Friedman Facts.com

These statements are paraphrased from the Oct. 1st Naomi Klein event.

Hummers bring out Klien’s “nasty side.”

Her feelings on Hummers have changed recently with the increase of the price of gas.

There are many reasons to oppose the MFI–it’s expensive, takes resources away from the university. It might stifle intelllectual diversity.

The MFI would be the academic equivolent of the big, yellow Hummer sitting in your driveway.

The economic chaos that we’re seeing on Wall Street right now are due to the ideas of MF.

We’ve been living a liberation movement–liberation of capital from restraint.

“Ideas have consequences.” -Rumsfeld

MF had the ability to have people fall in love with his seductive ideas. He had the dream of the perfect, utopian market.

I’m not here to discuss theory, but the way in which the real world works.

The Friedmanites in the room will object that the events in Chile, Russia and the USA are distortions of MF’s beliefs.

My grandparents were pretty hardcore Marxists. They had their dreams shattered, and the Left has had a healthy reexamination of their ideology.

Chilean Foreign Minister: “This was a concerted effort to tranfer a far-right ideology.”

“What’s interesting about the New Left in Latin America is that it’s based on democracy.”

GWB has overseen a destruction of the beliefs of the far-right libertarians.

“Right-wing trotskyists,” a frozen-in-time quality.

“Are these people fuelled by belief or by greed?”

Expounding on the links between the cuurent crisis and MF: Degregulation.

There will be three big banks in the USA.

Phil Gramm did the most to advance the legislative agenda of the Friedmanites.

Schwarzenegger’s intro to Free to Choose is not to be missed.

Friedmanism has an appeal to politicians who don’t know much about the economy.

Friedmanism neglects the public sphere. Infrastructure is going to be subject to the next wave of privatization.

The voucher system implemented in NO after Katrina is neglect of the public sphere.

Regarding the bailout: People are untrustworthy and shouldn’t have a say in the economy, Friedman would say.

The GW Bush administation is the culmination of laissez-faire economics.

The Obama campaign is a referendum on Friedman’s ideas.

Milton Friedman understood the utilty of crisis: “Only a crisis produces real change.”

We need to have better ideas laying around.

We’re throwing very profitable ideology around.

Government is spending Obama’s promises away (health care for all, green jobs, clean energy).

The MFI is about recapturing a moment of ideologicl certainty.

Join us in the real world.

My iPhone died as we went into Q&A. I’ll post some additional observations in a different post soon.