Naomi Klein Shock Doctrine Quotes

Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.

The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.

When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.

What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.

The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.

Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as "superconsumers," able to carry consumer demand all on their own.

in moments of crisis, people are willing to hand over a great deal of power to anyone who claims to have a magic cure—whether the crisis is a financial meltdown or, as the Bush administration would later show, a terrorist attack.

Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth.

During the Cold War, widespread alcoholism was always seen in the West as evidence that life under Communism was so dismal that Russians needed large quantities of vodka to get through the day. Under capitalism, however, Russians drinks more than twice as much alcohol as they used to - and they are reaching for harder painkillers as well.

The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that these ideas 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.

protected businesses never, never become competitive ... Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all other U.S. corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the U.S. government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot - all at taxpayer expense.

As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective.

This is what Keynes had meant when he warned of the dangers of economic chaos—you never know what combination of rage, racism and revolution will be unleashed.

Good times make bad policy. —Mohammad Sadli, economic adviser to Indonesia’s General Suharto2

The recent spate of disasters has translated into such spectacular profits that many people around the world have come to the same conclusion: the rich and powerful must be deliberately causing the catastrophes so that they can exploit them.

The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.

From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade.

When Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld conflate what is good for Lockheed, Halliburton, Carlyle and Gilead with what is good for the United States and indeed the world, it is a form of projection with uniquely dangerous consequences.

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?

We do not always respond to shocks with regression. Sometimes, in the face of crisis, we grow up—fast.

there is no humane way to rule people against their will.

Authoritarian Communism is, and should be, forever tainted by those real-world laboratories. But what of the contemporary crusade to liberate world markets? The coups, wars and slaughters to instill and maintain pro-corporate regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been written off as the excess of overzealous dictators, as hot fronts in the Cold War, and now of the War on Terror. If the most committed opponents of the corporatist economic model are systematically eliminated, whether in Argentina in the seventies or in Iraq today, that suppression is explained as part of the dirty fight against Communism or terrorism - almost never as the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism.

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 not know what nobody could deny.

It (the Chinese move to embrace capitalism in 1989) is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.

It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine. " Only a crisis-actual or percieved-produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

I had just one goal—to stay alive until the next day … . But it wasn’t just to survive, but to survive as me. —Mario Villani,

The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically - prices will not keep rising, nor will wages.

The widespread abuse...is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system - whether political , religious or economic - that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling...an indicator of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.

In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the “War on Terror” was a war against all obstacles to the new order.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke out strongly against war profiteers, saying, “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.

According to these new rules, the U.S. government was free to use the methods it had developed in the 1950s under layers of secrecy and deniability—only now it was out in the open, without fear of prosecution.

...while the IMF certainly failed the people of Asia, it did not fail Wall Street - far from it. The hot money may have been spooked by the IMF's drastic measures, but the large investment houses and multinational firms were emboldened...These fun-seeking firms understood that as a result of the IMF's "adjustments," pretty much everything in Asia was now up for sale - and the more the market panicked, the more desperate Asian companies would be to sell, pushing their prices through the floor.

The tsunami that cleared the shoreline like a giant bulldozer has presented developers with an undreamed-of opportunity, and they have moved quickly to seize it. —Seth Mydans, International Herald Tribune, March 10,

By the time the think-tank lifers arrived in Baghdad, the crucial roles in the reconstruction had already been outsourced to Halliburton and KPMG. THeir job as the public servants was simply to administer the petty cash, which in Iraq took the form of handling shrink-wrapped bricks of hundred-dollar bills to contractors. It was a graphic glimpse into the acceptable role of government in a corporatist state - to act as a conveyor belt for getting public money into private hands, a job for which ideological commitment is far more relevant than elaborate field experience.

No country offered more lucrative conditions than China: low taxes and tariffs, corruptible officials and, most of all, a plentiful low-wage workforce that, for many years, would be unwilling to risk demanding decent salaries or the most basic workplace protections for fear of the most violent reprisals.

When Jonas Salk, a scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, found it and developed the first polio vaccine in 1952, he did not patent the lifesaving treatment. "There is no patent," Salk told the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow: "Could you patent the sun?

