The Shock Doctrine

You might have read the piece in Salon the other day where John Dean laments the passing of the Republican Party as a positive, or, even, a non-damaging force in American life. The party he has known for forty years, and the party he says that his friends now know, is a hateful, entirely corrupt, and self-interested body composed of those who take revenge and those who fear having revenge taken upon them. Every current candidate for the presidency is "authoritarian" in an extreme and unAmerican way that Dean thinks would have in earlier decades been "corrected" by the political system, but the Republicans, according to Dean, have broken the political system precisely so that it won't correct them. Sounds like the financial markets, doesn't it?

Personally, I would have put things slightly differently. The Republican Party now seems to work like a gang, in which the most valued qualities in members are loyalty to the gang and the leader, obedience to authority, and violence toward outsiders. The gang is constantly having to prove its dominance, and so candidates for leadership vie with one another for the most tyrannical or violent rhetoric, rhetoric which simultaneously demonizes those who don't accept the authority of the gang and the leader and removes all rules and laws for the gang and the leader. No one is exempt from the wrath of the gang. In this case, the Republican party has now separated itself fairly clearly from the general American population, and as Americans support it less, they come to seem to the Republicans to be more and more the enemy. The far away enemy is one thing, in terms of threat (think Al Qaeda, Shiites, Sunnis) but the enemy close at hand is more threatening because their enmity is seen as a "betrayal."

I don't doubt Dean. I always thought that for a Republican, he had something of a conscience. What amazes me is that Republicans who are now exclaiming at what has happened to the Republican Party (and yes, I talked to my mother this morning) didn't see this coming. Everything, every value, that the Republicans have held up for my lifetime as desirable has been pointing us in this direction. As I've said before on the HuffPost, all of this is the necessary consequence of traditional Republican values, not an accidental byproduct. Or maybe I'll put it this way -- when you reject common humanity, value profits above people, practice sectarian religion, feel contempt for the choices of others, exalt wealth, conflate consumersim with citizenship, join exclusive clubs, daily practice unkindness rather than kindness, and develop theories, such as those of free market capitalism, that allow you to congratulate yourself morally for selfishness and short-sightedness, then being a gang member is in your future.

Speaking of Free Market Capitalism, John Dean should start reading Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine, which is being published next week, simultaneously in the US and in Britain. As Karl Marx pointed out, history and politics are not only psychological, they are also material. This week, the Guardian is running not only four excerpts from Klein's book, but also several commentaries both disagreeing and agreeing with her thesis. Her thesis is this (and if I am slightly inaccurate, blame me, not Naomi): In the fifties and sixties in the US, at least two lines of thought converged. One was about how to change people's minds without leaving marks and the other was about what was the best way of organizing a given economy. The first grew out of experiments in psychological torture (whoops, I mean electrocshock therapy) run by Ewen Cameron in the late 1940s. The theory was that patients could be rid of mental illnesses by "regressing" them to an infantile state, attaining a "clean slate" upon which new patterns of behavior and thought would be etched. Cameron used both electroshock and powerful drugs to attain his clean slate, having no actual knowledge of the chemistry of the brain or how it works -- in other words, he was operating in accordance with a metaphor. The result of Cameron's experiments, for the patients, was often considerable loss of short term and even long term memory and a subsequent lifelong feeling of "blankness" on the part of the patients (apparently, later refinements of electroshock techniques have mitigated these effects). In the 1950s, the CIA redirected these techniques toward torture of political opponents, allegedly to find out information, but really to test the techniques themselves (hello, Jose Padilla!).

At the same time, Milton Friedman was coming up with the idea that if only an economy could be purified of any kind of restraints on the free market (for example labor unions or socialized medicine or history), then the free market would be able to perfectly gauge the value of any type of good or service, and therefore an economy would balance itself, and, most importantly, inflation would be controlled (also, as you can see, a metaphor, or, perhaps, an extended analogy).

