tracing Chicago School ideas back especially to the School's much-admired leader Milton Friedman, (and implicitly to Hayek's Road to Serfdom and other libertarian wellsprings), I think her criticism of this group is convincing, and it is one those of us in the "logocracy" need to take to heart.
In the very last (brief) chapter, though, she turns to a surprisingly optimistic note, suggesting that ordinary people around the world are wising up to the horrors of "shock therapy" and offering more resistance. To my mind, reading her book and taking its lessons to heart offer a wonderful opportunity for those of us who may not be suffering the worst consequences of these ideas to educate ourselves and prepare to resist these ideas from within the belly of the beast (i.e. the world of reasonably well-off and well-educated Americans).
Clearly I am not the only one impressed by Klein's book. Her website already displays more than 25 foreign language and international versions of the book. It also provides links to several interesting reviews. My favorite was one from the San Francisco Chronicle, by William S. Kowinski. Aptly calling Klein's book "the master narrative of our time," Kowinski predicts that Shock Doctrine "could turn out to be among the most important books of the decade." Several other reviews have clever, evokcative titles--such as "Doing Well by Doing Ill" (Shashi Tharoor, WaPo), "The New Road to Serfdom" (Christopher Hayes, In These Times), and "Bleakonomics" (Joseph Stieglitz, NYT)--that reveal just how much Klein's book aims to overturn the conventional economic thinking of the last third of the twentieth century based on Friedman, Hayek, and company. This is the book to recommend to that dear friend of yours who is in danger of being seduced by economic libertarian thinking upon reading (Milton) Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, Hayek's Road to Serfdom, or anything by (Thomas) Friedman or Ayn Rand. It offers a stunning and historically grounded rebuttal to anyone who thinks that unfettered capitalism automatically leads to democratic freedom.
Of course, some will (rightly) say that Klein's "shock doctrine" pattern cannot explain everything in recent history. There will always be a few exceptions that don't fit the larger pattern. But what is most amazing about this book is how it links together so many disparate elements of recent global history into one coherent and convincing narrative. The "shock doctrine" may not explain everything, but it sure explains a lot. And it is an essential signpost in comprehending how we got into our present-day mess, so that we can work on building a better world.
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Obama's response to Clinton's attacks
Although he's now racked up another huge caucus win (in the nation's least populous state), it's been a bad couple of weeks for Barack Obama. The Clinton campaign, coming off slim wins in Ohio and Texas that they have succeeded in spinning as significant comebacks, has drawn Obama into a series of mini media frenzies. Obama's responses to attacks about his connection to the developer Tony Rezko, and the off-record comments of one of his advisers, were inept. Although pundits are egging Obama to respond in kind to Clinton's increasing negativity, if he does it will detract from his main message that he can bring a new politics to Washington, DC. Obama needs to stay above these sorts of manufactured controversies.
He can respond to them by being honest about what they are: silly non-issues designed to churn up a few media cycles and distract people from the larger issues in the campaign. And, of course, the big issue of the primary contest math: There is virtually no way Clinton can catch up in delegates. By continuing to contest the nomination through negative tactics (such as suggesting that only she and McCain have crossed the "commander-in-chief threshold") she is showing that she prefers a weaker Democratic party to a stronger party without Clinton leading it.
Obama's promise is that he can help restore to our politics the dignity and grand purpose that have drained away during the twenty years of petty squabbling under the Bushes and Clintons. He should stick with that message, which has already carried him to the primary lead, and not let the Clinton campaign drag him--and the rest of us--back down into the bickering over inconsequential issues that has dominated politics for so long.
He can respond to them by being honest about what they are: silly non-issues designed to churn up a few media cycles and distract people from the larger issues in the campaign. And, of course, the big issue of the primary contest math: There is virtually no way Clinton can catch up in delegates. By continuing to contest the nomination through negative tactics (such as suggesting that only she and McCain have crossed the "commander-in-chief threshold") she is showing that she prefers a weaker Democratic party to a stronger party without Clinton leading it.
Obama's promise is that he can help restore to our politics the dignity and grand purpose that have drained away during the twenty years of petty squabbling under the Bushes and Clintons. He should stick with that message, which has already carried him to the primary lead, and not let the Clinton campaign drag him--and the rest of us--back down into the bickering over inconsequential issues that has dominated politics for so long.
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