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shock doctrine
Critics Ask If Trump and Musk Are 'Intentionally Crashing the Economy'
"If you think back at the last economic crashes... the rich were able to buy up assets on the cheap and emerged even wealthier and more powerful than before," noted one progressive commentator.
Mar 05, 2025
Are U.S. President Donald Trump, top adviser Elon Musk, and allied oligarchs deliberately trying to tank the economy in order to line their own gilded pockets?
More and more observers from both sides of the political aisle are asking the question this week as the U.S. president implemented steep tariffs on some of the country's biggest trade partners, threatened a global trade war, and is taking chainsaw to government spending and programs—policies that, while inflicting economic pain upon nearly everyone else, could dramatically boost their already stratospheric wealth.
Numerous observers have likened it to the " disaster capitalism" examined in Naomi Klein's seminal 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism—politicians and plutocrats exploit the chaos of natural or human-caused crises to push through unpopular policies like privatization and deregulation that harm the masses while boosting the wealth and power of the ruling class.
Economic alarm bells were already ringing before Trump's 25% tariffs on most products from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on China—for a total of 20%—took effect on Tuesday, prompting retaliatory measures and threats of more to come.
Then, during his rambling joint address to Congress on Tuesday night, Trump threatened to impose reciprocal tariffs on every nation on Earth starting April 2 (because he "didn't want to be accused of April Fools' Day") if those countries did not lower barriers to trade with the United States.
@jamellebouie Replying to @C. Stetzer ♬ original sound - b-boy bouiebaisse
New York Times economic policy reporters Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson called Trump's sweeping tariffs "one of the biggest gambles of his presidency," and a move "that risks undermining the United States economy."
But what if that's the whole point?
"I've been entertaining this theory a little bit more lately, because [Trump's] economic moves seem so stupid and terrible and counterproductive without thinking that he is intentionally trying to cause harm," progressive political commentator Krystal Ball—who also has a degree in economics and is a certified public accountant— said Tuesday on the social media site X.
Ball cited an X
post by Saikat Chakrabarti, a progressive Democrat running for Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) House seat who worked on Wall Street for six years and helped found the online payment processing company Stripe, in which he accused Trump of "manufacturing a recession."
"But it makes sense when you realize his goal is to create something like Russia where the economy is run by a few oligarchs loyal to him," Chakrabarti added. "Creating that state is hard in a large, dynamic, powerful economy with too many actors who can oppose him. So he's accelerating concentrating money and power into the hands of his loyalists while he crashes the rest out."
Responding to this, Ball asserted that "at this point, until proven otherwise, the primary actor in the government and the economy is actually Elon, so I think it makes sense to think of Elon's incentives here and what he may actually want to accomplish."
"If you think back at the last economic crashes—both in Covid and in the 2008 financial crash—while initially everyone suffered, including the rich, out of both, the rich were able to buy up assets on the cheap and emerged even wealthier and more powerful than before," she noted.
"So in 2008, not only did they get their own custom bailout, but they were able to buy housing stock at absurdly low prices," Ball recalled. "The rich got richer than ever, inequality skyrocketed, and the big banks got bigger than ever."
"Same deal with the Covid-era recession," she continued. "So, while again, everyone suffered initially, there was a huge bailout package which, yes, did benefit ordinary people, but if you look at who came out really on top... you could see people like Elon Musk, people like Jeff Bezos, people like Mark Zuckerberg getting far wealthier. Their net worths, which were already very high, skyrocketed beyond anyone's wildest dreams."
Indeed, as Common Dreams reported, 700 billionaires got $1.7 trillion richer during two years of pandemic. Between March 2020 and April 2022, Musk got 10 times richer, while Zuckerberg's net worth more than tripled and Bezos' grew by nearly $80 billion, according to Forbes.
"Here's the other piece that's worth thinking about as well," Ball added. "Crash and crisis leads to governments and authoritarian leaders claiming more power for themselves. They can use the crisis and the emergency as a justification for taking on extraordinary powers and for taking extraordinary measures... measures that can be custom fit to primarily benefit oligarchs like Elon Musk."
"So I don't know guys, while we're running around here going... 'can't they understand how this is going to be devastating for the economy,' maybe they do understand," she concluded, "and maybe that's kind of the point."
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The End of the Chicago School
How a former teacher’s union organizer and a slate of progressive city council members are leading the windy city away from the neoliberalism that has dominated its politics for decades.
Jun 25, 2023
In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein diagrams the fundamentalist dream, held by right-wing economists, of creating an absolute state of market freedom. In Klein’s account, the true believer who most set this revelation into motion as a practical set of policies was Milton Friedman, who hoped to return society “to a state of pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions—government regulations, trade barriers, and entrenched interests.”
Friedman shaped and spread these ideas through the Chicago school of economics, a conservative movement that entered the public sphere in the 1950s as a new class of scholars at The University of Chicago charted a vision of unfettered capitalism where private markets would supersede the state.
By the end of the century, the city of Chicago—where this doctrine emerged—had become a testing ground for many of its central tenets including privatizing assets, cutting taxes on corporations, and slashing budgets for vital public services such as housing, education, and healthcare. But now, the tide appears to be turning.
Despite the coming impediments and obstructions they’ll likely face, the new political leadership is set to embark on a novel pathway for urban governance.
This year’s municipal elections saw a historic number of progressive candidates elected to City Council, while labor organizer Brandon Johnson toppled privatization zealot Paul Vallas in the mayoral race.
These results signal a sharp turn away from the economic orthodoxy that has dominated Chicago politics for decades. And despite the coming impediments and obstructions they’ll likely face, the new political leadership is set to embark on a novel pathway for urban governance hatched through a reinvigorated labor movement and years of community organizing for social justice.
A Fundamentalist Turn
The Chicago school stood in stark contrast to the Keynesian worldview that prevailed in the United States from the early 20th century through the post-World War II period. Proponents of this worldview urged the government to take an active role in setting monetary policy, to provide economic safeguards, and to regulate business. The counter revolutionaries of the Chicago school, meanwhile, focused on carrying out their agenda by cutting corporate taxes, ending regulations and worker protections, and privatizing major aspects of the economy. Following in the footsteps of Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, the overall project of the Chicago school became known as neoliberalism, and it sought to stamp out social democracy in place of a system where financial power alone dictates decision making in the realms of politics and the wider economy.
