Words&Dirt

“We stared at each other, with that inner hostility that had been there from the first.  After a moment I pushed my chair back and went over to the french windows.  I opened the screen and stepped out on to the porch.  The night was all around, soft and quiet.  The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.”

––The High Window, by Raymond Chandler, pg. 238-9

“All these incarnations share a commitment to the policy trinity––the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending––but none of the various names for the ideology seem quite adequate.  Friedman framed his movement as an attempt to free the market from the state, but the real-world track record of what happens when his purist vision is realized is rather different.  In every country where Chicago School policies have been applied over the past three decades, what has emerged is a powerful ruling alliance between a few very large corporations and a class of mostly wealthy politicians––with hazy and ever-shifting lines between the two groups.  In Russia the billionaire private players in the alliance are called ‘the oligarchs’; in China, ‘the princelings’; in Chile, ‘the piranhas’; in the U.S., the Bush-Cheney campaign ‘Pioneers.’  Far from freeing the market from the state, these political and corporate elites have simply merged, trading favors to secure the right to appropriate precious resources previously held in the public domain––from Russia’s oil fields, to China’s collective lands, to the no-bid reconstruction contracts for work in Iraq.

A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist.  Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security.  For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society.  But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.”

––The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, pg. 18-9