A state of shock...
It's not just what happens to us when something bad happens.
It's what happens to us when we lose our narrative...
When we lose our history, when we become disoriented.
What keeps us oriented, and alert, and out of shock...
Is our history.
So a period of crisis, like the one we are in,
is a very good time to think about history
to think about continuities, to think about roots.
It's a good time to place ourselves
in the longer human story of struggle.
Our story begins on June 1st of 1951
when representatives of western intelligence agencies
secretly met with academics, at Montreal's Ritz-Carlton hotel.
This meeting contributed to military funded research
into the effects of sensory deprivation at McGill university.
Sensory deprivation really is a way of producing extreme monotony.
Causes loss of critical capacity
thinking is less clear
and the subjects complain that they can't even daydream.
And when you have college students that can't daydream
you're ahead the bad way.
I began to think while we were doing our experiments, that it's possible that
something that involves physical discomfort, or even pain
might be more tolerable than simply the deprivation conditions that we studied.
Hebb decided to stop work on the research.
I had no idea when I suggested that
what a vicious weapon, potentially vicious weapon this could be.
But the experiments at McGill continued
on the hands of the ambitious head of psychiatry Dr. Ewan Cameron.
What he did was much more than what we had done.
We did our work strictly with the understanding that the subject
could get up at any point he wished to,
and someone did.
Cameron's patients were not so lucky.
The Allan Memorial Institute where he worked
began to resemble a macabre prison
where Cameron performed bizarre experiments on his psychiatric patients.
Cameron wanted to "de-pattern" or wipe clean his patients minds
so he could rebuild them from a blank slate.
Janine Huard was a young mother of four
suffering from post natal depression.
I used to shiver when they told me about
"You are gonna get a shock treatment tomorrow".
I used to shiver. I was so scared of it.
I would wake up in another room
all mixed up and sad
it used to make me very sad after.
You're just like a zombie walking around.
Cameron combined shock therapy with sleep therapy.
and the repeated playing of taped messages.
Says: "Janine, Janine...
you're running away from your responsibility."
"You don't want to take care of your husband and children."
All the time the same thing.
It sounds like you were being interrogated.
Yes, interrogation, but, for what purpose?
It wasn't long before CIA put Cameron's research into practice.
Many of these techniques appear in the agencies "KUBARK"
"counterintelligence interrogation manual".
These words are from the manual:
It's a fundamental hypothesis of this handbook
that this techniques are, in essence,
methods of producing a regression of the personality.
There is an interval, which may be extremely brief
of suspended animation
a kind of psychological shock or paralysis.
Experienced interrogators recognizes the fact when it appears.
and know that at this moment the "source" is far more open to suggestion
far likelier to comply than he was just before he experienced the shock.
At the same time as Dr. Ewen Cameron was conducting his experiments in Montreal
an exponent of another kind of shock was working not so far away.
Milton Friedman was teaching economics at the University of Chicago.
He believed economic shock therapy could encourage society
to accept a purer form of deregulated capitalism.
In october 2008
in midst of the biggest financial crisis since 1929
Naomi Klein went to the University of Chicago
to talk about Milton Friedman.
When Milton Friedman turned 90
the Bush White House held a birthday party for him.
And everyone made speeches, including George Bush.
But there was a really good speech that was given by Donald Rumsfeld.
My favorite quote on that speech, from Rumsfeld
is this. He said: "Milton is the embodiment of the truth
that ideas have consequences".
What I want to argue here is that
the economic chaos that we're seeing right now on Wall Street
and on Main Street, and on Washington
stands for many factors, of course, but among them
are the ideas of Milton Friedman.
Wall Street crash of 1929 led to the depression of the 30's.
Central to Friedmans thesis, was his opposition to the New Deal
announced by president Franklin Roosevelt in his inaugural speech.
Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.
This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.
Let me assert my firm belief
that the only thing we have to fear
is fear itself.
Influenced by the economist John Maynard Keynes
Roosevelt started a program of public employment
to get people back to work.
Today recession is a fading memory.
Millions of man and women have found employment
and with it confidence and hope.
It wasn't that simple. The depression lasted until World War II
But after the war, the Marshall plan spread Keyneses model
of government regulation and intervention to Europe.
His principles were widely accepted.
But not in the Economics Department of the University of Chicago.
Milton Friedman, from this University, waged a war against the "New Deal".
Friedman was member of a group called the Mont Pelerin Society,
led by the austrian economist Friederich von Hayek.
