The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

(or global corporatism run amok)

Keith Olberman interviews Naomi Klein

To create a political state in which the corporations reign supreme, the ideological pipe dream economy of Milton Friedman, all one needs to do is employee the methods first scientifically cataloged in America by the Central Intelligence Agency in the MKULTRA experiments with the help of Ewen Cameron and associates.

The corporatist model of statehood served Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Hirohito in Japan, Stalin in the USSR, Mao Tse-tung in China, Pinochet in Chile and every American president beginning with Woodrow Wilson.

"A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. Because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration and shrinking civil liberties.

In the attempt to relate the history of the ideological crusade that has culminated in the radical privatization of war and disaster, one problem recurs: the ideology is a shape-shifter, forever changing its name and switching identities. Milton Friedman called himself a "liberal," but his American followers, who associated liberals with high taxes and hippies, tended to identify as "conservatives," "classical economists," "free marketers," and, later, as believers in "Reaganomics" or "laissez-faire." In most of the world, their orthodoxy is known as "neoliberalism," but it is often called "free trade" or simply "globalization."

Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think tanks with which Milton Friedman had long associations - Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute - called itself "neoconservative," a worldview that has harnessed the full force of the United States military machine in the service of a corporate agenda. All these incarnations share a commitment to the policy trinity - the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending - but none of the various names for the ideology seem quite adequate.

Milton Friedman framed his movement as an attempt to free the market from the state, but the real-world track record of what happens when his purist vision is applied is rather different. In every country where Chicago School policies have been applied over the past three decades, what has emerged is a powerful ruling alliance between a few very large corporations and the international elite.

In Russia the billionaire private players in the alliance are called "the oligarches"; in China, "the princelings"; in Chile, "the piranhas"; in America, the Bush-Cheney campaign "Pioneers." Far from freeing the market from the state, these political and corporate elites have simply merged, trading favors to secure the right to appropriate precious resources previously held in the public domain - from Russia's oil fields, to China's collective lands, to the no-bid reconstruction contracts for work in Iraq." - Naomi Klein

"The influence of establishment insiders over our foreign policy has become a fact of life in our time. This pervasive influence runs contrary to the real long-term national security of our Nation. It is an influence which, if unchecked, could ultimately subvert our constitutional order. The viewpoint of the establishment today is called globalism.

In the globalist point of view, nation-states and national boundaries do not count for anything. Political philosophies and political principles seem to become simply relative. Indeed, even constitutions are irrelevant to the exercise of power. Liberty and tyranny are viewed as neither necessarily good nor evil, and certainly not a component of policy. In this point of view, the activities of international financial and industrial forces should be orientated to bringing this one-world design - with a convergence of the Soviet and American systems as its centerpiece - into being..... All that matters to this club is the maximization of profits resulting from the practice of what can be described as finance capitalism, a system which rests upon the twin pillars of debt and monopoly. This isn't real capitalism. It is the road to economic concentration and to political slavery." - Senator Jesse Helms 15 December 1987 comments directed to Ronald Reagan on the floor of the Senate

"We have allowed our institutions to be taken over in the name of a globalized American empire that is totally alien in concept to anything our founders had in mind. I suspect that it is far too late in the day for us to restore the republic that we lost a half-century ago." - Gore Vidal

isolation

In the 1950s, the United States Central Intelligence Agency funded bizarre experiments on Ewen Cameron's psychiatric patients, keeping them asleep and in isolation for weeks, then administering huge doses of electroshock as well as experimental drug cocktails which included neuroleptics, LSD, PCP and MDMA.

{On November 28, 1953, U.S. Army biochemist Dr. Frank Olson crashed through a hotel window in New York City and fell over 150 feet to the sidewalk below where he died. The New York City Police Department, U.S. Army, and CIA, for whom he also secretly worked, reported Olson's death as a suicide. In 1975, a Presidential-appointed commission inadvertently released information publicly that revealed that, days before his death, the CIA had surreptitiously dosed Olson with LSD. The CIA admitted that it had given the drug to Olson. Critical witnesses died strangely only days and weeks before they were to be questioned by prosecutors; government officials refused to speak and those that did suddenly developed severe memory problems; crucial documents were destroyed and lost; and investigators were intimidated and threatened.}

The experiments reduced patients to a pre-verbal, infantile state.

These patients were normal people seeking relief from minor psychiatric ailments - postpartum depression, anxiety, even for help to deal with marital difficulties - and had been used, without their knowledge or permission, as human guinea pigs to satisfy the Central Intelligence Agency's thirst for information on how to control the human mind.

Donald Ewen Cameron lived and worked in Albany, New York, and was involved in experiments in Quebec, Canada for Project MKULTRA which eventually lead to the publication of the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. Records from the office of the Quebec Ombudsman show only 15 psychiatrists licensed to practice in 1950, making the scenario of any psychiatrist working in isolation a “virtual impossibility.” One of Donald Ewen Cameron close associates was Heinz Edgar Lehmann *.

Ewen Cameron's theories were based on the idea that shocking his patients into a chaotic regressed state would create the preconditions for him to "rebirth" healthy model citizens.

The premise of Donald Ewen Cameron's theory rested on the idea that before healing can happen,
everything that existed before needs to be wiped out.

In his own writings Donald Ewen Cameron envisioned his acts of destruction as creation,
a gift to his fortunate patients who were, under his relentless re-patterning, going to be born again.

Donald Ewen Cameron was sure that if he blasted away at the habits, patterns and memories of his patients,
he would eventually arrive at that pristine blank slate.

