1. 25 March 2008

    Shock Doctrine

    Naomi Klein

    164 days ago

    Really a harrowing book from Naomi Klein. Follows the ideas of torture as they evolved scientifically, and melded with the economic theories of Milton Friedman to inspire a new way to run a country: that of corporatism. The first place these ideas took hold was in South America, when the CIA funded multiple coups d‘état and established military juntas supplied with Friedmanite economists (The and los Chicago Boys). This system was for some odd reason lauded by the West, and the systematic torture used to pacify those living in these countries was somehow seen as separate from the economic policies, when the economics were really the cause of the dissent that caused unheeded violence.

    The system spread to all over the world, until it was ensconced in the Western canon of developing all Third World countries, as the IMF and World Bank. Systems were put in place whereby any country needing emergency loans from the IMF could only get the money they needed to forestall complete and disastrous economic collapse by parcelling up all different aspects of their nation (water, electricity, industry) and selling it off to multinational corporations. Which led to the same things that happened in Latin America in the 70s.

    Now, under George W. Bush, this radical doctrine of privatization has taken hold on the US government. The war in Iraq has been fought by mercenaries and contractors just as much as by troops. FEMA doesn’t actually have any responsibility for dealing with disaster, it’s just an organization to arrange contractors around whatever happens to be the disaster du jour.

    This book really damns the Western economic systems that have taken power over the past 50 years. The financial system, multinational corporations, governments, Aid organizations (even NGOs) have all had their part to play in the dismantling of countless struggling nations, only to benefit a clique of super–rich governmental and corporate tycoons. An awfully depressing read, but thankfully it looks like things might be getting better: the US seems on the verge of economic collapse, developing nations almost universally now scorn the establishments of the IMF and World Bank. They’re looking back to where they were before this plague of shock doctrine and disaster capitalism overtook them: developmentalism as opposed to “barbarian capitalism.” Good luck to them, here are my notes.

    This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story—that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective bodhy politic as well as on countless individual bodies. 18

    Ewan Cameron ran a research program funded by the CIA at a canadian university in which he pioneered the idea of shock therapy—that by dramatically altering someone’s environment and submitting them to excessive shock of various forms, they could be brought to a state of mental infancy, from whence they could then be rebuilt into functioning citizens.

    Like pro–war hawks who call for the bombing of countries “back to the stone age,” Cameron saw shock therapy as a means to blast his patients back into their infancy, to regress them completely. 32

    The CIA, for its part, actively encouraged this narrative1, much preferring to be mocked as bumbling sci–fi buffoons than for having funded a torture laboratory at a respected university—and an effective one at that. 38

    1 When the program came to light in a class–action lawsuit by patients of Cameron against the CIA, the media sensationalized the fact that LSD was administered. They forgot to mention the rest of Cameron’s program.
    Jose Padilla:

    Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, he was accused of intending to build a “dirty bomb.” Instead of being charged and taken through the court system, Padilla was classified as an enemy combatant, which stripped him of all tights. Taken to a U.S. Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina, Padilla says he was infected with a drug that he believes was either LSD or PCP and subjected to intense sensory deprivation: he was kept in a tiny cell with the windows blacked out and forbidden to have a clock or a calendar. Whenever he left the cell he was shackled, his eyes were covered with blackout goggles and sound was blocked with heavy headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days and forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who, when they questioned him, blasted his starved senses with lights and pounding sounds.
    […] The Cameron–style regression techniques had completely succeeded in destroying the adult he once was, which is precisely what they were designed to do. “The extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged, both mentally and physically,” his lawyer told the court. “The government’s treatment of Mr. Padilla has robbed him of his personhood.” A psychiatrist who assessed him concluded that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.” The Bush–appointed judge insisted that Padilla was fir to stand trial, however. The fact that he even had a public trial makes Padilla’s case extraordinary. Thousands of other prisoners being held in U.S.–run prisons—who, unlike Padilla, are not U.S. citizens—have been put through a similar torture regimen, with none of the accountability of a civillian trial. 44

    ———

    Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn 50

    ———

    Developmentalism was so staggeringly successful for a time that the Southern Cone of Latin America became a potent symbol for poor countries around the world: here was proof that with smart, practical policies, aggressively implemented, the class divide between the First and Third World could actually be closed. 55

