The Shock[less] Doctrine

Trey Smith

Less than three days after Sandy made landfall on the East Coast of the United States, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute blamed New Yorkers’ resistance to big-box stores for the misery they were about to endure. Writing on Forbes.com, he explained that the city’s refusal to embrace Walmart will likely make the recovery much harder: “Mom-and-pop stores simply can’t do what big stores can in these circumstances,” he wrote.

And the preemptive scapegoating didn’t stop there. He also warned that if the pace of reconstruction turned out to be sluggish (as it so often is) then “pro-union rules such as the Davis-Bacon Act” would be to blame, a reference to the statute that requires workers on public-works projects to be paid not the minimum wage, but the prevailing wage in the region.

The same day, Frank Rapoport, a lawyer representing several billion-dollar construction and real estate contractors, jumped in to suggest that many of those public works projects shouldn’t be public at all. Instead, cash-strapped governments should turn to “public private partnerships,” known as “P3s.” That means roads, bridges and tunnels being rebuilt by private companies, which, for instance, could install tolls and keep the profits.

Up until now, the only thing stopping them has been the law — specifically the absence of laws in New York State and New Jersey that enable these sorts of deals. But Rapoport is convinced that the combination of broke governments and needy people will provide just the catalyst needed to break the deadlock. “There were some bridges that were washed out in New Jersey that need structural replacement, and it’s going to be very expensive,” he told The Nation. “And so the government may well not have the money to build it the right way. And that’s when you turn to a P3.”

Ray Lehmann, co-founder of the R Street Institute, a mouthpiece for the insurance lobby (formerly a division of the climate-denying Heartland Institute), had another public prize in his sights. In a Wall Street Journal article about Sandy, he was quoted arguing for the eventual “full privatization” of the National Flood Insurance Program, the federal initiative that provides affordable protection from some natural disasters — and which private insurers see as unfair competition.

But the prize for shameless disaster capitalism surely goes to right-wing economist Russell S. Sobel, writing in a New York Times online forum. Sobel suggested that, in hard-hit areas, FEMA should create “free trade zones — in which all normal regulations, licensing and taxes [are] suspended.” This corporate free-for-all would, apparently, “better provide the goods and services victims need.”

Yes that’s right: this catastrophe very likely created by climate change — a crisis born of the colossal regulatory failure to prevent corporations from treating the atmosphere as their open sewer — is just one more opportunity for more deregulation. And the fact that this storm has demonstrated that poor and working-class people are far more vulnerable to the climate crisis shows that this is clearly the right moment to strip those people of what few labor protections they have left, as well as to privatize the meager public services available to them. Most of all, when faced with an extraordinarily costly crisis born of corporate greed, hand out tax holidays to corporations.

Is there anyone who can still feign surprise at this stuff? The flurry of attempts to use Sandy’s destructive power as a cash grab is just the latest chapter in the very long story I have called The Shock Doctrine. And it is but the tiniest glimpse into the ways large corporations are seeking to reap enormous profits from climate chaos.
~ from Superstorm Sandy — a People's Shock? by Naomi Klein ~

You see? Climate change is just another strategy to wrest control away from the democratic process in order to generate astronomical profit! It is just such a despicable strategy to put the generation of wealth for the few AHEAD of the health and wellbeing of the majority.

Even worse, this is a natural outgrowth of the capitalist system. When profit is anointed king, everything else -- including people -- takes a backseat. It is an amoral system that begets immoral outcomes.

Afternoon Matinee: System Change, Not Climate Change

The Suffering of Others Is Good for Business

I've read several articles of late by a few left-leaning pundits who, on the one hand, try to defend American-style capitalism as being the best economic system the world has ever known, while, on the other hand, pointing out that the great wealth disparities rampant today and the predatory nature of this beloved system are too blame for much of the world's ills.

To argue the one position simultaneously with the next, they need a gambit that somehow can smooth over the vexing problems. The gambit they have chosen to employ is to say that the problem today is with unrestrained capitalism.

They way they see it is that, if capitalists can be restrained somewhat from pursuing the singular goal -- short-term profit -- that capitalism inherently requires, then equilibrium will be restored and we can return to the vision of sugar plums dancing in our heads.