They believed that if governments stopped providing services,
and stopped regulating markets,
the economy would correct itself.
In the 50's they where seen as cranks,
but over the last 30 years
their ideas had become the dominant economic doctrine.
The thesis of the "Shock doctrine" is
that we've been sold a fairy tale
about how this radical policies have swept the globe.
That they haven't swept the globe on the backs of freedom and democracy
but they have needed shocks, they have needed crisis
they have needed states of emergencies.
Milton Friedman understood the utility of crisis.
Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.
When that crisis occurs
the actions that are taken, depend on the ideas that are laying around.
It was in Chile, that Friedman's disciples first learned
how to exploit a large scale shock or crisis.
Usually, the official storytellers of neoliberalism,
the official publicists,
don't even mention Chile.
They start the story with Thatcher and Reagan,
because it's much more flattering that way.
In the 50's and 60's
Chile's progressive developmental policies
were a beacon in the region.
The Government invested in health, education and industry.
American corporations were worried their investments would suffer.
In response, the US State Department
began sponsoring students form Chile and the rest of South America
to study free market economics with Milton Friedman.
The University of Chicago had a join arrangement
with the Catholic University of Chile
under which a great many Chilean students
came to the University of Chicago,
were trained by us and received PhD's.
These students went back and taught in Chile.
The Catholic University economics department in Santiago
became a little Chicago School.
Arnold Harberger, the economist in charge of the program
described himself as a "seriously dedicated missionary".
In 1970, Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government
won the election on a platform of nationalisation
of large sectors of the economy.
Chile's phone company was majority owned by US corporation ITT.
ITT headed the attempts to stop Allende becoming president
it had the support of Richard Nixon in the White House.
I was not there, but I can
tell you what we now know to be a fact.
He ordered the CIA to prevent Allende from assuming the presidency.
Indeed, they tried to get me to lean on the chilean military
right after Allende was elected.
Despite the efforts of the CIA, Allende was sworn in as president.
Richard Nixon ordered the CIA director to make the economy scream.
Preparations began for the military coup.
Chilean "Chicago boys" started to work on
an 500 pages economic blueprint called "The brick".
With the US funding, everything was done
to destabilize the economy.
Truck drivers went on strike,
bringing factories and shops to a standstill.
There was a failed coup attempt on June the 29th 1973.
And then on September the 11th,
with General Pinochet leading the army.
The assault began on the presidential palace.
Chile had enjoyed 41 years of uninterrupted peaceful democratic rule.
Now, it has been violently overthrown.
Pinochet and his supporters described the coup as a war.
It was certainly designed to look like one.
It was a Chilean precursor of the "Shock and awe"
The "Chicago boys"
delivered their economic blueprint, The brick, to Pinochet.
In the days that followed
more than 13.000 opponent were arrested and imprisoned.
Thousands of prisoners were held in the National Stadium. Many were tortured.
Chile became notorious around the world.
At the beginning of November, 5.000 prisoners were released.
The 900 they left behind, were transferred to other detention centers.
Less than a mont later FIFA allowed Chile
to play a World Coup qualifier in the very same stadium.
Their opponents, the Soviet Union, refused to play there
then, Chile were allowed to score into an open goal
and went through to the 1974 World Coup finals.
With the population in shock
Pinochet imposed the policies recommended by the "Chicago boys":
removal of price controls, the sell of state companies,
the removal of import barriers and cuts to the government expenditure.
Friedman later openly acknowledge the importance of the Chilean experiments.
It was the first case in which you had a movement towards communism
which was replaced by a movement towards free markets.
It didn't work. A year later, inflation was 375% per year.
The highest in the world.
So in march 1975, Arnold Harbenger and Milton Friedman flew into Santiago.
He used a phrase that had never before been used
in a real world economic crisis.
He called for "Shock treatment"
He said that he was like a doctor
that was going to help a country that was suffering an epidemic.
And he was simply prescribing the medicine.
Friedman wrote that General Pinochet was sympathetically attracted
to the idea of the shock treatment.
but was clearly distressed at the temporary unemployment it might cause.
It rapidly became clear that Friedman's economic policies
benefited the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
It was calculated that a family trying to live on the average wage
had to spend 74% of its income on bread.
Items such as bus fares or milk became luxuries.
Pinochet got rid of free milk in school
a move that echoed the controversial policy
of the young Education ministry in Britain
who would later become his friend.
In order to enforce these economic policies
there had to be an enemy to fear.
