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Davidson Loehr
23 March 2008
PRAYER:
May our dark places begin to see the light.
May the large and small deaths we have endured release their grip on us, so that we may return to life.
May the apprehension which has stifled us give way to hope and trust.
May all those who have suffered know they have suffered enough, and that it is time to reclaim their dreams, and their courage.
There are two kinds of people: those who are alive and those who are afraid.
But now it is Easter. It is time to come back to life – in our hearts, our lives, and our relationships.
The night has lasted long enough. It is Easter. Let us reclaim our lives.
Amen.
SERMON: Crucifixion and Resurrection in Real-Time (Part III of the Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth)
This is the third in a series of sermons on the most dangerous fundamentalism on earth – a pretty serious subject. But it’s also Easter Sunday in the traditions of Christianity, florists, restaurants, and those who hunt for Easter Eggs, so I want to honor the seriousness of the first subject and the optimism of the second – a feat that might sound like it would have to be a miracle.
The story of Easter is the Christian version of the universal story of our hope that somehow death isn’t the last word, negating the significance of our lives. Hindus had addressed this a few centuries earlier through their metaphor of reincarnation. And you know the even older Egyptian myth of the Phoenix rising from its own ashes. It’s one of our oldest hopes.
Religious liberals usually see these stories, as I do, as metaphors, about psychological sorts of resurrection, or about the hope that life doesn’t have to kill your spirit, the spirit of love or hope, or the spirit of a people. Liberal biblical scholars talk of the resurrection this way, too.
The crucifixion I’ll talk about, however, is all too real. It has involved and continues to involve the real deaths of millions of people, the destruction of economies and societies, and the murder of hope, right here in our real world.
That’s the story of the most dangerous fundamentalism on earth – what author Naomi Klein calls the capitalist fundamentalism of the past 36 years, centered in Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago School of Economics, also called the Chicago School, or the Chicago Boys.
It made its dramatic entry on September 11, 1973 when, with the backing of our CIA, the brutal General Pinochet murdered the democratically elected president Salvadore Allende in Chile and unleashed a reign of robbery and terror from which the majority in Chile have never recovered.
By the 1980s, a sophisticated and coordinated plan for repeating all of this had been pretty much perfected:
First, they were aware and ready when a crisis happened or could be helped to happen, that could adequately paralyze a nation so they could apply what Friedman called their economic shock therapy. Since they had all these plans worked out, it was like having an overnight bag you could take with you on the next flight out to the latest crisis.
Chicago-trained economists arrived to show those in the power structure how to immediately rewrite the economic structures and laws, to remove all obstacles to looting by American and multinational corporations. This followed the 500-page plan they had put together after Pinochet’s murder of Chile’s president Allende in 1973.
The plan for kidnapping, torturing, terrorizing and killing citizens who opposed this theft had become standardized, following the procedures set out in our CIA interrogation manual known as Kubark. Put together in 1963, the CIA is still using it as their key interrogation manual. It’s the book that prescribes the early-morning or late-night kidnapping, hooding, beating, sensory deprivation, electroshock, and techniques like waterboarding of which we’re all aware.
Finally, a strong police or military presence and varying degrees of violence have been necessary every time Friedman’s ?Chicago School? economic plans have been put in effect, for obvious reasons: these are plans to loot entire societies, and the majority of people in those societies will not take it if they have the means to resist – especially the workers. The purpose of rewriting the laws, selling off the government assets, destroying workers’ unions, social support networks and bringing in kidnapping, torture, terrorism and murder is to insure that they won’t have the means or the will to resist.
But the violence isn’t the point. The violence enables the robbery. These are extraordinarily violent armed robberies. These methods have used in so many countries: Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Africa, Russia, China, Asia, Iraq and others. Some would also add England under Thatcher and our country since Reagan.
But today, I want to talk about only one of the countries where these practices were put into effect – Russia – in order to save time for the ?resurrection? part, the turning of the tide, the things that people around the world have begun to do to counter this economic plan.
Between 1989 and 1991 the old USSR collapsed. This had been our Cold War enemy. The most hawkish voices in and behind our government now believed that we had no rival for power in the world – and, we believed, no one could stop our greed or our aggression. Just like in a bad movie or video game, we thought we could rule the world. And the real point of ruling the world is money, not just bragging rights.
