Boganmeldelse

Klein, Naomi,The shock doctrinc : the rise of disaster capitalism   

John Le Carré citeres på omslaget for: "IMPASSIONED, HUGELY INFORMATIVE, WONDERFULLY CONTROVERSIAL, AND SCARY AS HELL." Jeg er fuldstændig enig !!

Hovedtesen: at et land i chock er nemmere at røve, er ganske utvivlsomt rigtig. At der foreligger en særlig ulykkeskapitalisme, en stribe virksomheder, der er parat til at profitere på genopbygning, til at stjæle eller købe til underpris i ly af en ulykke, eller lever af folkenes frygt dokumenterer Naomi Klein i denne bog.

Man kan desværre ikke være i tvivl om at ulykkeskapitalismen er parat til at fremkalde ulykkerne selv. Det røber Cavallo, Rodrik og Budhoo.

Var Jeltsin og hans Chicagodrenge et rent russisk produkt eller er de dyrket eller købt og betalt af udlandet. Jeltsin dukkede ikke op af den blå luft. Han var kendt i SUKP for drukkenskab og upålidelighed. Og havde haft (en eller flere ?) høje poster i det sovjetiske system. Han var i 1991 sat udenfor. I forbindelse med det chok, som Gorbatjovs tilbageholdelse på Krim i august 1991 skabte, skaffede Jeltsin sig en del prestige tilbage ved sin optræden under demonstrationerne mod kuppet, bl.a. siddende på en tank. Han holdt en del gode taler og genfik ved sin støtte til Gorbatjov nogen legitimitet.

Spørgsmålet om udenlandsk indblanding kan deles op. Hvem var kupmagerne ? Hvem stod bag dem ? På det tidspunkt var jeg sammen med en gruppe med et samlet bredt kendskab til Sovjetunionen, og kupmagerne udmærkede sig for dem især ved ukendthed ! Så kuppet kan være iværksat udefra.

Men der kan også være tale om, at nogen gik ind og købte Jeltsin, efter at have set hans optræden under demonstrationerne - og med viden om hans drukkenskab o.s.v. Herfor taler, at der var en markant forskel på demonstrationerne i Moskva (unge, delvist næsten uniformerede drenge, ubehagelige, men med et vist mål af disciplin) og i Irkutsk (et repræsentativt udsnit af befolkningen, fredelig, demokratisk og åben - man lyttede på 25 meget forskellige talere, med tålmodighed - der var vel 3 der fik BUHråb). Så der kan også være tale om, at nogen har købt et stort antal deltagere til demonstrationerne i Moskva - og et par generaler til at sende tanks ud - på demonstranternes side.

Vi ved jo, at bl. a.George Soros Open Society Institute har specialiseret sig i at dyrke dissidenter, herunder at finansiere dem. Det sker f.eks.netop nu (febr. 2008) i Burma/Myanmar, hvor OSI i.h.t. Avaaz eget nyhedsbrev administrerer de penge, som Avaaz har samlet ind til hjælp for demonstranterne.

Det siger vel ikke noget om i hvilken udstrækning der var udenlandsk indblanding/styring, at Gaidar og kompagni viste sig i stand til at føre Friedmansk ekstrem kapitalisme ud i livet, og vel heller ikke, at det danske militær aflyttede alle telefonsamtaler fra Sovjetunionen på det tidspunkt.

(Jeg modtager gerne oplysninger, litteraturhenvisninger og dokumentation om Jeltsins magtovertagelse). Hvordan det end blev skabt og styret, så er der en sjov symbolsk analogi mellem Hitlers og Jeltsins Rigsdagsbrand (og 9-11) i effekten. Jeg er vel ikke helt overbevist om, at den slags begivenheder kan give det chok, Klein taler om. Men den førte økonomiske politik var jo netop skabt til at give folk andre bekymringer end et evt. politisk engagement. Jeg mener, at Klein helt klart går ud i hampen, når hun mener, at Falklandskrigen, gjorde Thatchers politik mod minearbejderne m.m. mulig. Men regeringschefen får selvfølgelig nogen extra frihedsgrader, når landet er i krig - også her er der en parallel til 9-11. Og vist kan man tænke sig, at en krig startes med netop det formål - men den kan ikke give det chok, som Klein ellers taler om - før bomberne når i nærheden af den pågældende regeringschef ! Også chok kommer i forskellig størrelse.

I New Orleans havde "ejendomsmarkedet" længe haft et ønske om at få "saneret" visse fattigkvartrerer og i stedet for det stående sociale boligbyggeri (public housing) bygge ejerlejligheder til de rige. Men det stødte selvfølgelig mod politisk modstand. Derfor var der nogen, der blev glade og så muligheder, da stormen ramte. Der var ingen interesse for at renovere skolerne, men nok i at privatisere dem. Det indebar, at alle lærerne blev fyret. Det medførte også, at man kunne komme ud over den raceintegration, der trods alt var sket. Hele denne del skete med lynets hast, mens bygningernes og el-systemets renovering tager tid.

Naomi Klein sammenligner de chok, der anvendes mod hele lande med tortur og Ewen Camerons CIA-finansierede forskning heri på det canadiske McGill University. Man tilstræber, siger hun, i begge tilfælde en ren tavle. Jeg er ikke overbevist om analogien. Men nok om, at torturen kan anvendes for at give det nødvendige chok. Cameron anvendte elektrochok til at "slette" hjernen på folk. Det er besynderligt, at psykiatere kan deltage i den slags forskning - de er jo læger, og skulle vel have aflagt et lægeløfte. Endnu mere besynderligt, at de mener at kunne forsvare at anvende ECT som terapi. (Skaderne ser ikke ud til at kunne repareres, slet ikke i det omfang Cameron drømte om.) Torturmanualen er fra 1963. III. Genevekonvention om behandlingen af krigsfanger er dateret 12. aug. 1949 ! Dens artikel 17 forbyder specifikt tortur. [For at få respekt for de internationale konventioner må vi have nogen retsforfølgelser af vore egne krigsforbrydere og det kan udmærket være posthumt. Netop militære er jo ofte ganske ærekære, så det at man after sin død kan dømmes som krigsforbryder vil nok have nogen afskrækkende effekt. OJ]. Det er mere tvivlsomt, om den slags vil virke på det højere politiske niveau, som Kissinger og Cheney. Efter 9-11 taler man jo i den amerikanske regering i det mindste halvåbent om anvendelse af tortur (handskerne tages af o.lign. udtryk).

Naomi Klein stiller 2 doktorer chok overfor hinanden, Ewen Cameron og Milton Friedman. Det siger vel noget om Chicago-skolens fascistoide karakter, at dens teser indpodes nærmest religiøst - dette på samme tid, hvor vi i naturvidenskaberne klart beskrev naturlovene som hypoteser ! Det understreger også, at det Friedman bedrev ikke var økonomisk videnskab, men en politisk aktivitet, endda baseret på en særdeles intolerant ideologi. Og den handler om at tage fra de mange og give til meget få, derfor tåler den ikke rigtig dagens lys og slet ikke demokratisk indflydelse. Det er lidt mærkeligt, at man tror, at kunne slippe godt fra det. Ikke mindst når man tænker på at New Deal handlede om at forhindre, at folk blev socialister og lavede revolution. Udover New Deal var Chicago-folkene efter de økonomer, der ville bidrage til U-landes udvikling. Det førte jo til, at de pågældende lande selv ville have nytte af deres råstoffer o.s.v. Logisk set, altså ud fra en videnskabelig holdning, kunne man forestille sig, at udviklingslandene for at fremme egen udvikling skulle gøre, som de udviklede lande havde gjort. Altså beskytte sig med toldmure, forbyde eksport af uforarbejdede produkter etc. Men den slags ville jo helt fjerne de rige landes gevinst ved kolonialiseringen. Derfor Friedmans 3-foldige hestekurs recept. Ingen handelsbegrænsninger, ingen sociale ydelser, ingen begrænsninger på, hvad virksomheder må (hverken sundhedshensyn eller arbejdsmiljøhensyn måtte forstyrre den frie handel - det er helt i orden med et monopol, hvis det er vores og staten betaler). Ser man på virkeligheden, de faktiske resultater, virker det som om netop dem, der vil at U-lande udvikler sig, er Friedmans virkelige fjender, at hans virkelige mission er at beholde de rige landes gevinster af kolonialiseringen, og at resten er ORD, skalkeskjul udformet som ideologi. Det synes de rige landes erhvervsfolk om. Det er svært at vide i hvilken udstrækning Friedman og hans lærlinge selv troede/tror på deres officielle økonomiske teorier. Resultatet af en politik, der følger Friedmans råd, monetarisme, er - set i bagklogskabens skarpe lys - altid økonomiske sæbebobler, der springer, nogen få meget rige og stor statsgæld (Chile under Pinochet, USA under Bush). Og Friedman opstod ikke ud af den blå luft. Den virkelige 11. september, kuppet mod Allende, var således også en opfølgning af en tidligere indsats. Og det handlede meget om kobber. Både i Chile, Indonesien og i Brazilien sørgede USA for at uddanne økonomer til at sikre kapitalismen. (Er Niels Thygesen og Bodil Nyboe Andersen kloner af samme oprindelse ?). Man behøver ikke blive monetarist fordi man studerer (hos) Friedman, det viser Andre Gunder Frank.

