Disaster capitalism: Israel as warning

I think we can safely deduce that Jewish extremist Kach members aren't
too fond of Naomi Klein. On their informative online S.H.I.T.
(Self-Hating and/or Israel-Threatening) List, we read that she "is an
ISM sup****ter and Rachel Corrie lover. If Hitler were alive today,
she'd love him as well!" This considered evaluation will probably need
to be rephrased in less glowing terms if any patient Kahanists get
around to reading The Shock Doctrine - the Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Many are now familiar with the outlines of Klein's argument: in the
wake of natural and unnatural disasters, neo-liberal economic reform is
foisted on stricken societies while their citizens are in a condition
of collective disorientation. While the ruling class is quick to avail
of these "op****tunities," it doesn't actually set out to create them,
because it doesn't need to: "An economic system that requires constant
growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental
regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own,
whether military, ecological or financial." After great destruction
comes privatized reconstruction to the benefit of multinational
cor****ations and the detriment of ordinary people.

In itself, the thesis that capitalism thrives on disaster isn't exactly
novel. What Klein has done, however, is to draw analytical conclusions
from the consistency with which the metaphor of "shock" is employed in
this context. 

She recounts how in the 1950s the CIA funded electric shock experiments
by the US-American psychiatrist Ewen Cameron that entailed "attacking
the brain with everything known to interfere with its normal
functioning -- all at once" in order to reduce it to a tabula rasa upon
which, it was mistakenly believed, anything could be written. These
experiments inspired the CIA's MKUltra program designed "to break
prisoners suspected of being Communists and double agents." As a bonus,
Cameron's and the CIA's procedures laid the groundwork for torture
practices from Santiago de Chile to Abu Ghraib.

Next, Klein explores the doctrines of Milton Friedman and his Chicago
School disciples, those influential advocates of economic "shock
therapy" who also drew up their theories in the heady 1950s. Friedman,
according to Klein, was "the other Doctor Shock ... Friedman's mission,
like Cameron's, rested on a dream of reaching back to a state of
'natural' health, ... before human interferences created distorting
patterns. Where Cameron dreamed of returning the human mind to that
pristine state, Friedman dreamed of depatterning societies, of
returning them to a state of pure capitalism ... the only way to reach
that prelapsarian state was to deliberately inflict painful shocks ...
Cameron used electricity to inflict his shocks. Friedman's tool of
choice was ... the shock treatment approach he urged on bold
politicians for countries in distress."

The first society to be remodeled on the basis of Friedman's theories
was Pinochet's Chile. Here the overlap between Friedman and Cameron
ceases to be merely metaphorical: the ruthless implementation of the
former's shock therapy required the employment of the latter's, in the
form of torture.

The op****tunity afforded by war to effect a neo-liberal restructuring of
shocked and disorientated societies provided neo-conservatives with a
blueprint for taking advantage of natural catastrophes. The December
2004 tsunami that killed 250,000 people and left 2.5 million homeless
provided a golden op****tunity for the governments of Sri Lanka,
Thailand and Indonesia to achieve a free-market "second tsunami," often
employing funds donated for victim relief to "cleanse" fi****ng people
and other surplus natives from coastal regions destined for the
exclusive use of wealthy tourists. Hurricane Katrina, the following
year, afforded 93-year-old Milton Friedman the op****tunity to make his
final public intervention when he proposed that the "tragedy" of the
destruction of New Orleans's schools was "an op****tunity to radically
reform the educational system" by privatizing it. This amiable advice
was hastily acted upon, "in sharp contrast to the glacial pace with
which the levees were! repaired and the electricity grid was brought
back online ..."

Somewhere between natural catastrophes and wars come events like Jeffrey
Sachs's disastrous interventions in Bolivia and Poland, the Tiananmen
Square massacre, and Boris Yeltsin's Ubuesque rise to power in Russia.
In each case, however, the military -- and mercenaries nowadays -- play
a belligerent role in keeping the rabble in line. In a word, we are
dealing with a particularly lethal and one-sided class war (although
Klein avoids the phrase).

Exhibit A: Israel

Before the advent of Friedman and his successors, conventional wisdom
had it that "relative peace and stability were required for sustained
economic growth." More recently this state of affairs gave way to "the
Davos Dilemma": "Put bluntly, the world was going to hell, there was no
stability in sight and the global economy was roaring its approval." In
a context where "instability is the new stability," "Israel is often
held up as a kind of Exhibit A." Despite -- or because of -- its
parlous political situation, "Israel has crafted an economy that
expands markedly in direct response to escalating violence."

The explanation is that Israel's technology firms grasped the potential
of the global "homeland security" boom long before the horrible phrase
was even coined, and they now dominate that rapidly expanding sector.
Klein stresses the negative aspects of this development: "Israel should
serve as ... a stark warning. The fact that Israel continues to enjoy
booming prosperity, even as it wages war against its neighbors and
escalates the brutality in the occupied territories, demonstrates just
how perilous it is to build an economy based on the premise of
continual war and deepening disasters."

