The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth, Part II

9 March 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us not underestimate the high cost of serving low gods, for we become what we worship.

Let us learn the names of the gods we serve with our lives. The gods have many names, as they’ve always had: fear, greed, insecurity, power, anger, money, compassion, inclusion, exclusion – their names are legion. And each one will shape us in its own image, for better and worse.

Can we pay the economic cost of serving fairness and the cause of an equitable income for all? Can we pay the human cost of greed or indifference? Will we be so indiscriminately inclusive that we welcome toxic people into our lives? Will we be so indiscriminately exclusive that we lose touch with our greater and nobler humanity? Will serving power mean destroying justice, love, even people?

There are many questions because there are many gods, each with their own seductive demands, each able to make us look like them if only we will give them our lives.

May we seek to live in such a way that we can look back on the path we chose with pride, because it helped make us a blessing to ourselves and others. May we serve only gods that can give us life, not merely the illusion of it.

Religious prophets and sages have said forever that only the greater gods of compassion, justice, service and love can give us the life we seek.

Let us consider that they may be right.

Amen.

SERMON: The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth, Part 2

This is the second in a series of three sermons this month and at least two next month, all based on Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. I think I have done two sermons based on one book only once before. While I don’t expect you all to rush out and read this long and difficult book, I do want to tell you why I think it’s worth this much of my and our time. A reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle said, “Klein may well have revealed the master narrative of our time.” I think that’s right. I think she has put together the pieces of the complex story that has been behind most of the political coups and violence in the world for at least the past 35 years – at least the parts in which our country has been involved, overtly or covertly.

Here are some details that resulted from this master narrative in just the past few years, showing only one small part of it:

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law was unveiled that would allow Shell and British Petroleum to claim the country’s vast oil reserves. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly gave out tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of our tax dollars for running the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater. After a powerful tsunami devastates the coasts of Southeast Asia, armed guards prevent residents from returning to their fishing huts on the beach, and the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts. New Orleans’s residents, still scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened.

These are all small sophisticated parts of the methods that have been carefully crafted to serve the agenda of the fundamentalist capitalism I talked about last week.

Those goals of fundamentalist capitalism are:

– to undo all the gains of the New Deal that had empowered workers and the middle class.

– to take money from governments and workers, return it to the opulent minority and reduce the masses to disposable people, most of whom are sent permanently below the poverty line.

– to loot the world’s economies, making them serve American corporate interests.

These sound so over-the-top, so dramatic. At the very least, they are very ambitious plans. How could anyone possibly do it?

While the methods are easy to describe now, they didn’t fall out of the sky in a leatherbound book – though there are at least three key books at the heart of this plan.

But the methods evolved, picking up useful ideas as they came along, developing them behind the scenes.

One of the first ideas, which played a central role came from a set of psychological experiments done over fifty years ago.

They were done at McGill University in Montreal which our CIA began funding in 1957. They were run by a psychologist named Ewan Cameron – whom the director of psychology at McGill described as “criminally stupid” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 35). But stupid or not, Dr. Cameron helped change our world more powerfully than all of us here, all of our friends, and all of their friends combined are likely to do. As overstated as that might seem, I think it’s actually a very conservative estimate.

Dr. Cameron believed he could erase a person’s mind, turn it into a blank slate, and rewrite it any way he wanted, by using massive amounts of electroshock treatment, combined with keeping his patients in extreme isolation for weeks, and overloading their systems with drug cocktails of LSD, PCP and many others.

Dr. Cameron was half right. He could almost completely destroy a person’s mind. After these experiments were discovered in the late 1970s through a freedom of information act, a few of the severely damaged patients successfully sued the CIA, which settled for $750,000, the largest settlement ever paid out by the agency.

