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© Davidson Loehr
13 April 2008
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.
Children’s Story, Part 2:
Last time we talked about a special valley, and the many children who lived there. It was a wonderful place to live, until some new, short and mean people came there. They said, for some odd reason, that they were taller than the valley’s children, when anyone could see they were all shorter. When the valley children pointed this out, the short mean little people got even meaner, and shouted that this was because the children should be walking on their knees. They yelled this, and their yelling scared some of the children so much that they did begin walking on their knees, just to stop the yelling. Then others followed, and before you knew it, all the children in the valley were walking on their knees – which made the short and mean people the tallest in the valley after all.
This continued for years! For years the children of the valley kept walking on their knees. They continued to grow, of course – some of them grew almost a whole foot – so that, even on their knees, some of them were almost as tall as the short mean people.
There are so many things you just can’t do if you’re on your knees. You can’t play baseball, football, soccer or volleyball. It’s very hard to swim; racing and pole vaulting and high-jumping are out of the question. And this valley didn’t have television or computers or Play Stations or even Game Boys or cell phones! So there really wasn’t a lot to do.
Then, slowly, things began to change. No one knows just where it started. But in one part of the valley, a girl suddenly stood up. She just said her knees hurt, so she stood up. Another girl got angry at the small mean people yelling all the time, so she stood up just to spite them, and to show she was no longer afraid of them. Then one of the taller boys stood up, and found that he was almost a foot taller than the mean little people! This gave him an idea. He picked one of the short mean people up and lifted him right off the ground. This made the mean little person stop yelling. Then the boy said, with lots of children watching and listening, “You know, you’re almost a little cute when your mouth is closed!” The children laughed and laughed. And when other mean little people began coming around yelling at the tall boy, some other tall boys stood up, picked them up, and began passing them around like little dolls. This really made the mean people mad! But something was changing, and the madder they got, the more children stood up, the more they laughed, and the more they tossed them around like toys.
Then something very unexpected happened. One boy looked far away – they could see a lot farther when they were standing up – and over in another part of the valley, he saw other children standing up. They waved at them, and the other children waved back. A girl looked in another direction, and saw children standing up in another part of the valley. She shouted out to them, and they shouted back, and waved. Then some of the children began running to greet the children from other parts of the valley – it’s amazing how fast you can run when you’re not on your knees!
And the more children stood up, the more it gave other children courage to stand up. Before long, they were all standing up, for the first time in years. The mean little people were about hysterical by now, screaming at the top of their lungs. But the children were no longer afraid of them – after all, the children were all bigger than they were – and began passing them around like toys, and laughing. Then the little meanies started to bite the children – so they put the meanies in cages – like those dog cages you see in people’s cars.
But while they were having fun and getting a little revenge, they learned something much more serious. It turns out that during the years when they were on their knees, the meanies had not only been mean, but had also broken laws – a lot of laws. They had stolen a lot of money and done even worse things. Before long, they were arrested, and instead of being put in dog cages, they were put in prisons.
But there were so many of them that even the prisons soon filled up. Then they looked for other kinds of cages to hold the little meanies, and thought of – the zoos! With no children to visit the zoos for years, almost all the animals had been shipped somewhere else, and there were lots of empty cages. They weren’t too clean, but they were empty. Soon, they were all filled with the meanies, who stayed there for a very long time. So long that the children grew up, found mates, had their own children, and took their children to the zoo to see the many cages of Little Meanies, as they named them.
But their children weren’t very interested. All they saw were some small old people who yelled and said mean things. So soon they wouldn’t even feed them peanuts or any other zoo food, then they just stopped visiting, and forgot about them altogether.
But their parents didn’t forget about them, ever. Because they remembered what it had been like when they were afraid, and forced to walk on their knees, and they remembered how good it felt when they finally stood up. They have a lot to teach other people, including us – and that’s why I told you the story.
Prayer:
Let us remember the answer is always to become grounded in a love of life more abundant. There is a courage that comes from that love of a transcendent and commanding sense of life. That courage can let us stand up when most around us are still scared into kneeling. Let us have faith that our solitary act of standing up will give others the courage to consider standing up in their own lives.
