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In the final days of the election, many Republicans seem to have given up the fight for power.  But don’t be fooled: that doesn’t mean they are relaxing.  If you want to see real Republican elbow grease, check out the energy going into chucking great chunks of the $700 billion bailout out the door.  At a recent Senate Banking Committee hearing, Republican Senator Bob Corker was fixated on this task, and with a clear deadline in mind: inauguration. “ How much of it do you think may be actually spent by January 20 or so?”  Corker asked Neel Kashkari, the 35-year-old former banker in charge of the bailout. 

When European colonialists realized that they had no choice but to hand over power to the indigenous citizens, they would often turn their attention to stripping the local treasury of its gold and grabbing valuable livestock.  If they were really nasty, like the Portuguese in Mozambique in the mid-1970s, they poured concrete down the elevator shafts. 

NOTE TO JOURNALISTS ABOUT FALSE QUOTATION: A September 26 AFP wire story incorrectly attributed a quote to Naomi Klein that should have been attributed to Arun Gupta.  The error has been corrected by AFP but please note that the call-out below was NOT written by Naomi Klein and though she supported the original protest call, the statement is correctly attributed to Gupta, as stated in the corrected AFP article also posted below.  We would greatly appreciate if this error was not repeated. 

This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate to bail out the Wall Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place. 

This is the financial equivalent of September 11.  They think, just like with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the “therapy,” and we’ll just roll over! 

I wrote The Shock Doctrine in the hopes that it would make us all better prepared for the next big shock.  Well, that shock has certainly arrived, along with gloves-off attempts to use it to push through radical pro-corporate policies (which of course will further enrich the very players who created the market crisis in the first place...). 

The best summary of how the right plans to use the economic crisis to push through their policy wish list comes from Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich.  On Sunday, Gingrich laid out 18 policy prescriptions for Congress to take in order to "return to a Reagan-Thatcher policy of economic growth through fundamental reforms."  In the midst of this economic crisis, he is actually demanding the repeal of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which would lead to further deregulation of the financial industry.  Gingrich is also calling for reforming the education system to allow "competition" (a.k.a.  vouchers), strengthening border enforcement, cutting corporate taxes and his signature move: allowing offshore drilling. 

Whatever the events of this week mean, nobody should believe the overblown claims that the market crisis signals the death of "free market" ideology.  Free market ideology has always been a servant to the interests of capital, and its presence ebbs and flows depending on its usefulness to those interests. 

During boom times, it's profitable to preach laissez faire, because an absentee government allows speculative bubbles to inflate.  When those bubbles burst, the ideology becomes a hindrance, and it goes dormant while big government rides to the rescue.  But rest assured: the ideology will come roaring back when the bailouts are done.  The massive debts the public is accumulating to bail out the speculators will then become part of a global budget crisis that will be the rationalization for deep cuts to social programs, and for a renewed push to privatize what is left of the public sector.  We will also be told that our hopes for a green future are, sadly, too costly. 

Naomi has signed this public letter to the U.S. Secretary of State about potential U.S. involvement in recent violence in Bolivia. 

An Open Letter to the U.S. State Department Regarding Recent Violence in Bolivia

To Dr. Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State

Cc: Phillip Goldberg, U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia
Henrietta Fore, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Representative Eliot Engel, Chair, Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Committee of Foreign Affairs
Senator John McCain
Senator Barack Obama

Dear Dr. Rice,

We are writing out of deep concern over recent events in Bolivia that have left dozens dead and cost millions of dollars in lost revenue to the Bolivian government and the Bolivian people.  We are especially concerned that the United States government, by its own admission, is supporting opposition groups and individuals in Bolivia that have been involved in the recent whole-scale destruction, violence, and killings, above all in the departments of Santa Cruz, Pando, and Chuquisaca.