But at the time, several researchers at the CIA became interested in his methods as a special interrogation technique. They funded research at eighty institutions, including 44 universities and 12 hospitals. Their relationship with Dr. Cameron dates back to June 1, 1951. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 33)

By 1963, our CIA had incorporated Dr. Cameron’s electroshock, sensory deprivation, and drug and sensory overload techniques into a Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook (which they call Kubark), which claims it can take a resistant person and “destroy his capacity for resistance.” In other words, torture. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 39) The Kubark was the first of the three books undergirding what would become the revolution of capitalist fundamentalism.

A historian writing on the evolution of torture since the Inquisition describes the Kubark manual’s shock-inducing formula as “the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries.” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 41) Here’s some more of how it works:

Prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early-morning raids, as the manual instructs. They are immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation. And from Guatemala to Honduras, Vietnam to Iran, the Philippines to Chile, China, Russia and Iraq, the use of electroshock is everywhere. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 41)

In February 2006, the Intelligence Sciences Board, an advisory arm of the CIA, published a report that said that “a careful reading of the Kubark manual is essential for anyone involved in interrogation” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 43). It’s hard to overstate the influence on our world today of this “criminally stupid” man of fifty years ago.

Before long, those in our CIA looking for more effective methods of terrorizing and controlling people realized these same techniques of psychological “shock and awe” could be used to terrorize and control entire populations. This would become an absolutely essential part of the Chicago School’s plan to erase existing laws and freedoms, and remake whole economies to loot trillions of dollars of government assets paid for by taxpayers, while systematically destroying the ability of the middle class to resist, or to recover.

Since 1973, the economic plans have followed Milton Friedman’s theories. He had three rules that must always be applied, which some have called the “free-market trinity.” They’re in code, so I’ll translate them.

1. The first involves wholesale looting. Selling off government assets bought by the citizens for a fraction of their worth to your favored buyers, who may be family, Communist party members, or US or multinational corporations who support you. (The code word for this is “privatization.”)

2. Second, remove all legal constraints, to make the looting fast and easy. (The code word for this is “deregulation.”)

3. Then third, loot all the funds used for social support of the citizens: schools, social security, roads, insurance, medical care, etc. This is a lot of money, and it disempowers those most likely to oppose you. It helps eliminate the middle class and make fear and insecurity systemic – and, hopefully, permanent. (The code words for this are “cuts to social spending.”)

These are the real-world meanings of the words “privatization,” “deregulation” and “cuts to social spending.”

As you can imagine, it will take a lot of power, and almost certainly a lot of violence, to do this, for the simple reason that people will not stand by and be robbed, disempowered and disposed of, if they are able to resist.

So one more important piece of the puzzle was still needed, and we found it in 1965. That was the year our CIA helped Suharto overthrow Sukarto in Indonesia. They had overthrown Mosadegh in Iran in 1953 and replaced him with the brutal Shah, and removed Guatemala’s leaders in 1954 at the direct request of the United Fruit Company. But those were child’s-play compared with the Suharto case. These events were so long ago, many of us may not even know the names, and others may not imagine how they could matter any more.

Sukarto’s sin, as was always the case, was that he would not bend to U.S. corporate interests. He had thrown out the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which he recognized as tools of U.S. corporate ambitions. So we, through our CIA, backed Suharto, who was attracted enough to the great personal wealth and power he’d been offered to sell out his whole country to the desires of U.S. corporate interests – which are usually called “American interests” or “U.S. interests,” in the code language used. Of course he brought the IMF and World Bank back. But he did something else that had not been expected, and which combined nicely with Dr. Cameron’s work to complete the method by which we could and did loot and destroy the economies and societies of a dozen more countries over the next forty years, to this day.

What he did was to unleash such extreme and immediate violence, torture and murder that he effectively destroyed the rebellious workers and middle class. Suharto’s incredible violence got the attention of those in the CIA who were plotting the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. They noted Suharto’s effective brutality, and the role of a group of Berkeley economists in redefining the country’s economy (The Shock Doctrine, p. 68)

The Berkeley Economists passed laws letting foreign companies own 100% of Indonesian resources, handed out “tax holidays,” and within two years, Indonesia’s natural wealth – copper, nickel, hardwood, rubber and oil – was being divided up among the largest mining and energy companies in the world (The Shock Doctrine, p. 69).

