ANNIVERSARY INTERVIEW: Naomi Klein
Grandin, Greg
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS update
Greg Grandin’s latest book is Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan Books, 2006). He...
...It was clear that within share the responsibility with the people who pulled the triggers and built the torture chambers...
...But at the same time they seized powers, they outsourced them...
...And even though the examples...
...We saw it in Chile in the 1970s, Bolivia in the 1980s, Russia in the 1990s...
...But the titans of the disaster capitalism complex don’t brag...
...He was talking about his own ideas, the radical free-market ideological campaign based at the University of Chicago’s economics department, a campaign that could not advance under normal circumstances...
...But the point is, they were ready: roll back labor standards, school vouchers, even Arctic oil drilling...
...The business prospectus was this: The U.S...
...That was the second shock...
...Israel is a case study of what happens when a country completely loses its economic incentive for peace...
...Their ability to target somebody in their car is held up at international weapons shows, while an Israeli firm has teamed up with Boeing to win a Homeland Security contract worth $2.5 billion to build so-called virtual fences on the Mexican and Canadian borders...
...It has created a $200 billion market in homeland security and declared that the demand will never end...
...They treated that causality as NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS update completely self-evident...
...The right has been very good at emulating the style and strategy of the left...
...So I’ve tried to highlight those social-democratic economic alternatives that were proposed and were voted for over the last 35 years, and point out that they did not fail...
...It started in Latin America and it’s lifting first in Latin America, so that should give us hope...
...The left suffers from a crisis of confidence because too many of us believe the lie that our ideas have been tried and have failed, and that we lost the battle of ideas...
...Then, under Paul Bremer, Iraq went from a country strangled by sanctions to just absolute Wild West capitalism...
...I became interested in how these three shocks reinforce each other when I was in Iraq covering the occupation...
...They try to forget those early years under Pinochet...
...The government, while launching this new economy, also acts as its venture capitalist, providing unlimited funding to whoever can come up with the newest gadget to make us safe or to wage war abroad...
...And it needs to happen...
...But the more I talked to people, the more they explained that it hadn’t ended for them, that they had still been afraid...
...The crises don’t need to be created deliberately in dark conspiracies...
...And I think that’s fair...
...Friedman was always complaining Iraqis didn’t respond the way it had been scripted...
...They’re crisis-generating machines...
...But then, of course, the Chicago boys came back, after Salvador Allende’s overthrow, this time with tanks...
...And they acted on almost all of them, including building new oil refineries...
...It’s a philosophy for people whose political agenda is so unpopular, they can’t impose it under normal circumstances...
...One reason it’s taken so long to recognize this as a new economy and NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 update Shock and awe, then and now: the bombing of la Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace, in 1973 (left), and the remains of Iraq’s Adamia Palace in 2003...
...government will do whatever it takes to make the country “secure” at home...
...It shows that rapid growth and endless war can coexist...
...When she sent in the riot police to break the coal miners’ strike, she said, “We fought the enemy without, and now we will fight the enemy within...
...What you’re describing seems to be second-stage neoliberalism...
...in the book are very disturbing, they show that our allies—whether in Chile or Yeltsin’s Russia—didn’t lose in a fair fight...
...It is interesting in terms of the accepted wisdom of the 1990s: “Free trade” would promote peace, since countries would be too busy trading to bomb each other...
...The White House used the shock of September 11 to circumvent debate and, in the name of security, advance a very anti-democratic agenda...
...We should think of the whole network of right-wing think tanks that Friedman was instrumental in establishing and sustaining—the Heritage Foundation, the resurgent American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Insti tute—as intended to keep ideas warm, if you will, to make sure they are ready and waiting when the next crisis hits...
...The sales literature of these Israeli companies promotes the fact that these technologies, be they virtual fences, drones, or airport security, were field-tested on Palestinians...
...One strategy, devised by USAID, was to bring large numbers of Chilean students to the University of Chicago, which was then considered a very extreme institution...
...I think she was down to 22% in the polls...
...Latin America, the first region where neoliberalism was imposed and the first to produce a sustained resistance movement to it, has long been a central focus of Klein’s work, which includes, in addition to her writings, The Take, a 2004 documentary she produced with her husband, Avi Lewis, documenting the takeover of La Forja, a Buenos Aires auto plant, by its workers following Argentina’s 2002 economic meltdown...
