as well as other things. The talk was about Latin America and the origins of the Shock Doctrine, but she made references to the current situation throughout and the large part of the closing was on the U.S.A. elections.
Dear to my heart, her first words were about Katrina. Approximately: it was OK to leave people to die in New Orleans, but AIG couldn't be allowed to fail. Then she blasted Milton Friedman.
Barak Obama is a Centralist, he's honest about that. It's to his credit that when the center moves, he moves with it. It will be the job of progressives to move the center. She reminded us that right after the Republican convention, it looked like McCain might win [there's a lot of people wanting to make McCain win]. Obama's numbers didn't go back up until he started speaking about such things as "deregulation" and "trickle-down" don't work.
In her opinion, the first thing progressives need to do after an Obama win is to insist that the Secretary of the Treasury is not from Wall Street.
The people who created the mess should not be in charge of "fixing" the mess. There was a groundswell of spontaneous reaction against the first bailout bill -- it was voted down. It is possible to insist Treasury not be Wall Street. [Personal observation: there was a massive reaction against the attempt to privatize Social Security, and Bush was thwarted. I think that's the kind of action needed.] Klein's description was that Wall Street, currently, is acting as if Obama is giving them signals that he doesn't really mean some of the things he says -- politicians always say crazy things during elections. We have to press him hard to keep the promises so he can tell Wall Street "I can't give you what you want, they won't let me."
Paulson just made an announcement about the deficit. Paulson, aiding the corporate looting of the treasury, is laying the groundwork, she says, to saying "No, you can't" to all of Obama's "Yes we can".
She continually objected to Friedman's ideology, what she describes in "Shock Doctrine". There are several different words for it. In Latin America, they call it "Neoliberalism", that's the word she used last night. She also talked about the Chicago Boys. Friedman couldn't get his theories used in U.S.A., Chile was the first place were the experiment was tried. (There were a lot of students who went to right-wing University of Chicago from Chile, as a counter to all the leftist economists in Chile. I forget how she explained this started.)
Klein doesn't like corporate governance. The whole globalization problem is a problem of big corporations removing barriers to accumulating profits. According to Neoliberalism, the reasons for government is to protect borders, make war and enforce contracts. Nothing about social welfare. Someone who supports a mixed economy (democratic socialism -- in the middle between authoritarian communism and savage capitalism) gets immediately red-baited, accused of being authoritarian communist ... because a mixed economy is so attractive.
Chile isn't a conspiracy theory. The democratically elected socialist got put down in a coup -- the Chicago boys who were down in Chile took advantage of the opportunity to push for Friedman's ideas (they also egged the coup on, indicating there was a plan after the military took over and booted out the democratic socialism). There's stuff that was done in Chile that hasn't been done here yet. (Some of it was tried, like the attempt to privatize Social Security.) There's a narrative that the Neoliberals try to push: Chile was doing it right (too bad about the human rights abuses). But abuses are integral to the system. Many people were disappeared who were organizing against the system.
There's been a very successful "liberation movement" in the last 35 years, to liberate the moneyed elites from all constraints against profits. A mixed economy does almost everyone good -- but it does take away from profits, which is why the push by multinationals for corporate governance. And it's an aggravation that the process of democracy & elections in this country is such that so much of the participation is large amounts of paying corporate media for expensive advertising.
She told the story of Argentina, 1990s, when there were five presidents in three weeks: people were told to stay in their houses, the country was under siege, but they came out banging pots & pans -- because they remembered the last time. In Q & A afterwards, when asked about U.S.A. and not remembering history, she went on a riff about colonialism.
A core thing about this country is forgetting history: getting a New Start -- starting over, a blank sheet -- making a new country in someone else's land. (The genocide against Native Americans.) And self-serving references to god: Rep. Baker, while New Orleans was still flood, saying [paraphrase]"We couldn't clean out the projects, but God did." There's a similar mention in Pilgrim writings: Smallpox, which ravaged the Native Americans, was referred to by the Pilgrims as "the Divine Plague".
There's also a historical problem that Bush and Chaney weren't impeached -- the proceedings would have documented the abuses for better historical memory.
Some more quips. The GEO (graduate employees' union) held a demonstration against the university administration timed to highlight she would be lecturing -- she's used to people protesting her lectures (at University of Chicago?). She was also surprised (complemented) she got a packed house at the same time of Obama's TV slot.
Back to "no you can't". Someone (Paulson?) said, because of circumstances would have to reconsider entitlements. (Of course, it's social programs that need reconsideration, not the corporate handouts.) Another thing that needs to be done is renegotiate the bailout stuff. The second plan (that passed) is described as being like another plan elsewhere [I forget where] -- but that other plan was government (Britain?) buying into failing banks, getting 15% equity (US taxpayers got 5%) and voting rights of the Boards (we don't). And there's something in how it's structured that will make more money from the trough inevitable -- since public money is at risks, those corporations can't be allowed to fail. But we've got no conditions that they have to follow.
She opposes Friedman’s meme that "Free Markets" = Freedom. There’s a real world example of a truly free market, and it failed That was the derivatives market -- the shadow banking system that was totally unregulated. We all saw where that went. The Wall Street response was to demand the bailout: the nationalization of debt and privatization of profits. [Krugman has also written about this.] And it will be a continuing bailout – they will ask for more. (She gave an example, which I didn’t catch, of it already happening.)
Incidentally, it’s dangerous for the elites to break the rules so fragrantly break the rules. If the banks get a bailout, why should we repay student loans? [She got a big cheer there.] Why should there be foreclosures.
I'm sorry this is so fragmentary. She went all over the place, making connections. I was writing notes like crazy, but there was so much and I'm not sure I wrote down everything right, or am interpreting my notes correctly. I'm very glad I attended.
PS: I search tag "Naomi Klein" and found this previous diary by RobLewis which links to Democracy Now! that seems to cover a lot of the same material, except the more current election stuff.