Unfortunately no matter how doggedly Donald Ewen Cameron shocked, drugged and disoriented his patients they never became blank slates. The opposite proved true: the more he blasted, the more shattered his patients became. No matter how fully he regressed his patients, they never absorbed or accepted the endlessly repeated messages on his tapes. Their minds weren't "clean"; rather, they were a mess, their memories fractured, their trust betrayed.

Donald Ewen Cameron was a spectacular failure.

Though Donald Ewen Cameron was a genius at destroying people, he could not remake them.

Milton Friedman, a staunch supporter of laissez-faire economics, also believed in blank slates.
(But there is no such thing in an existent world.)

Milton Friedman was the leading economic theorist of the Chicago School of Economics for a half century.

Milton Friedman had a dream of reaching back to a free market state of "natural" health, when all was in balance, before human interferences created distorting patterns.

Milton Friedman dreamed of de-patterning societies, of returning them to a state of pure free market capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions - government regulations, trade barriers and entrenched corporate interests. (Thinking entrenced corporate interests will give up their interests willingly is an opium pipe dream - corporatists strive for cartels, monopolization and government guaranteed profits!)

Milton Friedman believed that when an economy is highly distorted, the only way to reach that perfect capitalist laissez-faire state was to deliberately inflict painful shocks: only "bitter medicine" could clear the economic distortions of ingrained socialist patterns.

{"A free market has to and does coordinate current and future production against future unknown demands, supplies, and shocks; and it has to and does find ways to alleviate the negative effects of shocks. People generally accomplish this by planning, forecasting, conservative practices, saving, hedging, insuring, and diversifying. There are countless ways, each tailored to particular circumstances.

When a man has a backup trade, he is hedging against being laid off in his main occupation.

When a family saves, it is hedging against loss of income.

When family members help one another in hard times, they are insuring each other.

The federal government and the federal reserve are institutions that generate economic shocks, after which they claim that they have the means, and only they have the means, to ameliorate their effects.

This is more than ignorance.

It is a lie.

These two institutions have unique powers that affect the entire economy, they generate large and pervasive shocks.

In the modern booms that lead to recessions in economic activity, the federal government and the federal reserve act in ways to cause private economic actors to maintain rates of consumption and investment and types of investment (as in housing and mortgages) that are too high and too dependent on growing debt.

They induce people to depart from their unhampered or free market needs. This is the shock to the economy.

To get people on a continuing basis to consume and invest at a higher rate, the central bank has continually to maintain a rate of growth of money that is higher than what people ordinarily demand.

This shock raises and distorts the price level, raises and distorts productive activity, and raises and distorts asset prices. It lowers risk premiums and induces speculation. It distorts trade patterns, capital flows, balances of payments, and exchange rates.

The federal government and the federal reserve push economic decisions further and further away from what people would decide if the credit growth had not been manipulated by the central bank. - Michael S. Rozeff}

Milton Friedman defended his ideas as a quest for the purest possible form of "participatory democracy" because in the free market, "each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants."(Of course he may not have the funds to purchase "the color of tie he wants", "the color of tie he wants" may no longer be manufactured or , it is possible, that "the color of tie he wants" may be reserved for law enforcement official as a badge of rank. For example when the president stands with anyone else he wears the red tie while the others wear various shades of blue.)

A large part of the appeal of Chicago School economics was that when the idea of solidarity among workers' was gaining ground around the world, Chicago School of economics ideology provided a way to defend the controlling corporate interests by solidifying them behind the idea that if they banded together behind this common ideology the workers' would be unable to force concessions. John M. Olin, realizing this would give ultimate power to controlling corporate interests became a longtime funder of Milton Friedman's ideological crusade and the largest single funder of corporatist think tanks. (By 2009 John M. Olin and corporatism, a corrupted version of Milton Friedman's laissez-faire capitialism, had succeeded in enslaving nearly the entire population of the world while controlling corporate interests agents enjoyed lives of luxury.)

Milton Friedman's Chicago School of economics ideology promised "individual freedom," a project that elevated citizens above any collective enterprise and liberated them to express their absolute free will through consumer choice. (This works for those holding fiat money!)

The Marxists had their workers' utopia, and the Chicagoans had their entrepreneurs' utopia,
both claiming that if they got their way, perfection and balance would follow!

"The Keynesian revolution against laissez-faire was costing the corporate sector dearly. Clearly what was needed to regain lost ground was a counterrevolution against Keynesianism, a return to a form of capitalism even less regulated than before the Depression. This wasn't a crusade that Wall Street itself could lead - not in the current climate. If Milton Friedman's close friend Walter Wriston (BB,CFR), head of Citibank, had come forward and argued that the minimum wage and corporate taxes should both be abolished, he naturally would have been accused of being a robber baron. That's where the Chicago School came in. It quickly became clear that when Milton Friedman, a brilliant mathematician and skilled debater, made those same arguments, they took on an entirely different quality. They might be dismissed as wrongheaded but they were imbued with an aura of scientific impartiality. The enormous benefit of having corporate views funneled through academic, or quasi-academic, institutions not only kept the Chicago School flush with donations but, in short order, spawned the global network of right-wing think tanks that would supply the counterrevolution's foot soldiers worldwide."- Naomi Klein

In an attempt to upset the socialized state with political and economic shock therapy the oligarchs of South America targeted leaders of unions, "disappeared" community leaders and assassinated religious leaders such as Padre Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez.

"There is little doubt that the United States, like all great powers, has embarked upon some very foolish wars and has acted as a bully, especially towards neighbors in its own hemisphere." - Ian Buruma

The citizenry is treated to a special form of re-education, called torture by social justice advocates and interrogation by the doppelgängers - Alberto Gonzales, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz *, Dov Zakheim *, Elliott Abrams *, Douglas J. Feith *, I. Lewis Libby *, Michael Mukasey *, Michael Chertoff * - as designed by Donald Ewen Cameron and spelled out in the CIA's KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation.