Friedman and Harberger argued that free market economics
went hand in hand with freedom and democracy.
But in Chile, where their ideas were being implemented
within the context of a military dictatorship,
the opposite was true.
Many in Latin America saw a direct connection
between the economic shocks that impoverished millions of people
and the epidemic of torture
inflicted on those who believed in a different kind of society.
One of those was Orlando Letelier.
Letelier had been Allende's ambassador in Washington.
He spent a year on one of Pinochet's prisons.
Before being exiled back to America.
In 1976, Letelier wrote:
"The economic plan has had to be enforced
and, in the Chilean context,
that could only be done by the killing of thousands,
the establishment of concentration camps all over the country
and the jailing of more than 100.000 persons in 3 years."
Less than a month later, Letelier was killed by a car bomb.
A powerful bomb, today tore through a car
that was driving along Washington's usually quiet embassy road.
The chilean was Orlando Letelier,
who also had been Foreign minister in the last months
of the late Salvador Allende's marxist regime.
Michael Townley, a member of Pinochet's secret police
was behind the bombing.
He'd entered the US on a false passport with the knowledge of the CIA.
Despite his confidence, Townley was extradited to the US
and convicted for Letelier's murder.
Pinochet ruled Chile as a military dictator for 17 years.
But in a franc interview Harberger remained in denial.
You can not have a repressive government for long
within a genuinely free economic system.
In the same year as Orlando Letelier's murder
Milton Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize of Economics.
You people have such a distorted idea of what went on.
Let me tell you some facts.
Number one, I was offered two honorary degrees
by Universities in Chile, before I went there
and I refused to take them, because those Universities
were being supported, in part, by public funds
and I did not want to appear in any way to provide any support
to the political system in Chile.
I'm not a representative of Chile, am not an adviser to Chile
I have no commitments with the government of Chile.
Friedman go home!
I'm very sorry for this incident
It could have been worse.
What I'm trying to do in "The sock doctrine"
is tell an alternative history
of how this savage stream
of pure capitalism that we've been living,
capitalism unrestrained,
came to dominate the world.
Chile wasn't the only country in South America
to adopt Chicago school policies.
Friedman disciples held key positions in Brazil
and advised the government of Uruguay.
Then, on March the 24th of 1976
a military coup overthrown the government of Isabel Perón
in Argentina.
A juncture of three generals took over the country
led by general Videla.
Chicago Boys landed key economic posts in the military government.
They seized the opportunity for major economic and social engineering.
Within a year from the coup, wages lost 40% of their value
factories closed, poverty spiraled.
Just as in Chile, people had to be terrorized
into accepting these economic policies.
Videla learned from Pinochet's experience.
He adopted the tactic of disappearing people.
Striking a balance between public and private horror.
Disappearances were often carried out in broad daylight,
but could always be denied.
Many of the techniques used by the Chilean and Argentinian military
had been learned in the US-run "School of the Americas".
"Torture techniques taught***
from rape, to disrobing,
to torture with pointed objects,
breaking of extremities, poking eyes out, branding...
In Latin America there are various regimes
which at the moment are abusing human rights.
Political murder, torture, deportations, imprisonment without a trial,
using the techniques that they may have learnt in this establishment.
You may be right.
If you can say that the skills which we've taught here
have been applied, I can't deny that.
The use of torture of a known enemy soldier
to gain some kind of military advantage,
I think is justifiable and smart.
To go beyond that, to use torture techniques
merely to intimidate people, is completely wrong,
unethical and immoral.
But in Argentina and Chile
these techniques were not used just on soldiers or terrorists.
They were used on students and Union members.
They were used on anyone who opposed
the free market economic policies of the regime.
In 1978, the Argentine Junta hosted the World Cup
The final was played in a stadium less than a mile away
from the biggest detention camp in the country,
where thousands of prisoners were held in torture chambers.
And Argentina took their terror regime one step further than Chile.
Among the disappeared were hundreds of pregnant women.
Women who were allowed to give birth before being murdered.
Those children, many of whom were raised by families connected to the military
were a powerful reminder of the Junta's project
to reengineer an entiere society.
While the Junta was still in power
a group of mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared
started to protest at the Plaza de Mayo.
They turn detectives, searching for the disappeared children.
After the Junta collapsed, some were found
and reunited with their families.
Occasionally, they found remains.
Mostly they found nothing.
General Videla was found guilty of murder, kidnaping and torture.