With considerable perspicacity Klein traces two factors contributing to
Israel's retreat into unilateralism in the post-Oslo period, both
linked to the Chicago School free market crusade. "One was the influx
of Soviet Jews, which was a direct result of Russia's shock therapy
experiment." The Rabin/Arafat "handshake on the White House lawn was on
September 13, 1993; exactly three weeks later, Yeltsin sent in the
tanks to set fire to the [Russian] parliament building ..."
Subsequently there began a wave of immigration to Israel from the
former USSR, thus "markedly increasing the ratio of Jews to Arabs,
while simultaneously providing a new pool of cheap labor" and swelling
the population of illegal settlements. It suddenly became possible for
Israel to dispense with Palestinian workers and introduce a policy of
closure, "sealing off the border between Israel and the occupied
territories ... preventing Palestinians from getting to their jobs and
selling their goods." The result ! was that the territories "were
transformed from run-down dormitories housing the underclass of the
Israeli state into suffocating prisons."

The other factor "was the flipping of Israel's ex****t economy from one
based on traditional goods and high technology to one
dispro****tionately dependent on selling expertise and devices relating
to counterterrorism," a process mightily exacerbated by the dot.com
crash of 2000 and by 9/11. By 2004 Israel had set itself up "as a kind
of shopping mall for homeland security technologies." Klein lists ten
samples of the reach of Israel's security industry, ranging from
Buckingham Palace to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the wealthy
New Orleans neighborhood of Audubon Place, where policing is in the
hands of an Israeli firm charmingly named "Instinctive Shooting
International."

In a world turning itself into a patchwork of fortresses separating the
rich from the poor, Israel is making itself indispensable. This "has
coincided precisely with [Israel's] abandonment of peace negotiations,
as well as a clear strategy to reframe its conflict with the
Palestinians not as a battle against a nationalist movement ... but
rather as part of the global War on Terror ..." Generalizing from those
"glimpses of a kind of gated future build and run by the disaster
capitalism complex" afforded by Baghdad, New Orleans and Sandy Springs
(a wealthy Republican suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, that has turned
itself into a "contract city" in order to prevent its taxes being used
to subsidize poor neighborhoods), she concludes that "This is what a
society looks like when it has lost its economic incentive for peace
and is heavily invested in fighting and profiting from an endless and
unwinnable War on Terror. One part looks like Israel; the other part
looks like Gaza ... In So! uth Africa, Russia and New Orleans the rich
build walls around themselves. Israel has taken this disposal process a
step further: it has built walls around the dangerous poor."

Light at the end of the tunnel

Naomi Klein's blockbuster is a worthy successor -- in scope, ambition
and achievement -- to Noam Chomsky's Deterring Democracy. Her
contextualization of Israeli politics is utterly convincing, and can
only confound those who still believe that Israel has the slightest
interest in reaching an equitable accommodation with its neighbors.

At the end of this tunnel of pessimism, Latin America provides a
glimmer of light: "Today Latin Americans are picking up the project [of
independent "developmentalism"] that was so brutally interrupted ...
Many of the policies cropping up are familiar: nationalization of key
sectors of the economy, land reform, major new investments in
education, literacy and health care. ... Latin America's mass
movements ... are learning how to build shock absorbers into their
organizing models." She refers to Venezuela's and Bolivia's grass-roots
progressive networks, Brazil's Landless Peoples Movement and its
cooperatives, Argentina's movement of "recovered companies," and the
entire region's increasing emancipation (Colombia sadly excepted) from
Wa****ngton's military and financial tutelage.

She fails to mention that such moves towards independence have only
become possible because Wa****ngton's increasingly fanatical focus on
the Middle East has diverted its attention (tem****arily?) from its
"back yard." The solidarity between Middle Eastern peoples that is
surely a precondition of Palestine's liberation is frustrated at every
turn by the repressiveness of Arab regimes (the Palestinian Authority
now tragically included) backed to the hilt by the financial and
military resources of the US and EU.

Nonetheless, it is within this oppressive climate that the Lebanese
people, Sunni and ****ite, trade unionists and Hizballah, have come
together to oppose the attempts by the West and its client prime
minister Siniora to remake Lebanon, in the wake of Israel's
catastrophic 2006 assault, in the image of New Orleans in the wake of
Katrina. Klein is one of the few Western intellectuals to have
appreciated the im****tance of this story, and this is just one of the
many virtues of this extraordinary book. Whether or not she is correct
in her belief that "the shock is wearing off," there is an indelible
truth in her assertion that "[t]he only prospect that threatens the
booming disaster economy on which so much wealth depends ... is the
possibility of achieving some measure of climatic stability and
geopolitical peace."

[Raymond Deane is a composer and a founding member of the Ireland
Palestine Solidarity Campaign.]
                                 *
=================================================================
 NY Transfer News Collective     *    A Service of Blythe Systems
           Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
            Our main website:   http://www.blythe.org
   List Archives:       http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
   Subscribe:     http://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr
=================================================================

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (FreeBSD)

iD8DBQFHFV9Uiz2i76ou9wQRA****AJ4zUJx+oQmtE9xZwZ16JU1XsxzNhgCgpvwP
2jO2XIckOuzPARjDj/5uuJA=
=2Mls
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----