Just because our most popular social safety net programs escaped this current round of shock doctrine doesn’t mean the basic formula won’t be recycled in the near future to justify cutting these programs.

No private entity should have the power to bring down a president with an arbitrary and unjustifiable wave of the hand. No company should be able to line up a nation’s assets and orchestrate a fire sale on behalf of Wall Street, and then give them a private showing about what’s in store. They should not have the right demand cuts that destroy critical social safety net programs that the public overwhelmingly supports like Social Security and Medicare, and they most certainly should not be able to crown a new king as they implement Wall Street’s shock doctrine vision for the future.

It was bad enough that Standard and Poors screwed the world economy by recklessly giving AAA ratings to worthless mortgage backed securities without ever reviewing the underlying pool of loans. But now they’ve decided to play the role of “enforcer” in Wall Street’s latest gambit: forcing the sale of US assets in an austerity fire sale.

In addition to the austerity measures, Greece is “selling the family silver,” putting airports, ports, railways, motorways, sewage works, national energy companies, banks, and the national lottery up for sale in a privatization push they hope will net 50 billion euros. However, private equity firms turned up their noses at the first offer of sale. Perhaps they’re looking for discounts, or they want to change the rules of hiring and firing even further in an effort to break the unions.

Once US investors own Pakistan’s transportation, oil, electricity and steel industries, you can bet that virtually no cash flow from these industries will come back into Pakistan. Where will Pakistan’s social safety net be then?

There is justifiably a lot of angry attention drawn to the fact that Wisconsin didn’t really have a budget problem until Republican Governor Scott Walker artificially created one by rushing through a series of business tax cuts. Now, in a classic shock doctrine fashion, he is using this manufactured “crisis” to justify his push to cripple labor unions and cut the salaries of teachers.

While I find his behavior deplorable, it is important for grassroots progressive to keep in mind that what Gov. Walker is doing in Wisconsin is, in many ways, a small-scale version of what President Obama (with the help of Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell) has been overseeing at the federal level.

Three months ago in this space, I wrote about Wisconsin governor-elect Scott Walker, who was showboating by making bogus demands and proclamations even though he was still two months from being inaugurated.

It’s probably no surprise that actually taking office hasn’t diminished Walker’s ambitions.

As we look forward into the new year, and the looming state budget crises, what should we anticipate?

The Fianna Fail government in Ireland has released the austerity plan it promised in response for the big bank bailout the rest of Europe forced on it. The most telling aspect of it is that it lowers minimum wage from 8.65 euro to 7.65, a cut of 11.5%. But it retains Ireland’s controversial 12.5% corporate tax.

Poor little Ross Douthat, this analysis gig of his is so hard, especially while the fantasy world of conservatism continues crashing all around him when his primary job is to keep that fantasy alive, at great cost to the real world. Today we find little Ross taking on the crash of the Irish economy. In flailing about for an explanation of what has happened to this former poster-child of Chicago economics run wild, Douthat briefly flirts with an accurate explanation of what went wrong, but then pays proper homage to his overlords by discarding the painfully obvious truth in favor of yet another conservative talking point that is easily demonstrated to be false.