Latin America’s Shock Resistance
In less than two years, the lease on the largest and most important US military base in Latin America will run out. The base is in Manta, Ecuador, and Rafael Correa, the country’s leftist president, has pronounced that he will renew the lease “on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami–an Ecuadorean base. If there is no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil, surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States.”
Since an Ecuadorean military outpost in South Beach is a long shot, it is very likely that the Manta base, which serves as a staging area for the “war on drugs,” will soon shut down. Correa’s defiant stand is not, as some have claimed, about anti-Americanism. Rather, it is part of a broad range of measures being taken by Latin American governments to make the continent less vulnerable to externally provoked crises and shocks.
This is a crucial development because for the past thirty-five years in Latin America, such shocks from outside have served to create the political conditions required to justify the imposition of “shock therapy”–the constellation of corporate-friendly “emergency” economic measures like large-scale privatizations and deep cuts to social spending that debilitate the state in the name of free markets. In one of his most influential essays, the late economist Milton Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum, what I call the shock doctrine. He observed that “only a crisis–actual or perceived–produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”
Latin America has always been the prime laboratory for this doctrine. Friedman first learned how to exploit a large-scale crisis in the mid-1970s, when he advised Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock following Pinochet’s violent overthrow of Socialist President Salvador Allende; the country was also reeling from severe hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy–tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation. It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted, and it became known as a Chicago School revolution, since so many of Pinochet’s top aides and ministers had studied under Friedman at the University of Chicago. A similar process was under way in Uruguay and Brazil, also with the help of University of Chicago graduates and professors, and a few years later, in Argentina. These economic shock therapy programs were facilitated by far less metaphorical shocks–performed in the region’s many torture cells, often by US-trained soldiers and police, and directed against those activists who were deemed most likely to stand in the way of the economic revolution.
In the 1980s and ’90s, as dictatorships gave way to fragile democracies, Latin America did not escape the shock doctrine. Instead, new shocks prepared the ground for another round of shock therapy–the “debt shock” of the early ’80s, followed by a wave of hyperinflation as well as sudden drops in the prices of commodities on which economies depended.
In Latin America today, however, new crises are being repelled and old shocks are wearing off–a combination of trends that is making the continent not only more resilient in the face of change but also a model for a future far more resistant to the shock doctrine.
When Milton Friedman died last year, the global quest for unfettered capitalism he helped launch in Chile three decades earlier found itself in disarray. The obituaries heaped praise on him, but many were imbued with a sense of fear that Friedman’s death marked the end of an era. In Canada’s National Post, Terence Corcoran, one of Friedman’s most devoted disciples, wondered whether the global movement the economist had inspired could carry on. “As the last great lion of free market economics, Friedman leaves a void…. There is no one alive today of equal stature. Will the principles Friedman fought for and articulated survive over the long term without a new generation of solid, charismatic and able intellectual leadership? Hard to say.”
It certainly seemed unlikely. Friedman’s intellectual heirs in the United States–the think-tank neocons who used the crisis of September 11 to launch a booming economy in privatized warfare and “homeland security”–were at the lowest point in their history. The movement’s political pinnacle had been the Republicans’ takeover of the US Congress in 1994; just nine days before Friedman’s death, they lost it again to a Democratic majority. The three key issues that contributed to the Republican defeat in the 2006 midterm elections were political corruption, the mismanagement of the Iraq War and the perception, best articulated by Jim Webb, a winning Democratic candidate for the US Senate, that the country had drifted “toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the nineteenth century.”
Nowhere, however, was the economic project in deeper crisis than where it had started: Latin America. Washington has always regarded democratic socialism as a greater challenge than totalitarian Communism, which was easy to vilify and made for a handy enemy. In the 1960s and ’70s, the favored tactic for dealing with the inconvenient popularity of economic nationalism and democratic socialism was to try to equate them with Stalinism, deliberately blurring the clear differences between the worldviews. A stark example of this strategy comes from the early days of the Chicago crusade, deep inside the declassified Chile documents. Despite the CIA-funded propaganda campaign painting Allende as a Soviet-style dictator, Washington’s real concerns about the Allende victory were relayed by Henry Kissinger in a 1970 memo to Nixon: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on–and even precedent value for–other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” In other words, Allende needed to be taken out before his democratic third way spread.