There is a healthy kind of humility that can come from kneeling before authentic altars to worthy gods. Let us pray that the gods we serve with our lives are worthy of our service, and let us have the humility to serve them with all that we have, for such service can bless and empower us.
But let us not forget what we already have, for it is also life-giving. We already have the ability to walk upright, and never to kneel before moral and ethical ideals that are beneath us. We already have the strength and the courage to do this when we know that we must.
This strength and this courage also bless and empower us, and they are closer at hand. Let us never be seduced into becoming so frightened that we forget to stand up for all we know to be life-affirming.
For that is the spark of God that is an essential part of almost all of us, and we must nurture that spark, and must use it to ignite our spirits, or it may go out. And that, we cannot afford.
And so let us kneel when kneeling is appropriate. But on those other, more numerous, occasions when we should stand up for ourselves, for others, and for what truly gives us life, let us stand, and receive those special blessings that come only to the courageous.
Amen.
SERMON: The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism in the World, Part 5
This is the fifth and final in the series of sermons adapted from Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which as I’ve said before, I think is the most important book I’ve read in the past twenty-five years for understanding the “master narrative” – the plot behind much that has been going on in our world since at least 1973. Today I want to share her insights about 9-11 and our illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and then some real-world very optimistic signs from another author, to end both the sermon series and the children’s story – which, like all good children’s stories, isn’t just for children.
Naomi Klein’s focus is on some of the economic back-story of 9-11 and Iraq, in Israel and the U.S.
It starts with the dot.com crash of 2000, which threatened all the stock markets in the world, but which threatened Israel most of all, because they had the most high-tech-dependent economy on earth. The country went into immediate free fall, and by June 2001, analysts were predicting that roughly three hundred high-tech Israeli firms would go bankrupt, with tens of thousands of layoffs. A Tel Aviv business newspaper declared in a headline that 2002 would be the “Worst Year for Israeli Economy Since 1953.” Then in the summer of 2001, the government encouraged the tech industry to branch out into security and surveillance. A slew of new start-ups were launched, specializing in everything from “search and nail” data mining, to surveillance cameras, to terrorist profiling. When the market for these services and devices exploded after 9-11, the Israeli state rejoiced that the growth provided by the dot.com bubble would be replaced with a homeland security boom. Ideologically, it was the perfect marriage of the Likud Party’s hawkishness and its commitment to Chicago School economics. By 2003, Israel was already making a stunning recovery, and by 2004 the country had seemed to pull off a miracle: it was performing better than almost any Western economy. Much of this growth was due to Israel’s savvy positioning of itself as a kind of shopping mall for homeland security technologies. The timing was perfect. Overnight, Israel became, in the words of Forbes magazine, “the go-to country for antiterrorism technologies” (The Shock Doctrine, p.435).
The business of providing “security” – in Israel and around the world – is directly responsible for much of Israel’s meteoric growth in recent years. The War on Terror industry saved Israel’s faltering economy, much as the disaster capitalism complex I talked about last week helped rescue the global stock markets (The Shock Doctrine, p. 436).
Be aware of code words like, “the global stock markets.” When the health of stock markets is taken as indicator of a healthy economy, it means those writing about it have privileged the profits of stock-holders over the well-being of workers whose release, cuts in insurance and benefits, etc. all make the stock prices rise. “The health of the global stock markets” has already privileged the owners above the vast majority of living human beings.
And since this is another application of the Chicago School plan, we already know the plot. So we won’t be surprised to learn that Israel’s post-9/11 growth spurt has produced a rapid division of their society between rich and poor. In 2007, 24.4 percent of Israelis were living below the poverty line, with 35.2 percent of all children in poverty – compared with 8 percent of children twenty years earlier (The Shock Doctrine, p. 439).
This discarding of 25 to 60 percent of the population has been the hallmark of the Chicago School crusade since the “misery villages” began mushrooming throughout the Southern Cone of South America in the seventies. In South Africa, Russia and New Orleans the rich build walls around themselves. Israel has taken this disposal process a step further: it has built walls around the desperate and dangerous poor (The Shock Doctrine, p. 442).