While these neoliberal ideas sat on the fringes of mainstream economics in the early decades following their introduction, by the 1970s a series of economic crises roiling the United States and parts of Europe opened the door to alternatives to Keynesianism, and the free marketers quickly swooped in. Right-wing and conservative politicians served as champions of this agenda in the political sphere.
As Klein wrote, these crises or “shocks” are exactly what neoliberals seize on to implement their designs of a society that favors corporate power brokers and demolishes the social safety net. The Chicago school outsourced their designs around the world and “structural adjustment programs” were imposed on countries in the Global South like Chile, starting in the 1970s, to maximize profits for transnational corporations.
Chicago became “the incubator, test case, and model for the neoliberal urban education agenda.”
The Shock Doctrine also points to the cyclical nature of these kinds of shocks being used to push through market reforms. Crises, even following natural disasters like extreme weather events, are in many ways manufactured by business and political authorities through starving communities of resources. The resulting economic chaos is in turn used as justification to implement policies such as privatization of public goods and lower corporate taxes, which are framed as disaster remedies. Instead, conditions of poverty and dislocation intensify, while private interests capitalize off of the orchestrated distress.
In the 1980s, the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher moved the United States and the United Kingdomsolidly in the direction of market fundamentalism through a suite of policies aimed at centralizing power in the hands of the business class and crushing organized labor. This shift has helped lead to over 40 years of swelling economic inequality marked by a widening wealth gap between the super rich and everyone else that now eclipses that of the Gilded Age.
By the time President Bill Clinton came into office in the early 1990s, the political consensus of both major parties had swung towards the principles of neoliberalism. On a national scale, Clinton implemented policies like welfare reform (which cut public benefits) and paired the deregulation of big banks with plans for “urban renewal” and corporate education reform. These latter programs set the course for many metropolitan areas where big city mayors took them up, including Chicago’s longtime Democratic Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Under Daley (who was first elected in 1989 and served until 2011), Chicago became a poster child for the neoliberal agenda. Public housing was demolished in place of market-rate units, taxpayer-funded subsidies flowed to major corporations, unionized jobs were cut in the public sector and swapped out with contractors, regulations on businesses were eased—or lifted—and everything from city parking meters to janitorial services were privatized. But the area where this agenda was perhaps most visible was the public schools. As scholar Pauline Lipman asserts, Chicago became “the incubator, test case, and model for the neoliberal urban education agenda.”
The experiments taken up included opening charter schools that were largely for-profit and non-union, enshrining standardized testing as the primary indicator of student achievement, and placing the entire school system under mayoral control, with an unelected school board and a chief executive officer who determined education policy for the city. As Lipman said, “[the] mayoral takeover is a case of the use of the coercive power of the state to enforce a neoliberal program.”
Many of these changes were carried out by Paul Vallas, Daley’s budget manager who became the first CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS). In that position, Vallas served as an architect of neoliberal policy at the city level, a reputation that earned him the nickname “Chainsaw Paul.” After leaving CPS in 2001 with the system in financial disarray, Vallas moved on to run school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Bridgeport, where he continued to execute privatization plans that gutted public schools.
In an April report for In These Times, researchers David I. Backer and Jason Wozniak found that: “Vallas’ business-model approach to school districts has produced financial failures and created chaos for school employees, students and community members. The policies Vallas has implemented, along with his governing style, have at times mimicked the tendencies he once praised about Chile. It also appears that Vallas often puts corporate interests ahead of the people he’s supposed to serve.”
Even after Vallas’ departure, Daley continued instituting market based reforms including his now-infamous Renaissance 2010 plan, begun in 2004, that was formulated to close or “turn around” public schools that were deemed to be “underperforming.” According to Pauline Lipman and co-author David Hursh, Renaissance 2010 placed “public schooling under the control of corporate leaders who aim to convert public schools to charter and contract schools, handing over their administration to corporations and breaking the power of unions… Such reforms not only disenfranchise the poor, people of color, students, parents, and educators, but also create an economically and spatially separate city.”
Teachers Revolt
Daley was succeeded by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2011, and he continued his predecessor’s mold of carrying out fiscal austerity, implementing regressive fines and fees, and further privatizing city assets and services at an alarming rate.
Emanuel’s tenure also highlighted the extreme racial dimension of neoliberal policy, as communities of color already enduring disinvestment and endemic poverty faced increasing criminalization and demonization, especially for Black youth. This directly added to the crisis of police violence and mass incarceration. Meanwhile, Emanuel enriched his Wall Street backers, shut down half of the city’s public mental health clinics, closed a record number of public schools, and went to war with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).
When Emanuel became mayor, the CTU had recently seen a sea change in leadership as the dissident Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) won elections in 2010 and flipped the leadership with Karen Lewis taking the helm as the union’s new president. CORE initially formed as a study group reading The Shock Doctrine and applied Klein’s analysis of neoliberalism to the state of politics and education policy in Chicago.
A key aspect of the strike was the CTU helping pioneer the strategy of bargaining for the common good, which means making demands centered on benefiting the larger community rather than simply over wages and working conditions.
CORE members saw the corporate reform agenda as an attempt to dismantle the public school system in place of a hyper-capitalist model meant to profit off of education—and believed organized resistance was the only way to stop that agenda. One of those members was Brandon Johnson, a middle school teacher who in 2014 told Strike for America author and Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht that under CORE, “it became a collective struggle rather than an individual struggle.”
Emanuel’s provocative stance toward the CTU, coupled with his privatization plans, led to a massive strike in 2012 that saw over 25,000 teachers, clinicians, and paraprofessionals take the streets to call for a more fair and equitable approach to public education. As CTU organizer Matt Luskin told Uetricht, “the overwhelming majority of CTU members really believe that this was a strike against the neoliberal corporate education reform agenda.” A key aspect of the strike was the CTU helping pioneer the strategy of bargaining for the common good, which means making demands centered on benefiting the larger community rather than simply over wages and working conditions.
The union put out a paper titled “The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve” that outlined a broad array of prescriptions to benefit the public good, including smaller class sizes and more nurses and social workers in schools. It also called for more investment in the city’s poorest communities that the union said should be funded through increased taxes on the wealthy and corporate entities. The paper also proposed an end to subsidies for big businesses.
