Comments on: Depraved Injustice and the Privatization of the Global Freshwater Commons

By: Harry Canary

Harry Canary — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:11:24 +0000

Milton Friedmann taught at the University of Chicago school of economics. Interesting. Why did he not teach at a private school? Or more importantly why did he not work in some productive capacity for private industry?

I am sick to death of academics. They are brought along in the most highly paded taxpayer subsidized cocoon of all. Milton was not exposed to any free market in his ideas or employment. I highly doubt he would have survived it. His followers, like Alan Greenspan and Babblin’ Ben Bernanke all in government supported and subsidized positions.

Time for the pseudo libertarians, fake conservatives and other talkers who have lived half their life in government or public university posts give up their ill gotten gains. And they need to give their inheritances of mommies money and really make it on their own. Go out in the world at 18 with no support and see how far you can get. Until they have, they need to shut up.

As for Goofy in the Mist, her “writing” half mispelled and atrocious grammar indicates lack of education except for listening to rushie drugboy’s propaganda.

By: Max Shields

Max Shields — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:28:43 +0000

The facts are clear, it’s not just that M. Friedman advised Pinochet, who may not have always been an apt pupil, but that Chilean economists during that time went to U. of Chicago to learn the ways of the free traders and neoliberialism ala Friedman. That exchange was intentional not simply happenstance.

By: Frank J. Smecker

Frank J. Smecker — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:50:57 +0000

Oops, I meant to write: ‘Dig some wells…’, not “Did some wells…” Anyway, it’s really nice outside right now where I am, so I’m done with the computer for the day.

By: Frank J. Smecker

Frank J. Smecker — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:46:50 +0000

Andrew, that’s all wonderful and all that Friedman started to slightly second-guess his depravity after some time. But that doesn’t negate the fact in any way that Pinochet was backed by the U.S. every step of the way – militarily, politically, and economically. The result of that was the loss of thousands of innocent lives. The same conditions have transpired many regions elsewhere – Iraq being one of the latest and more extreme cases; and the ‘Shock & Awe’ protocol that has been responsible for Iraq’s spiral into abject bedlam and violent decay was borne out of Chicago, heralded by folks like Friedman.
As for your circular logic for privatizing water – let’s not forget that for thousand upon thousands of years human beings – anywhere – had access to clean water. It has not been until large-scale industrial usages have been conceived and implemented, that water issues have emerged.
When the periphery is exploited by the capitalist core for ‘resources’ to be stolen (because that’s what Imperial conquest is), in order to continue economic growth for the privileged few, landbases become ruined; and then along comes institutions like the IMF and World Bank, forcing them into development programs to clean up the mess that western transnationals made in the first place, to make transport of the exploited resources back to the epicenters of growth more efficient, to construct large scale dams to power invading industry, etc. After all is said and done, the landbase is not the same as it was when it was lived on by the indigenous of the area.
You can argue all you want in favor of market-based economics and globalization, and the privatization of water, but your view is tendentious and sociopathic if it excludes the history of the indigenous peoples of exploited regions as well as an understanding of the FACT that before the West imposed itself upon peripheral landbases, those landbases were pristine, and communities virtually without poverty, that had easy access to clean water. Did some wells, blow up some mountains for tin, coal, etc., construct some mega-dams, and monocrop industrial plantations, and suddenly you have the real reason for water scarcity. The answer to solving this problem lies in halting altogether the dominant capitalist economic worldview and allowing things to return and resume in their natural conditions.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:20:44 +0000

@ Frank Joseph Smecker
There’s no way Milton Friedman “was an adviser to Pinochet”. He visited Chile only once, in 1975.