He was sentenced to life in prison.
These first experiments in Latin America presented Friedman and his cohorts
with a serious ideological problem.
Friedman had promised that these policies
would not just make the elites richer,
but they would create the freest possible societies,
that this was a war against tirany,
that capitalism and freedom went hand in hand.
But, here we see that in the 70's
the only countries putting this ideas into practice
were military dictatorships.
Nixon had fully supported imposing
these types of brutal free-market policies
in South American dictatorships.
But when it came to domestic economic policy in the US
where Nixon had to worry of being reelected.
it was a very, very different story.
Friedman enjoyed a friendly relationship with Nixon.
Several of his Chicago school colleagues and disciples
were recruited to work for the government.
Donald Rumsfeld was one of them.
But in 1971, with the economy in a slump
Nixon turned his back on Friedman's ideas
and imposed the wage and price control policy.
He put Rumsfeld in charge.
I have, for long, being opposed to the wage and price control,
I believe it involves
government intervention with the freedom of individuals,
and I think it's intolerable
The Keynesian policy was a success
and Nixon won a second term with a landslide majority.
It was a blow for Friedman.
Then in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of Britain.
Her intellectual guru was Friedman's old mentor
Friederich von Hayek.
And just over a year later, Ronald Reagan
was elected President of the US.
Both Britain and America were now ruled by unabashed Friedmanites.
Margaret Thatcher's program, when she came in,
had four planks:
cut government spending, cut tax rates,
reduce government ownership and operation of industries
or regulation of industry
and have a moderate and stable monetary policy
to bring down inflation.
Within the first 3 years in office
unemployment doubled in post of the economy,
leading to waves of strikes.
Thatchers personal approval ratings swamped to 25%
There were riots in Britain's major cities
Even Margaret Thatcher's admirers had their doubts.
The economic performance through the Thatcher's government has been mixed
To those waiting with bated breath
for that favorite media catch phrase, "the U turn"
I have only one thing to say:
you turn if you want to
"The Lady" is not for turning.
Friederich von Hayek urged Thatcher
to copy Pinochet's economic shock therapy policies
Thatcher replied:
"In Britain we got democratic institutions,
and we do need for a high degree of consent:
some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable."
Thatcher's profound unpopularity
seemed to be proving once again,
that free market fundamentalism was simply too unpopular,
too directly harmful to too many people
to survive in a democratic state
where governing requires getting the consent of the governed,
unlike a military dictatorship.
What pulled Thatcher back from the abyss and ultimately saved the project
was a crisis.
Indeed it was the ultimate crisis.
It was a war.
We are here because for the first time for many years
British sovereign territory has been invaded by a foreign power.
The government has now decided, that a large task force will sail
as soon as all preparations are complete.
HMS invincible will be in the lead.
Most people in Britain had never even herd of the Falklands.
But when Argentina invaded the small group of islands
thousands of miles away in the South Atlantic
Thatcher seized her opportunity
to prove her credentials as the "Iron Lady".
The war was over in less than 3 months.
As the troops returned to Britain
a wave of patriotic celebrations swept the country.
Thatcher won the 1983 election with a massive majority.
She could now push through a form of the economic shock therapy
witnessed in Chile.
The most powerful union in Britain was the National Union of Mineworkers.
When National Carbon tried to close pits down.
The miners went on strike.
Parts of central London are brought to a halt
as thousands of miners and sympathizers march through the city
in support of the miners strike.
It's british longest and most bitter strike since 1926.
And the most expensive ever.
The strike lasted almost a year.
Thatcher used every means at her disposal to destroy the union.
Eventually the miners were defeated.
Thatcher used this victory
bring the Chicago School revolution to Britain.
A series of glossy comercials promoted a massive program of privatizations.
Thatcher sold off the steal industry,
water,
electricity,
gas,
telephones,
airlines,
oil.
Public housing was sold off.
Council services put out to tender.
In 1986, financial and banking services were deregulated.
It was called the Big Bang.
No one here tonight needs reminding that the "Big bang"
is only a beginning.
In Britain, before Thatcher,
a CEO earned 10 times as much as the average worker.
By 2007, they earned more than 100 times as much.
In the US, before Reagan,
CEO's earned 43 times as much as the average worker.
By 2005, they earned more than 400 times as much.
Friedman openly acknowledged the importance of Thatcher and Reagan
in the spreading of Chicago School policies around the world.
