shock doctrine

#F2F2F2;line-height:120%;">Australia does totalitarianism poorly. The PATRIOT act at least appeared to have some limitations. These proposed new laws [1] don't encroach on privacy, they completely obliterate it. The Liberals are doing what the Nazi's did, minus the economic improvements, conservation and infrastructure (there's something to think about!).

It essentially implements the Internet monitoring that we were worried about years ago. There is little reason to doubt that Australian spies won't have a warrant to monitor one computer or device on the internet as soon as they can (I strongly suspect these laws legitimise what has been long standing practice and that such monitoring has been in place). We can consider the internet monitored, as these laws define no boundaries. This is no different to if the government had said "we will monitor the internet however we like".

I ask which "terrorist" organisation has the capability to threaten our liberties and rights to this extent? And all this from what? The media lying to the population by stating there was a beheading planned!See also international alert regarding Australia's draconian laws: "Australia on the Verge of Permitting Alarmingly Broad Internet Surveillance " by Emily Tankin.

[Article adapted from from this comment of 27 September 2014.]

"Remember, when the power structure sees a meme is working they double and triple down on it. With the beheading videos effectively pushing the American public back into a post-9/11 fetal position, it became clear that the fear of “beheadings” is enough to send the Western public into a total panic state. Then, suddenly a plot emerges that ISIS related terrorists were planning to publicly behead an Australian citizen in the middle of Sydney. As usual, mainstream media rushed to scare the shit out of everyone." [Source: "Australia Unleashes Draconian New Anti-Terror Law In Orwellian Orgy Of Baseless Fear-Mongering"]

Note that the police only confirmed 'violence', NOT beheadings being planned (or merely discussed or mentioned).[2] Colour me cynical, but this is a blatant attempt to jerk Australia back under the boot of authoritarian conservatism and give licence for military action against Syria, oops, sorry, ISIS... All the government agencies have to do, is follow anyone they want to make a target, and it is inevitable you can find something to blow up. The ISIS angle works doubly well, because objecting to the coming conflict paints one as someone against a humanitarian mission.

Consider the following, if one wanted to ban the Macrame and Crochet society, or ban knitting needles.

1) You begin surveillance of members of the Macrame and Crochet society, infiltrate meetings, etc.
2) Wait. Record everything.
3) Have a record of a phone call of Mavis telling Ethel "That Tony, I tell ya, he needs a good kick in the bum". Every Australian at some point or another says something along these lines about some politician. Chaff bag anyone?
4) Say that members of the organisation have been "planning violence" against Australians (true in a very strict sense), then LATER, mention its a politician.
5) Have the media use phrases like "The Macrame and Crochet society has been under surveillance...." . It is technically true and people will assume they must have done something wrong to be under surveillance. "Known to the police", "Was under surveillance" are scary sounding phrases which imply guilt and danger, but could actually be completely meaningless.
6) Organise 800 riot goons to arrest Mavis, complete with media presence (how do they know?). Call it the biggest anti-terror operation in history (again, technically true, because you've made it true).
7) Don't make effort to correct the media if they talk of 'stabbing people with knitting needles'. The media are allowed to get things wrong. Journalists don't get fired for mistakes. You can talk of remaining calm, but neglect to mention the media whipping things up, and do nothing at all to calm people.

And there you have it, you can have the population in hysteria, thinking that old grannies are going to gouge eyes out with knitting needles. The beauty of this scam is you don't have to lie! Hand on your heart, its all true!

The scariest thing was, as I was writing this, I had in the back of my mind that this could be a risk. That this would be monitored, put against my name. I would have never thought 20 years ago that in Australia it would be like this, but here we are... I remember as a child my grandmother telling me stories of how everyone was monitored in Nazi Germany, that people would dob on each other (often just out of spite) and that things you said could be used against you later. From what I've heard of people who lived in Communist countries, it wasn't too different there. These regimes did NOT have armed guards at every corner, STOPPING you from speaking. No, you were free to speak in Communist Russia, or Nazi Germany, but you never knew what was recorded, and you would find, sometime in the future, after exercising your 'freedom', you're in trouble.

NOTES

[1] Australia Unleashes Draconian New Anti-Terror Law In Orwellian Orgy Of Baseless Fear-Mongering (25/9/14)

Australian spies will soon have the power to monitor the entire Australian internet with just one warrant, and journalists and whistleblowers will face up to 10 years’ jail for disclosing classified information.

The government’s first tranche of tougher anti-terrorism laws, which beef up the domestic spy agency ASIO’s powers, passed the Senate 44 votes for and 12 against on Thursday night with bipartisan support from Labor.

The bill, the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2014, will now be sent to the House of Representatives, where passage is all but guaranteed on Tuesday at the earliest.

Anyone — including journalists, whistleblowers and bloggers — who “recklessly” discloses “information … [that] relates to a special intelligence operation” faces up to 10 years’ jail.

Any operation can be declared “special” and doing so gives ASIO criminal and civil immunity. Many, including lawyers and academics, have said they fear the agency will abuse this power.

Those who identify ASIO agents could also face a decade in prison under the new laws, a tenfold increase in the existing maximum penalty.

These changes have opposition support and would make it a criminal office to travel to a terrorist hot-spot without a reasonable excuse.

[2] "Anti-terror operation in Sydney and Brisbane 'thwarted' beheading plot," ABC News, 18 September 2014.

#F5F6CE;line-height:120%;">The same forces are at work across the entire globe - whether it be Ukraine or Australia, Elites (the 1%) are seeking to make the vulnerable more vulnerable in an insatiable effort to consolidate their wealth, and perhaps more importantly for them (and us) - their power.

It is now clear that America's democracy is completely corrupted.
It seems that Australia is also going down this path, with Joe Hockey 'selling' access for $22,000, and many other rorts for a privileged few going behind the scenes, such as those involving Sinodinos.

According to #ixzz31T0FxNdO">researchers from Princeton and Northwestern universities the U.S has now

"taken a turn down elitist lane and become a country led by a small dominant class comprised of powerful members who exert total control over the general population — an oligarchy"

So it seems that Australia is not far behind and as civil society in Australia is not-so-slowly dismantled, we will increasingly suffer the ill-effects of its absence as we change from a society that aims to look after the interests of all to one that looks after the interests of the few.

And if the 99% try and stop it, they are criminalised - with nearly 8,000 arrests of former participants in the Occupy movement globally,- or subjected to brute force, as is being discovered by the residents of the Northern Rivers Region, who are now appealing to the United Nations for protection.

And it is clear where this path leads, the U.S is now walking down it, as other countries have before. The experience of these countries, such as India, is well documented, so there really should be no surprises for Australians as to where we will end up. Australia, as an 'ally' of the U.S participates in its massive data collections through bases such as Pine Gap. The experience for other nations is that:

"The gathering of information to control people they rule is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, the government has embarked on a massive biometrics programme, perhaps one of the most ambitious and expensive information-gathering projects in the world— the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to “deliver services to the poor”, will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry? (A conservative estimate of the UID budget exceeds the Indian government’s annual public spending on education.) To “digitise” a country with such a large population of the largely illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part slum-dwellers, hawkers, adivasis without land records—will criminalise them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state.

Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill Gates’s obsession with digital databases, “numerical targets”, “scorecards of progress”. As though it is a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt and skewed profit-oriented, corporate policy."

"Corporate-endowed foundations are the biggest funders of the social sciences and the arts, endowing courses and student scholarships in “development studies”, “community studies”, “cultural studies”, “behavioural sciences” and “human rights”. As US universities opened their doors to international students, hundreds of thousands of students, children of the Third World elite, poured in. Those who could not afford the fees were given scholarships. Today in countries like India and Pakistan there is scarcely a family among the upper middle classes that does not have a child that has studied in the US. From their ranks have come good scholars and academics, but also the prime ministers, finance ministers, economists, corporate lawyers, bankers and bureaucrats who helped to open up the economies of their countries to global corporations."

and the final conclusion:

"Capitalism is in crisis. The international financial meltdown is closing in. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work.

The proletariat, as Marx saw it, has been under continuous assault. Factories have shut down, jobs have disappeared, trade unions have been disbanded. The proletariat has, over the years, been pitted against each other in every possible way. In India, it has been Hindu against Muslim, Hindu against Christian, Dalit against Adivasi, caste against caste, region against region. And yet, all over the world, it is fighting back. In China, there are countless strikes and uprisings. In India, the poorest people in the world have fought back to stop some of the richest corporations in their tracks.

Capitalism is in crisis. Trickledown failed. Now Gush-Up is in trouble too. The international financial meltdown is closing in. India’s growth rate has plummeted to 6.9 per cent. Foreign investment is pulling out. Major international corporations are sitting on huge piles of money, not sure where to invest it, not sure how the financial crisis will play out. This is a major, structural crack in the juggernaut of global capital.

Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises—War and Shopping—simply will not work."

Thus these excerpts from Arundhati Roy's article at Outlook India.com above indicate that India, like Greece and Ukraine, is another example of the excesses of corporate shock doctrine, which is in the process of being applied to Australia.

According to this author's research, Malcolm Fraser contributed policies which would assist the dismantling of Australia's then growing democracy and aid and abet this colony's overpopulation and overshoot of its own resources. These actions should not be forgotten, despite any subsequent helpful comments on foreign policy, a long time later. After the Whitlam government was sacked, and during high unemployment, the Fraser Liberal/National Party government (November 1975- March 1983) reinstituted economic policies that were dependent on rapid population growth - through high immigration - and high energy consumption. [1]

Whitlam's concept and attempts to create a system of feedback loops from population to housing were dismantled or under-financed. Prime Minister Fraser abolished DURD very early in his government, under which Federal funding for urban and regional development declined by 86 per cent. [2] He also began to liberalise the foreign investment rules, with the Foreign Takeovers Act (1975). [3]

In Whitlam's time foreign investment had been less than 10%, but it increased steadily after 1975. Between 1980 and 1981 there was the "highest capital inflow on record." Much of this was for loans to State governments for infrastructure projects, but after 1980 more and more was borrowed by private firms with an ever greater part going to property development. By 1985-86 services, tourism, real-estate and property development were responsible for over fifty per cent of incoming capital and real-estate was the biggest borrower. [4]

The Australian housing industry continued speculative land development and reliance on high immigration to feed population growth and thus demand, with little central planning. As the economy was opened up to the ideology of free market forces, speculation and housing price inflation increased. However, from 1974-1986 economic recession affected the housing industry. [5]

Government policies assisting home ownership were identified as an impediment to economic growth by, among others, a group that included the Australian Treasury, [6] over which Federal Treasurer Philip Lynch had presided until 1977, when he was sacked for involvement in Victorian land speculation scandals. Land scandals were not confined to Victoria, however. An example of political corruption and land speculation, with the demise of DURD and the Whitlam Government, occurred when the Liberal West Australian Minister for Industrial Development, Sir Charles Court, bailed out property developer, Alan Bond [7] by purchasing a property that Bond had been trying for years to get rezoned but which had been destined, with the co-operation of the previous WA Labor Government, under the Federal department, DURD, to remain a green corridor. Instead of leaving Bond with his unrezoned rural property, Court used DURD funds to purchase the property from Bond. Bond subsequently donated $20,000 to the Liberals' 1977 election campaign. Soon after Sir Charles Court raised $250,000 in a syndicate to finance Bond's America's Cup venture. [8]

The ALP West Australian Government that followed on from the Liberal one was no better. It formed a corrupt network with WA land speculators which was subsequently to be known as "WA Inc." The Premier involved in this was Brian Burke and he was later imprisoned for corruption. [9]

The members of the Australian Treasury group wanted a reduction in all forms of housing assistance. They also called for the freeing up of the housing market to market forces, without interference from subsidies or regulated industry rates. They blamed government regulation for keeping the cost of home ownership unrealistically low, inflating ownership expectations and leading to people owning too many houses. [10]

In response to lobbying, [11] immigration began to climb again from 1979 and remained high until 1982.