But how does one restrain a monster that seeks to cast off any and all restraints? Each time the people (in the form of the state) throw down an obstacle into the river of unmitigated greed, the stream itself begins to erode the obstacle -- a good Taoist reference there -- and, before we know it, the obstacle has been dispatched with.

Try as we might, one of the underlying premises of the capitalist model -- to profit upon the suffering and misery of others -- is, in my opinion, hard to escape from. If we look at the economic ills and evils that plague America and much of the rest of the world too, they exist precisely because a very small minority is profiting mightily at the expense of the overwhelming majority.

Calamity, catastrophe and war are always good for some business enterprises. When things are going south for most people and the planet, these firms enjoy a great bonanza of wealth and power. What Naomi Klein uncovered and chronicled in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is that the corporations and individuals who profit the most have made the conscious decision to manufacture crisis after crisis to keep the mother lode of dollars flowing their direction unimpeded.

I am not suggesting that, at some point, we won't be able to place a bridle on this out-of-control horse, but the bridle won't stay in place for long. As soon as we get the thoroughbred under control (restraint), he immediately will begin to devise new strategies to break free. History has shown he WILL succeed and then we'll have to go through the whole scenario all over again!

There has got to be a better way to order society so that a small minority is not allowed to prey on the misery of others.

Kentucky Fried Potholes

I have written quite a number of blog posts that feature quotes and analysis from Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. One of the strategies she warns about is the rush to sell off public assets to private corporate hands. On her blog yesterday, Rania Khalek draws our attention to a form of this strategy that absolutely boggles the mind!

In more desperate and bizarre attempts to fill in budget gaps the City Council in Naperville, IL is considering giving corporations exclusive rights to plaster their logos on city property. One proposed municipal sponsorship deal would allow Kentucky Fried Chicken to repair potholes in exchange for stamping the fresh asphalt with the chicken chain’s logo...

Before we know it, everything we can think of is going to be corporate-sponsored!

Sports fans have seen this creep for the last decade or so. In the old days, the college bowl season featured a handful of games at historic venues like the Orange, Cotton, Sugar or Rose Bowl. Today, however, in front of those historic names we now find corporate adornments like the Tostito's Fiesta Bowl or the Allstate Sugar Bowl!

Public schools have utilized corporate sponsorships to shore up sagging revenues and state aid.

In his book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, Matt Taibbi talks about the case of the City of Chicago leasing its parking meters to some unknown conglomerate for a one-time multi-million dollar payment in exchange for foregoing 75 years of municipal revenue.

What's next? Stoplights brought to us by General Electric? Park benches by Forest Lawn Cemeteries? City Hall by Walmart? Public roads by Halliburton?

Where will it end?

Another Example of American Shock Doctrine

In Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, one of the recurrent themes is of nations deciding (usually as terms of loans from the IMF and World Bank) to sell off state assets. These sales provided the government with short-term revenue and long-term loss of value. Of course, the corporatists LOVE this idea as they can slurp up revenue-generating assets for pennies on the dollar!

While a lot of people recognize the shock doctrine in other lands -- America is far too great for any of that -- too few people seem to understand that many of the aspects of this doctrine are being employed in the US today.

One example is featured in an article on Salon by Jonathan Easley.

In the past two weeks, President Obama dramatically freed himself from his enemies' suggestions that he is too "foreign" (with the release of his long-form birth certificate) and too "weak" (with the killing of Osama bin Laden). But you might have missed a subtler move by the president that could further erode his opponents' push to brand him a "socialist."

This past week, the administration asked Congress to form a commission to fast-track the sale of "excess" federal property in an attempt to wipe some zeros from the tail-end of the deficit figure.

The sale of public real estate to private interests has bipartisan support, but it's more significant than that: It's an indication that under Democratic leadership the U.S. government is beginning to behave as an entity that is concerned with such fiscal trivialities as ledgers and balance sheets. It's the opposite of state socialism and nationalization -- goals that Obama's critics on the right have relentlessly claimed that he's pursuing...

I am certain that some of this real estate indeed is excess. It probably represents unoccupied buildings that are doing nothing more than gathering dust. But we're talking about over 14,000 structures and I would bet that a lot of those buildings most likely currently are viable.