This form of social justice unionism not only won tangible victories for teachers and communities in Chicago, but it also helped inspire unions across the country to take up similar approaches when bargaining their own contracts—including teachers in states such as West Virginia and Arizona who would go on strike in subsequent years and help ignite the Red for Ed movement.
While the 2012 strike was successful in winning public support and an improved contract, it didn’t blunt Emanuel’s neoliberal schemes. The following year, in 2013, his administration closed 50 schools—the largest single set of public school closures at that point in U.S. history. The move inspired mass protests across the city, especially from CTU members.
As an organizer for the union, Johnson was a key player in both the 2012 strike and in fighting the subsequent school closings. He spoke out about the struggle in the media and helped form coalitions of community groups to advocate for educational justice. In 2015, Johnson participated in a hunger strike to reopen Dyett High School on the city’s South Side after it had been closed by Emanuel’s school board.
The CTU also took action to change Chicago’s political direction. As CTU President Karen Lewis said on the day of the mass school closure vote, “Clearly, we have to change the political landscape in this city.” To do so, the union joined a coalition of other labor groups in Chicago to form United Working Families (UWF), which would serve as—and remains—an organizing hub to train and run candidates for elected office from social movement backgrounds.
Moving Left
In 2018, Johnson ran for office himself and unseated a conservative incumbent to become a Cook County Commissioner. The following year, a slate of several left-wing candidates backed by the CTU swept into office, dramatically growing the progressive ranks of the Chicago City Council. The new class of alderpeople included a group who openly identified as socialists and who would go on to form Chicago’s first Democratic Socialist Caucus on the Council.
I reported on that year’s grassroots upsurge for In These Times’ March 2019 cover story, “Chicago’s Political Revolution.” The article closed with CTU President Stacy Davis Gates’ prediction that, “If I’m looking in a crystal ball, 2023 will actually be even more transformative.”
As prophesied, Davis Gates was speaking on stage at a victory party four years later, this time for Johnson who in May became Chicago’s 57th mayor. In that race, he faced off against Vallas, the establishment’s candidate who initially held a large lead in the polls and outspent Johnson two-to-one. On the campaign trial, Johnson and Vallas outlined radically opposing visions for how to govern the city.
Johnson’s feat is undeniably transformative for a city where wealthy interests have long dictated neoliberal policies that shut community voices out of decision making. The new mayor comes from a union that organizes to upend this dynamic, and to put working people at the head of the table.
Vallas leaned on his background working under Daley as a budget-cutter and school reform advocate, promising to continue in the mold of previous city leaders while embracing an extreme “law and order” approach to crime. Johnson, on the other hand, promised an agenda to reverse the disinvestment in, and criminalization of, communities of color. His platform included offering year-round youth employment, fully-funding public schools, reopening shuttered mental health clinics, making investments in affordable housing, and reducing public transit fares. The administration plans to fund these projects largely through increased taxes on the rich and major corporations.
Johnson’s feat is undeniably transformative for a city where wealthy interests have long dictated neoliberal policies that shut community voices out of decision making. The new mayor comes from a union that organizes to upend this dynamic, and to put working people at the head of the table.
Wesley Lowery profiled Johnson in the June cover story for In These Times, in which he wrote, “Once inaugurated, Johnson will arguably become the most progressive politician in modern history to lead a major U.S. city.”
In a June interview with MSNBC host and journalist Chris Hayes, Johnson explained, “My politics, quite frankly, emerged out of my faith, out of my upbringing… out of my real experiences of seeing austerity budgets, neoliberal politics that shuttered schools, that privatized education, that shut down public housing—and [how] somehow we were supposed to be OK with that. And I wasn’t. And so that’s what caused me to… see my role as an organizer as a road to ultimately see justice prevail.”
There Is an Alternative
Through collective action and political organizing, the CTU has helped build a viable alternative to neoliberalism in Chicago—a city that’s been stuck in a cycle of shock doctrine policies for decades. As a result of the CTU and UWF’s involvement in the 2023 elections (along with other groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America), the Chicago City Council now boasts the most left-wing members in modern memory, including an expanded Democratic Socialist Caucus. And with Johnson’s victory in the mayor’s race, the city is now led by one of the engineers behind this left-wing alternative.
Friedman and his disciples in the Chicago school envisioned a future of unadulterated laissez-faire economics, where capital rather than democracy dictates the arrangement of society. Their model of neoliberalism became so prevalent in part because its ideologues have sold it as a solution to nearly any ill, whether it is a financial crisis, natural disaster, or geopolitical conflict.
Today, the ravages of that system are ever apparent, especially in Chicago where many of its trademark policies were initiated. But voters have now embraced a wholesale departure from the political and economic paradigm that once seemed inescapable.
The new political leadership in Chicago is poised to offer a radically different alternative—one that rejects market exaltation and instead reverses long standing inequities, ensures economic security, and provides for the elements of a dignified life.
When the hegemony of Keynesianism began to fray in the 1970s, the market fundamentalists were ready to make their play for dominance. During this period, Friedman remarked that “when the time came that you had to change… there was an alternative ready there to be picked up.”
The new political leadership in Chicago is poised to offer a radically different alternative—one that rejects market exaltation and instead reverses long standing inequities, ensures economic security, and provides for the elements of a dignified life. Last month, UWF Executive Director Emma Tai explained, “Chicago is the only city in America that is leading the way in advancing a real political alternative that is seriously contesting for political power to expand the public good.” Successfully realizing this project will undoubtedly require overcoming near constant challenges from those seeking to maintain a neoliberal status quo.
Already, business-aligned groups are coming out with counter proposals to Johnson’s tax-the-rich plans, including the Civic Federation which recently released a report proposing increased fees on residents, including on garbage collection, along with such far-fetched ideas as cutting the number of City Council members in half. Meanwhile, the head of the CME Group, which runs the powerful Chicago Mercantile Exchange, has threatened to move the financial derivatives marketplace out of the city over the prospect of increased corporate taxes.
But the new mayor and his allies appear unbent on turning the page.
As Johnson told Hayes earlier this month: “Yes, the wealthy in this city, and quite frankly the wealthy in this country, have to contribute more to a society which they’ve benefited so much from.”