But the dream Allende represented was never defeated. It was temporarily silenced, pushed under the surface by fear. Which is why, as Latin America now emerges from its decades of shock, the old ideas are bubbling back up–along with the “imitative spread” Kissinger so feared.
By 2001 the shift had become impossible to ignore. In the mid-’70s, Argentina’s legendary investigative journalist Rodolfo Walsh had regarded the ascendancy of Chicago School economics under junta rule as a setback, not a lasting defeat, for the left. The terror tactics used by the military had put his country into a state of shock, but Walsh knew that shock, by its very nature, is a temporary state. Before he was gunned down by Argentine security agents on the streets of Buenos Aires in 1977, Walsh estimated that it would take twenty to thirty years until the effects of the terror receded and Argentines regained their footing, courage and confidence, ready once again to fight for economic and social equality. It was in 2001, twenty-four years later, that Argentina erupted in protest against IMF-prescribed austerity measures and then proceeded to force out five presidents in only three weeks.
“The dictatorship just ended!” people declared at the time. They meant that it had taken seventeen years of democracy for the legacy of terror to fade–just as Walsh had predicted.
In the years since, that renewed courage has spread to other former shock labs in the region. And as people shed the collective fear that was first instilled with tanks and cattle prods, with sudden flights of capital and brutal cutbacks, many are demanding more democracy and more control over markets. These demands represent the greatest threat to Friedman’s legacy because they challenge his central claim: that capitalism and freedom are part of the same indivisible project.
The staunchest opponents of neoliberal economics in Latin America have been winning election after election. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, running on a platform of “Twenty-First-Century Socialism,” was re-elected in 2006 for a third term with 63 percent of the vote. Despite attempts by the Bush Administration to paint Venezuela as a pseudo-democracy, a poll that year found 57 percent of Venezuelans happy with the state of their democracy, an approval rating on the continent second only to Uruguay’s, where the left-wing coalition party Frente Amplio had been elected to government and where a series of referendums had blocked major privatizations. In other words, in the two Latin American states where voting had resulted in real challenges to the Washington Consensus, citizens had renewed their faith in the power of democracy to improve their lives.
Ever since the Argentine collapse in 2001, opposition to privatization has become the defining issue of the continent, able to make governments and break them; by late 2006, it was practically creating a domino effect. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was re-elected as president of Brazil largely because he turned the vote into a referendum on privatization. His opponent, from the party responsible for Brazil’s major sell-offs in the ’90s, resorted to dressing up like a socialist NASCAR driver, wearing a jacket and baseball hat covered in logos from the public companies that had not yet been sold. Voters weren’t persuaded, and Lula got 61 percent of the vote. Shortly afterward in Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, former head of the Sandinistas, made the country’s frequent blackouts the center of his winning campaign; the sale of the national electricity company to the Spanish firm Unión Fenosa after Hurricane Mitch, he asserted, was the source of the problem. “Who brought Unión Fenosa to this country?” he bellowed. “The government of the rich did, those who are in the service of barbarian capitalism.”
In November 2006, Ecuador’s presidential elections turned into a similar ideological battleground. Rafael Correa, a 43-year-old left-wing economist, won the vote against Álvaro Noboa, a banana tycoon and one of the richest men in the country. With Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as his official campaign song, Correa called for the country “to overcome all the fallacies of neoliberalism.” When he won, the new president of Ecuador declared himself “no fan of Milton Friedman.” By then, Bolivian President Evo Morales was already approaching the end of his first year in office. After sending in the army to take back the gas fields from “plunder” by multinationals, he moved on to nationalize parts of the mining sector. That year in Chile, under the leadership of President Michelle Bachelet–who had been a prisoner under Pinochet–high school students staged a wave of militant protests against the two-tiered educational system introduced by the Chicago Boys. The country’s copper miners soon followed with strikes of their own.
