Robby on the issues… Sighted in Olympia: Milton Friedman’s ghost

By Robby Stern
A recent headline in the Washington State Labor Council “Legislative Update” reads: “There is blood in the water in Olympia.” David Groves, the talented editor of the weekly update, is referring to those corporations, business associations and politicians, both Republican AND Democratic, who view the present fiscal and economic crisis as an opportunity to privatize government services and significantly shrink the lifeline programs our state government provides.
Milton Friedman and his Chicago school of economics have provided the primary theoretical foundation upon which the ideologues of unfettered free market capitalism have built their movement over the last four decades. In her recent book, Shock Doctrine – the Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein vividly spells out the suffering these free market ideologues have wrought around the world. From Indonesia to Chile, from Argentina to Poland, from China to England, and from Russia to South Africa to the United States, disasters and political upheavals have been deliberately exploited to impose economic conditions that lead to the upper crust reaping huge wealth while the vast majorities of the people suffer terrible declines in their standards of living.
Klein refers to the economic policies that produce these outcomes as shocks delivered at a time when the majority of the population is reeling from the disaster or political upheaval that has befallen them. We have experienced these disasters and subsequent shocks in the United States. The Bush regime used the 9/11 tragedy to impose new policies and laws to which we would never have agreed were it not for the attack on our country. The 9/11 tragedy was the pretext for significant privatization of our military, including the emergence of a whole new private army. It led to the Patriot Act, the stepped up use of private prisons, and on and on. This effort to privatize the functions of government continued with the privatization of the emergency response to hurricane Katrina, as more and more corporations took their profit and huge CEO salaries from the public coffers.
Today, we are experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. This crisis occurred as a result of the deregulation, by both Democrats and Republicans, of the financial industry. Financial institutions were allowed to consolidate functions and to speculate in highly risky financial instruments. When they ran into trouble, they were bailed out by taxpayer dollars that were desperately needed to provide services to the real victims of this crisis: the unemployed, the elderly, the fragile, and our children. We witness the deepening suffering of the majority, while the shifting of public resources to the private sector generates enormous profits, compensation and bonuses for Wall Street.
Back to Olympia: The discussion today should be about generating the resources to provide assistance to those in need in Washington State. Instead, the advocates of shrinking and privatizing the education and human services purpose of government are exploiting the economic crisis to argue for closing public institutions for developmentally disabled children and adults and turning that function over to the private sector. They call for privatizing the liquor stores which provide dollars essential for the funding of human services in our state, and which provide employees, represented by the UFCW, with family wages and benefits.
Moreover, they are proposing to privatize our workers’ compensation system that provides an economic lifeline to injured workers. AIG and Liberty Mutual, two of the largest private insurers, “smell blood in the water.” The tax dollars are saved by lowering the wages and benefits of workers and their families. Meanwhile, corporations harvest huge profits and CEOs pull down their obscene compensation.
PSARA will fight these efforts. We’re joining with the very broad Rebuilding Our Economic Future Coalition, which believes that we should strengthen our public programs and raise the additional revenue needed to address and ameliorate the suffering created by this cruel economic crisis.
We’ve scheduled a “Legislative Action Week” beginning Monday, February 15 when we will join our coalition partners for a noon rally on the Capitol steps. The Teabaggers will be holding a rally at 10 a.m. that same day, promoting their anti-tax/anti-government agenda. Our coalition’s goal is to exceed their numbers with a massive turnout.
Then on Thursday, February 18, PSARA is organizing carpools to attend Senior Lobby Day. We’re making appointments with our legislators in advance. Please join us for this week of activity. Call us at (206) 448-9646 for information. If we’re not there, we’ll call you back.

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