This occasion brought about the second September 11th event in this story, on September 11th, 1991. That’s when President George HW Bush made the speech in which he introduced the phrase ?a New World Order.? The New World Order simply meant a world ruled by American corporate interests, since we believed there was now no one to stop us.
A few words on this date of September 11th, which figures prominently three times in this story. It seems very odd, but I have no idea how or why it would have been an intentional part of a huge overall plan. So as far as I can tell, it’s just one of those strange coincidences of history.
When Russia’s new president Boris Yeltsin came to the World Bank and IMF for help, they responded with this economic plan designed to destroy the Russian economy and remove all barriers to a feeding frenzy of foreign, mostly American, capitalists looting the entire Russian economy.
On October 28, 1991, Yeltsin announced the lifting of price controls, and the Russian economy was on its way to being decimated (The Shock Doctrine, p. 223). By the end of the day, his military assault on his own people had taken the lives of approximately five hundred people and wounded almost a thousand, the most violence Moscow had seen since the Russian Revolution of 1917 (The Shock Doctrine, p. 229).
The Chicago Boys went on a law-making binge, ramming through huge budget cuts, the price hikes on basic food items, including bread, and even more and faster auctioning off of government assets, at a mere fraction of their worth (The Shock Doctrine, p. 230). They quickly sold off the country’s approximately 225,000 state-owned companies (The Shock Doctrine, p. 223).
The average Russian consumed 40 percent less in 1992 than in 1991, and a third of the population fell below the poverty line. The middle class was forced to sell personal belongings from card tables on the streets – desperate acts that the Chicago School economists praised as ?entrepreneurial,? proof that a capitalist renaissance was indeed under way, one family heirloom and second-hand blazer at a time (The Shock Doctrine, p. 225). If you had to sell your possessions in order to eat, is ?entrepreneurial? the word you would choose? Can you feel the indifferent and brutal spirit of what Naomi Klein is calling this fundamentalist capitalism? Can you see why so much violence was necessary, to steal so much from so many people, and why one of Friedman’s critics called it economic genocide?
Communism may have collapsed without firing a single shot, but fundamentalist capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns – all to defend Russia’s new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy (The Shock Doctrine, p. 228).
Yeltsin’s assistant in charge of auctioning off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of government assets to corporations became one of the most outspoken champions of Pinochet’s tactics. ?In order to have a democracy in society there must be a dictatorship in power,? he pronounced (The Shock Doctrine, p. 232). This is perfect Orwellian 1984 doublespeak! The phrase ?democracy in society? here means simply the freedom of corporations to loot the entire economy without restraint. And the ?dictatorship of power? and the terrible violence it unleashed was not seen as an enemy of democracy, because no one planning this ever cared about the rights of workers, or anyone else who stood in the way. Human life counted for very little compared to the potential profits at stake.
Just like his mentor Pinochet’s, Yeltsin’s own family grew very rich, his children and several of their spouses appointed to top posts at large firms looted from the government (The Shock Doctrine, p. 233). It was like the old American Depression song, ?The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but ain’t we got fun!? — but without the fun parts.
In the absence of a major famine, plague or battle, never have so many lost so much in so short a time. By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt, and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed, creating an epidemic of unemployment. In 1989, before the Chicago School economic shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 a day. By 1997, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. That means that the ?economic reforms? imposed on Russia can claim credit for the impoverishment of 72 million people in only eight years (The Shock Doctrine, p. 238).
Nor were these catastrophic results unique to Russia; the entire thirty-five year history of the Chicago School experiment has been one of mass corruption and violent collusion between police states and large corporations. The point of the economic shock therapy is to open up a window for enormous profits to be made very quickly – and to eliminate all effective resistance by whatever means necessary (The Shock Doctrine, p. 241).
This is the crucifixion that has gone on for the last 40-50 years in countries all over the world – always, it seems, with the backing of our CIA and the involvement of some of our largest corporations and wealthiest individuals.
The parallels to the crucifixion of Jesus are surprisingly apt. Many biblical scholars believe the single event that doomed Jesus was his scene in Jerusalem’s huge temple, turning over the moneychangers’ tables, trying to stop them from making an unnecessary profit from the people. It’s not a coincidence that the most violent torture, suppression and murder in every country from Chile to Russia and others has been against workers, workers’ unions, and the artists and intellectuals who spoke out against the looting.
