Naomi Klein on: 'Shock Doctrine' and Greenspan

{Updated 9/30}

Naomi Kleins' book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is nothing if not controversial. So is Klein. Commentary surrounding Klein's book is raising important questions as to what effect activist economists have on politics. Those familiar with Robert Heilbroner's works, e.g. The Worldly Philosophers, Behind the Veil of Economics already know well what impact the most well-known and powerful economists have on politics.

In The Shock Doctrine Klein takes on Milton Friedman and "the Chicago boys", blaming them for planting the seeds of so-called free-market capitalism in the minds of disciples, paving the way for alleged "crony capitalism" that followed. William Grieder's appraisal of Friedman is also damning. So is Joseph Stiglitz's, in his "Bleakonomics" review of Klein's The Shock Doctrine. Here's Alexander Cockburn's review , which views Friedman in a slightly less evil light. Yesterday, Klein took on Alan Greenspan:

Greenspan and the Myth of the True Believer, Naomi Klein, The Nation,Sept. 27: … Since I began touring with my book The Shock Doctrine, I have had a number of exchanges like this, revolving around the same basic question: When hard-right political leaders and their advisers apply brutal economic shock therapy, do they honestly believe the trickle-down effects will build equitable societies--or are they just deliberately creating the conditions for yet another corporate feeding frenzy? Put bluntly, Has the world been transformed over the past three decades by lofty ideology or by lowly greed?

A definitive answer would require reading the minds of men like Dick Cheney and Paul Bremer, so I tend to dodge. The ideology in question holds that self-interest is the engine that drives society to its greatest heights. Isn't pursuing their own self-interest (and that of their campaign donors) compatible with that philosophy? That's the beauty: They don't have to choose. Unfortunately, this rarely satisfies graduate students looking for deeper meaning. Thankfully I now have a new escape hatch: quoting Alan Greenspan.

His autobiography, The Age of Turbulence, has been marketed as a mystery solved: The man who bit his tongue for eighteen years as head of the Federal Reserve was finally going to tell the world what he really believed. And Greenspan has delivered, using his book and the surrounding publicity as a platform for his "libertarian Republican" ideology, chiding George W. Bush for abandoning the crusade for small government and revealing that he became a policy-maker because he thought he could advance his radical ideology more effectively "as an insider, rather than as a critical pamphleteer" on the margins. Yet what is most interesting about Greenspan's story is what it reveals about the ambiguous role of ideas in the free-market crusade. Given that Greenspan is perhaps the world's most powerful living free-market ideologue, it is significant that his commitment to ideology seems rather thin and perfunctory--less zealous belief, more convenient cover story.

Much of the debate around Greenspan's legacy has revolved around the matter of hypocrisy, of a man preaching laissez-faire who repeatedly intervened in the market to save the wealthiest players. The economy that is Greenspan's legacy hardly fits the definition of a libertarian market but looks very much like another phenomenon described in his book: "When a government's leaders routinely seek out private-sector individuals or businesses and, in exchange for political support, bestow favors on them, the society is said to be in the grip of 'crony capitalism.'" He was talking about Indonesia under Suharto, but my mind went straight to Iraq under Halliburton. Greenspan is currently warning the world about a dangerous looming backlash against capitalism. Apparently, this has nothing at all to do with the policies of negligent deregulation that were his trademark. Nothing to do with stagnant wages due to free trade and weakened unions, nor with pensions lost to Enron or the dot-com crash, or homes seized in the subprime mortgage crisis. According to Greenspan, rampant inequality is caused by lousy high schools (which also has nothing to do with his ideology's war on the public sphere). I debated Greenspan on Democracy Now! recently and was stunned that this man who preaches the doctrine of personal responsibility refuses to take any at all.

Yet ideological contradictions are only relevant if Greenspan really is a true believer. I'm not convinced. Greenspan writes that as a student he had no interest in big ideas. Unlike his classmates who were in the thrall of Keynesianism with its promise of building a better world, Greenspan was simply good at math. He started doing research for powerful corporations; it was profitable, but Greenspan made no claims to a higher social contribution.