    And that’s where the Chicago School came in. It quickly became clear that when Friedman, a brilliant mathematician and skilled debater, made those same arguments, they took on an entirely different quality. They might be dismissed as wrong–headed but they were imbued with an aura of scientific impartiality. The enormous benefit of having corporate views funneled through academic, or quasi–academic, institutions not only kept the Chicago School flush with donations, but, in short order, spawned the global network of right–wing think tanks that would churn out the counterrevolution’s foot soldiers world–wide. 56

    ———

    Suharto then send out his soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his “shooting lists,” as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. Embassy received regular reports on their progress. As the information came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesian left had been annihilated. 67

    Corporatism, or “corporativism,” originally referred to Mussolini’s model of a police state run as an alliance of the three major power sources in society—government, businesses and trade unions—all collaborating to guarantee order in the name of nationalism. What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all–out war on the third power sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth. 86

    All Argentines were in some way enlisted as witnesses to the erasure of their fellow citizens, yet most people claimed not to know what was going on. THere is a phrase Argentines use to describe the paradox of wide–eyed knowing and eyes–closed terror that was the dominant state of mind in those years: “We did no know what nobody could deny.” 91

    The Latin American operation was modeled on Hitler’s “Night and Fog.” In 1941, Hitler decreed that resistance fighters in Nazi–occupied countries would be brought to Germany to “vanish in the night and fog.” Several high–profile Nazis took refuge in Chile and Argentina, and there is some speculation that they may have trained the Southern Cone intelligence agencies in these tactics. 91

    ———

    Rodolfo Walsh, a gregarious renaissance man, a writer of crime fiction and award–winning short stories, Walsh was also a super sleuth able to crack military codes and spy on the spies. His greatest investigative triumph took place when he was working as a journalist in Cuba, where he managed to intercept and decode a CIA telex that blew the cover of the Bay of Pigs invasion. That information is what allowed Castro to prepare for and defend against the invasion. 94

    The letter [Walsh’s Open Letter to the Military Junta] begins with an account of the generals’ terror campaign, its use of “maximum torture, unending and metaphysical,” as well as the involvement of the CIA in training the Argentine police. After listing the methods and grave sites in excruciating detail, Walsh abruptly switches gears: “These events, which stir the conscience of the civilized world, are not, however, the greatest suffering inflicted on the Argentinean people, nor the worst violation for human rights which you have committed. It is in the economic policy of this government where one discovers not only the explanation for the crimes, but a greater atrocity which punishes millions of human beings through planned misery… You only have to walk around greater Buenos Aires for a few hours ro check the speed with which such a policy transforms the city into a ‘shantytown’ of ten million people.” 95

    The day after writing the letter, on a trip to Buenos Aries to distribute copies around to dissidents was ambushed by 10 soldiers at a supposed meeting to discuss a disappeared colleague.

    Walsh, whose motto was “It isn’t a crime to talk; getting arrested is the crime,” immediately pulled out his gun and began firing. He injured one of the soldiers and drew their fire; he was dead by the time the car arrived at the Navy School of Mechanics. Walsh’s body was burned and dumped in a river. 96

    The leaders of the government had explicitly called for Walsh to be captured alive.

    ———

    To the extent that killings by the state were acknowledged, they were justified by the juntas on the grounds that they were fighting a war against dangerous Marxist terrorists, funded and controlled by the KGB. If the juntas used “dirty” tactics, it was because their enemy was monstrous. Using language that sounds eerily familiar today, Admiral Massera called it a “war for freedom and against tyranny… a war against those who favor death and by those of us who favor life… We are fighting against nihilists, against agents of destruction whose only objective is destruction itself, although they disguise themselves with social crusades.” 96

    Pinochet had Orlando Letelier, a former and repentant chilean freidmanite, assassinated by a car bomb while living in Washington, DC. 99

    Yet in the Southern Cone, the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands ad the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people. 102

    ———

    “the only transcendental theology: solidarity” —Osvaldo Bayer 112

    ———

    In a way, what happened in the Southern Cone in the seventies is that it was treated as a murder scene when it was, in fact, the site of an extraordinarily violent armed robbery. “It was as if that blood, the blood of the disappeared, covered up the economic program,” Acuna told me. 125

    To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses’ or ‘abuses’ is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simply an all pervasive system. Simone de Beauvoir, 126