In December 2006, a month after Friedman’s death, Latin America’s leaders gathered for a historic summit in Bolivia, held in the city of Cochabamba, where a popular uprising against water privatization had forced Bechtel out of the country several years earlier. Morales began the proceedings with a vow to close “the open veins of Latin America.” It was a reference to Eduardo Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, a lyrical accounting of the violent plunder that had turned a rich continent into a poor one. The book was published in 1971, two years before Allende was overthrown for daring to try to close those open veins by nationalizing his country’s copper mines. That event ushered in a new era of furious pillage, during which the structures built by the continent’s developmentalist movements were sacked, stripped and sold off.
Today Latin Americans are picking up the project that was so brutally interrupted all those years ago. Many of the policies cropping up are familiar: nationalization of key sectors of the economy, land reform, major investments in education, literacy and healthcare. These are not revolutionary ideas, but in their unapologetic vision of a government that helps reach for equality, they are certainly a rebuke to Friedman’s 1975 assertion in a letter to Pinochet that “the major error, in my opinion, was…to believe that it is possible to do good with other people’s money.”
Though clearly drawing on a long rebellious history, Latin America’s contemporary movements are not direct replicas of their predecessors. Of all the differences, the most striking is an acute awareness of the need for protection from the shocks that worked in the past–the coups, the foreign shock therapists, the US-trained torturers, as well as the debt shocks and currency collapses. Latin America’s mass movements, which have powered the wave of election victories for left-wing candidates, are learning how to build shock absorbers into their organizing models. They are, for example, less centralized than in the ’60s, making it harder to demobilize whole movements by eliminating a few leaders. Despite the overwhelming cult of personality surrounding Chávez, and his controversial moves to centralize power at the state level, the progressive networks in Venezuela are at the same time highly decentralized, with power dispersed at the grassroots and community levels, through thousands of neighborhood councils and co-ops. In Bolivia, the indigenous people’s movements that put Morales in office function similarly and have made it clear that Morales does not have their unconditional support: the barrios will back him as long as he stays true to his democratic mandate, and not a moment longer. This kind of network approach is what allowed Chávez to survive the 2002 coup attempt: when their revolution was threatened, his supporters poured down from the shantytowns surrounding Caracas to demand his reinstatement, a kind of popular mobilization that did not happen during the coups of the ’70s.
Latin America’s new leaders are also taking bold measures to block any future US-backed coups that could attempt to undermine their democratic victories. Chávez has let it be known that if an extremist right-wing element in Bolivia’s Santa Cruz province makes good on its threats against Morales’s government, Venezuelan troops will help defend Bolivia’s democracy. Meanwhile, the governments of Venezuela, Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia have all announced that they will no longer send students to the School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation)–the infamous police and military training center in Fort Benning, Georgia, where so many of the continent’s notorious killers learned the latest in “counterterrorism” techniques, then promptly directed them against farmers in El Salvador and auto workers in Argentina. Ecuador, in addition to closing the US military base, also looks set to cut its ties with the school. It’s hard to overstate the importance of these developments. If the US military loses its bases and training programs, its power to inflict shocks on the continent will be greatly eroded.
The new leaders in Latin America are also becoming better prepared for the kinds of shocks produced by volatile markets. One of the most destabilizing forces of recent decades has been the speed with which capital can pick up and move, or how a sudden drop in commodity prices can devastate an entire agricultural sector. But in much of Latin America these shocks have already happened, leaving behind ghostly industrial suburbs and huge stretches of fallow farmland. The task of the region’s new left, therefore, has become a matter of taking the detritus of globalization and putting it back to work. In Brazil, the phenomenon is best seen in the million and a half farmers of the Landless Peoples Movement (MST), who have formed hundreds of cooperatives to reclaim unused land. In Argentina, it is clearest in the movement of “recovered companies,” 200 bankrupt businesses that have been resuscitated by their workers, who have turned them into democratically run cooperatives. For the cooperatives, there is no fear of facing an economic shock of investors leaving, because the investors have already left.
Chávez has made the cooperatives in Venezuela 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 cooperatives 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. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing: rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chávez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the US government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf Coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to US taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chávez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.
Latin America’s most significant protection from future shocks (and therefore from the shock doctrine) flows from the continent’s emerging 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, a 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 healthcare all over the continent, while training students from other countries at its medical schools.
