Posts by Alexander Zaitchik

Alexander Zaitchik is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

Is Reason Magazine Afraid of Naomi Klein's Book?
Posted by Alexander Zaitchik, The eXile on November 19, 2007 at 1:00 PM.

This post, written by Alexander Zaitchik, originally appeared on The Exile

"So who's reviewing Naomi Klein's searing indictment of that bloodthirsty scoundrel Milton Friedman? I read a few pages in the store, and it appears he was little more than a bookwormy Jim Jones."

This comment was posted on Reason magazine's blog by a reader identified as "SxCx" on September 13, around the time Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine, hit the shelves. I found the post earlier today, about five minutes after I finished the book. As soon as I closed it, I jumped on the computer and loaded reason.com. I couldn't wait to see how the world's best written and most combative libertarian publication responded to Klein's devastating critique of the idea that libertarian economics are synonymous with, or even compatible with, free societies. The book is 500+ pages, and there is a lot to respond to. Boiled down, The Shock Doctrine argues that the imposition of unpopular neoliberal economic reforms have always required "shocks"--coups, wars, terror campaigns, natural disasters--before they can be forced onto dazed and distracted publics. Rarely if ever, argues Klein, have radical free market policies--most closely associated with the career of Milton Friedman and his University of Chicago spawn--taken root in a democratic system in which the public was involved in, or even fully aware of, what was happening. Thus the grand neoliberal experiments have always taken place in places like Pinochet's Chile. Klein gives us lots of well-sourced case studies.

Whether you agree with her or not, Klein's book is a serious one, a monster shot across the bow of staunch Friedmanites like the ones at Reason, who maintain that free markets and free societies are peanut butter and jelly. In an extra dig at anti-war Friedmanites like the ones at Reason, Klein argues that today's neocons--bogeymen on par with Communists at the magazine--are really just Friedmanites with bombs; and pure Friedmanites are really just neocons who prefer others to drop the bombs for them while they discuss economics. It's a body slam alright, and I was really looking forward to Reason's blistering but reasoned 5,000-word response to Klein's book. I was even going to make some popcorn for the read.

But two months after SxCx posted the question--"So who's reviewing Naomi Klein's searing indictment of that bloodthirsty scoundrel Milton Friedman?"--the answer appears to be: No one.

The only mentions of Klein's book on the Reason site are a couple of easy dismissals by blogger Michael C. Moynihan. The first of these, posted September 19, calls Klein's intensively researched and tightly argued book a "screed," and says that anyone who still believes the old Friedman-Pinochet "chestnut" should read a year-old article by Reason's Brian Doherty on the subject of Friedman's "hardly-knew-the-guy" relationship with Pinochet and his brutal dictatorship.

But Klein has the goods on this old "chestnut." As she shows, Friedman and his Chicago Boys were not all that bothered by Pinochet's bloody rule. Quite the opposite, they recognized that their free market wet dream could never be realized in a functioning democracy and welcomed the opportunities opened up by the Chicago Boys-tutored dictatorships in Latin America's southern cone in the 1970s. In some cases Friedmantes worked with the coup plotters before they even came to power.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Too Little, Way Late, Mr. Kissinger
Posted by Alexander Zaitchik on January 5, 2007 at 4:12 PM.

In 1958, Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. The book argued that people should relax about the use of those newfangled hydrogen bombs, which didn't necessarily spell doom for humanity, let alone vast continental powers like the United States and the Soviet Union. Because manageable, limited nuclear war was possible, the nuclear option should be kept on the table during crises, argued Herr Professor. In certain cases, the nuclear option was preferable to a prolonged conventional war.

As in, say, the latter stages of the Vietnam War. Nixon and Kissinger famously and seriously contemplated using nukes against North Vietnam; "madman theory" hype aside, they really did think about it.

But there was the same Henry Kissinger -- who, together with Edward Teller, was one of the inspirations for Dr. Strangelove -- arguing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday for the abolition of nuclear weapons. The essay -- entitled "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons" and co-authored with George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn -- lays out a commonsense and urgent plan for American leadership to stop and reverse proliferation, with the ultimate goal of complete abolition. Fifty years after writing a sanguine book about thermonuclear charges being detonated over cities, Kissinger is worried that things have gotten out of hand.

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Jerry Falwell's War On Kwanzaa
Posted by Alexander Zaitchik on January 3, 2007 at 8:09 AM.

Yesterday marked the end of Kwanzaa, the annual weeklong celebration of Pan-African identity and culture that is (sort of) celebrated by the African Diaspora around the world. And all across America, people are asking: Is Kwanzaa getting too commercial?

Actually, not many people are asking that. Kwanzaa is and always has been a relatively low-profile legacy of the 1960s, when black was finally embraced as beautiful and African heritage was reclaimed and celebrated. But where most see a positive if manufactured holiday symbolized by snippets of communitarian philosophy and a menorah-looking thing, Jerry Falwell sees a Marxist plot to rot America from within and, yes, ruin our celebration of the baby Jesus. Even though nobody really thinks much about the holiday, Falwell is urging his army of followers to "rethink" Kwanzaa.

"Kwanzaa," explains Falwell in a recent letter to the Moral Majority Coalition, "is not as innocent as it appears on the surface."

