The age of disaster capitalism; aka fascism; business and governmentcombine their powers to control

The age of disaster capitalism

http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2165953,00.html

In the days after 9/11, America's firefighters, nurses and teachers were hailed as the

country's heroes. But President Bush's embracing of the public sector didn't last

long. As the dust settled on the twin towers, the White House launched an entirely new

economy, based on security - with the belief that only private firms could meet the

challenge. In this exclusive extract from her new book, Naomi Klein reports on those

who see a profitable prospect in a grim future.

As George Bush and his cabinet took up their posts in January 2001, the need for new

sources of growth for US corporations was an urgent matter. With the tech bubble now

officially popped and the DowJones tumbling 824 points in their first two and half

months in office, they found themselves staring in the face of a serious economic

downturn. John Maynard Keynes had argued that governments should spend their way out

of recessions, providing economic stimulus with public works. Bush's solution was for

the government to deconstruct itself - hacking off great chunks of the public wealth

and feeding them to corporate America, in the form of tax cuts on the one hand and

lucrative contracts on the other. Bush's budget director, the think-tank ideologue

Mitch Daniels, pronounced: "The general idea - that the business of government is not

to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided - seems self-evident to

me." That assessment included disaster response. Joseph Allbaugh, the Republican party

operative whom Bush put in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) -

the body responsible for responding to disasters, including terrorist attacks -

described his new place of work as "an oversized entitlement programme".

Then came 9/11, and all of a sudden having a government whose central mission was

self-immolation did not seem like a very good idea. With a frightened population

wanting protection from a strong, solid government, the attacks could well have put an

end to Bush's project of hollowing out government just as it was beginning.

For a while, that even seemed to be the case."September 11 has changed everything,"

said Ed Feulner, old friend of Milton Friedman, the guru of unfettered capitalism and

president of the Heritage Foundation, 10 days after the attack, making him one of the

first to utter the fateful phrase. Many naturally assumed that part of that change

would be a re-evaluation of the radical anti-state agenda that Feulner and his

ideological allies had been pushing for three decades, at home and around the world.

After all, the nature of the September 11 security failures exposed the results of

more than 20 years of chipping away at the public sector and outsourcing government

functions to profit-driven corporations. Much as the flooding of New Orleans exposed

the rotting condition of public infrastructure, the attacks pulled back the curtain on

a state that had been allowed to grow dangerously weak: radio communications for the

New York City police and firefighters broke down in the middle of the rescue

operation, air-traffic controllers didn't notice the off-course planes in time, and

the attackers had passed through airport security checkpoints staffed by contract

workers, some of whom earned less than their counterparts at the food court.

The first major victory of the Friedmanite counter-revolution in the United States had

been Ronald Reagan's attack on the air-traffic controllers' union and his deregulation

of the airlines. Twenty years later, the entire air transit system had been

privatised, deregulated and downsized, with the vast majority of airport security work

performed by underpaid, poorly trained, non-union contractors. After the attacks, the

inspector general of the department of transportation testified that the airlines,

which were responsible for security on their flights, had skimped significantly to

keep costs down.

On September 10, as long as flights were cheap and plentiful, none of that seemed to

matter. But on September 12, putting $6-an-hour contract workers in charge of airport

security seemed reckless. Then, in October, envelopes with white powder were sent to

lawmakers and journalists, spreading panic about the possibility of a major anthrax

outbreak. Once again, 90s privatisation looked very different in this new light: why

did a private lab have the exclusive right to produce the vaccine against anthrax? Had

the federal government signed away its responsibility to protect the public from a

major public health emergency? Furthermore, if it was true, as media reports kept

claiming, that anthrax, smallpox and other deadly agents could be spread through the

mail, the food supply or the water systems, was it really such a good idea to be

pushing ahead with Bush's plans to privatise the postal service? And what about all

those laid-off food and water inspectors - could somebody bring them back?

The backlash against the pro-corporate consensus only deepened in the face of new

scandals such as that of Enron. Three months after the 9/11 attacks, Enron declared

bankruptcy, leading thousands of employees to lose their retirement savings while

executives acting on insider knowledge cashed in. The crisis contributed to a general

plummeting of faith in private industry to perform essential services, especially when

it came out that it was Enron's manipulation of energy prices that had led to the

massive blackouts in California a few months earlier. Friedman, aged 90, was so

concerned that the tides were shifting back toward Keynesianism that he complained

that "businessmen are being presented in the public as second-class citizens".

While CEOs were falling from their pedestals, unionised public sector workers - the

villains of Friedman's counter-revolution - were rapidly ascending in the public's

estimation. Within two months of the attacks, trust in government was higher than it

had been since 1968 - and that, remarked Bush to a crowd of federal employees, is

"because of how you've performed your jobs". The uncontested heroes of September 11

were the blue-collar first responders - the New York firefighters, police and rescue

workers, 403 of whom lost their lives as they tried to evacuate the towers and aid the

victims. Suddenly, America was in love with its men and women in all kinds of

uniforms, and its politicians - slapping on NYPD and FDNY baseball caps with unseemly

speed - were struggling to keep up with the new mood.

When Bush stood with the firefighters and rescue workers at Ground Zero on September

14 he was embracing some of the very unionised civil servants that the modern

conservative movement had devoted itself to destroying. Of course, he had to do it

(even Dick Cheney put on a hard hat in those days), but he didn't have to do it so

convincingly. Through some combination of genuine feeling on Bush's part and the

public's projected desire for a leader worthy of the moment, these were the most

moving speeches of Bush's political career.