As well as dismantling Whitlam's urban and rural development system, the Fraser Government commenced the first of a long series of steps to dismantle the free tertiary education system. It thereby reduced that avenue for Australia to increase its skilled and tertiary educated workforce, leaving industry few options but to import new skilled workers. The structure and finance of the industry meant that support for developing a local system to provide skilled tradesmen remained weak and unorganised. Thus the industry continued its strong reliance on imported skilled labour. As the economy was opened up to the ideology of free market forces, speculation and housing price inflation increased, with strong encouragement from the Australian Treasury.

The section in The Growth Lobby and its Absence on Australia's return to a populationist development and housing policy under the Fraser government illustrates my argument that in countries where a highly profitable property development and residential construction industry dominates, individual firms may be more inclined than government assisted housing systems to access international loans in order to finance continued expansion. Furthermore a deregulated financial environment will assist the strategy of borrowing to finance expansion.

In the end of Chapter 7 and in Chapter 8 of The Growth Lobby and its Absence, I examined evidence for the hypothesis that Australia had followed a cornucopian route and France a Malthusian one after the oil crash. My evidence consisted largely of indicators of policy and practice related to per capita and industrial energy consumption, principally in the building industry and the production of dwellings. I situated these indicators within the context of the different land development and housing systems in Australia and France and showed how the first relied on immigration but the latter did not. I gave evidence that both countries had temporarily reduced immigration at the time of the first oil shock for energy saving and economic reasons, but that the fall of the Whitlam government had brought an end to these politics in Australia and ushered in a high conventional energy using expansionist period with fast population growth. I attributed this growthist course in Australia largely to a populationist lobby in which property developers and residential construction companies were important actors. I explained the ability of France to consolidate its population and energy use to the absence of such a lobby.

There are, however, other possible additional explanations for the difference between immigration policies in France and Australia that have resulted in a higher migration intake in Australia. For example there is, arguably, a stronger ethnic lobby in Australia than in France and this lobby is able to press for extended family reunion. Because Australia has an active immigrant recruitment intake, it is difficult to justify a small humanitarian intake. A multiculturalist approach to new settlers, rather than an integrationist approach may favour the development of ethnic lobbies and the establishment of distinct communities with a variety of motives for expansion. These explanations were not explored in my thesis but that is not to say that they and others have no value. Nevertheless, the evidence pointing to a very important role for the property development lobby in driving immigration was strong in 1998 when I began my thesis, stronger in 2002 when I completed it, and overwhelming in 2014 as I update this excerpt.

Malcolm Fraser’s policies furthered the interests of the Australian property lobby and undermined the capacity of the Australian people to resist it and to self-govern. It seems likely to me that there was interference, in the form of a ‘shock doctrine’ type program that could well have been pushed onto Australia by the CIA, as the Christopher Boyce interview seems to point to and as John Pilger argued in A Secret Country, Vintage, 1992.

NOTES

This article is based on research and a modified excerpt from Sheila Newman The Growth Lobby and its absence (longer title, The Growth Lobby in Australia and its Absence in France), Swinburne University Research thesis in Environmental Sociology, 2002.
[1] Sandercock, Property, Politics and Urban Planning, Transaction publishers, 1990, p.17.
[2] Ian Manning , “Policies: Past and Present”, Chapter 2, pp10-32, Eds. Ruth Fincher and John Nieuwenhuysen, Australian Poverty: Then and Now, MUP, 1998, p.14 and Whitlam, The Whitlam Government, Viking, 1985, p.404; Leonie Sandercock, Property, Politics and Urban Planning, op.cit., p. 16.
[3] Later to be renamed the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act (1975)
[4] R.H. Fagan, "Foreign Investment" in Australian Encyclopaedia, Terry Hills, NSW, Australian Geographic, Pty. Ltd, 1995, pp. 1393-1394.
[5] Trevor Sykes describes a wave of property crashes in June 1974 and at the start of 1977 in Trevor Sykes, The Bold Riders, Allen and Unwin, St. Leonards, New South Wales, Australia, 1996 edition, printed 2000, p.267. David Hayward, "The Reluctant Landlord", in Urban Policy and Research, Vol. 14., No.1, 1996, p.23, describes the property recession as lasting from 1975-1986. There were however also small peaks in 1976 and 1982 which coincided with relative peaks in immigration. See my figure 8.1, Chapter 8 and the discussion below it.
[6] Terry Burke, Peter W. Newton, and Mary Ann Wulff, "Australia", International Handbook of Housing Policies and Practices, Ed. Willem van Vliet, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1990., pp.722-762: p.728 &732, citing Stone 1979.
[7] Alan Bond migrated to Perth, Australia as a child with his English parents. He began business by property speculation which relied on land rezoning and although he finished up having many other kinds of investments, the basis of his business remained property. He wheeled and dealed for three decades, generally using time payment to deal with huge loans, including one that he floated with Kumagai Gumi. He won the America's cup in 1983, thus earning great popularity for Australia and the public approval of Prime Minister Hawke. He became a multi-millionaire, increasing his fortunes greatly during the 1987-89 period, but underlying this was a 20 fold rise in debt over the last five years and, in 1989 Bond Corporation announced a loss of 980 million, which was the largest in Australia's history to that date. Bond eventually went to prison, but not for very many years. Source: Trevor Sykes, The Bold Riders, op.cit., Chapter Six.
[8] Trevor Sykes, The Bold Riders, op.cit., pp.57-58.
[9] Ibid., pp.58-141.
[10] "The push of the group [Stone writes about], including the Australian Treasury, was for a reduction in assistance for housing generally and an opening up of the housing market to market forces unfettered by subsidies or regulated interest rates that artificially lower the cost of home ownership, raise ownership expectations, and encourage overconsumption of housing." Terry Burke, Peter W. Newton, and Mary Ann Wulff, "Australia", International Handbook of Housing Policies and Practices, op.cit., pp.722-762: p.728 &732, citing Stone 1979.
[11] Birrell and Birrell, An Issue of People, Longman Cheshire, 1987, pp.236-237. Criteria for skilled immigrants were made easier to meet in unilateral decisions made by the Department of Immigration without consulting the Department of Employment. Birrell and Birrell describe the Department of Immigration as actively supporting the immigration lobby. They describe this lobby as being made up of "well-organized, financed, and articulate industry associations and companies, and vocal ethnic associations who can claim to represent and perhaps to influence the voting intentions of significant numbers of citizens."

#F5F6CE;line-height:120%;">Nelson Mandela is dead and, despite his immense charisma, intellect, capability and courage, Africa remains poor, divided, overpopulated and spectacularly unhealthy. In her monumental book, The Shock Doctrine, Penguin, 2007, Naomi Klein told how economists got control of the details of the revolution during handover negotiations, blinded revolutionaries with their sophistry, and tied it up in red tape. They actually returned the management of the central bank to its apartheid boss. This article is an excerpt from pp200-204 of the chapter in The Shock Doctrine entitled, 'Democracy born in chains.' The greatest loss to the African Revolution was that by the time Mandela rose to power, his government no longer had the right to redistribute land - which is the essence of revolutionary government.

"[...] the de Klerk government had a twofold strategy. First, drawing on the ascendant Washington consensus that there was now only one way to run an economy, it portrayed key sectors of economic decision making - such as trade policy and the central bank - as 'technical' or 'administrative.' Then it used a wide range of new policy tools - international trade agreements, innovations in constitutional law and structural adjustment programs - to hand control of those power centers to supposedly impartial experts, economists and officials from the IMF, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the National Party - anyone except the liberation fighters from the ANC. It was a strategy of balkanization, not of the country's geography (as de Klerk had originally attempted) but of its economy.

This plan was successfully executed under the noses of ANC leaders, who were naturally preoccupied with winning the battle to control Parliament. In the process, the ANC failed to protect itself against a far more insidious strategy - in essence, an elaborate insurance plan against the economic clauses in the Freedom Charter every becoming law in South Africa. "The people shall govern!" would soon become a reality, but the sphere over which they would govern was shrinking fast.

While these tense negotiations between adversaries were unfolding, the ANC was also busily preparing within its own ranks for the day when it would take office. Teams of ANC economists and lawyers formed working groups charged with figuring out exactly how to turn the general promises of the Freedom Charter - for housing amenities and health care - into practical policies. The most ambitious of these plans was Make Democracy Work, an economic blueprint for South Africa's post apartheid future, written while the high-level negotiations were taking place. What the party loyalists didn't know at the time was that while they were hatching their ambitious plans, the negotiating team was accepting concessions at the bargaining table that would make their implementation a practical impossibility. "It was dead before it was even launched," the economist Vishnu Padayachee told me of Make Democracy Work. By the time the draft was complete, "there was a new ball game."

[...]

"We were caught completely off guard," recalled Padayachee, now in his early fifties. He had done his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He knew that at the time, even among free-market economists in the U.S., central bank independence was considered a fringe idea, a pet policy of a handful of Chicago School ideologues who believed that central banks should be run as sovereign republics within states, out of reach of the meddling hands of elected lawmakers. For Padayachee and his colleagues, who strongly believed that monetary policy needed to serve the new government's 'big goals of growth, employment and redistribution,' the ANC's position was a no-brainer: "There was not going to be an independent central bank in South Africa."

Padayachee and a colleague stayed up all night writing a paper that gave the negotiating team the arguments it needed to resist this curveball from the national Party. If the central bank (in South Africa called the Reserve Bank) was run separately from the rest of the government, it could restrict the ANC's ability to keep the promises in the Freedom Charter. Besides, if the central bank was not accountable to the ANC government, to whom, exactly, would it be accountable? The IMF? The Johannesburg Stock Exchange? Obviously, the National Party was trying to find a backdoor way to hold on to power even after it lost the elections - a strategy that needed to be resisted at all costs. "They were locking in as much as possible," Padayachee recalled. "That was a clear part of the agenda."

Padayachee faxed the paper in the morning and didn't hear back for weeks. "Then, when we asked what happened, we were told, "Well, we gave that one up'." Not only would the central bank be run as an autonomous entity within the South African state, with its independence enshrined in the new constitution, but it would be headed by the same man who ran it under apartheid, Chris Stals. It wasn't just the central bank that the ANC had given up: in another major concession, Derek Keyes, the white finance minister under apartheid, would also remain in his post - much as the finance ministers and central bank heads from Argentina's dictatorship somehow managed to get their jobs back under democracy. The New York Times praised Keyes as "the country ranking apostle of low-spending business-friendly government."

Until that point, Padayachee said, "we were still buoyant, because, my God, this was a revolutionary struggle; at least there' be something to come out of it." When he learned that the central bank and the treasury would be run by their old apartheid bosses, it meant "everything would be lost in terms of economic transformation." When I asked him whether he thought the negotiators realised how much they had lost, after some hesitation, he replied, "Frankly, no." It was simple horse-trading: "In the negotiations, something had to be given, and our side gave those things - I’ll give you this, you give me that."

From Padayachee's point of view, none of this happened because of some grand betrayal on the part of ANC leaders but simply because they were out-maneuvered on a series of issues that seemed less than crucial at the time - but turned out to hold South Africa's lasting liberation in the balance.

What happened in those negotiations is that the ANC found itself caught in a new kind of web, one made of arcane rules and regulations, all designed to confine and constrain the power of elected leaders. As the web descended on the country, only a few people even noticed it was there, but when the new government came to power and tried to move freely, to give its voters the tangible benefits of liberation they expected and thought they had voted for, the strands of the web tightened and the administration discovered that its powers were tightly bound. Patrick Bond, who worked as an economic adviser in Mandela's office during the first years of ANC rule, recalls that the in-house quip was "Hey, we've got the state, where's the power?" As the new government attempted to make tangible the dreams of the Freedom Charter, it discovered that power was elsewhere.