There have been many articles on the deep overlap between our own neo-con group and a group of men with dual citizenship in both the U.S. and Israel. I’ve read lists with the names of up to sixteen men with dual citizenship among the big players in Washington, including Rabbi Dov Zakheim, who was comptroller of our Defense Department when it came up missing $2.3 trillion, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Michael Chertoff, head of our Homeland Security, George Tenet, former head of our FBI, and Eliot Abrams, who played a key role in the Iran-Contra scandal under President Reagan as Assistant Secretary of State, and has served George W. Bush as Deputy Assistant to the President, and Deputy National Security Advisor. The list also includes Donald Kagan, one of the chief architects of the Project for the New American Century, as well as Marc Grossman, Douglas Feith and a half dozen others whose names aren’t as well known (Richard Haas, Kenneth Adelman, Edward Luttwak, Robert Satloff, David Frum, David Wurmser, and Steven Goldsmith – Google “dual-citizen Israelis,” and you’ll see thousands of sites. Some are clearly angry about the fact that we have citizens of Israel determining our national policy – in ways the clearly benefit Israel – but no dual citizens from, say, Mexico. Most of these men were contributors to that Project for the New American Century, which was published in September 2000 and which contained the blueprint for our American imperialism that has come to life since 9-11.
Even the strongest critics from the Left, however, tend to see the neoconservatives as true believers, motivated exclusively by a commitment to the supremacy of American and Israeli power that is so all-consuming they are prepared to sacrifice economic interests in favor of “security.” But this distinction, as Naomi Klein puts it, is both artificial and amnesiac. The right to limitless profit-seeking has always been at the center of neoconservative ideology. With the War on Terror, the neocons didn’t abandon their corporatist economic goals; they found a new, much more effective way to achieve them. Of course these Washington hawks – both our US citizens, and our dual-country US and Israeli citizens – are committed to an imperial role for the United States in the world and for Israel in the Middle East. But both in Israel and the U.S., we now have a state of endless war abroad, and a security state at home. This matches perfectly with the methods of the disaster capitalism complex I talked about last week, which has built a multibillion-dollar industry based on the structure of war outside and a security state within. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 322).
The Chicago School and its disciples are back to looting markets, now with a new clever pitch. If the looting can be linked, even loosely, to terrorism, then everything is fair game, and all accounts is up for grabs – maybe, if they’re lucky, even Social Security. Bush can get around laws, courts and congress easily, and pass new secret signing statements that let him legally ignore any directives from Congress he doesn’t like. He can revoke the habeas corpus acts, letting us kidnap our own citizens and send them elsewhere for torture and perhaps murder. And he can revive the posse comitatus acts, letting him use government armies – or armed private contractors like Blackwater, as he did after Katrina in New Orleans – to frighten our citizens with loaded guns. And he can give himself the power of a dictator in the event of any emergency or crisis he deems worthy to put us under martial law. He has already done all this and more, with hardly any significant media coverage. All of this was enabled by the paralyzing shock of 9-11, just as similar changes in the laws were enabled by the shocks inflicted on many other countries on which the Chicago School scheme was inflicted.
In a speech on September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon could not account for that $2.3 trillion I mentioned earlier. He also announced his intention to outsource many defense jobs to private industry. By the next day, nobody remembered much about either of these subjects. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 287).
But the idea at the heart of Rumsfeld’s forgotten speech is the central tenet of the Bush regime, following Milton Friedman’s economic ideas: that the job of government is not to govern but to subcontract the task to the private sector, which will do it for profit (The Shock Doctrine, p. 288). Let me translate that. What this means is transferring our tax dollars away from governmental agencies – which are answerable to us – to private contractors, which have no accountability to us. Over 90% of Blackwater’s money, for example, comes from state and governmental contracts, which means our tax dollars. But in Iraq, Blackwater employees cannot be prosecuted for crimes they commit – including murder – either under Iraqi laws or under U.S. laws, as we learned when they killed seventeen Iraqi civilians last September.