Katrina was not unforeseeable. It was the result of a political structure that subcontracts its responsibility to private contractors and abdicates its responsibility altogether. —Harry Belafonte, American musician and civil rights activist, September 20052

Thomas Friedman, in his best-selling book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, declared that what happened in Asia wasn’t a crisis at all. “I believe globalization did us all a favor by melting down the economies of Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Brazil in the 1990s, because it laid bare a lot of rotten practices and institutions,

In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. —Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist, on his support for the invasion of Iraq2

We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves. —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Countries, like people, don't reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking.

the authors of the CIA manual, that effective torture was not sadism but science. “The precise pain in the precise place, in the precise amount” was his motto.

The Red Cross has said that U.S. military officials have admitted that somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the detentions in Iraq were “mistakes.

The vast majority of the victims of the Southern Cone’s terror apparatus were not members of armed groups but non-violent activists working in factories, farms, shantytowns and universities. They were economists, artists, psychologists and left-wing party loyalists. They were killed not because of their weapons (which most did not have) but because of their beliefs.

(According to The New York Times, “the top 20 service contractors have spent nearly $300 million since 2000 on lobbying and have donated $23 million to political campaigns.” The Bush administration, in turn, increased the amount spent on contractors by roughly $200 billion between 2000 and 2006.)

I recently traveled to Iraq, and I am trying to understand the role torture is playing there. We are told it’s about getting information, but I think it’s more than that—I think it may also have had to do with trying to build a model country, about erasing people and then trying to remake them from scratch.

A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For

The point of the exercise [torture] was getting prisoners to do irreparable damage to that part of themselves that believed in helping others above all else, that part of themselves that made them activists, replacing it with shame and humiliation.

The Marshall Plan was the ultimate weapon deployed on this economic front. After the war, the German economy was in crisis, threatening to bring down the rest of Western Europe. Meanwhile, so many Germans were drawn to socialism that the U.S. government opted to split Germany into two parts rather than risk losing it all, either to collapse or to the left. In West Germany, the U.S. government used the Marshall Plan to build a capitalist system that was not meant to create fast and easy new markets for Ford and Sears but, rather, to be so successful on its own terms that Europe’s market economy would thrive and socialism would be drained of its appeal.

As the political scientist Michael Wolfe puts it, “Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are unlikely to do it very well.” He adds, “As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster.”30

Much of U.S. foreign policy...is an exercise in projection, in which a tiny self-interested elite conflates its needs and desires with those of the entire world.

Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all.

It’s impossible to say how much the decision to use the tsunami as an opportunity for disaster capitalism contributed to the return to civil war.

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law … . They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission. —Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters, 2002

Those words went unheeded at the time, but when Europe was rebuilt after the Second World War, the Western powers embraced the principle that market economies needed to guarantee enough basic dignity that disillusioned citizens would not go looking once again for a more appealing ideology, whether fascism or Communism. It was this pragmatic imperative that led to the creation of almost everything that we associate today with the bygone days of “decent” capitalism—social security in the U.S., public health care in Canada, welfare in Britain, workers’ protections in France and Germany. A

Iraq is the last great frontier in the Middle East … . In Iraq, 80 per cent of the oil wells ever drilled have been discoveries. —David Horgan, chief executive of the Irish oil company Petrel, January 20072

In much of the Southern Hemisphere, neo liberalism is frequently spoken of as "the second colonial pillage": in the first pillage, the riches were seized from the land, and in the second they were stripped from the state.

That is what makes the Bush regime different: after the attacks of September 11, it dared to demand the right to torture without shame. That left the administration subject to criminal prosecution—a problem it dealt with by changing the laws.

According to one study, “a quarter of the workers rebuilding the city were immigrants lacking papers, almost all of them Hispanic, making far less money than legal workers.” In Mississippi, a class-action lawsuit forced several companies to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages to immigrant workers. Some were not paid at all. On one Halliburton/KBR job site, undocumented immigrant workers reported being wakened in the middle of the night by their employer (a subsubcontractor), who allegedly told them that immigration agents were on their way. Most workers fled to avoid arrest; after all, they could end up in one of the new immigration prisons that Halliburton/KBR had been contracted to build for the federal government.

Any attempt to hold ideologies accountable for the crimes committed by their followers must be approached with a great deal of caution. It's too easy to assert that those with whom we disagree are not just wrong but tyrannical, fascist, genocidal.

Simone de Beauvoir, writing on the same subject, concurred: “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.”24

Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social levelling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival.

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.

