Naomi Klein writes about year zero in Baghdad in the current issue of Harper's.

• A Plan. The administration did have a plan for postwar Iraq.
• Greed is Good. The postwar plan was to rebuild the country by privatizing Iraqi assets.
• Shock Therapy. On the need for an economic shock to distract the people while privatization takes place.
• Initial Success. Soon after the end of conflict, the shock-therapy technique seemed to be working.
• Year Zero. On Pragmatists and Year Zeroists and how the Year Zeroists came to dominate postwar Iraq, paving the way for privatization.
• The Iraqi Governing Council. How international law led Paul Bremer to install an interim Iraqi government under which privatization could continue.
• Opposite Effects. How Bremer's shock-therapy evidently did not distract people from the privatization effort but rather led them to join the resistance.
• Imports. Importing foreign capital and labor, even when domestic sources existed led to widespread resentment.
• Over their dead bodies. Workers perceived privatization as a death sentence, making the shock-therapy approach to pulling it off untenable.
• Beginning of the End. Iraqi discontent played into the hands of Muqtada al-Sadr. Violence escalated. Foreign corporations left. The conservative dream of creating a new Iraq began to crumble.
• The Dream is Dead. The dream of building a new Iraq based on pure principles of conservative economics had died.

Choice closing paragraphs:

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Bill Moyers on the state of journalism today

This speech by Bill Moyers at a Society of Professional Journalists conference is remarkable. In it, he recounts

• his experience in reporting stories in the face of government and corporate opposition,
• his notions of what journalism is and why it is getting more difficult,
• the challenges of a world dominated by ideologies of violence
• the emergence of The Rapture Index and the grip it holds on our leaders
• the challenges to journalism in an era of growing secrecy and government/corporate alignment, and
• examples of why journalism matters

Common Dreams has a brief summary of what Moyers said, but the full speech transcript is worth the time.

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David Weinberger dines with media moguls

David Weinberger (of Cluetrain and Small Pieces Loosely Joined fame) attended a gathering of the Entertainment and Media section of the World Economic Forum recently and wrote about it. He says he came away with four impressions:

First, these people are thrashing. They're floundering. They're desperate to find a way in which their organizations still add value. ...

Second, they don't understand what the hell we're talking about. ... To them, the Internet is a transport for distributing bits they own. ...

Third, they believe they're responding to the market. They do not recognize that their market has abandoned them. ... I think they actually believe that the legislation they're back[ing] is something the market wants. ...

Fourth, they're going to win. They own Congress and neither Congress nor the entertainment cartel sees any reason to compromise. ...

... Sure, there will be sophisticated hacks and analog holes and guys in back alleys with soldering irons who'll remove the hardware restrictions so your kid can include a snippet of a movie in her social studies paper. But that's exactly what losing looks like.

Depressed? You betcha. ...

We are doomed.

(Hat tip: Dan Gilmore.)

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