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How COVID-19 Is Normalizing an eLearning-Industrial-Complex in US Higher Education
We should think critically about whether the emergency response at a moment of crisis is being used to justify the questionable collaboration of neoliberal universities with a billion-dollar eLearning industry that prioritizes profit over learning.
Aug 07, 2020
In an Intercept piece earlier this year, Naomi Klein uses the term "coronavirus capitalism" to describe how the cataclysmic global Covid-19 pandemic is normalizing oppressive, capitalist practices that were previously unthinkable. She explains the way predatory ideas and practices of the government and powerful corporations continue to accumulate resources for the privileged, leaving the vulnerable exposed during the pandemic. At a time when U.S. universities operate more like big corporations, treat students as customers, and prioritize profit-making ventures, it is important to ask how the coronavirus capitalism is normalizing neoliberal ventures that many universities have been trying to implement for a long time.
In response to the rapid spread of Covid-19, U.S. universities swiftly moved classes online earlier this year. Most of the universities will offer some forms of online and hybrid classes in Fall 2020. The transition to online learning was a much-needed response to ensure the safety and security of students, faculty, staff, and other university workers during a global pandemic. Nevertheless, we should think critically about whether the emergency response at a moment of crisis is being used to justify the questionable collaboration of neoliberal universities with a billion-dollar eLearning industry that prioritizes profit over learning.
"There are growing incentives for neoliberal universities to normalize the emergency response to online transition and continue profit-making ventures with the eLearning industry."
Let us first acknowledge that eLearning has made higher education accessible to a student population who need flexible and self-paced learning opportunities. More than 6.3 million U.S. students are enrolled in at least one online course. With the advent of virtual collaboration and work-from-home culture, eLearning is becoming more and more relevant to our personal and professional needs. And precisely for this reason, the global eLearning market, which was worth $107 billion in 2015, has been forecasted to reach $325 billion by 2025.
In a New York Times piece, Christina Paxson, the President of Brown University, has argued that the tuition-dependent "business model" of most colleges and universities will be severely disrupted if they remain closed in Fall. Dr. Paxson states, "It's not a question of whether institutions will be forced to permanently close, it's how many." In a country where the idea of "tuition-free college" often faces severe backlashes, where the $1.6 trillion student-loan industry has clear incentives to keep colleges unaffordable, and where universities tend to make up for the lost federal and state funding through tuition hikes, it is not surprising that colleges--especially the ones with lesser resources--will face an unprecedented financial crisis during a global pandemic.
One of the increasingly popular survival mechanisms for struggling universities is to succumb to the eLearning market. The Harvard Business Review (HBR) has framed this strategy as "risk mitigation" that--according to HBR--will be helpful not just during the COVID-19 pandemic but also during a future calamity. This risk mitigation strategy offers a lucrative easy fix for universities undergoing a financial crisis that will only worsen after the pandemic. There are growing incentives for neoliberal universities to normalize the emergency response to online transition and continue profit-making ventures with the eLearning industry, sidestepping the need for transformative learning for students and ensuring sustainable working conditions for faculty and staff.
Why should we worry about the thriving "university-eLearning industrial complex"? Think about the example of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), which Professor Gabriel Kahn has aptly called "The Amazon.com of Higher Education." SNHU reverted from its near demise by rapidly expanding its online division, which now offers 200+ career-focused online degree programs. It unapologetically refers to its students as "customers" and claims to provide high quality "customer service." SNHU became the epitome of McDonaldization of higher education as a single click on the ad for an MBA program can get you a phone call from an admission counselor in less than nine minutes. SNHU's aggressive recruitment techniques are borrowed from for-profit schools, such as the University of Phoenix, which were widely criticized for offering an inferior quality of education, reliance on highly standardized courses, adjunct professors serving more like coaches and evaluators, low completion rates, and gouging students.
"If we really want to make higher education accessible and affordable, we need to challenge the coronavirus capitalism that has severely infected the U.S. higher education."
In the face of the Covid-19 recession, many struggling U.S. universities are now looking at the SNHU model as a survival technique. In the coming days, we can expect to see the continuation of a heavy focus on virtual learning and virtual student engagement, recruitment of highly paid administrators with the experience of transiting to online learning, and outsourcing of higher education to low-cost third-party online course providers such as StraighterLine and Study.com. SNHU pays as little as $2200 per 8-week undergraduate course to adjuncts who mostly deliver the content and have very little control over designing the materials and learning experience. The growing popularity of the SNHU model in the post-COVID world will offer strong incentives for abolishing full time and tenure-track lines, which will worsen the existing situation where 73% of all instructional positions are already held by low-paid contingent faculty with little to no job security and benefits. Neoliberal universities are likely to justify these corporate turns by exploiting the social justice language of making higher education "accessible" and "affordable" for all students.
Why is this framing of providing "accessible" and "affordable" higher education to all problematic? Students can take online courses at StraighterLine for as low as $59/course and an unlimited number of courses for $99/month. More than 130 partner schools now accept credits from StraighterLine. We reviewed the CPOLS101: American Government syllabus from StraighterLine and found that the syllabus basically recycles course contents from McGraw-Hill and is a summary of the textbook "We the People: An Introduction to American Politics." The course assessment methods are heavily reliant on the huge bank of multiple-choice and other test questions that come with the textbook. They offer no chance to engage in direct intellectual exchanges with instructors. There are little scopes for students to reflect critically on the digested information and participate in dialogues and debates with their peers.
Providing questionable quality of online education to students in need in the name of ensuring "accessibility" while students with privileged backgrounds continue to pay exorbitant tuition fees and attend top-notch higher education will create a tiered higher education system and exacerbate the growing inequities in our society. If we really want to make higher education accessible and affordable, we need to challenge the coronavirus capitalism that has severely infected the U.S. higher education. Band-aid solutions coming from the university-eLearning industrial complex will only aggravate the current crisis. We need major structural reforms like introducing a wealth tax that can pay for tuition-free public college education, abolish student debts, and work towards achieving an egalitarian society.
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'Same Ideas, Every Disaster': Right-Wing Heritage Foundation Urges Universal School Voucher Program for Coronavirus Recovery
The think tank also recommends immediately revising state requirements for teachers to allow people without teaching certifications to educate students.
