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

[Patrick Bond <pbond@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doug Henwood wrote:

> 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. 

Yeah, that was quite a rave of yours, comrade, way over the top. (If 
anyone wants my lbo-list rebuttal, let me know offlist.)

> 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.

Oh, man. You're staying up way late with little Ivan, it seems. :-) And 
I don't blame you, if this distracts from your own pollyannish view of 
the unfolding crisis. But you are missing your targets with this 
geographical confusion, when obviously she's aiming at the confluence of 
Chicago School assumptions of rational - or at least clearing - 
financial markets, and neoliberalism more generally.

> Capitalist class interest gets reduced to Griffin, and capitalist 
> ideology to Friedman, Goolsbee, and Furman. 

Another distortion. Sometimes, as Marx said, personalities are important 
as personifications of class (or class fraction) interest. You and I 
both find value in that sort of shorthand, no? I thought she handled the 
Goolsbee/Furman characters, in a few words, with nuance.

> Without any popular movement to discipline him, Obama's would govern 
> as a Rubinesque neoliberal.

Isn't that her point? Why not unite, rather than kvetch? And Max, what's 
your apparently malevolent agenda here, comrade? Y'all are sounding like 
jealous bullies.


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