3 books denounce capitalism

Mini-reviews of books that have crossed the desk of this columnist in recent months:
• “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein says it all in the subtitle: “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”
One example of disaster capitalism: Iraq. Destroy the country then rebuild it by paying the Bechtels, Blackwaters and Halliburtons huge sums.
Klein ridicules the notion that America had an “immaculate conception” and never “sinned.”
She shows the ugly truth of American history: unprovoked wars, wars to save capitalists and the ever-lasting stain of slavery and Jim Crow laws.
And under Bush? Use of electric shock and torture, rendition for torture abroad and years of imprisonment without charges.
Klein illustrates how the dominant ideology in America for four decades has been a Milton Friedman free market economy, repeatedly fueled by frightful shocks and violence to implement reactionary politics.
“The Bush team, Friedmanite to the core,” exploited the 9/11 aftershock by successfully promoting its backward vision “in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture,” she writes.
Klein says the enemy is “ruthless capitalism.” She’s right. Her bleak thesis leaves the reader full of despair. The evils of depressing capitalism: greed, deregulation, privatization, union-busting and riches for the few, economic scrambling for most people.
Yes, this a fervent cry for socialism. But, sadly, the U.S. Left is so minuscule. There hasn’t been a strong Left in America since Gene Debs 90 years ago.
In the unlikely event that the Left ever rises again in America, Naomi Klein should be canonized as an anti-capitalist saint.
• “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” by John Perkins. Economic hit men are consultants to developing nations. They “cheat nations of trillions of dollars by fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex and murder.”
Perkins should know. He was one of them.
On the Reign of Genocide in Indonesia under Suharto, Perkins writes: “We were promoting U.S. foreign policy and corporate interests. We were driven by greed rather than any desire to make life better for the vast majority of Indonesians.”
Above all, the economic hitmen were saving Indonesia “from the clutches of communism.” So what if one million people were killed over 30 years? It was realpolitick, aided and abetted by the CIA.
On Ecuador: the people “had suffered a long line of dictators and right-wing oligarches manipulated by U.S. political and commercial interests.”
But so what? America is a corporatocracy with profits über alles. The people be damned.
Perkins tells of “chickens coming home to roost” in 9 /11, retaliation for the CIA overthrow of Iran’s socialist Mossadegh in 1954.
• “The Soul of Capitalism” by William Greider portrays dehumanizing capitalism, a capitalism without soul, without a human face and without regard for the social contract.
In contrast, Greider writes: “Socialists in western Europe, while they did not succeed in replacing capitalism with state ownership, created a much gentler version of capitalism than America.”
Humaneness? In America, 20,000 workers are fired each year for union-organizing. Labor law? “It confines workers rather than liberates them.” Social responsibility? Retrograde economic guru Friedman proclaimed that “irresponsibility is what makes capitalism succeed.”
Capitalism meets the demands of the market but never yields to the demands of humanity.
• “What Orwell Didn’t Know,” a collection of 20 essays about Orwell edited by András Szåntó.
The 1946 Orwell essay, “Politics and the English Language,” is a classic. Political language, Orwell wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to mere wind.”
The Bush administration was masterful at inventing euphemisms. It disguised torture abroad as extraordinary rendition, a bill drafted by polluters was cloaked as a clear skies initiative, tax cuts for the wealthy were masked as tax relief, a tax on estate inheritance carried the propaganda title of death tax, a spurious argument to oppose evolution was dubbed intelligent design, a medically necessary late-term abortion was skillfully labeled partial birth, and the hunger struggle by 36 million of the nation’s poor was described as food insecurity.
The pièce de résistance of euphemism, however, was created by the Reagan administration: death squads in Nicaragua were called freedom fighters.
One essayist, Drew Westen, called the Bush years the most Orwellian of American democracy. Noting the constant repetition of the mantra war on terror after 9/11, Westen writes: “The Bush administration carefully crafted this phrase to maximize its fear appeal and to equate legitimate efforts to combat radical Islamic terrorism with the Iraq war.”
Language goes to war too.