This is a very different model from the kind of academic exchange that began at the University of Chicago in the mid-’50s, when hundreds of Latin American students learned a single rigid ideology and were sent home to impose it with uniformity across the continent. The major benefit is that ALBA is essentially a barter system in which countries decide for themselves what any given commodity or service is worth rather than letting traders in New York, Chicago or London set the prices for them. That makes trade less vulnerable to the kind of sudden price fluctuations that have hurt Latin American economies before. Surrounded by turbulent financial waters, Latin America is creating a zone of relative economic calm and predictability, a feat presumed impossible in the globalization era.
When one country does face a financial shortfall, this increased integration means that it does not necessarily need to turn to the IMF or the US Treasury for a bailout. That’s fortunate because the 2006 US National Security Strategy makes it clear that for Washington, the shock doctrine is still very much alive: “If crises occur, the IMF’s response must reinforce each country’s responsibility for its own economic choices,” the document states. “A refocused IMF will strengthen market institutions and market discipline over financial decisions.” This kind of “market discipline” can only be enforced if governments actually go to Washington for help. As former IMF deputy managing director Stanley Fischer explained during the Asian financial crisis, the lender can help only if it is asked, “but when [a country is] out of money, it hasn’t got many places to turn.” That is no longer the case. Thanks to high oil prices, Venezuela has emerged as a major lender to other developing countries, allowing them to do an end run around Washington. Even more significant, this December will mark the launch of a regional alternative to the Washington financial institutions, a “Bank of the South” that will make loans to member countries and promote economic integration among them.
Now that they can turn elsewhere for help, governments throughout the region are shunning the IMF, with dramatic consequences. Brazil, so long shackled to Washington by its enormous debt, is refusing to enter into a new agreement with the fund. Venezuela is considering withdrawing from the IMF and the World Bank, and even Argentina, Washington’s former “model pupil,” has been part of the trend. In his 2007 State of the Union address, President Néstor Kirchner (since succeeded by his wife, Christina) said that the country’s foreign creditors had told him, “‘You must have an agreement with the International Fund to be able to pay the debt.’ We say to them, ‘Sirs, we are sovereign. We want to pay the debt, but no way in hell are we going to make an agreement again with the IMF.’” As a result, the IMF, supremely powerful in the 1980s and ’90s, is no longer a force on the continent. In 2005 Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; the continent now represents just 1 percent–a sea change in only two years.
The transformation reaches beyond Latin America. In just three years, the IMF’s worldwide lending portfolio had shrunk from $81 billion to $11.8 billion, with almost all of that going to Turkey. The IMF, a pariah in countries where it has treated crises as profit-making opportunities, is withering away.
The World Bank faces an equally precarious future. In April Correa revealed that he had suspended all loans from the Bank and declared the institution’s representative in Ecuador persona non grata–an extraordinary step. Two years earlier, Correa explained, the World Bank had used a $100 million loan to defeat economic legislation that would have redistributed oil revenues to the country’s poor. “Ecuador is a sovereign country, and we will not stand for extortion from this international bureaucracy,” he said. Meanwhile, Evo Morales announced that Bolivia would quit the World Bank’s arbitration court, the body that allows multinational corporations to sue national governments for measures that cost them profits. “The governments of Latin America, and I think the world, never win the cases. The multinationals always win,” Morales said.
When Paul Wolfowitz was forced to resign as president of the World Bank in May, it was clear that the institution needed to take desperate measures to rescue itself from its profound crisis of credibility. In the midst of the Wolfowitz affair, the Financial Times reported that when World Bank managers dispensed advice in the developing world, “they were now laughed at.” Add the collapse of the World Trade Organization talks in 2006 (prompting declarations that “globalization is dead”), and it appears that the three main institutions responsible for imposing the Chicago School ideology under the guise of economic inevitability are at risk of extinction.
It stands to reason that the revolt against neoliberalism would be in its most advanced stage in Latin America. As inhabitants of the first shock lab, Latin Americans have had the most time to recover their bearings, to understand how shock politics work. This understanding is crucial for a new politics adapted to our shocking times. Any strategy based on exploiting the window of opportunity opened by a traumatic shock– the central tenet of the shock doctrine–relies heavily on the element of surprise. A state of shock is, by definition, a moment when there is a gap between fast-moving events and the information that exists to explain them. Yet as soon as we have a new narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented and the world begins to make sense again.
