The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

http://www.democracynow.org/ 2 Corinthians 8:9 - For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.

Video: Schwarzenegger’s Shock Therapy--The Poor Pay For The Sins Of The Rich

By Avi Lewis - June 16th, 2009 Now that Washington has ruled out an immediate bailout for California, we know who will pay the ultimate price for the crisis born on Wall Street: the state’s most vulnerable citizens. And with many states facing similar crises, this could be a preview of where the country as a whole is headed.

California is facing a $24.3 billion dollar budget gap, and the governor wants to attack it with cuts to social programs alone. If Schwarzenegger has his way, the price will be paid by 1.9 million people who lose their health care coverage, 1.3 million who lose basic welfare, thousands of state workers who get fired, schools that lose $5 billion in funding, having already survived brutal cuts earlier this year.

I just spent a week in LA and Sacramento filming a documentary on the crisis for Fault Lines, the show I co-host on Al Jazeera English Television. We interviewed teachers who are on hunger strike against the cuts, students organizing protest marches, health care workers and their patients, politicians from both parties, undocumented immigrants and the talk show hosts who demonize them (Californians will know the John and Ken Show…)

What we discovered (beyond some priceless video of Arnold Schwarzenegger introducing Milton Friedman’s TV series on PBS in 1990, is that thanks to the quirks of California’s system, the state is a Petri dish for some of the most virulent strains of American political culture.

Around the world, government is seen as the last hope to stimulate a comatose economy. In California, anti-tax, anti-spending, and anti-government sentiments are converging: California is facing a de-stimulus package of epic proportions.

Watch both parts of my half-hour documentary below, and check out AJE live, 24 hours day, at livestation.com.

Fault Lines, California: Failed State, Part 1:	Fault Lines, California: Failed State, Part 2:
A Film by Avi Lewis & Naomi Klein	Featured Activist Campaign G20: No More Business as Usual Day of Action, Central London Friday, September 4

http://my.opera.com/azimagery/blog/2009/09/04/american-casino-movie

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/04/lexicon-disappointment

A Lexicon of Disappointment

By Naomi Klein - April 15th, 2009

Published in The
Nation

All is not well in Obamafanland. It's not clear exactly what accounts for the change of mood. Maybe it was the rancid smell emanating from Treasury's latest bank bailout. Or the news that the president's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, earned millions from the very Wall Street
banks and hedge funds he is protecting from reregulation now. Or perhaps it began earlier, with Obama's silence during Israel's Gaza attack.

Whatever the last straw, a growing number of Obama enthusiasts are starting
to entertain the possibility that their man is not, in fact, going to save the world if we all just hope really hard.

This is a good thing. If the superfan culture that brought Obama to power is going to transform itself into an independent political movement, one fierce
enough to produce programs capable of meeting the current crises, we are all going to have to stop hoping and start demanding.

The first stage, however, is to understand fully the awkward in-between space in which many US progressive movements find themselves. To do that, we need a new language, one specific to the Obama moment. Here is a start.

Hopeover. Like a hangover, a hopeover comes from having overindulged
in something that felt good at the time but wasn't really all that healthy, leading to feelings of remorse, even shame. It's the political equivalent of the crash after a sugar high. Sample sentence: "When I listened to Obama's economic speech my heart soared. But then, when I tried to tell a friend about his plans for the millions of layoffs and foreclosures, I found myself saying nothing at all. I've got a serious hopeover."

Hoper coaster. Like a roller coaster, the hoper coaster describes
the intense emotional peaks and valleys of the Obama era, the veering between joy at having a president who supports safe-sex education and despondency that single-payer healthcare is off the table at the very moment when it could actually become a reality. Sample sentence: "I was so psyched when Obama
said he is closing Guantánamo. But now they are fighting like mad to make sure the prisoners in Bagram have no legal rights at all. Stop this hoper coaster--I want to get off!"