Then he discovered Ayn Rand. "What she did…was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral," he said in 1974.

Rand's ideas about the "utopia of greed" allowed Greenspan to keep doing what he was doing but infused his corporate service with a powerful new sense of mission: Making money wasn't just good for him; it was good for society as a whole. Of course, the flip side of this is the cruel disregard for those left behind. "Undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment," Greenspan wrote as a zealous new convert. "Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should." Was it this mindset that served him well as he supported shock therapy in Russia (72 million impoverished) and in East Asia after the 1997 economic crisis (24 million pushed into unemployment)?

Rand has played this role of greed-enabler for countless disciples. According to the New York Times, Atlas Shrugged, her novel that ends with the hero tracing a dollar sign in the air like a benediction, stands as "one of the most influential business books ever written." Since Rand is simply pulped-up Adam Smith, her influence on men like Greenspan suggests an interesting possibility. Perhaps the true purpose of the entire literature of trickle-down theory is to liberate entrepreneurs to pursue their narrowest advantage while claiming global altruistic motives--not so much an economic philosophy as an elaborate, retroactive rationale.

What Greenspan teaches us is that trickle-down isn't really an ideology after all. It's more like the friend we call after some embarrassing excess so that they will tell us, "Don't beat yourself up: You deserve it."

For more Shock Doctrine (and commentary) see:

The Guardian, Shock Doctrine minisite

Joseph Stiglitz's NY Times review, "Bleakonomics",Sept 30:

… Some readers may see Klein's findings as evidence of a giant conspiracy, a conclusion she explicitly disavows. It’s not the conspiracies that wreck the world but the series of wrong turns, failed policies, and little and big unfairnesses that add up. Still, those decisions are guided by larger mind-sets. Market fundamentalists never really appreciated the institutions required to make an economy function well, let alone the broader social fabric that civilizations require to prosper and flourish. Klein ends on a hopeful note, describing nongovernmental organizations and activists around the world who are trying to make a difference. After 500 pages of "The Shock Doctrine," it's clear they have their work cut out for them.

Comments

[Ray Tapajna]

We do not need any conspiracy theories to know Free Trade and Globalization did not evolve in any natural economic fashion. They were driven by powerful forces outside the will of the people. It is also obvious that workers had no voice in the process.
Free Trade was re-defined to include the moving of factories and production outside the USA. Historically Free Trade and all trade was based on trading products and not using human beings as workers as the main commodities.

We are in the age of branding and images. Greenspan sold Greenspan. In 1968 or so we wrote that gold should be the standard behind money. Fourty years later, he said his paper money imitated the gold standard.

In his book The Age of Turbulence, I found no mention of the Free Enterprise systems nor was it in the index. It seems strange but more strange is the fact that the Free Market stops at the door of the Federal Reserve Bank. It is private master bank of banks but does not allow the Free Market past its doors.

On our site, we were going to review Greenspan's book The Age of Turbulence in just one page or two but find ourselves continuing into several pages of articles. We found we had our destiny woven into this although we come from two different worlds.
See http://www.bizarrepolitics.com/greenspan-from-the-trenches
http://www.bizarrepolitics.com/greenspan-dancing-in-the-dark
http://www.bizarrepolitcs.com/confessions-for-history At the site you will find more. See Greenspan Orchestra without Drums and Greenspan Economic Gymnastics. In his book, Greenspan tells us that billions were spent in the Y2k crisis and then he tells us what a wonderful economy we had during the Clinton's years never connecting the Y2k problems with the economy.
Billions of dollars were spent to correct the problems and artificially boosted the economy.
Greenspan does not tell us what caused the Y2k crisis either.
He does not talk about more than a million workers in the computer industry losing their jobs. For almost a decade, computer systems lack good housekeeping because of the vast lost of jobs.
It should also be noted that more than 4,000 U.S. factories were moved to Mexico during Greenspan term in office. Greenspan did not trust human nature. He put greed on the altar of economics as something good.
( See also http://tapsearch.com/flatworld review of Thomas Friedman of the New York Times book - The World is Flat.