Want to redistribute land? Impossible - at the last minute, the negotiators agreed to add a clause to the new constitution that protects all private property, making land reform virtually impossible. Want to create jobs for millions of unemployed workers? Can't - hundreds of factories were actually about to lose because the ANC had signed on to the GATT, the precursor to the World Trade Organisation, which made it illegal to subsidise the auto plants and textile factories. Want to get free AIDS drugs to the townships, where the disease is spreading with terrifying speed? That violates an intellectual property rights commitment under the WTO, which the ANC joined with no public debate as a continuation of the GATT. Need money to build more and larger houses for the poor and to bring free electricity to the townships? Sorry - the budget is being eaten up servicing the massive debt, passed on quietly by the apartheid government. Print more money? Tell that to the apartheid-era head of the central bank. Free water for all? Not likely. The World Bank, with its large in-country contingent of economists, researchers and trainers (a self-proclaimed "Knowledge Bank"), is making private-sector partnerships the service norm. Want to impose currency controls to guard against wild speculation? That would violate the $850 million IMF deal, signed, conveniently enough right before the elections. Raise the minimum wage to close the apartheid income gap? Nope. The IMF deal promises 'wage restraint.' And don't even think about ignoring these commitments - any change will be regarded as evidence of dangerous national untrustworthiness, a lack of commitment to 'reform' an absence of a 'rules-based system.' All of which will lead to currency crashes, aid cuts and capital flight. The bottom line was that South Africa was free but simultaneously captured; each one of these arcane acronyms represented a different thread in the web that pinned down the limbs of the new government.

A long time antiapartheid activist, Rassool Snyman, described the trap to me in stark terms. "They never freed us. They only took the chain from around our neck and put it on our ankles." Yasmin Sooka, a prominent South African human rights activist, told me that the transition 'was business saying, 'We'll keep everything and you [the ANC] will rule in name ... You can have political power, you can have the facade of governing, but the real governance will take place somewhere else. It was a process of infantilization that is common to so-called transitional countries - new governments are, in effect, given keys to the house but not the combination to the safe."

As a result of the wars and sanctions against Iraq since 1990, found by the UK Government's own Chilcot Inquiry in 2012 to have been illegal, 3.3 million Iraqis have died and many more have fled, including 1.2 million to Syria, according to Wikipedia. Knowing that the same people who invaded Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are now arming, supplying and paying the so-called "Free Syrian Army" (FSA), Syrian patriots are fighting hard against the FSA killers -- and winning.

Please attend a public meeting at 7.30PM on Wednesday 6 March for peace in Syria at the Unitarian Church, 110 Grey Street, East Melbourne. (The previously advertised time of 6.30PM was wrong. Our apologies.)

In order to boost the numbers of fighters, sadly depleted by almost two years of savage fighting, Syrian women are now being enlisted into the armed forces as shown in this YouTube video on the Syrian Girl Partisan's YouTube channel. This channel is an excellent resource with which to arm yourself against lies from the mainstream media such as the Guardian article Brothers in arms: the 10 brothers fighting for the Syrian uprising of 22 February by Martin Chulov.

How you can help save lives and help Syria save itself from the New World Order

If you live close to Melbourne Victoria, please attend a public meeting for Peace in Syria.

Venue: Melbourne Unitarian Church Hall, 110 Grey Street, East Melbourne

Date: Wednesday 6 March

Time: 6:30PM

How did stealing from the public to enrich the private sector become a norm in Australia and why do some religions give it moral credence? This is a reminder of the existence of an important, publicly available article about the rise of right-wing so-called 'think tanks' in Australia since the mid 1970s and their recent tendency to combine forces with the religious right. Here, from another source and angle, are arguments that reinforce candobetter's message about the problems Australia has with the growth lobby and its merchants.

Manufacturing right-wing consent

An article by Marcus Smith and Peter Marden (2008): "Conservative Think Tanks and Public Politics," Australian journal of Political Science, 43:4, 699-717 describes how so-called 'think tanks' rose with the funding of private industry players who found in them a way to influence public perception to confuse business and commercial interest as "synonymous with public values". A hallmark of the language used for this was the notion of 'commonsense'. The authors identify a 'fact/value dichotomy' to push a 'logic of economic growth'.

They don't give this example but, "Jobs are more important than trees," immediately came to my mind as a slogan mindlessly repeated at election times.

The authors identify a 'pivotal shift' around 1980 when Sir Robert Crichton-Brown[1] led a political campaign to make business more pro-active in policy making processes and public debate, apparently with the aim of bolstering a privileged minority. Significantly preceding this campaign were visits to Australia in 1975 and 1976 of ultra-economic rationalists, Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. (See more about Friedman and the Chicago School in Naomi Klein's once in a century book, Shock Doctrine.) The result has been,

"a mutually supportive network of market fundamentalists and vested interests that is committed to undermining any opposition."

Mass media the corporate messenger

Smith and Marden write:

"Our concern derives more from the discursive force of think-tank commentary received and appropriated as 'expert opinion' by a media too lazy to apply rigorous critical analysis and a public interested but unable to access alternative views."

The success of the right-wing movement in influencing the media and politics is the result of

"unrivalled access to financial, intellectual and political resources; the availability of technologies that make wholesale manipulation of public opinion possible and which are used with almost negligible transparency or accountability; and, effectively, the anonymity of many participants mean this activity not only has the capacity to undermine any notion of a democratic politics, but is, in fact, the very intention."

The paper gives the example of the IPA's 'great Australian Dream project' as one where an alliance of interests was formed and operated in public debate in the Australian political context to popularise the notion that housing unaffordability was almost solely the result of irrational planning regulations stopping the release of land. The authors chronicle how Federal Treasurer Costello in August 2006 introduced into Parliament The Tragedy of Planning: Losing the great Australian Dream", a report about housing affordability, compiled by the IPA's Alan Moran, without anyone being made aware that the project was chaired by Bob Day, a former Housing Industry of Australia (HIA) president. They describe how these ideas were taken up and promoted far and wide in the mainstream press and by the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL), whom Day had addressed. They also note links to a web site in the USA called Demographia, which is run by Wendell Cox, who also has links to the IPA.

Smith and Marden criticise the rationale of unfair planning regulations preventing release of land because they feel that the issue of interest rates should have been included as the 'overwhelming reason' why young Australian families were finding it increasingly difficult to afford a home." They add,

"There is not enough space here to analyse in detail the position of the IPA with regard to the housing issue; however, what is clearly evident in the language used is the unwavering faith in free market values coupled with an appeal to conservative family values, all the while serving vested interests in the housing construction industry, which has supported the efforts of the IPA. ...focusing simply on planning regulations as the sole cause of the increase in house prices and the obvious solution being to 'remove the burden of red tape'. The argument is designed to conceal more than reveal, relying on jingoistic labels, such as the 'Banana Brigade' (build-absolutely-nothing-anywhere-near-anything) and the 'Consolidati' (urban-consolidation-culturists), which serve all too conveniently as scapegoats who are accused of protecting property investments at the expense of young families seeking a first home. The reality is that the issues surrounding the built environment are far more complex, with powerful vested political and economic interests seeking to control the debate."

Since they wrote this article, of course, there has been an absolute avalanche of special favours from government to the property development and growth lobby.

Candobetter.net would say that the overwhelming reason for high housing prices is that population growth causes an inflationary demand. High interest rates are just the icing on the cake for profiteers who hold Australians to ransome. Neither Smith and Marden nor the IPA seem to consider impacts on the natural environment or population policy. Andrew Norton's "Lone Classical Liberal" blog has some correspondence from a different angle, attacking Smith and Marden for getting the Australian dream wrong, claiming that Australians love failing to see that people "prefer, according to surveys, detached houses to flats." Other correspondence on the same blog also attacks universities for producing low quality arguments.

Perhaps because of its age, this excellent paper lacks a quantity of concrete examples of profiteering through the manufacture of consent, when examples in real life seem to abound. If we at candobetter.net did not have many pages of such examples, including links to The Growth lobby and its Absence we might find the story of this paper hard to believe. Instead, we find it corroborative and suppose that the reason the authors don't give many examples, but maintain their argument in the general and philosophical relates to the date of the research, prior to its publication, in 2008. At that time the scam of population growth was barely mentioned publicly. Nonetheless the article fills in some blanks. It is very well written, effective and provides fascinating documentation of associations between groups of people via their shared values and ideas.

Of loafs and fishes

The authors point at the link between religion and the growth lobby in the Alan Moran/Bob Day Australian Dream example. They then discuss the rise of the religious right in the United States and recently in Australia, finding a synergy between the religious right and the political right.

The adoption of 'Prayer Breakfasts' by Australian politicians from both major parties is one example of the surreptitious inclusion of religious sentiment into mainstream politics. ... The evidence of a transference to Australia of politico-religious values that are commonly associated with the political landscape of the USA is a major influence informing the emerging neoconservatism."

I was also bothered by the sudden introduction of Prayer Breakfasts as well as, earlier, the rise of pronatalism influenced by Christian groups, cropping up like the undead DLP, for instance with Kim Beasley, like father like son. (See "Pronatalist policies in Australia 1945-2000.") For this reason it has been a relief to have a childless unmarried atheist for Prime Minister, (Julia Gillard), even if experience tells me that branding can be deceptive, but then I tell myself that she must have something real going for her because the mainstream press hate her so.

So, what's the deal with religion and fascism?

"In attacking the notion of the state as benevolent, much of the critique recasts the state as an intrusive secular institution interfering in the relationship between the individual and God. A restoration of Christian ethics that are framed in natural law enshrined in Holy Scripture, shifts the emphasis of the state from provider to disciplinarian; the enforcer of the authority of the word of God and protector of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Within this framework, market fundamentalists and neoconservatives have identified a common interest that has enabled the formation of alliances between powerful corporate interests and right-wing conservatives and fostered a far more cohesive and influential political network."

NOTES

Sir Robert Crichton-Brown is a patron of Sydney University's Medical School Foundation, who give his biography thus:

Sir Robert Crichton-Brown KCMG CBE TD

Sir Robert joined the Lumley Group in 1938 in London. After war time service in Iceland, France, India and Burma from 1939 to 1945, he rejoined the Group, holding positions in Sydney from 1947 as Director, Managing Director and Chairman; remaining as a Director until 2003. He was Chairman of Rothmans of Pall Mall (Aust) Limited from 1981 to 1985 and Executive Chairman Rothmans International from 1985 to 1988. He also held positions as Director and Chairman of a range of commercial companies including the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney. Sir Robert was President of the Institute of Directors of Australia from 1967 to 1980, Honorary Federal Treasurer of the Liberal Party of Australia from 1973 to 1985, a Director of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital from 1970 to 1984. He worked with a number of community organisations including the Salvation Army, the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, the National Scout Association and the Girl Guides Association of Australia. Sir Robert was a member of Australia’s winning Admiral’s Cup Team in the UK (Balandra) in 1967 and in 1970 winner of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race (Pacha).

Sir Robert Crichton-Brown is an Honorary Governor and a Founding Member of the Medical Foundation. He held positions as Honorary Treasurer, and President from 1962 to 1987. Sir Robert was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the University of Sydney in 1987 and is an Honorary Life Governor of the Australian Postgraduate Federation in Medicine.

Burial at sea?
Osama bin Laden's body should never have been disposed of without extensive evidence of death and identity being made available to the public. How is anyone to believe reports of his death? Cui bono?

