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orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism.”
waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock, then quickly making the “reforms” permanent.
mass privatization, complete free trade, a 15 percent flat tax, a dramatically downsized government.
slogan for contemporary capitalism—fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward.
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, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market “reforms.” In Argentina in the seventies, the junta’s “disappearance” of thirty
In Latin America and Africa in the eighties, it was a debt crisis that forced countries to be “privatized or die,” as one former IMF
unraveled by hyperinflation and too indebted to say no to demands that came bundled with foreign loans, governments accepted “shock treatment” on the promise that it would save them from deeper disaster.
large-scale crisis provided the necessary pretext to overrule the expressed wishes of voters and to hand the country over to economic “technocrats.”
economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint—as it was in Chile in the seventies, China in the late eighties, Russia in the nineties and the U.S. after September 11, 2001—some
“War on Terror” but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture,
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.
model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state—in effect, to privatize the government.
outsourced, with no public debate, many of the most sensitive and core functions of government—from providing health care to soldiers, to interrogating prisoners,
global “homeland security industry”—economically insignificant before 2001—is now a $200 billion sector.
And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges.
known as “neoliberalism,” but it is often called “free trade” or simply “globalization.”
powerful ruling alliance between a few very large corporations and a class of mostly wealthy politicians—with
Russia the billionaire private players in the alliance are called “the oligarchs”; in China, “the princelings”; in Chile, “the piranhas”; in the U.S., the Bush-Cheney campaign “Pioneers.”
trading favors to secure the right to appropriate precious resources previously held in the public domain—from
aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security.
aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always,
It is in that state of shock that most prisoners give their interrogators whatever they want—information,
wage privatized wars abroad and build a corporate security complex at home.
John Maynard Keynes, intellectual architect of the New Deal and the modern welfare state.
most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies.
Usually it is extreme religious and racially based idea systems that demand the wiping out of entire peoples and cultures in order to fulfill a purified vision of the world.
coups, wars and slaughters to install and maintain pro-corporate regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been written off as the excesses of overzealous dictators, as hot fronts of the Cold War, and now of the War on Terror.
suppression is explained as part of the dirty fight against Communism or terrorism—almost never as the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism.
countries are shocked—by wars, terror attacks, coups d’état and natural disasters. And then how they are shocked again—by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy. And then how people who dare to resist these shock politics are, if necessary, shocked for a third time—by police, soldiers and prison interrogators.
Cameron believed that by inflicting an array of shocks to the human brain, he could unmake and erase faulty minds, then rebuild new personalities on that ever-elusive clean slate.
not to mend or repair his patients but to re-create them using a method he invented called “psychic driving.”
attacking the brain with everything known to interfere with its normal functioning—all at once. It was “shock and awe” warfare on the mind.
could not provide a scientific explanation for how it worked.
to prepare Western soldiers for whatever coercive techniques they might encounter if they were taken hostage.
to know where we are and who we are. Those two forces are “(a) our continued sensory input, and (b) our memory.”
trained by the CIA. “They taught us psychological methods—to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don’t let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.” There
shock-inducing formula of sensory deprivation followed by sensory overload as “the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries.”
immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation.
Guatemala to Honduras, Vietnam to Iran, the
From the seventies on, the role favored by American agents was that of mentor or trainer—not direct interrogator.
Torture, whether physical or psychological, clearly violates the Geneva Conventions’ blanket ban on “any form of torture or cruelty,”
their classes. On September 11, 2001, that longtime insistence on plausible deniability went out the
disorientation, extreme fear and anxiety, and collective regression.
They are left in isolation cells for months, taken out only to have their senses bombarded with barking dogs, strobe lights and endless tape loops of babies crying, music blaring and cats meowing.
Human rights groups point out that Guantánamo, horrifying as it is, is actually the best of the U.S.-run offshore interrogation operations, since it is open to limited monitoring by the Red Cross and lawyers. Unknown numbers of prisoners have disappeared into the network of so-called black sites around the world or been shipped by
Cameron used electricity to inflict his shocks; Friedman’s tool of choice was policy—the
The Marxists had their workers’ utopia, and the Chicagoans had their entrepreneurs’ utopia,
embraced the principle that market economies needed to guarantee enough basic dignity that disillusioned citizens would not go looking once again for a more appealing ideology,
corporate views funneled through academic, or quasi-academic, institutions not only kept the Chicago School flush with donations but, in short order, spawned the global network of right-wing think tanks that would churn out the counterrevolution’s foot soldiers worldwide.