Hopesick. Like the homesick, hopesick individuals are intensely nostalgic. They miss the rush of optimism
from the campaign trail and are forever trying to recapture that warm, hopey feeling--usually by exaggerating the significance of relatively minor acts of Obama decency. Sample sentences: "I was feeling really hopesick about the escalation in Afghanistan, but then I watched a YouTube video of Michelle in her organic garden and it felt like inauguration day all over again. A few hours later, when I heard that the Obama administration was boycotting a major UN racism conference, the hopesickness came back hard. So I watched slideshows of Michelle wearing clothes made by ethnically diverse independent fashion designers, and that sort of helped."
http://www.federaljack.com/2009/08/21/first-lady-requires-more-than-twenty-attendants/

Hope fiend. With hope receding, the hope fiend, like the dope fiend, goes into serious withdrawal, willing to do anything to chase the buzz. (Closely related to hopesickness but
more severe, usually affecting middle-aged males.) Sample sentence: "Joe told me he actually believes Obama deliberately brought in Summers so that he would blow the bailout, and then Obama would have the excuse he needs to do what he really wants: nationalize the banks and turn them into credit unions. What a hope fiend!"

Hopebreak. Like the heartbroken lover, the hopebroken Obama-ite
is not mad but terribly sad. She projected messianic powers onto Obama and is now inconsolable in her disappointment. Sample sentence: "I really believed Obama would finally force us to confront the legacy of slavery in this country and start a serious national conversation about race. But now he never seems to mention race, and he's using twisted legal arguments to keep us from even confronting the crimes of the Bush years. Every time I hear him say 'move forward,' I'm hopebroken all over again."

Hopelash. Like a backlash, hopelash is a 180-degree reversal of everything Obama-related. Sufferers were once Obama's most passionate evangelists.
Now they are his angriest critics. Sample sentence: "At least with Bush everyone knew he was an asshole. Now we've got the same wars, the same lawless prisons, the same Washington corruption, but everyone is cheering like Stepford wives. It's time for a full-on hopelash."

In trying to name these various hope-related ailments, I found myself wondering what the late Studs Terkel would have said about our collective hopeover. He surely would have

urged us not to give in to despair. I reached for one of his last books, Hope Dies Last. I didn't have to read long. The book opens with the words: "Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up."

And that pretty much says it all. Hope was a fine slogan when rooting for a long-shot presidential candidate. But as a posture toward the president of the most powerful nation on earth, it is dangerously deferential. The task as we move forward (as Obama likes to say) is not to abandon
hope but to find more appropriate homes for it--in the factories, neighborhoods and schools where tactics like sit-ins, squats and occupations are seeing a resurgence.

Political scientist Sam Gindin wrote recently that the labor movement can do more than protect the
status quo. It can demand, for instance, that shuttered auto plants be converted into green-future factories, capable of producing mass-transit vehicles and technology for a renewable energy system. "Being realistic means taking hope out of speeches," he wrote, "and putting it in the hands of workers."

Which brings me to the final entry in the lexicon. http://www.youtube.com/user/mediagrrl9

Hoperoots. Sample sentence: "It's time to stop waiting for hope to be handed down, and start pushing it up, from the hoperoots."

This article was first published in The Nation

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/4/republican_gomorrah_inside_the_movement_that

http://www.republicangomorrah.com/excerpt.php

Fromm’s analysis in Escape from Freedom provides an eerie but prescient description of the authoritarian mindset driving the movement that has substantially taken over the modern Republican Party: the Christian right.

Over the last five years,
I interviewed hundreds of the Christian right’s leaders and activists, attended dozens of its rallies and conferences, listened to countless hours of its radio programs, and sat in movement-oriented houses of worship where no journalists were permitted.

As I explored the contours of the movement, I discovered a culture of personal crisis lurking behind the
histrionics and expressions of social resentment.

This culture is the mortar that bonds leaders and followers together. Inside the movement initiates refer to it cryptically as “The Family,” an exclusive sect. The Christian right as a whole is called “the pro-Family” movement, and movement allies are known as “friends of The Family.” In an actual family, blood ties are required; however, joining the Christian right requires little more than becoming “born again,” a process of confession, conversion, and submission to a strict father figure.