Dialysis in the desert

I agree with Paul Craig Roberts in his article, "Osama bin Laden’s Second Death." Reports on Osama bin Laden's death do sound like an April Fool's joke. I don't have the same problem as Roberts does with the idea of bin Laden having renal dialysis in the desert or having problems transferring funds. Portable renal dialysis machines exist and rich people move money around in many forms, including as drugs, all over the world.

Poor taste

I don't pretend to know how Osama bin Laden lived or moved his money nor when he died. I don't find the media reports of 2nd May 2011 very believable and I didn't enjoy watching the President of the United States saying how great it was they had killed someone. I could have written that speech better, maybe starting with, "Regretfully, we announce that we found we had no alternative ..." But, can we believe anything the U.S. government says about international politics these days?

Where's the body?

What really gets me is the lack of a body. Burial at sea? How is anyone to accept that?

Surely with such an important corpus delecti - well, deceased person - the world is entitled to the most careful handling, with forensic examination, identification and finally a formal ceremony agreed to by world leaders, perhaps even with consultation with his family. The outcome of such a ceremony could have agreed to any form of disposal of the body, but the body should never have been disposed of without extensive evidence of death and identity being made available to the public.

It might help if we were to hear the accounts of the witnesses involved. Were there any independent journalists involved at the actual event of disposal of the body? Truly the whole thing strikes me as dreamlike and unbelievable, but it did from the beginning, anyway, when I woke up one day after working a nightshift and saw an incredible Hollywood-like production of aeroplanes sailing into skyscrapers. I waited and waited for King Kong to appear and stop them, but he never did. Instead we got that wil'o'the-wispy mastermind with renal failure, Osama bin Laden.

Cinema

But Osama bin Laden was never physically connected with the acts against the World Trade Center tower himself. Almost immediately after the event, on a cinematographic time-frame, it seemed, the US came up with pictures of the 18 men who were supposed to have executed the attack on the New York CBD under the orchestration of Osama bin Laden. Four of those men have since claimed still to be alive. It never seemed clear who was supposed to be the leader in this raid.

In the absence of a full investigation

One waited for a full investigation.
It never came.

For me, that was the clincher.[1] I initially simply accepted what I was told on the news, but when the inadequacy of the inquiry into 9/11 was put to me, I could not argue it away. Why didn't the USA seriously engage in a full investigation, demonstrating for all to see, why those 18 men were implicated and why we should believe Osama bin Laden's claim to be responsible?

Later many people identified the United States Government itself as a suspect in this tragedy of 9/11. A lot of the arguments for that were somewhat circumstantial, but so were the arguments implicating Osama bin Laden, even if he had claimed responsibility. There were many possible motives on both sides, involving big business in the United States on the one hand, and victims of big business in the Arab world, on the other.

Motives

Some of the accusations against the US Government allege that the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings served big-business interests that wanted to make money out of war, businesses collecting on insurance on the buildings, and CIA secrets that might have been destroyed conveniently in the buildings. Huge corporations like Halliburton and KPMG certainly made billions out of the war on Iraq, which was more or less contracted out to them by the US Government[2] - to the extent that the U.S.government has been unable to regulate corrupt financial practices and conduct of elections during the war, since it was found that it had abrogated its powers to oversee military conduct in one related hearing. [3] Halliburton is also involved in Afghanistan. KPMG has offices in Afghanistan and Pakistan.[4] Corporations do business everywhere, but we should not entrust them with war.

On the other side, the continuous exploitation of the Arab World by European industrial colonial forces, then by corporate colonial forces after the independence of those countries in the 1970s, furnishes an undeniable motive.

The current democratic struggles in the Arab world to get rid of governments (Bahrain, Egypt, ...) backed by the same international hegemonies looks like a reflection of this motive although that doesn't make it linked to 9/11. (Where to put Libya in this group is not easy. To this writer it still looks as if most Libyans consider Gadafi to be better than the internationally backed alternatives, or it would be easy to extract him. One therefore suspects the whole movement against him. I thought this article from Global Research about Libya was good.)

Conspiracy theory, motive and opportunity

How much in control of the US is the US Government? Part of the political and forensic mystery of 9/11 is the apparent bemusement of government leaders who look as if they are reading from incomplete scripts. I am not much of a conspiracy theorist. My preferred methodology is "Cui bono?" In order to explain the continuation of trends that make life unpleasant for many people, you can generally find parties, companies and economic sectors that actually derive focused benefit from the continuation of such trends. Dig deeper and you will find them lobbying on their behalf, using questionable arguments.

In this case, however, because the beneficiaries of 9/11 are also the beneficiaries of an immense crime, for the destruction of the towers was not a legal business operation, you are going to have to admit that a conspiracy must exist somewhere. Either you accept that Osama bin Laden -- or some other outsider or outsiders to the Western World -- benefited from 9/11 and orchestrated it for political reasons, or you suspect an "inside job."

Like good detectives, or world jury-members, we obviously seek to understand "who benefits" from 9/11 and we have two excellent theories: big business and its friends in government vs the victims of big business and its friends in government.

Whichever case seems more likely to you, unless you personally know something that I don't, without a proper investigation, neither case may be proven.

In the absence of suspects being brought to trial, you and I can only advance theories and argue them more or less persuasively. Governments and international bodies can, however, capture suspects, collect evidence, and do forensic tests. They can bring people and corporations to trial.

The fact that the US government has never done this in relation to the events of 9/11 is suspicious. Frankly, it makes me favour the theory of the "inside job" on the basis of cui bono. I have to ask myself, is the US Government protecting some influential 'friends' by not investigating 9/11 properly?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, author of "Osama bin Laden's second death," suggests that a motive for finding Osama bin Laden lies in the likelihood that the US is running out of money to keep the war in Afghanistan going.

Disposing of the evidence

Why, however, did the soldiers who claim to have killed bin Laden dispose of the body?

I'm afraid that it makes me more suspicious. Call me imaginative, if you like, but surely a proper world-policing task-force would have seized the evidence, along with the body, to bring them back for the long awaited investigation and trial, in good faith, to demonstrate to the world, once and for all, what really happened.

Getting rid of the body and blowing up bin Laden's alleged headquarters look to me like getting rid of the evidence. Cui bono?

Well, exactly.

This seems to bring us all back to where we started.

Ready for the next episode.

Enter the minotaur. Or the prophet. Or the son of God.
They are still looking for his body, too.

Will Obama bin Laden come back from the dead?
(Again?) [5]

It's that time of year. (Easter just past.)

How will the two sides of this quasi-mythical Hollywood-Corporate Press production continue to harness the power of the masses, with the help of mainstream press manufacture of consensus, presumably to protect the interests of the world's elites?

Many people in Australia likely to be suspicious too

In Australia there was a strong indication that the masses actually find the storyline a little unbelievable, going by such instances as the massive support for Australian maritime unionist Kevin Bracken's views. But politicians seem infinitely more credulous - going by Prime Minister Gillard's and her peers' response to Bracken's views. The Australian Press predictably denounced all questioning of the official bed-time story and, when if found, to its horror, that people wanted to discuss the matter, it simply stopped reporting. See "Free speech defenders 'persecute' Jon Faine"and Report on Jon Faine/Kevin Bracken interview and subsequent fall-out

Who's paying for the next production

Whose taxes are paying for this production now, if bin Laden's millions are no longer financing it? If they were ever financing it.

Do we have a choice?

One thing is for sure, if you take an extraordinary but material event out of the realms of the material and confirm it as a myth, no-one is going to expect a serious investigation. The way has been prepared for the 9/11 crime to be handed over to priests and the tourist circuits. It is a religion in the making, fit to shore up differences between muslims and christians, capitalists, communists and anarchists, for a long time to come.

If we choose to believe.

NOTES

[1] There was an almost immediate announcement of who the guilty parties were, after unbelievably speedy identification of suspects, but actual public investigation was avoided for nearly 2 and a half years, despite obvious demand. For comparison, the bombing of Pearl Harbour and President Kennedy's assassination were both investigated almost immediately. Ditto for the investigation of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinski, which was provided with a great deal more money than the 9/11
investigation, when it eventually occurred. Against all principles of a democratic public justice system, the public were denied careful and detailed establishment of evidence and reasons for allocation of guilt. The motive, of a fanatical racist religious ideologue with unlimited funds in the desert of Afghanistan, financing alienated muslims to carry out spectacular acts against United States infrastructure and bystanders for his own purposes, did need careful evidencing, to say the least.

The investigation seemed pro forma to observers, with numerous matters left uncovered. A notable hole in the report which came from the investigation was that it said nothing about the collapse of the World trade center tower number 7. This occurred a few hours after Towers one and two (the "Twin towers"), but the main difference was that no plane flew into it and it was located about half a kilometer away from the towers hit by the planes. It was as if the sudden death with head injuries of a man standing in the next street hours after two men who were shot by guns held to their heads in another street was ascribed to the impact of bullets on the first two men. So far no theory of why Tower 7 collapsed has sustained scientific criticism. That does not say that no relationship will ever be found, but it makes it unlikely. The principle of Occams razor would suggest that a separate cause of the collapse of the 7th building is likely. Another notable hole was the lack of questions about the failure of the US Defence system to halt any of these attacks in part or in full.

There may have been an explanation, but the world has never heard it. At best it might show up the US military system as asleep on the job. At worst it might show that it was in on the job.

[2] A representative of the FBI has reportedly said there is "no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."

On June 5, 2006, the Muckraker Report contacted the FBI Headquarters, (202) 324-3000, to learn why Bin Laden's Most Wanted poster did not indicate that Usama was also wanted in connection with 9/11. The Muckraker Report spoke with Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI. When asked why there is no mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden's Most Wanted web page, Tomb said, "The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden's Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11." Source

Even today, after the FBI has updated its wanted poster for bin Laden as "Deceased" the crimes of 9/11 are not among those listed: Murder of U.S. Nationals outside the United States; Conspiracy to Murder U.S. Nationals Outside the United States; Attack on a Federal Facility Resulting in Death."

[3] Naomi Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, (p.355) quotes, 'Michael Fleisher, the founder of the Chicago School based Shock Doctrine', saying in 2003 of Iraq that ‘protected businesses never, never become competitive’, and she comments: “he appeared to be impervious to the irony that Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all the other US corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the US government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot – all at taxpayer expense. The Chicago School crusade, which emerged with the core purpose of dismantling the welfare statism of the New Deal, had finally reached its zenith in this corporate New Deal. It was a simpler, more stripped down form of privatisation – the transfer of bulky assets wasn’t even necessary: just straight-up corporate gorging on state coffers. No investment, no accountability, astronomical profits. The double standard was explosive, as was the systematic exclusion of Iraqis from the plan.” See also pp. 362-378 for shocking stuff on conduct in Iraq.

[4] "WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney's (search) former company already has garnered more than $600 million in military work related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and potentially could earn billions more without having to compete with other companies.

As the Army's sole provider of troop support services, Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary has received work orders totaling $529.4 million related to the two wars under a 10-year contract that has no spending ceiling.

Rather than put the Iraq work up for bidding, the government has used the 2001 Halliburton contract to place the various work orders in Iraq, prompting criticism from some Democrats that Cheney's former company is receiving favored treatment.

"The amount Halliburton could receive in the future is virtually limitless," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who disclosed the troop support work orders Thursday. "It is simply remarkable that a single company could earn so much money from the war in Iraq."" Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,88122,00.html

[5] Klein, Shock Doctrine, pp. 357-358. The Custer Battles corruption case: "Two former employees of the security firm launched a whistle-blower lawsuit against the company, accusing it of cheating on reconstruction-related contracts with the CPA and defrauding the U.S. government of millions of dollars ,mostly for work done at the Baghdad International Airport. The case was based on documents produced by the company that clearly showed it was keeping two sets of numbers - one for itself, one for invoicing the CPA. retired Brigadier General Hugh Tant testified that the company's performance was 'probably the worst I've evern seen in my 30 yhears in teh army." (Among custer Battles' many alleged violations, it is said to have appropriated Iraqui-owned forklifts from the airport, repainted them and billed the CPA for the cost of leasing the machines.)

