Quotes from The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein

- ‘For Milton Friedman, however, the entire concept of a state-run school system reeked of socialism. In his view, the state’s sole functions were ‘to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside out gates and our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets.’ In other words, to supply the police and the soldiers – anything else, including free education, was an unfair interference in the market.’ (5)

- ‘Before Hurricane Katrina, the school board had run 123 public schools; now it ran just 4. Before that storm, there had been 7 charter schools in the city; now there were 31. New Orleans used to be represented by a strong union; now the union’s contract had been shredded, and its forty-seven hundred members had all been fired. Some of the younger teachers were rehired by the charters, at reduced salaries; most were not.’ (5)

- ‘I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, ‘disaster capitalism.’ ’ (6)

- ‘The bottom line is that while Friedman’s economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy, authoritarian conditions are required for the implementation of its true vision. For economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint – as it was in Chile in the seventies, China in the late eighties, Russia in the nineties and the U.S. after September 11, 2001- some sort of additional major collective trauma has always been required, one that either temporarily suspended democratic practices or blocked them entirely.’ (11)

- ‘The Bush administration immediately seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the “War on Terror” but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering U.S. economy. Best understood as a ‘disaster capitalism complex,’ it has much farther-reaching tentacles than the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against at the end of his presidency: this is global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the United States homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all ‘evil’ abroad. In only a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters. The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state – in effect, to privatize the government.’ (12)

- ‘The global ‘homeland security industry’ – economically insignificant before 2001 – is now a $200 billion sector.’ (13)

- ‘And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy – the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom – the medium is the message.’ (13)

- ‘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 realized 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 a class of mostly wealthy politicians – with hazy and ever-shifting lines between the two groups. In Russia the billionaire private players in the alliance are called ‘the oligarchs’; in China, ‘the princelings’; in Chile, ‘the piranhas;’ in the U.S., 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.’ (15)

- ‘Yet because the decisive role played by shocks and crises has been so effectively purged from the official record of the rise of the free market, the extreme tactics on display in Iraq and New Orleans are often mistaken for the unique incompetence or cronyism of the Bush White House. In fact, Bush’s exploits merely represent the monstrously violent and creative culmination of a fifty-year campaign for total corporate liberation.’ (19)

- ‘Wherever the [CIA] Kubark method has been taught, certain clear patters – all designed to induce, deepen and sustain shock – have emerged: prisoners are captured in the most jarring and disorienting way possible, late at night or in early-morning raids, as the manual instructs. They are immediately hooded or blindfolded, stripped and beaten, then subjected to some form of sensory deprivation. And from Guatemala to Honduras, Vietnam to Iraq, the Philippines to Chile, the use of electroshock is ubiquitous.’ (41)

- ‘From the seventies on, the role favored by American agents was that of mentor or trainer – not direct interrogator. Testimony from Central American torture survivors in the seventies and eighties is littered with references to mysterious English-speaking men walking in and out of cells, proposing questions or offering tips.’ (41-42)

- ‘On September 11, 2001, that longtime insistence on plausible deniability went out the window.’ (42)

- ‘One of the first people to come face-to-face with the new order was the U.S. citizen and former gang member José Padilla. Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, he was accused of intending to build a ‘dirty bomb.’ Rater than being charged and taken through the court system, Padilla was classified as an enemy combatant, which stripped him of all rights. Taken to a U.S. Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina, Padilla says he was injected with a drug that he believes was either LSD or PCP and subjected to intense sensory deprivation: he was kept in a tiny cell with the windows blacked out and forbidden to have a clock or a calendar. Whenever he left the cell he was shackled, his eyes were covered with blackout goggles and sound was blocked with heavy headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days and forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who, when they questioned him, blasted his starved senses with lights and pounding sounds. Padilla was granted a court hearing in December 2006, although the dirty-bomb allegations for which he had been arrested were dropped. He was accused of having terrorist contacts, but there was little he could do to defend himself: according to expert testimony, the Cameron-style regression techniques had completely succeeded in destroying the adult the once was, which is precisely what they were designed to do. ‘The extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged, both mentally and physically,’ his lawyer told the court. ‘The government’s treatment of Mr. Padilla has robbed him of his personhood.’ A psychiatrist who assessed him concluded that he ‘lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.’ The Bush-appointed judge insisted that Padilla was fit to stand trial, however. The fact that he even had a public trial makes Padilla’s case extraordinary. Thousands of other prisoners being held in U.S.-run prisons – who, unlike Padilla, are not U.S. citizens – have been put through a similar torture regimen, with none of the public accountability of a civilian trial.’ (44)

- ‘One released prisoner, a British citizen, told his lawyers that there is now an entire section of the prison, Delta Block, reserved for ‘at least fifty’ detainees who are in permanently delusional states.’ (45)

- ‘Human rights groups point out that Guantánamo, horrifying as it is, is actually the best of the U.S.-run offshore interrogation operations, since it is open to limited monitoring by the Red Cross and lawyers. Unknown numbers of prisoners have disappeared into the network of so-called black sites around the world or been shipped by U.S. agents to foreign-run jails through extraordinary rendition. Prisoners who have emerged from these nightmares testify to having faced the full arsenal of Cameron-style shock tactics.’ (45)

- ‘The core of such sacred Chicago teachings was that the economic forces of supply, demand, inflation and unemployment were like the forces of nature, fixed and unchanging. In the truly free market imagined in Chicago classes and texts, these forces existed in perfect equilibrium, supply communicating with demand the way the moon pulls the tides.’ (50)

- ‘Like all fundamentalist faiths, Chicago School economics is, for its true believers, a closed loop. The starting premise is that the free market is a perfect scientific system, one in which individuals, acting on their own self-interested desires, create the maximum benefits for all. It follows ineluctably that if something is wrong within a free-market economy – high inflation or soaring unemployment – it has to be because the market is not truly free. There must be some interference, some distortion in the system. The Chicago solution is always the same: a stricter and more complete application of the fundamentals.’ (51)

- ‘The Marxists had their workers’ utopia, and the Chicagoans had their entrepreneur’s utopia, both claiming that if they got their way, perfection and balance would follow.’ (52)

- ‘Chicagoans did not see Marxism as their true enemy. The real source of the trouble was to be found in the ideas of the Keynesians in the United States, the social democrats in Europe and the developmentalists in what was then called the Third World. These were believers not in a utopia but in a mixed economy.’ (53)

- ‘During this dizzying period of expansion, the Southern Cone began to look more like Europe and North America than the rest of Latin America or other parts of the Third World. The workers in the new factories formed powerful unions that negotiated middle-class salaries, and their children were sent off to study at newly built public universities. The yawning gap between the region’s polo-club elite and its peasant masses began to narrow.’ (55)

- ‘If Friedman’s close friend Walter Wriston, 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. And that’s where the Chicago School came in. It quickly became clear that when Friedman, a brilliant mathematician and skilled debater, made those same arguments, they took on an entirely different quality. They might be dismissed as wrong-headed 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 churn out the counterrevolution’s foot soldiers worldwide.’ (56)

- ‘Under pressure from these corporate interests, a movement took hold in American and British foreign policy circles that attempted to pull developmentalist governments into the binary logic of the ColdWar. Don’t be fooled by the moderate, democratic veneer, these hawks warned: Third World nationalism was the first step on the road to totalitarian Communism and should be nipped in the bud. Two of the chief proponents of this theory were John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and his brother Allen Dulles, head of the newly created CIA. Before taking public posts, both had worked at the legendary New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, where they represented many of the companies that had the most to lose from developmentalism, among them J.P. Morgan & Company, the International Nickel Company, the Cuban Sugar Cane Corporation and the United Fruit Company. The results of the Dulles’ ascendancy were immediate: in 1953 and 1954, the CIA staged its first two coups d’état, both against Third World governments that identified far more with Keynes than with Stalin. The first was in 1953, when a CIA plot successfully overthrew Mossadegh in Iran, replacing him with the brutal shah. The next was the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala, done at the direct behest of the United Fruit Company. The corporation, which still had the ear of the Dulles brothers from their Cromwell days, was indignant that President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán had expropriated some of its unused land (with full compensation) as part of his project to transform Guatemala, as he put it, ‘from a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state’ – apparently an unacceptable goal. Soon enough Arbenz was out, and United Fruit was back in charge.’ (58-59)

- ‘The U.S. government would pay to send Chilean students to study economics at what pretty much every recognized was the most rapidly anti-‘pink’ school in the world – the University of Chicago. Schultz and his colleagues at the university would also be paid to travel to Santiago to conduct research into the Chilean economy and to train students and professors in Chicago School fundamentals. What set the plan apart from other U.S. training programs that sponsored Latin American students, of which there were many, was its unabashedly ideological character. By selecting Chicago to train Chileans – a school where the professors agitated for the near-complete dismantling of government with single-minded focus – the U.S. State Department was firing a shot across the bow in its war against developmentalism, effectively telling Chileans that the U.S. government had decided what ideas their elite students should and should not learn. This was such blatant U.S. intervention in Latin American affairs that when Albion Patterson approached the dean of the University of Chile, the country’s premiere university, and offered him a grant to set up an exchange program, the dean turned him down. He said he would participate only if his faculty had input into who in the U.S. was training his students. Patterson went on to approach the dean of a lesser institution, Chile’s Catholic University, a much more conservative school with no economics department. The dean at the Catholic University jumped at the offer, and what became known in Washington and Chicago as ‘the Chile Project’ was born.’ (60)