Torturing Democracy

To re-educate the citizenry some are made to stand in a small box were one can neither sit or stand up straight, others are deprived of sensory stimulation and then blasted with loud music and flashing lights like the hooded prisoners at Guantanamo, perhaps electroshock therapy might be used on hooded torture victims were wires are attached to nipples and genitals as seen in images from Abu Ghraib in Iraq or possibly just simple sensory deprivation with LSD, PCP and MDMA drug cocktails thrown in for good measure as Jose Padilla would testify himself - if it wasn't classified.

When oligarchs take over and employee mercenary forces its seems that the use of violence and torture follows.

Many torturers adopted the posture of a doctor or surgeon and imagine that their electroshocks and other torments are therapeutic - that they are administering medicine to their prisoners - the "dirty" or "diseased" ones - the ones that fail to conform and fit into the image of a properly educated and perfect citizen - better known as mindless human robots, corporately conditioned consumer clones or golem.

"For the international investor, political instability of any kind is bad for business." - Shamus Cooke

"The bookkeeper's trick of creating money out of thin air, charging interest for its use, then forcing it down the throats of weaker nations by threat of violence, is what has allowed the soulless international money changers, since the founding of the Bank of England in 1696, gradually to conquer the world. The money monopoly translates into a monopoly on violence on an ascending scale." - Richard C. Cook

Views on torturing prisoners
Country	Against all torture*	Some degree permissible*	Neither/Don't Know
Israel	48%	43%	9%
Iraq	55%	42%	1%
Indonesia	51%	40%	8%
Philippines	56%	40%	5%
Nigeria	49%	39%	12%
Kenya	53%	38%	9%
China	49%	37%	13%
Russia	43%	37%	19%
America	58%	36%	7%
Brazil	61%	32%	8%
India	23%	32%	45%
S Korea	66%	31%	3%
Ukraine	54%	29%	18%
Poland	62%	27%	12%
Egypt	65%	25%	9%
Great Britain	72%	24%	4%
Mexico	50%	24%	27%
Turkey	62%	24%	14%
Australia	75%	22%	3%
Canada	74%	22%	4%
Chile	62%	22%	16%
Germany	71%	21%	7%
France	75%	19%	6%
Spain	65%	16%	19%
Italy	81%	14%	6%
Average	59%	29%	12%
*27,000 respondents in 25 countries were asked which position was closer to their own views: Clear rules against torture should be maintained because any use of torture is immoral and will weaken international human rights standards against torture. Terrorists pose such an extreme threat that governments should now be allowed to use some degree of torture if it may gain information that saves innocent lives. A majority of Jewish respondents in Israel, 53%, favour allowing governments to use some degree of torture to obtain information from those in custody, while 39% want clear rules against it. The Islamic and Christian respondents skew the overall Israel number down. Source: BBC/Globescan/PIPA October 19, 2006 "Various sources report that methods of torture in Israeli prisons include: Prisoners are forced to stand for long periods of time. Prisoners are refused toilet privileges. Prisoners have thick bags put over their heads and their arms are tied behind their backs with handcuffs designed so that any movement increases the pressure on their wrists. Prisoners have their stomachs stomped on and are repeatedly kicked like animals. Prisoners' testicles are squashed and they are beaten upon their genitals. Prisoners' hair are pulled; their heads beaten against the wall; and they are left hanging heads down. A stick is pushed up the anus of a prisoner. Cigarette butts are put out on a prisoner's bare skin. Relatives are brought in, subjected to abuse and even threatened with rape in front of prisoners. Ball point pens are forced into the penis of prisoners. Prisoners are kept in cells 28 inches wide by 6 feet long for weeks at a time." - Jack Berstein

"If you have gangrene in an arm, you have to cut it off." - Augusto Pinochet

Augusto Pinochet and his Latin American compatriots attempted to heal their countries of the sickness of socialism, of the impulse toward collective action, by cutting their gangrene corrupted arms off. They found out too late that you can not get much done without your arms (labor). (Chileans, having experienced widespread torture firsthand, do not seem to have much taste for it now.)

"In testimony from truth commission reports across the region, prisoners tell of a system designed to force them to betray the principle most integral to their sense of self. For most Latin American leftists, that most cherished principle was what Argentina's radical historian Osvaldo Bayer called "the only transcendental theology: solidarity." The torturers understood the importance of solidarity well, and they set out to shock that impulse of social interconnectedness out of their prisoners. Of course all interrogation is purportedly about gaining valuable information and therefore forcing betrayal, but many prisoners report that their torturers were far less interested in the information, which they usually already possessed, than in achieving the act of betrayal itself. The point of the exercise was getting prisoners to do irreparable damage to that part of themselves that believed in helping others above all else." - Naomi Klein

The International Monetary Fund launched its first "structural adjustment" crusade in 1983.

For the next two decades, every country that came to the fund for a major loan was informed that it needed to revamp its economy from top to bottom.

"Everything we did from 1983 onward was based on our new sense of mission to have the south 'privatized'; towards this end we ignominiously created economic bedlam in Latin America and Africa from 1983-88." - Davison Budhoo, International Monetary Fund senior economists and structural adjustment programs designer for Latin America and Africa throughout the eighties

When the populace has not been paralyzed by violence, as in the case of a bloodless coup, for laissez-faire economic reforms to be accepted they must be rammed down the throats of the people as they were in Bolivia in 1985 under the single executive decree of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada - D.S. 21060.