For weeks after the attacks, the president went on a grand tour of the public sector -

state schools, firehouses and memorials, the Centres for Disease Control and

Prevention - embracing and thanking civil servants for their contributions and humble

patriotism. He praised not only emergency services personnel but teachers, postal

employees and healthcare workers. At these events, he treated work done in the public

interest with a level of respect and dignity that had not been seen in the US in four

decades. Cost-cutting was suddenly off the agenda, and in every speech the president

gave, he announced some ambitious new public programme.

But far from shaking their determination to weaken the public sphere, the security

failures of 9/11 reaffirmed in Bush and his inner circle their deepest ideological

(and self-interested) beliefs - that only private firms possessed the intelligence and

innovation to meet the new security challenge. Although it was true that the White

House was on the verge of spending huge amounts of taxpayer money to launch a new

deal, it would be exclusively with corporate America, a straight-up transfer of

hundreds of billions of public dollars a year into private hands. The deal would take

the form of contracts, many offered secretively, with no competition and scarcely any

oversight, to a sprawling network of industries: technology, media, communications,

incarceration, engineering, education, healthcare.

What happened in the period of mass disorientation after the attacks was, in

retrospect, a domestic form of economic shock therapy. The Bush team, Friedmanite to

the core, quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through

its radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to

disaster response was a for-profit venture.

It was a bold evolution of shock therapy. Rather than the 90s approach of selling off

existing public companies, the Bush team created a whole new framework for its actions

- the war on terror - built to be private from the start. This feat required two

stages. First, the White House used the omnipresent sense of peril in the aftermath of

9/11 to dramatically increase the policing, surveillance, detention and war-waging

powers of the executive branch - a power-grab that the military historian Andrew

Bacevich has termed "a rolling coup". Then those newly enhanced and richly funded

functions of security, invasion, occupation and reconstruction were immediately

outsourced, handed over to the private sector to perform at a profit.

Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the

disaster capitalism complex - a fully fledged new economy in homeland security,

privatised war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and

running a privatised security state, both at home and abroad. The economic stimulus of

this sweeping initiative proved enough to pick up the slack where globalisation and

the dotcom booms had left off. Just as the internet had launched the dotcom bubble,

9/11 launched the disaster capitalism bubble. "When the IT industry shut down,

post-bubble, guess who had all the money? The government," said Roger Novak of Novak

Biddle Venture Partners, a venture capitalism firm that invests in homeland security

companies. Now, he says, "Every fund is seeing how big the trough is and asking, 'How

do I get a piece of that action?'"

It was the pinnacle of the counter-revolution launched by Friedman. For decades, the

market had been feeding off the appendages of the state; now it would devour the core.

Bizarrely, the most effective ideological tool in this process was the claim that

economic ideology was no longer a primary motivator of US foreign or domestic policy.

The mantra "September 11 changed everything" neatly disguised the fact that for

free-market ideologues and the corporations whose interests they serve, the only thing

that changed was the ease with which they could pursue their ambitious agenda. Now the

Bush White House could use the patriotic alignment behind the president and the free

pass handed out by the press to stop talking and start doing. As the New York Times

observed in February 2007, "Without a public debate or formal policy decision,

contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government."

And so, in November 2001, just two months after the attacks, the department of defence

brought together what it described as "a small group of venture capitalist

consultants" with experience in the dotcom sector. The mission was to identify

"emerging technology solutions that directly assist in the US efforts in the global

war on terrorism". By early 2006, this informal exchange had become an official arm of

the Pentagon: the Defence Venture Catalyst Initiative (DeVenCI), a "fully operational

office" that continually feeds security information to politically connected venture

capitalists, who, in turn, scour the private sector for start-ups that can produce new

surveillance and related products. "We're a search engine," explains Bob Pohanka,

director of DeVenCI. According to the Bush vision, the role of government is merely to

raise the money necessary to launch the new war market, then buy the best products

that emerge out of that creative cauldron, encouraging industry to even greater

innovation. In other words, the politicians create the demand, and the private sector

supplies all manner of solutions.

The department of homeland security, as a brand-new arm of the state created by the

Bush regime, is the clearest expression of this wholly outsourced mode of government.

As Jane Alexander, deputy director of the research wing of the department of homeland

security, explained, "We don't make things. If it doesn't come from industry, we are

not going to be able to get it."

Another is Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa), a new intelligence agency

created under Donald Rumsfeld that is independent of the CIA. This parallel spy agency

outsources 70% of its budget to private contractors; like the department of homeland

security, it was built as a hollow shell. As Ken Minihan, former director of the

National Security Agency, explained, "Homeland security is too important to be left to

the government." Minihan, like hundreds of other Bush administration staffers, has

already left his government post to work in the burgeoning homeland security industry,

which, as a top spy, he helped create.

Every aspect of the way the Bush administration has defined the parameters of the war

on terror has served to maximise its profitability and sustainability as a market -

from the definition of the enemy to the rules of engagement to the ever-expanding

scale of the battle. The document that launched the department of homeland security

declares, "Today's terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually

any weapon," which conveniently means that the security services required must protect

against every imaginable risk in every conceivable place at every possible time. And

it's not necessary to prove that a threat is real for it to merit a full-scale

response - not with Cheney's famous "1% doctrine", which justified the invasion of

Iraq on the grounds that if there is a 1% chance that something is a threat, it

requires that the US respond as if the threat is a 100% certainty. This logic has been

a particular boon for the makers of various hi-tech detection devices: for instance,

because we can conceive of a smallpox attack, the department of homeland security has

handed out half a billion dollars to private companies to develop and install

detection equipment.

