Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine": Corporatism in Extremis

Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine": Corporatism in Extremis

By Bernard Weiner

Created Apr 16 2008 - 12:27am

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

Most of the books I've read about the awfulness of the Bush presidency

remind me of the old story about the blind men trying to figure out what an

elephant looks like. Each one feels the part in front of him and describes

the elephant within that singular context. The blind men's descriptions are

correct but they don't really capture "elephant-ness," the totality of what

such an animal might be.

"The Shock Doctrine" by The Nation/Guardian writer Naomi Klein gets the

pieces of the elephant right, but, more importantly, the book displays the

author's deep understanding of the dangerous political/economic philosophies

that undergird U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

In this, "The Shock Doctrine" is the most compelling, intelligent,

meticulously researched and wholistic book I've yet read about how the U.S.,

over the past fifty years, got itself into the unholy mess it's in today.

A large part of Klein's book, as you might guess, involves the catastrophe

that is Iraq and the "war on terror" in general. But those military

misadventures, she says, are but symptoms of the more all-encompassing

ideological mindset that breeds the reckless policies being pursued today

both domestically and internationally.

PROFITEERING ON HUMAN TRAGEDY

In the main, that ideology rests on a narrow, greed-oriented economic and

political philosopy that barely recognizes the concept of a "public good."

Instead, the goal is what can be gained by private corporations and

individuals if the "public good" is removed from the equation so that "free

market" forces are permitted to act unconstrained.

The idea is to return to some imagined "clean slate" where those free-market

forces can be allowed to do their stuff absent governmental interference and

oversight. The economic "shock therapy" visited upon developing Latin

American countries and the Iraq War/Occupation provide just two examples of

such human intervention.

Often, however, Mother Nature through earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc.

wipes the slate clean so that the greed paradigm can be allowed to flourish

by removing (usually poorer) residents who get in the way of corporate

desires. Klein incisively and movingly relates the tale of what happened in

Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami disaster, where the local fishing

villages were turned into luxurious tourist sites by money-hungry government

officials in cahoots with Western developers. (Page 385)

Klein uses the term "disaster capitalism" to refer to these "orchestrated

raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events," where the

forces of greed view such tragedies "as exciting market opportunities."

(p.6) She quotes a Republican leader in Louisiana: "We finally cleaned up

public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Katrina,

Klein says, is a clear example of the new "preferred method of advancing

corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical

social and economic engineering." (p.8)

In short, in "disaster capitalism" there are huge profits to be made from

other peoples' misery, and since the welfare of the public is of no import

in this economic/political theory, all that is needed for full control and

enhanced profits are ways to optimally manage that misery.

MAN-MADE TRAUMA AND CHAOS

If nature doesn't provide that trauma, humans can. According to Klein,

that's what "Shock & Awe" was all about in Iraq and which will be used in

other attacks as well. The idea is to traumatize an entire culture through

death, destruction, deprivation, fright, and often torture. One U.S.

entrepreneur in Iraq stated it baldly: "fear and disorder offer real

promise" in the marketplace. (p.9) This is reminiscent of Condoleezza Rice's

famous comment after 9/11 that the terrorist tragedy offerred conservatives

a good "opportunity" to move quickly on their business and political

agendas.

Much of the rationale for this type of thinking was born from Milton

Friedman's economic model developed at the University of Chicago in the

1950s and beyond. Klein, oddly enough, doesn't even mention the

complementary teaching by political philosopher Leo Strauss, the

Machavellian godfather of neo-conservative extremism, who also was on the

Chicago faculty; many of Strauss' students became key players in the

CheneyBush Administration. Strauss in a nutshell: grab what you can get by

whatever means necessary.

While Friedman's tough, corporate model can be, and has been, imposed on

democratic cultures, Klein notes, "authoritarian conditions are required for

the implementation of its true vision." (p.11) And thus aggressive, tough

strictures are often employed, often by dictators or invading armies or

world financial institutions.

In non-dictatorships, government (which takes its cues from public clamor

for services) must be effectively neutered or "hollowed-out" over time. The

aim is to privatize as many of those public-need functions as possible, so

that huge amounts of money can be made and, as it happens, healthy chunks of

that cash can then be funnelled back into party coffers to aid proponents of

free-markets to stay in office and expand their power base. (Conservative

activist Grover Norquist aims for the day when government will be shrunken

to the point that it can be "drowned in a bathtub.")

