"Jakarta is Coming!" For a preview, watch Burma!

I tell you right now, myself: This post will sound lunatic unless you've read the most important history book since Hannah Arendt: Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. If you read nothing else in your life, read this, and the sooner the better.

I’m now 75 pages into The Shock Doctrine and I’m ready to scrawl on the walls, “Jakarta is coming!”

Building on other strategies that got us here, discussed elsewhere on this blog, I've started to ruminate about things going on around us as I write. For instance, just suppose that the increasingly violent anti-liberal rhetoric of the last 30 years has been a strategy to make the minds of conservative Americans not just amenable to cheating at the polls, but amenable actually to our removal.

In that scenario, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, the whole Faux apparatus in fact, and Clear Channel, and those who trashed the Dixie Chix and others are psychological storm troopers, a secular advance guard paralleling Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Tim LaHaye on the religious side. The tactic is not new. Goebbels perfected it on the Jews.

I’m now 75 pages into The Shock Doctrine and I’m ready to scrawl on the walls, “Jakarta is coming!”

The master that Bush and Cheney serve is Milton Friedman. The model that they follow is Suharto’s Indonesia and Pinochet’s Chile. The local trial balloon was New Orleans.

The enemy is the peaceful and prosperous New Deal society. Its crime was Keynesian/Galbraithian economics, ensuring that wealth produced by many is returned in some measure to many. That is called “redistribution,” or worse, “transfer,” as if the profit of a corporation were realized entirely by the men in the executive suite, without the labor of the employees, and as if the raw materials of which the wealth was created had always belonged to them and not to the commonwealth itself.

The objective is to make of the world—soon to be starring the great prize itself, the former constitutionally democratic USA—a completely unregulated economy—-without product safety or quality regulations, or workplace health and safety regulations, or humane labor requirements, or minimum wage requirements, or environmental protections, or tariffs, or any other form of restraint on “free trade.”

The infrastructure is in place. The jobs are being outsourced, the unions dismantled, and the trade agreements written apace. The plans have been written, tested, and perfected. The engineers are at their posts. The media has been harnessed, the military propagandized, the people divided, the domestic intelligence and torture apparatus made fully legal and acceptable, and erected, the detention centers have been built, the CIA has been brought to heel, the equation of protest with treason firmly established, the voting machines and voting laws in key states have been fixed, the Justice department is blocking investigations into fraud, corruption, and patently impeachable crimes, the high Court is pretty much rigged, and Congress has been neutralized. The presidency is unitary. Read, the president is a dictator. But he doesn't want us to know that, so he is denouncing what's happening now in Burma. Denouncing, but not actually doing anything to stop that, or Darfur, or Iraq. No, he's got bigger fish to fry.

The missing piece, according to the pattern previously tested successfully in Jakara, Santiago, and New Orleans, is the next big shock, analogous in effect to Katrina or to 9-11, if not much worse. Something big enough to stun the population long enough so that life as we know it can come to an end overnight.

As our Dictator President knows, the way to get that next shock is by bombing Iran. Either in the event itself or in the aftermath of retaliation, anyone who stands in the way of a declaration of martial law will be forcibly detained and tortured until everyone understands that there’s a new game in the USA, and it is called “disaster capitalism.” What’s yours is theirs, what’s ours is theirs, and what’s theirs is theirs--constitution rights, homes, bank accounts, savings, the land and our liberty itself. The end.

What’s going on now in Myanmar (Burma) is a miniature version of what will soon be coming to a theatre near you—that’s if any American has the grit to protest, I mean.

None other than Daniel Ellsberg just warned in a speech at American University that if we go to war with Iran, we will be a police state. Read all about it on the Consortium website.

Again: If you read nothing else in your life, read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. The veil will fall from your eyes.