Through all its various name changes - the war on terror, the war on radical Islam,

the war against Islamofascism, the third world war, the long war, the generational war

- the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged. It is limited by neither

time nor space nor target. From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous

traits make the war on terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic

perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash-in-the-pan war that could

potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture.

That was the business prospectus that the Bush administration put before corporate

America after September 11. The revenue stream was a seemingly bottomless supply of

tax dollars to be funnelled from the Pentagon ($270bn in 2005 to private contractors,

a $137bn increase since Bush took office), US intelligence agencies and the newest

arrival, the department of homeland security. Between September 11 2001 and 2006, the

Department of Homeland Security handed out $130bn to contractors - money that was not

in the private sector before and that is more than the GDP of Chile or the Czech Republic.

In a remarkably short time, the suburbs ringing Washington, DC became dotted with grey

buildings housing security "start-ups" and "incubator" companies, hastily thrown

together operations where, as in late-90s Silicon Valley, the money came in faster

than the furniture could be assembled. Whereas in the 90s the goal was to develop the

killer application, the "next new new thing", and sell it to Microsoft or Oracle, now

it was to come up with a new "search and nail" terrorist-catching technology and sell

it to the department of homeland security or the Pentagon. That is why, in addition to

the start-ups and investment funds, the disaster industry also gave birth to an army

of new lobby firms promising to hook up new companies with the right people on Capitol

Hill - in 2001, there were two such security-oriented lobby firms, but by mid-2006

there were 543. "I've been in private equity since the early 90s," Michael Steed,

managing director of the homeland security firm Paladin told Wired, "and I've never

seen a sustained deal flow like this."

Like the dotcom bubble, the disaster bubble is inflating in an ad-hoc and chaotic

fashion. One of the first booms for the homeland security industry was surveillance

cameras, 30m of which have been installed in the US, shooting about 4bn hours of

footage a year. That created a problem: who's going to watch 4bn hours of footage? So

a new market emerged for "analytic software" that scans the tapes and creates matches

with images already on file.

This development created another problem, because facial recognition software can

really make positive IDs only if people present themselves front and centre to the

cameras, which they rarely do while rushing to and from work. So another market was

created for digital image enhancement. Salient Stills, a company that sells software

to isolate and enhance video images, started by pitching its technology to media

companies, but it turned out that there was more potential revenue from the FBI and

other law-enforcement agencies. And with all the snooping going on - phone logs,

wire-tapping, financial records, mail, surveillance cameras, web surfing - the

government is drowning in data, which has opened up yet another massive market in

information management and data mining, as well as software that claims to be able to

"connect the dots" in this ocean of words and numbers and pinpoint suspicious activity.

In the 90s, tech companies endlessly trumpeted the wonders of the borderless world and

the power of information technology to topple authoritarian regimes and bring down

walls. Today, inside the disaster capitalism complex, the tools of the information

revolution have been flipped to serve the opposite purpose. In the process, mobile

phones and web surfing have been turned into powerful tools of mass state surveillance

by increasingly authoritarian regimes, with the cooperation of privatised phone

companies and search engines, whether it's Yahoo assisting the Chinese government to

pinpoint the location of dissidents or AT&T helping the US National Security Agency to

wiretap its customers without a warrant (a practice that the Bush administration

claims it has discontinued). The dismantling of borders, the great symbol and promise

of globalisation, has been replaced with the exploding industry of border

surveillance, from optical scanning and biometric IDs to the planned hi-tech fence on

the border between Mexico and the US, worth up to $2.5bn for Boeing and a consortium

of other companies.

As hi-tech firms have jumped from one bubble to another, the result has been a bizarre

merger of security and shopping cultures. Many technologies in use today as part of

the war on terror - biometric identification, video surveillance, web tracking, data

mining - had been developed by the private sector before September 11 as a way to

build detailed customer profiles, opening up new vistas for micromarketing. When

widespread discomfort about big-brother technologies stalled many of these

initiatives, it caused dismay to both marketers and retailers. September 11 loosened

this log jam in the market: suddenly the fear of terror was greater than the fear of

living in a surveillance society. So now, the same information collected from cash

cards or "loyalty" cards can be sold not only to a travel agency or the Gap as

marketing data but also to the FBI as security data, flagging a "suspicious" interest

in pay-as-you-go mobile phones and Middle Eastern travel.

As an exuberant article in the business magazine Red Herring explained, one such

program "tracks terrorists by figuring out if a name spelled a hundred different ways

matches a name in a homeland security database. Take the name Mohammad. The software

contains hundreds of possible spellings for the name, and it can search terabytes of

data in a second." Impressive, unless they nail the wrong Mohammad, which often seems

to happen, from Iraq to Afghanistan to the suburbs of Toronto.