According to Klein, it soon became apparent that all powerful shocks to a system had a similar effect, whether the system was a human body or a national body, and this was to temporarily disable the system's defenses. The US government, the CIA, and the free market economists began to act on this insight, to collude in larger experiments. The first of these was the right wing coup, in Chile, led by Augusto Pinochet, in 1973. At the time, Chile had a functioning leftish government and economy, and the voters had already rejected Friedman's pure free market troika: privatization of government functions, an end to social spending, and deregulation.The new economy was dependent upon outside investors and highly profitable to them -- let's call that the allure of globalization. Pinochet set about instilling terror in the population (that's the shock therapy) using death squads, exemplary killings, and torture. Taking advantage of this, the economists installed the new free market way of doing things within days of the coup. But Friedman's ideas did not work -- inflation rose. In the eighties, the Chilean government tried again, this time by inducing a profound economic crash -- essentially impoverishing the populace in order to bring them to heel. Ultimately, the Chilean "miracle" (Friedman's term) did nothing for the population, but it did enrich the top ten per cent and put 45% below the poverty line. It turns out that as far as the economists were concerned, this was a good thing.

The Shock Doctrine traces what the US, the CIA, the economists, the Neocons, and the multinational corporations learned from the Chilean experiment and subsequent ones (Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Poland, Russia, China, England) and finally makes its way to Iraq (this is a 590 page book, and the print is small). Essentially, they learned that a small economy is easier to "regress" than a large one, that the shock has to be brutal, and that the free market doesn't work as Friedman said it would (automatically assigning appropriate value), but that it sure does make a few people rich beyond their wildest dreams, and that these people were Friedman's (and his students') benefactors and paymasters. They also learned to lie lie lie in order to sell what amounts to a program of inhuman greed to voters who have other needs, wishes, and ideas.

For our purposes, the more interesting section of Klein's book is about Iraq, where she traveled in the first year after the invasion, and this section forms part of her series of posts at the Guardian. She believes that the Iraq War was intended to not only steal Iraqi oil, but also to impose a radical free market on an unwilling populace, and that that was what was behind the installation of Bremer as the capo of Iraqi reconstruction. She believes that, thanks to the resistance of the Iraqis and their deep resentment at being used and exploited by the Americans, this effort has failed. However, a parallel effort, to shock the US economy into absolute deregulation, privatization, and an end to social spending, has been and is succeeding. What this amounts to is the fleecing of the American taxpayer in order to enrich the war making industries. The byproduct, as in Chile, is the gutting of the rule of law and the American political system as we have known it. Why did Bush and Cheney go to war? Well, where do they get their fortunes? The Shock Doctrine works perfectly for them. As for that 45% below the poverty line, well, once the globalizing manufacturers exported the well-paying US jobs, then the globalizing financiers moved in and sold the newly impoverished working class a few sub-prime mortgages guaranteed to take whatever else they had. Then the financiers screamed for a bailout, and Bernanke gave it to them. The free market, you might say, is working perfectly now, at least according to its shock principles.

So, John Dean, stop wondering what happened to your fellow Republicans. They embarked, knowingly in many cases, unknowingly in some cases, with utter indifference in still other cases, upon the destruction of the common good. They began doing this in the Cold War and kept up with it when it turned out to benefit them economically. Some of them did this because they were fearful and aggressive by nature, and hurting those outside their own families and clubs felt good, or reassuring. Some did it for money. Some did it for "patriotism." Some did it for religion and some did it out of pure cussedness, but they did it, and they did it over time.

Klein ends her book on a hopeful note -- in many places such as Chile and Lebanon, the people have learned from their experiences -- they are cannier and more resistant to the shocks administered to them by Bushco and their own ruling classes. Having endured "Disaster Capitalism" for several decades, they understand their own self-interests better and aren't as easy to fool. I would like to be as hopeful. The question, as always, with Bush and Cheney, is how far are they willing to go? And, is anyone willing to stop them? From John Dean's article, it doesn't sound as though it is going to be the Republicans.

Comments

[ProfessorDuh]

I love Jane Smiley's level of analysis. Always succinct, always as brilliant as a scalpel flashing in the sun.

[morphizm]

Brilliant article. I hope everyone on HuffPo reads and memorizes it, so they're not taken in next time. If there is a next time. I also hope everyone reads Klein's book. I've been publishing her essays on Morphizm.com for years, and name-dropping disaster capitalism whenever possible. It's the only game in town. And it's a killer. Literally.

[mrcontinental]

Outstanding post dear; but no one is listening.