D.S. 21060, based on "The Brick," contained 220 laws which included an elimination of food subsidies, a canceling of almost all price controls, a 300% increase in the price of oil, deep cuts in government spending, unrestricted imports and the sale of state owned companies - the national oil company, the national air line, railway, electricity and phone companies. The winners of Bolivia's fire sale included Enron, Royal Dutch/Shell, Amoco Corp. and Citicorp - and the sales were direct.

"The important thing is to make these changes irreversible and to get them done before the anti-bodies kick in." - Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada

"Chicago School believers tend to portray the mid-eighties onward as a smooth and triumphant victory march for their ideology: at the same time that countries were joining the democratic wave, they had the collective epiphany that free people and unfettered free markets go hand in hand. That epiphany was always fictional. What actually happened is that just as citizens were finally winning their long-denied freedoms, escaping the shock of the torture chambers under the likes of the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos and Uruguay's Juan Maria Bordaberry, they were hit with a perfect storm of financial shocks - debt shocks, price shocks and currency shocks - created by the increasingly volatile, deregulated global economy." - Naomi Klein

Understandably unwilling to go to war with International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that controlled their debts, crisis-struck new democracies had little choice but to play by International Monetary Fund and the World Bank rules. In the early eighties, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank rules got a great deal stricter. The debt shock coincided precisely, and not coincidentally, with a new era in relations, one that would make military dictatorships largely unnecessary. It was the dawn of the era of "structural adjustment" - otherwise known as the dictatorship of debt.

"The world's biggest economies are reaching an inflection point where the growth in debt loads is becoming unsustainable." - William Pesek

"Debt is the source of all power and wealth for the central banking system as they do not actually produce any tradable good, such as industry; nor do they provide any necessary service, such as government. Interest on debt is the source of income and authority for the central banking system, and thus, it needs to continually advance credit and expand debt.

In Marxist theory, the nature of accumulation plays a very important part, in that it holds a dual character. One is known as accumulation as expanded reproduction, which is concerned with commodity markets and production (the circuit of capital), where money is made through the labor process. The other nature of accumulation is accumulation by dispossession, which is usually framed in terms of relations between capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production. This is accumulation derived from dispossessing someone of something. The Atlantic slave trade was an example of accumulation by dispossession, as Africans were dispossessed of their lives and freedom. Colonialism is another example, where resources are extracted, dispossessing the nation of its own resources.

Perhaps it would be helpful to expand upon Marx's ideas of accumulation by dispossession in regards to the central banking system. Central banking, not falling into the circuit of capital, and thus, accumulation as expanded reproduction, better represents an example of accumulation by dispossession. Money is given in loans at interest, to which the debtor is never meant to fully repay, and is dispossessed of its freedom and wealth through interest payments and debt bondage. Debt is just another word for slavery, therefore, the central banking system itself, functions through a system of accumulation by dispossession.

Conventional understanding of accumulation by dispossession describes it as an interaction between capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production, where the capitalist mode will dispossess the non-capitalist mode of production. Central banking, the pinnacle of the capitalist system and the primary source and avenue of its power, is an interaction between central banks and ALL modes of production. Industry/commerce, governments/nations, and individuals/people, are ALL dispossessed of their freedom through debt bondage." - Andrew Gavin Marshall

{The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were devised at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944. Harry Dexter White* was a primary mover behind the Bretton Woods Agreement and the formation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. A number of sources, including the FBI and Soviet archives, as well as the messages decoded by the Venona project, indicate that Harry Dexter White was engaged in espionage activity for the Soviet Union.

"International financial institutions often create the conditions for political instability, while covert Western intelligence support to disaffected and radical groups creates the means for rebellion; which then becomes the excuse for foreign military intervention; which then secures an imperial military presence in the region, thus gaining control over the particular region's resources and strategic position. This is the age-old conquest of empire: divide and conquer." - Andrew G. Marshall}

"Why do governments claim businesses and consumption need to be financed by debt? The answer is really very simple. The wealthy increase their wealth by lending and they do it without even having to use their own money by means of the Ponzi scheme known as fractional reserve banking. And when debtors cannot meet their obligations, their assets are acquired by the wealthy at fire sale prices who then become even wealthier. This is what corporatism does; it does it consistently and spectacularly. It really can have no other purpose. Credit is good only for creditors; debtors always lose." - John Kozy

"Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. Slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. This can be done by controlling the money. The great debt out of the war will be used as a means to control the volume of money. To accomplish this, bonds must be used as a banking basis. We are now awaiting for the Secretary of the Treasury to make his recommendation to Congress. It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we cannot control that." - banker's hazard circular 1862

{"The World Bank is increasing its financing of fossil-fuel projects worldwide. One example is the coal-powered Tata Ultra Mega power plant in western India, a $4.14 billion project scheduled to go online in 2012. When it is fully operational, it will become one of the world's 50 largest greenhouse-gas emitters and "will emit more carbon dioxide annually than the nation of Tunisia," according to the United States Department of Energy. The World Bank will provide "$450 million in loans and guarantees for the project and also may buy a $50 million stake in it." - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, August 24, 2008

"The World Bank is simply not slowing down its significant funding to fossil-fuel projects that will emit greenhouse gases for 20 to 40 years." - Heike Mainhardt-Gibbsof

"We act as a potent deterrent against government actions that may adversely affect investments." - World Bank website}

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have always claimed that everything they did was in the interest of stabilization. The International Monetary Fund's official mandate has always claimed to be crisis prevention - not social engineering or ideological transformation - so stabilization is the official rationale. The reality is that in country after country, the engineered international debt crisis was being methodically leveraged to advance the Chicago School agenda.