The coincidence
of Thatcher and Reagan having being in office at the same time
was enormously important for the public acceptance worldwide
of a different approach to economic and monetary policy.
What I'm describing now, is a plan and a hope for the long term,
the march of freedom and democracy
which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history
as it has left other tyrannies
which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self expression of the people.
There, we all know the fairy tale about the fall of communism.
That the West, under Reagan and Thatcher, looked so prosperous
to the people of the former communist block,
that they themselves demanded radical free-market policies.
Now, this really is a fairy tale.
It is true that people who had been living under authoritarian communism
genuinely wanted democracy,
and it's also true that people wanted to
be able to go and buy blue jeans and have Big Mac's.
That is true.
But that does not mean
that they wanted the kind of "wild west capitalism"
of oligarchs gone mad and no social protections
that so many eastern block countries actually ended up with
and suffer under to this day.
Thatcher had done everything she could
to break the power of the Unions in Britain
But in 1988, she went to Poland
to show her support for the workers union "Solidarity".
Now you see the process from where you are now,
to where you want to be.
Strikes in Poland, let to "Solidarity" being allowed
to contest a general election in June 1989.
This triggered a wave of demonstrations throughout eastern Europe.
In the past, the Soviet Union had used military force
to crush democratic movements.
But the Soviet Union had a new type of leader:
Mikhail Gorbachev,
who is committed to Glasnost and Perestroika.
He talked about a third way
a gradual transition to scandinavian-style social democracy.
Something between free market capitalism and communism.
Gorbachev charmed the public and politicians of the West.
He's a bold and determined and corageous leader.
Gorbachev stood and watched
as one by one the old communist regimes collapsed.
At the end of the year, the most famous symbol of the division of Europe
came tumbling down.
For Friedman and the "Chicago boys"
a whole new world opened up.
In the Soviet Union
Gorbachev was hoping to gradually reform the Russian economy.
In 1991, Gorbachev was invited to the G7 summit in London.
He was hoping for financial support for his gradual economic reforms.
Instead, he was told that unless he embraced a radical Shock therapy
there would be no aid at all.
The next month, there was a coup attempt against him.
A group of Communist Party hardliners
placed Gorbachev under house arrest in his holiday home in the Crimea.
Tanks surrounded the "White House", the Russian parliament.
Amid the chaos of street clashes
it was obvious that to reinforce their position
the hardliners would had to resort to violence.
Such action between the people and the security forces
has not been seen since the early days of the Russian revolution.
By dawn this morning, amid a sea of debris
it was becoming clear that the coup was disintegrating.
The Russian parliament building was unscathed,
the military had not made their move.
Inside, Boris Yeltsin was more powerful than ever.
This was Yeltsin's finest ever.
Gorbachev was released and he returned to Moscow.
But he had lost much of his power.
In december 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved.
A profound shock for the Russian people.
Yeltsin was now in charge of economic policy for the Russian Federation.
The free market came to Russia.
There was chaos.
The adoption of Chicago School policies in Russia
marked the beginning of a new chapter in the free market crusade.
It was all shock, no therapy
Despite the public efforts to promote popular capitalism
the reality was a small handful of businessman made vast fortunes.
State industries were sold off at bargain-basement prices.
The Russian press called Yeltsin's advisers
the "Chicago boys".
The Yeltsin shock therapy meant that in 1992
the average Russian consumed 40% less than in 1991.
A third of Russians fell below the poverty line.
And wages weren't paid for months.
One expert today predicted 140 million of Russians
will soon be living below the poverty line.
Corruption was rife.
Organized crime boomed.
Moscow became the new wild West.
The majority of Russians
opposed the "Chicago boys" radical vision for their country.
In march 1993, Parliament made a crucial decision.
It voted to repeal the special powers that had given to Yeltsin.
Yeltsin declared the state of emergency.
The Constitutional Court ruled that it was illegal.
On September 21st, Yeltsin took the "Pinochet option"
and disolved Parliaments.
The West "threw his whip" behind Yeltsin.
We feel that Boris Yeltsin is
the best hope for democracy in Russia
Two days later, Parliament voted to impeach Yeltsin
by 636 votes to 2.
Thousands of supporters of the Parliament
gathered outside the White House
and marched on the television station.
It looked like the supporters of Parliament were winning.
Yeltsin flew back to Moskow from his holiday home.
That night 100 demonstrators were killed
as the Yeltsin authorities fought back.
On the 4th of October, he ordered troops to stone the White House
shelling the very building he had defended 2 years earlier.