The casual exclusion of tens of millions of people by free-market ideologues has reproduced frighteningly similar explosive conditions: proud populations that perceive themselves as humiliated by foreign forces, looking to regain their national pride by targeting the most vulnerable in their midst.

According to a 2006 study, 90 percent of China’s billionaires (calculated in Chinese yuan) are the children of Communist Party officials. Roughly twenty-nine hundred of these party scions—known as “the princelings”—control $260 billion.54 It is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. Today, this collaborative arrangement can be seen in the way that foreign multinational media and technology companies help the Chinese state to spy on its citizens, and to make sure that when students do Web searches on phrases like “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” or even “democracy,” no documents turn up. “The creation of today’s market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events,” writes Wang Hui, “but rather of state interference and violence.

A network of right-wing think tanks seized on Friedman’s proposal and descended on the city after the storm. The administration of George W. Bush backed up their plans with tens of millions of dollars to convert New Orleans schools into “charter schools,” publicly funded institutions run by private entities according to their own rules. Charter schools are deeply polarizing in the United States, and nowhere more than in New Orleans, where they are seen by many African-American parents as a way of reversing the gains of the civil rights movement, which guaranteed all children the same standard of education. For Milton Friedman, however, the entire concept of a state-run school system reeked of socialism.

Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.

في عملية النهب الاستعماري الأولى جُرّدت الأرض من ثرواتها, وفي عملية النهب الثانية جُرّد البلد من أراضيه

Pieces of a living city cannot be auctioned off without taking into consideration that there are indigenous traditions, even if they seem odd to foreigners … . But these are our traditions and our city. For a long time we lived under the dictatorship of the Communists, but now we have found out that life under the dictatorship of business people is no better. They couldn’t care less about what country they are in. —Grigory Gorin, Russian writer, 19931

Most of us chose to oppose the war as an act of folly by a president who mistook himself for a king, and his British sidekick who wanted to be on the winning side of history. There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.

In Latin America and Africa in the eighties, it was a debt crisis that forced countries to be “privatized or die,” as one former IMF official put it.

The foundation's decision to get involved in human rights but 'not get involved in politics' created a context in which it was all but impossible to ask the question underlying the violence it was documenting: Why was it happening, in whose interests? That omission has played a disfiguring role in the way the history of the free-market revolution has been told, largely absent any taint of the extraordinarily violent circumstances of its birth. Just as the Chicago economists had nothing to say about the torture (it had nothing to do with their areas of expertise), the human rights groups had little to say about the radical transformations taking place in the economic sphere (it was beyond their narrow legal purview).

Corruption has been as much a fixture on these contemporary frontiers as it was during the colonial gold rushes. Since the most significant privatization deals are always signed amid the tumult of an economic or political crisis, clear laws and effective regulations are never in place - the atmosphere is chaotic, the prices are flexible and so are the politicians. What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting locations from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.

That is the untold story of what the IMF calls "stabilization programs," as if countries were ships being tossed around on the market's high seas. They do, eventually, stabilize, but that new equilibrium is achieved by throwing millions of people overboard: public sector workers, small-business owners, subsistence farmers, trade unionists. The ugly secret of "stabilization" is the vast majority never climb back aboard. They end up in slums, now home to 1 billion people; they end up in brothels or cargo ship containers. They are the disinherited, those described by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke as "ones to whom neither the past nor the future belongs.

When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.

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.

The universal experience of living through a great shock is the feeling of being completely powerless: in the face of awesome forces, parents lose their ability to save their children, spouses are separated, homes - places of protection - become death traps. The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping - having the right to be part of a communal recovery.

The term “shock doctrine” describes the quite brutal tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock—wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, or natural disasters—to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called “shock therapy.

Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us. —Richard Thomas, U.K. information commissioner, November 2006

Reconciliation means that those who have been on the underside of history must see that there is a qualitative difference between repression and freedom. And for them, freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible health care. I mean, what’s the point of having made this transition if the quality of life of these people is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless. —Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2001

A large part of the appeal of Chicago School economics was that, at a time when radical-left ideas about workers' power were gaining ground around the world, it provided a way to defend the interests of owners that was just as readical and was infused with its own calims to idealism. To hear Friedman tell it, his ideas were not about defending the right of factory owners to pay low wages but, rather, all about a quest for the purest possible form of "participatory democracy" because in the free market, "each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants." Where leftists promised freedom for workers from bosses, citizens from dictators, countries from colonialism, Friedman promised "individual freedom," a project that elevated atomized citizens about any collective enterprise and liberated them to express their absolute free will through their consumer choices.