Kuppet mod Allende var koordineret militært og økonomisk. Men det er en overdrivelse, når Klein skriver, at Chicagodrengene leverede "the intellectual assets" som militæret manglede. Friedmans chock-program er ikke rigtig nyt - kun emballagen er det. Det er hentet hos Macchiavelli. En vigtig pointe, som Klein har fra Allendes ambassadør i USA, Letelier, er, at der er tale en ét program, med planlagt misere, med en økonomisk side og en politisk undertrykkelsesside. Uden begge ville man ikke kunne opnå, at de store multinationale (læs amerikanske) virksomheder frit kunne plyndre Chile. Hvis man accepterer Friedmans forsøg på at holde de økonomiske "reformer" adskildt fra den militære undertrykkelse, spiller man hans spil. Det er samme sag i Argentina. Der kan argumenteres for, at den udryddelse af politiske opponenter, der finder sted, er folkemord, genocide. Folkemordskonventionen taler nemlig også om politiske grupper. I sin principerklæring lige efter kuppet skriver Pinochet, at hans projekt er at ændre den chilenske mentalitet (p. 103-4) og derfor lægges der også vægt på at forfølge kulturen  (f.eks. Victor Jara) og "rense" bybilledet for langhårede mænd og piger i bukser. (p. 105).

I hvert fald i Brazilien blev dødspatruljer direkte finansieret af multinationale (Ford og GM) og det forsøger man at skjule ved Fondens bevillinger til Menneskerettighedsarbejde. Også i Argentina var Ford (og Mercedes) aktiv i klassekampen. 

[Menneskerettighedsbevægelsen er også et meget amerikansk,dobbeltmoralsk, bevidst politisk styret fænomen, den bruges mod nogen f.eks. Serbien, men ikke mod andre, f.eks. Israel]. Naomi Klein understreger, at den også - ved udelukkende at koncentrere sig om forbrydelserne, uden at se på deres formål og baggrund - "kommer til" at frikende Chicago skolen for dens ansvar for menneskerettighedskrænkelserne. Bevægelsen glemmer også retten til mad og husly m.m. som også er med i FNs erklæring, [den del er enten ikke fin nok - eller den ville stille "den socialistiske lejr" i for pænt lys, OJ]. Det er det samme indskrænkede budskab, der ligger i, at man "glemmer" den rolle som USA, CIA, multinationale virksomheder, tidligere kolonimagter, storgodsejere, o.s.v. spiller i undertrykkelsen - [ligesom man altid stiller Israel på lige fod overfor palæstinenserne - selvom Israel er besættelsesmagten., OJ]

Ford Foundation betaler for uddannelsen af monetaristiske (Milton Friedman) økonomer til Indonesien og Latinamerika. Ford beskyldtes for at have et hemmeligt torturcenter på en af sine fabrikker og for at hjælpe styret med at "forsvinde" de fagligt aktive arbejdere (p. 124). Senere får man dårlig samvittighed og finansierer menneskerettighedsbevægelser, som bekæmper de diktatorer, som er indsat for at gennemføre den økonomiske politik, økonomerne repræsenterer. Det kan måske forklare, at menneskerettighedsorganisationerne altid koncentrerer deres aktivitet om styrer, USA ikke kan lide (som f.eks. Serbien, hvor der slet ikke var et menneskerettighedsproblem). Naomi Klein udtrykker det sådan: "Støtten kostede menneskerettighedsbevægelsens intellektuelle ærlighed....Det blev umuligt at stille det væsentlige spørgsmål om baggrunden for volden og undertrykkelsen, Hvorfor skete det og i hvis interesse ?". Her har hun fat i en pointe, det er det eneste, der kan forklare det mærkelige tunnelsyn, der karakteriserer disse bevægelser ! Dette at undgå netop det centrale spørgsmål betød også, at fri-markeds-revolutionens officielle historie kunne undgå at blive sværtet af de ekstraordinært voldelige omstændigheder omkring dens fødsel (Kleins bemærkning).

Brazil: Never Again, (Brasil: Nunca Mais) fra 1985, er den eneste større menneskerettighedsrapport, der nævner det forhold, at undertrykkelsen og den økonomiske politik var 2 sider af samme sag. Det er også den eneste rapport fra en sandhedskommission, der ikke fik støtte fra staten eller udenlandske fonds ! (p. 124). Menneskerettighedsorganisationernes intellektuelle forræderi betød, at et af verdens største væbnede røverier blev kamufleret, som en flok militærfolks tilfældige voldsudøvelse. (p. 125)

Tortur er formentlig det eneste middel til at gennemføre den slags røveri. Det rejser spørgsmålet om ikke nyliberalismen (friedmanismen) i sig selv er en voldelig ideologi. (p. 126).

En af de fængslede i Argentina var tobaksbonden og generalsekretæren i bøndernes organisation, Sergio Tomasella. På det argentinske tribunal mod, at militæret gik ustraffet i maj 1990, viste han, at en bonde kan se det, som en studielektor i Nakskov har svært ved at se. Han anklagede de internationale monopoler, deres værktøj fra generaler til soldater var ligegyldige. De skyldige var: Ford Motors, Monsanto, Philip Morris. De ville bestemme afgrøderne, bestemte sprøjtemidlerne, der forurener vores jord, de gennemtvang bestemte teknologier og en ideologi. Det var dem, der skulle fordømmes. p. 127

Friedrich Hayek er Chicago-skolens helgen. Han besøgte Chile i 1981 og skrev et stærkt rosende brev om Pinochet og hans Chicago-drenge til sin ven, Margaret Thatcher, hvori han anbefalede hende den samme recept. I sit svarbrev var hun noget skeptisk. Det ville ikke kunne lade sig gøre med UKs demokratiske system. Og det havde hun jo ganske ret i. Altså måtte man finde en vej uden om demokratiet. Selvom Friedman satte lighedstegn mellem frihed og kapitalisme kunne kun diktatorer gennemføre hans fri-markeds-doktrin. (p. 133) Hans folk var med overalt, hvor højreorienterede militærdiktatorer holdt i roret. (Også det kinesiske kommunistparti fik hans råd, i 1970erne).

Thatcher satte ind ideologisk. Tilsyneladende harmløst. Hun proklamerede, at hun ville skabe et "ejersamfund". Hun indså, at folk, der bor i socialt boligbyggeri i almindelighed ikke stemmer konservativt - men husejere gør. Så hun proklamerede, at staten ikke skulle blande sig i boligmarkedet. (p. 135). (Klein skriver ikke, hvilke redskaber hun anvendte for at gøre det mere attraktivt at eje sin egen bolig. Og hun nævner slet ikke, at boligerne først skulle afhændes af deres mere eller mindre offentlige ejere (Jeg kender ikke de systemer, der anvendes på det engelske boligmarked. Men formentlig gjorde hun det muligt for nogen boligforeningsformænd, kommunalt valgte bestyrelsesformænd i boligselskaber o.l. at berige sig selv. Det var metoden ved privatiserringen af russiske Gasprom m.m.fl. og ved privatiseringen af jernbaner o.m.a. fællesejede selskaber. Er det den slags, der her i Sverige har medført, at en socialdemokratisk statsminister forlader jobbet som nybleven godsejer ?)

