What does this say about the disparity between rich and poor, considering it occurred on two of the arguably worst days for global finance in the last decade?
Buy dead animals encased in tanks of formaldehyde. How this passes for art and why anyone would pay well in excess of hundreds of thousands dollars for such art is beyond me. I think it is gross arrogance and tastelessness that enable folk to purchase this morbid art. It has no meaningful or significant value. It doesn’t inspire or inform.
It does not take a master statistician to prove far beyond a shadow of a doubt that the divide between the rich and poor grew tremendously as time progressed. The global working and middle classes have been under constant assault by greedy, self interested governments and corporations for decades. This past week, decades of financial greed and waste culminated in the near breaking of the global economic system. The situation was so dire that the free marketing cheerleaders of the Bush Administration had to provide corporate welfare to near dead finciaial companies. The government justified the bailout with the notion that these corporations were “too big to fall” and could have plunged us into another Depression type situation. While I do not want the nation and world to experience a global depression, the impression of the government bailing out these financial services companies is quite disturbing.
As I continue to watch, read and listen to coverage of the financial crisis, I cannot help but think of Naomi Klein’s excellent book, The Shock Doctrine. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein debunks romanticism of free market capitalism. Her thesis is that in order for unregulated capitalism to flourish, society must experience some sort of shock to accept the new economic order. Shocks include coups, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, subversion of civil/human rights and most importantly, privatizing government services and assets which shifts public money into private hands. The idea is to establish a clean slate to build a free market utopia. Typically, before arriving at this blissful economic state, union leaders and critics are disappeared, food and fuel cost rise exponentially overnight and the middle class dies with one striking blow to its pocketbook.
For some reason, I see this massive bailout as a shock or series of shocks, if you include 9/11, Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from the Bush Administration. I would not place all the blame on the Bush Administration because this result was a long time coming, but the administration’s behavior did nothing to change the existing order. We are being told by an administration that privatized important government functions such as waging war, collecting and analyzing intelligence that American taxpayers must cut a $700 billion welfare check to companies that profited from the deregulated system responsible for this mess.
What is to come of this shock? I wish I knew. Even the goddess herself Naomi Klein doesn’t know for certain and neither do Congress, the Sectary of Treasury or Wall Street insiders (perhaps they do and this is just another propaganda campaign to do some insidious shit). Funny that Bush and Paulson are against providing aid to Americans on the short end of the economic stick (myself included). Socialism for the elites, and a GO FUCK YOURSELF to us peons of the lower classes.
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