Historical antecedents:

The link between conspiracy theories and oppression is as old as racial conflict. Some early American slaves were convinced that their new owners were cannibals bringing them to the New World to eat their flesh. In Washington in the nineteen-eighties, there was often talk in poorer black communities about The Plan. This was a belief that the “white power structure” had a secret scheme to inexorably move the black population out of the District. Similarly, in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the “higher powers” of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was “the silver-lining scenario.”

The best-known writer to come from the Ninth Ward is Kalamu ya Salaam. A poet, playwright, and civil-rights activist, Salaam used to go by the name of Val Ferdinand. When I told Salaam what I was hearing in New Iberia and Houston, he laughed, but not dismissively. He said, “The real question is why not?” He recalled that in 1927, in the midst of the worst flooding of the Mississippi River in recorded history, the white city fathers of New Orleans—the men of the Louisiana Club, the Boston Club, and the Pickwick Club—won permission from the federal government to dynamite the Caernarvon levee, downriver from the city, to keep their interests dry. But destroying the levee also insured that the surrounding poorer St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes would flood. Thousands of the trappers who lived there lost their homes and their livelihoods. The promise of compensation was never fulfilled. That, plus the persistent rumors of what may or may not have happened during Hurricane Betsy, Salaam said, has had a lingering effect. “So when I heard on TV that there was a breach at the Seventeenth Street levee, I figured they’d done it again,” he said. “Or, let’s just say, I didn’t automatically assume that it was accidental.”

The genius of the Conservative Movement has been not to wait for disaster, but to create it--and profit from it. As we shall see.

We're all niggers now, eh?

* * *
For you CTers out there, and those of you who are merely foily, what you are about to read connects the dots better than anything I've read yet (via the utterly essential and lingerifique Avedon, the Goddess-like being who puts the aggravation in aggregation). Jane Smiley reviews Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine (which I must read at once), and summarizes Klein's thesis.* I'm going to fair-use a lot of it here:

In the fifties and sixties in the US, at least two lines of thought converged. One was about how to change people's minds without leaving marks and the other was about what was the best way of organizing a given economy. The first grew out of experiments in psychological torture (whoops, I mean electrocshock therapy) run by Ewen Cameron in the late 1940s. ... Cameron used both electroshock and powerful drugs to attain his clean slate, having no actual knowledge of the chemistry of the brain or how it works -- in other words, he was operating in accordance with a metaphor. ... In the 1950s, the CIA redirected these techniques toward torture of political opponents, allegedly to find out information, but really to test the techniques themselves (hello, Jose Padilla!).

And hello all the "We do not torture" rationalizations the elves in Cheney's dank basement have come up with.

And the second line of thought:

At the same time, Milton Friedman was coming up with the idea that if only an economy could be purified of any kind of restraints on the free market (for example labor unions or socialized medicine or history), then the free market would be able to perfectly gauge the value of any type of good or service, and therefore an economy would balance itself, and, most importantly, inflation would be controlled (also, as you can see, a metaphor, or, perhaps, an extended analogy).

According to Klein, it soon became apparent that all powerful shocks to a system had a similar effect, whether the system was a human body or a national body, and this was to temporarily disable the system's defenses. The US government, the CIA, and the free market economists began to act on this insight, to collude in larger experiments. The first of these was the right wing coup, in Chile, led by Augusto Pinochet, in 1973.

These are, of course, "experiments" without informed consent, and so they are as unethical as they can possibly be.

The Shock Doctrine traces what the US, the CIA, the economists, the Neocons, and the multinational corporations learned from the Chilean experiment and subsequent ones (Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Poland, Russia, China, England) and finally makes its way to Iraq ... .

We face a thinking enemy, don't we? An enemy that adapts.

Essentially, they learned that a small economy is easier to "regress" than a large one, that the shock has to be brutal, and that the free market doesn't work as Friedman said it would (automatically assigning appropriate value), but that it sure does make a few people rich beyond their wildest dreams, and that these people were Friedman's (and his students') benefactors and paymasters. They also learned to lie lie lie in order to sell what amounts to a program of inhuman greed to voters who have other needs, wishes, and ideas.

So, I'd say the Iraq War (and a piece of good luck that worked out very well for them, Katrina) is a brutal shock. Wouldn't you? Not to mention global warming, the biggest shock of all.

And now the lies are catching up with them. It's as if all the good will ("soft power") that's on the balance sheets of our ruling class is evaporating. And that, my friends, would explain the moves Bush is making to federalize the national guard, eliminate Constitutional protections, implement satellite surveillance of the United States, force RealID down our throats, and so on.

Because you know what the flip side of greed is, don't you?

Of course you do.

It's fear. Their fear.**

[Klein] traveled in the first year after the invasion, and this section forms part of her series of posts at the Guardian. She believes that the Iraq War was intended to not only steal Iraqi oil, but also to impose a radical free market on an unwilling populace...

Interesting: The grand unified theory of the Conservative Ascendancy reveals the common factors in the Iraq and Katrina Clusterfucks.

... and that that was what was behind the installation of Bremer as the capo of Iraqi reconstruction. She believes that, thanks to the resistance of the Iraqis and their deep resentment at being used and exploited by the Americans, this effort has failed. However, a parallel effort, to shock the US economy into absolute deregulation, privatization, and an end to social spending, has been and is succeeding. What this amounts to is the fleecing of the American taxpayer in order to enrich the war making industries. The byproduct, as in Chile, is the gutting of the rule of law and the American political system as we have known it. Why did Bush and Cheney go to war? Well, where do they get their fortunes? The Shock Doctrine works perfectly for them.

Yes, as Babs said: It's worked out very well for them.

As for that 45% below the poverty line, well, once the globalizing manufacturers exported the well-paying US jobs, then the globalizing financiers moved in and sold the newly impoverished working class a few sub-prime mortgages guaranteed to take whatever else they had. Then the financiers screamed for a bailout, and Bernanke gave it to them. The free market, you might say, is working perfectly now, at least according to its shock principles.

Thanks to Kelley, we've been using the slogan "chaos is the plan" for awhile. And accurately so, it would seem.

Looks like when I picked Fire on the Mountain for Lo-Fi blogging, I was making a choice that was more appropriate than I knew...

The book site.

NOTE **How on earth markets driven by greed and fear can be characterized as rational is beyond me, but since a Professor says it...

UPDATE YouTubes.

The guardian site.