More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
mixed, managed economies grew faster and more equitably than those following the Wild West Washington Consensus.
speculative investment,
‘Third Way’ between free-market democratic capitalism and socialist statism.”
In an extraordinary act of interference with a sovereign nation’s political process, the IMF refused to release the money until it had commitments from all four main candidates that they would stick to the new rules if they won.
you can vote, South Koreans were told, but your vote can have no bearing on the managing and organization of the economy.
Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines.
traders responded to the IMF’s big Reveal by promptly yanking out even more money and further attacking Asia’s currencies. Korea was losing $1 billion a day and its debt was downgraded to junk bond status. The IMF’s “help” had turned crisis into catastrophe. Or, as Jeffrey Sachs, now in open warfare with the international financial institutions, put it, “Instead of dousing the fire, the IMF in effect screamed fire in the theatre.”
IMF’s totally unnecessary demands to slash government budgets and hike interest rates.
Many rural families in the Philippines and South Korea sold their daughters to human traffickers who took them to work in the sex trade
In Thailand, public health officials reported a 20 percent increase in child prostitution in just one year—the year after the IMF reforms.
so many Thai girls were being forced into the sex trade and the austerity policies for which she expressed her “strong support” on the same trip.
It was the Asian financial crisis’s equivalent of Milton Friedman expressing his displeasure with Pinochet’s or Deng Xiaoping’s human rights violations while praising their bold embrace of economic shock therapy.36
“crisis should not be used as an opportunity to seek a long agenda of reforms just because leverage is high, irrespective of how justifiable they may be on merits.”
They were there not to build their own businesses and compete but to snap up the entire apparatus, workforce, customer base and brand value built over decades by Korean companies, often to break them apart, downsize them or shut them completely in order to eliminate competition for their imports.
Morgan Stanley, which had been the loudest in calling for a deepening of the crisis, inserted itself into many of these deals, collecting huge commissions. It acted as Daewoo’s adviser on the sale of its automotive
Asia’s crisis is still not over, a decade later. When 24 million people lose their jobs in a span of two years, a new desperation takes root that no culture can easily absorb.
It expresses itself in different forms across the region, from a significant rise in religious extremism in Indonesia and Thailand to the explosive growth in the child sex trade.
The suicides have also continued: in South Korea, suicide is now the fourth most common cause of death, more than double the pre-crisis rate,
untold story of the policies that the IMF calls “stabilization programs,”
new equilibrium is achieved by throwing millions of people overboard: public sector workers, small-business owners, subsistence farmers, trade unionists.
Asia’s crisis was plainly a creation of the global markets.
usual IMF bullying or arm-twisting at trade summits.
developing countries formed a voting bloc and rejected demands for deeper trade concessions as long as Europe and the U.S. continued to subsidize and protect their domestic industries.
the dismal reality of inequality, corruption and environmental degradation left behind when government after government embraced Friedman’s advice, given to Pinochet all those years ago, that it was a mistake to try “to do good with other people’s money.” In
Nike model: don’t own any factories, produce your products through an intricate web of contractors and subcontractors, and pour your resources into design and marketing.
Microsoft model: maintain a tight control center of shareholder/employees who perform the company’s “core competency” and outsource everything else to temps, from running the mailroom to writing code.
Rumsfeld saw the army shedding large numbers of full-time troops in favor of a small core of staffers propped up by cheaper temporary soldiers from the Reserve and National Guard. Meanwhile, contractors from companies such as Blackwater and Halliburton would perform duties ranging from high-risk chauffeuring to prisoner interrogation to catering to health care.
Big Government joins forces with Big Business to redistribute funds upward, he wanted
functions so intrinsic to the concept of governing that the idea of handing them to private corporations challenged what it meant to be a nation-state: the military, police, fire departments, prisons, border control, covert intelligence, disease control, the public school system and the administering of government bureaucracies.
essential functions
It’s safe to say that if you could patent the sun, Donald Rumsfeld would have long since put in an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
activists in the U.S., who point out that some of Gilead’s key medicines were developed on grants funded by taxpayers.
protégé of Rumsfeld’s in the Ford administration, has also built a fortune based on the profitable prospect of a grim future,
his wife, Lynne, was earning stock options in addition to her salary as a board member at Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor.
Lockheed began taking over information technology divisions of the U.S. government, running its computer systems
cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census.
president’s commitment to auctioning off the state, combined with Cheney’s leadership in outsourcing the military and Rumsfeld’s patenting of drugs that might prevent epidemics, provided a preview of the kind of state the three men would construct together—it
sense of peril in the aftermath of 9/11 to dramatically increase the policing, surveillance, detention and war-waging powers of the executive branch—a power grab that the military historian Andrew Bacevich has termed “a rolling coup.”
building and running a privatized security state, both at home and abroad.
revenue stream was a seemingly bottomless supply of tax dollars to be funneled from the Pentagon ($270 billion a year to private contractors, a $137 billion increase since Bush took office); U.S. intelligence agencies ($42 billion a year to contractors for outsourced intelligence, more than double 1995 levels); and the newest arrival, the Department of Homeland Security. Between September 11, 2001, and 2006, the Department of Homeland Security handed out $130 billion to private contractors—money that was not in the economy before and that is more than the GDP of Chile or the Czech Republic.
In 2003, the Bush administration spent $327 billion on contracts to private companies—nearly 40 cents of every discretionary dollar.
surveillance cameras,
“analytic software” that scans the tapes and creates matches with images already on
digital image enhancement.
the government is drowning in data, which has opened up yet another massive market in information management and
This potential for error is where the incompetence and greed that have been the hallmark of the Bush years, from Iraq to New Orleans,
frequent flyer records, number of bags, how they pay for tickets and even what meals they order.” 54 Incidents of supposedly suspicious behaviour are tallied up to generate each passenger’s risk rating. Anyone can be blocked from flying, denied an entry visa to the U.S. or even arrested and named as an “enemy combatant” based on evidence from these dubious technologies—a
Bush administration has stripped them of habeas corpus, the right to see the evidence in court, as well as the right to a fair trial and a vigorous defense.
It’s a dynamic ripe for abuse: just as prisoners under torture will usually say anything to make the pain stop, contractors have a powerful economic incentive to use whatever techniques are necessary to produce the sought-after information, regardless of its reliability.
invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence agents let it be known that they would pay anywhere from $3,000 to $25,000 for al Qaeda or Taliban fighters handed over to them.
