Naomi Klein was a guest on The Rachel Maddow Show talking about her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism , and how it relates the our current economic situation and the bailout.
For a bit of background, her book is about how corporate interests take advantage of crisis situations to get people to do things the otherwise wouldn’t do. For instance, after a tsunami what was once a fishing village should now become a private beach for a resort to help get us through this crisis! Oh yeah, maybe the owners of the resort are helped a little more than others, but never you mind.
Naomi notes that the bailout is the largest transfer of pulic wealth to private companies ever. She says, it does appear to be working somewhat, but the problems on Wall Street are not being solved. Basically, to follow the theme of her book, the rich are being bailed out first and foremost.
Naomi is sending a bit of a mixed message because she’s amazed at the size of the bailout and saying that we citizens are going to feel ripped off. But she also says the bailout needs to be three time as large and the money needs to be spent on more stimulative items. I can kind of see a the overlap there, but still, I think she needs to hone her point.
She also suggests in some ways that this is bad because this type of situation has led to banks being nationalized in the past. But then she says the banks need to be aligned with the needs of the people more. Wait, it’s bad for banks to not be capitalistic, but they should be more concerned with the needs of the people than profit? Which is it?
She’s a great example of a person who throws out a lot of buzz words but really isn’t able to communicate any sort of a clear message.