Newsclipping of the Day :: The Davos Dilemma and other Sinister Plots

Naomi Klien spoke recently in New York, and was excerpted today by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! about this sinister notion she calls The Privatization of the State, in which the U.S. economy and government institutions are being subjected to a process of looting. In secret wave after secret wave of decision-making, the notion of privatizing everything we expect--our entitlements--is what it looks like when our self government has become completely taken over by business interests and the corporatocracy. A lame FEMA, defunded NPR, anxious Department of the Interior, Social Security in danger, the outsourcing of war and military life and death--you name it--so many "accomplishments" of the Bush Adminstration have undone life as we know it. And nobody knows it. And it is not just our government, but those of Iraq and Afghanistan too. Just about any state-run anything in Iraq is now "outsourced" to multinational NGOs. South and Central America were the test pilot programs during the Reagan years. It's neocolonialism and imperialism at its worst, and it is making the very instability and chaos that war creates necessary factors for economic growth.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

"What we are losing is the incentive, the economic incentive, for peace, the economic incentive for stability. When you can create such a booming economy around war and disaster, around destruction and reconstruction, over and over and over again, what is your peace incentive?"

"The Davos dilemma is this: for decades, it's been conventional wisdom that generalized mayhem was a drain on the global economy, that you could have an individual shock or a crisis or a war that could be exploited for privatization, but on the whole -- and this was the Thomas Friedman thesis -- there needed to be stability in order to have steady economic growth; the Davos dilemma is that it's no longer true. You can have generalized mayhem, you can have wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, threats of nuclear war with Iran, a worsening of the Israeli occupation, a deepening of violence against Palestinians, you can have a terror in the face of global warming, you could have increased blowback from resource wars, you can have soaring oil prices, but, lo and behold, the stock market just goes up and up and up."

Read or listen to/watch the entire comments of Naomi Klein's comments
HERE.

Have any of you read any of her works? I've read a few of her essays in Harper's, and remember NO LOGO well, but have not read Fences & Windows. And the forthcoming The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism certainly sounds like it will be an incredible expose.

I wonder why none of our democratic presidential candidates talk about this at all? Could it be they are completely complicit? Or unaware? Or just unable to really talk openly about anything?

When did we Americans come to believe we have any right to do any of this? And when the war profiteering is over (if ever), will we have a functioning economy left?

I do not consent to having my tax dollars spent in this way. I do not consent to having my government pitted against itself. What is it going to take to make our government an honest instrument of the people's will again? Can it be?

So many questions. So many lame-O candidates hiding under rocks.