[Mikeatle]

Oh, really?

[tandrmcdonald]

mrcontinental,
How condescendingly trite of you, dear. Try to stay on point.
Gramma Rose

[mrcontinental]

We don't count. We already know what's happening.

There is a massive amount of the population who are not listening; and that is a fact. Sad but true.

[Desiderata]

None of this could have been accomplished without the cooperation of some democrats in Congress.

Examine those who voted in favor of the Bankruptcy Reform Bill in 2005. That was the most toxic ingrediant in the "shock" soup in preparation of the final collapse underway via the sub-prime mortgage disaster.

The weight of such unescapable debt can only result in 40 million indentured servants in this new America.

Again, I will point out Joe Biden as a principle signature to this enslaving Bankruptcy Reform Bill. He wants to be the people's president, even after he showed such corrupt allegience to those who would destroy all that was once a protectorate of the middle class.

Hillary voted for the original bill in 2003, but was not present to vote the 2005 bill.

Overall, the war on terror and in Iraq has just been a smokescreen to blind us to the fact that the real war is being fought against us, and dwarfs those others in it's genecidal consequences.

[whit]

A difference in policy as shown by a vote on a single bill does not prove evil. While I'm against the Bankruptcy Reform Bill, there were clearly abuses of the prior law by people irresponsible for their debts. Biden, as senator from a state where credit cards are the major industry, properly represented his constituents' interests on this bill.

The answer to the largest cause of bankruptcy is universal health care. It shouldn't be left to the credit industry to pay for people's lack of insurance. We don't have universal health care yet precisely because Hillary is a poor strategist and leader. But even Hillary isn't evil; she's just not leadership material.

[Desiderata]

Mr. Biden's constituents are not the corporate and banking interests. Business has no constitutional right to vote__only citizens of this country. He screwed every working citizen of Deleware__his real constituents__ who voted, whether for or against him, and whether or not they pay their debts or, through some personal crisis, have fallen behind a payment or two, or simply are unable to pay any more.

[TheHandyman]

Yes, there were clearly abuses of the previous law, by corporations! The credit card industry sends out hundreds of thousands of credit card approval forms hoping that people will use them knowing that a percentage of those using them will not be able to make the payments. So they charge to rest of the clientel exorbitant interest rates. When people declared bankruptcy they couldn't legally collect on the debt. Now they can prevent people from declaring bankruptcy and they can take everything they own.

The American myth is that if you work really hard you can get ahead and make a good life for yourself. The truth is that the American reality is that the game is padded on the part of the Owners, not the workers. So the Banks and their owners realize the American Dream, no those that work hard.

[tandrmcdonald]

Note to Desiderata,
Bullbleep. Blaming the Democrats in Congress for the mess Bush/Cheney/Elmer Fudd (read Karl Rove) and the neocons have made is like blaming Hawaiians for Pearl Harbor, or New Yorkers for 9/11. I could go on for a real long time, but the point is, we have a mess and no one seems to have the spine to pick up a shovel and start cleaning it up.
Gramma Rose

[MamaBird62]

Another great book on this topic is "Blackwater USA" by Jeremy Scahill, who also writes for the Nation. It's a very disturbing account of what mercenaries, paid for with our tax dollars, are doing in Iraq. This military/corporate takeover of Iraq is the worst fleecing of the American public ever. I fear we won't hear as much about that from Democratic candidates for President as they raise funds from these same corporations.

[dadw5boys]

mama,
READ "BROKEN GOVERNMENT" our real enemy is the Heritage Foundation.

[TheHandyman]

And the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institue, the Hoover Institute!

[sierra]

Blackwater is one of the reasons this admin will not propose a draft.....­they don't need it...

There are thousands of ex-military around the world that will re-hire themselves as private mercenaries.

sierra

[gwpriester]

What Dean points out in his most excellent book is the personality profile of these "Neo-conservatives" who believe in the strong father figure, that all children are born bad and have to be punished to bring them into line, and that society must had hard fast rules that are either black or white. This is the fundamentalist Christian view as well. No nuance. And it explains why a neo-con neighbor of mine responded to my observation that Clinton would gather the brightest minds and get their opinion before making a decision. My neighbor's reaction was, please, Clinton was not a decision maker (was not the Decider?). Bush, he told me, makes a decision and even if it is the wrong decision, he sticks to it!