All this points to is that elements of the shock doctrine are creeping more and more into American politics and governance. Unlike in other nations, we are not being subjected to violent and life-altering shocks all at once. Our shocks are small, incremental and, sometimes, barely noticeable. Each one, however, establishes a precedent that later is expanded upon.

Sooner or later -- sooner if Congress stays on the current federal budget trajectory -- they will drop the hammer on us. Far too many Americans will be dumbstruck when this happens. How did this come to pass, they will ask, unaware that it has been creeping up on us for much of the last ten years.

Book Review: The Shock Doctrine

If I was going to found a radical people's university -- one to train progressive activists -- one book that would be required reading is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. As I have shared with you via snippets in over 20 posts, Klein makes a superb case that the shock doctrine is a key component for much of the human suffering of the last 40 years in the modern world.

Here's what Klein's website devoted to this marvelous book states as a summary.

In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998...

At its most basic, the shock doctrine is about unmitigated greed and selfishness. The economists at the Chicago School developed a blueprint to rain down untold misery on the poor and middle class in order to feed the narcissistic aspirations of the wealthy elite. Wherever it has been employed -- and it has been employed all over the world -- the divide between rich and poor has grown by staggering leaps and bounds.

If you are interested in understanding what is going on in the world today -- particularly in the United States -- you need to read this book. The agenda of deficit hawks, the Tea Party and supporters of endless war/severe austerity are utilizing the shock doctrine as their playbook. If there is ANY hope of countering them, we must understand what is driving them and Klein's book provides this information in engaging detail.

Disaster Capitalism at Work in Greece

One of the great aspects of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is that it doesn't merely describe what went on in some bygone era; it provides superb information as to what is going on in the world today. In other words, the shock doctrine isn't an ancient economic relic that no longer is employed. The Chicago School, in fact, is the engine running much of the world's economy.

As I'm sure you are well aware, Greece is in the throes of staggering debt and there have been concerns that it might default. In order to stave off this potentiality, the Greek government went to the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) looking for a bailout.

The bailout they received is nothing like the bailouts US corporations received from our taxpayer dollars. In our country, corporations had little strings attached and few, if any, mandates to reform their failed business models. As the result of our lax expectations, corporations used our money to buy other enterprises, lobby Congress and pay their executives outlandish salaries and bonuses.

I bet the Greek government would have loved a bailout on such minuscule terms!!

Unfortunately, the EU and IMF stuck to shock doctrine principles which mandate that Greece must slash social spending severely AND sell off state assets at below market prices.

According to Bloomberg,

Greece will sell a stake in Hellenic Telecommunications Organization SA (HTO), reduce its holding in Public Power Corp SA (PPC) to 34 percent from 51 percent and will begin selling down its stake in Athens International Airport. The sales will help raise 15 billion euros by 2013 and 50 billion euros by 2015...

Put another way, giant European and US corporations will take over supplying basic services to the Greeks and charging a pretty penny for it!!

The worst part of this whole situation is that Greece had no choice but to accept these draconian measures. If they had refused these ironclad stipulations, they would have received no bailout and, most likely, would have defaulted on their debt.

In its most basic essence, the shock doctrine is a form of legal blackmail. The rich hold out a slim carrot to those in desperate need and, in order to receive the carrot, the country must sell its soul to the devil. The country receives a short-term reprieve, while the corporations benefit from the future profits of formerly state assets.

The situation in Greece is informative to those of us in the US precisely because the GOP-backed proposed budget would send us moving down the same road. This is why we should muster everything we've got to resist it.

More N Klein-ed 3

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.
~ from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein ~

While, as Klein clearly details in her book, the minions of the Bush administration were the architects of war as a private profit-generating form of policy, there can be no question that President Obama has embraced this standard as well. Under his watch, we haven't conducted less war, we've merely switched theaters.

As US planes continue to bomb Libya, I continue to be dumbfounded that our president won a Nobel P-E-A-C-E Prize. Every day that he has been in office we have waged, at minimum, 2 wars. That number is undoubtedly higher if we include the covert military actions in places like Pakistan and Yemen.

How on earth can such deliberate actions be equated with peace?

