СОДРЖИНА
INTRODUCTION
Blank is beautiful: Three Decades
of Erasing and Remaking the World
PART 1
Two Doctor Shocks: research and development
- The Torture Lab: Ewen Cameron, the CIA and the Maniacal Quest to Erase and Remake the Human Mind
- The Other Doctor Shock: Milton Friedman and the Search for a Laissez-Faire Laboratory
PART 2
The first Test
- States of Shock: The Bloody Birth of the Counterrevolution
- Cleaning the Slate: Terror Does it Work
- “Entirely Unrelated”: How an Ideology Was Cleansed of Its Crimes
PART 3
Surviving Democracy: Bombs Made of Laws
- Saved by a War: Thatcherism and Its Useful Enemies
- The New Doctor Shock: Economic Warfare Replaces Dictatorship
- Crisis works: The Packaging of Shock Therapy
PART 4
Lost in Transition: While We
Wept, While We Trembled, While We Danced
- Slamming the Door on History: A Crisis in
- Democracy Born in Chains:
- Bonfire of a Young Democracy:
- The Capitalist Id:
- Let It Burn: The Looting of Asia and “The Fall of a
Second
PART 5
Shocking times: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Complex
- Shock Therapy in the
- A
PART 6
- Erasing
- Ideological Blowback: A Very Capitalist Disaster
- Full Circle: From
PART 7
The Movable Green Zone: Buffer Zones and Blast Walls
- Blanking the Beach: “The Second Tsunami”
- Disaster Apartheid: A World of Green Zones and Red Zones
- Losing the Peace Incentive:
CONCLUSION
Shock Wears Off: The Rise of
People’s Reconstruction
…
CHAPTER 14
SHOCK THERAPY IN THE U.S.A.
The Homeland Security Bubble
He’s a ruthless little bastard. You can be sure of that.
-Richard Nixon , U.S.
Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society
that is already all around us.
-Richard Thomas , U.K.
Homeland security may have just reached the state that Internet
investing hit in 1997. Back then, all you needed to do was put an “e” in front
of your company name and your IPO would rocket. Now you can do the same with
“fortress.”
-Daniel Gross, Slate, June 2005
It was a muggy Monday in Washington , and Donald
Rumsfeld was about to do something he hated: talk to his staff. Since taking
office as a defense secretary, he has solidified his reputation among Joint
Chiefs of Staff as high-handed, secretive and – a word that kept coming up –
arrogant. Their animosity was understandable. Since setting foot in the
Pentagon, Rumsfeld had brushed aside the prescribed role of leader and motivator,
and acted instead like bloodless hatchet man – a CEO secretary on downsizing
mission.
When Rumsfeld accepted the post,
many wondered why he would even want it. He was sixty-eight years old, had five
grandchildren and personal fortune estimated as much as $250 million – and he
had already held the same post in the Gerald Ford administration. Rumsfeld,
however, had no desire to be a traditional defense secretary, defined by the
wars waged on his watch; he had greater ambition than that.
The incoming defense secretary
had spent past twenty-odd years heading up multinational corporations and
sitting on their boards, often leading companies through dramatic mergers and
acquisitions, as well as painful restructurings. In the nineties, he had come
to see himself as a man of the New Economy, directing a company specializing in
digital TV, sitting on the board of another promising “e-business solutions”,
and serving as board chairman of the very sci-fi biotech firm that held the
exclusive patent on treatment for avian flu, as well as on several important
AIDS medications. When Rumsfeld joined the Cabinet of George W. Bush in 2001,
it was with a personal mission to reinvent warfare for the twenty-first century
– turning it into something more psychological than physical, more spectacle
than struggle, and far more profitable than it had never been before.
Much has been written about
Rumsfeld’s controversial “transformation” project, which prompted eight retired
generals to call for his resignation, and eventually forced him to step down
after the 2006 midterm elections. When Bush announced the resignation, he
described the “sweeping transformation” project – and not the War in Iraq or
the broader war “War on Terror” – as Rumsfeld profound contribution: “Don’s work
in these areas did not often make the headlines. But the reforms that set in
motion – that he has set in motion – are historic”. They are indeed, but it has
not always been clear what those reforms consist of.
Senior military officials derided
“transformation” as “empty buzz words”, and Rumsfeld often seemed determined
(almost comically) to prove the critics right: “The Army is going through what
is major modernization”, Rumsfeld said in April 2006. “It is moving from a
division-oriented force to a modular brigade combat team force… from
service-centric war-fighting to de-confliction war-fighting, to
interoperability and now toward interdependence. That’s a hard thing to do”.
But the project was never quite as complicated as Rumsfeld made it sound. Beneath
the jargon, it was simply an attempt to bring the revolution in outsourcing and
branding that he had been part of in the corporate world into the heart of the
U.S. Military.
During the 1990’s, many companies
that had traditionally manufactured their own products and maintained large,
stable workforces, embraced what became known as the 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. Other
companies opted for the alternative, Microsoft model: maintain a tight control
center of shareholders/employees who perform the company’s “core competency”
and outsource everything else to temps, from running the mailroom to writing
code. Some called the companies that underwent these radical restructurings
“hollow corporations”, because they were mostly form, with a little tangible
content left over.
