Meanwhile, in Idaho, the state legislature
has given final approval to a measure restricting the collective
bargaining of public school teachers. The bill would limit teachers’
collective bargaining to salaries and benefits. It also ends teacher
tenure, limits teacher contracts to one year, and removes seniority as a
factor in determining layoffs.
As a wave of anti-union bills are
introduced across the country in the wake of the Great Recession, many
analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and
author Naomi Klein first argued in her bestselling book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
In it, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push
through undemocratic, radical, free market economic policies.
Nobel Prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, recently referenced the book in his column
called "Shock Doctrine, U.S.A." He wrote, quote, "The story of the
privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority [in Iraq] was the
centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book 'The Shock Doctrine,'
which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the
1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises
to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those
crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher,
more unequal, less democratic society.
"Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display," Krugman wrote.
Well, Naomi Klein joins us today in our studio for the hour. In addition to The Shock Doctrine, she’s the author of two previous books: No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies and Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. She’s currently writing a new book which focuses on the public relations campaign distorting climate change facts.
Naomi Klein, welcome to Democracy Now!
NAOMI KLEIN: Hi, Amy. Great to see you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Let’s talk Wisconsin. What do you see is happening in this uprising?
NAOMI KLEIN:
Well, first of all, it’s such an incredible example of how to resist
the shock doctrine. And it should not be in any way surprising that we
are seeing right-wing ideologues across the country using economic
crisis as a pretext to really wage a kind of a final battle in a 50-year
war against trade unions, where we’ve seen membership in trade unions
drop precipitously. And public sector unions are the last labor
stronghold, and they’re going after it. And these governors did not run
elections promising to do these radical actions, but they are using the
pretext of crisis to do things that they couldn’t get elected promising
to do.
And, you know, that’s the core argument of and the thesis
of the book, is not that there’s something wrong with responding to a
crisis decisively. Crises demand decisive responses. The issue is this
backhanded attempt to use a crisis to centralize power, to subvert
democracy, to avoid public debate, to say, "We have no time for
democracy. It’s just too messy. It doesn’t matter what you want. We have
no choice. We just have to ram it through." And we’re seeing this in 16
states. I mean, it’s impossible to keep track of it. It’s happening on
such a huge scale.
Teachers’ unions are getting the worst of it.
Yesterday was International Women’s Day. This is—you know, as you
pointed out on your show, it’s overwhelmingly women who are providing
the services that are under attack. It’s not just labor that’s under
attack; it’s the services that the labor is providing that’s under
attack: it’s healthcare, it’s education, it’s those fundamental
care-giving services across the country, which could be profitable if
they were privatized.
AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio, more
than 20,000 people marched to oppose the Republican Governor John
Kasich’s attempted anti-union legislative putsch. Kasich recently
defended his policy proposals on Fox & Friends.
GOV. JOHN KASICH:
It’s part of a big piece of reform. Come March the 15th, we will be
reforming Medicaid, K-through-12, higher ed, prisons. It is going to be a
reform agenda in Ohio like no one has ever seen, all designed to get us
in a good position. In terms of unions? I respect unions. I come from a
union family. I mean, the idea that we’re attacking anybody is—look,
what we’re attacking: poverty, joblessness. OK, that’s what I’m
attacking. And all I’m doing is saying to everybody, participate.
Everybody jump in this. Together, we can make Ohio stronger. If we do
not do that, you know, then we’ll continue to lose jobs, and that means
misery for everybody. That’s not going to happen. We are going to be
successful here.
AMY GOODMAN:
Republican Governor John Kasich, going back to his old haunt. He was a
commentator for a long time for Fox and, before that, a conservative
congressman.
NAOMI KLEIN: You know, the reason
why this isn’t working and why people are so outraged by it and why
they’re in the streets and we’re finally seeing the resistance in this
country that we have seen in Europe, with this chant, "We won’t pay for
your crisis," that really started in 2008 in Greece and spread to Italy
and France and England—and, you know, the rest of the world has been
waiting for the United States to—you know, how much are Americans going
to take of this? It seems that Americans were willing to say, you know,
"We will pay for your crisis, and would you like a tax break with that?"
Right? And finally, they went too far. And so, that resistance is
finally happening.
And this attack on collective bargaining, the
reason why people won’t take it is precisely because they understand
that this is not shared pain. It is not being shared equally. The people
who created the crisis in the first place are not sharing the pain. And
the injustice of this response is so blatant. This isn’t just any
economic crisis. This tactic has worked. And this is, you know, what
I’ve tracked over a 30-year period, that it is really easy to use an
economic crisis—people panic, hyperinflation, issues like that. In the
'90s, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker, it was possible for him to argue
that the source of the budget crisis really was so-called entitlement
programs. You cannot do that in this moment in history because everybody
understands that the crisis was created on Wall Street, it was created
through speculation and greed, and a decision was made to bail out the
bankers with public money and to pass the bill on to the public. And
they're seeing the bonuses back. They’re seeing the outrageous salaries.
