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Naomi Klein- bekend van No Logo en Shock Doctrine- over de financiele crisis in de VS.

Free Market Ideology is Far from Finished
by Naomi Klein

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.

What we don't know is how the public will respond. Consider that in
North America, everybody under the age of 40 grew up being told that
the government can't intervene to improve our lives, that government
is the problem not the solution, that laissez faire was the only
option. Now, we are suddenly seeing an extremely activist, intensely
interventionist government, seemingly willing to do whatever it takes
to save investors from themselves.

This spectacle necessarily raises the question: if the state can
intervene to save corporations that took reckless risks in the
housing markets, why can't it intervene to prevent millions of
Americans from imminent foreclosure. By the same token, if $85bn can
be made instantly available to buy the insurance giant AIG, why is
single-payer health care which would protect Americans from the
predatory practices of health-care insurance companies seemingly
such an unattainable dream. And if ever more corporations need
taxpayer funds to stay afloat, why can't taxpayers make demands in
return like caps on executive pay, and a guarantee against more job
losses.

Now that it's clear that governments can indeed act in times of
crises, it will become much harder for them to plead powerlessness in
the future. Another potential shift has to do with market hopes for
future privatizations. For years, the global investment banks have
been lobbying politicians for two new markets: one that would come
from privatizing public pensions and the other that would come from a
new wave of privatized or partially privatized roads, bridges and
water systems. Both of these dreams have just become much harder to
sell: Americans are in no mood to trust more of their individual and
collective assets to the reckless gamblers on Wall Street, especially
because it seems more than likely that taxpayers will have to pay to
buy back their own assets when the next bubble bursts.

With the World Trade Organization talks off the rails, this crisis
could also be a catalyst for a radically alternative approach to
regulating world markets and financial systems. Already, we are
seeing a move towards "food sovereignty" in the developing world,
rather than leaving access to food to the whims of commodity traders.
The time may finally have come for ideas like taxing trading, which
would slow speculative investment, as well as other global capital
controls.

And now that nationalization is not a dirty word, the oil and gas
companies should watch out: someone needs to pay for the shift to a
greener future, and it makes most sense for the bulk of the funds to
come from the highly profitable sector that is most responsible for
our climate crisis. It certainly makes more sense than creating
another dangerous bubble in carbon trading.

But the crisis we are seeing calls for even deeper changes than that.
The reason these junk loans were allowed to proliferate was not just
because the regulators didn't understand the risk. It is because we
have an economic system that measures our collective health based
exclusively on GDP growth. So long as the junk loans were fuelling
economic growth, our governments actively supported them. So what is
really being called into question by the crisis is the unquestioned
commitment to growth at all costs. Where this crisis should lead us
is to a radically different way for our societies to measure health
and progress.

None of this, however, will happen without huge public pressure
placed on politicians in this key period. And not polite lobbying but
a return to the streets and the kind of direct action that ushered in
the New Deal in the 1930s. Without it, there will be superficial
changes and a return, as quickly as possible, to business as usual.

This article first appeared on The Guardian.