Suharto had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into a kind of shock, and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place. His use of terror was so merciless, so far beyond even the worst expectations, that a people who only weeks earlier had been collectively striving to assert their country’s independence were now sufficiently terrified that they ceded total control to Suharto and his henchmen. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations manager during the years of the coup, said Indonesia was a “model operation”. You can trace back all major, bloody events run from Washington to the way Suharto came to power. The success of that meant that it would be repeated, again and again” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 69). This is part of the master narrative of our time.

Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago School of Economics had been educating economics students from Chile since 1956, hoping that a merely intellectual revolution could change their thinking inside Chile, and had even replaced most of Chile’s top economic advisors with Chicago trained economists. But Chile had found this “third way” of structuring an economy that empowered the government – which nationalized major industries and assets – and the workers, who had powerful unions and healthy middle-class pay, while eliminating the powerful American corporations. They were doing almost as well as American workers under Roosevelt’s New Deal – the structure that Friedman and the Chicago School wanted to destroy wherever they found it, and which the CIA, serving the interests of our corporations, also wanted to destroy.

Suharto’s success gave them the vision of a rich opportunity. If they could find a powerful leader in Chile who would gladly sell out his country in return for great personal wealth and power, coach him in following Suharto’s massive terrorism and brutality, then bring in Chicago School economists while the entire country was paralyzed by shock and awe, they could return Chile to a blank slate, then remake the economy of Chile in the image of Milton Friedman’s utopian vision of a world in which all wealth and power were back in the hands of the opulent minority. It’s not clear whether Friedman saw, or cared about, the immense human cost of his utopian scheme, or whether he actually believed the things he said. But it is clear that when Friedman used the word “freedom,” he meant only the freedom of wealthy corporations to loot the economy without restraint, not the freedom of the masses or the governments to stop them.

Chile offered the golden opportunity for both our CIA and Friedman’s economic theories. This first great coup, this first dramatic step toward what would later be called The New World Order, happened on September 11, 1973, and once again our CIA was behind the coup. Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvadore Allende, was talking about nationalizing the oil fields and removing foreign oil corporations. We were not about to permit that. The CIA backed an extraordinarily violent man named General Augusto Pinochet.

General Pinochet fired rockets into the presidential palace, killing Allende. He quickly instituted torture, mass killings and arrests to throw the rest of Chile into terror and remove his ideological opposition, as Suharto had done in Indonesia. Chile had had 161 years of democratic rule, the past 41 uninterrupted. It all ended almost immediately through the violence and terror – the “shock and awe” – of Pinochet (The Shock Doctrine, p. 76-77).

Very soon a 500-page book detailing the economic restructurings of the entire country appeared. It was the second important book, which because of its size was known as “The Brick.” The proposals in it bore a striking resemblance to those found in the third sacred text – the most sacred text – of fundamentalist capitalism: Milton Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom, containing the free-market trinity of those chilling code words: privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 77).

In the coming years, the same policies laid out in “The Brick” would be imposed in dozens of other countries under cover of a wide range of crises. But Chile was the start of it, on September 11, 1973 (The Shock Doctrine, p. 78).

Even three decades later, Chile is still held up by some as proof that Friedmanism works. But the country’s period of steady growth that is held up as proof of its miraculous success did not begin until the mid-eighties – a full decade after the Chicago Boys implemented shock therapy and well after Pinochet was forced to make a radical course correction – because in 1982, Chile’s economy crashed (The Shock Doctrine, p. 85).

The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in the early eighties was that Pinochet never sold off Codelco, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile’s export revenues, and kept it afloat (The Shock Doctrine, p. 85).