In March 2006 a federal jury in Virginia ruled against the company, finding it guilty of fraud, and forced it to pay $10 million in damages. The company then asked the judge to overturn the verdict, with a revealing defense. It claimed that the CPA was not part of teh U.S.S government, and therefeore not subject to its laaws, including the False Claims act. The implications of this defense were enormous: the Bush administration had indemnified U.S. corporations working in Iraq from any liability under Iraqui laws; if the CPA wasn't subject to U.S. law either, it meant that the contractors weren't subject ot any law at all - U.S. or Iraqui. [...] In other words, the U.S. governmetn presence in Iraq during the first year of its economic experiment had beena mirage - there had been no government, just a funnel to get U.S. taxpayer and Iraqi oil dollars to foreign corporations, completely outside the law. In this way, Iraq represented the most extreme expression of the anti-state counterrevolution - a hollow state, where, as the courts finally established, there was no there, there."

[6] See film of Pakistan politician Benazir Buto interviewed by David Frost in 2007 about her survival of an assassination attempt just prior to her actual assassination, where, in passing, she says that Osama bin Laden was murdered.

...

Are troops what Haiti needs?

In the above news item, "Are Troops what Haiti needs?" Produced by Jesse Freeston, Reporter Ansel Herz says, "At one of the hospitals in Haiti that was not crushed there are basically just a few Haitian doctors there Haitian Red Cross then a team of French doctors probably about seven of them ... They're basically treating like one or two people at a time... They're poorly equipped. They don't have all the supplies that they need. ..There are hundreds of people outside this hospital in tents, waiting for some kind of care, many of them have been there for days." (Ed. There were similar reports on the French news a few days ago, and also that the US forces were more or less controlling the one airport and stopping other nations from helping the Haitians.) Ansel Herz also comments on the hyping of looting themes broadcast by mainstream news in Britain, with pictures showing two men trying to get items out of a collapsed building. He says that he has not seen any looting and that people are trying to find food and are sharing it with each other.

After the earthquake in Haiti, America is seen coming to the aid of the Haitians, with its mighty military power, although aid has been sent, it is not getting through to the people, which may be purposely done to plunge Haiti into rioting and looting that will need the U.S. soldiers to step in and declare military rule. This will be the prelude to yet another puppet government put into place to serve the U.S. Imperialists.

Disaster Capitalism and the Shock Doctrine

The clip above is of Naomi Klein talking about "disaster capitalism" as described in her book, The Shock Doctrine

The Shock Doctrine or 'disaster capitalism' has been observed many times before. (See review of Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine here.)

After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts. New Orleans residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened. After 9/11 The White house passed the patriot act.

These events are examples of the shock doctrine: using the public's disorientation following massive collective shocks - wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy, which advantages the US and its major financial organisations and corporations. Conditions are imposed, such as the selling off of publicly owned water and power to private companies when people who would normally unite to resist this are unable to organise against it due to fighting for their lives against a natural disaster.

The clip from The Real News also has footage from an interview with Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood, on sustained interference by recent US presidents, Bush and Clinton, and financiers with the ability of the twice reelected Haitian president, President Aristides, to carry out his election program. Bush and Clinton have already become involved in the US Disaster Aid program. This is a real problem for Haiti and for the world.

Excerpts plus comments posted by Frank Holland
Harold Pinter has died.
His Nobel speech summed up many European's view of the USA, I wonder how Obama will address those truths.

A few snippets

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: 'Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.' Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. 'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: 'But in this case "innocent people" were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?' Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,' he said.

[...]

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again.
The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance.

'Democracy' had prevailed.

[...]

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries.
Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened...

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.' It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

[...]

The Invasion of Iraq

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

-----------------------------------------------

Comment

Pinter does not add the other crimes, white collar crimes, emanating from New York and London, the crimes of milking and debasing the financial systems of the free world.

Now Obama will replace Bush, Brown has replaced Blair, but the past sins remain. I have no doubt Obama will try to solve both the energy crisis and the financial crisis by a massive investment in renewable energy projects, and Brown is strutting his stuff as the saviour of the world banking system. They will both hope that we can forget Iraq etc, but should we?

--

Exerpts plus comments posted by Frank Holland

A copy of the article One Year After the Publication of The Shock Doctrine, A Response to the Attacks was included in the Naomi Klein newsletter (www.naomiklein.org/contact-naomi-klein) which I received today. There was almost complete silence from the right wing think-tanks exposed in The Shock Doctrine for many months following its publication. In Australia, I nearly always encountered total silence from the ideological co-thinkers of Milton Friedman in online discussions, that is, until very recently when, in an Online Opinion forum discussion Winning the War In Iraq , I encountered posts, the content of which seemed to originate from a paper The Klein Doctrine - The Rise of Disaster Polemics published by The Cato Institute on 14 May. Klein's article is a response to this and to a similar article Dead Left by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic of 30 July 08.

This article exposes conclusively how these articles employ various dishonest debating including doing precisely what the accuse Klein herself of doing, that is taking quotes "out of context". As Klein writes she doesn't have time to comprehensively refute every falsehood in these articles. Her "full rebuttal is the book itself."

However, there is one other criticism that Klein has yet to respond to, that is her failure to take a stance against high immigration and her implicit depiction of all groups opposed to high immigration as reactionary anti-humanitarian and xenophobic. I have sent three e-mails so to either Naomi Klein or Debra Levy (debra [AT] naomiklein org) her chief researcher on this and have yet to receive a response. These concerns are also discussed in the article Why is Naomi Klein uncritical of mass immigration to the First World? of 27 July 08 by Sheila Newman.

However, in spite of this serious blemish, The Shock Doctrine remains a groundbreaking and indispensable work and her ongoing journalistic activism remains an immense service to humanity. - James Sinnamon

See also: Online Opinion discussions in which The Shock Doctrine is discussed: NSW power without pride and Winning the war in Iraq.

One Year After the Publication of The Shock Doctrine, A Response to the Attacks

By Naomi Klein, 2 September 2008, orignal article at www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/09/response-attacks.

Contents: #FriedmanSupportedTheWar" id="FriedmanSupportedTheWar">Sorry Boys, Milton Friedman Supported The War, #AttackTheAuthor" id="AttackTheAuthor">Ignore the Reporting, Attack the Author, #GraspingStraws" id="GraspingStraws">Grasping at Straws, #StrawMenMassacre" id="StrawMenMassacre">A Massacre of Straw Men, #GoToTheSource" id="GoToTheSource">Go to the Source

Exactly one year ago, I set off on a book tour to promote The Shock Doctrine. The plan was for it to last three months, quite long by publishing standards. Twelve months later, it is still going http://www.naomiklein.org/meet-naomi/tour-dates . But this has been no ordinary book tour. Everywhere I have traveled- from Calgary, Alberta to Cochabamba, Bolivia - I have heard more stories about how shock strategies have been used to impose unwanted pro-corporate policies. I have also been part of stimulating debates and discussions about how the current round of crises - oil, food, financial markets, heavy weather -- can be transformed into opportunities for progressive change.

And there have been other kinds of responses too. The Shock Doctrine is a direct attack on the intellectuals and institutions that have disseminated corporatist ideology around the world. When I wrote the book, I fully expected to get hit back. Yet for eight months following publication, there was an eerie silence from the 'free-market' ideologues. Sure, a few dismissive reviews appeared in the business press (www.naomiklein.org/articles/2007/10/business-press-unrequited-love) . But not a word from the Washington think tanks that I name in the book. Nothing from the University of Chicago economics department. Even The Economist magazine, which used to attack me gleefully and with great regularity, never mentioned the book in print. An American television producer, who was trying to find an opponent to debate me on-air, confided that she had never been turned down so consistently. "They seem to think if they ignore you, you'll go away."

Well, the silence from the right has certainly been broken. In recent months, several articles and reports have come out claiming to debunk my thesis. The most prominent are a 'background paper' (www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp102.pdf (663K), www.cato.org/pubs/bp/html/bp102/bp102index.html) published by The Cato Institute, extended into a full length book in Swedish (!), and a lengthy essay www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-a8a0-945d1deb420b in The New Republic by senior editor Jonathan Chait.

Several readers have written to this site (www.shockdoctrine.com) asking me to respond to these attacks, if only to help them defend the book more effectively. I resisted at first (clinging to my summer vacation) but I appreciate the feedback and several points do need correcting. Since the reports by Cato and The New Republic - though purporting to come from radically different points on the political spectrum - share some marked similarities, I've decided to tackle them together. Here goes.

#FriedmanSupportedTheWar" id="FriedmanSupportedTheWar">Sorry Boys, Milton Friedman Supported The War

Both Jonathan Chait and The Cato Institute claim that the late economist Milton Friedman was a staunch opponent of the invasion of Iraq. The Cato paper states of me that, 'She claims that Friedman was a 'neoconservative' and thus in favor of an aggressive American foreign policy, and she argues that Iraq was invaded so that Chicago-style policies could be implemented there%. but nowhere does she mention Friedman's actual views about the war. Friedman himself said: 'I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression.' And this was not just one war that he happened to oppose. In 1995, he described his foreign policy position as 'anti-interventionist.''

Similarly, Chait accuses me of not knowing the difference between libertarians and neo-cons and chides me for never mentioning -- 'not once, not anywhere' -- that Friedman 'argued against the Iraq war from the beginning.' Apparently Friedman's anti-war stance should be 'morbidly embarrassing' to me.

I am not the one who should be embarrassed. Despite his later protestations, Milton Friedman openly supported the war when it was being waged. In April 2003, Friedman told the German magazine Focus that 'President Bush only wanted war because anything else would have threatened the freedom and the prosperity of the USA.' Asked about increased tensions between the U.S. and Europe, Friedman replied: 'the end justifies the means. As soon as we're rid of Saddam, the political differences will also disappear.' [Read the whole interview in German (www.focus.de/finanzen/news/wirtschaft-lasst-erhard-auferstehen_aid_196501.html) and our translation (www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/milton-friedman-war-iraq).] Clearly this was not the voice of anti-intervention. Even in July 2006, when Friedman claimed to have opposed the war from the beginning, he remained hawkish. Now that the U.S. was in Iraq, Friedman told The Wall Street Journal, 'it seems to me very important that we make a success of it.'

All of this has nothing to do with my book, however. In The Shock Doctrine, I describe the invasion and occupation of Iraq as the culmination of Friedman's ideological crusade because he was America's leading intellectual favoring the privatization of the state - not because he personally supported the war, which is irrelevant. For more than five years Iraq has been the vanguard of this radical privatization project. Private contractors now outnumber U.S. soldiers and corporations have taken on such core state functions as prisoner interrogation.

Furthermore, I never said Friedman was a 'neo-conservative' and I discuss, at length, how difficult it is to find terms to describe the corporatist project that are acceptable to all readers. On page 17 (all page numbers refer to the Picador paperback) I write:

'In the attempt to relate the history of the ideological crusade that has culminated in the radical privatization of war and disaster, one problem recurs: the ideology is a shape-shifter, forever changing its name and switching identities. Friedman called himself a 'liberal,' but his U.S. followers, who associated liberals with high taxes and hippies, tended to identify as 'conservatives,' 'classical economists,' 'free marketers' and, later, as believers in 'Reaganomics' or 'laissez-faire.' In most of the world, their orthodoxy is known as 'neo-liberalism,' but it is often called 'free trade' or simply 'globalization.' Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think tanks with which Friedman had long associations-Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute-called itself 'neo-conservative,' a world view that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.'