- ‘Officially launched in 1956, the project saw one hundred Chilean students pursue advanced degrees at the University of Chicago between 1957 and 1970, their tuition and expenses paid for by U.S. taxpayers and U.S. foundations. In 1965, the program was expanded to include students from across Latin America, with particularly heavy participation from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The expansion was funded through a grant from the Ford Foundation and led to the creation of the Center for Latin American Economic Studies at the University of Chicago.’ (60)

- ‘When Nixon heard that Allende had been elected president, he famously ordered the CIA director, Richard Helms, to ‘make the economy scream.’ ’ (64)

- ‘The U.S. and British governments were determined to end Sukarno’s rule, and declassified documents show that the CIA had received high-level directions to ‘liquidate President Sukarno, depending upon the situation and available opportunities.’ After several false starts, the opportunity came in October 1965, when General Suharto, backed by the CIA, began the process of seizing power and eradicating the left. The CIA had been quietly compiling a list of the country’s leading leftists, a document that fell into Suharto’s hands, while the Pentagon helped out by supplying extra weapons and field radios so Indonesian forces could communicate in the remotest parts of the archipelago. Suharto then sent out this soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousands leftists on his ‘shooting lists,’ as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. embassy received regular reports on their progress. As the information came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesian left has been annihilated.’ (67)

- ‘The shooting lists covered the targeted killing; the more indiscriminate massacres for which Suharto is infamous were, for the most part, delegated to religious students. They were quickly trained by the military and then sent into villages on instructions from the chief of the navy to ‘sweep’ the countryside of Communists. ‘With relish,’ wrote one reporter, ‘they called out their followers, stuck their knives and pistols in their waistbands, swung their clubs over their shoulders, and embarked on the assignment for which they had long been hoping.’ In just over a month, at least half a million and possibly as many as 1 million people were killed, ‘massacred by the thousands,’ according to Time. In East Java, ‘Travelers from those areas tell of small rivers and streams that have been literally clogged with bodies; river transportation has at places been impeded.’ (67-68)

- ‘The Indonesian experience attracted close attention from the individuals and institutions plotting the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Washington and Santiago. Of interest was not only Suharto’s brutality but also the extraordinary role played by a group of Indonesian economists who had been educated at the University of California at Berkeley, known as the Berkeley Mafia. Suharto was effective at getting rid of the left, but it was the Berkeley Mafia who prepared the economic blueprint for the country’s future. The parallels with the Chicago were striking. The Berkeley Mafia had studied in the U.S. as part of a program that began in 1956, funded by the Ford Foundation.’ (68)

- ‘For those plotting the overthrow of Allende just as Suharto’s program was kicking in, the experiences of Brazil and Indonesia made for a useful study in contrasts. The Brazilians had made little use of the power of shock, waiting years before demonstrating their appetite for brutality. It was a near-fatal error, since it gave their opponents the chance to regroup and for some to form left-wing guerilla armies. Although the junta managed to clear the streets, the rising opposition forced it to slow its economic plans. Suharto, on the other hand, had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into a kind of shock and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place. His use of terror was so merciless, so far beyond even the worst expectations, that a people who only weeks earlier had been collectively striving to assert their country’s independence were now sufficiently terrified that they ceded total control to Suharto and his henchmen. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations manager during the years of the coup, said Indonesia was a ‘model operation….You can trace back all major, bloody events run from Washington to the way Suharto came to power. The success of that meant that it would be repeated, again and again.’ ’ (69)

- ‘Chile’s coup, when it finally came, would feature three distinct forms of shock, a recipe that would be duplicated in neighboring countries and would reemerge, three decades later, in Iraq. The shock of the coup itself was immediately followed by two additional forms of shock. One was Milton Friedman’s capitalist ‘shock treatment,’ a technique in which hundreds of Latin American economists had by now been trained at the University of Chicago  and its various franchise institutions. The other was Ewen Cameron’s shock, drug and sensory deprivation research, now codified as torture techniques in the Kubark manual and disseminated through extensive CIA training programs for Latin American police and military. These three forms of shock converged on the bodies of Latin Americans and the body politic of the region, creating an unstoppable hurricane of mutually reinforcing destruction and reconstruction, erasure and creation. The shock of the coup prepared the ground for economic shock therapy; the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks. Out of this live laboratory emerged the first Chicago School state, and the first victory in its global counterrevolution.’ (71)

- ‘If this shock approach were adopted, I believe that it should be announced publicly in great detail, to take effect at a very close date. The more fully the public is informed, the more will its reactions facilitate the adjustment.’ Friedman letter to Pinochet, 1975 (75)

- ‘General Augusto Pinochet and his supporters consistently referred to the events of September 11, 1973, not as a coup d’état but as ‘a war.’ Santiago certainly looked like a war zone: tanks fired as they rolled down the boulevards, and government buildings were under air assault by fighter jets. But there was something strange about this war. It had only one side. From the start, Pinochet had complete control of the army, navy, marines and police. Meanwhile, President Salvador Allende had refused to organize his supporters into armed defense leagues, so he had no army of his own.’ (75)

- ‘Pinochet…clearly wanted the event to be as dramatic and traumatic as possible. Even if the coup was not a war, it was designed to feel like one – a Chilean precursor to Shock and Awe. It could scarcely have been more shocking. Unlike neighboring Argentina, which had been ruled by six military governments in the previous four decades, Chile had no experience with this kind of violence; it had enjoyed 160 years of peaceful democratic rule, the past 41 uninterrupted. Now the presidential palace was in flames, the president’s shrouded body was being carried out on a stretcher, and his closest colleagues were lying facedown in the street at rifle point.’ (76)

- ‘The generals knew that their hold on power depended on Chileans being truly terrified, as the people had been in Indonesia. In the days that followed, roughly 13,500 civilians were arrested, loaded onto trucks and imprisoned, according to a declassified CIA report. Thousands ended up in the two main football stadiums in Santiago, the Chile Stadium and the huge National Stadium. Inside the National Stadium, death replaced football as the public spectacle. Soldiers prowled the bleachers with hooded collaborators who pointed out ‘subversives’; the one who were selected were hauled off to locker rooms and skyboxes transformed into makeshift torture chambers. Hundreds were executed. Lifeless bodies started showing up on the side of major highways or floating in murky urban canals.’ (76-77)

- ‘Even though Pinochet’s battle was one-sided, its effects were as real as any civil war or foreign invasion: in all, more then 3,200 people were disappeared or executed, at least 80,000 were imprisoned, and 200,000 fled the country for political reasons.’ (77)

- ‘The proposals in the final document bore a striking resemblance to those found in Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom: privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending – the free-market trinity. Chile’s U.S.-trained economists had tried to introduce these ideas peacefully, within the confines of a democratic debate, but they had been overwhelmingly rejected.’ (77)

- ‘In speeches and interviews, he used a term that had never before been publicly applied to a real-world economic crisis: he called for ‘shock treatment.’ He said it was ‘the only medicine. Absolutely. There is no other. There is no other long-term solution.’ ’ (81)

- ‘In the first year of Friedman-prescribed shock therapy, Chile’s economy contracted by 15 percent, and unemployment – only 3 percent under Allende – reached 20 percent, a rate unheard of in Chile at the time.’ (83)

- ‘[Gunder Frank] calculated what it meant for a  Chilean family to try to survive on what Pinochet claimed was a ‘living wage.’ Roughly 74 percent of its income went simply to buying bread, forcing the family to cut out such ‘luxury items,’ as milk and bus far to get to work.’ (84)

- ‘Pinochet held power for seventeen years, and during that time he changed political direction several times. The country’s period of steady growth that is held up as proof of its miraculous success did not begin until the mid-eighties – a full decade after the Chicago Boys implemented shock therapy and well after Pinochet was forced to make a radical course correction. That’s because in 1982, despite its strict adherence to Chicago doctrine, Chile’s economy crashed: its debt exploded, it faced hyperinflation once again and unemployment hit 30 percent – ten times higher than it was under Allende…The situation was so unstable that Pinochet was forced to do exactly what Allende had done: he nationalized many of these companies.’ (85)

- ‘The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in the early eighties was the Pinochet had never privatized Codelo, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile’s export revenues, which meant that when the financial bubble burst, the state still had a steady source of funds.’ (85)

