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Obamamania! • End of some eras • Naomi Klein’s shock treatment: Pinochet, meet Procrustes • U.S. in recession—how bad will it get? • crisis precedents • SWFs

Would you like change with that?

Super Tuesday II, as Fox dubbed it, took some steam out of the Obama bandwagon, but he’s still the likely Democratic nominee, and therefore the likely president-to-be. Which is remarkable, really—a nonparticipant can only stand slackjawed in awe of Obamamania. Previously rational people whom LBO admires, like Barbara Ehrenreich and Christopher Hayes, have fallen in love with the Senator’s brand of change we can believe in, a slogan that has to be one of the emptiest since Sandburg’s “The people, yes!,” that the New Party used in New York in the early 1990s. Obama has become the Tokio Hotel of politics.

End of some eras

With the financial markets still swooning and the U.S. economy almost certainly in or near recession, are some eras drawing to a close? The provisional answer would have to be between a maybe and a yes.

What eras are these? Let’s list a few: the right-wing ascendancy in the U.S., the neoliberal era globally, unchallenged U.S. dominance of the world order, and the eras of cheap food and energy.

Awe, shocks!

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books, 558 pp., $28.

Naomi Klein made herself deservedly famous with No Logo, whose official U.S. publication date of January 15, 2000, was just weeks after the popular hijacking of the WTO summit in Seattle. Not only was it well-timed, it was notable for moving beyond the usual critiques of consumption that had been staples of what was then called the antiglobalization movement and into the neglected world of production. It was a comprehensive look at the economic world of the time that helped energize a movement and deepen its understanding of the world.

Seven years later comes The Shock Doctrine, an even more ambitious book that aims to provide, in blurber Arundhati Roy’s words, “nothing less than the secret history of what we call the ‘free market.’” Although one should never look to jacket blurbs for measured evaluations, there’s really little that’s secret about this history, and Klein’s organizing “shock” metaphor explains nowhere near as much of the world we live in as she thinks it does.

Money

Evidence continues to mount that the U.S. economy is now in recession. In February, 63,000 jobs disappeared, the second consecutive loss. January’s decline was revised down; first reported as a loss of 17,000, it’s now –22,000 jobs. And those may be underestimates, since the labor statisticians often underestimate job losses early in recessions (for good technical reasons—they’re not cooking the books).

Miscellany

Precedents. What are the precedents for the subprime crisis and its fallout?

SWFs. Sovereign wealth funds, not single white females.

SWFs are pools of capital run by governments seeking high returns in the financial markets. They’re the aggressive cousins of official foreign exchange reserves, which are rather like rainy day funds run by finance ministries and central banks and invested conservatively in assets like U.S Treasury bills. Middle Eastern oil exporters and Asian exporters of manufactured goods have really seen the cash pile up lately, and they’re eager to get returns higher than the 2% you can get for lending to the U.S. government.