Under alle omstændigheder har både Danmark og Sverige ideologisk fulgt hende, så der nu knapt er en lejebolig tilbage. Det besynderlige er, at hverken socialdemokratiet eller de socialistiske partier har taget kampen op, som en ideologisk kamp.

Thatchers kontrarevolution var lige ved ar kulsejle. Men så udnyttede hun den kendsgerning, at de argentinske generaler krævede Falkland øerne (Malwinas) tilbage, til en rask lille krig. Under en krig sker der altid en politisk forskydning til gunst for den siddende regering. Det reddede hendes project (p. 137). Den gode gamle Labour Lord Tony Benn begreb, hvad det virkeligt handlede om. Uden at det dog fremgår, at han er klar over, at det handlede om hendes "ejersamfund"sprojekt. Hun benyttede sin øgede popularitet til at fortsætte kontrarevolutionen. Minearbejderstrejken i 1984 beskrev hun som indre fortsættelse af den ydre krig. Hun satte politiet massivt ind i et borgerkrigslignende omfang. (p. 138). Hun vinder også den krig og fortsætter sit privatiserings felttog - som Bush efter 9-11.

Klein får også forklaret, hvorfor det islamiske styre i Iran er et problem for USA, mens de islamiske styrer i Pakistan, Bosnien, Kosova ikke er. Dog uden at hun selv sammenligner. I Iran nationaliserer man bankerne og laver en jordreform (1979).

I stedet for chock i form af militærkup eller krig, kan man bruge økonomisk krigsførelse. Det skete i Bolivia fra 1985. Det og Jeffrey Sachs rolle deri skildres p. 142 - 154. Sachs citerer Keynes for, at man kan underminere et land og dets styre ved at underminere dets valuta. Og det gør man så og når op på en inflation på 14.000 procent. (Det betød dog ikke, at militæret ikke var med !). En af præsidenterne har sågar selv studeret i Chicago. Klein får så i denne sammenhæng beskrevet de "structural adjustments" som IMF og Verdensbanken altid forlanger af udviklingslandene. Omend hun beskriver dem udfra, hvad der skal til for at udvikle en økonomi - [og det er jo det modsatte af, hvad de 2 kollektive økonomiske tyranner vil].

[Det er karakteristisk for de økonomiske vismænds intellektuelle hæderlighed - eller deres logiske tænkeevne (jeg ved ikke hvor bristen er), at staten skal holde sig ude af markedet og økonomien", samtidig med at "Forbundsbanken skal pumpe likviditet ind i markedet" nu, hvor recessionen truer USA." OJ] Der er mange eksempler på privatisering af gevinsten, men nationalisering/socialisering af tabet.

Et Keynesiansk stabiliseringsprogram forhandles på plads og byrderne fordeles efter styrkeforholdene i parlament og samfund i øvrigt. Et Friedman/IMF/Verdensbanks stabiliseringsprogram gennemtvinges og byrderne lægges på de fattigere.

Jeg ser en bevidst strategi til genkolonialisering i 3 faktorer. 1. Først lurer man udviklingslandene til at optage store lån (til en ikke alt for vanvittig rente). Denne faktor har Naomi Klein ikke med. Men den er velbeskrevet hos John Perkins. 2. Så insisterer man på, at landene skal tilbagebetale også gæld, som er stiftet af de diktatorer, som de rige lande selv har hjulpet til magten. 3. Så sætter man renten fuldstændig vildt op, så gælden vokser astronomisk. De øvrige 2 faktorer nævner Klein, også som en bevidst strategi (se også citaterne af Rodrik og Cavallo). Måske er bevidste større midlertidige nedgange i råvarepriser et 4 element i strategien. Den lille statistik over antallet af prischok, Naomi Klein giver, taler for denne opfattelse. IMFs og Verdensbankens Washington Consensus er den pænere officielle version af en del af dette komplot.

Man nøjes ikke med at genkolonialisere, man kolonialiserer også tidligere selvstændige lande. Det viser sig i de socialistiske lande efter Sovjetunionens fald. Vi var mange, der troede på Reagans løfter til Gorbatjov og på Gorbatjovs vision. Solidarnosc plan for de polske statsvirksomheder var arbejderkooperativer, som de jugoslaviske TOZD. Den slags kunne blive en model for et 3. alternativ. 

• Derfor skulle det undgås i Polen. (Det klarede den katolske kirke sammen med Jeffrey Sachs, Balcerowicz og andre Friedman elever). 
• Derfor skulle Jugoslavija bombes. 
• Og man skulle for enhver pris undgå, at nogen så meget som diskuterede andre muligheder end kapitalismen i dens mest ekstreme form. Det skal nok ses i det lys, at de socialdemokratier, der politisk kunne konkurrere med kommunismen (Palmes, Anker Jørgensens o.s.v.) nu kunne undværes. Så fik vi dem, der tog model af Jeltsin - og bare berigede sig personligt ! (Joschka Fischer og Göran Persson).
• Derfor påstår Fukuyama, at historien er slut.

CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTION 

Blank Is Beautiful: Three Decades of Erasing and Remaking the World 3

PART 1 

Two Doctor Shocks: Research and Development 

1. The Torture Lab: Ewen Cameron, the CIA and the Maniacal Quest to Erase and Remake the Human Mind 25 

2. The Other Doctor Shock: Milton Friedman and the Search for a Laissez-Faire Laboratory 49 

PART 2 

The First Test: BirthPangs 

3. States of Shock: The Bloody Birth of the Counterrevolution 75 

4. Cleaning the Slate: Terror Does Its Work 98 

5. "Entirely Unrelated": How an Ideology Was Cleansed of Its Grimes 116 

PART 3

Surviving Democracy: Bombs Made of Laws 

6. Saved by a War: Thatcherism and Its Useful Enemies 131

 The New Doctor Shock: Economic Warfare Replaces Dictatorship 142 

8. Crisis Works: The Packaging of Shock Therapy 155 

PART 4 

Lost in Transition: While We Wept, While We Trembled, While We Danced 

9. Slamming the Door on History: A Crisis in Poland, a Massacre in China 171 

10. Democracy Born in Chains: South Africa's Constricted Freedom 194 

11. Bonfire of a Young Democracy: Russia Chooses "The Pinochet Option" 218 

12. The Capitallst Id: Russia and the New Era of the Boor Market 246 ' . 

13. Let It Burn: The Looting of Asia and "The Fall of a Second Berlin Wall" 263 

PART 5

Shocking Times: The Rise of the Disaster Capitalism Complex 

14. Shock Therapy in the U.S.A.: The Homeland Security Bubble 283

15. A Corporatist State: Removing the Revolving Door, Putting in Archway 308 

PART 6 

Iraq, Full Circle: Overshock 

16. Erasing Iraq: In Search of a "Model" for the Middle East 

17. Ideological Blowback: A Very Capitalist Disaster 341

18. Full Circle: From Blaik Slate to Scorched Earth 363 

PART 7

 The Movable Green Zone: Buffer Zones and Blast Walls 

19. Blanking the Beach: "l'he Second Tsunami" 385 

20. Disaster Apartheid: A World of Green Zones and Red Zones 406 

21. Losing the Peace Incentive: Israel as Warning 423 

CONCLUSION Shock Wears Off: The Rise of People's Reconstruction

Citater:

fra bagsiden: "This is a doctrine that sees moments of collective crisis as "windows of opportunity."