In the Bush Administration, Klein writes, "the war profiteers aren't just

clamoring to get access to government, they are the government; there is no

distinction between the two." (p. 314)

PRIVATIZING GOVERNMENT ITSELF

As we have seen time and time again in the Bush Administration, virtually

every possible government function is outsourced to corporate contractors,

often with no bidding for those contracts. The middle-class and poor get

stomped on and squeezed, but the corporate behemoths and multinationals --

the Bechtels and Halliburtons and Blackwaters and KPMGs -- make out like

bandits. Graft and corruption are built into the system, with billions

simply disappearing into corporate black holes, with the Administration

conveniently looking the other way. And the general public, of course, winds

up paying for all this transfer of wealth and is left holding the bag in the

form of lack of spending on public needs and infrastructure upkeep and a

huge debt burdening future generations.

"A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big

Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but

corporatist," writes Klein. (p. 87) (Mussolini described this amalgam of

government and business as fascism.)

"Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private

hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between

the dazzling rich and the disposable poor, and an aggressive nationalism

that justifies bottomless spending on security. ... Other features of the

corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with

government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass

incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always,

torture." (p. 15)

At times, Klein seems to be suggesting that such behaviors are but

unfortunate and accidental by-products of over-zealous free-marketeers, but

mostly she leans in the direction of a conscious conspiracy on the part of

the corporatist manipulators of the economy and body politic. For example,

she says, "the extreme tactics on display in Iraq and New Orleans are often

mistaken for the unique incompetence or cronyism of the Bush White House. In

fact, Bush's exploits merely represent the monstrously violent and creative

culmination of a fifty-year campaign for total corporate liberation." (p.19)

LATIN AMERICA AS CHICAGO LAB

Milton Friedman's economic model, engineered by his former students (Klein

calls them the "Chicago Boys") placed in key countries around the world,

rested upon, to use Friedman's words, inflicting "painful shocks: only

'bitter medicine' could clear those distortions and bad patterns out of the

way." (p. 50) But time after time when economic shock therapies were tried

out in the real world -- downsizing government, eliminating millions of

jobs, deregulation of industries, etc. -- the resulting social chaos and

dislocation were so horrific that the experiments had to be trimmed back or

reconfigured, often using the very Keynesian mixed-economy approaches that

are anathema to the Friedmanites.

The first public laboratory for Friedman's drastic economic model was Latin

America in the '50s and '60s and then beyond: Iran, Indonesia, former

colonies in Afria, etc. But, says Klein, rather than encourage and bring

democracy to Guatamala, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, et al., the result was the

CIA-engineered "overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did

not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands and

the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people." (p. 102)

Iraq, she indicates, is merely the latest manifestation of what happens when

private profit and private power are the be-alls and end-alls of government

policy, complemented by imperial hegemony resting on a belief in American

"exceptionalism."

"As proto-disaster capitalists, the architects of the War on Terror are part

of a different breed of corporate-politicians from their predecesors, one

for whom wars and other disasters are indeed ends in themselves. ... That's

because what is unquestionably good for the bottom line of these companies

is cataclysm -- wars, epidemics, natural disasters and resource shortages.

.... Public service is reduced to little more than a reconnaissance mission

for future work in the disaster capitalism complex." (p. 311)

SHOCKING & AWING IN IRAQ

Nowhere is this more evident that in Iraq, which contains all four of those

calamities (war, epidemics, natural disasters and resource shortages) in one

convenient location:

"After the crusade had conquered Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and

Asia, the Arab world called out as its final frontier...The architects of

this invasion were firm believers in the shock doctrine -- they knew that

while Iraqis were consumed with daily emergencies, the country could be

discreetly auctioned off and the results announced as a done deal."