Rumsfeld was convinced that the
U.S. Department of Defense needed an equivalent makeover; as Fortune said when he arrived at
Pentagon, “Mr. CEO” was “about to oversee the same sort of restructuring that
he orchestrated so well in corporate world”. There were, of course, some
necessary differences. Where corporations unburdened themselves of
geography-bound factories and full time workers, 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.
And where corporations poured their savings on labor into design and marketing,
Rumsfeld would spend his savings from fewer troops and tanks on the latest
satellite and nano-technologies from the private sector. “In the twenty-first
century”, Rumsfeld said of the modern military, “we’re going to have to stop
thinking about things, number of things, and mass, and think also and maybe
even first about speed and agility, and precision”. He sounded very much like
the hyperactive management consultant Tom Peters, who declared in the late
nineties that companies had to decide if they were “pure ‘players’ in
brain-war” or “lumpy-object purveyors”.
Not surprisingly, the generals
who were used to holding sway in the Pentagon were pretty sure that “things”
and “mass” still mattered when it came to fighting wars. They soon became
deeply hostile to Rumsfeld’s vision of a hollow military. After a little more
than seven months in office, the secretary had already stepped on so many
powerful toes, that it was rumored his days were numbered.
It was at this moment that
Rumsfeld called a “rare hall meeting” for Pentagon staff. The speculation began
immediately: Was he going to announce his resignation? Was he going to try his
hand at a pep talk? Was he belatedly trying to sell the old guard on
transformation? As hundreds of Pentagon senior staff filed into the auditorium
that Monday morning, “the mood was definitely one of curiosity”, one staffer
told me. “The feeling was, How are you going to convince us? Because there was
already a huge amount of animosity toward him”.
When Rumsfeld made his entrance
“we politely stood up and sat down”. It rapidly became clear that this was not
a resignation, ant it most certainly was not a pep talk. It may have been the
most extraordinary speech ever given by a U.S. secretary of defense. It began
like this:
“The topic today is an adversary
that poses a treat, a serious treat, to the security of the United States of America .
This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It
governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to
impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With
brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts
the defense of United States
and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.
Perhaps this adversary sounds
like the former Soviet Union , but that enemy
is gone: our foes are more subtle and implacable today… The adversary’s closer
to home. It’s Pentagon bureaucracy.”
…
Cheney and Rumsfeld: Proto-Disaster Capitalist
…The admiration was mutual.
Friedman was so impressed with Rumsfeld’s commitment to deregulated markets
that he aggressively lobbied Reagan to name Rumsfeld as his running mate in the
1980 election instead of George H. W. Bush. – and he never did quite forgive
Reagan for disregarding his advice. “I believe that Reagan made a mistake when
he chose Bush as his vice-presidential candidate”, Friedman wrote in his
memoirs; “indeed, I regard it as the worst decision not only of his campaign,
but of his presidency. My favorite candidate was Donald Rumsfeld. Had he been
chosen, I believe he would have succeeded Reagan as president, and the sorry
Bush-Clinton period would never had occurred”.
Rumsfeld survived being passed
over as Reagan’s running mate by throwing himself into his burgeoning business
carrier. As CEO of the international drug and chemical company Searle
Pharmaceuticals, he used his political connections to secure the controversial
and extraordinarily lucrative Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for
aspartame (marketed as NutraSweet); and when Rumsfeld brokered the deal to sell
Searle to Monsanto, he personally earned an estimated $12 million.
The high-stakes sale established
Rumsfeld as corporate power player, landing him seats on the boards of such
blue-chip firms as Sears and Kellogg’s. His status was a former defense secretary,
meanwhile, made him a score for any company that was part of what Eisenhower
had called the “military-industrial complex”. Rumsfeld sat on the board of the
aircraft manufacturer Gulfstream and was also paid $190.000 a year as a board
member of ASEA Brown Boveri (ABB), the Swiss engineering giant that gained
unwanted attention when it was revealed to have sold nuclear technology to North Korea ,
including the capacity to produce plutonium. The nuclear reactor sale went
through 2000, and at the time, Rumsfeld was the only North American on the ABB
board. He claims to have no memory of the reactor sale coming before the board,
though the company insists that “board members were informed about the
project”.
It was in 1997, when Rumsfeld was
named chairman of the board of the biotech firm Gilead Sciences that he would
firmly establish himself as a proto-disaster capitalist. The company had
registered the patent of Tamiflu, a treatment for many kinds of influenza and
the preferred drug for avian fly.*
(Footnote: Tamiflu has become
highly controversial. In a growing number of reported cases, young people who
took the drug became confused, paranoid, delusional and suicidal. Between
November 2005 and November 2006, twenty-five deaths around the world were
linked to Tamiflu, and in the United
States the drug is now issued with a health
warning alerting patients to an “increased risk of self-injury and confusion”
and urging them to “be closely monitored for signs of unusual behavior”.
…
(Naomi Klein: THE SHOCK DOCTRINE
– The rise of Disaster Capitalism; Metropolitan books, Henry Holt and comp. – New York )
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