    Foreign monopolies impose crops on us, they impose chemicals that pollute our earth, impose technology and ideology. All this through the oligarchy which owns the land and controls the politics. But we must remember—the oligarchy is also controlled, by the very same monopolies, the very same Ford Motors, Monsanto, Philip Morris. It’s the structure we have to change. This is what I have come to denounce. That’s all. Sergio Tomasella, 127

    ———

    The Falklands War, described by Jose Luis Borges: “a fight between two bald men over a comb.” 137

    This is where Friedman’s crisis theory became self–reinforcing. The more the global economy followed his prescriptions, with floating interest rates, deregulated prices and export–oriented economies, the more crisis–prone the system became, producing more and more of precisely the type of melt–downs he had identified as the only circumstances under which governments would take more of his radical advice. 159

    That meant that when Reagan and Thatcher came to power in the eighties, their highly ideological administrations were essentially able to harness the two institutions [The World Bank and the IMF] for their own ends, rapidly increasing their power and turning them into the primary vehicles for the advancement of the corporatist crusade. 163

    The principle was simple: countries in crisis desperately need emergency aid to stabilize their currencies. When privatization and free–trade policies are packaged together with a financial bailout, countries have little choice but to accept the whole package. The really clever part was that economists themselves knew that free–trade had nothing to do with ending a crisis, but that information was expertly “obfuscated.” […] “no significant case of trade reform in a developing country in the 1980s took place outside the context of a serious economic crisis.” 165

    In other words: “Want to save your country? Sell it off.”

    ———

    …not only did the ANC renege on Mandela’s original pledge of “the nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industry” but because of the debt [racked up by the pro–apartheid white government], it was doing the opposite—selling off national assets to make food in the debts of its oppressors. 212

    In the end, South Africa has ended up witha twisted case of reparations in reverse, with the white businesses that reaped enormous profits from black labor during the apartheid years paying not a cent in reparations, but the victims of apartheid continuing to send large paychecks to their former victimizers. And how do they raise money for this generosity? By stripping the states of its assets through privatization—a modern form of the very looting that the ANC had been so intent on avoiding when t agreed to negotiations, hoping to prevent a repeat of Mozambique. Unlike what happened in Mozambique, however, where civil servants broke machinery, stuffed their pockets, and then fled, in South Africa the dismantling of the state and the pillaging of its coffers continue today. 213

    After more than a decade since South Africa made its decisive turn toward Thatcherism, the results are scandalous:

    • Since 1994, the year the ANC took power, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million in 2006.
    • Between 1991 and 2002, the unemployment rate for black South Africans more than doubled, from 23 percent to 48 percent.
    • Of South Africa’s 35 million black citizens, only five thousand earn more than $60,000 a year. The number of whites in that income bracket is twenty times higher, and many earn far more than that amount.

    215

    Russia and Poland got the same shit deal South Africa did.

    Communism may have collapsed without the firing of a single shot, but Chicago–style capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire to defend itself: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns—all to defend Russia’s new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy. 228

    But Russia wasn’t a repeat of Chile—it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup dissolved the institutions of democracy and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup. Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the west. 229

    The scandal wasn’t just that Russia’s public riches were auctioned off for a fraction of their worth—it was also that, in true corporatist style, they were purchased with public money. As the Moscow Times journalist Matt Bivens and Jonas Bernstein put it, “a few hand–picked men took over Russia’s state–developed oil fields for free, as part of a giant shell game in which one arm of government paid another arm.” […] In other words, the Russian people fronted the money for the looting of their own country. 233

    …quick and dirty deals were actively encouraged by Western powers at every stage as the fastest way to kick–start the economy. National salvation through the harnessing of greed was the closest thing Russia’s Chicago Boys and their advisers had to a plan for what they were going to do after they finished destroying Russia’s institutions. 241

    ———

    Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medecine to governments and to peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples… THe blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up, too; cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the entire world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name. Davison Budhoo, 261

    In his letter, Budhoo, who died in 2001, made it clear that his dispute was over more tnat the treatment of one country by a handful of officials. He characterized the IMF’s entire program of structural adjustment as a form of mass torture in which “‘screaming–in–pain’ governments and peoples [are] forced to bend on their knees before us, broken and terrified and disintegrating, and begging for a sliver of reasonableness and decency on our part. But we laugh cruelly in their face, and the torture goes on unabated.”