It’s surprising how many roads lead back to Milton Friedman. For Rumsfeld, this idea of selling off the job of providing security to private contractors like Blackwater can be dated back forty years to the early sixties, when he attended seminars at the University of Chicago’s Economics Department, and developed a particularly close connection with Milton Friedman (The Shock Doctrine, p. 289).
What happened in our country in the period of mass disorientation after 9-11 was, in retrospect, a domestic form of economic shock therapy: the Chicago School plan, finally inflicted forcefully on our own country. The Bush team, Friedmanite to the core, quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through its radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture. This is how it was done in every other country: a crisis that paralyzed the nation was used to provide cover for the very fast looting of the government and disempowerment of the middle class. The Bush team created a whole new rationale for its actions – the War on Terror – built from the start to loot our government and systematically remove the social supports from underneath the middle and lower classes (The Shock Doctrine, p. 298). For decades, the Friedmanite market had been feeding off the appendages of the state; now it could devour the core. The mantra “September 11 changed everything” neatly disguised the fact that for Milton Friedman disciples and the corporations whose interests they serve, the only thing that changed was the ease with which they could pursue their ambitious economic agenda (The Shock Doctrine, p. 299).
There have been some amazing statements made to justify this looting. To take only one of them, Ken Minihan, former director of the National Security Agency, said, “Homeland security is too important to be left to the government” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 300). Think about this: the security of our country is too important to be left to the government? The rules have been changed under our noses, under the cover of the distraction and manufactured War on Terrorism following 9-11. But this is just how it was done in dozens of other countries.
There is much more to 9-11, its effects and implications, but now I need to move on to Iraq.
It’s been well established that the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq when they came into office, and had discussed it even in January 2001. The invasion of Iraq to control its oil, as well as the removal of Saddam Hussein, was called for in that Project for the New American Century published by our neocons in September 2000.
Iraq was, as Paul Wolfowitz said, where the oil was, and it was also an enemy of Israel. But other reasons for invading Iraq were tactical and economic.
There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake (The Shock Doctrine, p. 327).
But the existence of a plan to use our military to serve our country’s corporate interests is not new. General Smedley Butler laid it out in the 1930s, detailing his role as what he called a muscleman for the first three decades of the 20th century.
And recently, Stephen Kinzer has written in his 2006 book Overthrow that our overthrows of fourteen governments from Hawaii in 1893 to Iraq in 2003 have followed this same general plan:
He says, “In the modern world, corporations are the institutions that countries use to capture wealth. They have become the vanguard of American power, and defying them has become tantamount to defying the United States. When Americans depose a foreign leader who dares such defiance, they not only assert their rights in one country but also send a clear message to others (Overthrow, p. 4).”
In an interview with Democracy Now! On April 21, 2006, Kinzer broke the plan down into its three stages:
1. One or more of our giant corporations are frustrated by a country’s protective or non-compliant laws.
2. They take this to our elected representatives, where it is translated to a case – not of corporate interests, but “U.S. interests.”
3. It is then translated into a war of Good against Evil in order to sell the military intervention to the citizens, and send American soldiers to kill and to die (www.democracynow.org).
John Perkins also wrote about our plans to control and loot other nations, in his best-selling book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man a few years ago, where he says, “Iraq was very important to us, much more than was obvious. Contrary to common public opinion, Iraq is not simply about oil. It is also about water and geopolitics. Both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow through Iraq; thus, of all the countries in that part of the world, Iraq controls the most important sources of increasingly critical water resources (John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 183).
“Also, Iraq is in a very strategic location. It borders Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, and has a coastline on the Persian Gulf. It is within easy missile-striking distance of both Israel and the former Soviet Union. Military strategists equate modern Iraq to the Hudson River valley during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. In the eighteenth century, the French, British and Americans knew that whoever controlled the Hudson River valley controlled the continent. Today, it is common knowledge that whoever controls Iraq holds the key to controlling the Middle East. (John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, p. 184).