To which I could only ask, huh?

[CornellRedneck]

You miss the point. Clinton tried to run the Presidency by committee. You can't run ANYTHING by committee. It stifles decision making, as any businessman will tell you.

Right or wrong, Bush makes decisions. He is indeed a "Decider". Not a bad sobriquet if you can be it!

[Meanwhile]

I would rather be paralyzed by a committee than saddled with a Decider who ALWAYS makes the wrong decision.

[MikesMom]

Please. Do you really believe it's Bush who's making the "decisions"? He's never been anything but a front man.

[Mikeatle]

Do you really believe that Bush makes decisions? Bush hasn't made a decision in years.

[ScooterLiddy]

Bush sits up in the oval office reading comic books. Cheney is the decider. And he is an evil decider.

[caseyblab]

Mr. B's decisions are mostly about which bike trails he prefers.

[mommadona]

"She believes that the Iraq War was intended to not only steal Iraqi oil, but also to impose a radical free market on an unwilling populace, and that that was what was behind the installation of Bremer as the capo of Iraqi reconstruction.

She believes that, thanks to the resistance of the Iraqis and their deep resentment at being used and exploited by the Americans, this effort has failed.

However, a parallel effort, to shock the US economy into absolute deregulation, privatization, and an end to social spending, has been and is succeeding.

What this amounts to is the fleecing of the American taxpayer in order to enrich the war making industries­."

An EXCELLENT observation.

[rabun666]

Just as Hitler, when the Nazi's started losing their foreign wars, turned his war onto the domestic population in Germany. The holocaust intensified simultaneously with Hitler domestic war. This enabled Hitler to claim military success at some level and the Republican Party has declared war on the domestic population, of the US., just as Hitler and the Nazi's did.

[TruthSlayer]

What you described is no different then how the NEO-RATS (DemocRATS) work. Both parties are corrupt and in my opinion, all incumbents need to be run out of office.

[Magog]

Delay/foley 08'

[whit]

You do realize that "both parties are [equally] corrupt" is a Republican meme? It's a move to take your shock that there is corruption in politics, and render you hopeless in the face of the realization, so that you won't take any action to replace the Republicans with Democrats.

And, if you look at the record of corruption, especially in the last couple of decades, it's entirely wrong. Republicans have been far more corrupt than Democrats, in far more serious ways. It's a simple exercise to set up two columns and list each publicly-discovered example, give it a rating for seriousness in terms of undermining democracy and the public good, and add up the results. Unless you do this in an entirely biased way, Republican corruption comes out an order of magnitude greater than Democratic.

[nunzia]

Whit - you're so right. TruthSlayer is aptly named. Buying that reichwing b.s. is a lazy easy way out of responsibility and investigation. Some people, especially those who post here and proclaim themselves "progressive", would rather complain than learn. There is a difference between the two parties. We wouldn't be in Iraq if the Rethugs, including the Rethug SCOTUS, hadn't stolen the election from Gore and the Dems. A WHOLE LOT WOULD BE DIFFERENT TODAY.

[caseyblab]

Wake up and take responsibility for the last 6 years.

[tandrmcdonald]

I refuse to take one iota of responsibility for a gang of thugs I didn't vote for, don't like, and wouldn't cross the street to spit on. Put responsibility where it belongs, on the perpetrators of the hijacking of our country. You might want to start with the goons in the White House.
Gramma Rose

[Eoin45]

TruthSlayer, you slay the truth every time you post.

[NABNYC]

Maybe the entire Sopranos series was an effort by the creators to tell the American public that our government, or everyone in the Bush regime, is "mobbed up."

No Damon Runyonesque "cute" characters here. Cold-blooded killers, liars and thieves one and all. No "Apple-Cart Mary," but instead we've got "Hank the Knife" Kissinger. No "Lemon-Drop Kid," but instead we've got "Karl The Liar and Cheat" Rove. No "Sky" Masterson, but instead we've got "George The Idiot" Bush. And, of course, no "One-Eyed Broadway Pete," but instead "No-Heart Dick" Cheney. Nothing amusing about these folks.