“In the years following that visit, Friedman found that he had to discuss the issue over and over again, and he used the same main arguments each time: that his visit to Chile was not unique—he had been to several dictatorships, including the USSR; that he felt that academic contacts with countries which had oppressive governments could help the process of political liberalization in those countries; and that the opinion he had offered on how countries could resolve economic difficulty had been the same irrespective of these countries’ political regime. Friedman insisted that the advocates of monetary control and free market reforms in Chile should not be tarred with the same brush as Chile’s junta: “There are old students of mine down there and I’ll be God——d if I’m going to turn my back on them.” (Sunday Times, December 12, 1976.)”
http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2009/2009-017.pdf

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:53:21 +0000

No-one gets water infrastructure for free. The problem with publicly owned water systems is that they don’t get enough revenue, because politicians can’t resist holding down the charges, and they don’t get enough investment, because governments won’t fund them. So they can’t cover their costs and often end up verging on bankruptcy and unable to deliver service provision to the needy poor. Private water systems are less likely to have problems with investment (unless the politicians are holding down the charges again, which discourages investors), and are more likely to be run efficiently, but they obviously aren’t going to give water away for free. So in each case, you only get what you are prepared to pay for. The poor usually end up having to pay over the odds for bottled water.
BTW, the main article here is long, boring and confused – needs an executive summary. Like bottled water, there’s plenty of much clearer stuff out there. See for example: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/11/water_of_life.html

By: Benno Hansen

Benno Hansen — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:02:54 +0000

Thank you for this article. I use it in my latest post, Freshwater industrialization, privatization and pollution.

By: bozh

bozh — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:51:44 +0000

gorilla,
may i point out to you that you have omitted regress which the ‘progress’ had caused and is causing today?
the socalled progress had brought us WMD, illnesses, warming, warfare, anxiety, worries, etc.
today world uses some 130K chemicals; what many of them do us, nobody knows!
and we don’t know because governance [education, media, clergy, pols,etc.] doesn’t want us to know.
if minuses and pluses wld be tallied we wld be minus and not plus.

if ‘progress’ harms but one person or even animal, this represents a regress to me as long as i have healthy food to eat, clean air to breed, and two legs to use.
that is my progress and wealth/power. Let the selfish people ski, play sports, fly their jets, ply waters, ride cars, etc., but i am happy with my wealth. tnx bozhidar balkas vancouver

By: Barry99

Barry99 — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:27:57 +0000

gorilla – You forget, perhaps conveniently, that the Tigers of Asia, all success stories, all ignored the Friedman approach. They went on to do precisely the opposite of Friedman’s radical right recommendations. The countries that followed his path all went belly up economically until they came to their senses.

By: Frank J. Smecker

Frank J. Smecker — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:57:09 +0000

Your words are hollow man – not to mention lacking any intelligible foresight or common sense. Friedman was an adviser to Pinochet, which is more than enough said of his lack of morality.
You pompously aver, “The less market based your system, the worse the failures, period. It’s that simple.” What a way to slide your assumption by. How do you figure you’re correct? Show me how market based formula has ameliorated anything? Jamaica? I’m afraid not, the World Bank has destroyed their ability for endogenous growth. Jamaica’s currency has become virtually destitute of any value because of IMF policy, and the more debt they incur, the less money they have to export, in turn leading to less money to import what they need. Haiti? Market theory gone praxis has devastated that country and their people. The same with Africa, the Global South, and any indigenous community that is still remaining on the globe. India, a country that’s domestic condition has been influenced greatly by transnationals such as Monsanto as well as by American foreign policy, “allowed sixty-three million tons of grain to rot in its granaries. Twelve million tons were exported and sold at a subsidized price the Indian government was not willing to offer the Indian poor…in the period between the early 1990s and 2001, food grain absorption…dropped to levels lower than during the World War II years, including during the Bengal Famine, in which three million people died of starvation.”
Poverty, illiteracy, disease, malnutrition, ethnocide, genocide, species extinction, and landbase degradation, to name a handful, are common repercussions of globalized market based economics.
The U.S. consists of 5 percent of the global population, yet consumes the majority of the world’s resources. In 1960 corporate CEOs received forty times the average worker’s salary – today CEOs receives over three hundred times the average worker’s salary; between 1983 and 1995 the bottom 40 percent of U.S. households lost about 80 percent of their wealth through debt, and now approximately 10 percent of the U.S. population owns more than three fourths of all real estate, corporate stock, and bonds. If you want to know what’s wrong with that, ask a poor person – there’s more of them than there are rich people. Don’t be so myopic. Furthermore, the more international trade there is, the higher the third world debt. The wealth disparity between the first and third world is starker than the U.S. wealth gap.
Sorry, Gorilla in the Mist, but your conceited view of faring ‘fine’ through ecological mess is a truncated view. Technologies cannot be made without resources, and well, the latter are finite. Humans have been around for roughly 2 million years. Capitalism and civilization is just a dust particle on that scale. Un’civilized’ peoples lived for thousands of years without hyperexploiting their environment – it makes more sense not to compete, competition leads to overextraction of resources, and well, that leads to a lack of requirements to live. Do you think the lion or the grizzly compete for food? No. It’s in their best interest not to overeat, therefore they can continue living. Competition invariably leads to growing extraction rates, which in a finite world is just fucking dumb.
I have some advice for you. Get out of your sociopathic, wretched mind; find some friends – a community – and practice relation and cooperation. Read some books that aren’t sanctioned by the dominant culture – give yourself at least a chance to experience a different perspective: having only one leads to a distorted narrow view of the world. Your argument resonates with confusion, hence the unoriginal reiterated trash-talking that anyone can listen to if they turn on a TV, a radio, etc. You’re spewing acerbic banalities – here’s my final advice: Grow up and find your own voice.