"The World Bank must be given credit for having invented and successfully marketed the concept of 'structural adjustment,' a concept that packaged together microeconomic and macroeconomic reforms. Structural adjustment was sold as the process that countries needed to undergo in order to save their economies from the crisis. For governments that bought into the package, the distinction between sound macroeconomic policies that maintain external balance and stable prices, on the one hand, and policies that determine openness [like free trade], on the other, was obfuscated." - Dani Rodrik, Harvard economist

In the early 1990's Argentina had to undergo a "structural adjustment". By 1994, 90 % of all state enterprises - the oil fields, the phone system, the airline, the trains, the airport, the highways, the water system, the banks, the Buenos Aires zoo, the post office and the national pension plan - had been sold to private companies which included Citibank, Bank Boston, France's Suez and Vivendi, Spain's Respol and Telefonica.

Argentina's notoriously corrupt privatization circus was hailed as "A Bravo New World" in an investment report by Goldman Sachs.

"At the time of hyperinflation it's terrible , for the people, particularly for low-income people and small savers, because they see that in a few hours or in a few days they are being told their salaries got destroyed by the price increases, which take place at an incredible speed. That is why the people ask the government, 'Please do something.' And if the government comes with a good stabilization plan, that is the opportunity to also accompany that plan with other reforms. The most important reforms were related to the opening up of the economy, to deregulation and the privatization process. But the only way to implement all those reforms was, at that time, to take advantage of the situation created by hyperinflation, because the population was ready to accept drastic changes in order to eliminate hyperinflation and to go back to normality." - Domingo Cavallo pushed the Cavallo Plan which privatized Argentina's public sector. (The Cavallo Plan was later found to have been a 1,400 page document prepared by Argentina's two largest creditors JP Morgan and CitiBank.)

Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics was at work when China was cracked open to foreign investment. The wave of "economic reforms" that followed turned China into the sweatshop of the world. 90% of China's billionaires, "the Princelings", are the children of Communist Party officials. Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics was at work in Russia after the fall of the USSR. Boris Yeltsin was con-vinced by the economists schooled in Milton Friedman's ideology.

"Only a blitzkrieg approach during the ‘window of opportunity' provided by the ‘fog of transition' would get the changes made before the population had a chance to organize to protect its previous vested interests." - Joseph Stiglitz, chief economist at the World Bank at that time Boris Yeltsin was fooled as the promised structural adjustment occurred without any cushions, as at this time Western interests gleefully rejoiced that the juggernaut of Communism had finally been conquered.

When the Russian Parliament rejected the structural adjustments Boris Yeltsin unilaterally dissolved parliament and launched a military assault on Parliament that killed 500 people and injured over a thousand more. Boris Yeltsin would have become a successful dictator had the World Bank and International Monetary Fund just kept its side of the bargain by allowing the structural adjustment to be implemented over time and had not failed to remit the aid of $15 to $30 billion that Jeffery Sachs claimed was necessary to secure the Russian state's economic future.

Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics shock doctrine made it clear that economic reforms must take place all at once and the criminal international corporate elite really did not care if Russia became a failed state as long as there were large profits to be made and Communism did not become resurgent . (Aside: It was at this time that Viktor "Vikki" Anatolyevich "Bud" Bout a Russian former Soviet major and arms dealer, nicknamed "the Merchant of Death" started auctioning off the Soviet arsenal to any and all takers. The Hollywood movie The Lord of War is basically a real story based on the life of Viktor Bout.)

"While Jeffery Sachs saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as a liberation from authoritarian rule and was ready to roll up his sleeves and start helping, his Chicago School colleagues saw it as a freedom of a different sort - as the final liberation from Keynesianism and the do-gooder ideas of men like Jeffrey Sachs. Seen in that light, the do-nothing attitude that so infuriated Jeffery Sachs when it came to Russia was not "sheer laziness" but laissez-faire in action: let it go, do nothing. By not lifting a finger to help, all the men charged with Russian policy - from Dick Cheney, as Bush Sr.'s defense secretary, to Lawrence Summers, Treasury undersecretary, to Stanley Fischer at the International Monetary Fund - were indeed doing something: they were practicing pure Chicago School ideology, letting the market do its worst. Russia was what Friedian ideology looked like in practice, a foreshadowing of the get-rich-or-die-trying dystopia that many of these same players would create a decade later in Iraq." - Naomi Klein (In September 2009 it was revealed that 83 Russians a day die by overdosing on heroin.)

In an attempt to hold on to power Boris Yeltsin started a war in Chechnya. 40% of a state owned oil company, comparable to France's Total was sold for $88 million - Total's sales in 2006 were $193 billion. Norlisk Nickle, fifth largest producer fo nickle in the world, was sold for $170 million - profits now reach 1.5 billion annually. Yokos, which controls more oil than Kuwait was sold for $309 million. A 51% stake in Sidanko, now worth $2.8 billion was sold for $130 million. A huge weapons factory was sold for $3 million to - Viktor Bout perhaps? At this time "the oligarches" gained control of the Russian economy. Harvard economics professor Andrei Scleifer and his deputy Jonathan Hay helped the Russian oligarches design the "new economy." Harvard paid a settlement of $26.5 million, Andrei Scleifer agreed to pay $2 million and Jonathan Hay agreed to pay $1 million after a seven year court battle found that Harvard had breached its contract with the United States as Andrei Scleifer, Jonathan Hay and Hay's wife each had personally profited from their "economic design.