It certainly isn't peaceful for the nations we continue to attack and, because of our leader's thirst for bloodletting, it has led to vicious attacks on domestic spending. Under his tutelage, we're killing foreigners with bullets, bombs and missiles, while Americans are suffering and dying for a lack of basic services.

More N Klein-ed 2

Rather than meet the security challenge posed by September 11 with a comprehensive plan to plug the holes in the public infrastructure, the Bush team devised a new role for government, one in which the job of the state was not to provide security but to purchase it at market prices...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 the creative cauldron, encouraging industry to great innovation. In other words, the politicians create the demand, and the private sector supplies all manner of solutions -- a booming economy in homeland security and twenty-first-century warfare entirely underwritten by taxpayer dollars.
~ from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein ~

Sadly, though not surprisingly, President Obama has expanded on this blueprint. His campaign of "hope" wasn't meant for us; he hoped to deliver more and more public dollars to the disaster capitalists.

Thus far, things seem to be going all according to plan!!

More N Klein-ed 1

What happened in the period of mass disorientation after the [9/11] 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 nineties 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.
~ from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein ~

I have been sharing these little snippets, not because I think we simply should learn about recent history in isolation, but because what is going on in this nation right now is a direct byproduct. The current Tea Party assault to destroy government by starving it of public funds is an outgrowth of the shock doctrine.

On Wednesday, when the president addresses the nation about our "deficit problem," I expect his theme will be torn from the pages of the Chicago School of Economics. He may well out bush, Bush.

The More Easily Administered Shock

Throughout the last month, I have sung praises to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. It is one of the best books I have ever read in the realm of history and economics!

I already have several more snippets from it that I will be sharing in the coming days.

While I continue to recommend it highly, there is no question that it is NOT light reading. The paperback version spans nearly 600 pages with no pictures to pad that total!

Realizing that some of you simply may not have the time to commit to such an endeavor, I have found a documentary based on the book that will introduce you to the basic gist in less than 79 minutes. While the video certainly doesn't capture the breadth of the book, it does a commendable job conveying the basic principles underlying disaster capitalism and the shock doctrine.

In my opinion, once a person has read the book and/or watched the video, you won't see the world today with the same eyes!

Them Ain't Disparate Dots

The point is, there is something loose in America – something predatory and ruthless – that snickers cynically at all this good-hearted rhetoric and, then, turns good-sounding American policy into a rapacious, single-minded and self-serving instrument for those entrenched with power. As is the case with the TARP funds, the interests of wealth and power always seem to find a way to trump efforts to advance the dignity and well-being of the ordinary working American.

This predatory beast is killing us from the bottom up...
~ from "Why Are We In Libya?" by John Grant ~

This is a fascinating essay that draws together what might appear as disparate dots: the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the war in Libya and Naomi Klein's thesis from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. By the time you reach the bottom of Grant's piece, you will see that they are connected far more than you might have ever thought!

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

One of the things I am being reminded of again by Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is that life isn't always as it first appears. This is particularly true when certain elements of our society go out of their way to set up one smokescreen after another so that it becomes very difficult to tell up from down.

As Klein details in her discussion of various coups in South America from the 1970s - 1990s, what was generally reported by the mainstream US press was patently untrue. American readers were told that these coups represented spontaneous domestic uprisings and that the US, like so many other nations, merely was watching from the sidelines to see how these events played out.

In almost every case, the coup was fomented by covert operations of our own CIA. We funded, trained and promised millions or billions of dollars in aid to those who carried out the coups against democratically-elected leaders. Our government initiated these covert operations because the populist and, sometimes, socialist pathways of South American leaders didn't please the capitalists because it erected barriers that kept them from looting these countries at will.

Once the despots and military leaders seized power, these trends quickly were reversed and the bottom lines of many US and European-based corporations grew substantially. Empowered by their successes in overthrowing democracy in South America, this general blueprint (though sometimes sans the brutal violence) was utilized again and again in places like Poland, Russia, South Africa and many Asian nations.

With this as a backdrop, one has to wonder if the democratic uprisings in the Middle East are as innocent as we have been led to believe. We have been told time and again by the Obama administration and the mainstream media that the protests across the Middle East and Northern Africa are the result of spontaneous domestic yearnings for an end to brutal regimes and a call for freedom and democracy.

