Watch the Monkey Get Hurt, Monkey

I don't presume to know much about economics.  To say that I skipped that class in college would be a huge understatement -- I skipped the whole department.  Didn't even go in the building.

But it's an interesting time to be reading  Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein's insight into "disaster capitalism," whereby radical free-marketeers such as those currently in power seek to use moments of disaster and crisis to implement economic changes that serve their interests.

Here's some text from page 174:

It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine: "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

And from page 175:

The kind of crisis Friedman had in mind was not military but economic. What he understood was that in normal circumstances, economic decisions are made based on the push and pull of competing interests -- workers want jobs and raises, owners want low taxes and relaxed regulation, and politicians have to strike a balance between these competing forces. However, if an economic crisis hits and is severe enough -- a currency meltdown, a market crash, a major recession -- it blows everything else out of the water, and leaders are liberated to do whatever is necessary (or said to be necessary) in the name of responding to a national emergency. Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones -- gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus do not seem to apply.

Note that in Bush's speech to the nation tonight, he suggested that -- as Washington hurries to repair a crisis long felt by middle America, but only recently affecting corporations -- there should be no immediate changes to the lax or absent regulations that allowed such circumstances to come about in the first place.

From Page 200: 

Friedman's crisis theory became self-reinforcing. The more the global economy followed his prescriptions, with floating interest rates, deregulated prices and export-oriented economies, the more crisis-prone the system became, producing more and more of precisely the types of meltdowns he had identified as the only circumstances under which governments would take more of his advice.

Vote Barack Obama: He Probably Knows Who John Maynard Keynes Is.