"Like most of Russia's nouveau riche, [Vladimir] Goussinsky, a 45-year-old former theatrical director, made his money quickly and mysteriously. From a modest start in 1986 with a small company specializing in metal works, he expanded his holdings to include a bank and, later, a financial-industrial group called Most. Today, his empire includes an influential television channel, a satellite television network, a radio station and a company that provides programming and finances for some 50 regional television stations throughout Russia. Goussinsky's media empire also includes a leading daily newspaper and a weekly magazine published in cooperation with Newsweek. His personal wealth is believed to have topped $1 billion ... Like many of his fellow moguls, the publicity-shy Goussinsky rarely gives interviews in Russia, and his face - which he says, with a laugh, is the most important part of his Jewishness - is not familiar to most Russians. Contributing to his shadowy image, Goussinsky rides in a dark-blue, bullet-proof Mercedes, usually accompanied by a convoy of bodyguards. When he plays tennis, as many as 15 armed guards patrol the courts. And like many members of Russia's business elite, Goussinsky is involved in politics. Experts credit much of Goussinsky's meteoric financial rise to his close ties with Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov - and when it appeared possible that Communist Party candidate Gennadi Zyuganov would defeat Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential election, Goussinsky and six other key financiers banded together to fund Yeltsin's victorious re-election campaign. But Goussinsky is more than just one of Russia's wealthiest men. As the president of the Russian Jewish Congress, he is the public figurehead of Russian Jewry and the leading Russian sponsor of Jewish communal projects." - Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, August 21, 1998

"The real problem with the blame Russia narrative is that it preempts any serious examination of what the whole episode has to teach about the true face of the crusade for unfettered free markets, the most powerful political trend of the past three decades. The corruption of many of the oligarches is still spoken of as an alien force that infected otherwise worthy free-market plans. But corruption wasn't an intruder to Russia's free-market reforms: quick and dirty deals were actively encouraged by Western powers at every stage as the fastest way to kick-start the economy. National salvation through the harnessing of greed was the closest thing Russia's Chicago Boys and their advisers had to a plan for what they were going to do after they finished destroying Russia's institutions. Nor were these catastrophic results unique to Russia; the entire thirty- year history of the Chicago School experiment has been one of mass corruption and corporatist collusion between security states and large corporations, from Chile's piranhas, to Argentina's crony privatizations, to Russia's oligarches, to Enron's energy shell game, to Iraq's "free fraud zone." The point of shock therapy is to open up a window for enormous profits to be made very quickly - not despite the lawlessness but precisely because of it. "Russia Has Become a Klondike for International Fund Speculators," ran a headline in a Russian newspaper in 1997, while Forbes described Russia and Central Europe as "the new frontier." The colonial-era terms were entirely appropriate." - Naomi Klein

The southeast Asia monetary crisis of 1997 was exacerbated by the International Monetary Fund.

José Piñera graduated in 1970 as an economist from the Universidad Católica de Chile, at that time closely associated with the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago.

José Piñera was Augusto Pinochet's star economist.

"The day of reckoning has arrived." - José Piñera speaking for the Cato Institute committing on the southeast Asia monetary crisis of 1997.

"A very dramatic event towards a consensus of the type of market system we have in this country." - Alan Greenspan *

"You can't force a country to ask for help. It has to ask. But when it's out of money, it hasn't got many places to turn." - Stanley Fischer, International Monetary Fund negotiator

"The human costs of the International Monetary Fund's opportunism were nearly as devastating in Asia as in Russia. The International Labor Organization estimates that a staggering 24 million people lost their jobs in this period. Indonesia's unemployment rate increased from 4 to 12 percent. Thailand was losing 2,000 jobs a day at the height of the "reforms" - 60,000 a month. In South Korea, 300,000 workers were fired every month - largely the result of the International Monetary Fund's totally unnecessary demands to slash government budgets and hike interest rates. By 1999, South Korea's and Indonesia's unemployment rates had nearly tripled in only two years. As in Latin America in the seventies, what disappeared in these parts of Asia was what was so remarkable about the region's "miracle" in the first place: its large and growing middle class. In 1996, 63.7 percent of South Koreans identified as middle class; by 1999 that number was down to 38.4 percent. According to the World Bank, 20 million Asians were thrown into poverty in this period of what Rodolfo Walsh would have called "planned misery".

Corporatist crusaders are slow learners when it comes to the unintended consequences of their policies. The only lesson learned from the enormously lucrative Asian sell-off appears to have been yet more confirmation for the shock doctrine, more evidence that there is nothing like a true disaster, a genuine churning of society, to open up new economic frontiers. A few years after the peak of the crisis, several prominent commentators were even willing to go so far as to say that what happened in Asia, despite all the devastation, was a blessing in disguise." - Naomi Klein

In Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, the United States military doctrine published in 1996 that eventually formed the basis of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the authors state that the invading force should "seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance."

"George W. Bush has said many times that he believes Osama bin Laden is evil because he uses violence to achieve a political objective - you know, like implementing regime change through shock and awe. Anyone who doesn't see the irony here is not fit to be the leader of the free world." - Chris Yang

Although the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have loaned money to ‘undeveloped' countries the costs have been staggering. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank does not make loans for altruistic purposes contrary to popular belief. Collateral for those loans include the borrowing countries infrastructure and natural resources. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are increasingly forcing countries to privatize their infrastructure to be eligible for debt relief.

In this manner a handful of international corporations, controlled by the syndicate of the soulless led by Vivendi Universal and Suez, have aggressively taken over the management of public water services in countries around the world, dramatically raising the price of water to local residents. In August, 2000 more than 100,000 people in Kwazulu-Natal province, South Africa became ill with cholera after water and sanitation services to local communities were cut off for nonpayment. The World Trade Organization now prohibits the use of export controls for any purpose. Quotas or bans on the export of water imposed for environmental reasons will be challenged as a form of protectionism.