Another author says, “Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than oil as fuel. Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and China. It’s having our hand on the spigot.” (Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Resource Wars).
Invading and occupying Iraq also offered the chance to drive a wedge into the Arab and Muslim worlds, which would help Israel, as well as serving our own imperialist interests. And we’re planning to stay there. Remember that we have built the world’s largest embassy there, a building that could employ 5,000 people. It also fits into the Friedmanite vision. After the Chicago School had conquered Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, the Arab world – and of course the U.S. – called out as the final frontiers (The Shock Doctrine, p. 326). And we handled Iraq as we had handled the other countries, rewriting its laws to allow wholesale looting of the country immediately.
When Paul Bremer was sent to Iraq to act like the defacto government of the country, all the careful efforts during the 1990s to present “free trade” as something other than an imperial project were abandoned (The Shock Doctrine, p. 343). He lived in Saddam’s turquoise-domed Republican Palace, received trade and investment laws by e-mail from the Department of Defense, printed them out, signed them and imposed them by fiat on the shocked, awed, invaded and occupied Iraqi people (Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p. 344).
This is the Chicago School plan, so you know what comes next. You have probably observed, as I have, that once you understand the plot, it is disturbingly easy to see it being worked out, in country after country. Bremer changed the laws immediately to invite the corporate looting. One law lowered Iraq’s corporate tax rate from roughly 45 percent to a flat 15 percent (straight out of the Milton Friedman playbook). Another allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets – preventing a repeat of Russia, where the big money from looting the government went to the local rulers and their families. Even better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest, and they would not be taxed. Investors could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years and then be eligible for renewal, which meant that future elected governments would be saddled with deals signed by their occupiers (The Shock Doctrine, p. 345).
Bremer reworked Iraq’s trademark and copyright laws, eliminated trade barriers and afforded foreign businesses the option of circumventing Iraq’s legal system and taking any disputes to international tribunals. Previously, Iraqi banks were closed to foreign ownership. Now, not only can foreign banks operate in Iraq, they can take over private Iraqi banks as well.
He refused to turn power over to the Iraqis because it became immediately clear that they would never give up their oil fields, so Bremer cancelled all elections, and cut down democracy wherever it reared its unwelcome head (The Shock Doctrine, p. 364).
GW Bush spoke of Iraq as “spreading freedom in a troubled region,” and many mistook the sentiment as a starry-eyed commitment to democracy. But it was always that other kind of freedom, the one offered to Chile in the seventies and to Russia in the nineties – the freedom for Western multinationals to feed off freshly captured states – that was at the center of the model theory. The president made that perfectly clear only eight days after declaring an end to major combat in Iraq when he announced plans for the “establishment of a US-Middle East free trade area within a decade” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 329).
So in the end, the war in Iraq did create a model economy. It was a model for highly profitable war and reconstruction – a model that quickly became export-ready. Until Iraq, the frontiers of the Chicago crusade had been bound by geography: Russia, Argentina, South Korea. Now a new frontier can open up wherever the next disaster strikes (The Shock Doctrine, p. 382).
Iraq’s current state of disaster cannot be reduced either to the incompetence and cronyism of the Bush White House or to the sectarianism or tribalism of Iraqis. It is a very capitalist disaster, a nightmare of unfettered greed unleashed in the wake of war. The deadly and murderous feeding frenzy in Iraq is one created by a careful and faithful application of unrestrained Chicago School ideology (The Shock Doctrine, p. 351).
In February 2004, eleven months after the invasion, an Oxford Research International poll found that a majority of Iraqis wanted a secular government: only 21% wanted “an Islamic state,” and only 14 percent ranked “religious politicians” as their preferred political actors. Six months later, with the occupation in a new and more violent phase, another poll found that 70 percent of Iraqis wanted Islamic law as the basis of the state (The Shock Doctrine, p. 350).