...The result is that the public isn’t talking about disaster capitalism as a new economy, though its implications are more dramatic than those of Fordism...
...They’re devoted to intellectual disaster preparedness...
...Body Shocks: A 40th Anniversary Conversation With Naomi Klein By Greg Grandin N aomi klein is a canadian journalist and regular contributor to The Nation and the London Guardian...
...To a large extent, that was not just an academic program but the U.S...
...It’s an extraordinary wish list...
...They front-date the free-market crusade from its real start in 1973 to the 1980s, with Reagan and Thatcher, and then argue that the crusade was peaceful and democratic...
...Over the 20th century, natural disasters in Latin America have provided opportunities for groups associated with the left, or with nationalists...
...It started in the 1950s, when a great deal of concern in Washington centered on the so-called pink economists and the notion that Latin America was moving very far to the left...
...And everyone was saying, “The dictatorship is over...
...From a business perspective, this is tremendously reassuring...
...That is why a public debate about the consequences of this new economic stage is so crucial...
...When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around...
...Israel has turned itself into a showroom for homeland security technologies, like unmanned aerial drones used to surveil and target Palestinian leaders...
...Half the papers they churn out have the word crisis in them— “the coming crisis in X”— in pensions, in social security, in health care...
...He and his colleagues saw themselves as a band of rebels on the fringes, working with these Latin American students, who were brought into what was practically a cult for extreme capitalism...
...But the right has never been forced to go through that same soul-searching...
...She The Bush administration has created a $200 billion market in homeland security products and declared that the demand for them will never end...
...When I was living in Argentina, I read the writings of Rodolfo Walsh, one of Argentina’s most famous journalists...
...Because once you add the economic incentive for the crises, the only threats are peace and environmental sustainability...
...More than just investigating the excesses, abuses, and popular resistances to neoliberalism and war, Klein’s journalism consistently links them, exploring how the corporate globalism of the Clinton years flowed seamlessly into the neoconservatives’ preemptive warfare doctrine...
...The 1944 San Juan earthquake in Argentina signaled the beginning of Peronism...
...In the United States, the Chicago economics department was seen as way out there...
...When I read that, 25 years had passed, and people were in the streets, rejecting neoliberalism...
...Before he was murdered in 1977, he predicted that the effects of the terror would last between 20 and 30 years...
...The first stage generated serial crises...
...Britain’s democracy, she couldn’t achieve her goals as she faced reelection...
...After winning the Falklands War, her popularity shot up to 59...
...It is not a governmental agency in the traditional sense, but rather an empty shell that exists only to hand out money to private contractors to produce products that the government then buys...
...So the security state that they built was hollow, in the sense that it looks like it’s being run by the government, but the whole thing is outsourced to private companies...
...They had a kind of terror hangover...
...He knew that first-hand: Nixon was very sympathetic to Friedman’s ideas but found that if he tried to turn them into policy, he couldn’t hold on to power in an electoral democracy...
...But the backstory to Friedman’s involvement with the Pinochet government is less well-known...
...Living in Argentina for a year, about five years ago, my husband, Avi Lewis, and I were making a film on the economic crisis there...
...government and later by the Ford Foundation— and then sent back home to battle the “pinks...
...I look at those key junctures that were sold as peaceful and democratic: Britain and Bolivia in the 1980s, Yeltsin in the 1990s, and others...
...They also have a lot more money than left ever does...
...The Department of Homeland Security is a great example of this...
...But the Chicago boys came back after Allende’s overthrow, this time with tanks, and it was in this brutal, anti-democratic context that they “won...
...That’s the central tenet of the shock doctrine, which I also call “disaster capitalism...
...It’s much larger than the military-industrial complex, which we tend to think of as the companies making the missiles and getting the big contracts to rebuild bridges that have been bombed...
...they know better than that...
...The shock doctrine is a philosophy that has guided decision making at the highest levels of government in the United States and in many other countries...
...But the political debate had moved so far to the left that they were irrelevant to it...
...All it takes is for the disaster capitalists to be ready when they hit...
...So this is an economy with the wealth of the dot-coms but the discretion of the CIA...
...What do you mean by the title of your new book, The Shock Doctrine...