The significance of the 'neo-con' label gaining currency in the mid-nineties is that it was then that the Republicans, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich and backed by the think tanks I mentioned, swept Congress promising a 'Contract With America.' At this point, the label 'neo-conservatives' was not a reference primarily to hawkish foreign policy positions but to harsh economic ones. Back in the mid-nineties, many of the people most associated with the neo-con label today - David Frum and William Kristol and much of the Weekly Standard crowd - were squarely focused on demanding Friedmanite cut-backs and privatizations inside the United States. Frum, for example, first made his name in the U.S. with Dead Right,, his 1994 book exhorting the conservative movement to return to its free market economic roots. After Bill Clinton embraced much of this economic agenda, several of the key neo-con warriors narrowed their focus to American dominance on the world stage, a fact that has allowed their keen interests in Friedmanite economic ideas to be largely overlooked.

#AttackTheAuthor" id="AttackTheAuthor">Ignore the Reporting, Attack the Author

Both Chait's essay and the Cato paper are marked by a stubborn refusal to wrestle with the evidence quoted in my book. For instance, Chait dismisses out of hand my suggestion that there were economic interests behind the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo (though he grudingly admits I never claim that economics was the sole motivator). I do write that there were other factors motivating the war besides Slobodan Milosevic's egregious human rights violations. I base this claim on the post-war analysis provided by Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State under U.S. President Bill Clinton and the lead U.S. negotiator during the Kosovo war. In a 2005 essay (quoted on page 415), Talbott wrote:

'As nations throughout the region sought to reform their economies, mitigate ethnic tensions, and broaden civil society, Belgrade seemed to delight in continually moving in the opposite direction. It is small wonder NATO and Yugoslavia ended up on a collision course. It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform-not the plight of the Kosovar Albanians-that best explains NATO's war.'

Instead of explaining how the words of a top-level U.S. official could so clearly coincide with my argument, Chait chooses to completely ignore the Talbott quote. Again and again, readers of The New Republic are left with the distinct impression that The Shock Doctrine is a work of opinion journalism, rather than a thesis based on research and reporting.

When Chait and the Cato Institute do acknowledge my reliance on facts, they accuse me of manipulating them to fit my thesis. Interestingly, the first time Chait quotes my work, he does just that. To explain to his readers what kind of an extremist he is dealing with, he quotes my first book, No Logo. In it, I allegedly described the world as a 'fascist state where we all salute the logo and have little opportunity for criticism because our newspapers, television stations, Internet servers, streets and retail spaces are all controlled by multinational corporate interests.' If he had let the quote continue for one more sentence, his readers would have known that I went on to dismiss this worldview as overly caricatured. The next sentences read: 'there is good reason for alarm. But a word of caution: we may be able to see a not-so-brave new world on the horizon, but that doesn't mean we are already living in Huxley's nightmare... Instead of an airtight formula, is a steady trend... but riddled with exceptions.'

This is just the first of countless instances in which Chait twists my words to fit his thesis. When manipulation fails, he simply takes my points and passes them off as his own, without attribution. (I am well aware, for instance, that both Marxists and Keynesians have exploited crisis and disaster, which is why I explore left-wing disaster opportunism on pages 21-25, 65-70, 283, 316-317.)

#GraspingStraws" id="GraspingStraws">Grasping at Straws

The Cato paper does, at times, acknowledge that there are facts in my book, but faults me for failing to provide sources for my statistics. This is a bold charge to make against a book with 74 pages of endnotes. The one example mentioned is the statistic 'that between 25 and 60 percent of the population is discarded or becomes a permanent underclass in countries that liberalize their economies.' I did not provide a source for this stat because it is an amalgamation of stats I had already cited and for which I had already provided multiple sources. This is standard practice: once a statistic has been sourced, it can repeated (for the sake of brevity) without repeating the source. So here are those stats on which the 25-60 per cent amalgamation is based, with their sources, straight out of The Shock Doctrine endnotes:

• Unemployment in Bolivia was between 25% and 30% in 1987 (page 186. Source: Mike Reid, 'Sitting Out the Bolivian Miracle,' Guardian (London), May 9, 1987.)
• 25% of Russians lived in desperate poverty in 1996 (page 300. Source: Russian Economic Trends 5, no. 1 (1996): 56-57 cited in Bertram Silverman and Murray Yanowitch, New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners and Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 47.)
• Unemployment for black South Africans more than doubled from 23% in 1991 to 48% in 2002 (page 272. Sources: 'South Africa: The Statistics,' Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2006; Michael Wines and Sharon LaFraniere, 'Decade of Democracy Fills Gaps in South Africa,' New York Times, April 26, 2004.)
• Unemployment in Poland was at 25% in some areas in 1993 (page 241. Source: Mark Kramer, 'Polish Workers and the Post-Communist Transition, 1989-93,' Europe-Asia Studies, June 1995)
• 40% of young workers were unemployed in Poland in 2006 (page 241. Source: Andrew Curry, 'The Case Against Poland's New President,' New Republic, November 17, 2005)
• 59% of Poles had fallen below the poverty line in 2003 (pages 241-242. Source: Przemyslaw Wielgosz, '25 Years of Solidarity,' August 2005.)

Elsewhere, the Cato paper claims that, 'Klein never provides the reader with any data over a longer period. She% never once admits that Chile is the social and economic success story of Latin America and has virtually abolished extreme poverty.' In fact my economic analysis of Chile covers a 34-year span and I provide facts and data that directly challenge the claim that the country is a free market success story. Here is a relevant passage (pages 104-105):

'The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in the early eighties was that Pinochet had never privatized Codelco, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile's export revenues, which meant that when the financial bubble burst, the state still had a steady source of funds%. By 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent. Even in 2007, Chile remained one of the most unequal societies in the world-out of 123 countries in which the United Nations tracks inequality, Chile ranked 116th, making it the eighth most unequal country on the list.'

#StrawMenMassacre" id="StrawMenMassacre">A Massacre of Straw Men

Most of the attacks on The Shock Doctrine involve manufacturing claims, falsely attributing them to me, then handily tearing them down. For example, Jonathan Chait telescopes my point about Donald Rumsfeld's holdings in the Disaster Capitalism Complex like this: 'Donald Rumsfeld maintained his stock in Gilead Sciences, which holds the patent for Tamiflu, even while serving as defense secretary. Get it? Rumsfeld would stand to profit from a flu pandemic. But surely you don't have to be an admirer of Rumsfeld to doubt that he would engineer an outbreak of a deadly virus in order to fatten his stock portfolio.'

Actually, that is the plot of the movie V for Vendetta; it has absolutely nothing do with my book. What I do write about is how the Pentagon, under Rumsfeld's leadership, stockpiled Tamiflu and Rumsfeld stood to profit as the value of the stock increased by 807 per cent. On pages 394-395 I write:

'For the six years that he held office, Rumsfeld had to leave the room whenever talk turned to the possibility of avian flu treatment and the purchase of drugs for it. According to the letter outlining the arrangement that allowed him to hold on to his stocks, he had to stay out of decisions that 'may directly and predictably affect Gilead.' His colleagues, however, took good care of his interests. In July 2005, the Pentagon purchased $58 million worth of Tamiflu, and the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would order up to $1 billion worth of the drug a few months later.'

There are many more straw men propped up in the Cato Institute paper. Most involve vastly inflating the role I attribute to Milton Friedman. And no little wonder. Other than the University of Chicago economics department, Cato is the institution most intimately aligned and associated with Milton Friedman's radical theories. Among other tributes, every two years, Cato hands out the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, worth half a million dollars. (This year it went to a 23-year-old Venezuelan student activist to further his opposition to the government of Hugo Chavez). Since Friedman continues to serve as Cato's patron saint, it has much to lose from a diminishing of Friedman's reputation, as well as a direct interest in exonerating him of all crimes, real or imagined.

Here are a few more examples. The Cato paper claims that I put the entire blame for Pinochet's economic policies on the shoulders of Milton Friedman - then 'proves' that his direct involvement was minimal. Once again, I make no such claim. I do devote considerable space - roughly 60 pages -- to describing the impact of a U.S. State Department program that brought more than one hundred Chilean students to the University of Chicago as part of a deliberate effort to export free-market economic ideas to Chile. This is the program that gave birth to the infamous 'Chicago Boys' of Chile, several of whom were actively involved in planning the Chilean dictatorship's economic program before the 1973 coup even took place. Amazingly, the Cato paper makes absolutely no mention of this academic program in its effort to exonerate Friedman personally. The writer either missed 60 pages of my book, or deliberately chose to ignore them.

The greatest challenge in responding to the Cato paper is the scope if its dishonesty. Consider this one passage:

'Klein also blames Friedman and Chicago economics for the actions of the International Monetary Fund during the Asian financial crisis and the Sri Lankan government's confiscation of the land of fishing families to build luxury hotels after the tsunami. Yet the fact is that Friedman thought that the IMF shouldn't be involved in Asia, and he held that governments should be forbidden from expropriating property to give it to private developers. Of course, Klein could argue that Friedman was in some sense a source of inspiration for those policies, even though he was opposed to them. But she doesn't do that. She pretends that he agreed with them, and that that is what he and other Chicago economists wanted all along.'

Absolutely everything in this passage is wrong. I never say Friedman favored the IMF bailout in Asia, quite the opposite. On pages 335-336, I report that, 'Milton Friedman himself, now in his mid-eighties, made a rare appearance on CNN to tell the news anchor Lou Dobbs that he opposed any kind of bailout and that the market should be left to correct itself.' In what way could this constitute 'pretending' that Friedman supported the bailout?

I also freely acknowledge the fact that Friedman opposed the IMF on principle. However, as with Pinochet's government in the seventies, I also document that the IMF, at the time of the bailout, was packed with ideological Chicago Boys - a very different point than claiming the IMF was taking orders from Friedman. On page 202, I directly address this apparent contradiction:

'Philosophically, Milton Friedman did not believe in the IMF or the World Bank: they were classic examples of big government interfering with the delicate signals of the free market. So it was ironic that there was a virtual conveyor belt delivering Chicago Boys to the two institutions' hulking headquarters on Nineteenth Street in Washington, D.C., where they took up many of the top positions.'

The Shock Doctrine has room for this kind of complexity because it is not - despite what Cato claims - a book about the actions of one man. It is about a multifaceted ideological trend that has successfully served the most powerful corporate interests in society for half a century.

Furthermore, I never wrote, as Cato claims in that same passage, that Friedman had anything to do with 'the Sri Lankan government's confiscation of the land of fishing families to build luxury hotels after the tsunami.' His name does not appear once in my 25-page chapter on the tsunami. Once again, to write that I 'pretend' that Friedman is advocating these policies is pure fabrication. Furthermore, all of these inventions and misrepresentations appear in a single paragraph. The Cato background paper is 20 pages long and is comprised of dozens and dozens of equally dishonest paragraphs. Subjecting them all to this kind of rebuttal is simply too time consuming; my full rebuttal is the book itself.

#GoToTheSource" id="GoToTheSource">Go to the Source

Thanks to a fantastic team of researchers, especially my incredible research assistant Debra Levy, The Shock Doctrine has withstood a year's worth of intense media scrutiny in dozens of countries. It is not unscathed, but it has emerged in better shape than I dared hope. When errors are discovered, we immediately correct them in future editions and post a correction (www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/corrections-clarifications) and an explanation on the book's website. So far there has been only one significant error discovered, related to the profits earned from Dick Cheney's Halliburton stocks. It was immediately corrected. Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that this is but one of many examples that make the same point about conflicts of interest in the Bush Administration; indeed I devote an entire chapter to the topic. And this is the benefit of a methodology that is grounded not in anecdotes but in thousands of sourced facts and figures: the thesis does not rise or fall on any single example.