Apr 24, 2020
Progressives and public education advocates on Thursday denounced a proposal from the conservative Heritage Foundation for the United States' recovery from the coronavirus pandemic that includes a recommendation for a universal school voucher program via what one critic called a "particularly brutal" implementation plan.
The group's National Coronavirus Recovery Commission released a report (pdf) this week advising states to "immediately restructure" their education spending to keep taxpayer money from going to public schools.
"It's a bad policy idea for a variety of reasons, but this implementation would be particularly brutal if what they're seriously proposing is to strip public schools of all funding for the remainder of the year."
--Peter Greene, education blogger
With children in a number of states already out of school for the rest of the term, and with closures expected in some regions to potentially extend through the fall, the Heritage Foundation said that states should offer "education savings accounts (ESAs) to families, enabling them to access their child's share of state per-pupil funding to pay for online courses, online tutors, curriculum, and textbooks so that their children can continue learning."
Education blogger Peter Greene wrote that the plan amounts to "gutting" public education for the foreseeable future and potentially for the long-term, calling ESAs "super vouchers--a voucher that let parents spend public tax dollars with little oversight or accountability."
"It's a bad policy idea for a variety of reasons, but this implementation would be particularly brutal if what they're seriously proposing is to strip public schools of all funding for the remainder of the year," Greene wrote. "Seriously? Just finish the year with zero dollars because we're just going to hand out the rest of your operating budget as vouchers?"
Public school advocate Diane Ravitch said the plan--a pet cause of conservatives for decades--would "help America sink back at least a century in educating its children, perhaps even two centuries."
As Ravitch noted, the Commission counts among its members Kevin Chavous, "CEO of the notorious for-profit K-12 Inc. online charter chain, noted for high attrition, low graduation rates, and low test scores-and above all, high profits."
"In the nature of for-profit enterprises, there are always new worlds to conquer, new markets to open up," Ravitch wrote.
Naomi Klein, a vocal critic of "disaster capitalism," in which for-profit entities take advantage of crises to adopt economic policies which benefit the private rather than public sector, suggested the Heritage Foundation's recommendations were predictable. As Klein wrote in her book The Shock Doctrine, tens of millions of federal dollars were used to convert New Orleans into what the New York Times called "the nation's preeminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools" following Hurricane Katrina, with 31 of the privately-run, publicly-funded schools in the city and just four public schools remaining.
"Same ideas, every disaster," tweeted Klein.
Same ideas, every disaster. https://t.co/i2vqyN1dmy
-- Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) April 23, 2020
Incredibly important read for anyone who cares about public education, especially given the failure to provide bailout funds to cities and states. Public schools are closed now for public health but soon it could be because these psychos never wanted them open in the first place. https://t.co/i2vqyN1dmy
-- Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) April 23, 2020
The Commission's report also recommended altering requirements for teachers, saying the "supply of online teachers and tutors" should be free to teach alongside certified educators.
"State restrictions on teacher certification should be lifted immediately," the Foundation wrote, "allowing anyone with a bachelor's degree to provide K-12 instruction online."
The Foundation aims to "McDonaldize" the work of teaching "so that any shmoe can do it and employers can pay shmoe-level wages," Greene wrote.
"If cyber schools are going to cash in, they need access to cheap labor," he added.
The Commission's "reopen America" plan amounts to a push "to dismantle public education," tweeted Jennifer Berkshire, host of the education policy podcast "Have You Heard."
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Trump Accused of Exploiting Coronavirus Pandemic to Advance 'Truly Disgraceful' Union-Busting Effort
"This action reveals in stark terms just how determined the administration is to roll back the rights and benefits of federal employees."
Mar 20, 2020
President Donald Trump is not letting the global coronavirus pandemic stand in the way of his administration's assault on what's left of organized labor in the United States.
In fact, as the New York Times reported Friday, the Trump administration is actively using the outbreak as a pretext to ram through union-busting policies and other right-wing agenda items that would likely draw closer scrutiny and public outrage under normal circumstances.
"That they would push forward with this kind of union-busting in the midst of a pandemic... is truly disgraceful."
--Everett Kelley, American Federation of Government Employees
"The White House, under the guise of its coronavirus response, is quietly advancing policies that President Trump has long advocated, from tougher border controls to an assault on organized labor to the stonewalling of congressional oversight," the Times reported. "Administration officials insist that such long-sought policies are necessary to stem the outbreak. But opportunism is clearly in play."
On Wednesday, the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA)--a small federal agency governed by three Trump appointees--quietly issued a rule proposal public-sector unions condemned as "an ideological attack" on organized labor.
Under current law, federal employees are permitted to cancel their union dues and membership during an annual 15-day window after they have been a member for at least one year.
The FLRA's proposed rule would allow federal employees to cancel their dues at any time after one year of union membership.
"That they would push forward with this kind of union-busting in the midst of a pandemic, while front-line federal employees like [Veterans Affairs] caregivers, airport screeners, food inspectors, and other personnel are being forced to fight the administration for basic safety protocols and personal protective equipment, is truly disgraceful," Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said in a statement Thursday.
Colleen Duffy Kiko, the Trump-appointed FLRA chair, claimed last month that the rule change is necessary to comply with the "spirit" of the Supreme Court's 2018 Janus vs. AFSCME ruling, which said that public-sector unions cannot collect so-called "fair share" fees that help unions represent all workers, including non-union members.
Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), said in a statement that the FLRA's proposed change flies in the face of decades of established federal labor law. NTEU is challenging the proposed rule in court.
"There is only one reason to change one-year dues collection agreements and that is to try and harm unions," said Reardon. "This action reveals in stark terms just how determined the administration is to roll back the rights and benefits of federal employees."
The union-busting rule is one of several right-wing policies the Trump adminstration is pursuing under the cover of the coronavirus outbreak, which has infected nearly 13,000 people in the U.S. as of Friday morning.
"Across the government," the Times reported Friday, "departments have been citing the 'whole of government' response to the pandemic as they push through the same policies they sought before the crisis." Such a list could include xenophobic border restrictions, further attacks on science, bailouts for the oil and gas industry, and limitations on congressional oversight powers.
"We know what Trump's plan is: a pandemic shock doctrine featuring all the most dangerous ideas lying around, from privatizing Social Security to locking down borders to caging even more migrants."