Once the mechanics of the shock doctrine are deeply and collectively understood, whole communities become harder to take by surprise, more difficult to confuse–shock-resistant.
Naomi Klein is the author of many books, including her most recent, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Visit Naomi’s website at nologo.org.
© 2007 The Nation
Ecuador? What’s in Ecuador to have an American base for? If we were contributing troops and equipment to “drug-hunting”, why not use existing bases of the host nations? Perhaps it was just an impulse of knee-jerk imperial extra-territoriality. Musn’t let our boys pick up the bad habits of the natives and all that.
Just once, send a reporter to ask the people most affected by the educated fools who pose for one fancy idea or another.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Social programs that don’t victimize the poor and the working poor are nearly nonexistent.
If it weren’t for the greedy, avaricious accumulation of the electronic digits called Dollars by those who already have more than they need; poor folks would stand half a chance.
“If there is no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil, surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States.”
Maybe they could supervise US elections. Florida could certainly use the oversight.
It is a fantastic article. Thanks, Naomi Klein. The countries that are rich with natural resources have been plundered for centuries by both the US and the Europeans, leaving the natives suffering from lack of basic needs. The milirary bases of the former in the latter prepared the ground for this plunder by “removing the obstacles”. Thus, the military of these “blood-sucking” countries has become “contract killers” “owned” by the US and the European transnational corporations. Paul Wolfowitz (when he was the president of the World Bank) symbolised the combination of militarism and capitalism. Thank God, as Wolfowitz is kicked out of the World Bank, so also the beginning of the “expulsion” of the combination of military and capitalistic machinery is taking place in South American countries.
I sincerely hope that the African and Asian countries will learn from their South American counterparts and give their own citizens a better life by liberating their countries from the clutches of BLOOD SUCKING WHORES.
The Americans should also learn from their Southern neighbours that the power of the common citizens is mightier than that of the military and corporate machinery. Common citizens can take control of their own lives and their beloved country, instead of allowing the war and corporate companies controlling not only individual and community lives, but also the government. Let us look forward to this DAY OF LIBERATION from the bondage of murderers and plunderers.
Naoimi Klein has done all of us a great service in writing ‘Shock Doctrine’. The book connects dots that fill in a picture of the pain and suffering we have forced on our Latin American neighbors.
‘Shock Doctrine’ also made me realize that the Repugs are a coalition of religious and economic fundamentalists and that no fundamentalist can be reasoned with. The GOP must be defeated and driven from power; only then can we take back our country and enact the reforms we all desire.
Thanks, AGAIN, Naomi! This article really informed me about what is REALLY happening in South America. But it also made me realize how much the Shock Doctrine is being used by the American government against it’s own people. The problem here is, however, is that we are still in a state of shock. We haven’t even begun the process of recovery. That is going to take a major economic collapse for ALL Americans (not the rich of course) to regain their footing and follow the example of South American countries, and take our nation back.
That economic collapse is coming to a town near you in the not too distant future. Be prepared! Follow the example of our southern neighbors. To quote Naomi: “the progressive networks in Venezuela are at the same time highly decentralized, with power dispersed at the grassroots and community levels, through thousands of neighborhood councils and co-ops. In Bolivia, the indigenous people’s movements that put Morales in office function similarly and have made it clear that Morales does not have their unconditional support: the barrios will back him as long as he stays true to his democratic mandate, and not a moment longer. This kind of network approach is what allowed Chávez to survive the 2002 coup attempt: when their revolution was threatened, his supporters poured down from the shantytowns surrounding Caracas to demand his reinstatement, a kind of popular mobilization that did not happen during the coups of the ’70s.” I translate that to mean that to return power to the people in America, we have to unite in small groups of community to survive and thrive. Further, you will need that network of neighbors to survive the initial economic collapse.
So, peace to all, and best of luck. We’re going to need it.