During this dizzying period of expansion [the 1950s], the Southern Cone began to look more like Europe and North America than the rest of Latina America or other parts of the Third World. The workers in the new factories formed powerful unions that negotiated middle-class salraies, and their children were sent off to study at newly build public universities, The yawning gap between the region's polo-club elite and its peasant masses began to narrow. By the 1950s, Argentina had the largest middle class on the continent, and next-door Uruguay had a literacy rate of 95 percent and offered free health care for all citizens. 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.

Despite the mystique that surrounds it, and the understandable impulse to treat it as aberrant behavior beyond politics, torture is not particularly complicated or mysterious. A tool of the crudest kind of coercion, it crops up with great predictability whenever a local despot or a foreign occupier lacks the consent needed to rule: Marcos in the Philippines, the shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, the French in Algeria, the Israelis in the occupied territories, the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. The list could stretch on and on. The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system-whether political, religious, or economic- that is rejected by the people they are ruling.

According to the Pentagon's own figures, 86 percent of the prisoners at Guantanamo were handed over by Afghan and Pakistani fighters or agents after the bounties were announced. As of December 2006, the Pentagon had released 360 prisoners from Guantanamo. The Associated Press was able to track down 245 of them; 205 had been freed or cleared of all charges when they returned to their home countries. It is a track record that is a grave indictment of the quality of intelligence produced by the administration's market-based approach to terrorist identification.

Much has been made of the youth and inexperience of the US political appointees in the CPA - the fact that a handful of twentysomething Republicans were given key roles overseeing Iraq's $13 billion budget. While there is no question that the members of the so-called brat pack were alarmingly young, that was not their greatest liability. These were not just any political cronies; they were frontline warriors from America's counterrevolution against all relics of Keynesianism, many of them linked to the Heritage Foundation, ground zero of Friedmanism since it was launched in 1973. So whether they were twenty-two-year-old Dick Cheney interns of sixtysomething university presidents, they shared a cultural antipathy to government and governing that, while invaluable for the dismantling of social security and the public education system back home, had little use when the job was actually to build up public institutions that had been destroyed. In fact, many seemed to believe that the process was unnecessary. James Haveman, in charge of rebuilding Iraq's health care system, was so ideologically opposed to free, public health care that, in a country where 70% of child deaths are caused by treatable illnesses such as diarrhea, and incubators are held together with duct tape, he decided that an overarching priority was to privatize the drug distribution system.

Washington has always regarded democratic socialism as a greater threat than totalitarian Communism, which was easy to vilify and made for a handy enemy. In the sixties and seventies, the favored tactic for dealing with the inconvenient popularity of developmentalism and democratic socialism was to try to equate them with Stalinism, deliberately blurring the clear differences between the worldviews. (Conflating all opposition with terrorism plays a similar role today.) A stark example of this strategy comes from the early days of the Chicago crusade, deep inside the declassified Chile documents. Despite the CIA-funded propaganda campaign painting Allende as a Soviet-style dictator, Washington's real concerns about the Allende election victory were relayed by Henry Kissinger in a 1970 memo to Nixon: "The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on- and even precedent value for - other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it." In other words, Allende needed to be taken out before his democratic third way spread.

An armed conflict between nations horrifies us. But the economic war is no better than an armed conflict. This is like a surgical operation. An economic war is prolonged torture. And its ravages are no less terrible than those depicted in the literature on war properly so called. We think nothing of the other because we are used to its deadly effects…. The movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot help the gnawing fear that the movement will fail if it does not touch the root of all evil—human greed. —M. K. Gandhi, “Non-Violence—The Greatest Force,” 1926