This potential for error is where the incompetence and greed that have been the

hallmark of the Bush years, from Iraq to New Orleans, becomes harrowing. One false

identification coming out of any of these electronic fishing expeditions is enough for

an apolitical family man, who sort of looks like someone whose name sort of sounds

like his (at least to someone with no knowledge of Arabic or Muslim culture), to be

flagged as a potential terrorist. And the process of putting names and organisations

on watch lists is also now handled by private companies, as are the programs to

crosscheck the names of travellers with the names in the data bank. As of June 2007,

there were half a million names on a list of suspected terrorists kept by the National

Counterterrorism Centre. Another program, the Automated Targeting System (ATS), made

public in November 2006, has already assigned a "risk assessment" rating to tens of

millions of travellers passing through the US. The rating, never disclosed to

passengers, is based on suspicious patterns revealed through commercial data mining -

for instance, information provided by airlines about "the passenger's history of

one-way ticket purchase, seat preferences, frequent-flyer records, number of bags, how

they pay for tickets and even what meals they order". Incidents of supposedly

suspicious behaviour are tallied up to generate each passenger's risk rating.

Anyone can be blocked from flying, denied an entry visa to the US or even arrested and

named as an "enemy combatant" based on evidence from these dubious technologies - a

blurry image identified through facial recognition software, a misspelled name, a

misunderstood snippet of a conversation. If "enemy combatants" are not US citizens,

they will probably never even know what it was that convicted them, because the Bush

administration has stripped them of habeas corpus, the right to see the evidence in

court, as well as the right to a fair trial and a vigorous defence.

If the suspect is taken, as a result, to Guant

On Sep 15, 6:55 pm, Michigan Farmer <fr_e_n_s...@fastmail.us> wrote:

> The age of disaster capitalismhttp://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2165953,00.html

>

> In the days after 9/11, America's firefighters, nurses and teachers were hailed as the

> country's heroes. But President Bush's embracing of the public sector didn't last

> long. As the dust settled on the twin towers, the White House launched an entirely new

> economy, based on security - with the belief that only private firms could meet the

> challenge. In this exclusive extract from her new book, Naomi Klein reports on those

> who see a profitable prospect in a grim future.

>

> As George Bush and his cabinet took up their posts in January 2001, the need for new

> sources of growth for US corporations was an urgent matter. With the tech bubble now

> officially popped and the DowJones tumbling 824 points in their first two and half

> months in office, they found themselves staring in the face of a serious economic

> downturn. John Maynard Keynes had argued that governments should spend their way out

> of recessions, providing economic stimulus with public works. Bush's solution was for

> the government to deconstruct itself - hacking off great chunks of the public wealth

> and feeding them to corporate America, in the form of tax cuts on the one hand and

> lucrative contracts on the other. Bush's budget director, the think-tank ideologue

> Mitch Daniels, pronounced: "The general idea - that the business of government is not

> to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided - seems self-evident to

> me." That assessment included disaster response. Joseph Allbaugh, the Republican party

> operative whom Bush put in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) -

> the body responsible for responding to disasters, including terrorist attacks -

> described his new place of work as "an oversized entitlement programme".

>

> Then came 9/11, and all of a sudden having a government whose central mission was

> self-immolation did not seem like a very good idea. With a frightened population

> wanting protection from a strong, solid government, the attacks could well have put an

> end to Bush's project of hollowing out government just as it was beginning.

>

> For a while, that even seemed to be the case."September 11 has changed everything,"

> said Ed Feulner, old friend of Milton Friedman, the guru of unfettered capitalism and

> president of the Heritage Foundation, 10 days after the attack, making him one of the

> first to utter the fateful phrase. Many naturally assumed that part of that change

> would be a re-evaluation of the radical anti-state agenda that Feulner and his

> ideological allies had been pushing for three decades, at home and around the world.

> After all, the nature of the September 11 security failures exposed the results of

> more than 20 years of chipping away at the public sector and outsourcing government

> functions to profit-driven corporations. Much as the flooding of New Orleans exposed

> the rotting condition of public infrastructure, the attacks pulled back the curtain on

> a state that had been allowed to grow dangerously weak: radio communications for the

> New York City police and firefighters broke down in the middle of the rescue

> operation, air-traffic controllers didn't notice the off-course planes in time, and

> the attackers had passed through airport security checkpoints staffed by contract

> workers, some of whom earned less than their counterparts at the food court.

>

> The first major victory of the Friedmanite counter-revolution in the United States had

> been Ronald Reagan's attack on the air-traffic controllers' union and his deregulation

> of the airlines. Twenty years later, the entire air transit system had been

> privatised, deregulated and downsized, with the vast majority of airport security work

> performed by underpaid, poorly trained, non-union contractors. After the attacks, the

> inspector general of the department of transportation testified that the airlines,

> which were responsible for security on their flights, had skimped significantly to

> keep costs down.

>

> On September 10, as long as flights were cheap and plentiful, none of that seemed to

> matter. But on September 12, putting $6-an-hour contract workers in charge of airport

> security seemed reckless. Then, in October, envelopes with white powder were sent to

> lawmakers and journalists, spreading panic about the possibility of a major anthrax

> outbreak. Once again, 90s privatisation looked very different in this new light: why

> did a private lab have the exclusive right to produce the vaccine against anthrax? Had

> the federal government signed away its responsibility to protect the public from a

> major public health emergency? Furthermore, if it was true, as media reports kept

> claiming, that anthrax, smallpox and other deadly agents could be spread through the

> mail, the food supply or the water systems, was it really such a good idea to be

> pushing ahead with Bush's plans to privatise the postal service? And what about all

> those laid-off food and water inspectors - could somebody bring them back?