-- Naomi Klein
"Under normal conditions there would be extended debate and back and forth, but under this emergency some of those things will get through with less scrutiny," David Lapan, Trump's former spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, told the Times. "It is a way to use this national emergency or pandemic to push through some of these quickly that might not get through in the normal course of business."
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine--a 2007 book that documents how governments have exploited natural disasters and other crises to advance neoliberal policies--warned Monday that the Trump administration could draw from that same playbook amid the COVID-19 outbreak and urged progressives to be ready to fight back.
"We know what Trump's plan is: a pandemic shock doctrine featuring all the most dangerous ideas lying around, from privatizing Social Security to locking down borders to caging even more migrants," Klein said. "Hell, he might even try canceling elections."
"If there is one thing history teaches us, it's that moments of shock are profoundly volatile," Klein added. "We either lose a whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites, and pay the price for decades, or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier. This is no time to lose our nerve."
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Does the Coronavirus Crisis Have to End with a Wealthier Wealthy?
This time around, let’s use the power of the public purse to reduce inequality.
Mar 14, 2020
We all have to come together. We need to help each other. We don't have time for politics as usual.
In times of crisis -- the current coronavirus pandemic, for instance -- these sorts of calls for cooperation become the drumbeat of our daily lives. And most all of us march to that drumbeat because we understand that we do need to cooperate and help each other when crises crash down upon us.
Unfortunately, no drumbeat ever gets everybody marching in sync. In every society, some self-absorbed people will think first and always only of themselves. But these self-absorbed few, in relatively equal societies, pose no great problem. They just don't have the means to mess things up.
In more unequal societies, we have a different story. In deeply unequal societies, nations where wealth and power have concentrated intensely, a few people do have the means to undercut the common good. These wealthy few can exploit the vulnerabilities of societies in crisis to make themselves even wealthier.
Back in 2007, Naomi Klein explored this phenomenon brilliantly in her landmark book The Shock Doctrine. Klein showed how corporate elites worldwide have repeatedly and brutally used "the public's disorientation following a collective shock -- wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters -- to push through radical pro-corporate measures."
The 2008 financial collapse would vividly illustrate the dynamics Klein so powerfully described. The Wall Street giants whose reckless and even criminal behavior ushered in that crisis ended up, after the dust settled, even bigger and more powerful than before the crisis began.
Klein sees those same "shock doctrine" dynamics now resurfacing in the coronavirus crisis.
"We are seeing," she noted earlier this week, "this very predictable process that we see in the midst of every economic crisis, which is extreme corporate opportunism," a "dusting off" of the corporate and Wall Street wish list on everything from cutting and privatizing Social Security -- by undermining its current payroll tax revenue stream -- to enriching the fossil fuel industry.
What can we do, this crisis time around, to prevent a "shock doctrine" repeat? We need, for starters, to provide immediate support for those the coronavirus is hitting the hardest: the sick and those who care for them, the workers who lose jobs and income.
But we can't afford to stop there. We need, in effect, a "shock doctrine" in reverse. We need to seize the openings for change the coronavirus creates and challenge the capacity of our rich and powerful to become ever richer and more powerful at the expense of our greater social well-being.
One example: Within our increasingly coronavirus-ravaged economy, more and more families will be facing evictions as they fall behind on rents and mortgage payments. Progressive activists and like-minded elected leaders are now quite rightfully calling for a coronavirus moratorium on evictions.
But we have a chance here to go much further. Low-income families, a compelling new analysis of shelter in Southern California has just detailed, face a rental market that corporate landlords have thoroughly rigged against them. These corporate interests have created an "empire of fees and evictions" to gouge low-income families. Why not fight, in this coronavirus crisis moment, to rewrite the eviction-enabling statutes that let corporate landlords enrich themselves at the expense of families already reeling?
The coronavirus crisis also gives us an opportunity to use the power of the public purse to shift our economy towards greater equity and sustainability.
Various industries are already clamoring for federal loan guarantees and other bailouts to get them past the coronavirus crisis. We have an obligation to help workers in these industries. We have an opportunity to help these workers not just through the coronavirus crisis, but beyond.
The core of a reverse shock doctrine ought to be a massive public investment program designed to create good jobs, with a premium on projects that better position our economy to address climate change.
For immediate bailout funds, policymakers should consider attaching pro-worker strings. We could deny, for instance, tax-dollar support to private companies that pay their top execs over 50 or 100 times what they pay their most typical workers.
Moves in that direction would give top execs an incentive to pay workers more -- and exploit them less.
Back in mid-20th century America, a time of much greater equality than we have now, corporate top execs only averaged 30 times more pay than their workers. That more equal America proved resilient enough to overcome a fearsome polio epidemic and prosper.
That more equal America, let's remember, emerged out of the back-to-back crises of the Great Depression and world war against fascism. Progressives seized the opportunity those crises created and changed the face of American society. Why can't we?
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At 'Shock Doctrine Press Conference,' Trump Bails Out Oil Industry, Not US Families, as Coronavirus Crisis Intensifies
"Trump has once again put the interests of oil and gas executives ahead of the interests of people and communities."
Mar 13, 2020
Climate action groups and progressive critics expressed disappointment and outrage on Friday afternoon after President Donald Trump--despite a continued failure to offer far-reaching support to the U.S. public--moved to bolster the bottom lines of oil and gas companies by announcing a massive federal purchase for the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).
"Based on the price of oil, I've also instructed the Secretary of Energy to purchase at a very good price large quantities of crude oil for storage in the U.S. strategic reserve," Trump announced during a White House press conference--surrounded by CEOs from major corporations, including Walmart, CVS, and Target--in which he also declared an official national emergency in order to combat the outbreak of the coronavirus.
"With this move, Trump has rolled out a plan to prop up U.S. oil companies before he has even bothered to guarantee paid sick leave for US workers who are going to be on the frontlines of the coronavirus crisis for weeks to come."
--Alex Doukas, Oil Change International"We're going to fill it right up to the top," said of the SPR, but critics were quick to point out that move has everything to do with helping his wealthy friends and cronies in the fossil fuel industry, and nothing to do with helping average people now under threat from the spreading pandemic.
"Trump has once again put the interests of oil and gas executives ahead of the interests of people and communities," said Alex Doukas of Oil Change International. "With this move, Trump has rolled out a plan to prop up U.S. oil companies before he has even bothered to guarantee paid sick leave for US workers who are going to be on the frontlines of the coronavirus crisis for weeks to come."