The movement’s Jesus is the opposite of the prince of peace. He is a stern, overtly masculine patriarch charging into the fray with his sword raised against secular foes; he is “the head of a dreadful company, mounted on a white horse, with a double-edged sword, his robe dipped in blood,” according to movement propagandist Steve Arterburn.

Mark Driscoll, a pastor who operates an alternative Christian rock venue from his church, stirs the souls of twenty- something evangelical males with visions of “Ultimate Fighting Jesus.” This same musclebound god-man starred in Mel Gibson’s blood-drenched The Passion of the Christ, enduring bone-crushing punishment at the hands of Jews and pagans
for two hours of unrelieved pornographic masochism.

A portrait of virility and violence, the movement’s omnipotent macho Jesus represents the mirror inversion of the weak men who necessitated his creation. As Fromm explained, “the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness [italics in original]. It is the expression of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the
desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.”

The movement’s macho Jesus provided purpose to Tom DeLay, a dallying, alcoholic Texas legislator transformed through evangelical religion from “Hot Tub Tommy” into a dictatorial House majority leader known as “The Hammer.” Macho Jesus was the god of Ted Haggard, a closet homosexual born-again and charismatic megachurch leader, risen to head of the National Association of Evangelicals, preaching the gospel of spiritual warfare and anti-gay crusades. And he was the god of Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., an eccentric millionaire whose inheritance of massive wealth literally drove him mad, prompting his institutionalization, who found relief as one of the far right’s most reliable financial angels.

Macho Jesus even transformed the serial killer Ted Bundy, murderer and rapist of dozens of women, who became a poster child for anti-pornography activists with his nationally televised death row confessional.

The movement’s most powerful leader embodied the most severe qualities of his followers’ god. James Dobson is a quintessential strict father whose influence has been compared by journalistic observers to that of a cult leader. Unlike most of his peers, Dobson had no theological credentials or religious training. He was a child psychologist who burst onto the scene with a best-selling book that urged beating children into submission in order to restore the respect for God and government that America’s youth had lost during the 1960s.

Dobson leveraged his fame and wealth to build a kingdom of crisis that counseled the trauma-wracked Middle American masses with Christian oriented solutions to their personal problems. Then he marshaled them into apocalyptic morality crusades against abortion and homosexuality. When his Christian army reached critical mass, Dobson set them against the Republican establishment, flexing his grassroots muscle to destroy the ambitions of moderates such as Bob Dole and Colin Powell, and propelling movement figures such as DeLay and George W. Bush into ascendancy.

As Dobson consolidated his status as Republican kingmaker, the destructive tendencies of his closest allies began exploding, plunging the party into Gomorrah-like revelations of bizarre sex scandals and criminality. Ranging from DeLays misadventures with the felonious super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Christian right operative Ralph Reed to Haggards gay tryst with a male escort to Senator Larry Craigs bathroom stall come-on to an undercover cop, the scandals never ceased to surprise people who had once envisioned the Grand Old Party as a bastion of “family values.” Piled atop the Republicans disastrously handled occupation of Iraq and response to Hurricane Katrina, these sordid scandals ended the twelve-year experiment with Republican rule of the Congress in 2006.

In the chaotic 2008 Republican presidential primary, the Republican base split its vote between Mitt Romney, the economic conservative, and Mike Huckabee, the social conservative, creating space for John McCain, distrusted by all factions, to emerge. McCain wished to have as his running mate an independent-minded politician who could garner votes outside the Republicans increasingly narrow sphere of influence. His intention was to name Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who had been the Democratic candidate for vice president in 2000. But the movement rejected his appeal to pragmatism, threatened a full-scale revolt, and demanded to vet his running mate as a condition for support. From the Last Frontier of Alaska, a self-proclaimed hardcore pro-lifer and prayer warrior

Governor Sarah Palin, was summoned to deliver to McCain the political elements he had once labeled agents of intolerance.