>

> The backlash against the pro-corporate consensus only deepened in the face of new

> scandals such as that of Enron. Three months after the 9/11 attacks, Enron declared

> bankruptcy, leading thousands of employees to lose their retirement savings while

> executives acting on insider knowledge cashed in. The crisis contributed to a general

> plummeting of faith in private industry to perform essential services, especially when

> it came out that it was Enron's manipulation of energy prices that had led to the

> massive blackouts in California a few months earlier. Friedman, aged 90, was so

> concerned that the tides were shifting back toward Keynesianism that he complained

> that "businessmen are being presented in the public as second-class citizens".

>

> While CEOs were falling from their pedestals, unionised public sector workers - the

> villains of Friedman's counter-revolution - were rapidly ascending in the public's

> estimation. Within two months of the attacks, trust in government was higher than it

> had been since 1968 - and that, remarked Bush to a crowd of federal employees, is

> "because of how you've performed your jobs". The uncontested heroes of September 11

> were the blue-collar first responders - the New York firefighters, police and rescue

> workers, 403 of whom lost their lives as they tried to evacuate the towers and aid the

> victims. Suddenly, America was in love with its men and women in all kinds of

> uniforms, and its politicians - slapping on NYPD and FDNY baseball caps with unseemly

> speed - were struggling to keep up with the new mood.

>

> When Bush stood with the firefighters and rescue workers at Ground Zero on September

> 14 he was embracing some of the very unionised civil servants that the modern

> conservative movement had devoted itself to destroying. Of course, he had to do it

> (even Dick Cheney put on a hard hat in those days), but he didn't have to do it so

> convincingly. Through some combination of genuine feeling on Bush's part and the

> public's projected desire for a leader worthy of the moment, these were the most

> moving speeches of Bush's political career.

>

> For weeks after the attacks, the president went on a grand tour of the public sector -

> state schools, firehouses and memorials, the Centres for Disease Control and

> Prevention - embracing and thanking civil servants for their contributions and humble

> patriotism. He praised not only emergency services personnel but teachers, postal

> employees and healthcare workers. At these events, he treated work done in the public

> interest with a level of respect and dignity that had not been seen in the US in four

> decades. Cost-cutting was suddenly off the agenda, and in every speech the president

> gave, he announced some ambitious new public programme.

>

> But far from shaking their determination to weaken the public sphere, the security

> failures of 9/11 reaffirmed in Bush and his inner circle their deepest ideological

> (and self-interested) beliefs - that only private firms possessed the intelligence and

> innovation to meet the new security challenge. Although it was true that the White

> House was on the verge of spending huge amounts of taxpayer money to launch a new

> deal, it would be exclusively with corporate America, a straight-up transfer of

> hundreds of billions of public dollars a year into private hands. The deal would take

> the form of contracts, many offered secretively, with no competition and scarcely any

> oversight, to a sprawling network of industries: technology, media, communications,

> incarceration, engineering, education, healthcare.

>

> What happened in the period of mass disorientation after the attacks was, in

> retrospect, a domestic form of economic shock therapy. The Bush team, Friedmanite to

> the core, quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through

> its radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to

> disaster response was a for-profit venture.

>

> It was a bold evolution of shock therapy. Rather than the 90s approach of selling off

> existing public companies, the Bush team created a whole new framework for its actions

> - the war on terror - built to be private from the start. This feat required two

> stages. First, the White House used the omnipresent sense of peril in the aftermath of

> 9/11 to dramatically increase the policing, surveillance, detention and war-waging

> powers of the executive branch - a power-grab that the military historian Andrew

> Bacevich has termed "a rolling coup". Then those newly enhanced and richly funded

> functions of security, invasion, occupation and reconstruction were immediately

> outsourced, handed over to the private sector to perform at a profit.

>

> Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the

> disaster capitalism complex - a fully fledged new economy in homeland security,

> privatised war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and

> running a privatised security state, both at home and abroad. The economic stimulus of

> this sweeping initiative proved enough to pick up the slack where globalisation and

> the dotcom booms had left off. Just as the internet had launched the dotcom bubble,

> 9/11 launched the disaster capitalism bubble. "When the IT industry shut down,

> post-bubble, guess who had all the money? The government," said Roger Novak of Novak

> Biddle Venture Partners, a venture capitalism firm that invests in homeland security

> companies. Now, he says, "Every fund is seeing how big the trough is and asking, 'How

> do I get a piece of that action?'"

>

> It was the pinnacle of the counter-revolution launched by Friedman. For decades, the

> market had been feeding off the appendages of the state; now it would devour the core.

>

> Bizarrely, the most effective ideological tool in this process was the claim that

> economic ideology was no longer a primary motivator of US foreign or domestic policy.

> The mantra "September 11 changed everything" neatly disguised the fact that for

> free-market ideologues and the corporations whose interests they serve, the only thing

> that changed was the ease with which they could pursue their ambitious agenda. Now the

> Bush White House could use the patriotic alignment behind the president and the free

> pass handed out by the press to stop talking and start doing. As the New York Times

> observed in February 2007, "Without a public debate or formal policy decision,

> contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government."