The news came Friday as additional school closures were announced for states nationwide, grocery store shelves were wiped clean, and worry continues to spread about just how extensive the outbreak will become.
Greenpeace warned that the total cost of the oil purchase "could exceed $2.6 billion in public funds," a stark comparison when put next to the proposal put forth by House Democrats just hours earlier. Introducing the "Families First Coronavirus Response Act"(pdf), which calls for an estimated $1.7 billion aimed at helping working families and children to weather the public health crisis, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "The American people expect and deserve a coordinated, science-based and whole-of-government response to keep them and their loved ones safe: a response that puts families first to stimulate the economy."
By putting his adminstration's emphasis on bailing out the oil industry, John Noel, a senior climate campaigner for Greenpeace USA, said the president is doing the opposite of putting people first.
"Trump's response to a global pandemic is to put billionaires and corporate polluters ahead of American families. There's no evidence that this handout would protect jobs, pensions, benefits, or ease the hardships facing fossil fuel workers or communities confronting the COVID-19 outbreak right now. It's nothing more than a gift to the industry that created the climate crisis."
Doukas agreed, calling it "wildly inappropriate" for Trump "to abuse the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a tool to prop up the oil and gas industry at a time when the White House should be focusing on how to help everyday people in the US."
"Where is the relief for workers grappling with caring for their families, retail workers risking exposure every day, families grappling with debt and mounting bills while their livelihoods are put at risk?" he asked. "No, today President Trump focused on propping up polluting industries and trotting out CEOs to sell their wares."
Despite the criticisms from those focused on the needs of families, it appeared the announcement during what was dubbed Trump's "Shock Doctrine press conference" had the desired result.
As CNBC reported, following Trump's late-day announcement, "crude futures jumped 5%" in the last hour of market trading.
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The Right to Stay Home
Welcoming migrants is not enough—We need to change the global economy of displacement
May 24, 2019
"No one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark."
Immigration is perhaps the defining political issue of the Trump era. The political left, right, and center, each offer their own vision for the proper treatment of those who arrive on American borders in search of a better life. However, as Poet Warsan Shire's words remind us, migration does not begin at the border, it begins in homes and communities that are rarely abandoned without necessity.
Though the dynamics of migration are complex, at least one of Shire's sharks has a name: neoliberal globalization. Since the era of Reagan and Thatcher, powerful states and the wealthy interests that they represent have built a global economic order that places the market above all else. This has resulted in the systematic uprooting of the poor, the working class, and the subaltern of the Global South. Acting through trade deals and international financial institutions, neoliberal globalization causes displacement by creating conditions of poverty, imposing corporate agricultural policies, and fueling environmental destruction. While progressives fight for the rights of those displaced by this unjust system, they must also struggle to replace it.
The neoliberal order was designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many.
The neoliberal order was designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many. Institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank force Southern nations to adopt austerity, privatization, and unfettered capital mobility. Trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) empowercorporations, undermine labor, and constrict domestic policy space. Usurious creditors trap countries in cycles of debt and poverty, only to use the power of their holdings to reshape markets for further exploitation.
These policies have birthed untold poverty, inequality, and destitution, the conditions behind much migration. So-called liberalization launched a wave of financial crises across Asia and the "lost decade" for Sub-Saharan Africa. In the first twenty years under NAFTA, Mexico's economic growth ranked 18th of 20 Latin American countries, while real wages actually declined. On aggregate, the United States and Canada have seen modest economic benefits, but as in Mexico, most of these have gone to the top. As anthropologist Jason Hickel points out, "only 5% of all new income from global growth trickles down to the poorest 60%."
On top of these broader economic conditions, neoliberal globalization has forced on Southern countries an agricultural model that systematically removes indigenous, peasant, and smallholder farmers from their land to make way for large-scale corporate agriculture. The World Bank's Enabling the Business of Agriculture project, for example, encourages the conditioning of aid on corporate access to land. While other development programs claim to support smallholders, they are often little more than Band-Aids for systemic problems caused by the same actors. Trade deals like NAFTA prohibit protections for local farmers while freeing subsidized American corporations to flood Southern markets with artificially cheap commodities, makings mall-scale farming virtually impossible.
Those who escape agricultural displacement often instead find the environments on which they depend made uninhabitable. Trade deals like NAFTA allow corporations and capital to cross borders freely, forcing countries to compete to attract investment by slashing environmental regulations. Describing the experience of post-NAFTA Mexico, activist David Bacon relays the story of one farmer whose village became so polluted by American factory farms that "his children would wake up [at night] and vomit from the smell."
Entire towns are commonly uprooted so that Northern companies, funded by development banks, can clear forests, strip mine mountains, and flood valleys. In less than ten years, an estimated 3.3 million people were physically or economically displaced by World Bank-funded projects. The corporations responsible rarely face consequences because they have, for decades, lobbied against internationally binding human rights laws in favor of anemic voluntary Corporate Social Responsibility guidelines. Above all else, neoliberal globalization has fueled a changing climate that will, without action, spawn a refugee crisis orders of magnitude beyond what the world has ever seen.
The migration crisis is, more accurately, a crisis of displacement. It is the product of a model of globalization that prioritizes the profits of a few over the lives of the many. To solve it requires more than just humane border policy; it requires an alternative globalization.
An alternative system of trade would build global protections for workers and the environment while limiting the power of capital. A new agricultural policy would encourage, not deter, protections for peasants and indigenous communities. Democratizing international financial institutions like the World Bank would empower those most impacted by their policies. A binding global treaty would hold transnational corporations accountable for their human rights violations and a New Bretton Woods and Global Green New Deal would make major strides against global inequality and climate change. Though such systemic change will not come easily, it is necessary to address displacement at its root.
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Immigration and the Shock Doctrine
As the crisis grows, so does the danger and potential for more harm—but also the possibility for positive change.
Apr 13, 2019
If you look back over the Trump administration's handling of immigration during the past two-and-a-half years, you'll see a pattern of chronic tension and dysfunction. Like many people, you may have apprehended the pattern as a series of specific emergencies and dramatic events: the declaration of an "invasion" at our borders; the shutdown, or threatened shutdown, of our government or our southern border; the separation of migrant families crossing the border; the forced resignation of government officials unable to fulfill the president's demands for ever-harsher measures.