Popular religion wants to make Jesus a sweet pietistic figure who just preached love. But while that message might get someone ignored by the authorities, it wouldn’t get them killed. In his real life, his crucifixion may have had a lot to do with his activism on behalf of the poor.
And the resurrection as liberal Christian scholars understand it wasn’t about a dead man rising and walking again. It meant that after Jesus had died, some of his followers began to believe that he and his message had represented a perspective far higher and more life-giving than they could grasp simply by saying he was a wise man.
On the first two Sundays in April, I’ll go back to talk about some of the other countries where we have used these methods and the new developments in the tactics for doing so. But I want to spend the rest of our time on the ?resurrection,? the return to life of some of the devastated countries, how they did it, and how it might encourage and empower us.
The three chief financial institutions that have supported the economic looting were the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, the World Trade Organization, or WTO, and the World Bank. All three may now be among the moneychangers being thrown out of some of the world’s temples.
The International Monetary Fund had played a powerful role in helping to destabilize many countries so they could be looted, but eventually people caught on. After 1998, it became increasingly difficult to impose the shock therapy-style makeovers – through the usual IMF bullying or arm-twisting at trade summits. The defiant new mood coming from the South made its global debut when the WTO talks collapsed in Seattle in 1999. You probably remember the news stories about the college-age protesters then, but the real rebellion took place inside the conference center, when developing countries formed a voting bloc and rejected demands for deeper trade concessions as long as Europe and the US continued to subsidize and protect their domestic industries. Within a few years, the US government’s ambitious dream of creating a unified free-trade zone encompassing all of Asia-Pacific was abandoned, as were a global investors’ treaty and plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, stretching from Alaska to Chile (The Shock Doctrine, p. 279).
Remember that the words ?free trade? are code. They refer to a system whereby multinational corporations are allowed free entry into foreign markets, while subsidizing many of their own industries. So we can destroy local industries because the subsidized products we bring in can unfairly undercut them. This is how many feel we may destroy the native corn crops in Mexico with subsidized, artificially cheap American corn.
Ever since the Argentine collapse in 2001, opposition to foreign looting has become the defining issue of the continent, able to make governments and break them; by late 2006, it was practically creating a domino effect. Columbia seems to be the only Latin American country in which we still have some economic control (The Shock Doctrine, p. 451).
Latin America’s mass movements are learning how to build shock absorbers into their organizing models. They are less centralized than in the sixties, making it harder to destroy whole societies by eliminating a few leaders and replacing them with people who are willing to sell out their countries in return for immense personal wealth and power. The progressive networks in Venezuela are highly decentralized, with power dispersed at the grass roots and community level, through thousands of neighborhood councils and co-ops (The Shock Doctrine, p. 453-454).
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 cooperatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers (The Shock Doctrine, p. 455).
How effective has this been? In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent – a sea change in only two years. The transformation reaches beyond Latin America. In just three years, the IMF’s worldwide lending portfolio had shrunk from $81 billion to $11.8 billion, with almost all of that going to Turkey. Naomi Klein believes that the IMF, a pariah in so many countries where it has treated crises as profit-making opportunities, is starting to wither away. The World Bank faces an equally grim future. In the midst of the Wolfowitz affair, The Financial Times reported that when World Bank managers dispensed advice in the developing world, ?they were now laughed at.? Add the collapse of the World Trade Organization talks in 2006, and the futures of the three main institutions that had imposed the Chicago School ideology look to be at risk of extinction (The Shock Doctrine, p. 457).
This may signal the end of an era of American piracy that history will look back on in shame – depending, as always, on who gets to write that history. But as an Easter topic, it’s about the difference in the spirits and gods being served, about which ones can bring life. Easter, reincarnation, the Phoenix myth and all other resurrection stories, are always about the victory of life-giving spirits over smaller and more selfish ones.
This looks like it could be the reincarnation of the spirit of life and hope in new bodies and opportunities. And it looks like the rebirth of the sons and daughters of God, again living with power and authority. That’s what all religions worthy of the name teach as our sacred right during our days on this earth.
Let us seek and claim them. To all those in Latin America and other recovering countries, and to all of us seeking to survive the large and small deaths in our lives as well – Happy Easter.