It's all boiled down and succinct. Ever notice how European films often have a kind of charm that is rarely seen in American film? As if the Europeans still respect and value the holiday, the long walks, the down time. Our films are just shooting, car crashes, explosions. Our sex on film is just butt, crotch, boobs, writhing and done. No romance, just do it.

The only thing we respect in this country is money. The Republican party is devoted 100% to getting more money for themselves. They don't care if they have to kill 1 million or 10 million to accomplish that. They don't care if the rest of us all die young and miserably from cancer caused by the poisoned food produced by slave labor. They don't care if we lay on the street and die of a curable disease because we don't have health insurance. They don't care.

Most people still don't understand that. I think that Bush and Cheney would use nukes inside the U.S. if someone tried to force them out of office. Most people don't believe that. And people who still call themselves Republicans would cheer as the bombs rained down on their fellow Americans.

[seawolf77]

You nailed it my freind. These guys are legalized Mafia, nothing more, nothing less. I stopped being afraid of the boogeyman when I was 13, but to listen to these guys he's under every bed and in every closet. I'm sick of all of them. I don't vote becasue the electoral college has made my vote irrelevant. Hard to believe in America. Land of the free with the largest prison population in absolute as well as per capita basis. Where is my America? GONE.

[Meanwhile]

A few thousand people believing their votes are "irrelevant" can mean the difference between a decent president and an evil dictator. The Republican party thanks you for your apathy.

[mommadona]

"Personally, I would have put things slightly differently. The Republican Party now seems to work like a gang, in which the most valued qualities in members are loyalty to the gang and the leader, obedience to authority, and violence toward outsiders.­"

Mayberry Mafia: George HW and W Bush
Miami Mob: Jeb Bush
Moonie Mob: Neil Bush

ArBUSTED-o

[avergejoe]

"So, John Dean, stop wondering what happened to your fellow Republicans. They embarked, knowingly in many cases, unknowingly in some cases, with utter indifference in still other cases, upon the destruction of the common good."

And just what are the 'demlicans' going to do!
They have the same policies!

[dictatortot]

While I agree with this critique of the GOP to a large extent, it really applies primarily to the neocons and the Bush cabal, not to the entire party. Also, it's way too absolute and totalizing--there are decent conservatives in the GOP, like Snowe, Hegel, Collins, Specter, Warner, etc... There are also plenty of principled conservatives who decry the vapid right wing pundits AND the Bush cabal, including George Will, Bill Buckley, ad Pat Buchanan.

The really disheartening thing is that the Democrats are vulnerable to an equally devastating critiqe. Who's left for us to choose from? The Green Party, the Libertarians? Ross Perot?

To paraphrase the old song, "Cynical dogooders to the left of me, selfish donothings to the right, here I am--stuck in the middle with a huge tax burden and a wasteful, bloated, inefficient federal government­." (Okay, so its not quite as rhythmic as the original..­.)

http://www.newsprism.com

[abluevoice]

"What are the 'demlicans' (clever but destructive),going to do".
This is the same BS Nader's raiders used to hand Bush the Presidency (along with the Supreme court's help) in 2000.

Tell me one Democratic candidate that favors "stay the course" in Iraq.
or wants to dismantle the EPA and is not concerned about Global warming.
or wants to give the top 1% more tax breaks.
or wants to privatize social security
or is opposed to stem cell research
or doesn't want some form of national health insurance.
Or who kisses Pat Robertson's and James Dobson's butts, and wants to teach creationism as equal to science.
or who considers Limbaugh, Hannity and OReilly and Fox news as factual.
All of the problems in our domestic and foreign policy can be traced back to Republican one party rule for the past 7 years. None of these problems would exist if Gore was President. So stop blaming Democrats average Joe.

[WolfLarsen]

Gee, greedy politicians and predatory military contractors fleecing the American taxpayer. How novel. This is news?

[dadw5boys]

Did you ever think that when in 2000 the Supreme Court installed Bush as President IT WAS A COUP NOT AN ELECTION?

[rabun666]

The Bush appointee's[the political commizzars], Republicans in general and all of Bush's staffers have to take a loyalty to Bush oath. It's no secret I've seen it on TV.Hitler required a loyalty oath.

[rmc53x]

May i suggest the term "Neocon Mafia"