- ‘That was – what many Chileans understandably see as a war of the rich against the poor and middle class – is the real story of Chile’s economic ‘miracle.’ By 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent. Even in 2007, Chile remained one of the most unequal societies in the world – out of 123 countries in which the United Nations tracks inequality, Chile ranked 116^th, making it the 8^th most unequal country on the list. If that track record qualifies Chile as a miracle for Chicago school economists, perhaps shock treatment was never really about jolting the economy into health.’ (86)

- ‘For a time, the next fix came from other countries in Latin America’s Southern Cone, where the Chicago School counterrevolution quickly spread.’ (87)

- ‘Rather than openly killing or even arresting their prey, soldiers would snatch them, take them to clandestine camps, torture and often kill them, then deny any knowledge. Bodies were thrown into mass graves. According to Chile’s truth commission, established in May 1990, the secret police would dispose of some victims by dropping them into the ocean from helicopters ‘after first cutting their stomach open with a knife to keep the bodies from floating.’ In addition to their lower profile, disappearances turned out to be an even more effective means of spreading terror than open massacres, so destabilizing was the idea that the apparatus of the state could be used to make people vanish into thin air.’ (90)

- ‘Prisoners were taken to one of more than three hundred torture camps across the country. Many of them were located in densely populated residential areas; one of the most notorious was in a former athletic club on a busy street in Buenos Aires, another in a schoolhouse in central Bahía Blanca and yet another in a wing of a working hospital. At these torture centers, military vehicles sped in and out at odd hours, screams could be heard through the badly insulated walls and strange, body-shaped parcels were spotted being carried in and out, all silently registered by the nearby residents.’ (91)

- ‘The regime in Uruguay was similarly brazen: one of its main torture centers was a navy barracks abutting Montevideo’s boardwalk, an area once favored by families for ocean-side strolls and picnics. During the dictatorship, the beautiful spot was empty, as the city’s residents studiously avoided hearing the screams.’ (91)

- ‘The exact number of people who went through the Southern Cone’s torture machinery is impossible to calculate, but it is probably somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000, tens of thousands of them killed.’ (94)

- ‘In the run-up to Chile’s coup, the CIA bankrolled a massive propaganda campaign to paint Salvador Allende as a dictator in disguise, a Machiavellian schemer who had used constitutional democracy to gain power but was on the verge of imposing a Soviet-style police state from which Chileans would never escape.’ (96)

- ‘The UN Convention on Genocide as an ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, religious or racial group’; the Convention does not include eliminating a group based on its political beliefs – as had been the case in Argentina – but [Judge Carlos] Rozanski said he did not consider that exclusion to be legally legitimate. Pointing to a little-known chapter in UN history, he explained that on December 11, 1946, in direct response to the Nazi Holocaust, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution by unanimous vote barring acts of genocide ‘when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely on in part.’ The reason the word ‘political’ had been excised from the Convention two years later was that Stalin demanded it. He knew that if destroying a ‘political group’ was genocidal, his bloody purges and mass imprisonment of political opponents would fit the bill.’ (101)

- ‘Since the fall of Communism, free markets and free people have been packaged as a single ideology that claims to be humanity’s best and only defense against repeating a history filled with mass graves, killing fields and torture chambers. Yet in the Southern Cone, the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicted on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands and the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people.’ (102)

- ‘That realization meant that if the neoliberal revolution was going to succeed, the juntas needed to do what Allende had claimed was impossible – definitively uproot the seed that was sown during Latin America’s leftward surge.’ (103)

- ‘In Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, the juntas staged massive ideological cleanup operations, burning books by Freud, Marx and Neruda, closing hundreds of newspapers and magazines, occupying universities, banning strikes and political meetings. Some of the most vicious attacks were reserved for the ‘pink’ economists whom the Chicago Boys could not defeat before the coups. At the University of Chile, rival to the Chicago Boys’ home base, the Catholic University, hundreds of professors were fired for ‘inobservance of moral duties’ (including André Gunder Frank, the dissident Chicagoan who wrote angry letters home to his former professors). During the coup, Gunder Frank reported that ‘six students were shot on sight in the main entrance to the School of Economics to offer an object lesson to the remainder.’ ’ (104-105)

- ‘When the junta seized power in Argentina, soldiers marched into the University of the South in Bahía Blanca and imprisoned seventeen academics on charges of ‘subversive instruction’; once again, most were from the economics department.’ (105)

- ‘Mercedes Sosa, a fellow musician, was forced into exile from Argentina, the revolutionary dramatist Augusto Boal was tortured and exiled from Brazil, Eduardo Galeano was driven from Uruguay and Walsh was murdered in the streets of Buenos Aires. A culture was being deliberately exterminated. Meanwhile, another sanitized, purified culture was replacing it. At the start of the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, the only public gatherings permitted were shows of military strength and football matches. In Chile, wearing slacks was enough to get you arrested if you were a woman, long hair if you were a man.’ (105)

- ‘The majority of the people swept up in the raids were not ‘terrorists,’ as the rhetoric claimed, but rather the people whom the juntas had identified as posing the most serious barriers to their economic program. Some were actual opponents, but many were simply seen as representing values contrary to the revolution’s.’ (106)

- ‘It was in Argentina, however, that the involvement of Ford’s local subsidiary with the terror apparatus was most overt. The company supplied cars to the military, and the green Ford Falcon sedan was the vehicle used for thousands of kidnappings and disappearances. The Argentine psychologist and playwright Eduardo Pavlovsky described the car as ‘the symbolic expression of terror. A death-mobile.’ While Ford supplied the junta with cars, the junta provided Ford with a service of its own – ridding the assembly lines of troublesome trade unionists. Before the coup, Ford had been forced to make significant concessions to its workers: one hour off for lunch instead of twenty minutes, and 1 percent of the sale of each car to go to social service programs. All that changed abruptly on the day after the coup, when the counterrevolution began. The Ford factory in suburban Buenos Aires was turned into an armed camps; in the weeks that followed, it was swarming with military vehicles, including tanks and helicopters buzzing overhead. Workers have testified to the presence of a battalion of one hundred soldiers permanently stationed at the factory. ‘It looked like we were at war in Ford. And it was all directed at us, the workers,’ recalled Pedro Troiani, one of the union delegates. Soldiers prowled the facility, grabbing and hooding the most active union members, helpfully pointed out by the factory foremen. Troiani was among those pulled off the assembly line. He recalled that ‘before detaining me, they walked me around the factory, they did it right out in the open so that the people would see: Ford used this to eliminate unionism in the factory.’ ’ (108)

- ‘It wasn’t only unionists who faced preemptive attack – it was anyone who represented a vision of society built in values other than pure profit. Particularly brutal throughout the region were the attacks on farmers who had been involved in the struggle for land reform. Leaders of the Argentine Agrarian Leagues – who had been spreading incendiary ideas about the right of peasants to own land – were hunted down and tortured, often out in the fields they worked, in full view of the community.’ (109)

- ‘In Argentina, 81 percent of the thirty thousand people who were disappeared were between the ages of sixteen and thirty. ‘We are working now for the next twenty years,’ a notorious Argentine torturer told one of his victims.’ (110)

- ‘As is the case with most state terror, the targeted killings served a dual purpose. First, they removed real obstacles to the project – the people most likely to fight back. Second, the fact that everyone witnessed the ‘troublemakers’ being disappeared sent an unmistakable warning to those who might be thinking of resisting, thereby eliminating future obstacles. And it worked. ‘We were confused and anguished, docile and waiting to take orders…people regressed; they became more dependent and fearful,’ recalled the Chilean psychiatrist Marco Antonio de la Parra. They were, in other words, in shock. So when economic shocks sent prices soaring and wages dropping, the streets in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay remained clear and calm. There were no food riots, no general strikes. Families coped by quietly skipping meals, feeding their babies maté, a traditional tea that suppresses hunger, and waking up before dawn to walk for hours to work, saving on bus far. Those who died from malnutrition or typhoid were quietly buried.’ (111)

- ‘In the mountain of evidence that has cascaded out of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, two forms of prisoner abuse come up again and again: nudity and the deliberate interference with Islamic practice, whether by forcing prisoners to shave their beards, kicking the Korean, wrapping prisoners in Israeli flags, forced men into homosexual poses, even touching men with simulated menstrual blood. Moazzon Begg, a former prisoner at Guantánamo, says he was frequently forcibly shaved and a guard would say, ‘This is the part that really gets to you Muslims, isn’t it?’ Islam is desecrated not because it is hated by the guards (though it may well be) but because it is loved by the prisoners. Since the goal of the torture is to unmake personalities, everything that comprises a prisoner’s personality must be systematically stolen – from his clothes to his cherished beliefs. In the seventies that meant attacking social solidarity; today it means insulting Islam.’ (113)