"36. Central Intelligence Agency, Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, July 1963, 1, 101. Declassified mamual is available in full, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv " p. 469

"Richard Baker, a prominent Republican congressman...We couldn't do it, but God did." p. 4

"This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system." sagde Friedman, "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." p. 5

"Exactly thirty years after these three distinct forms of shock descended on Chile, the formula reemerged, with far greater violence, in Iraq. First came the war, designed, according to the authors of the Shock and Awe military doctrine, to "control the adversary's will, perceptions, and understanding and literally make an adversary impotent to act or react." Next came the radical economic shock therapy, imposed, while the country was still in flames, by the U.S. chief envoy L. Paul Bremer - mass privatization, complete free trade, a 15 percent flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Iraqs interim trade minister, Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, said at the time that his countrymen were "sick and tired of being the subjects of experiments. There have been enough shocks to the system, so we don't need this shock therapy in the economy." When Iraqis resisted, they were rounded up and taken to jails where bodies and minds were met with more shocks, these ones distinctly less metaphorical." p. 7-8

"As I dug deeper into the history of how this märket model had swept the globe, however, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Milton Friedman's movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. It was certainly the case that the facilitating disasters were getting bigger and more shocking, but what was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a new, post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of  strict adherence to the shock doctrine." p. 9

"In Russia in 1993, it was Boris Yeltsin's decision to send in tanks to set fire to the parliament building and lock up the opposition leaders that cleared the way for the fire-sale privatization that created the country's notorious oligarchs." p. 10

"But in 2001 that changed. When the September 11 attacks hit, the White House was packed with Friedmans disciples, including his close friend Donald Rumsfeld. 'The Bush team seized the moment of collective vertigo with a chilling speed - not,  as some have claimed, because the administration deviously plotted the crisis but because the  the key figures of the administration, veterans of earlier disaster capitalism experiments in Latin America and Eastern Europe, were part of a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain, and the way Christian-Zionist end-timers pray for the Rapture." p. 11-12

"To cite just three statistics that show the scope of the 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." p. 12-3

"Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new märket; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom - the medium is the message." p. 13

"All these incarnations share a commitment to the policy trinity - the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending...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." p. 15 [Det er den anerkendte betegnelse for denne statsform, først dyrket af Mussolini.]

""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." There is a long pause, and then a different tone of voice to the reply, still strained but... is it relief? "You have just spelled out exactly what the CIA and Ewen Cameron did to me. They tried to erase and remake me. But it didn't work." p. 26

"They were aware of its side effects, though. There was no question that ECT could result in amnesia; it was by far the most common complaint associated with the treatment....These behaviors usually passed quickly, but in some cases, when large doses of shock were used, doctors reported that their patients had regressed completely, forgetting how to walk and talk." p. 31

"First code-named Project Bluebird, then Project Artichoke, it was finally renamed MKUltra...."examined and investigated numerous unusual techniques of interrogation including psychological harassment and such matters as 'total isolation'" as well as "the use of drugs and chemicals.""p. 33

"The CIA, for its part, actively encouraged this narrative [at forskningen handlede om at restaurere ofre for hjernevask], 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....When the hearings asked Sidney Gottlieb, former director of MKUltra, to explain why he had ordered all the files destroyed from the $25 million program, he replied that "the project MKUltra had not yielded any results of real positive value to the Agency."" p. 38

"The handbook is a 128-page secret manual on the "interrogation of resistant sources"....The manual states on its first page that it is about to describe interrogation methods based on "extensive research, ineluding scientific inquiries conducted by specialists in closely related subjects."" p. 39

"By the mid-fifties, electroshock was being routinely used against liberation fighters by French soldiers in Algeria, often with the help of psychiatrists. In this period, French military leaders conducted seminars at a U.S. military "counterinsurgency" school in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in which they trained students in the Algeria techniques.'' p. 41

"Pierre Messmer, French minister of defense from 1960 to 1969, says that the Americans invited the French to train soldiers in the U.S. In response, General Paul Aussaresses, the most notorious and unrepentant of France's torture experts, went to Fort Bragg and instructed U.S. soldiers on "seizure, interrogation, torture" techniques." p. 471

"The shift in U.S. policy encapsulated by Vice President Dick Cheney's infamous statement about working "the dark side" did not mark an embrace by this administration of tactics that would have repelled its more humane predecessors (as too many Democrats have claimed, invoking what the historian Garry Wills calls the particular American myth of "original sinlessness". Rather, the significant shift was that what had previously been performed by proxy, with enough distance to deny knowledge, would now be performed directly and openly defended." p. 42

That is what makes the Bush regime different: after the attacks of September 11, it dared to demand the right to torture without shame.... when Congress approved the Military Commissions Act of 2006..... Bush attached a "signing statement" asserting his right "to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions" as he sees fit." p. 43

"On this front Cameron was a spectacular failure. No matter how fully he regressed his patients, they never absorbed or accepted the endlessly repeated messages on his tapes. Though he was a genius at destroying people, he could not remake them....Their minds weren't "clean"; rather, they were a mess, their memories fractured, their trust betraved." p. 47

"Frank Knight, one of the founders of Chicago School economics, thought professors should "inculcate" in their students the belief that each economic theory is "a sacred feature of the system," not a debatable hypothesis." p. 50

"The 1930s through to the early 1950s was a time of unabashed faire: the can-do ethos of the New Deal gave way to the war effort, with public works programs launched to creatc much-needed jobs, and new social programs unveiled to prevent growing numbers of people from turning hard left." p. 54

"Developmentalist economists argued that their countries would finally escape the cycle of poverty only if they pursued an inward-oriented industrialization strategy instead of relying on the export of natural resonrces, whose prices had been on a declining path, to Europe and North America. They advocated regulating or even nationalizing oil, minerals and other key industries so that a healthy share of the proceeds fed a government-led development process." p. 55

"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 worldwide." p. 56

"In short, and quite unabashedly, he was calling for the breaking of the New Deal - that uneasy truce between the state, corporations and labor that had prevented popular revolt after the Great Depression....Though always cloaked in the language of math and science, Friedman's vision coincided precisely with the interests of large multinationals, which by nature hunger for vast new unregulated markets. In the first stage of capitalist expansion, that kind of ravenous growth was provided by colonialism - by "discovering" new territories and grabbing land without paying for it, then extracting riches from the earth without compensating local populations." p. 57

"When Eisenhower took office in 1953, Iran had a developmentalist leader in Mohammad Mossadegh, who had already nationalized the oil company, and Indonesia was in the hands of the increasingly ambitious Achmed Sukarno, who was talking about linking up all the nationalist governments of the Third World into a superpower on par with the West and the Soviet Bloc....Under pressure from...corporate interests, a movement took hold in American and British foreign policy circles that attempted to pull developmentalist governments into the binary logic of the Cold War." p. 58

"John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's secretary of state, and his brother Allen Dulles, head of the newly created CIA...represented many of the companies that had the most to lose from developmentalism, among them J. P. Morgan & Company, the International Nickel Company, the Cuban Sugar Cane Corporation and the United Fruit Company.....President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman had expropriated some of its unused land (with full compensation) as part of his project to transform Guatemala..... Albion Patterson, director of the U.S. International Cooperation Administration in Chile...had become increasingly concerned about tbe maddening influence of Raul Prebisch and Latin America's other "pink" economists. "What we need to do is change the formation of the men, to influence the education, which is very bad," be bad stressed to a colleague." p. 59

"Officially launched in 1956, the project saw one hundred Chilean students pursue advanced degrees at the University of Chicago between 1957 and 1970, their tuition and expenses paid for by U.S. taxpayers and U.S foundations." p. 60

""Suddenly, Chile and its economy became a topic of daily conversation in the Department of Economics," recalled Andre Gunder Frank, who studied under Friedman in the 1950s and went on to become a world-renowned development economist." p. 61

"As a form of intellectual imperialism, it was certainly unabashed. There was, however, a problem: it wasn't working." p. 62

"By Chile's historic 1970 elections, the country had moved so far left that all three major political parties were in favor of nationalizing the country's largest source of revenue: the copper mines then controlled by U.S. mining giants." p. 63 "When Nixon heard that Allende had been elected president, he famously ordered the CIA director. Richard Helms, to "make the economy scream."...Mining companies had invested $1 billion over the previous fifty years in Chile's copper mining industry - the largest in the world - but they had sent $7.2 billion home." p. 64

"the U.S. Senate...launched an investigation and uncovered a far-reaching conspiracy in which ITT had offered $1 million in bribes to Chilean opposition forces and "sought to engage the CIA in a plan covertly to manipulate the outcome of Chilean presidential election"....Most alarming to the Senate was the relationship between ITT executives and the U.S. government. In testimony and documents, it became clear that ITT was directly involved in shaping U.S. policy toward Chile at the highest level." p. 65

"There were two models of "regime change" that Allende's opponents had been studying closely as possible approaches. One was in Brazil, the other in Indonesia. When Brazil's U.S.-backed junta, led by General Humberto Castello Branco, seized power in 1964, the military had a plan not merely to reverse Joao Goulart's pro-poor programs but to crack Brazil wide open to foreign investment."p. 66 "Indonesia's 1965 coup followed a vety different trajectory. Since the Second World War, the country had been led by President Sukarno, the Hugo Chavez of his day (though minus Chavez's appetite for elections). Sukarno enraged the rich countries by protecting Indonesia's economy, redistributing wealth and throwing out the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which he accused of being facades for the interests of Western multinationals....declassified documents show that the CIA had received high-level directions to "liquidate President Sukarno, depending upon the situation and available opportunities."" p. 67