See Water privatization background, Archive for the 'Water privatization' & Who owns water?

Every year the World Bank lends billions of dollars for water sector projects in the developing world. The projects it finances, to deliver public water through private corporations, have a track record of leaving communities dry while transnationals reap unsightly profits.

In 1998, the World Bank granted Armenia $30 million to upgrade the water supply in its capital city of Yerevan, provided that it hand over the public water utility to a transnational corporation. Despite massive subsidies, the private operator failed to improve basic water delivery in Yerevan. A parliamentary investigation discovered that through a series of crooked deals the corporation misappropriated an estimated $35 million from the Armenian people and amassed over $50 million in debt. Today, water flows from the tap only a few hours a day, and residents live in fear of outbreaks of water contamination. The World Bank refuses to recognize the corruption, and instead continues to insist that the project - and the private contractor - surpassed all expectations.

"This case raises difficult questions about the legitimacy of development projects all over the world where so-called 'public-private partnerships' are involved, The World Bank's complicity in corruption calls the whole of the Bank's water lending into disrepute." - Patti Lynn

In 2001 the water services industry made a trillion dollars in profits.

"The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank float unpayable loans to impoverished countries and then, as part of the agreement, force those countries to sell off all the natural resources and infrastructure to multinational corporations in sweetheart deals." - Roy Dickinson

"The current difficulties present an opportunity to tackle long-delayed structural reforms. While the global financial crisis may not be particularly conducive to pushing ahead with the still extensive privatization agenda, this should not deter the authorities from bold structural reforms. With vested interests likely off balance, this may indeed be an opportune time to tackle long-standing - politically difficult - issues." - IMF, April 30, 2009

"The International Monetary Fund is being anointed as the global central bank. They've issued debt for the first time in history. They're issuing Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). When I say issuing, it's printing money; there's nothing behind these SDRs." - Jim Rickards, 09/25/09

"The analysis of the essence of the globalization process, the military and political doctrines of the United States and other countries, shows that terrorism contributes to a world dominance and the submissiveness of states to a global oligarchy. This means that terrorism is not something independent of world politics but simply an instrument, a means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new world elite. It is precisely this elite that constitutes the key element of world terrorism, its ideologist and its "godfather". The main target of the world elite is the historical, cultural, traditional and natural reality; the existing system of relations among states; the world national and state order of human civilization and national identity. Today's international terrorism is a phenomenon that combines the use of terror by state and non-state political structures as a means to attain their political objectives through people's intimidation, psychological and social destabilization, the elimination of resistance inside power organizations and the creation of appropriate conditions for the manipulation of the countries' policies and the behavior of people.

Terrorism is the weapon used in a new type of war. At the same time, international terrorism, in complicity with the media, becomes the manager of global processes. If we analyze what happened on September 11, 2001, we can arrive at the following conclusions:
1. The organizers of those attacks were the political and business circles interested in destabilizing the current world order and who had the means necessary to finance the operation.
2. Only secret services and their current chiefs – or those retired but still having influence inside the state organizations – have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such magnitude.
3. Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders. Thus, a team of professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation.

The September 11 operation modified the course of events in the world in the direction chosen by transnational mafias and international oligarchs; that is, those who hope to control the planet's natural resources, the world information network and the financial flows." - General Leonid Ivashov

"From 1961 to 1970 Latin America paid out to other regions, mostly to the US, a little over 20 billion dollars, practically all in financial services (royalties, interest and repatriated profits to foreign capital). About 30 per cent of this potential deficit was offset by export surpluses, while the remaining 70 per cent was paid through new indebtedness, new private foreign investment and other capital movements. The new indebtedness, representing as it does new costs for financial services, raised still higher the proportion of export earnings required for repatriation of royalties, interest and profits to foreigners, mostly US, thus decreasing amounts available for investment.

During these ten years private foreign capital provided new investment of only 5 billion dollars while taking out 20 billion dollars. The lion's share went to US investors whose investment, which averaged about 12 billion dollars in value, returned about 13 billion dollars to the US. Without the loans and grants from the US under the Alliance for Progress, Latin America would have had to devote about 10 per cent more of its export earnings to the services account so that 'fair return' on investment could be satisfied. Otherwise a moratorium or some other extreme measure would have been necessary - hardly conducive to new credit and investment.

The Alliance for Progress has been, in effect, a subsidy program for US exporters and private investors - in many cases the same firms. For Latin America this has meant a deficit in the external sector of about 6 billion dollars that limited the importation of equipment and technology needed for faster economic growth - the deficit compensated by new indebtedness.

For the United States this has meant a return to private investors of about five dollars for every dollar sent from the US to Latin America during the period, plus a favorable trade balance, plus billions of dollars in loans that are earning interest and will some day be repaid. In other words Latin America through the Alliance for Progress has contributed to the economic development of the United States and has gone into debt to do it.

No wonder we prop up these governments and put down the revolutionaries." - Philip Burnett Franklin Agee

"What about the oath of secrecy I signed when I joined the CIA in 1964?

My oath was illegally, fraudulently obtained.

CIA recruiters lied to me about the clandestine services as they swore me in. They insisted the CIA functioned to gather intelligence. It did not kill, use drugs, or damage people's lives, they assured me. These lies were perpetuated in the following year of training courses. It was not until the disclosures of the Church and Pike Committees in 1975 that I learned the full, shocking truth about my employers. At best, the oath was used to protect those directors from exposure by their underlings, although the directors themselves freely leaked information to further their operational or political ploys.