>

> And so, in November 2001, just two months after the attacks, the department of defence

> brought together what it described as "a small group of venture capitalist

> consultants" with experience in the dotcom sector. The mission was to identify

> "emerging technology solutions that directly assist in the US efforts in the global

> war on terrorism". By early 2006, this informal exchange had become an official arm of

> the Pentagon: the Defence Venture Catalyst Initiative (DeVenCI), a "fully operational

> office" that continually feeds security information to politically connected venture

> capitalists, who, in turn, scour the private sector for start-ups that can produce new

> surveillance and related products. "We're a search engine," explains Bob Pohanka,

> director of DeVenCI. According to the Bush vision, the role of government is merely to

> raise the money necessary to launch the new war market, then buy the best products

> that emerge out of that creative cauldron, encouraging industry to even greater

> innovation. In other words, the politicians create the demand, and the private sector

> supplies all manner of solutions.

>

> The department of homeland security, as a brand-new arm of the state created by the

> Bush regime, is the clearest expression of this wholly outsourced mode of government.

> As Jane Alexander, deputy director of the research wing of the department of homeland

> security, explained, "We don't make things. If it doesn't come from industry, we are

> not going to be able to get it."

>

> Another is Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa), a new intelligence agency

> created under Donald Rumsfeld that is independent of the CIA. This parallel spy agency

> outsources 70% of its budget to private contractors; like the department of homeland

> security, it was built as a hollow shell. As Ken Minihan, former director of the

> National Security Agency, explained, "Homeland security is too important to be left to

> the government." Minihan, like hundreds of other Bush administration staffers, has

> already left his government post to work in the burgeoning homeland security industry,

> which, as a top spy, he helped create.

>

> Every aspect of the way the Bush administration has defined the parameters of the war

> on terror has served to maximise its profitability and sustainability as a market -

> from the definition of the enemy to the rules of engagement to the ever-expanding

> scale of the battle. The document that launched the department of homeland security

> declares, "Today's terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually

> any weapon," which conveniently means that the security services required must protect

> against every imaginable risk in every conceivable place at every possible time. And

> it's not necessary to prove that a threat is real for it to merit a full-scale

> response - not with Cheney's famous "1% doctrine", which justified the invasion of

> Iraq on the grounds that if there is a 1% chance that something is a threat, it

> requires that the US respond as if the threat is a 100% certainty. This logic has been

> a particular boon for the makers of various hi-tech detection devices: for instance,

> because we can conceive of a smallpox attack, the department of homeland security has

> handed out half a billion dollars to private companies to develop and install

> detection equipment.

>

> Through all its various name changes - the war on terror, the war on radical Islam,

> the war against Islamofascism, the third world war, the long war, the generational war

> - the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged. It is limited by neither

> time nor space nor target. From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous

> traits make the war on terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic

> perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash-in-the-pan war that could

> potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture.

>

> That was the business prospectus that the Bush administration put before corporate

> America after September 11. The revenue stream was a seemingly bottomless supply of

> tax dollars to be funnelled from the Pentagon ($270bn in 2005 to private contractors,

> a $137bn increase since Bush took office), US intelligence agencies and the newest

> arrival, the department of homeland security. Between September 11 2001 and 2006, the

> Department of Homeland Security handed out $130bn to contractors - money that was not

> in the private sector before and that is more than the GDP of Chile or the Czech Republic.

>

> In a remarkably short time, the suburbs ringing Washington, DC became dotted with grey

> buildings housing security "start-ups" and "incubator" companies, hastily thrown

> together operations where, as in late-90s Silicon Valley, the money came in faster

> than the furniture could be assembled. Whereas in the 90s the goal was to develop the

> killer application, the "next new new thing", and sell it to Microsoft or Oracle, now

> it was to come up with a new "search and nail" terrorist-catching technology and sell

> it to the department of homeland security or the Pentagon. That is why, in addition to

> the start-ups and investment funds, the disaster industry also gave birth to an army

> of new lobby firms promising to hook up new companies with the right people on Capitol

> Hill - in 2001, there were two such security-oriented lobby firms, but by mid-2006

> there were 543. "I've been in private equity since the early 90s," Michael Steed,

> managing director of the homeland security firm Paladin told Wired, "and I've never

> seen a sustained deal flow like this."

>

> Like the dotcom bubble, the disaster bubble is inflating in an ad-hoc and chaotic

> fashion. One of the first booms for the homeland security industry was surveillance

> cameras, 30m of which have been installed in the US, shooting about 4bn hours of

> footage a year. That created a problem: who's going to watch 4bn hours of footage? So

> a new market emerged for "analytic software" that scans the tapes and creates matches

> with images already on file.

>

> This development created another problem, because facial recognition software can

> really make positive IDs only if people present themselves front and centre to the

> cameras, which they rarely do while rushing to and from work. So another market was

> created for digital image enhancement. Salient Stills, a company that sells software

> to isolate and enhance video images, started by pitching its technology to media

> companies, but it turned out that there was more potential revenue from the FBI and

> other law-enforcement agencies. And with all the snooping going on - phone logs,

> wire-tapping, financial records, mail, surveillance cameras, web surfing - the

> government is drowning in data, which has opened up yet another massive market in

> information management and data mining, as well as software that claims to be able to

> "connect the dots" in this ocean of words and numbers and pinpoint suspicious activity.