...And that is why it is so crucial that we have a public debate about the political consequences of this new economic stage...
...He was referring to economic crisis, but in the book I look at a wide range of traumas that can serve this “softening up” purpose for imposing free-market policies...
...I’ve come to think of the War on Terror as playing the same kind of role as a really over-hyped market bubble, much like the dot-coms of the late 1990s...
...When Friedman came up with his theory about exploiting crisis, he was very consciously imitating the left...
...And it was in this brutal, anti-democratic context that they “won...
...empire abroad, in the aftermath of wars and natural disasters...
...Or else they were betrayed by leaders who promised one thing during election campaigns and delivered something completely different once in power (Solidarity in Poland, the ANC in South Africa...
...What do you think tipped the balance to the right, allowing it to better take advantage of disruption...
...The disaster capitalism complex is really a privatized security state—both the construction of a security state on the “home front” and the expansion of U.S...
...If it doesn’t, the search for the next shock laboratory will continue...
...Beginning with No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (1999), Klein’s work has explored the two major forces that have shaped the post–Cold War world: the extension of radical free-market capitalism and, after 9/11, the resurgence of imperial militarism...
...They were never even attempted, because the shock therapists blasted them out of the way before they got the chance to fail...
...The third extent, because Friedman himself did travel to Chile in 1975 and meet with Pinochet...
...Which is what makes it terrifying...
...First came the “shock and awe” attack...
...Better than the left ever did, the right has combined the discipline and crisis provocation of Leninists with a Gramscian patience to work through institutions, fueled by Trotskyist passion...
...we will fight a war against evil everywhere, forever...
...The students were trained as ideological warriors—their tuition was paid for by the U.S...
...And we accept that...
...the second is now spawning a whole new economy that profits off those crises...
...And that should serve as a warning about what happens when so much of the economy is tied up in the disaster capitalism complex—you have a strong disincentive to building a more peaceful, sustainable world...
...State Department was somehow going to convert Chile to Friedmanism, to a form of capitalism that was more radical than anything that had been attempted in the United States, was clearly absurd...
...She parlayed this success into a war at home, and she was very explicit about it...
...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS update Greg Grandin’s latest book is Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan Books, 2006...
...This softens them up for the second shock, also known as shock therapy—the free-market economic policies pushed through all at once, as a sort of extreme country makeover...
...It started with Chile, but it later expanded to Argentina, Brazil, Mexico...
...once you add the economic incentive for crises, the only threats are peace and environmental sustainability...
...But the think tanks are also adept at creating many of the crises, or the atmosphere of crisis, that they then exploit...
...Many foreign policy think tanks, often funded by companies tied to the disaster capitalism complex, also play central roles in maintaining fear about ter rorism and immigration, which in turns grows the market for security products...
...I examine three different kinds of shock: first, major cataclysmic events, like wars and terrorist Andrew Stern NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007 update attacks, that throw people into a state of total disorientation...
...The idea that the U.S...
...In other words, if you sink your money in this industry, if you supply “security” products to meet the demand they have created, it’s a safe bet...
...They started organizing and protesting and resisting...
...Milton Friedman, the late free-market economic guru, articulated the shock doctrine better than anybody...
...Your book winds its way through a remarkable history, from Britain after the Malvinas War, to the United States under Reagan and post–Cold War Eastern Europe, on to Iraq, South Asia, and New Orleans...
...Thatcher’s case is particularly interesting...
...They won in Latin America, they won in Russia, they won in China—or so we are told...
...From a business perspective, this is tremendously reassuring because investors are always looking for predictability and sustainability, and the Bush administration has delivered it...
...But Israel’s economy is one of the most successful in the world, growing 8% a year, and a lot of what is driving this growth is war industry...
...But the real Chicago boys, as you have written in Empire’s Workshop, were the Chileans who had studied at the University of Chicago...
...On September 13, two weeks after the levees broke, an all-night meeting was held at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, bringing together the key players from many of the other big think tanks, as well as congressional Republicans...
...government’s attempt to change the ideoform of shock is the literal shock of the torture chamber...
...I say that as a leftist...
...They went back to Chile in the 1960s and they had their little journals and the economics pages of newspapers and they published papers...
...Back then, an endless procession of glossy articles told us how rich the captains of the information economy were...