You remember the stunning quote from Boris Yeltsin’s assistant in Russia: that, “In order to have a democracy in society there must be a dictatorship in power” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 232). The phrase “democracy in society” meant the freedom to loot it, not the freedom of the people. That has been true in every country in which the Chicago School plan has been put into effect: in order for the corporations to freely loot the government assets, including the money formerly spent on social services to support the middle and lower classes, there must be a dictatorship of power, because otherwise the citizens wouldn’t allow it. Someone must put the citizens on their knees. This means it’s fair to wonder whether there will also have to be a dictatorship of power in our own country.
As proto-disaster capitalists, the architects of the War on Terror are part of a different breed of corporate-politicians from their predecessors, one for whom wars and other disasters are indeed ends in themselves (The Shock Doctrine, p. 311).
I saw figures this week saying our illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq has cost us nearly 4,500 deaths and almost 75,000 casualties – not counting more than a million Iraqis we have killed. But these numbers aren’t significant if you’re only looking at the opportunity for profit, oil, and controlling the Middle East. First, we choose the gods we will serve. They, in turn, determine what we are capable of seeing and caring about.
The most important negotiations going on in Iraq today are still to try and transfer control of their oil primarily to American investors and corporations for the next generation or two. The Iraqi Parliament has so far refused to approve any of this, even though there are reports that members of their Parliament have been offered bribes of $5 million each if they’ll sell out their country in favor of U.S. control of their oil. How many of our own elected officials in Washington do you think could resist a $5 million bribe?
One last thought on Iraq. The cost of the war has recently been estimated at $3 trillion. From a Friedmanite perspective, the huge cost of the war is a very good thing, because it helps drain the money that might otherwise go to social support services, education, health care, and maintaining the U.S. infrastructure. The longer the war can be continued, the more drastic and permanent these cuts can be. When budget cuts are made, remember that they are virtually always made to those social support services. So huge war expenses help disempower and disable the middle and lower classes for generations to come, as the Chicago School plan has done to every other economy – like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but more deadly and in real-world time rather than just sci-fi time. Meanwhile, the atmosphere of war makes it easy – as we”ve seen – for the President to claim and take increased powers. War is not only good business; it is a brilliant tactic in the Friedmanite scheme to do unto the U.S. what we have done unto dozens of other countries over the past thirty-five years.
When the contractor infrastructure built up during the Bush years is looked at as a whole, what is seen is a fully articulated state-within-a-state that is as muscular and capable as the actual state is frail and feeble. This corporate shadow state has been built almost exclusively with public resources (90 percent of Blackwater’s revenues come from state contracts). Yet the vast infrastructure is all privately owned and controlled. The citizens who have funded it have absolutely no claim to this parallel economy or its resources. The actual state, meanwhile, has lost the ability to perform its core functions without the help of contractors. Its own equipment is out of date, and the best experts have fled to the private sector (The Shock Doctrine, p. 417).
Even more surreally, governments are now seen as competitors. In a 2006 report titled, “Neglected Defense: Mobilizing the Private Sector to Support Homeland Security” – whose advisory committee included some of the largest corporations in the sector – warned that “the compassionate federal impulse to provide emergency assistance to the victims of disasters affects the market’s approach to managing its exposure to risk.” Too-compassionate governments could, unless controlled, hamper the corporate fleecing of desperate people. Published by the Council on Foreign Relations, the report argued that if people know the government will come to the rescue, they have no incentive to pay for private, for-profit, protection. In a similar vein, a year after Katrina, CEOs from thirty of the largest corporations in the US joined together under the umbrella of the Business Roundtable, which includes in its membership Fluor, Bechtel and Chevron. The group, calling itself Partnership for Disaster Response, complained of “mission creep” by the nonprofit sector in the aftermath of disasters. Apparently charities and NGOs were infringing on their market by donating building supplies rather than having Home Depot supply them for a fee (The Shock Doctrine, p. 418).
