M
Michigan Farmer
Guest
The shock doctrine
http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2165053,00.html
Her explosive new book exposes the lie that free markets thrive on freedom. In our
first exclusive extract, the No Logo author reveals the business of exploiting disaster
Naomi Klein Saturday September 8, 2007 The Guardian
I met Jamar Perry in September 2005, at the big Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana. Dinner was being doled out by grinning young Scientologists, and he was
standing in line. I had just been busted for talking to evacuees without a media
escort and was now doing my best to blend in, a white Canadian in a sea of African-
American southerners. I dodged into the food line behind Perry and asked him to talk
to me as if we were old friends, which he kindly did.
Born and raised in New Orleans, he'd been out of the flooded city for a week. He and
his family had waited forever for the evacuation buses; when they didn't arrive, they
had walked out in the baking sun. Finally they ended up here, a sprawling convention
centre now jammed with 2,000 cots and a mess of angry, exhausted people being
patrolled by edgy National Guard soldiers just back from Iraq.
The news racing around the shelter that day was that the Republican Congressman
Richard Baker had told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in
New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans'
wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I think we have a
clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big
opportunities." All that week Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists
helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper
workers and a "smaller, safer city" - which in practice meant plans to level the
public housing projects. Hearing all the talk of "fresh starts" and "clean sheets",
you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains
just a few miles down the highway.
Over at the shelter, Jamar could think of nothing else. "I really don't see it as
cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who
shouldn't have died."
He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us overheard and whipped
around. "What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn't an opportunity.
It's a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?" A mother with two kids chimed in. "No,
they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine."
One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton
Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook
for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in
failing health, "Uncle Miltie", as he was known to his followers, found the strength
to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke.
"Most New Orleans schools are in ruins," Friedman observed, "as are the homes of the
children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country.
This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity."
Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of
dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing
public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they
could spend at private institutions.
In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the
electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system
took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the
city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been
almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.
The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that "Katrina accomplished in a
day ... what Louisiana school reformers couldn't do after years of trying". Public
school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman's plan "an educational land grab". I
call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events,
combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, "disaster
capitalism".
Privatising the school system of a mid-size American city may seem a modest
preoccupation for the man hailed as the most influential economist of the past half
century. Yet his determination to exploit the crisis in New Orleans to advance a
fundamentalist version of capitalism was also an oddly fitting farewell. For more than
three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very
strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private
players while citizens were still reeling from the shock.
In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism's
core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as "the shock doctrine". He
observed that "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change". When that
crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some
people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters;
Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University
of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid
and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the
"tyranny of the status quo". A variation on Machiavelli's advice that "injuries"
should be inflicted "all at once", this is one of Friedman's most lasting legacies.
Friedman first learned how to exploit a shock or crisis in the mid-70s, when he
advised the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of
shock after Pinochet's violent coup, but the country was also traumatised by
hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the
economy - tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending and
deregulation.
It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became
known as a "Chicago School" revolution, as so many of Pinochet's economists had
studied under Friedman there. Friedman coined a phrase for this painful tactic:
economic "shock treatment". In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed
sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or "shock therapy",
has been the method of choice.
I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years
ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on
Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass
privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized
government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating
2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors
and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the
entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts,
blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By
the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the
preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to
engage in radical social and economic engineering.
Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to
salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. "When I rebuild
the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself," said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New
Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm.
But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri
Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called "reconstruction" began with
finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.
When I began this research into the intersection between super-profits and
mega-disasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive
to "liberate" markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement
against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I
was accustomed to seeing business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at
WTO summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the IMF.
As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, I
discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi
of Friedman's movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of
capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. What was happening in Iraq and New
Orleans was not a post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in
crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the
shock doctrine.
Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past 35 years look very different. Some of
the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed
as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed
with the intent of terrorising the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground
for radical free-market "reforms". In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen
Square massacre and the arrests of tens of thousands that freed the Communist party to
convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too
terrified to demand their rights. The Falklands war in 1982 served a similar purpose
for Margaret Thatcher: the disorder resulting from the war allowed her to crush the
striking miners and to launch the first privatisation frenzy in a western democracy.
The bottom line is that, for economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint,
some sort of additional collective trauma has always been required. Friedman's
economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy - the US under
Reagan being the best example - but for the vision to be implemented in its complete
form, authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian conditions are required.