Now compare this article to a Naomi Wolf article. See the critique of corporations? Now that is progressive.
I agree with Arvy. Maybe it would be good to have a bunch of Ecuadorian soldiers stationed in Miami. Not only could they monitor the elections, but they could probably actually help to prevent drug trafficking…
On November 8, 2007, the Peru Free Trade Agreement was passed in Congress. This is only the first step towards the establishment of a sustainable model for future trade agreements.
How did the U.S. finagle this? Was it the two huge ranch properties bought by the Bush Family near the Bolivian border? Or is it the assurance that there is no extradition agreement with the Peru administration?
Great work Naomi!
12-20 million illegal immigrants have bailed their own backward, corrupt governments to live in the USA. If their country-building skills were so advanced, then why are they bailing their OWN countries like sinking ships?
If we Latinos never stop race baiting, white-guilt trippin’, and promoting our victim status, then Latin countries will continue to under preform on the international market, especially compared to some European and Asian countries.
Yes, I know folks. Self-reflection, constructive criticism, and accountability is sometimes painful work!
The other thing these South American nations have going for them right now (in addition, lucky them, to having been exposed to the shock doctrine early, allowing them now to be in a state of recovery) are leaders who are not invested in privatization, and a public that votes for candidates invested in the public good. There are so many obstacles to similar transitions from private to public ownership happening in the US, but that is a major one. Most of our candidates are bought and sold, representatives only of the corporate oligarchy. We Americans are living in the belly of the beast, the beast that terrorizes both other nations (now learning to stand on their own feet) and Americans themselves, who are in a complete state of alienation and confusion.
American empire, like the Roman empire, has been pillaging the countries blessed with rich natural resources, not only in South America, but also in Africa and Asia. It has concealed this reality of plunder in the name of “freedom” and “democracy”. In other words, its “beneficial ideology” has masked its greed, thus making the subject countries more dependent on its “alms” inspite of being the actual owners of rich resources, from which the American empire is benefiting.
I see this pattern common in the Roman empire (ofcourse any empire, for that matter). The patronage system defined the relationship between the Roman empire and its subject societies. Whenever a society was conquered by another or what Price calls it “an intrusion of authority” into its world, a system of adjustments had to take place in the subject society in order for the local people to come to terms with the new situation. Generally, the official policy in the subject society was that of accommodating the new power relations. The local people were either inclined or forced to follow this official policy. For the allegiance to the empire, subject society was guaranteed “freedom” from external and internal threats. This “beneficial ideology” was perpetuated by the local elites in the subject societies, hailing the “freedom” and “security” Rome had established and promised of their continuance in the subject society through military force. It was intended to make the bondage more acceptable to the local populace and to justify the external rule in their eyes. It is said: “a successful colonization includes cultivating the acceptance of the colonial relationship among the colonized.” In the client societies the political ideals of autonomy and independence were replaced by “two aims that were both functional and ideological. One was to use cities as administrative centers for supervising the production and distribution of local and regional resources. That also…meant taxation flowing back to Rome. The other one was to build communities by creating for the empire’s urban populations a common form of civic life (and) a common set of civic buildings…That…meant loyalty flowing back to Rome.” Thus, “benefaction” had become an ideological concealment to the exploitative relationship between the empire and the subjects. Emperors used “gifts” also to bolster their power and the power of the local elite classes whose support they needed. Thus, the patron-client relationship between the emperor and the subject societies increased social differentiation. Local wealthy aristocracy was also involved in “benefaction”. However, the major purpose of the “benefaction” of the local elite was not to relieve poverty but to register and naturalize the inequalities of the social system in the society just as the emperire’s patronage and “generosity” marshaled and orchestrated the overall hierarchy of the system as a whole. The “gifts” objectified the relations of respect, dependence, authority and power upon which the entire system rested. Thus, the culture of “benefaction” not only provided a rationale that justified the dominance of the internal (in the form of the local elites) and external (in the form of the Roman emperor) powers, but also concealed the exploitation in this exchange relationship.
Isn’t it what the US and the European countries have been involved in for centuries??????? I thank God, this MASK OF THE EMPIRE has been removed in the South American countries, for the benefit of their citizens. I hope that the other countries will follow this example.