"The parallels with the Chicago Boys were striking. The Berkeley Mafia had studied in the U.S. as part of a program that began in 1956, funded by the Ford Foundation. They had also returned home to build a faithful copy of a Western-style economics department, theirs at the University of Indonesia's Faculty of Economics. Ford sent American professors to Jakarta to establish the school, just as Chicago profs had gone to help set up the new economics department in Santiago. "Ford felt it was training the guys who would be leading the country when Sukarno got out" John Howard, then director of Ford's International Training and Research Program, bluntly explained." p. 68

"This economic team, having studied at a less ideological school, were not antistate radicals like the Chicago Boys.....However, the Berkeley Mafia could not have been more hospitable to foreign investors wanting to mine Indonesia's immense mineral and oil wealth, described by Richard Nixon as "the greatest prize in the Southeast Asian area." They passed laws allowing foreign companies to own 100 percent of these resources, handed ont "tax holidays," and within two years, Indonesia's natural wealth - copper, nickel, hardwood, rubber and oil - was being divided up among the largest mining and energy companies in the world. 

For those plotting the overthrow of Allende just as Suharto's program was kicking in, the experiences of Brazil and Indonesia made for a useful study in contrasts. The Brazilians had made little use of the power of shock, waiting years before demonstrating their appetite for brutality. It was a near-fatal error, since it gave their opponents the chance to regroup and for some to form left-wing guerrilla armies. Allthough the junta managed to clear the streets, the rising opposition forced it to slow its economie plans,

Suharto, on the other hand, had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into a kind of shock and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place......You can trace back all major, bloody events run from Washington to the way Suharto came to power. The success of that meant that it would be repeated, again and again." p. 69

"Although the overthrow of Allende was universally described as a military coup, Orlando Letelier, Allende's Washington ambassador, saw it as an equal partnership between the army and the economists. "The 'Chicago boys,' as they are known in Chile," Letelier wrote, "convinced the generals that they were prepared to supplement the brutality, which the military possessed, with the intellectual assets it lacked." p. 71

"For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less. -Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513" p. 75

"The Chicago Boys had confidently assured Pinochet that if he suddenly withdrew government involvement from these areas all at onee, the "natural" laws of economics would rediscover their equilibrium, and inflation - which they viewed as a kind of economic fever indicating the presence of unhealthy organisms in the market - wonld magically go down. They were mistaken. In 1974, inflation reached 375 percent - the highest rate in the world and almost twice the top level under Allende." p. 79

"At the same time, Chileans were being thrown out of work because Pinochet's experiment with "free trade" was flooding the country' with cheap imports. Local businesses were closing, unable to compete, unemployment hit record levels and hunger became rampant. The Chicago School's first laboratory was a debacle....The only people benefiting were foreign eompanies and a small clique of financiers known as the "piranhas,"" p. 80

"In speeches and interviews, he [Friedman] used a term that had never before been publicly applied to a real-world economic crisis: he called for "shock treatment." He said it was "the only medicine. Absolutely. There is no other. There is no other long-term solution."...Pinochet would need to act fast and decisively; Friedman emphasized the importance of "shock" repeatedly, using the word three times and underlining that "gradualism is not feasible."", p.81

"Interestingly, the most powerful criticism of shock therapy came from one of Friedman's own former students, Andre Gunder Frank. During his time at the University of Chicago in the fifties, Gunder Frank - originally from Germany - had heard so much about Chile that when he graduated with a PhD in economics, he decided to go see for himself the country his professors had portrayed as a mismanaged developmentalist dystopia. He liked what he saw and ended up teaching at the University of Chile, then serving as an economic adviser to the government of Salvador Allende, for whom he developed a great respect. As a Chicago Boy in Chile who had defected from the school's free-market orthodoxy, Gunder Frank had a unique perspective on the country's economic adventure." p. 83

"The countty's period of steady growth that is held up as proof of its miraculous success did not begin until the mid-eighties - a full decade after the Chicago Boys implemented shock therapy and well after Pinochet was forced to make a radical course correction. That's because in 1982, despite its strict adherence to Chicago doctrine, Chile's economy crashed: its debt exploded, it faced hyperinflation once again and unemployment hit 30 percent-ten times higher than it was under Allende. The main cause was that the piranhas, the Enron-style financial houses that the Chicago Boys had freed from all regulation, had bought up the country's assets on borrowed money and run up an enormous debt of $14 billion.

The situation was so unstable that Pinochet was forced to do exactly what Allende had done: he nationalized many of these companies. In the face of the debacle, almost all the Chicago Boys lost their influential government posts, including Sergio de Castro. Several other Chicago graduates held prominent posts with the piranhas and came under investigation for fraud, stripping away the carefully cultivated facade of scientific neutrality so central to the Chicago Boy identity. [min fremhævelse, OJ]

The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in he early eighties was that Pinochet had never privatized Codelco, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile's export revenues, which meant that when the financlal bubble burst, the state still had a steady source of funds." p. 85

"If that track record qualifies Chile as a miracle for Chicago school economists, perhaps shock treatment was never really about jolting the economy into health. Perhaps it was meant to do exactly what it did  - hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence." p. 86

"The newly declassified documents from Brazil show that when Argentina's generals were preparing their 1976 coup, they wanted "to avoid suffering an international campaign like the one that has been unleashed against Chile. To achieve that goal, less sensational repression tactics were needed - lower-profile ones capable of spreading terror but not so visible to the prying international press. In Chile Pinochet soon settled on disappearances." p. 89

"According to Chile's truth commission, established in May 1990, the secret police would dispose of some victims by dropping them into the ocean from helicopters "after first cutting their stomach open with a knife to keep the bodies from floating." In addition to their lower profile, disappearances turned out to be an even more effective means of spreading terror than open massacres, so destabilizing was the idea that the apparatus of the state could be used to make people vanish into thin air.

By the mid-seventies, disappearances had become the primary enforcement tool of the Chicago School juntas throughout the Southern Cone - and none embraced the practice more zealously than the generals occupying Argentina's presidential palace.

The Argentine junta excelled at striking just the right balance between public and private horror, carrying out enough of its terror in the open that everyone knew what was going on, but simultaneously keeping enough secret that it could always be denied." p. 90

"Since those wanted by the various juntas often took refuge in neighboring countries, the regional governments collaborated with each other in the notorious Operation Condor. Under Condor, the intelligence agencies of the Southern Cone shared information about "subversives" - aided by a state-of-the-art computer system provided by Washington - and then gave each other's agents safe passage to carry out cross-border kidnappings and torture, a system eerily resembling the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" network today." p. 91

"A 1975 U.S. Senate investigation into U.S. intervention in Chile found that the CIA had provided training to Pinochet's military in methods for "controlling subversion." And U.S. training of Brazilian and Uruguayan police in interrogation techniques has been heavily documented. According to court testimony quoted in the country's truth commission report, Brazil: Never Again, published in 1985, military officers attended formal "torture  classes" at army police units where they watched slides depicting various excruciating methods." p. 92

""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...." p. 95

"There was only one [ikke 2] project, the former ambassador [Letelier] insisted, in which terror was the central tool of the free-market transformation. 

"The violation of human rights, the system of institutionalized brutality, the drastic control and suppression of every form of meaningful dissent is discussed (and often condemned) as a phenomenon only indirectly linked, or indeed entirely unrelated, to the classical unrestrained 'free market' policies that have been enforced by the military junta," Letelier wrote in a searing essay for The Nation. He pointed out that "this particularly convenient concept of a social system, in which 'economic freedom' and political terror coexist without touching each other, allows these financial spokesmen to support their concept of 'freedom' while exercising their verbal muscles in defense of human rights."

