Introduction - Blank Is Beautiful: Three Decades of Erasing and Remaking the World (into Hell)
New Orleans, post-Katrina, is a metaphor for an American-style “New World Order” with unfettered capitalism unleashed in its most savage form. Klein quotes Republican Congressman Richard Baker telling lobbyists, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it but God did.” And New Orleans developer Joseph Canizaro added, “I think we have a clean sheet to start again (and take advantage of) big opportunities.” Their scheme is erasing communities and replacing them with upscale condos and other high-profit projects on choice city real estate at the expense of poor Mother Nature forced out and government not allowed back.
Above Photo (Arne Duncan, David Vitale, Pedro Martinez). June 6, 2007. Duncan’s phony ‘deficit’ and the Shock Doctrine in Chicago’s public schools. On June 6, 2006, Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan unveiled a proposed budget for the 2006-2007 school year (the “FY 2007” budget) . For six months, Duncan had been proclaiming that the school system faced a “deficit” of more than $300 million and that the failure of the State of Illinois to pay more to Chicago’s schools was forcing the school system to make massive cuts. The most dramatic cuts involved $26.5 million from special education services, resulting in the reduction of approximately 200 teachers and more than 700 special education aides. By the time Duncan announced the FY 2007 budget at the news conference above, however, he and his top financial aides knew that there had been no such deficit. The claim, reported widely in the media, was simply not true. Three of those most responsible for the claim were (left to right above: David Vitale (Chief Administrative Office), Pedro Martinez (Budget Director) and Arne Duncan (Chief Executive Officer). Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.Enter the “grand guru” of freewheeling capitalism, then age 93 and in failing health. This was conservative/libertarian economist Milton Friedman’s moment he first articulated in his 1962 book “Capitalism and Freedom.” His thesis: “only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When a crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around....our basic function (is) to develop alternatives to existing policies [ones Friedman rejects, and have them ready to roll out when] the impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Klein calls crises “democracy-free zones,” and Friedman’s thesis “the shock doctrine.” For New Orleans, it means “permanent reforms” like destroying public housing and issuing vouchers for privatized schools in lieu of rebuilding public ones with government reconstruction funds.
For Friedman, government’s sole function is “to protect our freedom both from (outside) enemies....and from our fellow-citizens.” It’s to “preserve law and order (as well as) enforce private contracts, (and) foster competitive markets.” In his view, anything else in public hands is socialism that for “free market” fundamentalists like Friedman is blasphemy.
Until 1973, Friedman’s radical doctrine stayed in his classroom, but all that changed on an earlier September 11. Following General Augusto Pinochet’s bloody ascent to power, he had a real life laboratory as advisor to the new Chilean dictator. His prescription came to be known as the “Chicago School” revolution of rapid-fire economic transformation he called “shock treatment,” now known as “shock therapy.” It’s an economic version of “destroy(ing) the village (and country) to save it” from the Vietnam era and nearly as harsh.
Millions know its lessons, but Friedman’s not their hero. It’s central tenets are structurally adjusted mass-privatizations, government deregulation, unrestricted free market access for foreign corporations, and deep cuts in social spending with repressive laws, harsh crackdowns and torture along for the ride to reinforce the core tenet Reaganites call “trickle down” and Brits call “Thatcherism.”
Its recipients call it hell, and Klein explains why — in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Russia, the Falklands, Poland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, New Orleans, Israel, and coming to a neocon-occupied homeland neighborhood near you. It’s “disaster capitalism” unleashed, and business is booming. Klein cites insiders saying opportunities are on a par with a thriving “emerging market.... The deals are even better than the dot-com days, and ‘the security bubble’ picked up the slack when those earlier bubbles popped.”
Reaganomics adherents are today’s neoconservatives with the “full force of the US military machine (serving their unfettered) corporate agenda” of greed writ large. Its holy policy trinity is: “elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending (if any at all).” But instead of lifting all boats as promised, it’s mirror opposite. It creates a powerful ruling corporatist class partnered with corrupted political elites - “with hazy and ever-shifting lines between the two groups.” Russia got billionaire “oligarchs,” China “the princelings,” Chile “the piranhas,” and America the Bush-Cheney “Pioneers.”
Everywhere, the scheme is the same: huge public wealth transfers to private hands, exploding public debt most often, “an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and disposable poor, and an aggressive nationalism (like George Bush’s permanent “war on terrorism” and the world) that justifies bottomless spending on security.” “Inside the bubble” is paradise. Outside, however, is hell with “aggressive surveillance, mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties,” a declining standard of living and repression and torture reinforcing the message to non-believers.
Klein calls the harshness “a metaphor of the shock doctrine’s underlying logic.” When applied, it induces a state of “deep disorientation,” and shock to force targets “to make concessions against their will.” The “shock doctrine” works the same way on a mass scale, and the 9/11 experience proved it. It exploded the “familiar world” and created a period of disorientation and regression the Bush administration jumped on abroad and at home. As Klein put it: “Suddenly we found ourselves living in a kind of Year Zero (with) everything we knew of the world before (now) dismissed as ‘pre-9/11’ thinking.” We became a “blank slate, a clean sheet of paper,” and the administration did what was impossible before. It’s how the “shock doctrine” works: “the original disaster (terror attack, war, hurricane, market meltdown) puts the entire population into a state of collective shock” enabling policy manipulators to move in for the kill to remake the world in their image and get it done before the shock wears off.
