Naomi Klein released this year her new 4 years research titled “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” that destruct the myth of “free market” democracy. It all started from a bunch of guys called the Chicago Boys, headed by Milton Friedman, that experimented their ultraliberist process of social and economic engineering. A process based on a deviated form of capitalism defined “disaster capitalism”.
They started from Chile to apply massively their visions on society, being the economic consultant for the Pinochet tiranny. The natural disaster that destroyed tens of thousands of lives in New Orleans is seen as an ‘opportunity’ to put the city’s schooling and public housing in private hands. 9/11 became the excuse for the creation of a vast, private-security industry.
Then the Iraq war, organised around the idea that following the shock and awe military strategy, the country could be organised as a pure, free-market paradise, partly because country and people alike were so traumatised that they would offer no opposition. In the book is explained as the Shock and Awe strategy started as a psicological strategy to cure madness in the ’50s to become a global political strategy to “cure” societies that don’t want to apply for the free market circus.
Employing electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and drug-induced comas, these experiments helped develop some of the “coercive interrogation techniques” that have been practised in Guantánamo Bay, but it all started from the psicological tests of the 50’s. Klein uses torture as a metaphor, and does not claim any cause-and-effect link between its re-emergence and the rise of neo-liberal shock therapy; but she does point to some disquieting similarities. Individuals and societies have been “de-patterned” with the aim of remaking them on a better, more rational model. The same Shock and Awe tecnique are now being used bot just on individuals but also on populations. In each case, the experiments have failed, while inflicting lasting and often irreparable damage on those who were subjected to them.
Here an excerpt form the book:
“In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.
The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that “Katrina accomplished in a day … what Louisiana school reformers couldn’t do after years of trying”. Public school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman’s plan “an educational land grab”. I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, “disaster capitalism”.
Privatising the school system of a mid-size American city may seem a modest preoccupation for the man hailed as the most influential economist of the past half century. Yet his determination to exploit the crisis in New Orleans to advance a fundamentalist version of capitalism was also an oddly fitting farewell. For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock.
In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as “the shock doctrine”. He observed that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the “tyranny of the status quo”. A variation on Machiavelli’s advice that “injuries” should be inflicted “all at once”, this is one of Friedman’s most lasting legacies.”