Letelier went so far as to write that Milton Friedman, as "the intellectual architect and unofficial adviser for the team of economists now running the Chilean economy," shared responsibility for Pinochet's crimes. He dismissed Friedman's defense that lobbying for shock treatment was merely offering "technical" advice.", p. 99

"As the judge [Carlos Rozanski of Argentina's federal court] put it, there had been a "plan of extermination carried out by those who ruled the country. He explained that the killings were part of a system, planned far in advance, duplicated in identical fashion across the country, and committed with clear intent not of attacking; individual persons but of destroying; the parts of society that those people represented. Genocide is an attempt to murder a group, not a collection of individual persons; therefore, argued the judge, it was genocide....Pointing to a little-known chapter in UN history, he explained that on December 11, 1946, in direct response to the Nazi Holocaust, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution by unanimous vote barring acts of genocide "when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part."" p. 101

"Theirs is a system based entirely on a belief in "balance" and "order" and the need to be free of interferences and "distortions" in order to succeed. .....In order for the ideal to be achieved, it requires a monopoly on ideology." p. 103

"In mid-1969, just as the junta entered its most brutal phase, an extralegal police force was launched called Operation Bandeirantes, known as OBAN. Staffed with military officers, OBAN was funded, according to Brazil: Never Again, "by contributions from various multinational corporations, including Ford and General Motors."" p. 108

"[Sergio de Castro - Pinochets økonomiminister, elev af Friedman] has also observed that an "authoritarian government" is best suited to safeguarding economic freedom because of its "impersonal" use of power.....Just a decade earlier, the countries of the Southern Cone - with their exploding industrial sectors, rapidly rising middle classes and strong health and education systems - had been the hope of the developing world. Now rich and poor were hurtling into different economic worlds, with the wealthy gaining honorary citizenship in the State of Florida and the rest being pushed back into underdevelopment, a process that would deepen throughout the neoliberal "restructurings" of the postdictatorship era." p. 111

"Milton [Friedman] is the embodiment of the truth that "ideas have consequences. - Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. defense secretary, May 2002 

People were in prison so that prices could be free. -EduardoGaleano, 1990." p. 116.

""Despite my sharp disagreement with the authoritarian political system of Chile," Friedman wrote in his Newsweek column, "I do not regard it as evil for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean Govemment."

In his memoir, Friedman claimed that Pinochet spent the first two years trying to run the economy on his own, and that it wasn't until "1975, when  inflation still raged and a world recession triggered a depression in Chile, [that] General Pinochet turned to the 'Chicago Boys.'"' This was blatant revisionism - the Chicago Boys had been working with the military' before he coup even took place, and the economic transformation began on the day the junta took power. At other points, Friedman even claimed that Pinochet's entire reign - seventeen years of dictatorship and tens of thousands tortured - was not a violent unmaking of democracy but its opposite. "The really important thing about the Chilean business is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society," Friedman said.....Milton Friedman had been awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economics for his "original and weighty" work on the relationship between inflation and unemployment. Friedman used his Nobel address to argue that economics was as rigorous and objective a scientific discipline as physics, chemistry and medicine." p. 117

"The Blinders of "Human Rights"...That movement unquestionably played a decisive role in forcing an end to the junta's worst abuses. But by focusing purely on the crimes and not on the reasons behind them, the human rights movement also helped the Chicago School ideology to escape from its first bloody laboratory virtually unscathed." p. 118

"Amnesty's position, emblematic of the human rights movement as a whole at that time, was that since human rights violations were a universal evil, wrong in and of themselves, it was not necessary to determine why abuses were taking place but to document them as meticulously and credibly as possible. ....After the evidence was examined, the report concludes that the threat posed by left-wing guerrillas  was in no way commensurate with the level of repression used by the state. But was there some other goal that made the violence "explicable or necessary"? Amnesty made no mention of it. ..... It carefully lists all the junta laws and decrees that violated civil liberties but named none of the economic decrees that lowered wages and increased prices, thereby violating the right to food and shelter - also enshrined in the UN charter." p. 119

"In another major omission, Amnesty presented the conflict as one restricted to the local military and the left-wing extremists. No other players are mentioned - not the U.S. government or the CIA; not local landowners; not multinational corporations." p. 120

"The refusal to connect the apparatus of state terror to the ideological project it served is characteristic of almost all the human rights literature from this period......  another factor [was] at play: money. By far the most significant source of funding for this work was the Ford Foundation...the foundation spent a staggering $30 million on work devoted to human rights in Latin America." p. 121

"Prior to the military coups, the Ford Foundation's primary role in the Southern Cone had been to fund the training of academics, mostly in economics and agricultural science, working closely with the U.S. State Department. Frank Sutton, the deputy vice president of Ford's international division, explained the organization's philosophy: "You can't have a modernizing country without a modernizing elite." p. 121-2

"But there were several significant exceptions. As discussed earlier, the Foundation was the primary funder of the University of Chicago's Program of Latin American Economic Research and Training, which churned out hundreds of Latino Chicago Boys. Ford also financed a parallel program at the Catholic University in Santiago, designed to attract undergraduate economics students from neighboring countries to study under Chile's Chicago Boys. - That made the Ford Foundation, intentionally or not, the leading source of funding for the dissemination of the Chicago School ideology throughout America, more significant even than the U.S. government.....Now the economic institutions that Ford had helped build in both Chicago and Santiago were playing a central role in the overthrow of Chile's democracy, and its former students were in the process of applying their U.S. education in a context of shocking brutality. Making matters more complicated for the foundation, this was the second time in just a few years that its proteges had chosen a violent route to power, the first case being the Berkeley Mafia's meteoric rise to power in Indonesia after Suharto's bloody coup ....In 1974, nationalist riots broke out in Indonesia against "foreign subversion" of the economy; the Ford Foundation became a target of popular rage - it was the foundation, many pointed out, that had trained Suharto's economists to sell Indonesia's oil and mineral wealth to Western multinationals." p. 122

"Whether as a result of panic, social conscience or some combination of both, the Ford Foundation dealt with its dictatorship problem the way any good business would: proactively. In the mid-seventies Ford transformed itself from a producer of "technical expertise" for the so-called Third World to its leading funder of human rights activism. That about-face was particularly jarring in both Chile and Indonesia. After the left in those countries had been obliterated by regimes that Ford had helped shape, it was none other than Ford that funded a new generation of crusading lawyers dedicated to freeing the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners being held by those same regimes.... In the 1950s, the Ford Foundation often served as a front organization for the CIA, allowing the agency to channel funds to anti-Marxist academics and artists who did not know where the money was coming from, a process extensively documented in The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders. Amnesty was not funded by the Ford Foundation; nor were the most radical of Latin Americas human rights defenders, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo." p. 123

"Since the economic policy was extremely unpopular among the most numerous sectors of the population, it had to be implemented by force...., many more lives would be stolen by "planned misery" than by bullets. In a way, what happened in the Southern Cone of Latin America 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....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 Philippincs, the shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, the French in Algeria, the Israelis in the occupied territories, the U.S. 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 large numbers of the people they are ruling." p. 125

"But the economic war is no better than an armed conflict..... An economic war is prolonged torture .... The movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But 1 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."  p. 129

"The Islamic regime, which had not yet transitioned to full-blown authoritarianism, nationalized the banking seetor and then brought in a land redistribution program. It also imposed controls on imports and exports, a reversal of the shah's free-trade policies." p. 136

"The Labour MP Tony Benn said, "It looks more and more as if what is at stake is Mrs. Thatcher's reputation, not the Falkland Islands at all," p. 137

"Her poll numbers were similarly transformed. Thatcher's personal approval rating more than doubled over the course of the battle, from 25 percent at the start to 59 percent at the end, paving the way for a decisive victory in the following year's election..... As the Guardian reporter Seumas Milne documents in his definitive account of the strike, The Enemy Within: Thatcher's Secret War against the Miners, the prime minister pressed the security services to intensify surveillance of the union and, in particular, its militant president, Arthur Scargill. What ensued was "the most ambitious countersurveillance operation ever mounted in Britain." The union was infiltrated by multiple agents and informers, and all its phones were bugged, as were the homes and even the fish-and-chips shop frequented by its leadership." p. 138