Until recently, these conditions did not exist in the US. What happened on September
11 2001 is that an ideology hatched in American universities and fortified in
Washington institutions finally had its chance to come home. The Bush administration,
packed with Friedman's disciples, including his close friend Donald Rumsfeld, seized
upon the fear generated to launch the "war on terror" and to ensure that it is an
almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new
life into the faltering US economy. Best understood as a "disaster capitalism
complex", it is a global war fought on every level by private companies whose
involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the
US homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all "evil" abroad.
In a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting
terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to
increasingly frequent natural disasters. The ultimate goal for the corporations at the
centre of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances
so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary functioning of the state
- in effect, to privatise the government.
In scale, the disaster capitalism complex is on a par with the "emerging market" and
IT booms of the 90s. It is dominated by US firms, but is global, with British
companies bringing their experience in security cameras, Israeli firms their expertise
in building hi-tech fences and walls. Combined with soaring insurance industry profits
as well as super profits for the oil industry, the disaster economy may well have
saved the world market from the full-blown recession it was facing on the eve of 9/11.
In the torrent of words written in eulogy to Milton Friedman, the role of shocks and
crises to advance his world view received barely a mention. Instead, the economist's
passing, in November 2006, provided an occasion for a retelling of the official story
of how his brand of radical capitalism became government orthodoxy in almost every
corner of the globe. It is a fairytale history, scrubbed clean of the violence so
intimately entwined with this crusade.
It is time for this to change. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been
a powerful reckoning with the crimes committed in the name of communism. But what of
the crusade to liberate world markets?
I am not arguing that all forms of market systems require large-scale violence. It is
eminently possible to have a market-based economy that demands no such brutality or
ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public
health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy - such as a
national oil company - held in state hands. It's equally possible to require
corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and
for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that
mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.
John Maynard Keynes proposed just that kind of mixed, regulated economy after the
Great Depression. It was that system of compromises, checks and balances that
Friedman's counter-revolution was launched to dismantle in country after country. Seen
in that light, Chicago School capitalism has something in common with other
fundamentalist ideologies: the signature desire for unattainable purity.
This desire for godlike powers of creation is precisely why free-market ideologues are
so drawn to crises and disasters. Non-apocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to
their ambitions. For 35 years, what has animated Friedman's counter-revolution is an
attraction to a kind of freedom available only in times of cataclysmic change - when
people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way -
moments when democracy seems a practical impossibility. Believers in the shock
doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture - a flood, a war, a terrorist attack
- can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable
moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these
artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.
Torture: the other shock treatment
From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global
free-market crusade. Chile's coup featured three distinct forms of shock, a recipe
that would re-emerge three decades later in Iraq. The shock of the coup prepared the
ground for economic shock therapy; the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone
thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks.
But torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious
peoples; it is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine's underlying logic. Torture, or
in CIA parlance, "coercive interrogation", is a set of techniques developed by
scientists and designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation.
Declassified CIA manuals explain how to break "resistant sources": create violent
ruptures between prisoners and their ability to make sense of the world around them.
First, the senses are starved (with hoods, earplugs, shackles), then the body is
bombarded with overwhelming stimulation (strobe lights, blaring music, beatings). The
goal of this "softening-up" stage is to provoke a kind of hurricane in the mind, and
it is in that state of shock that most prisoners give their interrogators whatever
they want.
The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely. The original disaster - the coup,
the terrorist attack, the market meltdown - puts the entire population into a state of
collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to
soften up whole societies. Like the terrorised prisoner who gives up the names of
comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would
otherwise fiercely protect.
- - - - - > Some comments: What Klein calls capitalism actually should be called
fascism--as outlined in my web page shown below.
Her analysis gives proof to something I've been harping on for about six
years-the current regime, meaning every administration since FDR, is not worthy of our
support. If you currently pay any taxes, you are supporting fascism
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's a new page describing the social aspects of American Fascism at
http://politicsusaweb.com/RootsOfFascism.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Still the most concise explanation of how we are who we are:
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress
of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her August claims, have been
born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing,
and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it
does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the
ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the
awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be
both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly
submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will
be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words
or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those
whom they oppress."
---Frederick Douglass
Source: Douglass, Frederick. [1857] (1985). "The Significance of
Emancipation in the West Indies." Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3,
1857; collected in pamphlet by author.