>

> In the 90s, tech companies endlessly trumpeted the wonders of the borderless world and

> the power of information technology to topple authoritarian regimes and bring down

> walls. Today, inside the disaster capitalism complex, the tools of the information

> revolution have been flipped to serve the opposite purpose. In the process, mobile

> phones and web surfing have been turned into powerful tools of mass state surveillance

> by increasingly authoritarian regimes, with the cooperation of privatised phone

> companies and search engines, whether it's Yahoo assisting the Chinese government to

> pinpoint the location of dissidents or AT&T helping the US National Security Agency to

> wiretap its customers without a warrant (a practice that the Bush administration

> claims it has discontinued). The dismantling of borders, the great symbol and promise

> of globalisation, has been replaced with the exploding industry of border

> surveillance, from optical scanning and biometric IDs to the planned hi-tech fence on

> the border between Mexico and the US, worth up to $2.5bn for Boeing and a consortium

> of other companies.

>

> As hi-tech firms have jumped from one bubble to another, the result has been a bizarre

> merger of security and shopping cultures. Many technologies in use today as part of

> the war on terror - biometric identification, video surveillance, web tracking, data

> mining - had been developed by the private sector before September 11 as a way to

> build detailed customer profiles, opening up new vistas for micromarketing. When

> widespread discomfort about big-brother technologies stalled many of these

> initiatives, it caused dismay to both marketers and retailers. September 11 loosened

> this log jam in the market: suddenly the fear of terror was greater than the fear of

> living in a surveillance society. So now, the same information collected from cash

> cards or "loyalty" cards can be sold not only to a travel agency or the Gap as

> marketing data but also to the FBI as security data, flagging a "suspicious" interest

> in pay-as-you-go mobile phones and Middle Eastern travel.

>

> As an exuberant article in the business magazine Red Herring explained, one such

> program "tracks terrorists by figuring out if a name spelled a hundred different ways

> matches a name in a homeland security database. Take the name Mohammad. The software

> contains hundreds of possible spellings for the name, and it can search terabytes of

> data in a second." Impressive, unless they nail the wrong Mohammad, which often seems

> to happen, from Iraq to Afghanistan to the suburbs of Toronto.

>

> This potential for error is where the incompetence and greed that have been the

> hallmark of the Bush years, from Iraq to New Orleans, becomes harrowing. One false

> identification coming out of any of these electronic fishing expeditions is enough for

> an apolitical family man, who sort of looks like someone whose name sort of sounds

> like his (at least to someone with no knowledge of Arabic or Muslim culture), to be

> flagged as a potential terrorist. And the process of putting names and organisations

> on watch lists is also now handled by private companies, as are the programs to

> crosscheck the names of travellers with the names in the data bank. As of June 2007,

> there were half a million names on a list of suspected terrorists kept by the National

> Counterterrorism Centre. Another program, the Automated Targeting System (ATS), made

> public in November 2006, has already assigned a "risk assessment" rating to tens of

> millions of travellers passing through the US. The rating, never disclosed to

> passengers, is based on suspicious patterns revealed through commercial data mining -

> for instance, information provided by airlines about "the passenger's history of

> one-way ticket purchase, seat preferences, frequent-flyer records, number of bags, how

> they pay for tickets and even what meals they order". Incidents of supposedly

> suspicious behaviour are tallied up to generate each passenger's risk rating.

>

> Anyone can be blocked from flying, denied an entry visa to the US or even arrested and

> named as an "enemy combatant" based on evidence from these dubious technologies - a

> blurry image identified through facial recognition software, a misspelled name, a

> misunderstood snippet of a conversation. If "enemy combatants" are not US citizens,

> they will probably never even know what it was that convicted them, because the Bush

> administration has stripped them of habeas corpus, the right to see the evidence in

> court, as well as the right to a fair trial and a vigorous defence.

>

> If the suspect is taken, as a result, to Guant

In article <npZGi.3424$3Y1.28@newssvr17.news.prodigy.net>,

fr_e_n_saf_@fastmail.us says...

>

>

>The age of disaster capitalism

>http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2165953,00.html

>

>In the days after 9/11, America's firefighters, nurses and teachers were hailed

as the

>country's heroes. But President Bush's embracing of the public sector didn't

last

>long. As the dust settled on the twin towers, the White House launched an

entirely new

>economy, based on security - with the belief that only private firms could meet

the

>challenge. In this exclusive extract from her new book, Naomi Klein reports on

those

>who see a profitable prospect in a grim future.

You're ending this with a quote which I think is good:

"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]

So it's a question of overthrowing those oppressors, intenationally too.

Not easy, but must and can be done, I hold.

Rolf M.

http://www.rolf-martens.com

Here are parts of a post about Mussolini written by a very

anti-Mussolini person. He has done his homework though and cites many

books which are also anti-Mussolini and anti-Fascist. These are some

things they admit:

"He had a profound contempt for those whose overriding ambition was to

be rich. It was a mania, he thought, a kind of disease, and he

comforted himself with the reflection that the rich were rarely happy"

Here Hibbert (1962, p. 47) is describing a lifelong attitude of

Mussolini that continued right into his time as Italy's Prime Minister

- when he refused to take his official salary.

"There was much truth in the comment of a Rome newspaper that the new

fasci did not aim at the defence of the ruling class or the existing

State but wanted to lead the revolutionary forces into the Nationalist

camp so as to prevent a victory of Bolshevism.

even after coming to power, to take drives in the country with his

wife and stop at various

farmhouses on the way for a chat with the family there. He would enjoy

discussing the crops, the weather and all the usual rural topics and

obviously just liked the feeling of being one of the people. His claim

to represent the people was not just theory but heartfelt. And he

never gave up his "anti-bourgeois" rhetoric.

