Riding the slippery slide to chaos

"So, it was...this idea that because the goal was, in New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s famous phrase, not nation-building, but “nation-creating,” you know, which is an extraordinarily violent idea, if you stop and think about what it means to create a nation in a nation that already exists, something has to happen to the nation that was already there, and we’re talking about a culture as old as civilization. So I think that because there was this idea that we were starting from scratch and this idea that is often portrayed, you know, in the US media as idealistic, of wanting to build a model nation in the heart of the Arab world that would spread to neighboring countries."

So goes the idea of the The Shock Doctrine as applied in Iraq according to Naomi Klein's latest book by the same name.

While Iraq was intended, New Orleans was fortuitous chance. But both situations, one created, the other natural, were opportunities exploited to advance a neo-liberal doctrine of recreating the world through "disaster capitalism."

As John Gray explains in his review "The end of the world as we know it" ,

"Klein believes that neo-liberalism belongs among 'the closed, fundamentalist doctrines that cannot co-exist with other belief-systems ... The world as it is must be erased to make way for their purist invention. Rooted in biblical fantasies of great floods and great fires, it is a logic that leads ineluctably towards violence.'

"The social breakdowns that have accompanied neo-liberal economic policies are not the result of incompetence or mismanagement. They are integral to the free-market project, which can only advance against a background of disasters" (emphasis Dada's)...

"Klein seems to suggest that these disasters are manufactured as part of a deliberate policy framed by corporations with hidden influence in government.

"Her more considered view, which is also more plausible, is that disaster is part of the normal functioning of the type of capitalism we have today: 'An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dotcom collapse all demonstrate.'"

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It was nice to hear Klein delineate why, increasingly, I'm feeling more and more crappy while less and less secure these days. Why the new economics needs disasters to thrive, needs horrific situations of destruction and human misery from an Iraq in rubble, a New Orleans in ruins, or a U.S. of crumbling highways and bridges, flooding subways, and decaying schools for which the government's solution is, "Don't repair it, just sell it!"