"By 1985, Thatcher had won this war too: workers were going hungry and couldn't hold out; in the end 966 people were fired. It was a devastating setback for Britains most powerful union, and it sent a clear message to the others: if Thatcher was willing to go to the wall to break the coal miners, on whom the country depended for its lights and warmth. it would be suicide for weaker unions producing less crucial products and services to take on her economic order. Better just to accept whatever was on offer. It was a message very similar to the one Ronald Reagan had sent a few montlis after he took office vvith his response to a strike bv the air-traffic controllers. By not  showing up to work, they had "forfeited their jobs and will be terminated," Reagan said. Then he fired 11,400 of the country's most essential workers in single blow - a shock from which the U.S. labor movement has yet to fully recover....Much as the terrorist attacks of September 11. 2001, would take an unpopular president and hand him an opportunity to launch a massive privatization mitiative (in Bush's case, the privatization of security, warfare and reconstruction). (p. 139)

"It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizcs the shock doctrine; "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that 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." It was to become a kind of mantra for his movement in the new democratic era. Allan Meltzer elaborated on the philosophy: "Ideas are alternatives waiting on a crisis to serve as the catalyst of change." p. 140

[Sachs] admired Friedman's "faith in markets, his constant insistence on proper monetary management," calling it "far more accurate than fuzzy structuralist or pseudo-Keynesian arguments one hears a lot in the developing world." Those "fuzzy" arguments were the same ones that in Latin America had been suppressed by violence a decade earlier - the conviction that in order to escape poverty, the continent needed to break the colonial ownership structures with such interventionist policies as land reform, trade protections and subsidies, nationalization of natural resources, and cooperatively run workplaces." p. 144

"Although the core tenet of Keynesianism is that countries in severe economic recession should spend money to stimulate the economy, Sachs took the opposite approach, advocating government austerity and price increases in the midst of the crisis." p. 144-5.

"One newly elected senator ended up playing a pivotal role; Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (known in Bolivia as Goni). He had lived in the United States for so long that he spoke Spanish with a heavy American accent and had returned Bolivia to become one of the country's wealthiest businessmen. He owned Comsur, the second-largest private mine in the country, soon to be the largest. As a young man, Goni had studied at the University of Chicago. " p. 145

"On August 6,1985, it was Paz who was sworn in as president of Bolivia. Only four davs later, Paz appointed Goni to head up a top-secret bipartisan emergency ceonomic team charged with radically restructuring the economy. 'I'he group's starting point was Sachs's shock therapy, but it would go much further than anything he had suggested....At this point Sachs was hack at Hazard, but  he says he "was happy to hear that the ADN |Banzer's party], had shared a copy of our stabilization plan with the new president and his team. Paz's party had no idea that their leader had struck this backroom deal." p. 146

"After seventeen days, Bedregal, the planning minister, had the draft of a textbook shock therapy program. It called for the elimination of food subsidies, the canceling of almost all price controls and a 300 percent hike in the price of oil." p. 147

"When the document was complete, the team made five copies: one for Paz, one for Goni and one for the treasury minister. The destination ot the other two copies revealed how certain Paz and his team were that many Bolivians would regard the plan as an act of war: one was for the head of the army and the other was for the chief of police. Paz's cabinet, however, was still in the dark. They continued to be under the mistaken impression that they were working for the same man who had nationalized the mines and redistributed land all those years ago." p. 148

"Ricardo Grinspun, a professor of economics specializing in Latin America at York University explains that an approach in the Keynesian or developmentalist tradition seeks to mobilize support and share the burden through "a negotiated process involving key stakeholders - government, employers, farmers, unions and so on. In this way the parties come to agreements over income policies, like wages and prices, at the same time that stabilization measures are implemented." p. 149

"[S]hock therapy in Bolivia had the same effects that it had in the rest of the region; a small elite grew far wealthier while large portions of what had been the working class were discarded from the economy altogether and turned into surplus people." p. 149

"According to Goni (who would later become president of Bolivia), Sachs helped to stiffen the resolve of policy makers when public pressure was building against the human cost of shock therapy.....One immediate result of this resolve was that many of Bolivia's desperately poor were pushed to become coca growers, because it paid roughly ten times as much as other crops (somewhat of an irony since the original economic crisis was set off by the U.S.-funded siege on the coca farmers.)... The coca industry played a significant role in resuscitating Bolivia's economy and beating inflation (a fact now recognized by historians but never mentioned by Sachs in explanations of how his reforms triumphed over inflation." p. 150

"The victory over inflation that Sachs had helped engineer was enough to qualify Bolivia as a stunning free-market success story "the most remarkable of modern times," as The Economist deseribed it. "Bolivia's Miracle" gave Sachs immediate star status in powerful financial circles and launched his career as the leading expert on crisis-struck economies, sending him on to Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela in the coming vears....The Bolivian left had taken to calling Paz's decree pinochetismo económico - economic Pinochetism." p. 151

"Bolivia did show that shock therapy could be imposed in a country that had just had elections, but it did not show that it could be imposed democratically or without repression - in fact, it proved, once again, that the opposite was still the case.... The major opposition came from the country's main labor fedcration, which called a general strike that brought industry to a halt. Paz's response made Thatcher's treatment of the miners seem tame. He immediately declared a "state of siege," and army tanks rolled through the streets of the capital, which was placed under a strict curfew. To travel through their own country, Bolivian citizens now needed special passes. Riot police raided union halls, a university and a radio station, as well as several factories. Political assemblies and marches were forbidden, and state permission was required to hold meetings. Oppositional politics was effectively banned - just as it had been during the Banzer dictatorship......With the leaders of the labor federation on a hunger strike, Paz directed the police and military to round up the country's top two hundred union leaders, load them on planes and fly them to remote jails in the Amazon." p. 152

"It was strikingly clear that in Bolivia, hyperinflation had played the same role as had Pinochet's "war" in Chile and the Falklands War for Margaret Thatcher - it had created the context for emergency measures, a state of exception during which the rules of democracy could be suspended and economic control could be temporarily handed over to the team of experts in Goni's living room. For hard-core Chicago School ideologues like Williamson, that meant that hyperinflation was not a problem to be solved, as Sachs believed, but a golden opportunity to be seized.....The crisis was the result of two main factors, both with roots in Washington financial institutions. The first was their insistence on passing on illegitimate debts accumulated under dictatorships to new cemocracies. The second was the Friedman-inspired decision at the U.S. Federal Reserve to allow interest rates to soar, which massively increased the size of those debts overnight." p. 156

"At the time of the transitions to democracy, powerful arguments were made, both moral and legal, that these debts were "odious" and that newly liberated people should not be forced to pay the bills of their oppressors and tormentors." p. 157

"In 1982, just before Argentina's dictatorship collapsed, the junta did one last favor for the corporate sector. Domingo Cavallo, president of Argentina's central bank, announced that the state would absorb the debts of large multinational and domestic firms that had, like Chile's piranhas, borrowed themselves to the verge of bankruptcy. The tidy arrangement meant that these companies continued to own their assests and profits, but the public had to pay off between $15 and $20 billion of their debts; among the companies to receive this generous treatment were Ford Motor Argentina, Chase Manhattan, Citibank, IBM and Mercedes-Benz." p. 158

"A new kind of shock was in the news: the Volcker Shock, Economists used this term to describe the impact of the decision made by Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker when he dramatically increased interest rates in the United States, letting them rise as high as 21 percent, reaching a peak in 1981 and lasting through the mid-eighties....A "price shock" occurs every time the price of an export commodity like coffee or tin drops by 10 percent or more. According to the IMF, developing countries experienced 25 such shocks between 1981 and 1983; between 1984 and 1987, the height of the debt crisis, they experienced 140 such shocks, pushing them deeper into debt." p. 159

"Friedman may have opposed the institutions [IMF etc.] on philosophical grounds, but practically, there were no institutions better positioned to implement his crisis theory. When countries were sent spiraling into crisis in the eighties, they had nowhere else to turn but the World Bank and the IMF. When they did, they hit a wall of orthodox Chicago Boys, trained to see their economic catastrophes not as problems to solve but as precious opportunities to leverage in order to secure a new free-market frontier." p. 162

"The colonization of the World Bank and the IMF by the Chicago School was a largely unspoken process, but it became official in 1989 when John Williamson unveiled what he called "the Washington Consensus."", p. 163

"Davison Budhoo, an IMF senior economist who designed structural adjustment programs in Latin America and Africa throughout the eighties, admitted later that "everything we did from 1983 onward was based on our new sense of mission to have the south 'privatised' or die; towards this end we ignominiously created economic bedlam in Latin America and Africa in 1983-88."..... The really clever part was that the economists themselves knew that free trade had nothing to do with ending a crisis, but that information was expertly "obfuscated."" p. 164 [Min fremhævelse, OJ]