While I grant this could well be true, owing to past history, this could merely be the "reality" that certain elements want us to believe. It is just as likely -- if not more so -- that our own CIA provided the spark that became the fire. As fires often do, they aren't always so easily controlled and so some of the real estate being burned now may not be of our choosing.

Bless the Red

This liberation from all constraints is, in essence, Chicago School economics (otherwise known as neoliberalism or, in the U.S., neoconservatism): not some new invention but capitalism stripped of its Keynesian appendages, capitalism in its monopoly phase, a system that has let itself go -- that no longer has to work to keep us as customers, that can be as antisocial, antidemocratic and boorish as it wants.

As long as communism was a threat, the gentleman's agreement that was Keynesianism would live on; once that system lost ground, all traces of compromise could finally be eradicated, thereby fulfilling the purist goal Friedman had set out for his movement half a century earlier.
~ from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein ~

The passage above dramatically underscores WHY leftists are so needed in this world. While many of you may be leery of the socialist perspective, socialism tends to pressure capitalism into being more humane.

One of the chief reasons conservative Republicans and/or the Tea Party have gained such prominence in this country is that there is no longer a sustained America Left to push back. With no countermanding force, the conservatives have commandeered both the political discourse and the legislative process.

If the American Left doesn't revitalize itself, woe be to the vast majority in this nation.

The Point Behind the Klein Quotes

Over the past two weeks, I have featured quite a few quotes from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. I share them as I work my way through this long and detailed book. I am sure I will share more of them as I progress.

I worry that some of you might think to yourself, what's the point? Sure, this stuff happens in South America, Russia, Africa and the Middle East, but it doesn't happen here in the US or, if you ain't a Yank, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain, or wherever else in the industrial western world.

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it DOES happen here. Because of our so-called democracies, it happens to us in different and more insidious ways. A good deal of this economic sleight-of-hand takes place right under our noses -- we simply fail to recognize it for what it truly is.

The various anti-union legislation being signed or proposed in many state legislatures represents one of the many tentacles of the Chicago School of Economics monster. It may be wrapped in Tea Party symbolism, but make no mistake about it, it is pure Friedmanism.

Another good example is the bill recently signed into law in Michigan which grants the governor power to appoint an Emergency Manager to take over towns and school districts that appear to be teetering toward bankruptcy.

According to the law...the governor will be able to declare “financial emergency” in towns or school districts and appoint someone to fire local elected officials, break contracts, seize and sell assets, and eliminate services.

Under the law whole cities or school districts could be eliminated without any public participation or oversight, and amendments designed to provide minimal safeguards and public involvement were voted down.

An amendment to require Emergency Managers to hold monthly public meetings to let people know how they are governing was rejected by Senate Republicans, along with proposals to cap Emergency Manager compensation and require that those appointed to run school districts have some background in education...

Look familiar? This new law contains many of the same strategies employed by the Chicago Boys in Chile, Bolivia, South Africa, Russia and countless more nations!

As you can easily see from the passage above, the supporters of this law don't even pretend to be interested in transparency. Every attempt to provide the public with more information or recourse was kept out of the bill. Consequently, it means that unelected managers will hold more power than all the citizens combined and now there is not a whole helluva lot citizens can do about it!!

If we have ANY hopes of stopping disaster capitalism from taking stronger root in this country, we need to know what it looks like in all its various forms. This is why I will continue to feature quotes from Klein's book and urge you to pick up a copy for yourself and study it.

Another Klein-ism

I've got to tell you, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein ranks right up there for me with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for books on aspects of American history that expose the lies we've been taught over and over again.

Here is a long passage from Chapter 11 of Klein's book. It doesn't need any commentary from me because it is straightforward and to the point.

The movement that Milton Friedman launched in the 1950s is best understood as an attempt by multinational capital to recapture the highly profitable, lawless frontier that Adam Smith, the intellectual forefather of today's neoliberals, so admired -- but with a twist. Rather than journeying through Smith's "savage and barbarous nations" where there was no Western law (no longer a practical option), this movement set out to systematically dismantle existing laws and regulations to re-create that earlier lawlessness.