...You talk about Israel as a laboratory for this new economy, the way that Chile was a laboratory for neoliberalism—a country that constantly wages war but enjoys a vibrant economy...
...But it failed...
...It was after that experience that Friedman came up with crisis as his solution...
...they were crushed...
...I do see some reason for optimism, however, despite all the horrifying examples of cynical campaigns to exploit moments of trauma that I chronicle in the book...
...The left has been held accountable for its totalitarian regimes, and the ideology of centralized state Communism has been held accountable when it can be imposed only through massacres...
...left: JeSuS InoStrozA / ArchIvo lAtIno...
...We saw this dramatically after Hurricane Katrina...
...His strategy was shaped by how well the left responded to the Great Depression, and he thought, though he never said it explicitly, that free marketeers had lost their confidence, that the socialists and the Keynesians NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS update were ready with their demands and agendas for when the market crashes...
...I had no idea what they were talking about, because the dictatorship had ended in 1983...
...And then the Argentine junta seized the Malvinas, or the Falkland Islands, an event Thatcher seized upon to save her political career...
...But Friedmanites lost badly in Chile when it was peaceful...
...Many readers will know Chile as the first place where the direct relationship between neoliberal economics and torture became evident...
...Even though millions of dollars were spent on their education, these ideological warriors flopped...
...He wrote in the early 1980s, “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change...
...rIght: roBert J gAlBrAIth / gloBAlAwAre to understand how it is changing our lives is that in the 1990s we got used to our elites bragging about their wealth...
...NACLA editorial committee member Greg Grandin interviewed Klein on the occasion of NACLA’s 40th anniversary...
...When Friedman died last year, we heard an unrelenting celebration of this supposedly peaceful battle that his side won...
...So Israel is the ultimate paradox...
...He teaches history at New York University...
...And the enemy within was the unions...
...But from the very beginning, from the very first laboratory, the Friedmanites lost badly when it was peaceful...
...I argue that torture is strongly linked to economic shock therapy, because it is when people reject free-market “reforms” that states often turn to torturing individuals, and also to terrorizing whole societies...
...Living in Argentina gave me the confidence to actually make those connections and name the names and say, well, if this economic project could be imposed only through violence, then surely the architects of that economic project had tried to push through some very unpopular free-market reforms in 1981 and 1982, making her the least popular prime minister in British history, or certainly in the history of polling...
...The right is embarrassed about the Latin American laboratory and sort of wants to say, well, it doesn’t count...
...This is why conspiracy theories aren’t necessary: We have an increasingly crisis-prone economy and ecology...
...And that was true to some about how marginal he was, how the Keynesians at Harvard and Yale had a monopoly on political influence...
...There has to be some sort of shock, or body blow, to a society—a war, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster—that makes people lose their footing, lose their orientation...
...They were still in shock, but they were finally coming out of it and regaining their confidence...
...This new economy was announced after September 11...
...And I think much of the world is still in shock, but it does eventually lift...
...Everybody I talked to in Argentina said 30,000 people were disappeared in the 1970s so that the economic model could be imposed, after another group of Chicago boys came to power within a military dictatorship...
...earthquakes in Nicaragua and Guatemala in the 1970s led to increased popular radicalization...
...logical landscape of Latin America...
...You also sketch out a new form of capital accumulation, in a way, a new economic logic, in which the most dynamic sectors of the global economy are tied to what you call the “disaster capitalism complex...
...In the aftermath of that shock, you can push through a political program that you couldn’t otherwise...
...How did living in Latin America inform your analysis, that this radical economic doctrine requires an intense amount of violence and coercion to implement...
...Years ago, when I heard the phrase “the Chicago boys,” I thought it referred to North Americans who had gone to Chile and worked with Pinochet...
...And when the resistance emerged, we saw the third shock, which is the body shock, the torture chamber...
...They came up with 32 free-market solutions for Hurricane Katrina...
...You also write about “people’s reconstruction,” everyday responses to the worst predations of neoliberalism, movements that have been very strong in Latin America...
...Today we understand how the Bush administration used September 11 to seize power for the executive branch to wage preemptive war...
...This initial failure is important because we’re so often told that capitalism, or this radical form of capitalism, has triumphed around the world because there was a battle of ideas, and the Friedmanites won...
Vol. 40 • November 2007 • No. 6