His policies were basically protectionist. He controlled the

exchange-rate of the Italian currency and promoted that old favourite

of the economically illiterate - autarky - meaning that he tried to

get Italy to become wholly self-sufficient rather than rely on foreign

trade. He wanted to protect Italian products from competing foreign

products.

By 1939 he had doubled Italy's grain production from its traditional

level, enabling Italy to cut wheat imports by 75% (Smith, 1967, p.

92).

He made Capri a bird sanctuary (Smith, 1967, p. 84) and in 1926 he

issued a decree reducing the size of newspapers to save wood pulp.

And, believe it or not, he even mandated gasohol - i.e. mixing

industrial alcohol with petroleum products to make fuel for cars

(Smith, 1967, p. 87). Mussolini also disliked the population drift

from rural areas

into the big cities and in 1930 passed a law to put a stop to it

unless official permission was granted

he advocated private enterprise within a strict set of State controls

designed, among other things, to prevent abuse of monopoly power

(Gregor, 1979, Ch. 5).

....a big expansion of public works and a great improvement in social

insurance measures. He also set up the "Dopolavoro" (after work)

organization to give workers cheap recreations of various kinds (cf.

the Nazi Kraft durch Freude movement). His public health measures

(such as the attack on tuberculosis and the setting up of a huge

maternal and child welfare organization) were particularly notable for

their rationality and fficiency and, as such, were rewarded with great

success. For instance, the incidence of uberculosis

dropped dramatically and infant mortality declined by more than 20%

(Gregor, p. 259).

"instituted a programme of public works hitherto unrivalled in modern

Europe. Bridges, canals and roads were built, hospitals and schools,

railway stations and orphanages, swamps were drained and land

reclaimed, forest were planted and universities were endowed."

In 1929 Mussolini and Pope Pius 12th signed the Lateran treaty -

which is still the legal basis for the existence of the Vatican State

to this day - and Pius in fact at one stage

called Mussolini "the man sent by Providence". The treaty recognized

Roman Catholicism as the Italian State religion as well as recognizing

the Vatican as a sovereign state. What Mussolini got in exchange was

acceptance by the church - something that was enormously important in

the Italy of that time.

the great hatred that existed in prewar Germany between the Nazis and

the "Reds". And the early Fascists battled the "Reds" too, of course.

The 1919 election manifesto, for instance, contained policies of

worker control of industry, confiscation of war profits, abolition of

the Stock exchange, land for the

peasants and abolition of the Monarchy and nobility. Further,

Mussolini never ceased to inveigh against "plutocrats".

He wanted a harmonious and united Italy for all Italians of all

classes and was sure that achieving just treatment for the workers

needed neither revolution nor any kind of

artificially enforced equality.

This made Italian Fascism a much more popular creed than Stalin's

Communism. This is perhaps most clearly seen by the always persuasive

"voting with your feet" criterion. Mussolini made no effort to prevent

Italians from emigrating and although some anti-Fascists did, net

emigration actually FELL under Mussolini. Compare this with Stalin and

the Berlin wall.

Mussolini gained power through political rather than revolutionary

means. His famous march on Rome was only superficially revolutionary.

The King of Italy and the army

approved of him because of his pragmatic policies so did not oppose

the march. So this collusion ensured that Mussolini's "revolution" was

essentially bloodless.

His considerable popularity for many years among a wide range of

Italians shows how effective his recipe for achieving that was.

In his "corporate state", Mussolini was the first to create ...a

system of capitalism under tight government control. And his corporate

state was one where the workers had (at least in theory) equal rights

with management.

REFERENCES Amis, M. (2002) Koba the Dread : laughter and the twenty

million.

N.Y.: Talk Miramax

Carsten, F.L. (1967) The rise of Fascism. London: Methuen.

Funk & Wagnall's New Encyclopedia (1983) Funk & Wagnall's

Galbraith, J.K. (1969) The affluent society. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin.

Gilmour, I.H.J.L. (1978) Inside right. London: Quartet.

Greene, N. (1968) Fascism: An anthology. N.Y.: Crowell.

Gregor, A.J. (1979) Italian Fascism and developmental dictatorship

Princeton, N.J.: Univ. Press.

Hagan, J. (1966) Modern History and its themes. Croydon, Victoria,

Australia: Longmans.

Hibbert, C. (1962) Benito Mussolini Geneva: Heron Books. Herzer, I.

(1989)

The Italian refuge: Rescue of Jews during the holocaust. Washington,

D.C.:

Catholic University of America Press

Horowitz, D. (1998) Up from multiculturalism. Heterodoxy, January.

See:

http://www.cspc.org/het/multicul.htm

Lenin, V.I. (1952) "Left-Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder. In:

Selected Works, Vol. II, Part 2. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing

House.

Martino, A. (1998) The modern mask of socialism. 15th John Bonython

lecture,

Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney. See

http://www.cis.org.au/Events/JBL/JBL98.htm

Muravchik, J. (2002) Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism

San

Francisco: Encounter Books.

Smith, D.M. (1967) The theory and practice of Fascism. In: Greene, N.

Fascism: An anthology N.Y.: Crowell.

Steinberg, J. (1990) All or nothing: The Axis and the holocaust

London:

Routledge.

http://www.ihr.org/ http://www.natvan.com

http://www.thebirdman.org http://www.nsm88.com/

http://wsi.matriots.com/jews.html