Some of the wild careering of the administration's behavior can be traced to a particular mix of incompetence, willful ignorance, and toxic narcissism. But a good part of it is explicable if you consider the concept of the "shock doctrine" that author and activist Naomi Klein introduced back in 2007 (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism). In that book and in subsequent publications, Klein showed how political leaders exploit the disorientation and fear resulting from various kinds of calamities: a sudden economic collapse, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster. Pursuing authoritarian rule, these leaders declare states of emergency and take advantage of the circumstances to ram though measures benefiting economic and political elites.
In the case of Trump's immigration policies, a number of "emergencies" were simply manufactured or generated by the administration, e.g. the termination of the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program, or the institution of the cruel "zero tolerance" (family separation) policy. While headlines focused on these issues, the administration continued efforts to criminalize migrants and to normalize its emphasis on detention, deportation, and the militarization of our borders. Its ongoing efforts have continued to benefit for-profit prison corporations like the GEO Group ($2.3 billion in 2018 revenues) and CoreCivic ($1.8 billion in 2018) as well as a host of military contractors involved in border security.
Now we're faced with a genuine, unprecedented border crisis. As New York Times journalists have reported, the number of people (mostly Central American) attempting to cross the border and seek asylum has risen to about 100,000 a month, almost a million in a year. The number of migrant families seeking entry this past February increased five-fold over the same month in 2018, and there are now 800,000 pending cases in immigration courts, with each case requiring an average of 700 days to process. Many families enter the country facing woefully inadequate resources for housing, food, and medical care.
As Naomi Klein has argued, Donald Trump's actions and policies represent not so much an aberration as a culmination of anti-democratic trends impacting American political culture over many years. Trump's responses to the most recent crises - his threats to shut down the border, his attempts to make asylum ever-more difficult to attain, and his cutting off of aid to Central American nations - emerge from such trends. And, as can be expected, his responses have exacerbated, not alleviated, problems by encouraging people to migrate sooner rather than later, and by eliminating programs that could help reduce violence in neighboring nations.
The past two-and-a-half years have taken us to a critical juncture. Immigration policy based on incarceration, deportation, and militarization has proven itself to be a disastrous failure, and Trump continues to double down on a course of action that inflicts suffering on countless individuals and families. Enabled by the powers of his office and the support of his anti-immigrant allies, he daily enacts his own shock doctrine to distract and disorient. As the crisis grows, so does the danger and potential for more harm.
Yet as the crisis grows, so does the possibility for positive change. It shouldn't be too great a leap to see that anti-violence and anti-poverty assistance to other nations represents a far wiser investment than millions spent on drones and other military equipment. Nor, with some degree of awareness, should it be too difficult to perceive the immorality of incarcerating migrants in detention facilities - and the far better (and more cost-effective) alternative of community accompaniment programs that help people integrate into communities. Nor should it be impossible to grasp that lifting the taint of criminalization from millions can help actualize human potential in unimagined ways.
These views may seem alien or even threatening to many people in our current political climate, and it will be difficult and fatiguing to ensure a fair hearing for them amidst the noise of the Trump shock doctrine. But much present suffering hangs in the balance - as does, in the longer term, the promise of a broader and richer vision of human community.
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'Shock Doctrine' Author Naomi Klein Worries 'What Next?' If Trump Succeeds in Inventing a 'National Emergency'
"What further roll back of rights... become possible under the banner of 'emergency?'" asks author and activist. "What is to stop him from declaring emergencies again and again if this works?"
Jan 09, 2019
As a result of creating a fake crisis in order to appease his far-right base and achieve a policy goal that has majority public opposition, President Donald Trump continues to threaten to declare a "national emergency" as a way to commandeer military funds in order to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
"Even I'm bored of the Shock Doctrine, but this is a bit extreme."
-- Naomi KleinBut even as experts debate whether or not Trump has the authority to make such a declaration--and consensus that an immediate legal battle would ensue--author and activist Naomi Klein on Thursday morning expressed worry that if the president is allowed to get away with such anti-democratic maneuvers, what would stop him from repeating the tactics in the future.
Klein's statement of concern came in response to a new story on the issue by Charlie Savage at the New York Times - one which noted that "If the president does invoke emergency powers to circumvent Congress, it would be an extraordinary violation of constitutional norms -- and establish a precedent for presidents who fail to win approval for funding a policy goal."
The Times article was headlined, "Trump's Emergency Powers Threat Could End Shutdown Crisis, but at What Cost?" To which Klein answered: "At a huge cost. What further roll back of rights (e.g. curfews, 'no protest zones'), not to mention intensified state violence and surveillance, become possible under the banner of 'emergency?' What is to stop him from declaring emergencies again and again if this works?"
At a huge cost. What further roll back of rights (e.g. curfews, "no protest zones"), not to mention intensified state violence and surveillance, become possible under the banner of "emergency?" What is to stop him from declaring emergencies again and again if this works? https://t.co/2wTsAhNsQ1
-- Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) January 10, 2019
In her 2007 book of the same name, Klein used the framework of the 'Shock Doctrine' to describe scenarios in which powerful actors such as corporate interests or governments use crises--whether natural or human-cause, real or invented--to push through a set of unpopular policies that would be impossible, or a least difficult, to enact absent the threat of fear and chaos generated by such societal "shocks."
On Thursday morning, Trump said that if a deal with Democrats is not reached soon," I would say it would be very surprising to me that I would not declare a national emergency and just fund it through the various mechanisms."
On Wednesday, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he has "the absolute right to do national emergency if I want."
In her reaction, Klein argued the president's syntax was revealing. "Not 'to declare a national emergency' but 'do national emergency' - make it out of whole cloth," she noted.
Incidentally, Trump's syntax is enormously revealing: "I have the absolute right to do national emergency if I want." Not "to declare a national emergency" but "do national emergency" - make it out of whole cloth. Even I'm bored of the Shock Doctrine but this is a bit extreme. https://t.co/x8EygYzimL
-- Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) January 10, 2019
"Even I'm bored of the Shock Doctrine," Klein added, "but this is a bit extreme."
Update: This post was updated to include new comments from Trump about the likelihood he would declare an emergency.
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