They’re seeing corporations not paying their taxes. And it’s just too
unjust. It’s just so morally outrageous. And then to turn on the
television and talk about everybody sharing the pain? I mean, people are
just not that stupid. Thankfully.
AMY GOODMAN: And where does the Obama administration fit into this?
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN:
We have played that clip of President Obama when he was running for
president, saying, "If anyone challenges your collective union rights, I
will be walking with you."
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.
Well, I mean, this is the irony of this moment, and this is—it really is
about democracies. Scott Walker was not elected with a mandate to bust
unions and to strip collective bargaining rights. He did not mention
that in his campaign. He talked about balancing the budget. He made some
vague statements, you know, about shared sacrifice. But he absolutely
did not campaign promising to do what he is now doing. Obama, on the
other hand, campaigned promising to strengthen union rights. He
promised, again and again, whenever he had a labor audience, that he was
going to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and he promised to stand
with them.
And, you know, one of the things that’s so important
for us to understand about why—you know, there are many reasons why the
resistance is so strong in Wisconsin and why they’ve become this beacon
for not just the rest of the country, but the world, and so much of it, I
think—you know, my colleague at The Nation, John Nichols, has
written beautifully about it this week in a cover story where he talks
about the rich sense of collective history, of collective memory, and
the fact that people know their progressive history in Wisconsin, so
they’re harder to exploit. You know, they’re not going to fall for the
latest Fox News messaging, because they know their history. But, you
know, this is—there’s something else that’s going on here. And, well, I
mean, I’ll just let you take it from there.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask you about Michigan.
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And then we’re going to go to a break.
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: About a thousand people rallied in Michigan—
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN:—reminiscent of Wisconsin. Talk about the proposal there.
NAOMI KLEIN:
Well, I just found out about this last night, and like I said, there’s
so much going on that these extraordinary measures are just getting lost
in the shuffle. But in Michigan, there is a bill that’s already passed
the House. It’s on the verge of passing the Senate. And I’ll just read
you some excerpts from it. It says that in the case of an economic
crisis, that the governor has the authority to authorize the emergency
manager—this is somebody who would be appointed—to reject, modify or
terminate the terms of an existing contract or collective bargaining
agreement, authorize the emergency manager for a municipal
government—OK, so we’re not—we’re talking about towns, municipalities
across the state—to disincorporate. So, an appointed official with the
ability to dissolve an elected body, when they want to.
AMY GOODMAN: A municipal government.
NAOMI KLEIN:
A municipal government. And it says specifically, "or dissolve the
municipal government." So we’ve seen this happening with school boards,
saying, "OK, this is a failing school board. We’re taking over. We’re
dissolving it. We’re canceling the contracts." You know, what this
reminds me of is New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when the teachers
were fired en masse and then it became a laboratory for charter
schools. You know, people in New Orleans—and you know this, Amy—warned
us. They said, "What’s happening to us is going to happen to you." And I
included in the book a quote saying, "Every city has their Lower Ninth
Ward." And what we’re seeing with the pretext of the flood is going to
be used with the pretext of an economic crisis. And this is precisely
what’s happening. So it starts with the school boards, and then it’s
whole towns, whole cities, that could be subject to just being dissolved
because there’s an economic crisis breaking collective bargaining
agreements. It also specifies that—this bill specifies that an emergency
manager can be an individual or a firm. Or a firm. So, the person who
would be put in charge of this so-called failing town or municipality
could actually be a corporation.
AMY GOODMAN: Whose government they dissolve, a company takes over.
NAOMI KLEIN:
A company takes over. So, they have created, if this passes, the
possibility for privatization of a whole town by fiat. And this is
actually a trend in the contracting out of public services, where you do
now have whole towns, like Sandy Springs in Georgia, run by private
companies. It’s very lucrative. Why not? You start with just the water
contract or the electricity contract, but eventually, why not privatize
the whole town? So—
AMY GOODMAN: And what happens then? Where does democracy fit into that picture?
NAOMI KLEIN:
Well, this is an assault on democracy. It’s a frontal assault on
democracy. It’s a kind of a corporate coup d’état at the municipal
level.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Naomi Klein—yes, the journalist and author. Her latest book is called Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
You can go to our Facebook page, and you can post questions there for
her and just continue to participate in the dialogue. Let me ask you a
question that came to us from Facebook. This is a question about the
Madison protest for you, posted on our Facebook page. Kevin
Williams—Kelvin Williams asks, "Are there any specific ways that
Wisconsin workers can use the ideas in [your book] 'The Shock Doctrine'
to go on the offensive and force true fiscal responsibility, perhaps
even rolling back the compromise contract?"