    After the letter was published, the government of Trinidad commissioned two independent studies to investigate the allegations and found that they were correct: the IMF had inflated and fabricated numbers, with tremendously damaging results to the country. 262

    In an extraordinary act of interference with a sovereign nation’s political process, the IMF refused to release the money until it had commitments from all four main candidates that they would stick to the new rules if they won. With the country effectively held at ransom, the IMG was triumphant: each candidate pledged his support in writing. 270

    (Before the IMF’s demands, two of the candidates had run openly anti–IMF campaigns.)

    ———

    When Rumsfeld joined the cabinet of George W. Bush in 2001, it was with a personal mission to reinvent warfare for the twenty–first century—turning it into something more psychological than physical, more spectacle than struggle, and far more profitable than it had ever been before. 284

    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. 301

    What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand–wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors—rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatized war built to have no end. 306

    “Ch 15: A corporatist state—removing the revolving door, putting in an archway.”

    It’s hard to believe—but then again, that was pretty much Washington’s game plan for Iraq: shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all okay with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food. In Iraq, this cycle of culture erasing and culture replacing was not theoretical; it all unfolded in a matter of weeks. 339

    In other words, the U.S. government presence in Iraq during the first year of its economic experiment had been a mirage—there had been no government, just a funnel to get U.S. taxpayer and Iraqi oil dollars to foreign corporations, completely outside the law. In this way, Iraq represented the most extreme expression of the anti–state counterrevolution—a hollow state, where, as the courts finally established, there was no there, there.

    I don’t quite know what that last clause means either. But the court decision referenced was that in which Custer Battles—a contractor accused of blatant fraudulent activities in Iraq—appealed and won on the grounds that the CPA was in fact not a government at all, that Iraq was in fact outside of US law (under which the initial verdict was reached), as well as outside whatever Iraqi system of governance was being put into place.

    ———

    Put simply, if Iraqis were allowed to freely elect the next government, and f that government had real power, Washing would have to give up on two of the war’s main goals: access to Iraq for U.S. military bases and full access to Iraq for U.S. multinationals. […] Within his first six months in the job, he [Paul Bremer] had canceled a constituent assembly, nixed the idea of electing the drafters of the constitution, annulled and called off dozens of local and provincial elections and then vanquished the beast of national elections—hardly the actions of an idealistic democrat.. 364

    In the first three and a half years of occupation, and estimated 61,500 Iraqis were captured and imprisoned by U.S. forces, usually with methods designed to “maximize capture shock.” Roughly 19,000 remained in custody in the spring of 2007. Inside the prisons more shocks followed: buckets of freezing water; snarling, teeth–baring German shepherds; punching and kicking; and sometimes the shock of electrical current running from live wires. 366

    That is what happens with projects to build model societies in other people’s countries. The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated. It is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelgänger, the scorched earth—only then that the dream of total creation morphs into a campaign of total destruction. 364

    It turns out that funding Iraqis to rebuild their own country is more efficient than hiring lumbering multinationals who don’t know the country or the language, surround themselves with $900–a–day mercenaries and spend as much as 55 percent of their contract budgets on overhead. 375

    In effect, the law called for Iraq’s publicly owned oil reserves, the country’s main source of revenues, to be exempted from democratic control and run instead by a powerful, wealthy oil dictatorship, which would exist alongside Iraq’s broken and ineffective government. 377

    The law passed. But not at first, when people were paying attention: it wasn’t rammed through until the insurgency and surge started to cause so much violence that Iraqis had better things to worry about then legislation.

    ———

    It was the weeping faces of these fishing families and other like them in Thailand and Indonesia that had triggered the historic outpouring of international generosity after the tsunami—it had been their relatives piled up in mosques, their wailing mothers trying to identify a drowned baby, their children swept to sea. Yet for communities like Arguam Bay, the “reconstruction” meant nothing less than the deliberate destruction of their culture and way of life and the theft of their land. As Kumary said, the entire reconstruction process would result in “victimizing the victims, exploiting the exploited.” 389

    “Governments have largely failed in their responsibility to provide land for permanent housing,” the report concluded. “They have stood by or been complicit as land has been grabbed and coastal communities pushed aside in favor of commercial interests.” 399

    Almost everyone I met commented on what one preist called “the NGO wild life”: high–end hotels, beachfront villas, and the ultimate lightning rod for popular rage, the brand–new white sport utility vehicles. All the aid organizations had them, monstrous things that were far too wide and powerful for the country’s narrow dirt roads. All day long they went roaring past the camps, forcing everyone to eat their dust, their logos billowing on flags in the breeze—Oxfam, World Vision, Save the CHildren—as if they were visitors from a far–off NGO World. In a country as hot as Sri Lanka, these cars, with their tinted windows and blasting air conditioners, were more than modes of transportation, they were rolling microclimates. 403