By: gorilla in the mist

gorilla in the mist — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:18:20 +0000

one qoute from milton taken out of context does not make for intelligent analysis. Chicago school is gaining traction a second time around among policy makers in developing countries becuase it’s underpinnings provide a very compelling structure to build an economic growth model that works. Capitalism is sprerading because it works well when harnessed correctly, just as motors and engines spread as tools, over past centuries because they work well at what they do. The problem on here is so many conflate capitalism, which is simply an economic model with socio-political system.

One thing most westerners fail miserably to grasp, is that everyone else has caught on that the models that have given westerners the wealth to develop, are all market based capitalism. So everyone is adopting those models, period. The less market based your system, the worse the failures, period. It’s that simple. Everyones onto the gigf. But self absorption and the ego are an infinite force, and so many westerners are convinced that the economic struggles of the rest of the world, are caused by westerners themselves, beacuse well…westerners are so hugely important. That’s why many parrot compliants about the Bretton Twins, IMF, or the Chicago boys or WTO, etc. etc. while those organizations have been hawking there ideas for decades with variuos levels of adoption, you would need to grow up in a developing country to grasp, just how little all that external bullshit really had on what went down. And dont tell me about the CIA and all that crap either.

But, reading comments here western egomania is an invinvible force.. your so convinced of your own relevence you cant shake the idea that the whole world will look like the u.s in 50 years time wether you like it or not. And the environmental armegedon you speak of, well there will be environmental losses, and there will be adaptations to limits, and there will be new technologies and conservation, BUT like the other thousands of years of history, we will muddle along, and do fine..histrionics from braty westerners or not, were comming strong from the third world, so FUCK YOU CHICKEN LITTLES!

By: Frank J. Smecker

Frank J. Smecker — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:12:02 +0000

To Mulga Mumblebrain:
You’re absolutely right – Friedman was a psychopath; and as a student matriculating towards a psychology degree, here is the definition of ‘psychopath’ straight out of the text book:”Psychopaths are individuals who exhibit a persistent pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others.” Although, it’s difficult to distinguish whether ‘Uncle Milty’ was a psychopath or sociopath…I’d like to think of him as a conflation of both.
Milton Friedman, the progenitor and patriarch of globalization and neoliberal free trade once observed that, “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Friedman went on to act as adviser to General Augusto Pinochet, at which point he advised Pinochet to “impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy – tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation.” This inevitably led to acute hyperinflation and the loss of thousands of lives. So yeah, Friedman is nothing less than a sociopathic psychopath. But it takes a sociopathic-psychopathic culture to construct the framing conditions that produce sociopathic pyschopaths.
How’s this for a cultural product: “Shock and Awe are actions that create fears, dangers, and destruction that are incomprehensible to the people at large, specific elements/sectors of the threat society, or the leadership. Nature in the form of tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, uncontrollable fires, famine, and disease can engender Shock and Awe.”
– ‘Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance,’ the military doctrine for the U.S. war on Iraq.