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
__________________________________________________________________
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constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section
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If you wish to use copyrighted material from this post for purposes of your own that
go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2165053,00.html
Her explosive new book exposes the lie that free markets thrive on freedom. In our
first exclusive extract, the No Logo author reveals the business of exploiting disaster
Naomi Klein Saturday September 8, 2007 The Guardian
I met Jamar Perry in September 2005, at the big Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana. Dinner was being doled out by grinning young Scientologists, and he was
standing in line. I had just been busted for talking to evacuees without a media
escort and was now doing my best to blend in, a white Canadian in a sea of African-
American southerners. I dodged into the food line behind Perry and asked him to talk
to me as if we were old friends, which he kindly did.
Born and raised in New Orleans, he'd been out of the flooded city for a week. He and
his family had waited forever for the evacuation buses; when they didn't arrive, they
had walked out in the baking sun. Finally they ended up here, a sprawling convention
centre now jammed with 2,000 cots and a mess of angry, exhausted people being
patrolled by edgy National Guard soldiers just back from Iraq.
The news racing around the shelter that day was that the Republican Congressman
Richard Baker had told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in
New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans'
wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I think we have a
clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big
opportunities." All that week Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists
helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper
workers and a "smaller, safer city" - which in practice meant plans to level the
public housing projects. Hearing all the talk of "fresh starts" and "clean sheets",
you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains
just a few miles down the highway.
Over at the shelter, Jamar could think of nothing else. "I really don't see it as
cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who
shouldn't have died."
He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us overheard and whipped
around. "What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn't an opportunity.
It's a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?" A mother with two kids chimed in. "No,
they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine."
One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton
Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook
for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in
failing health, "Uncle Miltie", as he was known to his followers, found the strength
to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke.
"Most New Orleans schools are in ruins," Friedman observed, "as are the homes of the
children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country.
This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity."
Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of
dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing
public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they
could spend at private institutions.
In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the
electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system
took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the
city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been
almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.
The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that "Katrina accomplished in a
day ... what Louisiana school reformers couldn't do after years of trying". Public
school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman's plan "an educational land grab". I
call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events,
combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, "disaster
capitalism".
Privatising the school system of a mid-size American city may seem a modest
preoccupation for the man hailed as the most influential economist of the past half
century. Yet his determination to exploit the crisis in New Orleans to advance a
fundamentalist version of capitalism was also an oddly fitting farewell. For more than
three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very
strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private
players while citizens were still reeling from the shock.
In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism's
core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as "the shock doctrine". He
observed that "only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change". When that
crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some
people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters;
Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University
of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid
and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the
"tyranny of the status quo". A variation on Machiavelli's advice that "injuries"
should be inflicted "all at once", this is one of Friedman's most lasting legacies.
Friedman first learned how to exploit a shock or crisis in the mid-70s, when he
advised the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of
shock after Pinochet's violent coup, but the country was also traumatised by
hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the
economy - tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending and
deregulation.
It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became
known as a "Chicago School" revolution, as so many of Pinochet's economists had
studied under Friedman there. Friedman coined a phrase for this painful tactic:
economic "shock treatment". In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed
sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or "shock therapy",
has been the method of choice.
I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years
ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on
Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass
privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized
government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating
2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors
and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the
entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts,
blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By
the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the
preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to
engage in radical social and economic engineering.
Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to
salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. "When I rebuild
the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself," said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New
Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm.
But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri
Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called "reconstruction" began with
finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.
When I began this research into the intersection between super-profits and
mega-disasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive
to "liberate" markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement
against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I
was accustomed to seeing business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at
WTO summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the IMF.
As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, I
discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi
of Friedman's movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of
capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. What was happening in Iraq and New
Orleans was not a post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in
crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the
shock doctrine.
Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past 35 years look very different. Some of
the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed
as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed
with the intent of terrorising the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground
for radical free-market "reforms". In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen
Square massacre and the arrests of tens of thousands that freed the Communist party to
convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too
terrified to demand their rights. The Falklands war in 1982 served a similar purpose
for Margaret Thatcher: the disorder resulting from the war allowed her to crush the
striking miners and to launch the first privatisation frenzy in a western democracy.
The bottom line is that, for economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint,
some sort of additional collective trauma has always been required. Friedman's
economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy - the US under
Reagan being the best example - but for the vision to be implemented in its complete
form, authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian conditions are required.