"Rodrik [Dani Rodrik, a renowned Harvard economist who worked extensively with the World Bank] even conceded that privatization and free trade - two central pieces of the structnral adjustment package - had no direct link with creating stability" p. 165

"the Argentine state sold off the riches of the country .... By 1994, 90 percent of all state enterprises had been sold to private companies, ineluding Citibank, Bank Boston, France's Suez, and Vivendi, Spain's Repsol and Telefonica. Before making the sales, Menem and Cavallo had generously performed a valuable service for the new owners; they had fired roughly 700,000 of their workers....Years later, Cavallo explained. "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." p. 167

"The centrepiece [of 1981 Solidarnosc plan] was a radical vision for the huge state-run companies, which employed millions of Solidarity members, to break away from governmental control and become democratic workers' Cooperatives. "The socialized enterprise." the program stated, 'should be the basic organizational unit in the economy. It should be controlled by the workers council representing the collective and should be operatively run by the director, appointed througli competition and recalled by the council." p. 173

"Surely, after all the Cold War railing against totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain, Poland's new rulers could have expected a little help. No such aid was on offer. Now in the grips of Chicago School economists, the IMF and the U.S. Treasury saw Poland's problems through the prism of the shock doctrine. An economic meltdown and a heavy debt load, compounded by the disorientation of rapid regime change, meant that Poland was in the perfect weakened position to accept a radical shock therapy program.......The potential for rapid profits for those who got in first was tremendous.....The White House, under George W. Bush, congratulated Solidarity on its triumph against Communism but made it clear that the U.S. administration expected Solidarity to pay the debts accumulated by the regime that had banned and jailed its members - and it offered only $119 million in aid." p. 176

"It was George Soros, the billionaire financier and currency trader, who had enlisted Sachs to play a more hands-on role. Soros and Sachs traveled to Warsaw together....Sachs said at the time that Solidarity should simply refuse to pay the inherited debts, and he expressed confidence that he could mobilize $3 billion in support - a fortune compared with what Bush had offered. He had helped Bolivia land loans with the IMF and renegotiated its debts; there seemed no reason to doubt him. That help, however, came at a price: for Solidarity to get access to Sachs's connections and powers of persuasion, the government first needed to adopt what became known in the Polish press as "the Sachs Plan"or  'shock therapy.' .....the Sachs Plan advocated selling off the state mines, shipyards and factories to the private sector. It was a direct clash with Solidarity's economic program of worker ownership." p. 177

"Many of Solidarity's leaders didn't like Sachs's ideas - the movement had formed in a revolt against drastic price increases imposed by the Communists - and now Sachs was telling them to do the same on a far more sweeping scale.....As the Polish editor Przemyslaw Wielgosz explains, the top tier of the movement "became effectively cut off... their support came not from the factories and industrial plants, but the church....Michnik later observed bitterly that "the worst thing about Communism is what comes after."" p. 178

"Friedman's fundamentalist version of capitalism was a long way from what Walesa had been promising the country that summer, he was still insisting that Poland was going to find that more generous third way, which he described in an interview with Barbara Walters as "a mixture....It won't be capitalism. It will be a system that is better than capitalism, that will reject everything that is evil in capitalism."" p. 179

"Halina Bortnowska: You can no longer expect people to act in their own best interests when they're so disoriented they don't know - or no longer care - what those interests are. Balcerowic, the finance minister, has since admitted that capitalizing on the emergency environment was a deliberate strategy - a way like all shock tactics, to clear away the opposition. He explained that he was able to push through policies that were antithetical to the Solidarity vision in both content and form because Poland was in what he dubbed a period of "extraordinary politics."" p. 181

"Many were claiming that all of this flux, and the fall of real and metaphorical walls, would lead to an end of ideologieal orthodoxy. Freed from the polarizing effects of dueling superpowers, countries would finally be able to choose the best of both worlds - some hybrid of political freedom and economic security. As Gorbachev put it, "Many decades of being mesmerized by dogma, by a rule-book approach, have had their effect. Today we want to introduce a genuinely creative spirit."  In Chicago School circles, such talk of mix-and-match ideologies was met with open contempt." p. 182

"The occasion was a speech by Francis Fukuyama titled "Are We Approaching the End of History?" For Fukuyama, then a senior policy maker at the U.S. State Department, the strategy for advocates of unfettered capitalism was clear: don't debate with the third-way crowd; instead, preemptivelv declare victory." p. 182-3.

"Fukuyama look that thesis into bold new terrain, arguing that deregulated markets in the economic sphere, combined with liberal democracy in the political sphere, represented "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and ... final form of human governmentl."....The argument was a magnificent example of the democracy avoidance honed by the Chicago School. Much as the IMF had sneaked privatization and "free trade" into Latin America and Africa under cover of emergency "stabilization" programs. Fukuvama was now trying to smuggle this same highly contested agenda into the pro-democracy wave rising up from Warsaw to Manila." p. 183

"In 1989, history was taking an exhilarating turn, entering a period of genuine openness and possibility. So it was no coincidence that Fukuyama. from his perch at the State Department, chose precisely that moment to attempt to slam the history book shut. Nor was it a coincidence that the World Bank and the IMF chose that same volatile year to unveil the Washington Consensus - a clear effort to halt all discussion and debate about any economic ideas outside the free-market lockbox. 'I'hese were democracy-containment strategies, designed to undercut the kind of unscripted self-determination that was, and always had been, the greatest single threat to the Chicago School crusade." p. 184

"In fact, Deng was enthusiastically committed to converting to a corporate-based economy - so committed that, in 1980, his government invited Milton Friedman to come to China and tutor hundreds of top-level civil servants, professors and party economists in the fundamentals of free-market theory....He claimed that Hong Kong, despite having no democracy, was freer than the United States, since its government participated less in the economy. ....From the start, Deng clearly understood that repression would be crucial. ....now the party was going to launch its own counterrevolution and ask workers to give up many of their benefits and security so that a minority could collect huge profits. It was not going to be an easy task. So, in 1983 as Deng opened up the country to foreign investment and reduced protections for workers, he also ordered the creation of the 400,000-strong People's Armed Police, a new, roving riot squad." p. 185

"Recently, another analysis of the meaning of Tiananmen has emerged, one that challenges the mainstream version while putting Friedmanism at the heart of the story. This alternative narrative is being advanced by, among others, Wang Hui, one of the organizers of the 1989 protests, and now a leading Chinese intellectual of what is known as China's "New Left." In his 2003 book, China's New Order, Wang explains that the protesters spanned a huge range of Chinese society - not just elite university students but also factory workers, small entrepreneurs and teachers. What ignited the protests, he recalls, was popular discontent in the face of Deng's "revolutionary" economic changes, which were lowering wages, raising prices and causing "a crisis of  layoffs and unemployment. ...and the fact that the process was highly antidemocratic." p. 187

"Five days after the bloody crackdown, Deng addressed the nation and made it perfectly clear that it wasn't Communism he was protecting with his crackdown, but capitalism.....Orville Schell, a China scholar and journalist, summarized Deng Xiao-ping's choice: "After the massacre of 1989, he in effect said we will not stop economic reform; we will in effect halt political reform.".....Deng had some notable defenders. After the massacre, Henry Kissinger wrote an op-ed arguing that the party had no choice. "No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators.... A crackdown was therefore inevitable " p. 189.

  P.S.

090710, Mark Weisbrot, TheGuardian - Disaster Capitalism Hits Europe (and the US is Next). Eurozone governments and European authorities are using the economy to justify pushing through rightwing policy changes. ... What is really going on is that powerful interests within these countries - including Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal - are taking advantage of the situation to make the changes that hey want. ..The crash vas triggered by the collapse of a large housing bubble in Spain, as well as the bursting of a big stock market bubble: the value of stocks plunged from 125% of GDP in November 2007 to 54% of GDP a year later. ... Ironically, the people who want to take advantage of the "crisis" in Spain are actually increasing the risk of more serious debt problems, since the debt burden will rise if the economy lapses into recession or years of stagnation because of their fiscai tightening measures.

Orla Jordal, 2007

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