Improvisation

One wouldn't expect this, but economists have a habit of speaking confidently when they are really just improvising, thinking through a theory or ideological theory, even worse, and then having the balls to convince a government to let them try it out.

Reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, especially now, especially living in a post-Bush world with the consequences of a Bush presidency, we should be a bit skeptical about the decisions being made here, at the G 20 Summit that just closed in London, and inside the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. We have to get smarter about economics and money.

Economists like Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel Prize in 1976, was the expert helping the infamous, brutal war criminal General Pinochet "transform" Chile into a radical free market state. President Salvador Allende was assassinated during a military coup that was in large part orchestrated by Nixon-Kissinger to assure that the natural resources of the country would not fall back into the hands of the people who owned them. Then in came Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" to destroy the safety net, the middle class, the trade union movement, and spread poverty while dividing up those rich natural resources among multinational corporations.

And Jeffrey Sachs, the guru of Bono now and a big name in international aid, was once the economist who helped Bolivia achieve the same rape of its people, although a bit less brutally than Chile, and who was responsible for leading post-Apartheid South Africa away from a socialized state with redistribution of wealth as a means of reparations to those Africans who had suffered so under colonialism, and into a give away that assured that South Africans, the dark skinned ones, would remain poor and in shantytowns. Unemployment rates are higher there now than ever before.

In America we look to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as somehow benevolent institutions because up to now we have always controlled them, but that isn't how they are seen by developing nations. So these agreements that came out of the G 20 Summit in London should be viewed skeptically. We are watching a bailout that is destroying the middle and working classes in our own country, destroying the safety net and trade unions, while pouring money into the banks and investment houses. And we see some of the same economists in the background. Once again Larry Summers is right there. Read about him and then wonder if he should have the ear of the President. Now it's been disclosed just how much money he made spekaing with the same companies he is trying to rescue. Why is Paul Krugman so critical of Obama's decisions? Krugman is another Nobel winner for economics.

Essentially no one knows what they are doing! It's all improvisation.