Until recently, these conditions did not exist in the US. What happened on September
11 2001 is that an ideology hatched in American universities and fortified in
Washington institutions finally had its chance to come home. The Bush administration,
packed with Friedman's disciples, including his close friend Donald Rumsfeld, seized
upon the fear generated to launch the "war on terror" and to ensure that it is an
almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new
life into the faltering US economy. Best understood as a "disaster capitalism
complex", it is a global war fought on every level by private companies whose
involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the
US homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all "evil" abroad.
In a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting
terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to
increasingly frequent natural disasters. The ultimate goal for the corporations at the
centre of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances
so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary functioning of the state
- in effect, to privatise the government.
In scale, the disaster capitalism complex is on a par with the "emerging market" and
IT booms of the 90s. It is dominated by US firms, but is global, with British
companies bringing their experience in security cameras, Israeli firms their expertise
in building hi-tech fences and walls. Combined with soaring insurance industry profits
as well as super profits for the oil industry, the disaster economy may well have
saved the world market from the full-blown recession it was facing on the eve of 9/11.
In the torrent of words written in eulogy to Milton Friedman, the role of shocks and
crises to advance his world view received barely a mention. Instead, the economist's
passing, in November 2006, provided an occasion for a retelling of the official story
of how his brand of radical capitalism became government orthodoxy in almost every
corner of the globe. It is a fairytale history, scrubbed clean of the violence so
intimately entwined with this crusade.
It is time for this to change. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been
a powerful reckoning with the crimes committed in the name of communism. But what of
the crusade to liberate world markets?
I am not arguing that all forms of market systems require large-scale violence. It is
eminently possible to have a market-based economy that demands no such brutality or
ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public
health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy - such as a
national oil company - held in state hands. It's equally possible to require
corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and
for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that
mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.
John Maynard Keynes proposed just that kind of mixed, regulated economy after the
Great Depression. It was that system of compromises, checks and balances that
Friedman's counter-revolution was launched to dismantle in country after country. Seen
in that light, Chicago School capitalism has something in common with other
fundamentalist ideologies: the signature desire for unattainable purity.
This desire for godlike powers of creation is precisely why free-market ideologues are
so drawn to crises and disasters. Non-apocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to
their ambitions. For 35 years, what has animated Friedman's counter-revolution is an
attraction to a kind of freedom available only in times of cataclysmic change - when
people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way -
moments when democracy seems a practical impossibility. Believers in the shock
doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture - a flood, a war, a terrorist attack
- can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable
moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these
artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.
Torture: the other shock treatment
From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global
free-market crusade. Chile's coup featured three distinct forms of shock, a recipe
that would re-emerge three decades later in Iraq. The shock of the coup prepared the
ground for economic shock therapy; the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone
thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks.
But torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious
peoples; it is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine's underlying logic. Torture, or
in CIA parlance, "coercive interrogation", is a set of techniques developed by
scientists and designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation.
Declassified CIA manuals explain how to break "resistant sources": create violent
ruptures between prisoners and their ability to make sense of the world around them.
First, the senses are starved (with hoods, earplugs, shackles), then the body is
bombarded with overwhelming stimulation (strobe lights, blaring music, beatings). The
goal of this "softening-up" stage is to provoke a kind of hurricane in the mind, and
it is in that state of shock that most prisoners give their interrogators whatever
they want.
The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely. The original disaster - the coup,
the terrorist attack, the market meltdown - puts the entire population into a state of
collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to
soften up whole societies. Like the terrorised prisoner who gives up the names of
comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would
otherwise fiercely protect.
- - - - - > Some comments: What Klein calls capitalism actually should be called
fascism--as outlined in my web page shown below.
Her analysis gives proof to something I've been harping on for about six
years-the current regime, meaning every administration since FDR, is not worthy of our
support. If you currently pay any taxes, you are supporting fascism
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There's a new page describing the social aspects of American Fascism at
http://politicsusaweb.com/RootsOfFascism.html
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Still the most concise explanation of how we are who we are:
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress
of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her August claims, have been
born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing,
and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it
does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the
ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the
awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be
both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly
submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will
be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words
or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those
whom they oppress."
---Frederick Douglass
Source: Douglass, Frederick. [1857] (1985). "The Significance of
Emancipation in the West Indies." Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3,
1857; collected in pamphlet by author.
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
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