What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the workers. 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, 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 8th most unequal country on the list (The Shock Doctrine, p. 86).

Chile under the Chicago School rule was offering a glimpse of the future of the global economy, a pattern that would repeat again and again, from Russia to South Africa to Argentina: – roughly half the population excluded from the economy altogether; out-of-control corruption and cronyism; decimation of nationally owned small and medium-sized businesses; a huge transfer of wealth from public to selected private hands, followed by a huge transfer of private debts to be paid by taxpayers (The Shock Doctrine, p. 87).

Following their great success in Chile, our CIA and Friedman’s Chicago economists repeated their success in Brazil and Uruguay. Friedman traveled to Brazil in 1973, at the height of the regime’s brutality, and declared the economic experiment “a miracle.” Next was Argentina in 1976, when a junta seized power from Isabel Peron. That meant that all four countries that had once been the showcases of the Third Way were now run by US-backed military governments and were living laboratories of Chicago School economics (The Shock Doctrine, p. 87). It was an incredible coup that had been over twenty years in the making. No matter what I think of the gods being served here, I absolutely marvel at the brilliance and forethought of those behind the plans. If the world, like the world of professional wrestling, can be divided into the Smarts and the Marks, these are the Smarts, and I am among the Marks.

By the mid-seventies, “disappearances” of people had become the primary enforcement tool of the Chicago School juntas throughout the Southern Cone. An estimated thirty thousand people had been “disappeared” in Argentina alone (The Shock Doctrine, p. 90). “Disappeared,” you understand, is another code word. It means kidnap, torture and murder.

The torture followed the trademark methods codified in the Kubark manual: early morning arrests, hooding, isolation, drugging, forced nudity, electroshock. And everywhere, the terrible legacy of the McGill experiments in deliberately induced regression (The Shock Doctrine, p. 92).

The exact number of people who went through the Southern Cone’s torture machinery is probably somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000, tens of thousands of them killed (The Shock Doctrine, p. 94).

As Naomi Klein puts it, “Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves (The Shock Doctrine, p. 327).”

And the media have mis-reported these coups for decades, focusing on all the sensational torture, murder, violence, and human rights abuses. At the same time, they have commended the countries in opening their doors to American corporations, and making what they like to call the transition to democracy or free trade. The word “democracy” here does not mean the people have freedom. It means the corporations have freedom and the people don’t. The media and most human rights groups wrote the killings up as regrettable, unnecessary violence, as though they weren’t serving other goals. But they are organic parts of the Chicago School plan, which has never worked without great violence and murder. Naomi Klein put it very clearly, this way:

“In a way, what happened in the Southern Cone of Latin America in the seventies is that it was treated as a murder scene when it was, in fact, the site of an extraordinarily violent armed robbery (The Shock Doctrine, p. 125).” It is the crime which in this country we call homicide in the commission of a felony. In Texas, it’s a capital crime: you can get the death penalty for it.

I think this is one of Klein’s clearest insights into the master narrative of our times: that it was always about money, and the violence always served the greed – from Iran, Guatemala and Indonesia to the Southern Cone, Bolivia, China, Africa, Russia, Asia, England and Iraq. Does anyone really believe it will be stopped at the borders of our own country for long?

Much of this has to sound familiar. You’ve heard parts of it in hundreds of major news stories over the past 35 years. But there are two more stages in the evolution of the most dangerous fundamentalism on earth, which I’ll talk about in two weeks, and in April.

We are talking about what St. Paul called the “powers and principalities” that govern our world, the gods they serve, which are the gods we too have been taught to serve. If you buy the premise that people with immense wealth and power should be allowed to take whatever their superior forces grant them, then the human costs may seem insignificant, as they seemed to Friedman and his economists. But if the human costs of unrestrained greed – what are now many tens of millions of deaths and well over a billion humans thrown into permanent poverty – if those costs are insignificant, what have we become? What gods do we serve, and are they really giving us a life and a nation of which we can be proud?