- ‘An estimated five hundred babies were born inside Argentina’s torture centers, and these infants were immediately enlisted in the plan to reengineer society and create a new breed of model citizens. After a brief nursing period, hundreds of babies were sold or given to couples, most of them directly linked to the dictatorship. The children were raised according to the values of capitalism and Christianity deemed ‘normal’ and healthy by the junta and never told of their heritage, according to the human rights group the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo that has painstakingly tracked down dozens of these children. The babies’ parents, considered too diseased to be salvageable, were almost always killed in the camps.’ (114)

- ‘Contributing to the problem was that particular way that these acts of terror were framed as narrow ‘human rights abuses’ rather than as tools that served clear political and economic ends.’ (118)

- ‘In another major omission, Amnesty presented the conflict as one restricted to the local military and left-wing extremists. No other players are mentioned – not the U.S. government or the CIA; not local landowners; not multinational corporations. Without an examination of the larger plan to impose ‘pure’ capitalism on Latin America, and the powerful interests behind that project, the acts of sadism documented in the report made no sense at all – they were just random, free-floating bad events, drifting in the political ether, to be condemned by all people of conscience but impossible to understand.’ (120)

- ‘Given its own highly compromised history, it is hardly surprising that when Ford dived into human rights, it defined the field as narrowly as possible. The foundation strongly favored groups that framed their work as legalistic struggles for the ‘rule of law,’ ‘transparency’ and ‘good governance.’ ’ (123)

- ‘The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system – whether political, religious or economic – that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling.’ (125)

- ‘In 1971, the U.S. economy was in a slump; unemployment was high and inflation was pushing prices way up. Nixon knew that if he followed Friedman’s laissez-faire advice, millions of angry citizens would vote him out of a job. He decided to put caps on the prices of necessities such as rent and oil.’ (133)

- ‘In his second term, the president proceeded to shred even more of Friedman’s orthodoxies, passing a slew of new laws imposing higher environmental and safety standards on industry. ‘We are all Keynesians now,’ Nixon famously proclaimed – the cruelest cut of all. So deep was this betrayal that Friedman would later describe Nixon as ‘the most socialist of the presidents of the United States in the 20^th century.’ (133)

- ‘Thatcher still looked poised to lose her job after just one term. In 1979, she had run on the slogan “Labor isn’t working,” but by 1982, the number of unemployed had doubled under her watch, as had the inflation rate. She had tried to take on one of the most powerful unions in the country, the coal miners, and had failed. After three years in office, Thatcher saw her personal approval rating drop to only 25 percent…lower than any British prime minister in the history of opinion polls. Approval for her government as a whole had sunk to 18 percent. With a general election looming, Thatcherism was about to come to an early and inglorious close, well before the Tories had achieved their most ambitious goals of mass privatization and breaking the blue-collar unions.’ (135)

- ‘Thatcher was fighting for her political future – and she succeeded spectacularly. After the Falkland Islands victory, which took the lives of 255 British soldiers and 655 Argentines, the prime minister was heralded as a war hero, her moniker ‘Iron Lady’ transformed from insult to high praise. Her poll numbers were similarly transformed. Thatcher’s personal approval rating more than doubled over the course of the battle, from 25 percent at the start to 59 percent at the end, paving the way for a decisive victory in the following year’s election.’ (138)

- ‘By 1985, Thatcher had won this war too: workers were going hungry and couldn’t hold out; in the end 966 people were fired. It was a devastating setback for Britain’s most powerful union, and it sent a clear message to the others: if Thatcher was willing to go to the wall to break the coal miners, on whom the country depended for its lights and warmth, it would be suicide for weaker unions producing less crucial products and services to take on her new economic order. Better just to accept whatever was on offer. It was a message very similar to the one Ronald Reagan had sent a few months after he took office with his response to a strike by the air-traffic controllers. By not showing up to work, they had ‘forfeited their jobs and will be terminated,’ Reagan said. Then he fired 11,400 of the country’s most essential workers in a single blow – a shock from which the U.S. labor movement has yet to fully recover.’ (139)

- ‘In Britain, Thatcher parlayed her victory in the Falklands and over the miners into a major leap forward for her radical economic agenda. Between 1984 and 1988, the government privatized, among others, British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, British Airport Authority and British Steel, while it sold its shares in British Petroleum.’ (139)

- ‘Sachs was correct in predicting that price increases would end hyperinflation. Within two years, inflation was down to 10 percent, impressive by any standard. The broader legacy of Bolivia’s neoliberal revolution is far more contentious. All economists agree that rapid inflation is enormously damaging, unsustainable and must be controlled – a process that imposes significant pain during the adjustment. The debate is over how a credible program can be achieved, as well as who, in any given society, is forced to bear the brunt of that pain. Ricardo Grinspun, a professor of economics specializing in Latin America at York University, explains that an approach in the Keynesian or developmentalist tradition seeks to mobilize support and share the burden through ‘a negotiated process involving key stakeholders – government, employers, farmers, unions and so on. In this way, the parties come to agreements over income policies, like wages and prices, at the same time that stabilization measures are implemented.’ In sharp contrast, says Grinspun, ‘the orthodox approach is to shift all the social cost onto the poor through shock therapy.’ That, he told me, is precisely what happened in Bolivia.’ (149)

- ‘Just a Friedman had promised in Chile, freer trade was supposed to create jobs for the newly jobless. It didn’t, and the unemployment rate increased from 20 percent at the time of the elections to between 25 and 30 percent two years later. The state mining corporation along – the same one that Paz had nationalized in the 1950s – was downsized from twenty-eight thousand employees to just six thousand. The minimum wage never recovered it value, and two years into the program, real wages were down 40 percent; at one point they would drop 70 percent.’ (149)

- ‘One immediate result of this resolve was that many of Bolivia’s desperately poor were pushed to become coca growers, because it paid roughly ten times as much as other crops (somewhat of an irony since the original economic crisis was set off by the U.S.-funded siege on the coca farmers). By 1989, an estimated one in ten workers was turning to work in some aspect of the coca or cocaine industries. These workers would include the family of Evo Morales, future president of Bolivia and a former leader of the militant coca growers’ union. The coca industry played a significant role in resuscitating Bolivia’s economy and beating inflation (a fact now recognized by historians but never mentioned by Sachs in explanations of how his reforms triumphed over inflation). Just two years after the ‘atomic bomb,’ illegal drug exports were generating more income for Bolivia than all its legal exports combined, and an estimated 350,000 people were earning a living in some facet of the drug trade. ‘For now,’ a foreign banker observed, ‘the Bolivian economy is hooked on cocaine.’ ’ (150)

- ‘Thanks to Sachs – ‘evangelist for democratic capitalism,’ as The New York Times described him – shock therapy had finally shaken off the stench of dictatorships and death camps that had been clinging to it ever since Friedman made his fateful trip to Santiago a decade earlier.’ (151)

- ‘The major opposition came from the country’s main labor federation, which called a general strike that brought industry to a halt. Paz’s response made Thatcher’s treatment of the miners seem tame. He immediately declared a ‘state of siege,’ and army tanks rolled through the streets of the capital, which was placed under strict curfew. To travel through their own country, Bolivian citizens now needed special passes. Riot police raided union halls, a university and a radio station, as well as several factories. Political assemblies and marchers were forbidden, and state permission was required to hold meetings. Oppositional politics was effectively banned – just as it had been during the Banzer dictatorship.’ (152)

- ‘Paz directed the police and military to round up the country’s top two hundred union leaders, load them on planes and fly them to remote jails in the Amazon.’ (152)

- ‘On their own, the debts would have been an enormous burden on the new democracies, but that burden was about to get much heavier. A new kind of shock was in the news: the Volcker Shock. Economists used this term to describe the impact of the decision made by Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker when he dramatically increased interest rates in the United States, letting them rise as high as 21 percent, reaching a peak in 1981 and lasting through the mid-eighties. In the U.S., rising interest rates led to a wave of bankruptcies, and in 1983 the number of people who defaulted on their mortgages tripled.’ The deepest pain, however, was felt outside the U.S. In developing countries carrying heavy debt loads, the Volcker Shock – also known as the ‘debt shock’ or the ‘debt crisis’ – was like a giant Taser gun fired from Washington, sending the developing world into convulsions. Soaring interest rates meant higher interest payments on foreign debts, and often the higher payments could only be met by taking on more loans.’ (159)

- ‘Want to save your country? Sell it off.’ (165)

- ‘Rodrik even conceded that privatization and free trade – two central pieces of the structural adjustment package – had no direct link with creating stability.’ (165)

- ‘But as had been the case in Latin America, before anything else could happen, Poland needed debt relief and some aid to get out of its immediate crisis. In theory, that’s the central mandate of the IMF: providing stabilizing funds to prevent economic catastrophes. If any government deserved that kind of lifeline it was the one headed by Solidarity, which had just pulled off the Eastern Bloc’s first democratic ouster of a Communist regime in four decades. Surely, after all the Cold War railing against totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain, Poland’s new rulers could have expected a little help. No such aid was on offer. Now in the grips of Chicago School economists, the IMF and the U.S. Treasury saw Poland’s problems through the prism of the shock doctrine.’ (176)