Through Palin, archetype of the right-wing woman, the movement’s influence over the party reached its zenith. As a direct result, however, the party sank to its nadir, suffering crushing defeats in the presidential and congressional races. Palins candidacy mobilized the Christian right elements that McCain alienated, but she repelled independents and moderate Republicans in droves, winnowing away the partys constituency in every region of the country except the Deep South. Palin fatally tarnished McCains image while laying the groundwork for her potential resurrection and that of the movement in the presidential contest of 2012.

The Christian right reached the mountaintop with the presidency of George W. Bush, shrouding science and reason in the shadow of the cross and the flag. But even at the height of Bushs glory, in his 2004 campaign, a few isolated moderate Republicans warned that the Republican Party was in danger of collapse. Of course their jeremiads were ignored. That year, Christie Todd Whitman published a book titled Its My Party Too, decrying the takeover by what she called the “social fundamentalists.

A member of a distinguished and wealthy eastern Republican family, with deep ties to the party, she had been governor of New Jersey and head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Bush, only to quit when fundamentalist ideologues substituted right-wing doctrine for science in its studies. After the 2008 Republican debacle, Whitman pointed out that even though McCain was not considered a champion of the religious right, his percentage of so-called “values voters” increased by 3 percent over Bushs in 2004. McCain, the last Republican moderate on the national stage, had lost among “moderate voters” by 21 points to Obama.

As soon as Obama took office, the movement camped in the wilderness prepared to take political advantage of the worst economic troubles since the Great Depression by injecting a renewed sense of anti-government resentment. As most people agonized and even panicked over the sudden economic collapse, the Christian right’s peddlers of crisis lifted their hands to the heavens. They had a whole new world of trauma to exploit, more desperate and embittered followers to manipulate, and maybe just maybe another chance at power.

Republican Gomorrah is an intimate portrayal of a political, social, and religious movement defined by an escape from freedom.” As Erich Fromm explained, those who join the ranks of an authoritarian cause to resolve inner turmoil and self-doubt are always its most fervent, rigidly ideological, and loyal members. They are often its most politically influential members as well. President Eisenhower described the mental stress and burden that animates such movements. His admonition to beware the danger posed to democracy by those who seek freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions should be as memorable in history as his caution about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address.

The characters I have profiled may not represent a majority in terms of sheer numbers, but through their combined power, they reflect the dominant character of the movement and, by extension, of the Republican Party they have subsumed. That party has ignored Eisenhowers warning and realized his darkest fears.

John Pilger The Invisible Government"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-uq7O1RqQQ

The Invisible Government by John Pilger I wasn't going to mention

The Green Berets when I sat down to write this, until I read the other day that John Wayne was the most influential movie who ever lived. I a saw the Green Berets starring John Wayne on a Saturday night in 1968 in Montgomery Alabama. (I was down there to interview the then-infamous governor George Wallace). I had just come back from Vietnam, and I couldn't believe how absurd this movie was. So I laughed out loud, and I laughed and laughed. And it wasn't long before the atmosphere around me grew very cold.

My companion, who had been a Freedom Rider in the South, said, "Let's get the hell out of here and run like hell." We were chased all the way back to our hotel, but I doubt if any of our pursuers were aware that John Wayne, their hero, had lied so he wouldn't have to fight in World War II.

And yet the phony role model of Wayne sent thousands of Americans to their deaths in Vietnam, with the notable exceptions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Last year, in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the playwright Harold Pinter made an epoch speech. He asked why, and I quote him, "The systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought in Stalinist Russia were well know in the West, while American state crimes were merely superficially recorded, left alone, documented." And yet across the world the extinction and suffering of countless human beings could be attributed to rampant American power.

"But," said Pinter, "You wouldn't know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." Pinter's words were more than the surreal. The BBC ignored the speech of Britain's most famous dramatist.