Appendix B -- Shock and awe capitalism

*ZNet | Economy*

*Reviewing Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" *

*by Stephen Lendman; September 20, 2007*

Naomi Klein is an award-winning Canadian journalist, author,

documentary filmmaker and activist. She writes a regular column

for The Nation magazine and London Guardian that's syndicated

internationally by the New York Times Syndicate that gives

people worldwide access to her work but not its own readers at home.

In 2004, she and her husband and co-producer Avi Lewis released

their first feature documentary - "The Take." It covered the

explosion of activism in the wake of Argentina's 2001 economic

crisis. People responded with neighborhood assemblies, barter

clubs, mass movements of the unemployed and workers taking over

bankrupt companies and reopening them under their own management.

Klein is also the author of three books. Her first was "No Logo

- Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies" (2000) that analyzes the

destructive forces of globalization. Next came "Fences and

Windows - Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization

Debate" (2002) covering the global revolt against corporate power.

Her newest book just out is "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of

Disaster Capitalism" that explodes the myth of "free market"

democracy. It shows how neoliberal Washington Consensus

fundamentalism dominates the world with America its lead

exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic

meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic

shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere.

Wars are waged, social services cut, and freedom sacrificed when

people are too distracted, cowed or bludgeoned to object. Klein

describes a worldwide process of social and economic engineering

she calls "disaster capitalism" with torture along for the ride

to reinforce the message - no "New World Order" alternatives are

tolerated.

"Free market" triumphalism is everywhere - from Canada to

Brazil, China to Bulgaria, Russia to South Africa, Vietnam to

Iraq. In all cases, the results are the same. People are

sacrificed for profits and Margaret Thatcher's dictum applies -

"there is no alternative."

"The Shock Doctrine" is a powerful tour de force, four years of

on-the-ground research in the making and well worth the wait. In

an age of corporatism partnered with corrupted political elites,

it's must reading by an author now firmly established as a major

intellectual figure on the left and champion of social justice.

Naomi Klein is all that and more. Even for those familiar with

her topics, the book is stunning, revealing, unforgettable and

essential to know. This review will cover a healthy sample of

what's in store for readers in the full exquisitely written

text. It's in seven parts with a concluding section. Each will

be discussed below starting with a brief introduction.

Introduction - Blank Is Beautiful: Three Decades of Erasing and

Remaking the World (into Hell)

New Orleans, post-Katrina, is a metaphor for an American-style

"New World Order" with unfettered capitalism unleashed in its

most savage form. Klein quotes Republican congressman Richard

Baker telling lobbyists: "We finally cleaned up public housing

in New Orleans. We couldn't do it but God did." And New Orleans

developer Joseph Canizaro added: "I think we have a clean sheet

to start again (and take advantage of) big opportunities." Their

scheme is erasing communities and replacing them with upscale

condos and other high-profit projects on choice city real estate

at the expense of the poor mother nature forced out and

government won't allow back.

Enter the "grand guru" of free-wheeling capitalism, then age 93

and in failing health. This was conservative/libertarian

economist Milton Friedman's moment that he first articulated in

his 1962 book "Capitalism and Freedom." His thesis: "only a

crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When a

crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas

that are lying around....our basic function (is) to develop

alternatives to existing policies (ones Friedman rejects, and

have them ready to roll out when the) the impossible becomes

politically inevitable." Klein calls crises "democracy-free

zones," and Friedman's thesis "the shock doctrine." For New

Orleans it means "permanent reforms" like destroying public

housing and issuing vouchers for privatized schools in lieu of

rebuilding public ones with government reconstruction funds.

For Friedman, government's sole function is "to protect our

freedom both from (outside) enemies....and from our

fellow-citizens." It's to "preserve law and order (as well as)

enforce private contracts, (and) foster competitive markets." In

his view, anything else in public hands is socialism that for

"free market" fundamentalists like Friedman is blasphemy.

Until 1973, Friedman's radical doctrine stayed in his classroom,

but all that changed on an earlier September 11. Following

General Augusto Pinochet's bloody ascent to power, he had a real

life laboratory as advisor to the new Chilean dictator. His

prescription came to be known as the "Chicago School" revolution

of rapid-fire economic transformation he called "shock

treatment," now known as "shock therapy." It's an economic

version of "destroy(ing) the village (and country) to save it"

from the Vietnam era and nearly as harsh.

Millions know its lessons, but Friedman's not their hero. It's

central tenets are structurally adjusted mass-privatizations,

government deregulation, unrestricted free market access for

foreign corporations, and deep cuts in social spending with

repressive laws, harsh crackdowns and torture along for the ride

to reinforce the core tenet Reaganites call "trickle down" and

Brits call "Thatcherism."

Its recipients call it hell, and Klein explains why - in Chile,

Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Russia, the

Falklands, Poland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Orleans, Israel,

and coming to a neocon-occupied homeland neighborhood near you.

It's "disaster capitalism" unleashed, and business is booming.

Klein cites insiders saying opportunities are on a par with a

thriving "emerging market...."the deals are even better than the

dot-com days, and the 'the security bubble' picked up the slack

when those earlier bubbles popped."

Reaganomics adherents are today's neoconservatives with the

"full force of the US military machine (serving their

unfettered) corporate agenda" of greed writ large. Its holy

policy trinity is: "elimination of the public sphere, total

liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending (if any

at all)." But instead of lifting all boats as promised, it's

mirror opposite. It creates a powerful ruling corporatist class

partnered with corrupted political elites - "with hazy and

ever-shifting lines between the two groups." Russia got

billionaire "oligarchs," China "the princelings," Chile "the

piranhas," and America the Bush-Cheney "Pioneers."

Everywhere, the scheme is the same: huge public wealth transfers

to private hands, exploding public debt most often, "an

ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and disposable

poor, and an aggressive nationalism (like George Bush's

permanent "war on terrorism" and the world) that justifies

bottomless spending on security." "Inside the bubble" is

paradise. Outside, however, is hell with "aggressive

surveillance, mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties," a

declining standard of living, and repression and torture

reinforcing the message to non-believers.

Klein calls the harshness "a metaphor of the shock doctrine's

underlying logic." When applied, it induces a state of "deep

disorientation," and shock to force targets "to make concessions

against their will." The "shock doctrine" works the same way on

a mass scale, and the 9/11 experience proved it. It exploded the

"familiar world" and created a period of disorientation and

regression the Bush administration jumped on abroad and at home.

As Klein put it: "Suddenly we found ourselves living in a kind

of Year Zero (with) everything we knew of the world before (now)

dismissed as 'pre-9/11' thinking." We became a "blank slate, a

clean sheet of paper," and the administration did what was

impossible before. It's how the "shock doctrine" works: "the

original disaster (terror attack, war, hurricane, market

meltdown) puts the entire population into a state of collective

shock" enabling policy manipulators to move in for the kill to

remake the world in their image and get it done before the shock

wears off.

Part 1 - Two Doctor Shocks - Torture and Chicago School

Fundamentalism

Following a crisis shock, another quickly follows. The corporate

piranhas exploit disorientation with economic "shock therapy"

along with "police, soldiers and prison interrogators" with

torture their method of choice "to build a model country (by)

erasing people and then trying to remake them from scratch."

Klein reviews the history of CIA's interest in torture as a way

to control the human mind. It began with the Montreal doctor

they funded to perform "bizarre experiments on his psychiatric

patients (by) keeping them asleep and in isolation for weeks,

then administering huge doses of electroshock (plus)

experimental (psychedelic LSD and hallucinogen PCP angel dust)

drug cocktails."

The experiments were performed at McGill University's Allan

Memorial Institute by Dr. Ewen Cameron even though they clearly

violated all standards of medical ethics using human guinea pigs

without their permission with permanent damage their reward.

Cameron believed by blasting the human brain with an array of

shocks, he could "unmake and erase faulty minds, then rebuild

(on a blank slate) new personalities" cleansed of their previous

nature. It was voodoo science, and it failed. His patients were

his victims, but CIA gained a wealth of knowledge it now employs

with no pangs of conscience or regard for ethics.

Klein traces CIA's interest in mind manipulation to a 1951

trinational meeting of intelligence agencies and academics in

Montreal when concern was that Communists could brainwash POWs

to control them. That was when the spy agency engaged Canadian

researchers to learn how, and one of them was Dr. Donald Hebb,

director of psychology at McGill, who was working on the

problem. Intelligence agencies were impressed enough with his

work to fund classified sensory-deprivation experiments on

volunteer McGill students.

They proved intensive isolation interferes with clear thinking

enough to make people more receptive to suggestion. They were

also "formidable interrogation techniques" amounting to torture

that Hebb knew violated medical ethics. He later characterized

Cameron's work as "criminally stupid," but CIA got what it

wanted - a way to interrogate "resistant sources" in a "new age

of precise, refined torture, not the gory, inexact" kind from

the Spanish Inquisition or what Nazis and other tyrants often

practiced. Cameron's experiments with human guinea pigs built on

Hebb's earlier work laying the foundation for CIA's "two-stage

psychological torture method" of sensory deprivation followed by

sensory overload. University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy

in his book, "A Question of Torture" on CIA interrogation,

called it "the first real revolution in the cruel science of

pain in more than three centuries."

Pre-9/11, these techniques were freely used covertly as any form

of abuse or torture violates the Geneva, UN and other statutes

prohibiting these practices as well as the US Army's own Uniform

Code of Military Justice barring "cruelty" and "oppression" of

prisoners. No longer, as "On September 11, 2001, that longtime

insistence on plausible deniability went out the window" as well

as any claim this nation respects the law and rights of free

people everywhere. What once was done sub rosa or by proxy is

now condoned and authorized at the highest levels of government

on the fraudulent claim of national security to hide the real

aim of social control.

Klein notes torture is still technically banned in the US, but

only when pain is the "equivalent in intensity to (what

accompanies) serious physical injury, such as organ failure."

Simply put, anything goes, but it's not put that way. In Iraq,

it was thought "shock and awe" would be so stunning, Iraqis

"would go into a kind of suspended animation." A second makeover

Chicago School fundamentalism shock could then be imposed on a

blank post-invasion slate, and bingo, mission accomplished.

Klein notes "there was no blank slate, only rubble and

shattered, angry people" who were blasted with more shocks when

they resisted. Like Cameron and his experiments, "Iraq's shock

doctors can destroy, but they can't seem to rebuild," and the

same is true wherever these shock doctors show up.

Milton Friedman and the Search for a Laissez-Faire Factory

The epicenter of shock ideology is the University of Chicago

Economics Department. It came out of the 1950s "in the thrall"

(of a) man on a mission to fundamentally revolutionize his

profession," and on that score Milton Friedman succeeded

mightily. Friedman, now gone, believed, markets work efficiently

and best unfettered of rules, regulations, onerous taxes, trade

barriers, entrenched interests, and human interference. Whereas

Cameron believed electroshocks could restore natural health,

Friedman favored economic shock as extreme and destructive to

nations as Cameron and CIA's methods are to human minds.

Friedman taught this voodoo science and believed to the end, all

contrary evidence aside, it was perfect and worked. Chicago

School fundamentalism developed at a post-war time in the 1950s

when leftist ideas supporting worker rights were gaining ground.

Where they "promised (workers) freedom from bosses, citizens

from dictatorship (and) countries from colonialism," Friedman

promised "individual freedom" to choose that appealed to owners

of capital who embraced him and his thinking.

It stood in stark contrast to what became known as

"developmentalism" or "Third World nationalism" in the post-war

developing world. Economists in it favored an "inward-oriented

industrialization" strategy to break the cycle of poverty and

grow. Like Keynesians and social democrats, they showed it

worked in Latin America's Southern Cone with leaders like Juan

Peron "put(ting) their ideas into practice with a vengeance (by)

pouring public money into infrastructure projects, (providing)

local businesses generous subsidies, and keeping out foreign

imports with....high tariffs." It brought prosperity to the

South and "dark days" for Friedman, his acolytes, and

free-wheeling capitalists losing out to social progress.

It sprung corporate America to action by funding a legion of

think tank and Chicago School foot soldiers to change the

message and fortunes of their businesses. Friedman was their

ideological leader preaching public wealth should be in private

hands, rules and regulations out the window, accumulation of

profits unrestrained, and social welfare programs curtailed or

abolished. In short - deregulate, privatize and get government

out of the business of everything besides providing security and

enforcing contracts. He also believed taxes were onerous and

once said he was "in favor of cutting (them) under any

circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's

possible...."

He also said corporations should be exempt from federal taxes

claiming what they pay ends up in consumer prices that, in fact,

is pure nonsense as every marketing MBA (like this writer)

learns straightaway. The fundamental law of pricing is to charge

what the market will bear, no more or less. In other words, get

all you can but no more than buyers will pay. Soon enough they'd

pay plenty in the developing world.

In 1953, the US declared war against "developmentalism" with

CIA's first ever coup against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran.

Another followed the next year in Guatemala, and in both

instances democratically elected leaders were ousted because

corporate interests opposed them. It was only the beginning, and

Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" soon had a real time laboratory

to prove their "capitalist utopia" worked.

Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government electoral victory in

1970 was the opportunity. Three years later he was out giving

Friedman the chance he wanted. Klein related the results in what

she called "the first Chicago School state" with others to

follow. They're all the same with "an unstoppable hurricane of

mutually reinforcing destruction and reconstruction, erasure and

creation" following the crisis. Next is unfettered economic

shock therapy with torture and disappearances awaiting resisters

and anyone guilty of bad thinking. Friedman's brave new world

was beginning to roll. It's devastation is everywhere including

at home.

Part 2 - The First Test - The Bloody Birth of the Counterrevolution

Counterrevolution began 34 years ago in Chile on another

September 11 that should have been unimaginable and had to seem

surreal. There were tanks in the streets and fighter jets

attacking government buildings in a scene all too real and

deadly. It played out in Santiago and around Chile and was just

the beginning of a long nightmare. It brought General Augusto

Pinochet to power (with plenty of CIA help) who called his

action "a war," not a coup, and to reinforce his message he made

it seem like one. Blood in the streets, the presidential palace

in flames, and President Salvador Allende dead ended the most

vibrant democracy in the Americas. It was a cakewalk with "the

junta's grand battle over by mid-afternoon."

A state of siege was imposed followed by mass arrests, killings

and torture in a climate of fear that enveloped the country.

Allende supporters were targeted in Chile's "Caravan of Death."

Chileans paid dearly, but the Chicago Boys had their moment of

triumph, and they were ready. Rolling off the press was their

detailed economic manual for the new government called "The

Brick." It was a 500 page Chicago School shock therapy wish

list. It was "the first Chicago School state," its first "global

counterrevolution" victory, and "a genesis of terror" in a brave

new world for Chileans.

The economic playbook was right from Milton Friedman's

"Capitalism and Freedom" that's long on free market triumphalism

and void on its effects on real people. It was pure Friedman

featuring mass privatizations, deregulation and deep social

spending cuts flavored generously with corporate-friendly tax

cuts, trade unionist crackdowns, savage repression for

non-believers, and an end to Chile's social democratic state

Friedman condemned.

Pinochet bought it along with a team of Chicago School alumni

called "technos." They embarked on a free market binge with

disastrous results. In the first year, inflation hit 375%,

thousands of Chileans lost jobs, the country was flooded with

cheap imports, local businesses closed and hunger grew along

with public and small business discontent in this free market

"paradise." In desperation, "it was time to call in the big

guns" with Milton Friedman coming to Santiago to reinforce his

message that for things to improve they first had to get worse.

It was classic shock treatment and Chicago School baloney with

Friedman preaching patience and promising an "economic miracle"

if his prescription was followed.

Pinochet agreed, and slash and burn followed with visions of

paradise at the end of the rainbow. It was pure untested

fantasy, and the results showed it. After one year of hardened

shock therapy, Chile's economy contracted 15%, unemployment

rocketed to 20%, and contrary to Friedman's rosy scenario it

lasted for years with no social safety net help for desperate

Chileans.

Klein notes Chile today is still cited as a model that free

market "Friedmanism" works in spite of the clear evidence it

doesn't. Growth did resume a decade later, but only after

conditions worsened. It forced Pinochet to reinstate Allende

policies like renationalizing privatized companies but not his

social democratic agenda. Chileans were left with the shambles.

When the economy stabilized and rapid growth resumed in the late

80s, poverty was 45%, but the richest 10% saw their incomes rise

by 83%. Even today, Klein notes, Chile remains one of the most

unequal societies in the world. It's shock therapy miracle

shifted "wealth to the top and shock(ed) much of the middle

class out of existence."

It's the way it works everywhere and a glimpse of the future:

"an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting

fueling superprofits and frantic consumerism, ringed by ghostly

factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past;

roughly half the population (excluded); out-of-control

corruption and cronyism; (decimated) nationally owned small and

medium-sized businesses; (mass) transfer of (public) wealth (and

resources) to private hands (accompanied by) a huge (shift) of

private debts into public hands." Inside the Chilean bubble was

paradise. Outside was "The Great Depression." Bubble-benefitters

reacted with "junkie logic: Where is the next fix?"

It was first across the border in other Latin American Southern

Cone countries where the "counterrevolution spread (and) people

vanish(ed)." Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay were targeted with

similar results as in Chile under juntas replacing democrats.

Chicago School fundamentalism was on a roll, and woe to the

non-believers. Nations that were developmentalism models became

wastelands with decades of worker gains lost almost overnight.

Factories closed, wages fell, unemployment soared, poverty grew

severe, dissenters disappeared, and ordinary people suffered to

prove what pin-stripped academics knew after Chile went sour.

Instead, it was on to the next target.

In them all, the slate was cleansed and terror unleashed,

unrestrained by national borders. Former Allende economist and

diplomat turned activist Marcos Orlando Letelier became a victim

in September, 1976. While living in Washington, he condemned

Chile's "economic freedom" for the privileged and paid with his

life. Pinochet's DINA secret police killed him and his American

colleague, Ronni Moffit, by remote-detonating a bomb planted

under his driver's seat. An FBI investigation learned the

assassins entered the country under false passports with full

CIA knowledge and complicity.

The purging included cleansing wrong ideas and thinkers like

legendary left wing Chilean folk singer, Victor Jara. He was

seized and taken to Chile's notorious National (killing and

torture) Stadium to be reeducated. Soldiers broke his hands so

he couldn't play the guitar. Then they shot him 44 times "to

make sure he couldn't inspire from....the grave." One culture

was being erased and replaced by another. As in Nazi Germany,

books were burned, newspapers and magazines shuttered,

universities occupied and strikes and political meetings banned.

Trade unionists were specially targeted as threats to the new

economic order. Its leaders were rounded up, movement members

viciously attacked, and "battalions" targeted workers in

factories. They were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and

disappeared in a sweeping reign of terror designed to crush

opposition and wrong-thinking.

In Argentina, Ford Motor Company's local subsidiary was

complicit. It helped soldiers and secret police rid unionists

from its factories and supplied vehicles as well. Green Ford

Falcon sedans became the feared symbol of terror an Argentine

playwright called "death-mobiles." Many thousands kidnapped and

disappeared rode off in these cars, never to return.

Farmers involved in land reform struggles also were targeted

along with anyone with "a vision of society built on values

other than pure profit." It affected community worker activists,

many church-connected, who wanted social services like health

care, public housing and education the state was erasing through

shock therapy and mass repression. Klein noted while "policies

attempted to excise collectivism from the culture,

inside....prisons (the practice was to) excise it from the mind

and spirit." The sickness was democratic socialism, the cure

pain and suffering. Wrong-thinkers were taught the hard way, and

many paid with their lives. Chicago School fundamentalism is

harsh medicine. Its grand guru, Milton Friedman, was

unrepentant. He called it "freedom" and took his mathematical

model miracle to the grave amidst a hail of undeserved eulogies.

In his memoirs before he died, his "blatant revisionism" on

Chile was shameful and disturbing. He falsely claimed Pinochet

only asked for help in 1975 when, in fact, the Chicago Boys

worked with the military before the 1973 coup, and their

policies were implemented on Pinochet's first day in power.

Friedman also claimed the junta's repressive years didn't undo

Chilean democracy. In his view, it opened up "more room for

individual initiative and for a private sphere of life (offering

a greater) chance of a return to a democratic society." It was

classic convoluted Chicago School thinking. It made him famous

courtesy of corporate triumphalism, generous funding and an

utter disdain for human rights and dignity.

Friedman also used his 1976 Nobel lecture to argue economics was

as scientifically accurate and objective as other sciences. He

failed to mention its dark side - devastating poverty,

unemployment, shuttered factories and mass human misery and

deaths in the first nation adopting his ideology on its

victimized people. Now it's everywhere and savagely enforced in

an age of corporate dominance, wars for profit and neglect of

human needs to fund them. That's Friedman's real legacy from the

barrel of a gun and called "freedom."

Part 3 - Surviving Democracy

Chicago School dogma became known as Thatcherism in Britain, but

its prime minister wasn't an early adherent. Margaret Thatcher

thought Chilean shock therapy wasn't possible in a democracy

like the UK because voters wouldn't buy it. Three years into her

first term, her approval rating was lower than George Bush's.

She was in danger of not being reelected and didn't dare risk

imposing bitter economic medicine that would sink her chances.

That is, until destiny intervened on April 2, 1982 when

Argentina invaded the British-held Falkland Islands off its

coast that was unimportant to either country except for the

political hay to gain from war.

Thatcher jumped at the chance to regain her footing and "went

into Churchillian battle mode," even though Argentina's

president, General Leopoldo Galtieri, wasn't Adolph Hitler. But

defending the British empire was almost as good, and it paid

off. Thatcher's political future was at stake. She revived it,

more than doubled her approval rating and henceforth was known

as the "Iron Lady" that for her was high praise, and she made

the most of it.

She launched a "corporatist revolution" based on Chicago School

economics she thought impossible earlier. She parlayed her new

popularity to a victory against striking coal miners in 1984

with tactics like unleashing 8000 "truncheon-wielding" riot

police in a single confrontation. Before the strike ended,

thousands of workers were injured, but Thatcher stood firm with

a clear message to other unionists. Take what you're offered or

get the same medicine.

She didn't stop there, and what followed was a radical economic

agenda in a wave of state enterprise privatizations including

British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, British Steel and

others in what Klein called "the first mass privatization

auction in a Western democracy." It proved Chicago School

fundamentalism didn't need repressive dictatorships to advance

as long as "Iron Ladies" like Thatcher were around to match the

best of them, short of all out tanks in the streets shock

therapy, that is. Her eleven and a half years in power proved

it, and Britain hasn't been the same since with Labor as

committed now as the Tories.

Bolivia was soon targeted as well, but in 1985 was part a

democratic wave sweeping the world. It was an election year with

two familiar figures facing off for the presidency - former

dictator Hugo Banzar and former elected president, Victor Paz

Estenssoro. It was close and Banzar thought he won so before

final returns were in he named 30 year old Harvard economist

Jeffrey Sachs to help develop an anti-inflation economic plan

for the country.

Sachs was part Keynsian but larger part Chicago School adherent

that made for a bad combination. He bought its orthodoxy in

softer form by supporting debt relief and generous aid along

with the shock therapy he advised Banzar to adopt as the only

solution to hyperinflation.

As it turned out, Banzar lost and Paz won, and while no

socialist, he was no Chicago School adherent either, or so

voters thought. Four days into his term, he charged his

emergency economic team to radically restructure the economy

using shock therapy with a twist. It was much harsher than Sachs

proposed with the entire state-centered structure Paz erected

decades earlier dismantled in the first 100 days before the

public could react. In its place, food subsidies were ended,

price controls lifted, wages frozen, oil prices hiked 300%, deep

government spending cuts imposed, unrestricted imports allowed,

and state-owned companies downsized as a first step to

privatizing them. It cost hundreds of thousands of full-time

jobs, pensions and safety net protections. Friedman continued to

roll.

The results were predictable. The minimum wage never regained

its value, and two years later real wages were down 40% and

average per capita income dropped from $845 in 1985 to $789 in

1987. As in other shock therapy countries, a small elite got

richer while the great majority of Bolivians lost out with

campesinos faring worst. In 1987, they earned on average $140 a

year, or less than one-fifth the nation's declining average income.

Bolivian misery gave Sachs star status for the country's

"Miracle." It launched his new career and brought him to

Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela and Russia later on

plus a best-selling book and three-part PBS "success story"

series. The only problem was it wasn't true. President Paz had

no mandate for shock therapy, and many workers were predictably

furious at his betrayal. They went on strike and Paz's response

made Margaret Thatcher's earlier action against striking coal

miners seem tame by comparison. Tanks rolled in the streets, and

riot police raided union halls, a university and factories.

Hundreds of arrests followed, including the top 200 union

leaders, and oppositional politics was banned. The siege lasted

three months during the decisive shock therapy period with more

repression and Chicago School medicine later.

It showed shock therapy needs harsh authoritarian rule backing

with Bolivia's pin-stripped politicians, economists and

bureaucrats administering it, not uniformed soldiers as in

Chile. Paz's democratic victory was illusory like others when

leaders renege on promises and sacrifice them on the alter of

Chicago School orthodoxy.

Argentina was another "textbook case." In the post-Falklands War

period, it was burdened with billions in odious debt Washington

insisted be serviced and paid. It was far more onerous after the

(Paul) "Volker Shock" when the US Federal Reserve Chairman hiked

interest rates up to 21% in the early-mid 1980s to fight

inflation, so he said. It was painful in the US and disastrous

for developing countries turning their debt burdens into crises.

New loans were needed to pay off old ones, and the debt spiral

was born afflicting nations then and still today. That was the

whole idea, or at least one of them.

Argentina, Brazil and other countries had another option they

didn't take - defaulting on debt so great it was unrepayable. As

Klein put it: "Understandably (new democracies were) unwilling

to go to war with Washington (and the international lending

agencies it controls so they) had little choice but to play by

Washington's rules (and) in the early eighties (they) got a

great deal stricter....It was the dawn of the era of 'structural

adjustment' - otherwise known as the dictatorship of debt."

In the 1980s, Chicago School economists colonized the IMF and

World Bank to advance their corporatist crusade. Economist John

Williamson named it "the Washington Consensus" that stuck ever

since. It consisted of core economic policies both institutions

consider essential for economic health according to their

orthodoxy. We know them well: all "state enterprises

....privatized (and) barriers impeding entry of foreign

firms....abolished." There was more that together was classic

Friedman dogma: privatization, deregulation, unrestricted free

trade (never called fair), and deep cuts in government spending

except for security.

Indebted developing countries learned shock doctrine 101 the

hard way. Getting aid meant accepting Washington Consensus rules

- the whole package. So to save their countries, they had to

"sell (them) off." Klein calls Argentina the "model student" in

the 1990s under leaders like Carlos Menem. Appointing Domingo

Cavallo economy minister signaled he bought the corporatist

package. But as Klein points out: "Argentina was not unique (and

by 1999) Chicago School alumni included more than twenty-five

government ministers and more than a dozen central bank

presidents from Israel to Costa Rica."

Shock therapy was on a role that in Argentina turned into a

textbook case of therapeutically induced disaster. What Time

magazine in 1992 called "Menem's Miracle" became Menem's Mirage

when the economy collapsed in 2001, and Argentina did the

unthinkable with Menem gone and a new president in power. It

defaulted on an $805 million debt to the World Bank. It should

have ended the neoliberal experiment, but instead it spread.

Economic crises fueled it, and when old ones ebbed "even more

cataclysmic ones appear(ed): tsunamis, hurricanes, wars and

terrorist attacks. Disaster capitalism was taking shape" with

shock therapy its tool of choice.

Part 4 - Lost in Transition: Slamming the Door on History

Before the Berlin Wall fell, Lech Walesa became a labor hero in

Poland and the West by defying the Moscow-controlled government

and getting away with it. Solidarnosc (Solidarity) spread from

its Gdansk roots to the country's mines, shipyards and factories

and within a year had 10 million members. They won the right to

bargain but wanted more. They aspired to take over the state and

institute their own alternative economic and political program.

It's radical centerpiece was to transform huge state-run

companies into worker-run cooperatives so Solidarity members

could be empowered in their own "socialized enterprise."

Walesa objected, lost the debate, and he feared what then

happened. The Jaruzelski government declared martial law, sent

tanks to the streets and rounded up thousands of Solidarity

members. By the late 80s, the crackdown subsided, the economy

was in free fall, workers again struck and Mikhail Gorbachev's

reformist government was in power in Moscow. Solidarity was

legalized, a Citizens' Committee Solidarity wing was formed, its

members stood in snap elections and won effective control of the

government capturing 260 parliamentary seats.

It should have been the best of times, but with the economy in

trouble, Poland needed aid including debt relief. With Chicago

School alumni running IMF, none was offered except under

Washington Consensus rules, take it or leave it. Enter Jeffrey

Sach, the shock doc, with an even harsher plan than imposed on

Bolivia. It included an immediate end to price controls,

slashing subsidies, and privatizing mines, shipyards and

factories. It short, it ran directly counter to Solidarity's aim

for worker-run industry.

Sachs promised Solidarity Poland could become like France or

Germany under his plan. By swallowing shock therapy medicine

first, taking the pain, the patient would end up cured and

healthy - if he was right. After debate, the verdict was in and

the treatment bought with predictable results. Sachs promised

"momentary dislocations" but delivered a full-blown depression.

Industrial production plummeted 30% after two years of

"reforms." Unemployment skyrocketed, and in 1993 hit 25% in some

areas. It's still chronic today with recent World Bank figures

pegging it at around 20%, the highest in the European Union. For

young people, it's even worse with 40% of workers under 24

unemployed.

Most alarming is the number of people in poverty. From a 15%

level in 1989, it rose to a startling 59% in 2003. Incredibly,

the country, like Chile, is still cited as a free market reform

model. It's pure myth, angry Poles know it, but reports in the

West ignore them as they do shocked victims everywhere.

They didn't ignore "the shock of Tiananmen Square," but didn't

report it accurately either. In the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping

was transforming his country economically while keeping rigid

political control including iron-fisted repression when needed.

Democracy was nowhere in sight nor is it now. While many of

Deng's reforms were successful and popular, others in the late

80s weren't, and it provoked deep anger in the cities by people

most affected. Price controls were lifted, corruption and

nepotism was rampant, freedom minimal, job security eliminated,

unemployment soared, and deep inequalities grew between "winners

and losers in the new China."

It came to a head with mass protests in 1989 in Tiananmen Square

that Western reports characterized as a clash between old-guard

Communist authoritarians and idealistic students wanting

western-style democracy. It was pure propaganda. The protests

were massive and threatened the government, but democracy wasn't

the issue. It was popular discontent from wrenching economic

change raising prices, lowering wages, and causing "a crisis of

layoffs and unemployment." Protesters weren't against economic

reform. They were against the Chicago School version of it, but

their efforts were costly.

Deng declared martial law May 20, tanks rolled in the square,

indiscriminate shooting took place, and when it ended thousands

were dead, many more thousands injured, and still more thousands

hunted down, arrested, jailed, some tortured, and hundreds

likely executed. Shock therapy rolled in China as in Chile -

through the barrel of a gun and raw state terror. Following the

crackdown, China opened to foreign investment, joined the WTO,

and turned the country into the world's largest low wage

sweatshop for Wal-Mart's "Always Low Prices."

For foreign investors and party apparatchiks, it was a win-win

arrangement with Klein citing a 2006 study showing 90% of

China's billionaires to be Communist Party officials. About 2900

"party scions" (called "the princelings") control $260 billion,

and Klein notes the "stark similarity between (China's

authoritarian rule) and Chicago School capitalism - a shared

willingness to disappear opponents, blank the slate of all

resistance and begin anew" using shock and fear to transform

countries into free market paradises for the privileged.

The Tragedy of South Africa's "Democracy Born in Chains"

Klein quotes Nelson Mandela in January, 1990 (two weeks before

he was freed) in a note to his supporters from prison saying:

"The nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industries

is the policy of the ANC (and changing) our views....is

inconceivable. Black economic empowerment is a goal we fully

support and encourage, but in our situation state control of

certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable." That belief

became ANC policy in 1955 in its Freedom Charter. The liberation

struggle wasn't just about a political system but an economic

one as well. White workers in mines earned 10 times more than

blacks, and large industrialists worked with the military to

enforce order and disappear dissenters.

Once apartheid ended, a new way was possible, and Mandela seemed

poised to lead it. The ANC had "a unique opportunity to reject

the free market orthodoxy of the day" and choose a "third path

between Communism and capitalism." ANC candidates swept the 1994

elections and Mandela became president at a time South Africa

surpassed Brazil as the most unequal society in the world.

Negotiations were held with the ruling National Party, and a

peaceful handover was achieved but not without "prevent(ing)

South Africa's apartheid-era rulers from wreaking havoc on their

way out the door."

Negotiations took place on two parallel tracks - political and

economic. Mandela and his chief negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa,

"won on almost every count" politically. But along side it,

economic negotiations were held with the country's current

president, Thabo Mbeki, in charge with the outcome in the end

far different. With ANC leaders preoccupied with controlling

Parliament, the former white supremacist government and

industrialists were determined to safeguard their wealth, and

they succeeded by assuring Washington Consensus policies would

be instituted when political power changed hands.

ANC economists and lawyers were outfoxed or outgunned by the

opposition, IMF, World Bank, GATT and power of big capital

against inexperienced politicians and technocrats who ended up

losers. Black officials controlled the government, but

discovered the real power was elsewhere. As Klein put it: "The

bottom line was that South Africa was free but simultaneously

captured." The leadership mistakenly thought once firmly in

power they could undo earlier made transition compromises.

They couldn't or didn't for the same reasons other developing

countries accept free market rules. Adopt them or be punished by

the market as Mandela learned when he was freed. The South

African stock market collapsed in panic, and the country's

currency (the rand) dropped by 10%. He acknowledged the problem

later on saying it's "impossible for countries....to decide

economic policy without regard to the likely response of these

markets." It's too bad he didn't know how Hugo Chavez managed

after 1999 (oil aside). He achieved what Mandela reneged on, and

Venezuela's economy is booming. Had he and ANC officials stood

their ground early on, South Africa (with its mineral riches)

might have done the same thing - had a growth economy in a

socially democratic state and a model for its neighbors.

They didn't, black South Africans lost out, Mandela's legacy is

tainted, and a key factor was current president Thabo Mbeki. He

spent spent years studying in exile in England during the

apartheid years during which time "he was breathing in the fumes

of Thatcherism." He became the ANC's free market tutor, believed

in market fundamentalism, and its prescription was "growth and

more growth." It meant neoliberal shock therapy with the full

Friedman package Mbeki supported. He later professed: "Just call

me a Thatcherite," and Mandela told journalist John Pilger the

same thing in retirement saying: "....you can call it

Thatcherite but, for this country, privatization is the

fundamental policy."

After over a decade of that agenda (1994 - 06), Klein

highlighted the toll showing conditions today much worse than

under apartheid, and ANC's leadership responsible:

-- the number of people living on less than $1 a day doubled

from two to four million;

-- the unemployment rate more than doubled to 48% from 1991 - 2002;

-- only 5000 of 35 million black South Africans earn over

$60,000 a year;

-- the ANC government build 1.8 million homes while two million

South Africans lost theirs;

-- nearly one million South Africans were evicted from farms in

the first decade of democracy; as a result, the shack dweller

population grew by 50%, and in 2006, 25% of South Africans lived

in them with no running water or electricity. And there's more:

-- the HIV/AIDS infection rate is about 20%, and the Mbeki

government shamefully denied the severity of the crisis and did

little to alleviate it; it's been a major reason why average

life expectancy in the country declined by 13 years since 1990;

-- 40% of schools have no electricity;

-- 25% of people have no access to clean water and most who do

can't afford the cost; and

-- 60% of people have inadequate sanitation, and 40% no telephones.

"Freedom" for these people and all black South Africans came at

a high price, and no efforts are being made to ameliorate it.

Political empowerment was traded for economic apartheid under

Chicago School fundamentalist rules. Klein observed: "Never

before had a government-in-waiting been so seduced by the

international community." If China, Vietnam and even Russia saw

"the neoliberal light," Mandela was told, how could South Africa

resist it. The ANC leadership might have (and Mandela had the

credentials to lead them) had they examined the wreckage around

the world in Friedman-seduced countries. Instead, they took the

easy way out and surrendered.

Russia Chooses "the Pinochet Option"

The man who ignited political and social change in Russia wasn't

around long enough to lead it. Mikhail Gorbachev became head of

the Soviet Union's Communist Party in March, 1985, believing the

economy stalled and needed change. His solution became glasnost

(liberalizing opening up) and perestroika (reconstruction), and

Soviet Russia would never be the same again. By the early 1990s

the press was freed, the constitutional court was independent,

and elections were held for Russia's parliament, local councils,

president and vice-president. In addition, Gorbachev favored a

Scandinavian-style social democracy combining free market

capitalism with strong social safety net protections. He hoped

to build "a socialist beacon for all mankind." He never got the

chance.

While still in office at the 1991 G7 meeting in London, his

fellow heads of state delivered a free market message Chicago

School-style. Later, the IMF, World Bank and other international

lending agencies reinforced it - Soviet-era debts must be

honored and aid depended on adopting strict shock therapy rules.

The Soviet Union soon dissolved, Gorbachev was out, Boris

Yeltsin became Russia's president, and Chicago School

fundamentalism was adopted as needed "reform." Klein calls what

happened next "one of the greatest crimes committed against a

democracy (in peacetime) in modern history."

Yeltsin assembled a team of Chicago School ideologues to remake

the economy. Jeffrey Sachs showed up, too, with other US-funded

transition experts to help write privatization decrees, launch a

New York-style stock exchange, and craft a total radical

economic makeover for a country long used to central planning.

Only one thing stood in the way - democracy, and a parliament

able to vote down what Yeltsin's team designed. A clash of wills

drew closer in the spring of 1993 when parliament's budget

diverged from IMF demands for strict austerity. Yeltsin reacted

with the "Pinochet option." He issued decree 1400 dissolving

parliament and abolishing the constitution. Two days later,

parliament voted 636 - 2 to impeach him, and battle lines were

drawn.

Yeltsin sent troops to surround parliament and cut off power,

heat and phone lines. The army backed him and he pressed on. He

then proceeded to dissolve all city and regional councils in the

country. Then, on October 4, 1993, he ordered the army to storm

the parliament, set it ablaze and "defend Russia's new

capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy." The

assault took about 500 lives, wounded nearly 1000 others with

the enthusiastic support from the West in headlines like the

Washington Post proclaiming "Victory Seen for Democracy" in

Russia. Some democracy.

Yeltsin now had unchecked dictatorial power, the West had its

man in Moscow, and shock therapy had an open field to inflict

wreckage on Russia's people who didn't know what him them as it

unfolded. A corporatist state replaced a communist one, and its

apparatchiks were winners along with a handful of western mutual

fund managers who made "dizzying returns investing in newly

privatized Russian companies." In addition, "a clique of

nouveaux billionaires" (17 in all called "the oligarchs") were

empowered to strip mine the country of its wealth and ship

profits offshore at the rate of $2 billion a month.

As a result, Yeltsin's popularity plunged so he did what all

desperate leaders do to hold power with the next election to

worry about. He began a war in 1994 in the breakaway Chechen

republic killing 100,000 civilians by the late 90s. Elections

were held in 1996, and Yeltsin won by overcoming his low

approval ratings with huge oligarch-funding and near-total

control of television coverage. He then quietly handed power to

Vladimir Putin on December 31, 1999 without an election but with

the stipulation he was exempt from criminal prosecution. His

legacy was devastating with Klein noting "never have so many

lost so much in so short a time." When Russia's 1998 financial

crisis hit:

-- 80% of Russia's farmers were bankrupt;

-- around 70,000 states factories had closed;

-- an "epidemic" of unemployment raged;

-- before shock therapy in 1989, two million Russians lived in

poverty on less than $4 a day; by the mid-90s, the World Bank

estimated 74 million were impoverished and by 1996 conditions

for 25% (almost 37 million) Russians were "desperate" and the

country's underclass remained permanent;

-- Russians drink twice as much now as before; painkilling and

hard drug use increased 900%, and HIV/AIDS threatens to become

epidemic with a 20-fold jump in infections since 1995; suicides

are also rising, and violent crime increased more than fourfold; and

-- Russia's population is declining by 700,000 a year with

capitalism having already having killed off 10% of it as one

more example of free market-inflicted disaster. That's the brave

new world disease spreading everywhere with another

scorched-earth stop below. Friedman called it "freedom."

The Looting of Asia

In the summer of 1997, economic crisis hit Asia from no apparent

cause beyond rumors the Thai bhat was in trouble, and Thailand

didn't have enough dollars to back it. Hot money in became an

electronic stampede out with "Asian Contagion" unleashed and

heading for Indonesia, South Korea and other so-called Asian

Tiger countries that were fast-growth miracles until they

crashed together with the plight of one affecting the others. It

then got worse and spread to Latin America and Russia with US

markets also affected briefly in 1997 and then again with a

severe jolt in the summer of 1998.

The 1997 Asian panic was crippling with $600 billion in stock

market wealth taking decades to build wiped out in a year. Klein

notes "a classic fear cycle" ignited the crisis that might have

been contained by the same type "quick, decisive loan" rescue

package offered Mexico in 1994 in their so-called Tequila

Crisis. It would have been a strong signal to markets the US

Treasury and international lending agencies wouldn't let the

Asian Tigers fail. No help came, and the message instead was:

"Don't help Asia." Why? Because "Asia's catastrophe was an

opportunity (for predatory western corporations and vulture

investors) in disguise."

Asian Tigers grew by protecting their markets and barring

foreign companies from ownership of land or national firms. They

also restricted imports from the West and Japan and instead

built up their own domestic markets. Western predators wanted

unfettered entry to the region with the right to scoop up the

best Asian companies but needed a way to do it. Now they had it

from an event Klein calls "the fall of a second Berlin Wall," as

important to western capital as the first one.

Enter the IMF with crisis-struck Asian countries too sick to

resist it. They needed help, and the lending agency had plenty

to offer on similar terms as to previous crisis recipients. With

economies in trouble and empty treasuries, the Tigers got no

choice. First, they had to remove all "trade and investment

protectionism and activist state intervention that were the key

ingredients of the Asian miracle." IMF also demanded big

spending cuts, "flexible" workforces (meaning mass layoffs and

constrained wages and benefits), privatized basic services, and

the rest of the package they demand for loans.

The regional toll was devastating with the International Labor

Organization estimating 24 million lost jobs along with "what

was so remarkable about the region's 'miracle' in the first

place: its large and growing middle class." In addition, 20

million people fell into the "planned misery" of poverty,

reversing an earlier trend reducing it. Women and children

suffered most with families selling daughters to human sex

traffickers to survive as child prostitution had a new growth

market.

So did Wall Street as IMF structural adjustments put "pretty

much everything in Asia....up for sale" in the affected

countries. The more markets panicked, the lower asking prices

became, and the more pressured hurting companies were to sell

out for what they could get or face bankruptcy. It was a bonanza

for buyers, and major deals went through in a great fire sale at

bargain prices. Asia became hugely transformed with hundreds of

local brands replaced by western transnational ones. The New

York Times called it "the world's biggest going-out-of-business

sale." It also became an early glimpse of post-9/11 disaster

capitalism - a way for corporate predators to exploit crises in

what's become common practice in the age of "terror" creating

opportunities galore and big profits for well-connected firms.

Klein notes the Asian crisis never ended as desparation took

root after 24 million people lost jobs in two years. No nation

handles that, and the fallout can be unpredictable. It led to a

rise in religious extremism in Indonesia and Thailand and "the

explosive growth in the child sex trade." Unemployment is still

high and layoffs continue with new foreign owners demanding

higher profits with jobs disappearing to provide them.

Eventually things settle down but never to where they once were.

Throwing people overboard, displacing small farmers and business

owners and crushing unions means those affected stay that way.

"They end up in slums, now home to one billion people (and

rising); they end up in brothels or in cargo ship containers.

They are the disinherited (or what) German poet Rainer Maria

Rilke (called) 'ones to whom neither the past nor the future

belongs.' " They're the human wreckage left behind by countries

swallowing Chicago School economic medicine. Its promised

miracle is people-poison but not for vulture investors thriving

on it. Disaster capitalism is on a roll, and its growth market

potential is unlimited and guaranteed to continue unless mass

public outrage stops it as one day it will.

Part 5 - The Rise of the Disaster Capitalism Complex -

Shock Therapy in the USA

Richard Nixon knew before the rest of us that Donald Rumsfeld is

"a ruthless little bastard." He also has a knack for making

enemies even inside the Pentagon he ran as Defense Secretary. He

planned to "reinvent warfare for the twenty-first century

(making it) more psychological than physical, more spectacle

than struggle, and far more profitable" than ever before. Talk

aside, he wanted to revolutionize the military by running it

like the corporate world, and that meant using methods like

outsourcing and branding. His idea was for fewer full-time

troops, more as-needed ones from the Reserves and National

Guard, and a lot of backup help from private contractors like

Blackwater USA for security and Halliburton for a range of

functions unrelated to soldiering. He wanted less staff and more

tax dollars diverted to private companies. The Pentagon brass

wasn't pleased, but Rumsfeld was boss and Dick Cheney backed him.

Klein calls them both "proto-disaster capitalists" who practice

"the central tenet of the Bush regime (that) the job of

government is not to govern but to subcontract." The

privatization mania was kick-started in the Reagan era, but Bill

Clinton bought it as well. Now the feeling is anything

government can do, private business can do better so let them.

That means fire departments, prisons, public schools, public

health, data management, border control and even parts of the

military. As Klein explained: "crisis-exploiting

methods....honed over the previous three decades would be used

to (privatize) the infrastructure of disaster creation

and....response. Friedman's crisis theory was going postmodern

(to create a) privatized police state" by auctioning it off.

"Then came 9/11, and the idea of hollowing out government seemed

opposite of what a frightened public wanted - a strong central

government to protect them. Bush promised it in speeches, but

"his inner circle had no intention of converting to

Keynesianism." September 11 security failures only reinforced

their belief that private firms could handle the challenge

better than government, and that meant transferring hundreds of

billions of public dollars to corporate pockets. The Bush

administration exploited shock and fear "to push through its

radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from

war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture."

Mass disorientation post-9/11 provided the opportunity, and the

"war on terror" became a "bold evolution of shock

therapy....built to be private from the start" to capitalize on

it. It came in two stages. First, policing, surveillance,

detention and war-making powers of the executive were

dramatically increased though nothing in the Constitution

permits it. Then, the whole package, including occupation and

"reconstruction," was outsourced to well-connected private firms

that responded with generous campaign funds to keep the mutually

reinforcing daisy chain humming. Using the ploy of fighting

"terrorism," the homeland disaster capitalism complex emerged as

a full-blown new economy and what Klein calls "a virtual fourth

branch of government."

The Bush administration's idea of government, with security as

one function, wasn't to provide it but to buy it at cost-plus

market prices with lots of latitude for the plus. Just as the

internet launched the dot-com bubble, from 9/11 emerged the

disaster capitalism one, and it was off to the races "in an ad

hoc....chaotic fashion."

Fighting "terrorism" is big business, and one of the first

opportunities was the market for surveillance cameras with 30

million of them installed in the US, billions of hours of

footage, analytic software to scan it, digital image enhancement

to help it, and information management and data mining

technology to handle all data government collects on everyone

and everything. September 11 unlocked the potential, a huge new

growth market was created, and protection from terror became

more important than big brother watching. In six short years, an

industry that barely existed is now much larger than Hollywood

or the music business, and its potential looks limitless.

Klein calls it "an unprecedented convergence of unchecked police

powers and unchecked capitalism, a merger of the shopping mall

and the secret prison" in a frightening brave new world most

people barely understand or know exists. It generates enormous

wealth that creates a powerful incentive for its winners to sell

fear for more of it and partnering with government makes it

easy, especially the kind in power now.

Capitalism Becomes Corporatism in a Corporatist State

Proto-disaster capitalism defines the Bush administration as

crises, wars and other disasters "conflate with what's good for

Lockheed, Halliburton, Carlyle and (Rumsfeld's old company)

Gilead" Sciences. Cataclysm is a growth business that in the

current climate involved "some of the seediest and most blatant

corruption scandals in recent history," war-profiteering in the

hundreds of billions, and a "whirling revolving door between

government and business" taken to a new level. The limitless

homeland security and war-profiteering markets are so alluring,

hundreds of administration officials can't wait to cash in like

earlier ones did. Klein names some noted ones like Richard

Pearle, James Baker, Henry Kissinger, Paul Bremer, George

Shultz, John Ashcroft, Tom Ridge, Rudi Giuliani, Richard Clarke,

James Woolsey, Joe Allbaugh, and Michael Brown who wrote an

infamous memo to a fellow FEMA staffer asking: "Can I quit now?"

That's the whole idea in a get rich quick environment - get an

impressive government title, stay in office long enough in a

department handing out big contracts, collect insider

information with market value, then quit and cash in. Klein

calls public service now "little more than a reconnaissance

mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex." She

also quotes Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on

Government Oversight (a nonprofit watchdog group) saying: "It's

impossible to tell where the government ends and Lockeed

begins." She also believes that corporatist economic goals and

right to limitless profit seeking lie at the heart of the most

committed neocons who talk a good game but value great wealth

their top priority. They partnered permanent war and homeland

security with the disaster capitalism complex to get it, and

it's hard indeed telling where one ends and the other begins.

But it's centerpiece project is Iraq, and its headquarters is in

Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.

Part 6 - Iraq, Full Circle - Overshock - Erasing A Country

Perhaps no country provides a greater untapped opportunity for

unfettered capitalism than Iraq. It represents the planet's last

remaining low-hanging oil resources fruit with potentially more

of it than Saudi Arabia according to some oil analysts. It's

also strategically located in the heart of the oil-rich Middle

East (with two-thirds of proved reserves) Klein calls the

"crusade's....final frontier." Iraq's potential alone is so

enormous it made war the way to crack open its market potential

because peaceful methods hadn't worked. Its conquest would then

serve as "a different model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim

world" that could become a catalyst to opening the whole region.

The potential is a giant free-trade zone, the illusion of newly

created democracies, and the freedom for unfettered capitalism

"to feed off freshly privatized states." Klein explained this as

"the model theory," Iraq as the model, with the idea not being

nation-building but nation-creating. But what of the nation

already there that's known as the "cradle of civilization." It

would have to be erased, and Chicago School fundamentalism would

create a new one in its place in its own image with a blank

slate to work from.

Bush administration war planners considered the full array of

possible shocks and went with them all - blitzkrieg "shock and

awe," elaborate PsyOps, use of fear as a weapon, repressive

occupation, mass detention and torture, and "the fastest and

most sweeping political and economic shock therapy program

attempted anywhere....From the start, the invasion was

(Washington's message) to the world....in the language of

fireballs, deafening explosions and city-shattering quakes." It

said dare challenge US authority, and you're next. Shock and awe

planners designed its strategy to deter "the public will of the

adversary to resist (to render) the adversary completely

impotent" from the effects of sensory deprivation and overload

inducing disorientation and regression.

In March, 2003, Baghdad got it on a massive scale. The ministry

of communication and four telephone exchanges was blitzed and

set ablaze cutting off millions of phones and preventing people

from learning if their family and friends were alive. Television

and radio transmitters were also destroyed along with the

electrical grid plunging the city into "an awful, endless

night." Residents were trapped in their homes unable to speak or

hear each other or see outside at night. "LIke a prisoner

destined for a CIA black site, the entire city was shackled and

hooded. Next it was stripped."

Unchecked looting did the most to erase the "country that

was....Gone are 80% of the museum's 170,000 priceless

objects....the national library is a blackened ruin....the

Ministry of Religious Affairs....was left a burned-out shell

(and the) national heritage was lost." Paul Bremer's senior

economic advisor, Peter McPherson, wasn't bothered. It made his

job of radically downsizing the state and selling it off easier.

Cleaning the slate and erasing the nation was proceeding fast.

It "all unfolded in a matter of weeks." Baghdad was "open for

business," and the fire sale for its assets began with US firms

having first dibs on everything, except oil, and that would come

later as it has now but is stalled.

While he was there, Paul Bremer was Washington's man in Baghdad

charged with readying the launch of Iraq, Inc. He saw to it laws

were passed smoothing the way for Chicago School shock therapy.

Two hundred firms were to be privatized immediately to get

"inefficient state enterprises into private (predatory)

hands...." New economic laws followed that comprised a "wish

list....foreign investors and donor agencies dream of,"

according to The Economist. The corporate tax was cut from 45%

to a flat 15%; another allowed foreign companies to own 100% of

Iraqi assets and take all profits out of the country; all

restrictions on imports were removed; and investors could sign

deals and leases lasting 40 years so no future government could

change them.

Iraq became a bold new experiment with invasion, occupation and

reconstruction transforming the country into a fully privatized

new market "with a huge pot of public money" doing it. Klein

called the adventure an "anti-Marshall plan," mirror opposite

the post-WW II plan, and guaranteed "to further undermine Iraq's

badly weakened industrial sector and send Iraqi unemployment

soaring." No funds went to Iraqis or their industries nor was

anything done to build a sustainable economy, or rebuild local

infrastructure like electrical grids, schools, and hospitals.

Iraqis played no role in planning, local firms weren't even

given "subsubsubcontracts," jobs were destroyed not created

while thousands of serf-type foreign workers were brought in and

abused, and critically needed social services were ignored.

Another goal was for a fully outsourced, hollow government with

no function so "core" a contractor couldn't handle it for

profit. It was pure pillage, but nothing went as planned. "Each

miscalculation provoked escalating levels of resistance" with

occupying forces responding with counter repression "sending the

country into an inferno of (unending) violence." Everything

"tearing Iraq apart today - rampant corruption (and unfettered

plundering), ferocious sectarianism, the surge in religious

fundamentalism and the tyranny of death squads (including US

'Salvador option' ones) - escalated in lockstep with....Bush's

anti-Marshall Plan." In that environment, the country became "a

cutthroat capitalist laboratory" for shameless pillage. Iraq

today is a model, a metaphor for everything wrong with Chicago

School dogma showing it to be savage, ruthless, heartless and

bankrupt.

Its implementation is the core reason for resistance that

continues and grows, but it caught war planners off guard when

it began. They thought the shock and awe of attack, invasion,

occupation and rapid transformation on the ground would be

disorienting. Instead, Iraqis demanded a say from the start in

how their country would be rebuilt and transformed. "And it was

the Bush administration's response to this unexpected turn of

events that generated the most blowback of all" that became even

worse by crushing democracy and effectively installing a puppet

government in the fortified Green Zone masquerading as a real one.

The result was predictable and so was the harsh response - mass

detentions, aggressive interrogations, administration-sanctioned

gloves off torture, and US unleashed "Salvador option" death

squads making it hard to know who's doing the killing and

blasting away at selected targets. What is clear are the

consequences - "millions of psychologically and physically

(traumatized, angry and) shattered people, first by Saddam,

(then) by war, (then) by one another (and the occupation).

Bush's in-house disaster capitalists didn't wipe Iraq clean,

they just stirred it up....Countries, like people, don't reboot

to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep

breaking....Which....requires more blasting - upping the dosage...."

Slowly, it's disappearing, disintegrating, erasing an entire

country - women behind veils and doors, children from schools,

four million displaced, Iraqi industry collapsed, a new growth

industry in kidnapping for ransom, a country so unstable

investment is high-risk, and even the heavily fortified Green

Zone is too unsafe for George Bush to visit on one of his

"surprise trips" to the country. Bremer's charge was to build a

"corporate utopia" but instead unleashed a "ghoulish dystopia,"

and, on an April, 2004 visit to the country, Klein thought she

was witnessing a mass contractor exodus with 1500 of them

leaving in one week.

Now she's not sure. Big investors like Wal-Mart, HSBC and

Procter and Gamble never showed up, and in December, 2006, the

Pentagon announced a new project to get state-owned factories

operating with plans to buy cement and machinery from them

instead of the usual corporate suppliers. Does it signal a

change of disaster capitalism tactics? Not at all, and it's

likely this amounts to no more than tinkering and tokenism that

in the end will do little for the local economy and even less to

reduce hardened anger.

The Big Oil drafted Hydrocarbon Law is still a work in progress

but already inflamed things further, and well it should. It's an

anti-Marshall Plan project at its worst, and in whatever final

form is a shameless act of theft on the grandest scale. It's a

privatization blueprint for plunder giving Big Oil a bonanza and

Iraqis a mere sliver of their own resources. In one draft,

Iraq's National Oil Company got exclusive control of just 17 of

the country's 80 known oil fields with all yet-to-be-discovered

deposits set aside for foreign investors. Even worse, Big Oil is

free to expropriate all earnings with no obligation to invest

anything in Iraq's economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire

local workers, respect union rights, or share new technologies.

In addition, foreign investors are guaranteed long-term

contracts up to 30 or more years, dispossessing Iraq and its

people of their own resources in a naked scheme to steal them

and deny them the one source of revenue able to rebuild their

shattered country and lives.

The battle for Iraq continues that involves clinging to if not

winning the hearts and minds on the home front as well. The

country is a wasteland, the nation creation project bankrupt,

and the prospect for success bad and worsening. Iraq has been a

graveyard for past imperial powers, and it may just be a matter

of time until history again repeats. The Brits in the South know

it, and after four and a half futile years are tiptoeing out to

the dismay of their "coalition" partners. One day, Washington

may join them, and for shocked Iraqis it can't come too soon.

For now, though, the shock continues, and Iraq more closely

resembles hell than "the cradle of civilization."

Part 7 - The Movable Green Zone: Blanking the Beach - "The

Second Tsunami"

For coastal Sri Lankans, like those in Arugam Bay, December 26,

2004 felt more like 1945 Hiroshima than life before that fateful

day changing everything for them. A devastating tsunami took

250,000 lives and left 2.5 million homeless throughout the

region. It affected Arugam Bay, "a fishing and faded resort

village" on the island's east coast that government was

showcasing in its plans to "build back better." Indeed, but not

for the villagers hoteliers, developers and the government

wanted removed but weren't sure how until nature did what they

couldn't. Everything was gone, and a blank slate remained for

what the tourist industry long wanted - "a pristine beach (in a

prime area), scrubbed clean of all the messy signs of people

working, a vacation Eden. It was the same up and down the coast

once rubble was cleared....paradise."

"New rules" forbade homes on the beach and a "buffer zone"

imposed insured it. Beaches were off-limits, displaced Sri

Lankans were shoved into temporary grim barracks camps inland,

and "menacing, machine-gun-wielding soldiers" patrolled to keep

them there.

Tourist operators were treated differently. They were encouraged

to build and expand on prime vacated oceanfront land. It was all

in a document called the "Arugam Bay Resource Development Plan"

to transform the former fishing village into a "high-end

'boutique tourism destination' (with) five-star resorts,

luxury....chalets, (and even a) floatplane pier and helipad."

Arugam Bay was to be a model for transforming up to 30 similar

"tourism zones" into a "South Asian Riviera." When the plan

leaked out, people in Arugam Bay and around the country were

outraged.

The grand scheme to remake Sri Lanka was around two years

earlier and began when the civil war ended. It was to be the

country's reentry into the world economy as one of the last

remaining uncolonized places globalization hadn't touched, and a

high-end tourism project was seen as the right option. It would

be a luxury destination for the "plutonomy set," once a few

changes were made. Government's 80% land ownership had to be

opened to private buyers, more "flexible" labor laws were

needed, and modernized infrastructure had to be developed with

World Bank and IMF providing funds on their usual shock therapy

terms discussed above. With mass public opposition to the ideas,

it wouldn't be easy, and before the tsunami hit, militant

strikes and street protests held it back.

Sri Lanka's president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, was elected on an

"overtly antiprivatization platform," but the tsunami changed

everything and helped her see "the free market light." Four days

after the disaster, her government passed a bill "pav(ing) the

way for water privatization." It also raised gasoline prices and

began crafting legislation to privatize the electricity company

in pieces. It was like a second tsunami, and the same scheme

followed hurricane Mitch in October, 1998 with Hondurus,

Guatemala and Nicaragua hardest hit like New Orleans discussed

below.

Klein explained when the tsunami struck in 2004, "Washington was

ready to take the Mitch model (now familiar) to the next level -

aiming not just at individuals laws but at direct corporate

control over the construction." Sri Lanka's president complied

and created a new body called the Task Force to Rebuild the

Nation fully empowered to proceed. On it were the most powerful

business leaders from banking and industry including key players

from the beach tourism sector. Absent were villagers, farmers,

environmentalists or even a "disaster-reconstruction

specialist." Klein called the task force a new type corporate

coup d'etat mother nature made possible.

In ten days, then had a complete reconstruction blueprint from

"housing to highways" with aid money directed to corporate

development and nothing for disaster victims. They were destined

to become permanent shantytown dwellers similar to the kinds

ringing most Global South cities and populating Global North

inner ones. Similar stories of law changes and land grabs came

out of other affected Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia,

Thailand, the Maldives and India where around 150 Tamil Nadu

displaced women had to sell their kidneys for food.

A year after the tsunami, NGO ActionAid surveyed the aftermath

in five Asian countries and found the same pattern everywhere -

residents barred from rebuilding, living in militarized

temporary camps, hotels "showered with incentives," no

restoration of homes lost, and "entire ways of life" destroyed.

In July, 2006 in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers ended their

cease-fire and war resumed. It's hard knowing if disaster

capitalism had a role because peace was always precarious, the

government offered little, and continued violence at least

promised a chance for something better before and more than ever

now given the choice between disaster capitalism and hope.

Disaster Apartheid - A World of Green and Red Zones

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and

flooded New Orleans. The well-off left town, "checked into

hotels, and called their insurance companies." For 120,000

others without cars or means of transportation, it was another

story. They depended on the state, waited for help and got none.

FEMA is supposed to provide it, too, but it was one of the many

government functions Bush gutted advancing savage capitalism at

the expense of public service.

Katrina was disastrous for those affected, but Milton Friedman

saw "an opportunity" in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. It was easy

for him to say from his luxury San Francisco digs as well as his

like-minded ideologues who met 14 days later to plan how to

pounce on the tragedy for profit. They produced 32 Chicago

School-type schemes packaged as "hurricane relief" that was a

wish list for developers and hell for the displaced. They ranged

from suspending Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster

areas and making the whole area a flat tax free enterprise zone

to erasing public schools by giving parents vouchers for

privately-run charter ones. They also wanted environmental

regulations suspended on the Gulf Coast and permission to drill

in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that showed how far

afield they'd go to capitalize on the shock of a local tragedy.

Things moved fast, and within weeks "the Gulf Coast became a

domestic laboratory for the same kind of (outsourcing schemes)

pioneered in Iraq." The names were familiar with Halliburton

first in line along with Bechtel, Blackwater USA and a host of

others homing in for the kill. Billions were at stake, and no

open bidding was required, just good connections. As Klein put

it: "within days of the storm it was as if Baghdad's Green

Zone....lifted from....the Tigris and landed on the bayou....As

in Iraq, government once again played the role of a cash machine

equipped for both withdrawals and deposits." Corporations took

one and repaid with the other in sizable campaign contributions

in a pattern now familiar.

They also ignored unemployed locals and relied instead on cheap

imported undocumented labor easily exploited. The Bush

administration showed its type compassion, too, with $40 billion

in budget cuts for essentials like Medicaid, food stamps,

student loans and more so funds could go to contractors and the

wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, a familiar pattern.

In visiting Iraq, Klein first thought the "Green Zone phenomenon

was unique to the war in Iraq." She then discovered it emerges

wherever disaster capitalism lands with the same stark divisions

between the included and excluded. It was evident in New Orleans

with "gated green zones and raging red" ones - not from flood

damage but from predatory free market solutions only for the

privileged.

The Bush administration refused emergency funds for public

sector salaries so 3000 city workers were fired. Charity

Hospital closed and still isn't open. Public transit was gutted

losing half its workers, and most public housing is still

boarded up and empty by design. Some sits on prime land close to

the French Quarter, developers want it for luxury properties,

and New Orleans is being erased for profit just like Iraq. It

was all planned with the storm the excuse to do it.

Earlier "creative destruction" opportunities generated "rust

belts," neglected neighborhoods, and underfunded inner city

public schools. Creative neglect is at work as well as the

American Society of Civil Engineers in 2007 said it will cost

$1.5 trillion over five years to bring essential public

infrastructure back to standard. Instead it continues to

deteriorate while the well-off withdraw into gated communities

and luxury condos with all their needs met by private providers.

Klein calls this trend a "state-within-a-state that is muscular"

and as able as the public one is frail. It no longer can

function without help from contractors as government is hollowed

so business can prosper.

New Orleans is a window on the future in which survival depends

on the ability to pay, and those who can't are discarded like

trash. It promises a world of protected Green Zones with those

outside it neglected, abandoned, ignored and forgotten.

Losing the Peace Incentive - Israel As Warning

Conventional wisdom once thought economic growth and prosperity

required peace and stability. No longer. Post-9/11, the terror

scare was ignited, wars rage in Iraq and Afghanistan, more war

is threatened on Iran, oil prices touched $80 a barrel, the WTO

Doha Round trade talks collapsed, and "a golden period of

broadly shared growth" prevails (at least until the recent

credit crunch). How come?

Conflict and global instability don't just benefit arms related

industries. They help the high-tech security sector, heavy

construction, private health care companies treating soldiers

and oil and gas. The business bonanza in Iraq alone is hugely

profitable with all sorts of companies cashing in. The same goes

for New Orleans and Gulf Coast overall. Terrorist attacks are

good for business. The more destruction, the more to rebuild - a

great market for disaster capitalism it pounces on with every

incentive to assure the trend continues unchallenged, and why

not when government throws public tax dollars at it.

Today, "instability is the new stability," and Israel is its

"Exhibit A." In the post-1993 Oslo years, the Jewish state

designed its economy to expand in response to escalating

violence at home at first and now everywhere. The nation's

technology firms pioneered the homeland security industry, and

they still dominate it. In addition, its economy overall is the

most "tech-dependent in the world," according to Business Week

magazine, twice as dependent as the US representing half its

exports.

Following the 2000 dot-com crash, Israel's leading tech

companies needed a new global niche, and the government

encouraged expansion beyond information and communications

technologies into security and surveillance. It launched a slew

of start-ups "specializing in everything from 'search and nail,'

data mining, surveillance cameras, to terrorist profiling." It

was perfect timing for a market that exploded post-9/11, and

Israel's economy is thriving with one of the fastest growth

rates in the world. Klein calls the country "a kind of shopping

mall for homeland security technologies," and Forbes magazine

says it's "the go-to country for antiterrorism technologies."

Today, the country's counterterrorism industry is booming, and

its defense-related exports make it the fourth largest arms

dealer in the world, larger than the UK.

Klein notes: "With more and more countries turning themselves

into fortresses (with walls and high-tech fences part of it),

'security barriers' may prove to be the biggest disaster market

of all." In the case of Israel, it's also another "Chicago

School frontier marked by rapid stratification of society

between rich and poor inside the state." The security boom

fueled a wave of privatizations accompanied by social program

cuts, "an epidemic of inequality," and the virtual end of Labor

Zionism. Klein notes 24.4% of Israelis live in poverty,

including 35.2% of children, compared to 8% twenty years earlier

(but she doesn't say if these figures include Arab Israeli

citizens comprising 20% of the population). She concludes

Israeli industry no longer fears war as it thrives on it.

Today, Baghdad, New Orleans and suburban Atlanta Sandy Springs

are glimpses of a gated community future run by the disaster

capitalism complex. But it's in its most advanced state in

Israel - "an entire country (turned into) a fortified gated

community, surrounded by locked-out people living in (the)

permanently excluded red zones" of Gaza and the West Bank that

aren't just left out but are encroached on and under attack.

Disaster capitalism thrives in this environment so it yearns to

bring it to a neighborhood near you, and that's a prospect to fear.

Hopeful Signs - Shock Wears Off

Klein quotes Canada's National Post editor, Terence Corcoran,

wondering if the Chicago School movement Milton Friedman

launched could continue as before after his November, 2006

death. The movement's pinnacle was capturing the Congress in

1994 that it lost in 2006 for three reasons - public

disenchantment with the Iraq war, political corruption, and a

growing class divide unseen since the Gilded Age of the "robber

barons" or roaring 20s. Each factor related to core Chicago

School economics - privatization, deregulation and cutting

government services. In the US, it created a wealth disparity

economist Paul Krugman calls unprecedented while poverty is

growing and the middle class dying in the richest country in the

world that's also the least caring one.

Everywhere Chicago School fundamentalism shows up, the results

are the same. A small elite gains hugely while most others

don't. But cracks in the ideology are visible as many of its

front line adherents got caught up "in an astonishing array of

scandals and criminal proceedings (from the) earliest

laboratories in Latin America to the most recent one in Iraq."

Before he died, Pinochet was under house arrest. In Argentina,

courts stripped former junta leaders of immunity. Bolivia's de

Lozada got chased from the country and is now a wanted man. In

Russia, many of the oligarch fraudsters were either in exile or

jail. In Canada, newspaper magnate Conrad Black was convicted of

fraud. In the US, a rogue's gallery of CEOs were charged and

convicted as well, and other high level types were caught up in

scandals like lobbyist Jack Abramoff's influence-peddling one.

Klein notes another hopeful sign as well - shock effects were

beginning to wear off, and in Argentina's 2001 economic crisis

forced out five presidents in three weeks. It was spreading and

most apparent in Latin America where it began with opponents of

Chicago School doctrine winning elections like Hugo Chavez in

Venezuela, but he wasn't alone. It showed a renewed faith in

democracy and condemnation of Washington Consensus dogma when

people made a choice at the polls in free and open elections.

Today's movements aren't replicas of the past, and one of the

differences "is an acute awareness of the need for protection

from shocks of the past" - coups, foreign shock therapists,

torturers, debt and currency shocks.

They've learned from the past and are building "shock absorbers

into their organizing models." It's in movements less

centralized, Venezuela's grassroots community councils, Brazil's

Landless Peoples Movement, and the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico

where thousands battled police since a year ago May and still

won't quit. In addition, governments are rejecting old trade

models and adopting new ones like Venezuela's ALBA bartering

system making it less vulnerable to turbulent markets.

They're also rejecting World Bank and IMF debt slavery, and the

change is dramatic. In 2005, 80% of IMF's lending portfolio was

to Latin America. It dropped to 1% in 2007. And IMF's 2005 $81

billion dollar portfolio shrank to $11.8 billion in three years

with nearly all of it in Turkey. The World Bank is also being

rejected. Venezuela severed its relationship, and Ecuador's

Raphael Correa suspended bank loans and declared its country

representative persona non grata in an extraordinary move the

equivalent of a well-deserved slap in the face. In addition, the

Doha Round trade talks collapsed, and some observers thought it

signaled "globalization is dead," or if not, it's at least

breathing hard.

Resistance is showing up in Europe, too, with voters in France

and the Netherlands rejecting the European Constitution the

French call "savage capitalism" and a codification of the

corporatist order they reject. The Putin era in Russia is also

seen as a backlash against the shock therapy of the 90s that

impoverished millions of its people still left out and many

desperate. The same is true in South Africa where people in

slums abandoned the ANC to protest against their broken Freedom

Charter promises. It even surfaced in China where, according to

official government sources, 87,000 large protests were held

involving over four million workers and peasants. They won major

victories for new rural area spending, better health care, and

pledges to eliminate education fees.

Millions of Lebanese were in the streets as well that wasn't a

show of strength by Hezbollah as the major media characterized

it. It was a rejection of the Siniora government's willingness

to accept Chicago School reforms in exchange for billions of

needed reconstruction loans to recover from Israel's summer,

2006 blitzkrieg attack. Klein called their actions "a poor and

working-class people's revolt."

Examples are everywhere but so far just ripples in a pond

needing greater numbers for real change. They were in

tsunami-struck Thailand where, unlike in Sri Lanka, many

settlements were successfully rebuilt in months but not by the

government offering no aid. So hundreds of villagers "engaged in

what they called land 'reinvasions,' " defied their government

with direct-action, and rebuilt their communities making them

better than before the destruction.

The same thing happened in New Orleans. In February, 2007,

housing project residents "reinvaded" their old homes and

reclaimed them in another example of "people rebuilding for

themselves" and bypassing government indifferent to their needs

and rights. Klein calls this phenomenon "the antithesis of the

disaster capitalism complex's ethos." The actions are communal

with people helping each other, rebuilding rubble, and aiming to

end the erasure "of history, of culture, of memory."

It's a message of collective shock resistance replacing shock,

but it's too early to declare victory. The signs are

encouraging, and with enough of them who knows what's possible.

Hopefully a better world replacing the bankrupt notion that

markets work best and government is the problem. That's an idea

for the trash bin of history where it belongs and where it one

day will be.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at

lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to

The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on

TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.