- ‘When Friedman and his wife, Rose, arrived in Shanghai in September 1988, they were dazzled by how quickly mainland China was beginning to look and feel like Hong Kong. Despite the rage simmering at the grass roots, everything they saw served to confirm ‘our faith in the power of free markets.’ Friedman described this moment as ‘the most hopeful period of the Chinese experiment.’ In the presence of official state media, Friedman met for two hours with Zhao Ziyang, general secretary of the Communist party, as well as with Jiang Zemin, then party secretary of the Shanghai Committee and the future Chinese president. Friedman’s message to Jiang echoed that advice he had given to Pinochet when the Chilean project was on the skids: don’t bow to the pressure and don’t blink. ‘I emphasized the importance of privatization and free markets, and of liberalizing at one fell stroke,’ Friedman recalled. In a memo to the general secretary of the Communist Party, Friedman stressed that more, not less, shock therapy was needed. ‘China’s initial steps of reform have been dramatically successful. China can make further dramatic progress by placing still further reliance on free private markets.’ ’ (186)

- ‘These historic protests were almost universally portrayed in the international media as a clash between modern, idealistic students who wanted Western-style democratic freedoms and old-guard authoritarians who wanted to protect the Communist state. Recently, another analysis of the meaning of Tiananmen has emerged, one that challenges the mainstream version while putting Friedmanism at the heart of the story. This alternative narrative is being advanced by, among others, Wang Hui, one of the organizers of the 1989 protests, and now a leading Chinese intellectual of what is known as China’s ‘New Left.’ In his 2003 book, China’s New Order, Wang explains that the protestors spanned a huge range of Chinese society – not just elite university students but also factory workers, small entrepreneurs and teachers. What ignited the protests, he recalls, was popular discontent in the face of Deng’s ‘revolutionary’ economic changes, which were lowering wages, raising prices and causing ‘a crisis of layoffs and unemployment.’ According to Wang, ‘These changes were the catalyst for the 1989 social mobilization.’ ’ (187)

- ‘For the most part, the massacre was covered in the Western press as another example of Communist brutality: just as Mao had wiped out his opponents during the Cultural Revolution, now Deng, ‘the Butcher of Beijing,’ crushed his critics under the watchful eye of Mao’s giant portrait. A Wall Street Journal headline claimed that “China’s Harsh Actions Threaten to Set Back [the] 10-Year Reform Drive’ – as if Deng was an enemy of those reforms and not their most committed defender, determined to take them into bold new territory. Five days after the bloody crackdown, Deng addressed the nation and made it perfectly clear that it wasn’t Communism he was protecting with his crackdown, but capitalism. After dismissing the protesters as ‘a large quantity of the dregs of society,’ China’s president reaffirmed the party’s commitment to economic shock therapy. ‘In a word, this was a test, and we passed,’ Deng said, adding, ‘Perhaps this bad thing will enable us to go ahead with reform and the open-door policy at a more steady, better, even a faster pace….We haven’t been wrong. There’s nothing wrong with the four cardinal principles [of economic reform]. If there is anything amiss, it’s that these principles haven’t been thoroughly implemented.’ (189)

- ‘For foreign investors and the party, it has been a win-win arrangement. According to a 2006 study, 90 percent of China’s billionaires (calculated in Chinese yuan) are the children of Communist Party officials.’ (190)

- ‘Shock therapy in Poland did not cause ‘momentary dislocations,’ as Sachs had predicted. It caused a full-blown depression: a 30 percent reduction in industrial production in the two years after the first round of reforms. With government cutbacks and cheap imports flooding in, unemployment skyrocketed, and in 1993 it reached 25 percent in some areas – a wrenching change in a country that, under Communism, for all its many abuses and hardships, had no open joblessness. Even when the economy began growing again, high unemployment remained chronic. According to the World Bank’s most recent figures, Poland has an unemployment rate of 20 percent – the highest in the European Union. For those under twenty-four, the situation is far worse: 40 percent of young workers were unemployed in 2006, twice the EU average. Most dramatic are the number of people in poverty: in 1989, 15 percent of Poland’s population was living below the poverty line; in 2003, 59 percent of Poles had fallen below the line.’ (191-192)

- ‘Today, the country stands as a living testament to what happens when economic reform is severed from political transformation. Politically, its people have the right to vote, civil liberties and majority rule. Yet economically, South Africa has surpassed Brazil as the most unequal society in the world.’ (198)

- ‘As for the ‘banks, mines and monopoly industry’ that Mandela had pledged to nationalize, they remained firmly in the hands of the same four white-owned megaconglomerates that also control 80 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. In 2005, only 4 percent of the companies listed on the exchange were owned or controlled by blacks. Seventy percent of South Africa’s land, in 2006, was still monopolized by whites, who are just 10 percent of the population. Most distressingly, the ANC government has spent far more time denying the severity of the AIDS crisis than getting lifesaving drugs to the approximately 5 million people infected with HIV, though there were, by early 2007, some positive signs of progress. Perhaps the most striking statistic is this one: since 1990, the year Mandela left prison, the average life expectancy for South Africans has dropped by thirteen years.’ (206)

- ‘After more than a decade since South Africa made it decisive turn toward Thatcherism, the results of its experiment in trickle-down justice are scandalous: Since 1994, the year the ANC took power, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million in 2006. Between 1991 and 2002, the unemployment rate for black South Africans more than doubled, from 23 percent to 48 percent.’ (215)

- ‘A clear signal from Washington or the EU could have forced Yeltsin to engage in serious negotiations with the parliamentarians, but the received only encouragement. Finally, on the morning of October 4,1993, Yeltsin fulfilled his long-prescribed destiny and became Russia’s very own Pinochet, unleashing a series of violent events with unmistakable echoes of the coup in Chile exactly twenty years earlier. In what was the third traumatic shock inflicted by Yeltsin on the Russian people, he ordered a reluctant army to storm the Russian White House, setting it on fire and leaving charred the very building he had built his reputation defending just two years earlier.’ (228)

- ‘By the end of the day, the all-out military assault had taken the lives of approximately five hundred people and wounded almost a thousand.’ (229)

- ‘Russia’ wasn’t a repeat of Chile – it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup, dissolved the institutions of democracy and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup. Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the West.’ (229)

- ‘The events looked different in Russia. Yeltsin, the man who had risen to power by defending the parliament, had now literally set it on fire.’ (229)

- ‘Before shock therapy, Russia had no millionaires; by 2003, the number of Russian billionaires had risen to seventeen.’ (231)

- ‘For the country’s oligarchs and foreign investors, only one cloud loomed on the horizon: Yeltsin’s plummeting popularity. The effects of the economic program were so brutal for the average Russian, and the progress was so self-evidently corrupt, that his approval ratings fell to single digits. If Yeltsin was pushed from office, whoever replaced him would likely put a halt to Russia’s adventure in extreme capitalism. Even more worrying for the oligarchs and the ‘reformers,’ there would be a strong case for renationalizing many of the assets that had been handed out under such unconstitutional political circumstances. In December 1994, Yeltsin did what so many desperate leaders have done throughout history to hold on to power: he started a war. His national security chief, Oleg Lobov, had confided to a legislator, ‘We need a small, victorious war to raise the president’s ratings,’ and the defense minister predicted that his army could defeat the forces in the breakaway republic of Chechnya in a matter of hours – a cakewalk.’ (231-232)

- ‘In September 1999, the country was hit with a serious of exceedingly cruel terrorist attacks: seemingly out of the blue, four apartment buildings were blown up in the middle of the night, killing close to three hundred people. In a narrative all too familiar to Americans after September 11, 2001, every other issue was blasted off the political map by the only force on earth capable of doing the job. ‘It was this sort of very simple fear,’ explains the Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats. ‘All of a sudden, it appeared that all these discussions about democracy, oligarchs – nothing compared to this fear to die inside your own apartment.’ The man put in charge of hunting down the ‘animals’ was Russia’s prime minister, the steely and vaguely sinister Vladimir Putin. Immediately after the apartment bombings, in late September 1999, Putin launched air strikes on Chechnya, attacking civilian areas. In the new light of terror, the fact that Putin was a seventeen-year veteran of the KGB – the most feared symbol of the Communist era – suddenly seemed reassuring to many Russians. With Yeltsin’s alcoholism making him increasingly dysfunctional, Putin the protector was perfectly positioned to succeed him as president. On December 31, 1999, with the war in Chechnya foreclosing serious debate, several oligarchs engineered a quiet handover from Yeltsin to Putin, no elections necessary.’ (236-237)

- ‘By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt, and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed, creating an epidemic of unemployment. In 1989, before shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 a day. By the time the shock therapists had administered their ‘bitter medicine’ in the mid-nineties, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. That means that Russia’s ‘economic reforms’ can claim credit for the impoverishment of 72 million people in only eight years. By 1996, 25 percent of Russians – almost 37 million people – lived in poverty described as ‘desperate.’ ’ (237-238)