Warren Christopher, the US Secretary of State said:
"The US does not easily support the suspension of Parliaments,
but these are extraordinary times."
Yeltsin now had absolute power.
With the advise of the "Chicago boys"
he ruled through a form of crony capitalism.
Even more, state industries were sold off
creating a new class of billionaire businessmen
with huge political influence.
The Oligarchs.
By 1998, 80% of Russian farms were bankrupt
and 70.000 state factories were closed.
In 8 years the number of people living in poverty increased by 72 million.
Meanwhile Moscow would go on
to have more billionaires than any other city in the world.
Good afternoon. Thank you for coming. Today it is my...
honor to announce that I'm submitting the name of Donald Rumsfeld
to be Secretary of Defense.
I look forward to serving our country again.
Rumsfeld had been Secretary of Defense before, under Gerald Ford.
Then, the enemy we were supposed to fear was the Soviet Union.
I'm not saying with certainty that the Russians are coming,
I'm saying the terms are here.
I'm not saying the Russians are 10ft tall,
I'm saying they used to be
5.3 and are now 5.9 and a half and they're growing.
Now there was a new enemy closer to home.
On September the 10th, 2001
Rumsfeld made a speech laying out his plans
to privatize much of the US military.
Milton Friedman would have been proud.
He said: "The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat,
a serious threat to the security for the USA.
This adversary is one of the world's last bastions of central planning
it governs by dictating 5-year plans.
Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union,
but that enemy is gone.
This adversary is closer to home.
It's the Pentagon bureaucracy.
Today, we declare war on bureaucracy."
The next day, American Airlines flight 77
crashed into the Pentagon, killing 184 people.
Think about that feeling after those attacks.
Who are these people? Where did they come from?
Why do they hate us?
There was a total loss of collective narrative.
We were not living in the world that we thought we've lived in.
And we kept hearing from our political leaders
that everything we thought we understood before the attacks, no longer applied.
There was a new phrase: "pre-911 thinking".
And what happened in that moment,
is that suddenly new stories magically appeared.
That we were in a "clash of civilizations".
That's the world that we suddenly lived in.
That there was an "axis of evil",
and that we were fighting a war against terror.
This abstract un-winnable war
had huge economic consequences.
Before 2001, Homeland Security barely registered as an industry.
Today it is bigger than Hollywood and the music industry combined.
Between september the 11th, 2001 and 2006
the department of Homeland Security handed out 130 billion dollars
to private contractors.
This is the disaster capitalism complex.
A new economy built on fear.
This would be a monumental struggle
of good versus evil
The best defense against terror
is a global offensive against terror
wherever it might be found.
The first phase of this war, was the bombing of Afghanistan.
The Taliban government was quickly overthrown.
The aftermath of the war was more complicated.
Our fight against terrorism began in Afghanistan,
but it will not end there.
We're primarily looking at detainees
that we can use for collecting intelligence.
Guantanamo was the first time that the techniques of the KUBARK manual
were explicitly and publicly being used by American forces
officially sanctioned by the White House.
Isolation, both physical and psychological,
must be maintained from the moment of apprehension.
The capacity of resistance is diminished by disorientation.
Prisoners should maintain silence at all times.
They should never be allowed to speak to each other.
3 of the prisoners were Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed
and Shafiq Rasul, from Tipton, in England.
They spent more than 2 years in Guantanamo
before being released without charge.
Mentally yeah, you couldn't speak to nobody,
you couldn't do nothing, you couldn't stand up.
Sitting there, you being in your thought all the time thinking:
"What the hell's going on? Where the hell am I?
Are we gonna be stayin' here for the rest of our lives?
Are we ever going back home?
Will we ever see our family again?"
Of the 779 prisoners that had been held in the Guantanamo bay
only 3 have ever been convicted of any offense.
Now, the only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people
It was a message to the whole world, and the message was clear.
It was: this is what happens to you if you get in our way.
The war on terror is not about one man
and it is not about one country.
There were many justifications given for the invasion of Iraq.
But if US had really wanted to attack a country
where the leaders of Al-Qaeda were thought to be hiding,
which had nuclear weapons
and were selling nuclear technology to other countries,
then Pakistan would have been the obvious choice.
It had close connections to the Taliban
and was being run by a military dictator.
Instead, George Bush chose to target Iraq.
A country with the third largest oil reserves in the world.