As to my critics' charge that I am selective in my use of quotations, that's a danger for any writer. It is also why Debra and I launched the 'resources' section (www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/chapter-resources) of the book's website. On this page, readers can access dozens of original reports, letters and studies that make up some of the key source material for the book. If you are concerned that I am exaggerating Friedman's support for the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet, read a letter Friedman wrote to Pinochet http://wwww.naomiklein.org/files/resources/pdfs/friedman-pinochet-letters.pdf . If you are suspicious that I am making disaster capitalism seem more conspiratorial than it is, read the minutes www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/part7/chapter20/pro-market-ideas-katrina from a meeting that took place at the Heritage Foundation just two weeks after the levees broke in New Orleans. It lays out 32 'free market solutions' for Hurricane Katrina and high gas prices, many of which have been championed by the Bush Administration.

The thesis of The Shock Doctrine was not born of whimsy but of four years of research. Debra and I put these documents online because we want educators, students and general readers to move beyond an admittedly subjective version of history - as all histories are -- and go straight to the source. We invite you to explore these documents, send us ones we missed, and come to your own conclusions.

Naomi Klein was interviewed on 16 July 2008 on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) TV show "The Hour", for 15 minutes, about her book, The Shock Doctrine, Penguin 2007. Her biography and her family background show a deep concern for social justice and human rights. Unfortunately there seems to be an environmental naivety which could cancel out many of her efforts and her family's on these issues.

Klein was born in 1970, two years after Ehrlich's book, The Population Bomb, Ballantine Books, 1968, was published. Her husband is Avi Lewis, son of Stephen Lewis, former NDP leader of Ontario and the man devoted to feeding Africa and preventing death in Africa. Lewis seems, however, to have failed to look at African land-rights and rights to family planning in a continent where Western interference with long-term settlement patterns and local economies, has caused appalling overpopulation, hunger, environmental devastation and species loss, in a country which for centuries had the richest biodiversity and no major population, hunger, or environmental problems.

Klein's brother Seth is a member of the left wing Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Vancouver. This is a think tank dedicated to economic and social issues. It challenges free market solutions, school vouchers, privatisation and what it considers "right wing" immigration ideas. Unfortunately, it considers 'right wing' any opposition to open borders.

It is clear that Naomi Klein has been very careful on the issue of immigration and open borders in her book, The Shock Doctrine. Nonetheless, throughout her book, she criticises policies of invasive development and their accompaniment by the importation of foreign workers - for instance in Iraq and in Sri Lanka. She recognises the problem of the alienation of public and village land by multinationals, and through international gentrification in the service of rich tourists, although she does not overtly link this to immigration, but to class and exclusive exploitation. There is therefore a danger that some readers may miss the connection between the buying up of real-estate by foreign individuals and corporations and the migration to those sites by large quantities of first world immigrants. Closer to home, her book flags opposition to immigration in the 'developed world', but she is obviously uneasy with the legitimacy of this. For some reason she fails to identify as strongly with the lower classes in the US, Canada and the UK, as she does with those further from her own home range. So she, or her staff of writers in these chapters, talk about how the people of the first world should be criticising the corporate take-over of land and government everywhere, and they warn against people displaced in the developed world targeting incoming immigrants with their resentment. It seems to me that she thus does a disservice to the disempowered of the West, who exist alongside its fabled and rightly deplored affluent upper classes. If the people of Iraq, Sri Lanka, South America etc., have her blessing to resent the stealing and repopulating of their regions by footloose multinationals and the importing of foreign workers to service the projects of those multinationals, then why shouldn't those dispossessed in the 'developed' world, not have the freedom of expressing their right to control over what happens locally and to their countries, including control over borders?

Psychologically, Klein is firmly ranged against the evil corporations who are waiting for the next disaster to impose their free market agenda on the next helpless victims. On the ground, however, she is strangely reluctant to sheet home the way the evil corporations benefit financially from the open borders policies they lobby for whilst they prone a committment to human rights. What is stopping Klein from seeing - or if she sees it, what is stopping her from expressing - that the impact on the poor in North America, Canada, the UK, Australia etc of the transfer of cheap labour from desperately poor developing countries, is just as damaging and unjust when it happens in the West as it is when applied to developing countries? In the West, wholesale import of labour destroys hard-won working class conditions. In the West, the sale of property overseas and the importing of cashed up immigrants to stoke up demand for US, UK, Canadian, Australian, etc real estate, puts basic shelter out of the reach of people on low wages. It also pushes infrastructure further out into the fragile ecosystems bordering the intensive conglomerations in those countries, trashing the environment and accelerating climate change in the process.

Is there, I wonder, some way to get Naomi and her staff and publishers to see that the disempowerment of the modest middle classes and the poor in the industrialised world, is only extending the third world into the Richworld, and shoring up the exploiting classes and their corporate servants - the banks, property developers, international tourism, the military, the mass-media - the whole globalisation machine?

In the interview, Klein was exercised by the fact that Hurricane Katrina allowed the rich an opportunity to finally gentrify a devastated housing project long denied the poor. The poor who might have benefited from that housing project had been wiped out by the cyclone.

The bigger issue of climate change and what was behind it - the intensity and huge scale of our activities and populations - was not considered. Economic growth and the population growth it markets as inevitable and necessary, were never questioned.

Klein rightly highlights the growing inequities of the already starkly imbalanced distribution of wealth across the regions and classes of the world, except in the worlds of the readers she is writing for. She minutely documents crying injustices in a manner more effective than has hitherto been achieved. But why does she not stand back for just a moment to see the role that overpopulation and mass movements of people has in disorganising communities and networks, the better to be exploited by those who push for this and benefit from it?

And why does she not stand back and see that, if the great writers of the world fail to also dramatise the terrible conflicts between human population growth and the environment and food production and human rights, then all her work is for nothing?

By Sheila Newman, from an idea and notes by Tim Murray

It looks like a corporate-agribusiness group called the "Foodbowl Group" have tapped a short-circuit in local, regional and state democracy in an attempt to take over land and water in the Murray Darling Basin. (See #FoodbowlGroup">end this article for who the Foodbowl Group are).

Plans are for a $600 million pipeline to be paid for by Melbourne Water users who've been told to expect their bills to double over the next five years. They'll also pay nearly a third of the billion dollars allocated to carry 75 billion litres of water a year from the Goulburn Murray River system over the Great Dividing Range to Melbourne.

What is going on?

The Foodbowl group describes its aims as "To support the transition of small farming enterprises to world-competitive, sustainable agribusiness enterprises with a variety of models that maintain and enhance community cohesion." (More 'aims' lower down in article).

But were they invited? Were they asked?

Apparently not.

The impacted community, seems to be appalled and powerless. In the cities, in the rest of Australia, we all need to be paying attention to this. The Murray Darling Basin is Australia's only major inland food production area, and our richest. Despite horrendous farming practices, beginning with returned soldiers' plots, it still produces. Taking over this area with faceless big-business is not the answer to our environmental problems because big agribusiness answers to no-one and beats the life out of land and water before moving on. It is solely profit motivated, seeking to compete on the world market in a zero-sum game that takes no prisoners. The people who work in corporations may have good motives, but they are part of a machine which prioritises profit over anything else in a world where competition has taken over commonsense and sensitivity.

With fuel, food and water prices, cost of land and housing going up, Australians cannot rely on government to protect them. We have to avoid being split up and disempowered by so-called planning initiatives and top-down redesign of the way we live and produce food. When the chips are down it is only by ensuring that we have local production that we can negotiate for food and water, work and housing.

In the end, no government should tell people that they may not farm simply because they do not compete on the world market. Only two generations ago it was quite reasonable to aim for self-sufficiency, and not too much more was required to make a small income. These days, unless we ruin the land to make a dollar, we are priced off the land by taxes and regulations.

The world market is antithetical to sustainable agriculture - notably permaculture. Permaculture is the only sustainable way for Australian agriculture to survive. I don't pretend that you can have mixed farming everywhere; desert and rangeland comprise 75% of Australia. You cannot grow crops on rangeland; you can only run livestock, or live by hunting and gathering. The Victorian Government, like the other state governments and the Federal Government, have unreasonable commercial expectations, display little empathy for citizens, contempt for democracy, and a kind of worship for big business and development, called fascism elsewhere.

Barry Jones in his Sleepers Wake said it would come to this: governments overwhelmed by technology, taking advice from big business.

At the end of this article the investors in the Foodbowl group are listed. Here are the Foodbowl Group's objectives, as mentioned on their website

#Objectives" id="Objectives">[Foodbowl Unlimited] Regional Development Objectives

"While funding for Stage 1 of the Irrigation Modernization Project has been provided under the State Water Plan, the Foodbowl Group believes a range of regional development initiatives must be taken in parallel with the project.

Strategies need to be developed on a whole of region basis to:

• Ensure local government and planning authorities are working together to co-ordinate land-use and planning policies to encourage development of the most suitable land for appropriate agriculture;
• Develop a continuing and informed dialogue with the agribusiness community regarding likely demand for crops and foodstuffs in the context of changing world demographics and climate change;
• To work with state and federal governments to attract large water-use industry to the region;
• To work with educational institutions to develop expertise in irrigation and water-use research and support appropriate skills development to meet the region’s emerging needs;
• To promote and encourage appropriate non-water infrastructure to support the region’s development as an increasingly important centre for food and processed food exporting;
• To support the transition of small farming enterprises to world-competitive, sustainable agribusiness enterprises with a variety of models that maintain and enhance community cohesion."

#FoodbowlGroup" id="FoodbowlGroup">Who are the Foodbowl Group?

The Victorian Government is sponsoring this project in company with:

- Telstra
- Tyco Water Pty Ltd, Tyco Water Pty Ltd
37 Silica St, Carole Park 4300, Queensland, Australia.
Main business activities: Steel water pipes & fittings, steel pilings for wharfs & offshore structures.
Do they have anything to do with Mr Pratt and his Visy pvc piping projects in which the Victorian and Federal government became so involved? We don't know. Do you?

- GHD is an international engineering company: www.ghd.com.au/aptrixpublishing.nsf/Content/Directors_about
www.ghd.com.au/aptrixpublishing.nsf/Content/Offices_about

- Rubicon Systems Australia is a telecommunications, information technology and water technology company. Their Chairman, Stan Wallis, has long associations with multinational corporation management, and was formerly Chair of Amcor, AMP and Coles Myer, and author of the Wallis Report (Federal Government commissioned 1997). He is the President of the Business Council of Australia, which has been a major driver for the undemocratic push for a huge population in Australia. It is this push for population growth which has made recent droughts so much more severe and caused such great hardship. The Victorian Government, beginning with Jeff Kennett, spear-headed population growthism, at the behest of the Housing Industry and its upstream and downstream beneficiaries - mining, big-engineering, big-finance, newspaper-realty, and chipboard manufacture, among others.

See also, Who's who in AMCOR"

- The Hugh Williamson Foundation.
Under 'Governance', the Foundation lists Members of its 'Council' in 2007 as:

Richard Bluck AM, RFD, Executive Director, Leadership Victoria
John Allen, Principal, John Allen & Associates
Rhonda Barro (WCLP '99), Executive Director, Barro Group
Stella Clark, Stella Clark (WCLP '97), CEO, Bio 21 Aust. Ltd.
Geoff Cosgriff (WCLP '90), Executive Director, LogicaCMG P/L
Graham Evans AO, Consultant & former senior executive, BHP Billiton
Suzanne Jessup (WCLP '00). General Manager, Mahlab Recruitment
Charles Macek, Chairman, Sustainable Investment Research Institute
Andrea Polmear, Managing Director, Launching Pad
Garry Ringwood, Exec. Director, Executive Interim Management
Jane Tongs (WCLP '93), Chairman, Australian Alpine Enterprises
Jill Hollingworth (WCLP '97), Director, Tango Public Relations

What you can do: visit plugthepipe.com and join their mailing list.