Kwanzaa's creator, UC-Long Beach professor Ron Karenga, has a "very dubious history" dating back to his days in the radical UCLA student group United Slaves, explains Falwell. Partly because of Karenga's radical past, Falwell "cannot accept Kwanzaa as a legitimate American holiday."

"It is corrupt and wholly anti-American," he writes. "There is danger in it."

How much danger? According to the official Kwanzaa website, the holiday "reinforces associated values of truth, justice, propriety, harmony, balance, and reciprocity… It reminds us to hold to our ancient traditions as a people who are spiritually grounded, who respect our ancestors and elders, cherish and challenge our children, care for the vulnerable, relate rightfully to the environment and always seek and embrace the Good."

Sounds dangerous to me, Jerry. Right up there with a suitcase nuke. Thanks for the warning.

Castro Outlives Another American President
Posted by Alexander Zaitchik on December 27, 2006 at 11:26 AM.

Admire him or despise him, it's tempting to think Fidel Castro keeps a piece of polished Cuban Mahogany in his office with, as of yesterday, six marks on it -- one for each American president he has defied and survived, beginning with Dwight Eisenhower. Every president starting with Ike has presided over plots of various levels of nefariousness against Castro's Cuba, the most notorious being the Kennedy era's botched invasions, exploding clam plots and beard-melting conspiracies. But even the more benign U.S. administrations have maintained the embargo and participated in various other forms of economic subterfuge against the hemisphere's only socialist isle.

It has long been a parlor game guessing how many of his American nemeses Castro will bury before finally going to that great sugar-cane farm in the sky. Unless Jimmy Carter chokes on a peanut or Bill Clinton gets in bed with an athletic 22-year-old, the final number looks like it is going to be six.

As he nears his own death, one wonders if the newly God-fearing Castro doesn't find less satisfaction than he used to in the passing of an American President, especially this one. Gerald Ford once called Castro an "international outlaw" and threatened "appropriate action" against Cuban troops in foreign countries, but it was also Ford who forbade government-sponsored assassinations in a landmark 1976 presidential directive. True, it was applied under enormous public and Congressional pressure led by Senator Frank Church. But it was still Ford's signature that removed the large CIA-sponsored bulls-eye from the center of Castro's forehead. The flurry of restrictions on black-ops and oversight rules signed by Ford didn't mean we stopped assisting rogue anti-Castro elements in Miami-Dade, but officially we weren't in the assassination business anymore. That was something. It was a big something, actually, and for a long time.

Alas, not anymore. The current administration was the first to turn its back on Ford's executive orders banning state-sponsored assassinations and establishing intelligence oversight, and it's worth remembering that Ford's most important legacy died a violent death several years before he did. With at least two more years of Bush-Cheney lawlessness to go, we can at least be thankful for that other major Ford legacy: The rehab clinic.

George Will Hates "You"
Posted by Alexander Zaitchik on December 22, 2006 at 3:36 PM.

"You" knew it was coming. As soon as Time magazine crowned All of Us "Person of the Year" and pasted gimmicky foil mirrors on the cover of its iconic money mule, the countdown began on a torrent of Big Media dismissals. It started even before the issue went to press, when Brian Williams was tapped to register his dissent as part of the "Person of the Year" feature package. The NBC anchor worries that the nation will "miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we will fail to meet the next great challenge...because we are too busy celebrating ourselves" amid the white noise of millions of online diaries and politics blogs.

The implication here is that the next great idea or book will be thoughtfully presented to a distracted America by NBC, home of the "Today" show. Despite the idiocy of Brian Williams lecturing anybody about the intelligent consumption of information, his critique was quoted with approval in an anti-"You" fastball with more mustard on it -- George Will's Dec. 21 column, entitled, "Full Esteem Ahead." Like Williams, Will is unhappy that so many formerly passive media-consumers have become merry media-makers, contributing to the online orgy of opinion that Time calls "the new digital Democracy."

Oh, is George Will pissed. The bow-tied one clearly and deeply resents the fact that he will spend the rest of his life watching his stature and influence wane, occasionally getting eaten alive by Americans who have always had a better sense of humor and now have their very own column spaces.

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Regional Nuclear War -- No Big Whoop?
Posted by Alexander Zaitchik on December 12, 2006 at 12:48 PM.

Days before presidential ink drops without much notice on the Henry J. Hyde United States and India Nuclear Cooperation Promotion Act of 2006, thus laying the groundwork for a nuclear arms race in South Asia, researchers with the American Geophysical Union have released a study on the atmospheric effects of a "limited" nuclear exchange of the kind envisioned between, say, India and Pakistan. Back in the mid-80s, the original nuclear-winter theory was based on a model assuming thousands of thermonuclear detonations across the planet; the AGU scientists have updated the variables to match contemporary, smaller-scale threats.

Their findings aren't much sunnier than the original total nuclear-winter scenario (which is captured to devastating effect in Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Road, probably the greatest piece of nuclear war art ever created.)

The study, "Environmental Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts ", unveiled Monday at a meeting in San Fancisco, concludes that even a limited nuclear war would trigger enough massive fires and throw enough smoke plumes into the stratosphere to result in "long-lasting, global climate effects." This global cooling would have a profound effect on agricultural production on every continent. The authors conclude that even a "tiny" nuclear exchange would produce "climate changes unprecedented in recorded human history."

Could it be that the U.S.-India nuke deal is just the first stage of a devilishly brilliant plan by the Bush Administration to finally address global warming?