Re: [Pen-l] Naomi Klein: Beware of Obama's Chicago School of Economics boys

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Jun 14, 2008, at 12:21 AM, Max B. Sawicky wrote:

> It is worth remembering that Clinton ran left in the general  
> election and then turned
> right (after positioning to the right of Cuomo in the primaries,  
> then after Cuomo
> disappeared, shifting to the left of Tsongas), but this column  
> gives me no incentive
> to read her book(s), except for the recreation of skewering them.

I've skewered the latest,

<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Shock.html>,

though not recreationally. Naomi is very smart & talented, but she  
tends to force everything into a single narrative - shock or, in this  
case, Chicago. She wants to blame Milton Friedman for modern  
capitalism (though judging from The Shock Doctrine, it's hard to see  
any evidence that she's read any of his work). The Chicago obsession  
causes her to look only at Citadel and Kenneth Griffin, as if Obama  
weren't getting a ton of money from all of Wall Street. If she wants  
a hedge fund name, there's Paul Tudor Jones, who threw a fundraiser  
for BHO in April 2007. An FT article on that party quoted someone as  
saying "All of Greenwich [home of the HF industry] is in love with  
Obama." But Greenwich is 825 miles from Chicago, so it doesn't fit  
the model. Capitalist class interest gets reduced to Griffin, and  
capitalist ideology to Friedman, Goolsbee, and Furman. Without any  
popular movement to discipline him, Obama's would govern as a  
Rubinesque neoliberal.


Doug

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