“While as a nation we have mostly done a good job of keeping the military out of law enforcement, we’ve done a poor job, to borrow a bit of martial rhetoric, of guarding our flanks. The biggest threat to the Symbolic Third Amendment today comes from indirect militarization. Instead of allowing our soldiers to serve […]
“Once the mechanics of the shock doctrine are deeply and collectively understood, whole communities become harder to take by surprise, more difficult to confuse––shock resistant. The intensely violent brand of disaster capitalism that has dominated since September 11 emerged in part because lesser shocks––debt crises, currency crashes, the threat of being left behind ‘in history’––were […]
“Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however, disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival. Baghdad’s Green Zone is the starkest expression of this world order. […]
“When I was researching Ewen Cameron’s electroshock experiments in the 1950s, I came across an observation made by one of his colleagues, a psychiatrist named Fred Lowry. ‘The Freudians had developed all these subtle methods of peeling the onion to get at the heart of the problem,’ he said. ‘Cameron wanted to drill right through […]
“Where the Iraq experiment entered bold new terrain was that it transformed the invasion, occupation and reconstruction into an exciting, fully privatized new market. This market was created, just as the homeland security complex was, with a huge pot of public money. For reconstruction alone, the boom was kicked off with $38 billion from the […]
“Public pronouncements and photo ops aside, Bush and his inner circle had no intention of converting to Keynesianism. Far from shaking their determination to weaken the public sphere, the security failures of 9/11 reaffirmed their deepest ideological (and self-interested) beliefs––that only private firms possessed the intelligence and innovation to meet the new security challenge. Although […]
“Two months after the IMF came to its final agreement with South Korea, The Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined ‘Wall Street Scavenging in Asia-Pacific.’ It reported that Pelosky’s firm, as well as several other prominent houses, had ‘dispatched armies of bankers to the Asia-Pacific region to scout for brokerage firms, asset management firms […]
“For years, there had been rumors that the international financial institutions had been dabbling in the art of ‘pseudo-crisis,’ as Williamson put it, in order to bend countries to their will, but it was difficult to prove. The most extensive testimony came from Davison Budhoo, an IMF staffer turned whistle-blower, who accused the organization of […]
“The movement that Milton Friedman launched in the 1950s is best understood as an attempt by multinational capital to recapture the highly profitable, lawless frontier that Adam Smith, the intellectual forefather of today’s neoliberals, so admired––but with a twist. Rather than journeying through Smith’s ‘savage and barbarous nations’ where there was no Western law (no […]
“When I arrived in South Africa, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Freedom Charter was approaching and the ANC had decided to mark the event with a media spectacle. The plan was for Parliament to relocate for the day from its usual commanding home in Cape Town to the far more humble surroundings […]