The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism - Naomi Klein

[Triana]

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Naomi Klein

How did you feel on 9/12?

So stunned you couldn't figure out a next move? Desperate for an
explanation, any explanation? Filled with a desire for someone powerful
to do something big --- or as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
would later say about the invasion of Iraq, "What they needed to see was
American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad,
basically saying, 'Which part of this sentence don't you understand?'"

Most of the people I know in New York experienced all that. But only
briefly. And then --- although our city got the worst of it --- we were
flooded with empathy, eager to unite and help, and, above all, desperate
to understand. Which is, I believe, why the book most bought --- and
read, and discussed --- in my crowd in the weeks after 9/11 was Ahmed
Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300089023/headbutlercom-20>.

Maybe you felt as my friends and I did.

If so, Naomi Klein sends you congratulations --- you are likely to see
through (and, later, resist) the business-take-all power grab that she
says is the likely follow-up to any disaster, natural or political.

If so, Naomi Klein warns you to be damn careful. If our government
doesn't leave you to save yourself (as in New Orleans), an outsourced
army like Blackwater might decide you're trouble and decide to
re-educate or kill you (as in Iraq).

Either way, if Klein is remotely right, you can pretty much kiss goodbye
your fantasies of American "goodness" and "good will" and even
"democracy" --- when the interests of an American corporation that's
tight with the government are at stake, the usual rules don't apply.
Terror, torture, mayhem, murder: The techniques are technicalities. All
that counts: the triumph of business interests, a continued flow of
money and power to the inner circle.

And this will happen more and more, Klein says, if "disaster capitalism"
--- that is, "orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of
catastrophe" --- continues to prevail.

In her book, Klein asks how this happened. Her answer: an alternative
history of the last 30 years. The tightly-reported, intensely-sourced
story she tells is not unfamiliar to people outside America and to
progressives here at home. Still, to see her connect the dots between
Pinochet in Chile and Bremer in Iraq is dazzling and disturbing --- this
book will be an eye-opener for some, a mind-closer for others.

A cast of thousands sweeps through the 466 pages of her book, but only
two men are key.

One is the economist Milton Friedman.

The other is Dr. Ewen Cameron, a Canadian psychiatrist.

Even people who know almost nothing about economics have heard of Milton
Friedman. He taught at the University of Chicago and influenced
generations of students. He advised Presidents and world leaders. He won
the Nobel Prize. When he died, in 2006, the obituaries were glowing.

Friedman's big idea was free markets. He was beloved by conservatives
not for his opposition to Marxism but for his rejection of Keynesian
economic theory. Unlike Keynes's liberal disciples, he believed
government should, if possible, never meddle with the economy. But
Friedman's views were actually more complicated. "Only a crisis --- real
or perceived --- produces real change," he said. And he advised
government leaders in Chile and England to do more than meddle; he urged
them to use crisis to introduce radical political and economic
re-engineering.

Almost no one can identify Ewen Cameron, but in the 1950s, he did
important research for the CIA. Using electroshock, LSD, sustained
isolation and other techniques, he showed that he could inflict
sufficient shock to a patient's brain to erase memory. And then he could
build a new personality in its place.

Klein's thesis in "The Shock Doctrine" is that exceedingly clever
disciples of Friedman saw how Cameron's psychological techniques could
be used on entire countries. Let's say a new government comes to power
with an ardent pro-business agenda. Instead of changing policy one piece
at a time in the hope that it can legislate significant change before
anyone notices, new governments should trumpet their agenda. And then
they should use whatever muscle is necessary to shock the population
into cowed acceptance.

Klein's no fool; she emphasizes that it's impossible to hold ideologues
directly responsible for crimes committed by their followers. At the
same time, like anyone with an overarching theory, she connects dots
that are unrelated and ignores exceptions. My guess: Most readers will
have trouble with her large perceptions: In South America, the greatest
supporers of "free market" capitalism have been dictators; in the United
States, war profiteers are the government; in Iraq, Saddam's real crime
was signing oil contracts with the Russians and negotiating with a
French company. I suspect what readers will remember are the facts
they've never encountered before.