NAOMI KLEIN:
Mm-hmm. It’s a great question. I think what’s finally starting to
happen, and this is—Wisconsin has really been going from one victory
after another. This started off with an attack, but people have
been—have just found such incredible reserves of resolve and dignity and
collective history that the ground is shifting. So, the situation under
which those compromises were made, those concessions were made, it’s
changed. You know, people are feeling their power and their possibility.
AMY GOODMAN:
I mean, it’s amazing now. The Governor, who was just elected, Scott
Walker, a few months ago, is now—his popularity has dipped to the 30s.
NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: And even the conservative newspapers are asking serious questions.
NAOMI KLEIN:
Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean, he clearly made a real miscalculation. I mean,
what was obvious is that he was really playing to the national stage.
He’s clearly a very ambitious guy. He’s got real national political
aspirations. I think that’s clear. You know, in that conversation with
fake David Koch, the prank call, he compares himself to Reagan. He
compares his actions to Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers,
that sort of "shot heard around the world" moment. That’s what he
wanted, you know? And he is not getting that.
AMY GOODMAN: And then he said, first he fired the PATCO strikers, and then the Berlin Wall came down. He made that link.
NAOMI KLEIN:
He said it. And it’s not a crazy link, in the sense that it was part of
a frontal assault on labor and the left, and it continued for many,
many years. But, you know, it’s not the ’80s anymore, and people are on
to these tactics.
And I do think—you know, just coming back to
that question—that it is possible. But the real key is that we have to
be having the debate about where the money should be coming from. I
mean, if there is a fiscal crisis—and in Wisconsin, there’s a crisis
that was created by tax cuts, and this is why there’s so much outrage,
because it comes back to that false claim that there’s shared sacrifice
here. There isn’t shared sacrifice here. There are gifts that are being
handed out to the elites. Scott Walker is governing based on this
radical free market ideology that if we just create the perfect, most
hospitable, most gentle, less demanding conditions for corporations to
do business, then we’ll have a booming economy, and it will trickle
down, and everyone will benefit. And that is exactly the ideology that
Obama campaigned against—and won—saying we can’t keep giving more and
more to the people at the top and waiting for it to trickle down. And
that was a message that really resonated with voters.
One thing I
wanted to come back to that I was starting to get at earlier about why
what’s happening in Wisconsin is happening in Wisconsin and what we need
to take from it is that when bad things are happening, it’s helpful to
have a bad guy. And Scott Walker is a good bad guy. And he has
galvanized progressives. And people have, you know, an enemy to organize
around and to point out these disparities. It hasn’t happened at the
federal level, despite the fact that Obama is also involved in attacking
labor rights with his pushing of charter schools and draconian budget
cuts. He’s not a good bad guy for progressives. So, we’re still in a
situation where Obama is getting away with, in my opinion, shock
doctrine-style tactics, because people don’t—still don’t want to believe
that Obama is doing it, too. So, when you have an easy bad guy, a
Republican governor who’s obviously trying to be the reincarnation of
Ronald Reagan, you can mobilize the left. But it won’t just work if we
are only going after the Republicans and if this is fought along just
partisan lines, as opposed to being fought based on principle. No matter
who is doing it, we need to be mobilizing, if it’s Obama, if it’s Scott
Walker.
AMY GOODMAN: And the people that
President Obama surrounds himself with, especially when it comes to the
Wall Street insiders, especially as we move into the 2012 election, when
it’s said Obama will raise more than a billion dollars for the
presidential election?
NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm. Yeah,
I mean, there’s a lot of denial, still, about who Obama is and who he
surrounds himself with. And, you know, we’re going to talk a little bit
later about Tim DeChristopher, but I’ve said it many times: Obama is
fundamentally a centrist. And I do think that when there is a mobilized
progressive movement in the United States that is putting pressure on
him, on Democrats in Congress, they will respond.
And that’s
another lesson that we can take from Wisconsin. You know, I was talking,
once again, to John Nichols the other day, and he said, "What’s really
working here is that we have the inside-outside pincer." Right? You’ve
got people in the streets, but you also have Democrat—Democratic
lawmakers willing to put themselves on the line, being surprisingly
courageous, leaving the state, and blocking it. So it isn’t just the
people in the Rotunda. It isn’t just the protesters at the rally. It’s a
kind of a partnership that’s going on. Why is that happening? Well,
they looked out the window, and they saw their voters in the streets
really committed and really mobilized, and that gave them courage.
And
that’s something really important to remember about how—you know, so
many liberal groups are involved in this gentle backroom lobbying, a
token protest here and there, which says, "I’m willing to spend a couple
of hours on a Saturday, but I’m not really willing to fight to win."
And what’s going on in Wisconsin is something very different. It’s not
just a rally on a Saturday afternoon. It is people really upending their
lives for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. That sends a message to
politicians who want to get re-elected that this is a big issue, a top
priority. And they hear that.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, as we turn now to Tim DeChristopher.