For the corporations involved, the bad news is that, unfortunately, large-scale disasters – whether made by CIA-backed armies, IMF-sponsored destruction of their economy, or Mother Nature – these lucky breaks can’t continue forever. Naomi Klein predicts that when the disaster bubble bursts, firms such as Bechtel, Fluor and Blackwater will lose much of their primary revenue streams. The next phase, she thinks, is all too clear: with emergencies on the rise, government no longer able to foot the bill, and citizens stranded by their can’t-do state, the parallel corporate state will rent back its disaster infrastructure to whoever can afford it, at whatever price the market will bear. For sale will be everything from helicopter rides off rooftops to drinking water to beds in shelters (The Shock Doctrine, p. 419).
In a widely circulated manifesto for Fast Company magazine, John Robb (former covert-action mission commander with Delta Force turned successful management consultant) describes the “end result” of the war on terror as an approach to national security built not around the state but around private citizens and companies”. [Your] security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life. Parallel transportation networks – evolving out of the time-share aircraft companies such as Warren Buffett’s NetJets – will cater to this group, leapfrogging its members from one secure, well-appointed lily pad to the next.” That elite world is already largely in place, but Robb predicts that the middle class will soon follow suit, “forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security.” In other words, a world of suburban Green Zones. As for those outside the secured perimeter, “they will have to make do with the remains of the national system. They will gravitate to America’s cities, where they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance and marginal or nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no other refuge” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 420). To translate, this means that how safe you are will depend on race and economic class, not citizenship or your rights as a human.
The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the US had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure – roads, bridges, schools, dams – that it would take more than a trillion and a half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. But of course these are the types of expenditures that are being cut back. It’s easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by private companies – hired guns (The Shock Doctrine, p. 415).
The process is already well under way. Another glimpse of a disaster apartheid future can be found in a wealthy Republican suburb outside Atlanta. Its residents decided that they were tired of watching their property taxes subsidize schools and police in the country’s low-income African-American neighborhoods. They voted to incorporate as their own city, Sandy Springs, which could spend its taxes on services for its 100,000 citizens and not have the revenues redistributed throughout the larger Fulton County. They had no government structures. In September 2005, the same month that New Orleans flooded, the residents of Sandy Springs were approached by the construction and consulting giant CH2M Hill with a unique pitch: let us do it for you. For the starting price of $27 million a year, the contractor pledged to build a complete city from the ground up. A few months later, Sandy Springs became the first “contract city.” Only four people worked directly for the new municipality – everyone else was a contractor. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that “when Sandy Springs hired corporate workers to run the new city, it was considered a bold experiment.” Within a year, however, contract-city mania was tearing through Atlanta’s wealthy suburbs, and it had become “standard procedure in north Fulton County.” Soon, a campaign began for the new corporate cities to join together to form their own county, which would mean that none of their tax dollars would go to the poor neighborhoods nearby. This will create areas like the Green Zones in Baghdad, and New Orleans”. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 422).
These patterns of economic class (and race) stratification have been repeated everywhere that the Chicago School ideology has triumphed. In December 2006, a month after Friedman died, a UN study found that “the richest 2 per cent of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.” The shift has been starkest in the US, where CEOs made 43 times what the average worker earned in 1980, when Reagan kicked off the Friedmanite crusade. By 2005, CEOs earned 411 times as much (The Shock Doctrine, p. 444).
Throughout its thirty-five-year history, the Chicago School agenda has advanced through the intimate cooperation of powerful business figures, crusading ideologues and strong-arm political leaders (The Shock Doctrine, p. 445).
This is about the master narrative of our times, the “back-story” of the world, the fact that it has almost never really been run by voters, citizens, never followed the polite rules, almost never run like a democracy. It indicts the deep and now dangerous naïveté of citizens – perhaps especially liberals. Too many citizens – goaded on by the media that are owned by about five giant corporations – act as though this is a democracy, as though of course those are the rules, and we just need a bigger parade or bigger protest or self-righteous PBS specials to get our leaders to return to playing by those rules. But the rules were changed to enable better profit-taking by the few from the many, as they were changed in many other countries.