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:12:49 +0000

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/blogs/republican/peak-coal-47061401

As Al Bartlett, the guru of exponential math and resource economics, is fond of noting: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

If you read this do a few on Wall Street or at the Fed and Treasury understand exponential function? Sort of as it seems it is a big part of moving forward where one plus one is now 20 still with the help of compound interest. With oil or coal and growth 20 heads back the other way. The answer again is Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. We could start with a come back of one and one is two not 20. So far I don’t think that fit’s into there model and just change the facts with that illusion of knowledge they know well.

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:09:17 +0000

Friedman a psychopath well at least a smart ass kind of like the people I see on TV who like to bring up his name. You know according to Friedman lower tax’s on the rich is the answer. Clowns and not very good ones. If Friedman could see the big picture today would he say the same thing? I think he would like the tiny proportion of evil shits we now see. Are they really evil shits well at the very least very very confused although evil shits is probably a better way to put it.

By: Mulga Mumblebrain

Mulga Mumblebrain — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:14:05 +0000

Friedman, like all his ilk was, in my opinion at least, a psychopath. Of course there are other useful labels like robopath and shit, but the straight psychological definition is, I believe, sufficient. Lack of empathy, indifference to the fate of others (although these two are often feigned, for PR purposes)gigantic egomania, boundless avarice etc. The corporate psychopaths and their propagandists sit, safe for now, inside a coccoon of larcenously acquired wealth, either believing their own lies, or unconcerned as they will be dead in a decade or two. Our one faint hope of survival depends critically on the complete transformation of society, and that cannot be achieved unless market capitalism is ended, forever. All the technological fixes that are, indeed, possible, will simply put off the evil hour if the system of rule by corporate psychopaths remains intact. Indeed, unless the psychopaths are brought under control, it would be better that human ‘civilization’ suffers a cataclysmic collapse, rather than see the spiritual disease of the death cult of market capitalism escape into the cosmos. Unless humanity takes the opportunity of the greatest crisis in its history to make a moral and spiritual leap to a higher level of consciousness and a new view of life as lucky happenstance to be enjoyed while it lasts, not an arena for contention, displays of egomania and boundless greed, we are stuffed. I doubt we are capable of such a transformation, if only because it only takes a tiny proportion of evil shits to wreck things for everyone else, and at present there seems no shortage of such types.

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:06:09 +0000

Have all these countries found a genius like Greenspan? … What the foreign experience suggests is, you don’t need a genius. You just need someone willing to make fighting inflation his top priority.” Milton

Well Milton inflation is now the least of our problems. It looks like we used most of our energy into making money and forgot about almost anything else you can think of.

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money. ~Cree Indian Proverb

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:27:26 +0000

I think my wife feels I am a fool because I wash most of the dishes. Well the reason is because I think wife finds washing dishes strange. I find it easy should I feel strange?

By: bozh

bozh — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:20:05 +0000

don,
milton friedman is a mistake. Good news is, nature never makes the same mistake twice.
i gave you first the good news; now i’ll give you even better news:
after our evanescence, nature will not make us ever again and get fooled twice.
and nobody likes to be made fool of even once let alone twice.
tnx

By: Don Hawkins

Don Hawkins — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 16:33:20 +0000

“What kind of society isn’t structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system”
Milton Friedman

Not only is Milton wrong but so far do the least harm is not exactly what is going on. Two articles today one on the Amazon and this one that’s what is going on. In the face of what we know is happening to the Earth better known as the home planet does capitalism seem like the system that will do the least harm? This little economic downturn debt get it now pay later and the fix more debt pay later climate change pay later. On this present path paying later will not be a problem and social organization well organization is probably the wrong word. Milton forgot about the Earth and he was not the first to do that just on a grand scale this time.