Now about the Defense Department war plan
It is not like the other Gulf war
it's more along the line to the Panama invasion in 1989
CBS news is been told it would start on what's called "A-day".
"A" as in "airstrikes".
Airstrikes so devastating
they would leave Saddam's soldiers unable or unwilling to play.
The idea is to rain down the thunder so hard as to create, quote:
"Shock and awe".
If the Pentagon sticks to its card war plan, one day on March
the Airforce and Navy will launch between 3 and 400 cruise missiles
at targets in Iraq.
More than were launched in the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War.
The sheer size of this has never been seen before,
never been contemplated before.
Halla Ullman is one of the authors of the "Shock and awe" concept,
which relies on large numbers of "precision guided weapons".
So that you have this simultaneous effect
rather like nuclear weapons at Hiroshima:
not taking days or weeks, but a minute.
You also take the city down.
By that I mean you get rid of their power, their water.
And you begin this relentless campaign to wear them down
so that in 2, 3, 4, 5 days
they're physically, emotionally, and psychologically exhausted.
Last night, a square mile in central Baghdad seemed like hell on earth.
During the first wave of the bombing
The citizens of Baghdad suffered the version of "sensorial deprivation"
described in the KUBARK manual.
In the chaos that followed the overthrown of Saddam Hussein
the US did little to stop the looting.
Some US officials even thought it gave them a head start
on dismantling the Iraqi state.
John Agresto, director of higher education reconstruction
said he saw the looting of schools as the "opportunity for a clean start".
In fact, before sanctions
Iraq had the best education system in the region.
89% of the Iraqis were literate.
By contrast, in New Mexico, John Agresto's home state
46% of the population were functionally illiterate.
Iraq had three distinct forms of shock
they were all working together and reinforcing each other.
You had the shock of the war,
which was immediately followed by economic Shock Therapy
imposed under Paul Bremer.
And as resistance to that economic transformation,
very rapid economic shock, grew
you had the shock of enforcement, including torture.
Three different kinds of shock.
In may 2003
Paul Bremer was appointed the US envoy to Iraq.
Two weeks after he arrived
he declared the country "open for business".
We consider that the coalition has very broad authorities
to determine the direction of the Iraqi economy.
Bremer knew little of Iraq
but he knew about disaster capitalism.
He had launched "Crisis Consulting Practice"
at the start of the Homeland Security boom.
Today is a very important day in Baghdad
Bremer spent the first four months
passing classic Chicago School laws.
Rumsfeld described Iraq
as having some of the most enlightened and inviting
tax and investment laws in the free world.
One of the first acts of Bremer
was to fire 500.000 state workers.
This was partly an act of De-Ba'athification
by slashing governments, was also owed to Friedman.
Money was promised for reconstruction.
Our investment in the future of Afghanistan and Iraq
is the greatest commitment of this kind since the Marshall plan.
But in fact it was just the opposite.
Whereas the Marshall plan was inended to boost european industries
USA money in Iraq was spent on US corporations.
If work came to Iraqis
came at the bottom of a series of subcontractors.
"Creative Associates" received contracts worth 100 million dollars
to draft the curriculum and print new textbooks for the new education system.
Management and technology consultant "Bearing Point"
was awarded contracts worth 240 million dollars
to build a market-driven system in Iraq
North Carolina based RTI (Research Triangle Institute)
received contracts worth 466 million dollars
to advise on bringing democracy to Iraq.
And "Halliburton" was awarded 20 billion dollars in cost plus Iraqi contracts.
"Parsons" was handed 186 million dollars to build 142 health clinics.
Only 6 were ever completed.
Basic electricity and water supplies hardly improved
despite billions being spent in the 4 first years.
We're gonna succede here. And when we succeed here
we'll have done something important. Not just for 25 million of Iraqis,
we will have done something it serves western interests in this whole region
Even the new Iraqi currency was printed abroad.
Let me show you an example of this notes.
The US even paid private contractors
to monitor the work of the private contractors
who had won contracts.
WE WANT JOB!
I was in Baghdad in 2004
and this is the period when bombs started to go off regularly in Baghdad
and in fact, the night that I arrived, a bomb went off really near our hotel
But what was really striking to me in this period
was that despite the violence and despite the chaos, the next day
Iraqis were out on the street, protesting.
19 killed and 100 injured in Najaf
And what they were demanding, at this time, was elections.
Their right to actually have a say
in what the post-Saddam era would look like
In the early days of the occupation, the protests were peaceful.