And where Smith's colonists earned their record profits by seizing what he described as "waste lands" for "but a trifle," today's multinationals see government programs, public assets and everything that is not for sale as terrain to be conquered and seized -- the post office, national parks, schools, social security, disaster relief and anything else that is publicly administered.

Under Chicago School economics, the state acts as the colonial frontier, which corporate conquistadors pillage with the same ruthless determination and energy as their predecessors showed when they hauled home the gold and silver of the Andes.

Where Smith saw fertile green fields turned into profitable farmlands on the pampas and the prairies, Wall Street saw "green field opportunities" in Chile's phone system, Argentina's airline, Russia's oil fields, Bolivia's water system, the United States' public airwaves, Poland's factories -- all built with public wealth, then sold for a trifle.

Then there are the treasures created by enlisting the state to put a patent and a price tag on life-forms and natural resources never dreamed of as commodities -- seeds, genes, carbon in the earth's atmosphere. By relentless searching for new profit frontiers in the public domain, Chicago School economists are like the mapmakers of the colonial era, identifying new waterways in the Amazon, marking off the location of a hidden cache of gold inside an Inca temple.

Corruption As a Starting Point

This points to a nagging and important question about free-market ideologues: Are they "true believers," driven by ideology and faith that free markets will cure underdevelopment, as is often asserted, or do the ideas and theories frequently serve as an elaborate rationale to allow people to act on unfettered greed while still invoking an altruistic motive?

All ideologies are corruptible...and there are certainly honest neo-liberals. But Chicago School economics does seem particularly conducive to corruption. Once you accept that profit and greed practiced on a mass scale create the greatest possible benefit for society, pretty much any act of personal enrichment can be justified as a contribution to the great creative cauldron of capitalism, generating wealth and spurring economic growth -- even if it's only for yourself and your colleagues.
~ from Chapter 13 of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein ~

I am taking the liberty of quoting liberally from this book because it provides for needed education. I think that far too many people -- and I definitely include myself in this category -- don't realize that the tentacles of disaster capitalism are ensnaring almost every aspect of the world we live in.

From what I knew before starting this book and what I've learned specifically from Klein's text, my answer to the question posed about is that the purveyors of the Friedman school of thought are anything but "true believers." Their calculus is not based on what is most beneficial for nations and peoples; it is far more about taking whatever they can get their hands on and everyone else be damned!

They may utilize the terminology of Christianity, patriotism, freedom and/or shared sacrifice, but these are mere props to get what they so cravenly desire: greater and greater amounts of personal wealth and power.

What to Do About Libya

I haven't written anything about the ongoing strife in Libya because, frankly, I am feeling a bit torn. As a pacifist, I tend not to favor military solutions. On the other hand, the people protesting the current despotic regime are being killed and brutalized. What is a pacifist to make of such a desperate situation?

If we lived in a more just world, I might favor a very limited police-like international action to remove Qaddafi from power. But we don't live in a just world and it defies credulity to believe that a US-led NATO force would limit themselves to such a narrow parameter. It is far more likely that Libya would become another Iraq and Afghanistan.

Military intervention of almost any kind will cause one of the actions it hopes to prevent: the killing of innocents. No matter how careful or circumscribed a military action might be, making war is a sloppy business. Innocent citizens invariably become caught in the crossfire and so the casualties we've witnessed over the past month could easily turn into a drop in a bucket.

Then there is the issue of national sovereignty. While there is no question that Qaddafi is a brutal tyrant, who are we to take sides? I know it sounds callous -- it even feels callous -- to say that we should allow the Libyan people to work out their own governance in their own way, but would we want the Organization of American States to swoop in to take out by force Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker!?

Another consideration involves the global hegemony. The ruling elite are more apt to seek a military solution ONLY if it enhances profit. As Michel Chossudovsky writes at Global Research, "A war on Libya would have an immediate impact on the price of crude oil. The latter has risen by 18 percent since the beginning of the insurrection in Libya."

The above consideration represents one of the prime reasons I am suspicious of the UN's recent decision to establish a "No Fly Zone" and/or attack Libya. Qaddafi has been killing his own countrymen left and right for over 6 weeks. There is only one stronghold of opposition left -- Benghazi.