- ‘During the Cold War, widespread alcoholism was always seen in the West as evidence that life under Communism was so dismal that Russians needed large quantities of vodka to get through the day. Under capitalism, however, Russians drink more than twice as much alcohol as they used to.’ (238)

- ‘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 longer a practical option), this movement set out to systematically dismantle existing laws and regulations to re-create that earlier lawlessness.’ (241)

- ‘Under Chicago School economics, the state acts as the colonial frontier.’ (242)

- ‘As long as Communism was a threat, the gentlemen’s agreement that was Keynesianism would live on; once that system lost ground, all traces of compromise could finally be eradicated, thereby fulfilling the purist goal Friedman had set out for his movement a half century earlier. That was the real point of Fukuyama’s dramatic ‘end of history’ announcement at the University of Chicago lecture in 1989: he wasn’t actually claiming that there were no other ideas in the world, but merely that, with Communism collapsing, there were no other ideas sufficiently powerful to constitute a head-to-head competitor.’ (253)

- ‘It turned out that the countries were victims of pure panic, made lethal by the speed and volatility of globalized markets. What began as a rumor – that Thailand did not have enough dollars to back up his currency – triggered a stampede by the electronic herd.’ (267-268)

- ‘The human costs of the IMF’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 and that 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 IMF’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.’ (272)

- ‘The defiant new mood coming from the South made its global debut when the World Trade Organization talks collapsed in Seattle in 1999. Though the college-age protestors received the bulk of the media coverage, the real rebellion took place inside the conference center, when developing countries formed a voting bloc and rejected demands for deeper trade concessions as long as Europe and U.S. continued to subsidize and protect their domestic industries.’ (279)

- ‘It was in 1997, when Rumsfeld was named chairman of the board of the biotech firm Gilead Sciences, that he would firmly establish himself as a proto disaster capitalist. The company had registered the patent for Tamiflu, a treatment for many kinds of influenza and the preferred drug for avian flu. If there was ever an outbreak of the highly contagious virus (or the threat of one), governments would be forced to buy billions of dollars’ worth of the treatment from Gilead Sciences.’ (290)

- ‘The most effective ideological tool in this process was the claim that economic ideology was no longer a primary motivator of U.S. foreign or domestic policy. The mantra ‘September 11 changed everything’ neatly disguised the fact that for free-market ideologues and the corporations whose interests they serve, the only thing that changed was the ease with which they could pursue their ambitious agenda. Now, rather than subjecting new policies to fractious public debate in Congress or bitter conflict with public sector unions, the Bush White House could use the patriotic alignment behind the president and the free pass handed out by the press to stop talking and start doing.’ (299)

- ‘As of June 2007, there were half a million names on a list of suspected terrorists kept by the National Counterterrorism Center.’ (304)

- ‘Part of the reason the Bush administration has relied so heavily on private intelligence contractors working in new structures like Rumsfeld’s secretive Office of Special Plans is that they have proven far more willing than their counterparts in governments to massage and manipulate information to meet the political goals of the administration – after all, their next contract depends on it.’ (305)

- ‘Now only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.’ (306)

- ‘In his 2006 book Overthrow, the former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer tries to get to the bottom of what has motivated the U.S. politicians who have ordered and orchestrated foreign coups d’état over the past century. Studying U.S. involvement in regime change operations from Hawaii in 1893 to Iraq in 2003, he observes that there is often a clear three-state process that takes place. First, a U.S.-based multinational corporation faces some kind of threat to its bottom line by the actions of a foreign government demanding that the company ‘pay taxes or that it observe labor laws or environmental laws. Sometimes that company is nationalized or is somehow required to sell some of its land or its assets,’ Kinzer says. Second, U.S. politicians hear of this corporate setback and reinterpret it as an attack on the United States: ‘They transform the motivation from an economic one into a political or geo-strategic one. They make the assumption that any regime that would bother an American company or harass an American company must be anti-American, repressive, dictatorial, and probably the tool of some foreign power or interest that wants to undermine the United States.’ The third stage happens when the politicians have to sell the need for intervention to the public, at which point it becomes a broadly drawn struggle of good versus evil, ‘a chance to free a poor oppressed nation from the brutality of a regime that we assume is a dictatorship, because what other kind of a regime would be bothering an American company?’ Much of U.S. foreign policy, in other words, is an exercise in mass projection, in which a tiny self-interested elite conflates its needs and desires with those of the entire world.’ (310)

- ‘In the Bush administration, the war profiteers aren’t just clamoring to get access to government, they are the government; there is no distinction between the two.’ (314)

- ‘That is pretty much the philosophy: stay in government just long enough to get an impressive title in a department handing out big contracts and to collect inside information on what will sell, then quit and sell access to your former colleagues. Public service is reduced to little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex.’ (315)

- ‘Perle continues to be introduced as an ‘analyst’ or as a Pentagon adviser, perhaps as ‘a neocon,’ but certainly there is never any suggestion that he might just be an arms dealer with an impressive vocabulary.’ (322)

- ‘Even the most committed critics tend to portray the neocons as true believers, motivated exclusively by a commitment to the supremacy or American and Israeli power that is so all-consuming they are prepared to sacrifice economic interests in favor of ‘security.’ This distinction is both artificial and amnesiac. The right to limitless profit-seeking has always been at the center of neocon ideology. Before 9/11. Demands for radical privatization and attacks on social spending fuelled the neocon movement – Friedmanite to its core – at think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage and Cato.’ (322)

- ‘After the crusade had conquered Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, the Arab world called out as its final frontier.’ (326)

- ‘The idea that a failure to join the Washington Consensus could be enough to provoke a foreign invasion may seem far-fetched, but there was a precedent. When NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999, the official reason was Slobodan Milosevic’s egregious human rights violations that had horrified the world. But in a little-reported revelation years after the Kosovo war, Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state under President Clinton and the lead U.S. negotiator during the war, provided a distinctly less idealistic explanation. ‘As nations throughout the region sought to reform their economies, mitigate ethnic tensions, and broaden civil society, Belgrade seemed to delight in continually moving in the opposite direction. It is small wonder NATO and Yugoslavia ended up on a collision course. It was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform – not the plight of the Kosovar Albanians – that best explains NATO’s war.’ The revelation came out in a 2005 book, Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo by Talbott’s former communications director, John Norris.’ (328)

- ‘The president made that perfectly clear only eight days after declaring an end to major combat in Iraq when he announced plans for the ‘establishment of a U.S.-Middle East free trade area within a decade.’ Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz, a veteran of the Soviet shock therapy adventure, was put in charge of the project.’ (329)

- ‘When the war began, the residents of Baghdad were subjected to sensory deprivation on a mass scale. One by one, the city’s sensory inputs were cut off; the ears were the first to go. On the night of March 28, 2003, as U.S. troops drew closer to Baghdad, the ministry of communication was bombed and set ablaze, as were four Baghdad telephone exchanges, with massive bunker-busters, cutting off millions of phones across the city. The targeting of the phone exchanges continued – twelve in total – until, by April 2, there was barely a phone working in all of Baghdad…Many Iraqis say that the shredding of their phone system was the most psychologically wrenching part of the air attack. The combination of hearing and feeling bombs going off everywhere while being unable to call a few blocks away to find out if loved ones were alive, or to reassure terrified relatives living abroad, was pure torment.’ (334-335)

- ‘Most drugstores in Baghdad had sold out of sleeping aids and antidepressants, and the city was completely cleaned out of Valium.’ (335)

- ‘The official reason for the wholesale annihilation of Baghdad’s phone system was to sever Saddam’s ability to communicate with his elite commandos. But after the war, U.S. interrogators conducted extensive ‘interviews’ with top Iraqi prisoners and discovered that for years Saddam had been convinced that spies were tracking him through his phone calls and therefore had used a phone only twice in the previous thirteen years. As usually, reliable intelligence wasn’t necessary; there would be plenty of ready money for Bechtel to build a new system.’ (335)

- ‘The national library, which contained copes of every book and doctoral thesis ever published in Iraq, was a blackened ruin. Thousand-year-old illuminated Korans had disappeared from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was left a burned-out shell.’ (336)

- ‘McGuire Gibson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, called it ‘a lot like a lobotomy. The deep memory of an entire culture, a culture that has continued for thousands of years, has been removed.’ ’ (336)

- ‘The neocolonialist blindness is a running theme in the War on Terror. At the U.S.-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, there is a room known as ‘the love shack.’ Detainees are taken there after their captors have decided they are not enemy combatants and will soon be released. Inside the love shack, prisoners are allowed to watch Hollywood movies and are plied with American junk food. Asif Iqbal, one of three British detainees known as the ‘Tipton Three,’ was permitted several visits there before he and his two friends were finally sent home. ‘We would get to watch DVDs, eat McDonald’s, eat Pizza Hut and basically chill out. We were not shackled in this area….We had no idea why they were being like that to us. The rest of the week we were back in the cages as usual….On one occasion Lesley [an FBI official] brought Pringles, ice cream and chocolates, this was the final Sunday before we came back to England.’ His friend Rhuhel Ahmed speculated that the special treatment ‘was because they knew they had messed us about and tortured us for two and a half years and they hoped we would forget it.’ ’ (338-339)