Samples:

In 2001, there were two security-oriented lobbying firms in Washington.
In 2006, there were 543.

"Shock and Awe" was literal. In the 1991 Gulf War, the United States
dispatched 300 cruise missiles in 5 weeks. In 2003, we fired off 380 in
a single day. Between March 20 and May 3, we dropped 30,000 bombs and
launched 20,000 cruise missiles --- 67% of the total number ever made.

In Thailand, within 24 hours of the /tsumani/, some developers sent
private security guards to fence in beach property they did not own so
they could build luxury hotels there.

In New Orleans, FEMA paid a contractor $175 a square foot to put tarp
owned by FEMA on the roofs of houses. The workers who actually applied
the tarp got $2 an hour.

In the first year of deployment for Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld cut 55,000
jobs in the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Lockheed Martin doesn't just build aircraft. It sorts our mail, writes
Social Security checks and counts the census --- it "writes more code
than Microsoft."

One fact in particular jumps out: The Defense Authorization Act (2006)
gives the president the power to declare martial law and use the Armed
Forces and National Guard to restore order in the event of an emergency.
What's new about that? Previously, the president only had that power in
the event of insurrection. If you've got a paranoid imagination....

A depressing book? Well, sometimes reality's a bummer. But the end is
not at all doom-and-gloom. Around the world, Klein says, people are
understanding how disaster capitalism works --- and fighting back.
Obviously, she hopes her book will start that process here.

--- Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com

[pitohui]

1. fact nit

The workers who actually applied
the tarp got $2 an hour.



that is simply not true, we had an immediate and long lasting labor shortage and even illegals were getting as much as $20 an hour -- an order of magnitude over $2 an hour!

we still have a labor shortage today, any able bodied person who wants a job at $8.50 an hour (an unheard of sum for unskilled labor pre-K) can get it

[Triana]

4. I seem to remember reading something to that effect back then...

...too late to change it in the book I suppose.

[fasttense]

6. I'm not sure Naomi Klein is wrong about the $2.00 per hour.

"One of the four prime contractors the corps used was LJC Defense Contractors of Dothan, Ala. The corps will say only that it paid the prime contractors an average of $2.38 per square foot for the labor to install the tarps - almost as much as the cost to install a permanent roof, according to the National Roofing Contractors Assn.

Through interviews and a Freedom of Information Act request, The Times learned that LJC let its contract to six levels of subcontractors in a descending ladder that consumed roughly 95% of the money before it got to the people who did the work.

Several illegal immigrants said they were recruited from around the country to come to New Orleans last September and install the tarps under part of the LJC contract. They said they were promised 11 cents a square foot for the work.

And, they said, the subcontractor who hired them didn't pay. "We worked three months for free," said Leonel Santos of Durango, Mexico, who performed part of the LJC contract.

Santos said workers slept outdoors in a park, ate once a day from cans of food bought at convenience stores, and showered with hoses. For three months, the workers said, they labored seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. - as stipulated in the LJC contract - installing tarps on houses in the suburbs of Metairie and Kenner, then Baton Rouge and Lake Charles.

The subcontractor and his assistants - who were from the same village in Mexico as many of the workers - gave the workers partial payments along the way.

"Sometimes they'd pay us $200; some weeks they wouldn't pay us anything," said Ruben Carrillo, another Durango immigrant who worked on the LJC contract. "They kept saying they didn't have any money. They'd say, 'Wait for next week.'"

Santos, Carrillo and other workers say each is owed about $1,600. They are now represented by Molina, who has filed a complaint on their behalf with the US Department of Labor."

http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/64/22426

Since most workers were not paid what they were promised, it is difficult to determine how much an hour they actually got. But assuming they got paid, at 11 cents per square feet, assuming you can lay a little over 18 feet of tarp in one hour, it comes out to $2.00 per hour.

Sure you could get more than $2/hr if your employer didn't lie to you and you were actually paid.

edited for spelling

[Swamp Rat]

2. k&r

[burrowowl]

3. K&R

[WinkyDink]

5. Latin America, Africa, Asia---all have known and felt this for decades.