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$80 million redevelopment project was to be financed with aid money raised in the name of the victims of the tsunami.
“If you have something for me,” she said, “put it in my hand.”
anyone who wanted state assistance with tsunami recovery would need to move to one of five designated “safe islands.”
permanent underclass of between 25 and 60 percent of the population.
investigators found “significant overcharges, wasteful spending, or mismanagement.”
unregulated corporate handouts,
hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity.
income from government contracts on their own corporate overhead—between 20 and 55 percent, according to a 2006 audit of Iraq contractors.
(90 percent of Blackwater’s revenues come from state contracts),
The oil and gas industry is so intimately entwined with the economy of disaster—both as root cause behind many disasters and as a beneficiary from them—that it deserves
easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines,
One was the influx of Soviet Jews, which was a direct result of Russia’s shock therapy experiment. The other was the flipping of Israel’s export economy from one based on traditional goods and high technology to one disproportionately dependent on selling expertise and devices relating to counterterrorism. Both factors were greatly disruptive to the Oslo process: the arrival of Russians reduced Israel’s reliance on Palestinian labor and allowed it to seal in the occupied territories, while the rapid expansion of the high-tech security economy created a powerful appetite inside Israel’s wealthy
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March 30, 1993, Israel began its policy of “closure,” sealing off the border between Israel and the occupied territories, often for days or weeks at a time, preventing Palestinians from getting to their jobs and selling their goods. Closure
the War on Terror industry saved Israel’s faltering economy, much as the disaster capitalism complex helped rescue the global stock markets.
(walls and high-tech fences are going up on the border between India and Kashmir, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan),
strategy to reframe its conflict with the Palestinians not as a battle against a nationalist movement with specific goals for land and rights but rather as part of the global War on Terror—one against illogical, fanatical forces bent only on destruction.
they were not creating a perfectly harmonious economy but turning the already wealthy into the superrich and the organized working class into the disposable poor. These patterns of stratification have been repeated everywhere that the Chicago School ideology has triumphed.
CEOs made 43 times what the average worker earned in 1980, when Reagan kicked off the Friedmanite crusade. By 2005, CEOs earned 411 times as much.
many of the men who had been on the front lines of the international drive to liberate the markets from all restrictions were at that moment caught up in an astonishing array of scandals and criminal proceedings,
were shocked out of the way at key political junctures. When resistance was fierce, they were defeated with overt violence—rolled
Washington has always regarded democratic socialism as a greater threat than totalitarian Communism, which was easy to vilify and made for a handy enemy.
(Conflating all opposition with terrorism plays a similar role today.)
Despite the CIA-funded propaganda campaign
barbarian capitalism.”
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.28 Many are pieces of state infrastructure—toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics—handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing—rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are
essentially a barter system, in which countries decide for themselves what any given commodity or service is worth, rather than letting traders in New York, Chicago or London set the prices for them.
When one country does face a financial shortfall, this increased integration means that it does not need to turn to the IMF or the U.S. Treasury for a bailout.
IMF, a pariah in so many countries where it has treated crises as profit-making opportunities, is starting to wither away. The World Bank faces an equally grim future.
institution needed to take desperate measures to rescue itself from its profound crisis of credibility.
Once the mechanics of the shock doctrine are deeply and collectively understood, whole communities become harder to take by surprise, more difficult to confuse—shock resistant.
Kamal Hamdan, a Lebanese economist, estimated that, as a result, “household bills [would] increase by 15 percent because of increased taxes and adjusted prices”—a classic peace penalty.
if receiving reconstruction funds meant raising the cost of living for a war-ravaged people, it hardly deserved to be called aid.