The forty- or fifty-year history of “terrorism” conducted in European countries by right-wing groups within those countries in order to put citizens into manageable states of shock – all of which were apparently done with the philosophical and economic backing of our own CIA – should raise some sober and frightening questions about the violence done to our own country that achieved similar ends. The reluctance to acknowledge that, to name the real powers and principalities that actually run the world, to challenge the biggest of the lies, is to remain in a kind of Disneyland, irrelevant to the world around us, as meek accomplices in the rape of the world. When we read that there are now about ten lobbyists in Washington D.C. for every elected official, or that all nominated presidential candidates are funded primarily by corporations – do we really think this has no implications? John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, once said that the people who own the country ought to run it. That was accomplished quite a while ago – we have been on our knees far longer than we want to acknowledge.
Now, still rushing, I want to move toward some of the very real and very optimistic signs that are going on all over the world.
The kind of hope that is flowering is like the widespread grass-roots movements going on in Latin America that I talked about a few weeks ago, but on a much, much larger scale. A church member sent me a wonderful essay by Paul Hawken that I hadn’t seen, which describes a lot of this. The essay is taken from his new book Blessed Unrest, but he’s been writing books on ecology and commerce for twenty years. (A Global Democratic Movement Is About to Pop, by Paul Hawken, Orion Magazine, posted on May 1, 2007, printed on April 1, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/51088/)
He says he’s given nearly a thousand talks about the environment in the past fifteen years, and has noticed something he believes is unprecedented in human history: the existence of what he now believes are between one and two million organizations working toward ecological sustainability and social justice all over the world. They represent the hope for a better world that beckons us.
This is a kind of burgeoning awareness, growing and spreading in every city and country, made up of families in India, students in Australia, farmers in France, the landless in Brazil, the poor of Honduras and Durban, villagers in remote places, indigenous tribes of Bolivia, and housewives in Japan. Its leaders are farmers, zoologists, shoemakers and poets.
Our media don’t make us aware of the huge movement bubbling up. When the African woman Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago, the wire service stories didn’t mention the network of six thousand different women’s groups in Africa planting trees. But that’s the really empowering story, not the more sensational story about the one woman who started it, even though Maathai deserves recognition for her hard and brilliant work bringing the problem to the world’s attention. When we hear about a chemical spill in a river, is it ever mentioned that more than four thousand organizations in North America have adopted a river, creek, or stream in order to clean it up and save it?
Paul Hawken says this is the first time in history that a large social movement is not bound together by a charismatic leader. What bind it together are ideas, not ideologies. What this nameless movement is doing is to offer solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global climate change, terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income and loss of culture. And what drives it is tens or hundreds of millions of people getting back in touch – in spite of their governments – with what it means to be fully human, alive, and involved. Theologically, it is people getting back to serving a god worth serving, a god of life, love, justice and courage. It is like children beginning to stand up in that valley, to notice and connect with the others who are standing up.
I hope and believe that this dispersed movement will prevail, will suffuse and permeate most institutions. I think it may change enough people to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destruction. This is like the story of The Hundredth Monkey from a generation ago.
The kind of healing, the kind of revolution we need, according to Naomi Klein, Paul Hawken, John Perkins and millions of others involved in these movements, will not come from our governments, and will not come from electing a Democratic president. It won’t come from superficial NPR and PBS programs merely milking the surface features of deep crimes for the day’s entertainment. Both NPR and PBS, it seems to me, have become a lot like the opiates of the intellectual class. It’s unrealistic to expect our mass media to educate us, because this kind of education does not draw crowds, but our mass media are struggling for existence and need crowds in order to attract advertisers. And these financial controls apply to NPR and PBS almost as much as they do to the mainstream media.
If we are to have a safe and fair new world, it will come, as it came in the children’s story, from individuals beginning to stand up to the moral midgets who have run roughshod over our world for a very long time. It will come from individuals standing up to them – here, there, and everywhere. Like the Iraqi Parliament members who are refusing to be bribed even for five million dollars because they serve higher and holier values. To stand up is to refuse to be terrorized by governments who learned long ago that keeping us frightened is the best way to make us give up our freedoms. Healing ourselves and our world is not a liberal or a conservative activity. It is a sacred activity, and it is absolutely within our reach. It is time to stand up.
