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Thursday, September 27, 2007 |
If you want to understand the present state of the world, you have to read Naomi Klein's book 'The Shock Doctrine - the Rise of Disaster Capitalism'.
Buy this book.
"For three decades, Friedman and his followers had methodically exploited moments of shock in other countries - foreign equivalents of 9/11, starting with Pinochet's coup on September 11, 1973. What happened on September 11, 2001, is that an ideology hatched in American universities and fortified in Washington institutions finally had its chance to come home.
The Bush administration immediately seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the 'War on Terror' but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering U.S. economy. Best understood as a 'disaster capitalism complex', it has much farther-reaching tentacles than the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against at the end of his presidency: this is global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the United States homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all 'evil' abroad. In only a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters. The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state - in effect, to privatize the government.
To kick-start the disaster capitalism complex, the Bush administration outsourced, with no public debate, many of the most sensitive and core functions of government - from providing health care to soldiers, to interrogating prisoners, to gathering and 'data mining' information on all of us. The role of the government in this unending war is not that of an administrator managing a network of contractors but of a deep-pocketed venture capitalist, both providing its seed money for the complex's creation and becoming the biggest customer for its new services. To cite just three statistics that show the scope of transformation, in 2003, the U.S. government handed out 3,512 contracts to companies to perform security functions; in the twenty-two-month period ending in August 2006, the Department of Homeland Security had issued more than 115,000 such contracts. The global 'homeland security industry' - economically insignificant before 2001 - is now a $200 billion sector. In 2006, U.S. government spending on homeland security averaged $545 per household.
And that's just the home front of the War on Terror; the real money is in fighting wars abroad. Beyond the weapons contractors, who have seen their profits soar thanks to the war in Iraq, maintaining the U.S. military is now one of the fastest-growing service economies in the world.
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The primary economic role of wars was 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'. That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties. Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.
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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 those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture."
More resources. Further reading.
If the 9/11 attack was facilitated by the Bush administration (and it very much looks like it), then this book documents its motives.
Some time ago I heard a Dutch politician commenting on Dutch television on the ever more frequent floodings with these words: 'We'll have to see this as a recurrent problem. The only thing to do is to insure yourself.' Not a word about the task of the government to protect and safeguard the population. What happens in America is happening in Europe and large parts of the world.
12:50:56 AM 
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© Copyright 2008.
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