#CWA" id="CWA">Country Womens Association (CWA) Reject the North South Pipeline

2 June 2008

The CWA passed unanimously a motion at their annual conference over the weekend requesting that the Brumby government to stop the pipeline. Over 1000 women present.

Wording was as follows:

"that the CWA urge the Victorian Government not to proceed with the North-South pipeline which transfers water to Melbourne."

Contact: Doreen Napier, Agriculture and Environment Convenor, CWA - Phone 03 58522597

I hate to resort to clichés, but this is a ‘must read’ book – the kind that only gets published once in a hundred years.

The theory Klein develops is that the main reason for the rise of democracy and social-welfare with its old age pensions, public hospitals, public housing, and universal education after the Great Depression of the 1930s was that the beneficiaries of the robber-baron culture which had dominated until then were aware that if people were kept sufficiently miserable, they would turn to communism and socialism.

Reading of the desecration and live dismemberment of Iraq and seeing the name KPMG, I could not help but think of how our recent Premier, Steven Bracks, who was so fond of public-private partnerships, and whose government gave away 20 ha of public land in Royal Park to private 52% owned Singapore developer, Australand. In a move which even the departing Queensland Premier criticised, Bracks recently began to work for KPMG Peat Marwick, which, incidentally, is involved in reconstruction efforts in East Timor.

Also published on Web Diary. See also: "Shock Doctrine's Shocking Short Shrift" of 8 Nov 07 by Carolyn Baker.

A review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine ( Penguin Australia, 2007)
By Sheila Newman. Also published on Web Diary. (2233 words)

Klein is a Canadian political scientist. She put this book together over a four year period, employing different teams of researchers for each chapter. The documentation is awesomely solid, making her assertions difficult to tear down, and thus supporting a theory which would otherwise seem almost fantastic, were it not also supported by more and more freestanding works.

The theory Klein develops is that the main reason for the rise of democracy and social-welfare with its old age pensions, public hospitals, public housing, and universal education after the Great Depression of the 1930s was that the beneficiaries of the robber-baron culture which had dominated until then were aware that if people were kept sufficiently miserable, they would turn to communism and socialism.

But the robber-barons, land-sharks and bankers were only waiting for an opportunity to break down any political system which would stop them from having anything they wanted. Their method was tried and true: a religion embracing trickle-down economics, endless growth and total deregulation. I have wondered for some time how so many dim-witted, narrowly educated people going by the tag of ‘economist’ came to inhabit the corridors of power in our society. This has been somewhat explained to me by Klein, who identifies the genesis of a theoretical basis, defence and propaganda effort for corporatist free-market replacing real government. She places the rise of the shock doctrine of economic rationalism at Chicago University in the Chicago School of Economics, led by economist Milton Friedman, the author of Capitalism and Freedom.

She describes how this school set about training people in its atrocious doctrine all over the world. Its practitioners sought to break down all examples of egalitarian, community oriented democratic states, speciously linking ‘democracy’ to the imposition of ‘free-market’ economics.

Although Klein does not make this connection, their program began in 1973 which was the time of the first oil-shock. She describes a course of corporatised looting, torture, slavery and repression which begins with Pinochet’s rise in Chile, with Milton Friedman as his advisor, and passes through similar horrors in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Poland, South Africa, Russia, and Irak. She finishes this incredible expose by describing the nauseating excesses of developers masquerading as foreign AID in Sri Lanka and Thailand after the tsunamis which so many Australians and others contributed their money to help.

Within 24 hours of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, where land had been 80% publicly owned, processes demanded by the World Bank, US AID, and the Asian Development Bank began to change the laws to transfer public land to private ownership, and to privatise public utilities and resources. Indeed those seem to be the signs that the shock doctrine is operating in a country – privatisation of public land, telephones, water, power and pharmaceutical distribution. Obviously I think that Australians should act quickly to familiarise themselves with Naomi Klein’s book and to begin to appreciate the danger to what remains of our democracy, public wealth and institutions. The possibility for land redistribution in South Africa by Mandela’s government had been similarly hamstrung.

Familiar bland illogical assertions come up along with the names of familiar corporations. Klein quotes (p. 355), “Michael Fleisher, the founder of the Chicago School based Shock Doctrine, saying in 2003 of Iraq that ‘protected businesses never, never become competitive’, and she comments: “he appeared to be impervious to the irony that Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all the other US corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the US government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot – all at taxpayer expense. The Chicago School crusade, which emerged with the core purpose of dismantling the welfare statism of the New Deal, had finally reached its zenith in this corporate New Deal. It was a simpler, more stripped down form of privatisation – the transfer of bulky assets wasn’t even necessary: just straight-up corporate gorging on state coffers. No investment, no accountability, astronomical profits. The double standard was explosive, as was the systematic exclusion of Iraqis from the plan.”

Reading of the desecration and live dismemberment of Iraq and seeing the name KPMG, I could not help but think of how our recent Premier, Steven Bracks, who was so fond of public-private partnerships, and whose government gave away 20 ha of public land in Royal Park (Melbourne central) to private 52% owned Singapore developer, Australand. In a move which even the departing Queensland Premier criticised, Bracks recently began to work for KPMG Peat Marwick, which, incidentally, is involved in reconstruction efforts in East Timor.

Klein argues convincingly that the Chicago school acolytes have supported reigns of pure terror where peoples have, almost overnight, been reduced to poverty and starvation, with their states brought from sovereignty to economic indigence and crippling debt to the International Monetary Fund and other private agencies as they paid for ridiculously expensive, publicly resisted corporate projects and sold off state assets.

Klein tells how the IMF came about through an international agreement to prevent countries from falling into desperation and war by loaning them money to get through rough spots. It was modelled on the post WW2 Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan for Germany was particularly careful to preserve protection for Germany’s industry and workers. But Chicago-school economics came to rule the IMF, she says, and the book is about how this doctrine stripped its victims of democracy, labour protection and public assets, and, when war broke out or torture and imprisonment were rife, its practitioners turned a blind eye, instead celebrating the chaos as a clean slate for the birth of a rational economy.

The hypothesis is that democracy is destroyed by causing social shocks to countries and, in the ensuing panic and disorientation, the political system is dismantled and the economy pillaged through privatisation and government contracted debt. The International Monetary Fund is severely implicated in this as are a number of international corporations.

Examples of things which socially shock a country, most of which are dealt with by Klein using examples in many countries, are:
- The Breaking down of labour laws and trade regulations
- Mass immigration and the Contracting of business to foreign imported labour in preference to local labour
- Falling wages
- bank privatisation, deregulation of the economy
- Breaking down of the public service, public welfare
- Loss of public subsidy of therapeutic drugs
- Privatisation of public hospitals, schools…
- Privatisation of public technology, power and utilities – telephones, electricity, water and energy resources like oil and gas
- Unaffordable privatised housing and land development
- Land speculation leading to homelessness
- Unaffordable justice systems
- Privatisation of the military – use of mercenaries and contractors
- Torture, disappearance, and war
- Natural disasters

Signs of the dismantling of a political system and its reinvention as a corporatocracy include:
- education of young people, educators and politicians, in economic rationalist doctrines as the only true way
- growth economics
- the normalisation of theft of the public wealth through its transfer to the private sector
- loss of restrictions on investment by political regulators
- acceptance of ostentatious lifestyles in politicians and their public frequentation of corporate figures
- Phoney enquiries
- Commercial-in-confidence activities which make it impossible for the public to obtain information
- the privatisation of areas normally administered by government, for instance mercenaries for soldiers, corporations for military support and logistics like accommodation, clothing and food, immigration (immigration agents)
- The institutionalisation with public funded support for corporations. (The Victorian Government’s gift to Australand of public land and $80 m in exchange for what many would call very little, comes to my mind).

At the end of the book Naomi Klein tells us about countries which are fighting back against the robber-baron corporatisation of their governments, land, and industries. Examples are described in Latin America, Lebanon, Thailand, and many other places.

Chavez Venezuela:

(p.455) “In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops 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 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. 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 given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.”

Lebanon:

(p.459) “So when delegates from thirty wealthy nations got together in Paris in January 2007 to pledge $7.6 billion in reconstruction loans and grants, they naturally assumed that Lebanon’s government would accept whatever strings they attached to the aid. The conditions were the usual ones: phone and electricity privatizations, price increases on fuel, cuts to the public service and an increase to an already controversial tax on consumer purchases. 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. As for the reconstruction itself, the jobs would of course go to the giants of disaster capitalism, with no requirement to hire or subcontract locally - ” …

(p.460): “Many Lebanese citizens, however, were distinctly less cooperative. Despite the fact that a lot of their homes still lay in ruins, thousands participated in a general strike, organized by a coalition of unions and political parties, including the Islamist party, Hezbollah. The demonstrators insisted that if receiving reconstruction funds meant raising the cost of living for a war-ravaged people, it hardly deserved to be called aid. So while Siniora was reassuring donors in Paris, strikes and road blockades brought the country to a halt – the first national revolt specifically targeting post-war disaster capitalism. Demonstrators also staged a sit-in, which went on for two months, turning downtown Beirut into a cross between a tent city and a street carnival.” … “The biggest motivator driving many of those camped out in downtown isn’t Iran or Syria, or Sunni versus Shiite. It’s the economic inequality that has haunted Lebanese Shiites for decades. It’s a poor and working-class peoples’ revolt.”

Thailand:

(p. 402), “Some of the most direct clashes took place in Thailand, where, within 24 hours of the wave, developers sent in armed private security guards to fence in land they had been coveting for resorts. In some cases the guards wouldn’t even let survivors search their old properties for the bodies of their children. The Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters group was hastily convened to deal with the land grabs.”…

(p. 463) “…villagers approached all government promises with intense scepticism and refused to wait patiently in camps for an official reconstruction plan. Instead, within weeks, hundreds of villagers engaged in what they called ‘land reinvasions’. They marched past the armed guards on the payroll of developers, tools in hand, and began marking off the sites where their old houses had been…” (p.464) A Thai NGO, commented that, ‘With the entire community camping out there, it became difficult for the authorities to chase them away, especially given the intense media attention being focused on tsunami rehabilitation.’”

[Should the homeless in Australia and those who stand to lose their overly expensive homes due to government facilitation of land-speculation consider such a move?]

New Orleans:

And, with the dispossession by corporations and public private partnerships in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (with which the book begins): (p.465) “In February 2007, groups of residents who had lived in the public housing projects that the Bush administration was planning to demolish began ‘reinvading’ their old homes and taking up residence. Volunteers helped clean out apartments and raised money to buy generators and solar panels.”

Klein concludes (p. 466), “The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping – having the right to be part of a communal recovery.”… “These are movements that do not seek to start from scratch but rather from scrap, from the rubble that is all around. As the corporatist crusade continues its violent decline, turning up the shock dial to blast through the mounting resistance it encounters, these projects point a way forward between fundamentalisms. Radical only in their intense practicality, rooted in the communities where they live, these men and women see themselves as mere repair people , taking what’s there and fixing it, reinforcing it, making it better and more equal. Most of all, they are building in resilience – for when the next shock hits.”

I hate to resort to clichés, but this is a ‘must read’ book – the kind that only gets published once in a hundred years.

Also published on Web Diary. See also: "Shock Doctrine's Shocking Short Shrift" of 8 Nov 07 by Carolyn Baker.