- ‘Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was ‘open for business.’ ’ (339)

- ‘ ‘Getting the rights to distribute Proctor & Gamble products would be a gold mine,’ one of the company’s partners enthused. ‘One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out 30 Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country.’ ’ (340)

- ‘Like the prisoners in Guantanamo’s love shack, all of Iraq was going to be bought off with Pringles and pop culture – that, at least, was the Bush administration’s idea of a postwar plan.’ (340)

- ‘In Iraq, Washington cut out the middlemen: the IMF and the World Bank were relegated to supporting roles, and the U.S. was front and center. Paul Bremer was the government….This dynamic was what set the economic transformation of Iraq apart from earlier laboratories. All the careful efforts during the nineties to present ‘free trade’ as something other than an imperial project were abandoned.’ (343)

- ‘The occupation authority did take possession of $20 billion worth of revenues from Iraq’s national oil company, to spend as it wished.’ (345)

- ‘What happened to the billions earmarked for Iraq’s reconstruction, however, bore no relationship to the history Bush invoked. Under the original Marshall Plan, American firms benefited by sending equipment and food to Europe, but the explicit goal was to help war-torn economies recover as self-sufficient markets, creating local jobs and developing tax bases capable of funding domestic social services – the results of which are in evidence in Germany and Japan’s mixed economies today. The Bush cabinet had in fact launched an anti-Marshall Plan, its mirror opposite in nearly every conceivable way. It was a plan guaranteed from the start to further undermine Iraq’s badly weakened industrial sector and to send Iraqi unemployment soaring. Where the post-Second World War plan had barred foreign firms from investing, to avoid the perception that they were taking advantage of countries in a weakened state, this scheme did everything possible to entice corporate America (with a few bones tossed to corporations based in countries that joined the ‘Coalition of the Willing’).’ (346-347)

- ‘In addition to Halliburton’s construction and management of military bases across the country, the Green Zone was, from the start, a Halliburton-run city-state, with the company in charge of everything from road maintenance to pest control to movie and disco nights.’ (348)

- ‘To participate in the gold rush at all, Iraqi firms would have needed emergency generators and some basic repairs – which should not have been insurmountable, given Halliburton’s speed in building military bases that look like Midwestern suburbs.’ (349)

- ‘Mohammed Tofiq at the Industry Ministry told me he had made repeated requests for generators, pointing out that Iraq’s seventeen state-owned cement factories were perfectly positioned both to supply the reconstruction effort with building materials and to put tens of thousands of Iraqis to work. The factories received nothing – no contracts, no generators, no help.’ (349)

- ‘As for sectarian violence, it was virtually unknown for the first year for the first year of the occupation. The first major incident, the bombing of Shia mosques during the holiday of Ashoura, was in March 2004, a full year after the invasion. There can be no doubt that the occupation deepened and ignited these hatreds.’ (350)

- ‘Bremer’s classic Chicago School decision to fling open the borders of unrestricted imports while allowing foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets infuriated Iraq’s business class.’ (352)

- ‘Bremer’s plan to privatize Iraq’s two hundred state companies was regarded by many Iraqis as yet another U.S. act of war. Workers learned that in order to make the companies attractive to foreign investors, as many as two-thirds of them would have to lose their jobs.’ (353)

- ‘The U.S. government presence in Iraq during the first year of its economic experiment had been a mirage – there had been no government, just a funnel to get U.S. taxpayer and Iraqi oil dollars to foreign corporations, completely outside the law. In this way, Iraq represented the most extreme expression of the anti-state counterrevolution – a hollow state, where, as the courts finally established, there was no there, there.’ (358)

- ‘The young Moqtada al-Sadr proved particularly adept at exposing the failures of Bremer’s privatized reconstruction by running his own shadow reconstruction in Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, earning himself a devoted following. Funded through donations to mosques, and perhaps later with help from Iran, the centers dispatched electricians to fix power and phone lines, organized local garbage collection, set up emergency generators, ran blood drives and directed traffic…He also took the young men who saw no jobs and no hope in Bremer’s Iraq, dressed them in black and armed them with rusty Kalashnikovs.’ (359)

- ‘Bremer’s next problem was the elections breaking out in towns and cities across the country. At the end of June, only his second month in Iraq, Bremer sent word that all local elections must stop immediately.’ (363)

- ‘Iraq’s first ‘sovereign’ government would be appointed, not elected.’ (364)

- ‘Many who were posted in Iraq in the early months draw a direct link between the various decisions to delay and defang democracy and the ferocious rise of the armed resistance. Salim Lone, a UN diplomat who was in Iraq after the invasion, saw the pivotal moment as Bremer’s first antidemocratic decision. ‘The first devastating attacks on the foreign presence in Iraq, for example, came soon after the United States selected in July 2003 the first Iraqi leadership body, the Iraqi Governing Council: The Jordanian mission and then, soon after, the UN’s Baghdad headquarters were blown up, killing scores of innocents…the anger over the composition of this council, and the UN support for it, was palpable in Iraq.’ (364)

- ‘As resistance mounted, the occupation forces fought back with escalating shock tactics. These came late at night or very early in the morning, with soldiers bursting through doors, shining flashlights into darkened homes, shouting in English (a few words are understood: ‘motherfucker,’ ‘Ali Baba,’ ‘Osama bin Laden’). Women reached frantically for scarves to cover their heads in front of intruding strangers; men’s heads were forcibly bagged before they were thrown into army trucks and spend to prisons and holding camps. In the first three and a half years of occupation, an estimated 61,500 Iraqis were captured and imprisoned by U.S. forces, usually with methods designed to ‘maximize capture shock.’ Roughly 19,000 remained in custody in the spring of 2007. Inside the prisons, more shocks followed: buckets of freezing water; snarling, teeth-baring German shepherds; punching and kicking; and sometimes the shock of electrical currents running from live wires.’ (365-366)

- ‘Like thousands of his fellow prisoners, Ali was released from Abu Gharib without charged, pushed off a truck after being told ‘You were arrested by mistake.’ The Red Cross has said that U.S. military officials have admitted that somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the detentions in Iraq were ‘mistakes.’ According to Ali, many of those human errors emerged from U.S.-run jails looking for revenge. ‘Abu Gharib is a breeding ground for insurgents….All the insults and torture make them ready to do just about anything.’ ’ (370)

- ‘The situation is far worse in jails run by Iraqis. Saddam had always relied heavily on torture to hold on to power. If torture was to receded in post-Saddam Iraq, it would have required a focused effort to repudiate such tactics on the part of a new government.’ (370)
- ‘In Iraq, there are also more high-tech ways of conveying messages of terror. Terrorism in the Grip of Justice is a widely watched TV show on the U.S.-funded Al Iraqiya network. The series is produced in conjunction with the Salvadorized Iraqi commandos. Several released prisoners have explained how the show’s content is produced: detainees, often grabbed at random in neighborhood sweeps, are beaten and tortured, and threats are made against their families until they are ready to confess to any crime – even crimes that lawyers have proved never took place. Then the video cameras come out to record the prisoners ‘confessing’ to being insurgents, as well as thieves, homosexuals and liars. Every night, Iraqis watch these confessions, coming from the bruised and swollen faces of the unmistakably tortured.’ (371)

- ‘The children disappeared from the schools – as of 2006, two-thirds of them stayed home.’ (373)

- ‘An even more dramatic about-face came from the Pentagon. In December 2006, it announced a new project to get Iraq’s state-owned factories up and running….Army Lieutenant General Peter W. Chiarelli, the top U.S. field commander in Iraq, explained that ‘we need to put the angry young men to work….A relatively small decrease in unemployment would have a very serious effect on the level of sectarian killing going on.’ ’ (375)

- ‘Meanwhile, in the midst of the wave of neo-Keynesian epiphanies, Iraq was hit with the boldest attempt at crisis exploitation yet. In December 2006, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group fronted by James Baker issued its long-awaited report. It called for the U.S. to ‘assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise’ and to ‘encourage investment in Iraq’s oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies.’ Most of the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations were ignored by the White House, but not this one: the Bush administration immediately pushed ahead by helping to draft a radical new oil law for Iraq, which would allow companies like Shell and BP to sign thirty-year contracts in which they could keep a large share of Iraq’s oil profits, amounting to tens of even hundreds of billions of dollars – unheard of in countries with as much easily accessible oil as Iraq, and a sentence to perpetual poverty in a country where 95 percent of government revenues come from oil. This was a proposal so wildly unpopular that even Paul Bremer had not dared make it in the first year of occupation. Yet it was coming up now, thanks to deepening chaos. Explaining why it was justified for such a large percentage of the profits to leave Iraq, the oil companies cited the security risks. In other words, it was the disaster that made the radical proposed law possible.’ (376)

