A fear of disaster capitalism: My comment to the New York Times

Here's a passage from a story in the New York Times:

"Mr. Obama, who has largely been secluded from public view since being elected three weeks ago as the 44th president, is taking steps to be more visible in the next phase of his transition. He is scheduled Tuesday to name his budget director, Peter R. Orszag, who held the job under President Bill Clinton, and is expected to outline new budget reforms that will call on Americans to make sacrifices." (emphasis mine)

And then this passage:

"Mr. Obama noted that he still intended to pursue a middle-class tax cut. “The very wealthiest among us,” he said, “will pay a little bit more in order for us to be able to invest in the economy and get it back on track.”

And now the background:
This story is about Obama's economic proposals to get the U.S. economy market going, and the members of his economic team. Great, fine, whatever.

Okay, here's my problem. I've been reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine- it's wonderful and provocative. It connects the dots- something mainstream journalism rarely ever does- between Friedman free-market policies and the atrocities the U.S. has been involved with around the world. In short, she shows how the implementation of so-called free market policies around the world, that is, the privatization and denationalization of markets and commodities, is intimately connected to violence.

In fact, she argues, free market policies rely on the a "shock" doctrine to unsettle and erase a population's reliance on Keynesian economic policies. The startling realization I had while reading this is our "work" in Iraq identically matches the work done in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and other countries around the world where interventionist American foreign policy, either covert or in public, overthrew democratically-elected governments (Salvador Allende, for instance) to implement through violence free market policies. These policies strip government funding from social services, increase interest rates to control inflation, but entail atrocious violence to control populations and result in massive poverty. This is a fact. This is neoliberalism. This is the free market that Bush has been touting the past few days to "calm" the markets.

Here's my concern with the New York Times article, and really, even though these are just excerpts, they are not taken out of context. I've been nervous about just who Obama will appoint to his economic team. I'm worried he will appoint devout neoliberals (a.k.a. neoconservatives) to his cabinet. He sorta has. But the line where the Times writers state that he is asking Americans, broadly speaking, to make sacrifices really got me worried.

And then, the next quote, where Obama clearly states that only the wealthiest will have their taxes raised. This is my problem, and it may seem minor: the conflation of the general American public with the wealthiest overall by discursively connecting all Americans, as in the first quote, with the wealthiest, as in Obama's quote. This functions to diminish the actual economic anxieties and realities of those of us who do not make millions of dollars a year. Moreover, it masks the discrepancies that exist between the rich and the poor, or that there even is a discrepancy.

Media scholars have shown, and the world's unreal expectations of what life is like in America- that we all drive nice cars and have gads of money, that there are material consequences to rhetoric like this in the news. People understand the world increasingly through representations in the media, and in this instance, a number of things may occur: policy makers may underestimate the need for truly "bold" economic policies that the Bush administration and other Republicans would NEVER dream of putting into place, the circumstances of the poor and struggling are underestimated and diminished- relegated to, "it's their own fault"- by such stories.

But, on another note, to connect to Klein's work, I do worry that we may not see progressive economic policies from the Obama administration but something else. Larry Summers was President Clinton's Treasury Secretary, and the Clintons are not Keynesians, for sure. I like his ideas so far...but we'll see. It's too early to tell.