It really makes one wonder why this decision has been rendered now and not before most of the carnage had taken place. This leads me to believe that the decision has little to do with the protection of the lives and human rights of the Libyan people and far more to do with the price of oil and other economic machinations.

Finally, as I continue to work my way through Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, it has left me to wonder if the world's neocons simply are preparing Libya for the next dose of shock and awe. It certainly wouldn't surprise me that they have waited for the carnage to grow worse and worse so they can swoop in at the last moment to put the shock doctrine in place -- their way of stealing Libyan resources, while impoverishing millions of people!

What is your take on this whole situation?

It All Comes Back to Economics

I know I sound like a broken record, but I can't say enough good things about The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. I have been a student of economics and history for much of the past 20 years, but I am finding out that a lot of the things I THOUGHT I knew, I don't know half as well as I thought.

When I was first exposed to theory and writings of Karl Marx in the early 90s, one of the first aspects I learned about was that Marx believed that life eventually devolves back to our economic relations. We've been taught that economics is but one of many important facets, but Marx showed that it underlies so much of what we think and do in modern society.

I thought that I had kept this lesson close to my heart ever since, but in reading Klein's book, I realize that I had forgotten about it far more than I would care to admit!! Too often I unwittingly have accepted the pronouncements of government officials and the mainstream media. This book clearly shows that almost everything they decide to share with the public has to do more with the current propaganda angle than actual facts or truth.

To offer an example, I had taken the South African liberation from apartheid at face value. Like most people I know, I focused strictly on the human rights and political aspects of this liberation and did not give much consideration at all to the economic angle. However, as Klein illustrates in Chapter 10, the underlying economic considerations ended up hamstringing the political freedom won.

Klein outlines the Freedom Charter adopted by the African National Congress (ANC) in the 1950s. It is a stirring document that served as the guide for the ANC over the next 40 years or so as they fought to end apartheid. It called for basic human rights like the ability to vote and have a voice in governance as well as many more radical proposals like the redistribution of land and a dismantling of the white corporate state.

Unfortunately, before the keys of the kingdom were handed over to the ANC by the rich white minority, the latter consciously sabotaged the nation's economic system so that it became economically unviable for the new ANC-based government to deliver on the very commitments it had fought so hard for so long to be in the position to implement. In the end, it turned out that gaining political freedom meant a lot less than it should have because economic freedom remained lacking.

Want to redistribute land? Impossible -- at the last minute, the negotiators agreed to add a clause to the new constitution that protects all private property, making land reform virtually impossible.

Want to create jobs for millions of unemployed workers? Can't -- hundreds of factories were actually about to close because the ANC had signed on to the GATT, the precursor to the World Trade Organization, which made it illegal to subsidize the auto plants and textile factories.

Want to get free AIDS drugs to the townships, where the disease is spreading with terrifying speed? That violates an intellectual property rights agreement under the WTO, which the ANC joined with no public debate as a continuation of the GATT...

The list goes on and on and on.

Why did the ANC willingly sign on to the very agreements that later hamstrung them? They were sold a bill of goods by Milton Friedman and his cronies. By the time they realized they had been had, it was way too late.

Shock and Awe

The idea that policy change should be like launching a surprise military attack is a recurring theme for economic shock therapists. In Shock and Awe: Achieving a Rapid Dominance, the US military doctrine published in 1996 that eventually formed the basis for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the authors state that the invading force should "seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance.

Economic shock works according to a similar theory: the premise is that people can develop responses to gradual change -- a slashed health program here, a trade deal there -- but if dozens of changes come from all directions at once, a feeling of futility sets in, and populations go limp.
~ from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein ~

It makes me wonder if governors like Scott Walker expected this kind of reaction: labor not to put up much of a fight. Boy, were they ever surprised!

Still, I am concerned that Klein's point eventually may prove to be on target. Draconian legislation of all sorts and nefarious "austerity" programs are being introduced across the nation and in the halls of the nation's capitol too. While a portion of the masses is fighting back now, it still is like too few fingers to shore up the holes in a leaking dike.

Will we be able to keep up the momentum or, in the face of a nonstop onslaught, will a feeling of utter futility and resignation set in? Time will tell.

This brief series of posts began with this one.