<..> įprastomis aplinkybėmis ekonominių sprendimų priėmimą sąlygoja konkuruojančių interesų kova: darbuotojai siekia darbo ir aukštesnių atlyginimų, darbdaviai - mažesnių mokesčių sąlygoja konkuruojančių interestų kova: darbuotojai siekia darbo ir aukštesnių atlyginimų, darbdaviai - mažesnių mokesčių ir kuo menkesnio reguliavimo, o politikai priversti įvesti pusiausvyrą tarp šių tarpusavyje besivaržančių jėgų. Vis dėlto kilus pakankamai didelei ekonominei krizei - smunkant valiutai, rinkai patiriant krachą ar didžiulę recesiją - nusistovėjusi tvarka suardoma ir šalių lyderiams atlaisvinamos rankos imtis bet kokių būtinų (ar tariamai būtinų) priemonių, kurias galima pateisinti šalyje susidariusia ypatinga padėtimi. Tam tikra prasme krizė - tai jau demokratijos neribojama zona, įprastos politikos spraga, kai nustojama paisyti poreikio susitarti.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, played the part of the free-spending venture capitalist of that same heady era. Whereas in the nineties 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.

some of Gilead’s key medicines were developed on grants funded by taxpayers.18 Gilead, for its part, sees epidemics as a growth market, and it has an aggressive marketing campaign to encourage businesses and individuals to stockpile Tamiflu, just in case.

Leftists in the developing world have long argued that genuine democracy, with fair rules preventing corporations from buying elections, would necessarily result in governments committed to the redistribution of wealth. The logic is simple enough: in these countries, there are far more poor people than rich ones. Policies that directly redistribute land and raise wages, not trickle-down economics, are in the clear self-interest of a poor majority. Give all citizens the vote and a reasonably fair process, and they will elect the politicians who appear most likely to deliver jobs and land, not more free-market promises.

In December 1994, Yeltsin did what so many desperate leaders have done throughout history to hold on to power: he started a war. His national security chief, Oleg Lobov, had confided to a legislator, “We need a small, victorious war to raise the president’s ratings,” and the defense minister predicted that his army could defeat the forces in the breakaway republic of Chechnya in a matter of hours—a cakewalk. 59

The major benefit is that ALBA is essentially a barter system, in which countries decide for themselves what any given commodity or service is worth, rather than letting traders in New York, Chicago or London set the prices for them. That makes trade far less vulnerable to the kind of sudden price fluctuations that devastated Latin American economies in the recent past. Surrounded by turbulent financial waters, Latin America is creating a zone of relative economic calm and predictability, a feat presumed impossible in the globalization era.

Sachs had been heavily influenced by Keynes’s writings on the connection between hyperinflation and the spread of fascism in Germany after the First World War. The peace agreement imposed on Germany had sent it into severe economic crisis—including a hyperinflation rate of 3.25 million percent in 1923—which was then compounded by the Great Depression a few years later. With an unemployment rate of 30 percent and generalized rage at what seemed a global conspiracy, the country was fertile ground for Nazism.

A state of shock is what happens to us- individually or as a society- when we experience a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not yet have adequate explanation. At its essence, a shock is the gap that opens up between event and existing narratives to explain that event, Being creatures of narrative, humans tend to be very uncomfortable with meaning vacuums- which is why those opportunistic players, the people I have termed "disaster capitalists," have been able to rush into the gap with their preexisting wish lists and simplistic stories of good and evil.

her excellent book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein discussed the phenomenon of learned helplessness.

Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market “reforms.

At the time of hyperinflation it’s terrible for the people, particularly for low-income people and small savers, because they see that in a few hours or in a few days they are being told their salaries got destroyed by the price increases, which take place at an incredible speed. That is why the people ask the government, ‘Please do something.’ And if the government comes with a good stabilization plan, that is the opportunity to also accompany that plan with other reforms … the most important reforms were related to the opening up of the economy and to the deregulation and the privatization process. But the only way to implement all those reforms was, at that time, to take advantage of the situation created by hyperinflation, because the population was ready to accept drastic changes in order to eliminate hyperinflation and to go back to normality.”40

Further Reading You can learn more about the technologies and themes explored in Freedom™ through the following books: Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Penguin Press The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, Metropolitan Books When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce, Beacon Press The Shadow Factory by James Bamford, Doubleday When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten, Kumarian Press & Berrett-Koehler Publishers The Transparent Society by David Brin, Basic Books Wired for War by P. W. Singer, Penguin Press The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwyn, Oxford University Press Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Portfolio Brave New War by John Robb, John Wiley & Sons

Our explanations for why the war was waged rarely went beyond one-word answers: oil, Israel, Halliburton. Most of us chose to oppose the war as an act of folly by a president who mistook himself for a king, and his British sidekick who wanted to be on the winning side of history. There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.