>> "The architects of the war surveyed the global aresenal of shock tactics

>> and decided to go with all of them -- blitzkrieg military bombardment

>> supplemented with elaborate psychological operations, followed up with

>> the fastest and most sweeping political and economic shock therapy

>> program attempted anywhere, backed up, if there was any resistance, by

>> rounding up those who resisted and subjecting them to 'gloves-off'

>> abuse...[an] experiment in mass torture for months." (p. 331)

Torture and the other dislocations usually occur early as a demonstration

model; the extreme maltreatment is not aimed solely or sometimes even mainly

at those persons tortured or killed, but are designed to stimulate a general

sense of chaos and fright and to "destroy the parts of society that those

people represent," such as resisters, political activists, or labor

organizers. (p. 101)

So why did the U.S. Occupation go so badly? One could name a host of

reasons, but certainly a huge one is an obvious blind spot in the theory of

American exceptionalism:

"It was this theft of Iraq's reconstruction funds from Iraqis, justified by

unquestioned, racist assumptions about U.S. superiority and Iraqi

inferiority -- and not merely the generic demons of 'corruption' and

'incompetence' -- that doomed the project from the start. (p. 347) ... It

was straight-up corporate gorging on state coffers." (p. 355)

"[The Bush Administration} had commissioned a kind of country-in-a-box,

designed in Virginia and Texas, to be assembled in Iraq. ... Iraqis did not

see the corporate reconstruction as 'a gift': most saw it as a modernized

form of pillage," in cahoots with a corrupted Iraqi government bureaucracy.

(p. 347) At that point, a huge number of those disenchanted, angry Iraqis

joined the armed rebels.

RENTING-BACK ESSENTIAL SERVICES

So what lies in store for the future, now that so many major countries are

little more than national-security police states, with their traditional

governmental public-service functions outsourced or otherwise "disappeared"?

Klein looks into her crystal ball:

>> "The next phase of the disaster capitalism complex is all too clear: with

>> emergencies on the rise, government no longer able to foot the bill, and

>> citizens stranded by their can't-do state, the parallel corporate state

>> will rent back its own disaster infrastructure to whomever can afford it,

>> at whatever price the market will bear. For sale will be everything from

>> helicopter rides off rooftops to drinking water to beds in shelters." (p.

>> 319) Blackwater providing armed guards in post-Katrina New Orleans was

>> just the tip of the iceberg (p. 421), or Sandy Spring, GA., where the

>> entire city government is run by the private corporation CH2M Hill.

>>"But the [disaster] industry has far greater ambitions, including

>>privatized global communication networks, emergency health and

>>electricity...the contracting-out of police and fire departments to

>>private security companies...and the ability to locate and provide

>>transportation for a global workforce in the midst of a major disaster.

>>... [We are witnessing] the expansion of the narrow military-industrial

>>complex into the sprawling disaster capitalism complex. Today, global

>>instability does not just benefit a small group of arms dealers; it

>>generates huge profits for the high-tech security sector, for heavy

>>construction, for private health-care companies treating wounded soldiers,

>>for the oil and gas sectors -- and of course for defense contractors." (p.

>>420)

And the stock markets reflect that reality, rising as disasters occur. Says

Klein: "Shock-therapy 'reforms' have been the crack cocaine of financial

markets." (p. 87)

COUNTERING THE GREED MERCHANTS

Can anything be done to counter the rise of the

national-security/disaster-capitalism states? Klein says the blowback is

already happening against disaster-capitalism all over the globe, but is

most clearly evident in Latin America where leaders and populations are

rebelling against U.S. hegemonic desires and harsh IMF policies. They are

learning to "build shock absorbers into their organizing models," Klein

writes. (p. 453)

In Europe, two countries (France and Holland) rejected the European

Constitution, the French because they saw that document as "the codification

of the corporatist order," what they called "savage capitalism." More and

more grassroots-generated collectives are being started in Brazil to reclaim

unused land, and in Argentina hundreds of bankrupt companies "recovered" by

their workers have been turned into democratically-organized cooperatives.

(p. 455)

These are small steps, to be sure, but they may represent strong, active

anti-disaster capitalism tectonics about to emerge. Certainly, the

appearance of this brilliantly argued book is a giant and necessary step in

turning this country, and the world, around.#

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at

universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the

San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor

of The Crisis Papers (http://www.crisispapers.org [1]). To comment:

crisispapers@comcast.net

..

First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 4/15/08.

http://www.crisispapers.org/essays8w/klein.htm [2]

Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson