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| WISDOM Y INSPIRACION www.geocities.com/libertadkorps/wisdomyinspiracion Naomi Klein interviewed by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, Nov 17 2008 "Amy, the last time I was on Democracy Now, we were talking about Henry Paulson�s original three-page proposal, the $700 billion stickup, where he basically said, 'Give me $700 billion. Don�t ask any questions. I can never be challenged by any arm of government or any court of law.' Now, that aspect of the bailout was supposedly dealt with.... But now we�re finding out that, in fact, Henry Paulson has achieved his original goal by stealth, because there is no accountability, and lawmakers are very hesitant to challenge this, because they�re afraid of causing a run on the banks, of causing more market instability.... "This is a classic example of what I call disaster capitalism or the shock doctrine: Banks had been pushing for this tax break for many years; they weren�t able to get it through during normal circumstances; but in a crisis they push it through the back door when everybody is focused on�well the point they pushed this through, September 30th, was the worst economic crisis and people were focused on the collapse of Lehman.... So why is it that we are not questioning this solution, the so-called solution to the crisis, which is creating even bigger banks, banks that will once again be too big to fail? We�re really heading to a future where there will be three or four large banks, all of them too big to fail... which means that if they get themselves into trouble again, they will be bailed out again.... "This bailout is really not a bailout at all; it�s a parting gift to people Bush once referred to as 'my base.' I liken it to what European colonial rulers used to do when they finally realized they had to hand over power; they would loot the treasury on the way out the door.... But we�re supposed to somehow not notice that $250 billion, an astronomical sum, was just wasted, going to bonuses, going to shareholder payouts, going to CEO salaries.... "This crisis isn�t over, and the same people who justified this bailout, who clamored for this bailout, are the very people who are going to turn around and say to Obama, 'We can�t afford universal healthcare. In fact, we can�t afford what meager services Americans get in exchange for their tax dollars, like Social Security payments.'... So this really is reverse Robin Hood gone mad. The money has been given to the people who needed it least, and it�s going to be used to justify austerity measures imposed against those who need it most. It�s going to be used to justify cuts to food stamps. It�s going to be used to justify cuts to Social Security, to healthcare, to justify why more ambitious plans for a national healthcare program, for green energy are not affordable.... What we�re seeing is a resurrection of discredited free trade agenda.... The Colombia free trade deal, the International Monetary Fund, the Doha round, they�re all coming back from the dead at precisely the moment we should be burying, for good, this whole agenda of deregulation." Naomi Klein, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM, Henry Holt 2007 pp 5-6 "One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was Milton Friedman, grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism.... Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions, many run at a profit, that would be subsidized by the state.... The administration of George W Bush backed up their plans with tens of millions of dollars to convert New Orleans schools into 'charter schools,' publicly funded institutions run by private entities.... Within nineteen months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools. Before Hurricane Katrina, the school board had run 123 public schools; now it ran just 4. Before that storm, there had been 7 charter schools in the city; now there were 31. New Orleans teachers used to be represented by a strong union; now the union's contract had been shredded, and its forty-seven hundred members had all been fired. Some of the younger teachers were rehired by the charters, at reduced salaries; most were not.... I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, 'disaster capitalism.'" pp 8-9 "Friedman first learned how to exploit a large-scale shock or crisis in the mid-seventies, when he acted as adviser to the Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet.... Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy: tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending, and deregulation. Eventually, Chileans even saw their public schools replaced with voucher-funded private ones. It became known as a 'Chicago School' revolution, since so many of Pinochet's economists had studied under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago.... Pinochet also facilitated the adjustment with his own shock treatments; these were performed in the regime's many torture cells, inflicted on the writhing bodies of those deemed most likely to stand in the way of the capitalist transformation. Many in Latin America saw a direct connection between the economic shocks that impoverished millions and the epidemic of torture that punished hundreds of thousands of people who believed in a different kind of society.... The formula reemerged with far greater violence in Iraq. First came the war, designed according to authors of the Shock and Awe military doctrine, to 'control the adversary's will, perceptions and understanding, and literally to make an adversary impotent to act or react.' Next came the radical economic shock therapy, imposed while the country was still in flames, by US Chief Envoy L Paul Bremer: mass privatization, complete free trade, a 15 percent flat tax, a dramatically downsized government.... When Iraqis resisted, they were rounded up and taken to jails where bodies and minds were met with more shocks, these ones distinctly less metaphorical." pp 10-12 "The three trademark demands--privatization, government deregulation and deep cuts to social spending--tended to be extremely unpopular with citizens.... Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era were in fact committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public.... In Argentina in the seventies, the junta's 'disappearance' of thirty thousand people, most of them leftist activists, was integral to the imposition of the country's Chicago School policies, just as terror has been a partner for the same kind of economic metamorphosis in Chile. In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and subsequent arrests of thousands that freed the hand of the Communist Party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights. In Russia in 1993, it was Boris Yeltsin's decision to send in tanks to set fire to the parliament building and lock up the opposition leaders that cleared the way for the fire-sale privatization that created the country's notorious oligarchs.... In Latin America and Africa in the eighties, it was a debt crisis that forced countries to be 'privatized or die.'... In Asia, it was the financial crisis of 1997-98--almost as devastating as the Great Depression--that humbled the so-called Asian Tigers, cracking open their markets to what the New York Times described as 'the world's biggest going-out-of-business sale.'" pp 14-15 "When the September 11 attacks hit, the White House was packed with Friedman's disciples, including his close friend Donald Rumsfeld. The Bush team seized the moment of collective vertigo with chilling speed--not, as some claimed, because the administration deviously plotted the crisis, but because key figures in the administration were part of a movement that prays for crisis the way drought-struck farmers pray for rain.... The Bush Administration immediately seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the War on Terror, but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry.... This is global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the United States homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all 'evil' abroad.... The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of this complex is to bring the model of for-profit government... in effect, to privatize the government. To kick-start the disaster capitalism complex, the Bush Administration outsourced, with no public debate, many of the most sensitive and core functions of government, from providing health care to soldiers, to interrogating prisoners, to gathering and 'data-mining' information on all of us." pp 18-19 "A more accurate term for a system that erases boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist, but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor... bottomless spending on security... aggressive surveillance... mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties, and often, though not always, torture." p 297 "This points to a nagging and important question about free-market ideologues: Are they 'true believers,' driven by ideology and faith that free markets will cure underdevelopment, as is often asserted, or do the ideas and theories frequently serve as an elaborate rationale to allow people to act on unfettered greed while still invoking an altruistic motive?... Chicago School economics does seem particularly conducive to corruption. Once you accept that profit and greed as practiced on a mass scale create the greatest possible benefits for any society, pretty much any act of personal enrichment can be justified as a contribution to the great creative cauldron of capitalism, generating wealth and spurring economic growth--even if it's only for yourself and your colleagues." pp 300-301 "In 1989 before shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 per day. By the time the shock therapists had administered their bitter medicine in the mid-nineties, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line.... As miserable as life under communism was, with crowded, cold apartments, Russians at least were housed; in 2006 the government admitted that there were 715,000 homeless kids in Russia, and UNICEF has put the number as high as 3.5 million children.... In Russia today, wealth is so stratified that the rich and poor seem to be living not only in different countries but in different centuries. One time zone is downtown Moscow... where oligarchs race around in black Mercedes convoys, guarded by top-of-the-line mercenary soldiers.... In the other time zone, a seventeen-year-old provincial girl, asked about her hopes for the future, replied, 'It's difficult to talk about the twenty-first century when you're sitting here reading by candlelight.... It's the nineteenth century here.'" pp 304-309 "The entire thirty-year history of the Chicago School experiment has been one of mass corruption... from Chile's piranhas, to Argentina's crony privatizations, to Russia's oligarchs, to Enron's energy shell game, to Iraq's 'free fraud zone.' The point of shock therapy is to open up a window for enormous profits to be made very quickly, not despite the lawlessness but precisely because of it.... Under Chicago School economics, the state acts as the colonial frontier, which corporate conquistadors pillage with the same ruthless determination and energy as their predecessors showed when they hauled home gold and silver of the Andes.... Wall Street saw 'green field opportunities' in Chile's phone system, Argentina's airline, Russia's oil fields, Bolivia's water system, the United States' public airwaves, Poland's factories, all built with public wealth, then sold for a trifle.... After every one of these profit frenzies come the promises: next time, there will be firm laws in place before the country's assets are sold off, and the entire process will be watched over by eagle-eyed regulators.... Lawlessness on the frontier, as Adam Smith understood, is not the problem but the point, as much a part of the game as the contrite hand-wringing and pledges to do better next time." pp 562-563 "In December 2006, a month after Friedman died, a UN study found that 'the richest 2 percent of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.' The shift has been starkest in the US, where CEO's made 43 times what the average worker earned in 1980.... By 2005, CEO's earned 411 times as much.... By 2006... Augusto Pinochet was under house arrest.... In Argentina, the courts stripped the country's former junta leaders of immunity, sending ex-president Jorge Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera to jail for life.... In Bolivia, former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada... was wanted on several charges relating to the gunning down of protestors.... In Russia, not only had the Harvard Men been found guilty of fraud, but many of the Russian oligarchs... were either in jail or living in exile.... Enron's Ken Lay, poster boy for the ill effects of energy deregulation, died in July 2006 having been convicted of conspiracy and fraud." pp 565-572 "On the international stage, the staunchest opponents of neoliberal economics were winning election after election. Venezuelan Presidente Hugo Chavez... was reelected for a third term.... Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was reelected as president of Brazil largely because he turned the vote into a referendum on privatization.... Shortly afterward in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, former head of the Sandinistas, made the country's frequent blackouts the center of his winning campaign.... In November 2006, Ecuador's presidential elections turned into a similar ideological battleground. Rafael Correa, a forty-three-year-old leftwing economist, won the vote against Alvaro Noboa, a banana tycoon and one of the richest men in the country.... By then, Bolivian Presidente Evo Morales was already approaching the end of his first year in office. After sending in the army to take back the gas fields from multinational plunderers, he moved on to nationalizing parts of the mining sector. In the same period in Mexico, the results of the fraud-tainted 2006 elections were being contested through the creation of an unprecedented 'parallel government' of the people.... In the Mexican state of Oaxaca... a statewide rebellion against the corruption of the corporatist state raged for months.... Chile and Argentina are both led by politicians who define themselves against their countries' Chicago School experiments.... Chile's Presidente Michelle Bachelet was one of thousands who were victims of Pinochet's reign of terror. In 1975 she and her mother were imprisoned and tortured in Villa Grimaldi.... Her father, a military officer, had refused to go along with the coup and was murdered by Pinochet's men. In December 2006, a month after Friedman's death, Latin American leaders gathered for a historic summit in Bolivia, held in the city of Cochabamba, where a popular uprising against water privatization had forced Bechtel out of the country several years earlier." pp 575-579 "In Brazil, the phenomenon is best seen in the million and a half farmers of the Landless Peoples Movement (MST) who have formed hundreds of cooperatives to reclaim unused land. In Argentina, it is clearest in the movement of 'recovered companies,' two hundred bankrupt businesses that have been resuscitated by their workers, who have turned them into democratically run cooperatives. For the cooperatives, there is no fear of facing an economic shock of investors leaving, because investors had already left.... In Venezuela, Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts, and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 cooperatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers.... Venezuela has emerged as a major lender to other developing countries, allowing them to do an end run around Washington.... Brazil is refusing to enter into a new agreement with the IMF. Nicaragua is negotiating to quit the fund, Venezuela has withdrawn from both the IMF and the World Bank, and even Argentina... has been part of the trend.... President Kirchner said... 'no way in hell are we going to make an agreement again with the IMF.'... In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF's total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent.... The World Bank faces an equally grim future. In April 2007, Ecuador's Presidente Rafael Correa revealed he had suspended all loans from the bank and declared the institution's representative in Ecuador 'persona non grata'-- an extraordinary step.... Evo Morales announced that Bolivia would quit the World Bank's arbitration court.... Paul Wolfowitz was forced to announce his resignation as president of the World Bank in May 2007... The Financial Times reported that when World Bank managers dispensed advice in the developing world, 'they were now laughed at.' Add the collapse of the World Trade Organization talks in 2006 (prompting declarations that 'globalization is dead') and the futures of the three main institutions that had imposed the Chicago School ideology are at risk of extinction.... But the most remarkable mood change is taking place in China. For many years, the raw terror of the Tiananmen Square Massacre succeeded in suppressing popular anger at the erosion of worker rights and deepening rural poverty. Not anymore. According to official government sources, in 2005 there was a staggering 87,000 large protests in China involving more than 4 million workers and peasants." pp 586-588 "Despite all successful attempts to exploit the 2004 Tsunami, memory proved to be an effective tool of resistance.... Dozens of coastal villages were flattened by the wave, but unlike in Sri Lanka, many Thai settlements were successfully built within months.... Thailand's politicians were just as eager as those elsewhere to use the storm as an excuse to evict fishing people and hand over land tenure to large resorts.... Instead, within weeks hundreds of villagers engaged in what they called land 'reinvasions.' They marched past armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off sites where their old houses had been.... All along the Thai coast where the tsunami hit, this kind of direct action reconstruction is the norm.... The results are communities stronger than they were before the wave. The houses on stilts built by Thai villagers in Ban Tung Wah and Baan Nairai are beautiful and sturdy; they are also cheaper, larger and cooler than the sweltering prefab cubicles on offer from foreign contractors.... A year after Katrina hit, a remarkable exchange took place in Thailand between the leaders of that country's grassroots reconstruction effort and a small delegation of hurricane survivors from New Orleans. Visitors from the United States were taken aback by the speed with which rehabilitation had become a reality.... After community leaders from New Orleans returned home, there was indeed a wave of direct action in the city.... In February 2007, groups of residents who had lived in the public housing projects the Bush Administration was planning to demolish began 'reinvading' their old homes and taking up residence. Volunteers helped clean out apartments and raised money to buy generators and solar panels.... The reinvasion turned into a block party complete with a New Orleans brass band." Noam Chomsky, THE PROSPEROUS FEW AND THE RESTLESS MANY, 1994 "There are two important consequences of Globalization: First, it extends the Third World Model to Industrialized Nations. In the Third World there is a two-tiered society: a sector of extreme wealth and privilege, and a sector of huge misery and despair among useless, superfluous people.... South Central Los Angeles once had factories. They moved to Eastern Europe, Mexico, Indonesia.... As you'd expect, this whole structure of decision-making answers to transnational corporations and international banks and raises decision-making to the executive level, leaving a 'democratic deficit,' parliaments and populations with less influence. Not only that, but the public doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know." Howard Zinn, Lecture at Binghamton University, NY, Nov 8 2008 "Newspapers this morning report highest unemployment in decades. The government needs to create jobs. Private enterprise is not going to create jobs. Private enterprise fails, the so-called free market system fails again and again. When the Depression hit in the 1930s, Roosevelt and the New Deal created jobs for millions of people. And there were people out there on the fringe who yelled, �Socialism!� Didn�t matter. People needed it.... There is the interest of Exxon and Halliburton, and there�s the interest of the worker, the nurse�s aide, the teacher, the factory worker. Those are different interests.... No, the government is not looking out for your interest.... Governments do not represent the interests of their people. See? That�s why governments keep getting overthrown.... That's why governments lie�. If they told the truth, they would be out of office.... If you look at history, you see people felt powerless until they organized, and they got together, and they persisted, and they didn�t give up, and they built social movements. Whether it was the anti-slavery movement or the black movement of the 1960s or the antiwar movement in Vietnam or the women�s movement, they started small and apparently helpless; they became powerful.... We�re not powerless. We just have to be persistent.... If you join some group, it will make you feel better.... Life becomes more interesting and rewarding when you become involved with other people in some great social cause." |