The Shock Doctrine Page #7

Dozens of iraquis were killed during the operation.

US had indemnified the private contractors against any of iraqui laws.

So they were operating in a law free bubble, a little like Guantanamo.

I asked your Secretary of Defense a couple months ago

what law governs their actions.

I was gona ask him. Go ahead.

Help!

Just as Cameron's Shock therapy left his patients confused and broken,

so the multiple shocks inflicted on Irak

reduced the country to a lawless, violent, sectarian mess.

By the time of Saddam Hussein's execution in 2006

1000 iraquis would've been killed each week.

By april 2007, the UN high comission for refugees (ACNUR)

estimated that 4 million people had had to leave their homes,

hundreds of thousands of iraquis had died.

I think the historians will write, very clearly,

that we did a great and noble thing here.

When hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in agust 2005

the world was shocked to witness a sort of "disaster apartheid".

The economically secured drove out of town

while tens of thousans of the vulnerable were stranded

with little or no help from the state.

I went to New Orleans while the city was still underwater

and what I saw was that what I had witnessed in Irak, was repeating

not in the aftermath of a war, but in the aftermath of a tremendous natural disaster.

Milton Friedman died in 2006,

his very last public policy recommendation

was an "article" that he wote for the Wall Street Journal

3 months after Katrina.

He said:
"Those New Orleans schools are in ruins

as are the homes of the children ho had attended there.

The children are now scattered all over the country.

This is a tragedy, but this is also an oportunity to radically reform

the Education System".

He was aplicating the hole sell privatisation of the school system of this city.

Was his sort of, Swan song.

I witnessed a similar process in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami.

People who'd lived on the beaches for generations

were prevented from returning

so that the land could be privatized and sold off to luxury hotels.

And this is exactly what I mean by the Shock Doctrine-

The systematic raiding of the public sphere

in the aftermath of a disaster.

When people are too focused on the emergency on their daily concerns

to protect their interests.

Maybe the first act of resistence

is to refuse our collective memory to be wiped.

In 2008, Naomi Klein vidited Villa Grimaldi

with Isabel Morel, the widow of Orlando Letelier.

Villa Grimaldi is a memorial to the cruelty of the Pinochet regime

and to his eventual defeat.

It's not that I loved Pinochet

but I think that he was our teacher in many things.

We learned about evil.

In 1998, Pinochet was arrested while he was in London.

His old allied Margaret Thatcer stood by his side.

I know how much I owe to you.

It took 30 years for the economic experiment

originally test driven by Pinochet to make its way around the globe to Irak.

But the similarities between past and present are startling.

Between Pinochet's concentration camps

and Bush's Guantnamo detention center.

Between the disapeared in Chile and those in Irak.

Between the experiments of Ewen Cameron

and the torture ? on the prisoners of Abu Ghraib.

He erased all the past, that's why he gave electroshock,

all the past from the patient, and he would implant new ideas.

But Janine resisted.

In 1998, the CIA agreed to pay compensations to Janine

and other victims of Ewan Cameron's experiments.

Janine:
are you proud that they tried to break you

and that you had fought so hard, and won?

In a way I am, in a way, I am.

Because I must have some will power seeds in me.

It's very very hard to fight a government.

People would tell me: "Janine, you don't fight the government.

What's the matter with you? They're too big."

But I had faith that we would win.

It is in the nature of unregulated markets, to be volatile.

Bubbles are allowed to inflate, and then, inevitably, they burst.

Since the deregulation of the "Big Bang" in the 80's

there have been a number of market shocks.

In 1987 there was "black monday".

Markets fell spectacularly.

It was the largest one day percentage decline in stock market history.

In 1992, there was "black wednesday".

When currency speculators made fortunes betting against the Pound.

In 1997, there was the Asian contraction?.

In one year, 600 billion dollars disappeared from the stock markets of Asia.

And then in september 2008

the finacial markets imploded.

The market is not functioning properly.

There has been a wide spread loss of confidence.

On september the 15th, "Lehman brothers" filed for chapter 11 bankrupcy protection

yet only one week later

it was announced that workers in their New York offices, would share 2.5 billion dollars in bonuses.

It is estimated that Wall Street firms paid 18,4 billion dollars in bonuses last year (2008).

The year of the crash.

Despite retoric of populist rather taking on the fat cats

and standing up for the little guy and saving Main street

Not Wall street

We are witnessing a transfer of wealth of unfathomable size.

It is a transfer of wealth from public hands

from the hands of government, collected from regular people

in the form of taxes

into the hands of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the world.

Needless to say, the very individuals and corporations that created this crisis.

[Alan Greenspan - Former President

of US ferderal reserve]

We are in the midsts of a one in a century credit tsunami.

I found a flaw, I don't know how significant or permanent it is

but I've been very distressed by that fact.

In the US it was the financial crisis that secured Obama's victory.

Americans wanted a change of course.

This crisis is clearly understood, by almost everyone

as being the direct result of this particular ideology

of deregulation an privatisation.

The scale of the crisis offers the hope of change.

The shock doctrine as a strategy

relies on us not knowing about it, for it to work.

What I find most hopeful, about the current economic crisis

is that this tactic is getting tired.

Because the element of surprise is no longer there.

We're onto them and it's not working.

We're becoming shock resistant.

The last time the world suffered a financial crisis as severe as this

people turned to the Keynesian policies of the New Deal (1933).

let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear

it's fear itself/f

More than 2 million people came to washington

to hear Obama's innauguration speech.

Many journalists made comparisons with FDR

It's been a lot of talk recently

about comparing Obama to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

So I want to talk a little bit about FDR, because there is this great FDR story

(it could be an aprocryphal one)

When he would be visited by some progressist organisation, or union

and they would be proposing some new progressist policy

that they wanted to be part of the New Deal

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