Naomi Klein: Public Revolt Builds Against Rip-off Rescue Plans for the Economy

By Naomi Klein, The Nation. Posted February 6, 2009.

Governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with the same bad ideas will not survive to tell the tale.

Watching the crowds in Iceland banging pots and pans until their government fell reminded me of a chant popular in anti-capitalist circles in 2002: "You are Enron. We are Argentina."

Its message was simple enough. You--politicians and CEOs huddled at some trade summit--are like the reckless scamming execs at Enron (of course, we didn't know the half of it). We--the rabble outside--are like the people of Argentina, who, in the midst of an economic crisis eerily similar to our own, took to the street banging pots and pans. They shouted, "¡Que se vayan todos!" ("All of them must go!") and forced out a procession of four presidents in less than three weeks. What made Argentina's 2001-02 uprising unique was that it wasn't directed at a particular political party or even at corruption in the abstract. The target was the dominant economic model--this was the first national revolt against contemporary deregulated capitalism.

It's taken a while, but from Iceland to Latvia, South Korea to Greece, the rest of the world is finally having its ¡Que se vayan todos! moment.

Read on...

It would be nice to think that relatively non-violent protest can affect governments in these days of taser and laser crowd control. But I'm not convinced that Harper's or Obama's stimulus bailouts aren't mired in free-market ideology. The banks are bankrupt. Bank of America and Citibank market caps are miniscule but they are being given bailout money manytimes their market cap. Why? Governments just aren't ready to admit that the banks need to be nationalized. And many bankers need to be charged with fraud. Tom

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