    ———

    Blackwater has a 600 acre, $40-$50 million dollar compound in North Carolina. 416

    When Katrina hit, FEMA had to hire a contractor to award contracts to contractors. Similarly, when it came time to update the Army manual on the rules for dealing with contractors, the army contracted out the hob to one of its major contractors, MPRI—it no longer had the know–how in–house. 417

    Under Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a government—the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings, policy battles—but it no more does the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike’s Beaverton campus stitch running shoes. 418

    No Conspiracies Required:

    The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous [than the current american conspiracies]. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short–term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets into crisis–creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dot–com collapse all demonstrate. Our common addiction to dirty, nonrenewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters (up 430% since 1975) and wars waged for control over scarce resources (not just Iraq and Afghanistan but lower–intensity conflicts such as those that rage in Nigeria, Colombia and Sudan), which in turn create terrorist blowback (a 2007 study calculated that the number of terrorist attacks since the start of the Iraq war had increased sevenfold). 426

    ———

    The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that these ideas [Developmentalism] were never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures. When resistance was fierce, they were defeated with overt violence—rolled over by Pinochet’s, Yeltsin’s, and Deng Xiaoping’s tanks. At other times, they were simply betrayed through what John Williamson called “voodoo politics.” […] It is precisely because the dream of economic equality is so popular, and so difficult to defeat in a fair fight, that the shock doctrine was embraced in the first place. 451

    “barbarian capitalism” —Daniel Ortega 452

    In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent—a sea of change in only two years. 457

  2. 07 January 2006

    972 days ago

    Scandal of force-fed prisoners

    Welcome to the gulag:

    New details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on hunger strike at Guant

    via Kjell Olsen972 days ago

  3. 12 December 2005

    999 days ago

    Khaled El-Masri

    US captures German Citizen while vacationing, discovers he is innocent, holds him in Afghanistan for 2 months anyway, proceed to drop him in an Albanian forest.

    via Kjell Olsen999 days ago

  4. 18 November 2005

    1022 days ago

    Tortured men look like 'Holocaust victims'

    Witnesses said many of the 169 men and youths were emaciated and looked like “Holocaust survivors”. Some had suffered beatings so severe that their skin had peeled off, and three men had been kept locked in a cupboard where they could not move. All the others were packed, blindfolded, into three rooms nine feet long and 11 feet wide. Kim Sengupta

    America – Holocausting terrorists.

    via Kjell Olsen1022 days ago

  5. 14 November 2005

    1026 days ago

    Out of Mind

    Testimony of the torture used by American forces.

    via Kjell Olsen1026 days ago

  6. 11 November 2005

    1029 days ago

    ... And why it should never be one - Los Angeles Times

    What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust

    via Kjell Olsen1029 days ago

  7. 07 November 2005

    1033 days ago

    The Daily Whim: We Do Not Torture, We Exempt

    So there you have it. This administration does not feel compelled to answer to Congress and allow them to

    via Kjell Olsen1033 days ago

  8. 07 October 2005

    1064 days ago

    McCain passes amendment to end torture of detainees; Bush threatens veto || kuro5hin.org

    If you can tell me one good thing bush has done in the last five years, I’ll give you a cookie. He is a complete fuckwit.

    Yesterday evening, John McCain passed an amendment to the next military appropriations bill which if followed would end such practices by simply requiring the treatment of detainees to be held to the standards in the Army field manual. Bush claims he’s going to veto it. This would mean the first, and so far only, veto of Bush’s entire presidency would be performed in support of torture.

    The debate over the U.S. policy on interrogation is made extremely difficult by the aforementioned fact that nobody seems to know what the U.S. policy is.

    Bush is, in fact, the first president since James A. Garfield not to veto anything, and Garfield spent over three years of his one term in office dead.

    via Kjell Olsen1064 days ago

  9. 29 September 2005

    1072 days ago

    Judge orders release of Abu Ghraib photos

    My task is not to defer to our worst fears, but to interpret and apply the law, in this case, the Freedom of Information Act, which advances values important to our society, transparency and accountability in government. U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein

    via Kjell Olsen1072 days ago

  10. Also somewhat recently

      |