- ‘Blackwater’s original contract in Iraq was to provide personal security for Bremer, but a year into the occupation, it was engaging in all-out street combat. During the April 2004 uprising of Moqtada al-Sadr’s movement in Najaf, Blackwater actually assumed command over active-duty U.S. marines in a daylong battle with the Mahdi Army, during which dozens of Iraqis were killed.’ (378)

- ‘Lockheed Martin has gone furthest in this direction. In early 2007, it began ‘buying companies in the $1000bn-a-year healthcare market,’ according to The Financial Times, and it also snapped up the engineering giant Pacific Architects and Engineers. The wave of acquisitions signified a new era of morbid vertical integration in the disaster capitalism complex: in future conflicts, Lockheed is poised not only from making the weapons and fighter jets but from rebuilding what they destroy, and even from the treating [sic] the people injured by its own weapons.’ (381)

- ‘A year and a half into the Iraq occupation, the U.S. State Department launched a new branch: the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization. On any given day, it is paying private contractors to draw up detailed plans to reconstruct twenty-five different countries that may, for one reason or another, find themselves the target of U.S.-sponsored destruction, from Venezuela to Iran.’ (381-382)

- ‘Officially, the government said the bugger zone was a safety measure, meant to prevent a repeat of the devastation should another tsunami strike. On the surface it made sense, but there was a glaring problem with that rationale – it was not being applied to the tourism industry. On the contrary, hotels were being encouraged to expand onto the valuable oceanfront where fishing people had lived and worked. Resorts were completely exempted from the buffer-zone rule.’ (388)

- ‘The $80 million redevelopment project was to be financed with aid money raised in the name of the victims of the tsunami.’ (389)

- ‘Some of the most direct clashes took place in Thailand, where, within twenty-four hours of the wave, developers sent in armed private security guards to fence in land they had been coveting for resorts. In some cases the guards wouldn’t even let survivors search their old properties for the bodies of their children.’ (402)

- ‘Almost everyone I met commented on what one priest called ‘the NGO wild life’: high-end hotels, beachfront villas and the ultimate lightning rod for popular rage, the brand-new white sport utility vehicles. All the aid organizations had them, monstrous things that were far too wide and powerful for the country’s narrow dirt roads. All day long they went roaring past the camps, forcing everyone to eat their dust, their logos billowing on flags in the breeze – Oxfam, World Vision, Save the Children – as if they were visitors from a far-off NGO World.’ (403)

- ‘It was taken for granted that the state – at least in a rich country – would come to the aid of the people during a cataclysmic event. The images from New Orleans showed that this general –belief – that disasters are a kind of time-out for cutthroat capitalism, when we all pull together and the state switches into higher gear – had already been abandoned, and with no public debate.’ (408)

- ‘When it comes to paying contractors, the key is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.’ (409)

- ‘As in Iraq, government once again played the role of a cash machine equipped for both withdrawals and deposits. Corporations withdrew funds through massive contracts, then repaid the government not with reliable work but with campaign contributions and/or loyal foot soldiers for the next elections. (According to The New York Times, ‘the top 20 service contractors have spent nearly $300 million since 2000 on lobbying and have donated $23 million to political campaigns.’ The Bush administration, in turn, increased the amount spent on contractors by roughly $200 billion between 2000 and 2006.)’ (412)

- ‘Something else was familiar: the contractors’ aversion to hiring local people who might have seen the reconstruction of New Orleans not only as a job but as part of healing and reempowering their communities. Washington could easily have made it a condition of every Katrina contract that companies hire local people at decent wages to help them put their lives back together. Instead, the residents of the Gulf Coast, like the people of Iraq, were expected to watch as contractors created an economic boom based on easy taxpayer money and relaxed regulations.’ (412)

- ‘No extensive studies have been conducted on New Orleans labor conditions, but the Advancement Project, a grassroots advocacy group in New Orleans, estimates that 60 percent of the immigrant workers in New Orleans have not been paid for at least part of their work.’ (413)

- ‘At first I thought the Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq. Now, after years spent in other disaster zones, I realize that the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned.’ (414)

- ‘It’s easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.’ (415)

- ‘The implications of the decision by the current crop of politicians to systematically outsource their elected responsibilities will reach far beyond a single administration. Once a market has been created, it needs to be protected. The companies at the heart of the disaster capitalism complex increasingly regard both the state and nonprofits as competitors – from the corporate perspective, whenever governments or charities fulfill their traditional roles, they are denying contractors work that could be performed at a profit.’ (418)

- ‘Another potential growth identified by the disaster capitalism complex is municipal government: the contracting-out of police and fire departments to private security companies.’ (420)

- ‘Given the boiling temperatures, both climatic and political, future disasters need not be cooked up in dark conspiracies. All indications are that simply by staying the current course, they will keep coming with ever more ferocious intensity. Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market’s invisible hand. This is one area in which it actually delivers.’ (427)

- ‘What makes Israel interesting as a guns-and-caviar model is not only that its economy is resilient in the face of major political shocks such as the 2006 war with Lebanon or Hamas’s 2007 takeover of Gaza, but also that Israel has crafted an economy that expands markedly in direct response to escalating violence.’ (428)

- ‘It is not a coincidence that the Israeli state’s decision to put ‘counterterrorism’ at the center of its export economy has coincided precisely with its abandonment of peace negotiations, as well as a clear strategy to reframe its conflict with the Palestinians not as a battle against a nationalist movement with specific goals for land and rights but rather as part of the global War on Terror – one against illogical, fanatical forces bent on destruction.’ (439)

- ‘The security buildup has been accompanied by a wave of privatizations and funding cuts to social programs that has virtually annihilated the economic legacy of Labor Zionism and created an epidemic of inequality the likes of which Israelis have never known. In 2007, 24.4 percent of Israelis were living below the poverty line, with 35.2 percent of children in poverty – compared with 8 percent of children twenty years earlier.’ (439)

- ‘This is what a society looks like when it has lost its economic incentive for peace and is heavily invested in fighting and profiting from an endless and unwinnable War on Terror. One part looks like Israel; the other part looks like Gaza.’ (441)

- ‘It is a bitter irony that when shock therapy was prescribed in Russia and Eastern Europe, its painful effects were often justified as the only way to prevent a repeat of the conditions in Weimar Germany that led to the rise of Nazism. The casual exclusion of tens of millions of people by free-market ideologues has reproduced frighteningly similar explosive conditions: proud populations that perceive themselves as humiliated by foreign forces, looking to regain their national pride by targeting the most vulnerable in their midst.’ (450)

- ‘It is precisely because the dream of economic equality is so popular, and so difficult to defeat in a fair fight, that the shock doctrine was embraced in the first place.’ (451)

- ‘In Venezuela, Chávez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run.’ (455)

- ‘Latin America’s most significant protection from future shocks (and therefore from the shock doctrine) flows from the continent’s independence from Washington’s financial institutions, the result of greater integration among regional governments. The Bolivian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) is the continent’s retort to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the now buried corporatist dream of a free-trade zone stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Though ALBA is still in its early stages, Emir Sader, the Brazil-based sociologist, describes its promise as ‘a perfect example of genuinely fair trade: each country provides what it is best placed to produce, in return for what it most needs, independent of global market prices.’ So Bolivia provides gas at stable discounted prices; Venezuela offers heavily subsidized oil to poorer countries and shares expertise in developing reserves; and Cuba sends thousands of doctors to deliver free health care all over the continent, while training students from other countries at its medical schools.’ (455-456)

- ‘In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent.’ (457)

- ‘But the most remarkable mood change is taking place in China. For many years, the raw terror of the Tiananmen Square massacre succeeded in suppressing popular anger at the erosion of workers’ rights and deepening rural poverty. Not anymore. According to official government sources, in 2005 there were a staggering eighty-seven thousand large protests in China, involving more than 4 million workers and peasants. (‘Four million workers!’ exclaimed a group of U.S. labor writers. ‘In the US we celebrated the birth of a new global social movement when 60,000 people showed up for the ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999.’) China’s activist wave has been met with the most extreme state repression since 1989, but it has also resulted in several concrete victories: major new spending in rural areas, better health care, pledges to eliminate education fees. China too is coming out of shock.’ (458)

- ‘Lebanon’s shock resistance went beyond protest. It was also expressed through a far-reaching parallel reconstruction effort. Within days of the cease-fire, Hezbollah’s neighborhood committees had visited many of the home shit by the air attacks, assessed the damage and were already handing out $12,000 in cash to displaced families to cover a year’s worth of rent and furnishings. As the independent journalists Ana Nogueira and Saseen Kawzally observed from Beirut, ‘That is six times the dollar amount that survivors of Hurricane Katrina received from FEMA.’ ’ (461-462)