But as time went on, and the protests didn't have an effect
More and more Iraqis joined the armed resistance.
The violence spun out of control.
As in South America 3 decades earlier
bodies were often dumped by the road side as a warning to others.
These were Iraq's "disappeared".
Extremely aggressive measures were needed to suppress the opposition.
The first 3 and a half years of the occupation
61.500 Iraqis were captured.
By spring 2007, 19.000 remained in custody.
In prison they were interogated using techniques
that could be traced to those devised by the CIA
from Ewan Cameron's experiments in the 50's.
According to the Red Cross
US military officials admitted
that between 70 and 90% of arrests in Iraq were mistakes.
The chaos in Iraq seems like a defeat for shock therapy
But in Iraq, disaster capitalism moved on.
Now, the disaster itself provided the opportunity for profit.
US military spending has almost doubled since 2001.
Nearing 700 billion dollars per year.
As long ago in 1961, president Eisenhower, not a noted liberal
warned of the danger of a too powerful military.
On this conjunction of an immense military establishment
and a large arms industry is new in the American experience
and we must guard against the acquisition of unwanted influences
wether sought or unsought
by the military industrial complex.
We must never let the weight that this combination
endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
The war in Iraq is the most privatized war in modern history.
The green zone in Baghdad is an extreme version
of what is happening around the world.
A privatized, secure world protected from the chaos outside.
In 1991, in the first Gulf war
for every 100 soldiers there was 1 military contractor.
In 2003, at the beginning of the war in Iraq
for every 100 soldiers there were 10 contractors.
By 2006, for every 100 soldiers there were 33 contractors.
A year later, for every 100 soldiers there were 70 contractors.
By july 2007,
there were more contractors than soldiers in Iraq.
This was going beyond what even Milton Friedman had dared to hope.
The only things I would not denationalize
are army forces, the courts,
and some of your roads and highways.
One of the most high-profile contractors
was "Blackwater USA".
During the April 2004 uprising in Najaf
Blackwater assumed command over US Marines.
Dozens of Iraqis were killed during the operation.
US had indemnified the private contractors against any of Iraqi 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...
I'm gonna ask him. Go ahead.
Help!
Just as Cameron Shock therapy left his patients confused and broken,
so the multiple shocks inflicted on Iraq
reduced the country to a lawless, violent, sectarian mess.
By the time of Saddam Hussein's execution in 2006
1000 Iraqis would've been killed each week.
By april 2007, the UN High Commission for Refugees
estimated that 4 million people had had to leave their homes,
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis 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 August 2005
the world was shocked to witness a sort of "disaster apartheid".
The economically secured drove out of town
while tens of thousands 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 Iraq, 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 wrote 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 who have attended them.
The children are now scattered all over the country.
This is a tragedy, but this is also an opportunity to radically reform
the Education System".
He was applicating the whole sell privatization
of the school system of this city.
It 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 interest.
Maybe the first act of resistance
is to refuse to allow our collective memory to be wiped.
In 2008, Naomi Klein visited 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 Thatcher 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 Iraq.
But the similarities between past and present are startling.
Between Pinochet's concentration camps
and Bush's Guantanamo detention center.
Between the disappeared in Chile and those in Iraq.
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 1-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 $ disappeared from the stock markets of Asia.
And then in september 2008
the financial 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 $ in bonuses.
It is estimated that Wall Street firms
paid 18,4 billion $ in bonuses last year.
The year of the crash (2008).
Despite the tore of populist rhetoric about 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 once-in-the-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 privatization.
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.
And what I find most hopeful, about the current economic crisis
is that this tactic is getting tired.
Because that 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.
Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is
fear itself
More than a 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
(and it could be an apocryphal one)
When he would be visited by
some progressist organization, or union,
and they would be proposing some new progressist policy
that they wanted to be part of the New Deal,
and he would hear them out, he would listen to them,
and in the end, he would say:
"Now go out there and make me do it".
And they did.
In 1937, which was a pivotal year for the New Deal
Do you know how many strikes there were in this country?
4.740 strikes, lasting an average of 20 days.
Do you know how many strikes there were in 2007?
21.
Now, the other reason to remember this history of struggle
is that it tells us something very important.
Something that we need to remember at this moment
when so much is at stake.
It teaches us that if we want responses to this economic crisis
that'd leave us to a world that is healthier,
that is more just, that is more peaceful,
we are gonna have to go out there,
and make them do it. Thank you.
Subtitles checked corrected and resync'd by PaleAle