I was assigned to a managerial position in the CIA's covert Angola program. Under the leadership of the CIA director we lied to Congress and to the 40 Committee, which supervised the CIA's Angola program. We entered into joint activities with South Africa. And we actively propagandized the American public, with cruel results - Americans, misguided by our agents' propaganda, went to fight in Angola in suicidal circumstances. One died, leaving a widow and four children behind. Our secrecy was designed to keep the American public and press from knowing what we were doing - we fully expected an outcry should they find us out.

I would not have undertaken to expose the clandestine services if I felt they were essential to our national security.

I am persuaded they are not.

CIA case officers are almost entirely dependent on CIA material for knowledge of their areas of operation, perpetuating CIA biases and superficial observations. It is exceedingly rare that CIA officers, including even the analysts of the Directorate of Information, will read the books and articles which the academic world publishes about their areas of interest.

The CIA maintains secret liaison with local security services wherever it operates. Its stations are universally part of the official communities of the host countries. Case officers live comfortable lives among the economic elite; even "outside" or "deep cover" case officers are part of that elite. They become conditioned to the mentality of the authoritarian figures, the police chiefs, with whom they work and socialize, and eventually share their resentment of revolutionaries who threaten the status quo.

On March 15,1961, FNLA guerrillas mounted an attack across the Congo border along a 400-mile front, killing African and Portuguese men, women, and children alike. Portuguese air force planes immediately brought in military reinforcements using NATO arms intended for the defense of the North Atlantic area, and began striking back with indiscriminate wrath, even bombing and strafing areas that had not been affected by the nationalist uprising. Portuguese police seized nationalists, Protestants, communists, and systematically eliminated black leaders by execution and terrorism.

South African planes and trucks turned up throughout Angola with just the gasoline or ammunition needed for an impending operation. On October two South African C-l30 airplanes, met a CIA C-141 flight and whisk its load of arms down to Silva Porto. CIA officers and BOSS representatives met the planes at Ndjili and jointly supervised the transloading.

The 40 Committee papers for the Angolan operation, written by the CIA did not list a peaceful option, although the State Department African Affairs Bureau and the U.S. consul general in Luanda had firmly recommended noninvolvement.

At the end of World War II, we were militarily dominant, economically dominant, and we enjoyed a remarkable international credibility. With a modicum of restraint and self-confidence we could have laid the foundations of lasting world peace.

Instead we exaggerated the challenge of a Soviet Union which had just lost 70,000 villages, 17l0 towns, 4.7 million houses, and 20 million people in the war. We set its dread KGB as a model for our own alter ego in foreign affairs.

In the words of the Hoover Commission report of 1954:

There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply.

If the U.S. is to survive, long-standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered.

We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services.

We must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.

It may become necessary that the American people be acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.

Cast as super-patriots, there were no rules, no controls, no laws, no moral restraints, and no civil rights for the CIA game-players. No individual in the world would be immune to their depredations, friends could be shafted and enemies destroyed, without compunction. Eventually, like any secret police, they became abusive of the people: they drugged American citizens; opened private mail; infiltrated the media with secret propaganda and disinformation; lied to our elected representatives; and set themselves above the law and the Constitution." - John Stockwell

"In 1975, when Portugal decided to end five centuries of rule in Angola, the country's three nationalist factions were to form a coalition - but that plan soon collapsed into warfare, with the leftist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) fighting the right-wing allied Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) forces.

The Soviet Union and Cuba supported the MPLA. Washington backed both the FNLA - which was also receiving Chinese aid - and UNITA. The CIA began an Angolan operation with the directive to harass Soviet efforts there and "prevent an easy victory by communist-backed forces in Angola." CIA efforts to help the FNLA and UNITA soon ran into problems as both factions' forces were less than adequate so mercenaries were hired. In April 2002 the MPLA and Unita signed a formal ceasefire in Luanda to end the 27-year conflict.

According to Jane's Intelligence Review, wide-scale warfare is being replaced by what it calls LIC - low-intensity conflict. Jane's Intelligence Review goes on to suggest that, as the nature of war has changed, "it is into this gap in society that the private security firm has stepped." Jane's Intelligence Review points out that in 1997, during the chaotic fighting in Central Africa, a number of security firms were hired by the United Nations "to provide security support (for convoy and refugee protection) to peacekeeping or international relief operations."

There are several major players now in this privatization of warfare. One of the best-known is the South African-based Executive Outcomes. In the early 1990s, the firm was hired by Angola's MPLA government to protect the nation's oil-producing region from attacks by UNITA forces." - Bruce Kennedy

back to stacks contents

This web site is not a commercial web site and is presented for educational purposes only.

This website defines a new religious ideology to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of the religion aptly named The Truth of the Way of Life - a rational religion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a personal relation with God through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a “hate crime.”

This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The international corporate cartel already controls the world central banking system, mass media worldwide, the industrial military entertainment complex of America and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization is based on cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point of a gun.

American social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general through mass media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.

All views and opinions presented on this web site are the views and opinions of individual human men and women that, through their writings, showed the capacity for intelligent, reasonable, rational, insightful and unpopular thought. All factual information presented on this web site is believed to be true and accurate and is presented as originally presented in print media which may or may not have originally presented the facts truthfully. Opinion and thoughts have been adapted, edited, corrected, redacted, combined, added to, re-edited and re-corrected as nearly all opinion and thought has been throughout time but has been done so in the spirit of the original writer with the intent of making his or her thoughts and opinions clearer and relevant to the reader in the present time.

Fair Use Notice This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of criminal justice, human rights, political, economic, democratic, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the United States Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information see: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.