‘Gobble’ization is perhaps experiencing the karmic circle of its ancestral Roman orgies.
Maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of the end of corporate military fascism as represented by the USA. The world is now beginning to see the truth of what the USA really stands for. It is not true democracy, but rule by a corporate military elite that wishes to subjugate the masses to a feudalist existence. Latin America has shown the world that another world is possible. That is the world of democratic socialism, or social democracy, where resources are put to use in benefitting the people rather than the elite.
The only problem is that, if the elite believes that it is losing the battle, it will resort to desperate measures which will lead to World War III. The elite has nothing to lose but to anihilate the world if they cannot have it their way.
rrivera, you wrote:
“12-20 million illegal immigrants have bailed their own backward, corrupt governments to live in the USA. If their country-building skills were so advanced, then why are they bailing their OWN countries like sinking ships?”
Are you for real? Or just some right wing baiter? The 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants you’re talking about are poor people, who could not escape poverty in their own countries because their governments followed the prescriptions of Washington consensus and the IMF. The reason they have had to leave is because they listened to American funded and dominated financial institutions for the past 30 years. See what happens in the next 30. They’ve just begun to get out from under the global corporate thumb! Honestly, I think you are just baiting.
Your next line says:
“If we Latinos never stop race baiting, white-guilt trippin’, and promoting our victim status, then Latin countries will continue to under preform on the international market, especially compared to some European and Asian countries.”
What does this mean? Which latin country are you from? , and finally you follow it with:
“Yes, I know folks. Self-reflection, constructive criticism, and accountability is sometimes painful work!
”
I agree. So take your own advise since you’ve obviously been a supporter of the failed Washington consensus, and IMF economic models. Time for some self-reflection!
All of that said, I think you might just be some economic shill. We regular CD readers are starting to notice never-before-seen, and never again heard-from users with dissenting typical right-wing veiws.
How much are they paying you to sell you soul?
We are witnessing the slow but steady fall of the American empire. The methods of the past, like the US senate and congress, are rotten to the core. It’s time for democracy, truth and justice - absolute horror to the oligarchy.
========
“The hurricane of revolution has begun, and it will never again be calmed.” Hugo Chavez
folks, we had better get ready for their violence. no cornered rat every gives up without a fight. what are you going to do when they impose full military rule after the next ‘terrorist incident’? think about it.
Oldgoat—I loved your play on words and your analogy. So apt.
Bless you Naomi Klein for doing such a fantastic job of bringing your readers up to speed with this amazing overview of the seachange taking place with our American neighbors to the south. Yes, folks, Central Americans and South Americans are Americans, too. We are North Americans.
I have been searching high and low for something to feel excited and hopeful about and you have provided it. Food for the soul, indeed.
We need to see that we are not immune here, in fact we are in the midst of our own shock, and perhaps we can avoid some of it’s worst effects, if we can wake up in time.
There is so much we can learn from the cooperative movements to the south. We had better because it may mean the difference between surviving and not surviving the shock waves that are still to come. And how is it that despite our bullying efforts to install and support dictators as our proxies, the people of South America have found their voice and have made common cause. Gee, maybe even living out their common dream. I salute them and send blessings their way! The Light will prevail!
Ring the death-knell of Milton Friedman! Bye-bye Uncle Miltie!
kloro,
“folks, we had better get ready for their violence. no cornered rat every gives up without a fight. what are you going to do when they impose full military rule after the next ‘terrorist incident’”
They’ve had to commit most of their skullduggery away from the cameras, in the dark, in order to get away with atrocities away from the US. The Deaf-Dumb-Blind Media — DDMB — have helped blanket people from seeing protests and other manifestations of resistance. But this isn’t a nation of 23 million, like Iraq, or nearly 70 million — despite the various fascist overtures & apparently shameless, I think they tremble ever time they pull one of their capers, wondering when the boots are going to be coming for them.
They would not lie and hide if they were not so afraid of us.
If you liked this article read the entire book, The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitaliism by Naomi Klein.
For those bereft of hope due to the blatant and undeniable political corruption evident in both major political parties, take heart. The beauty of Oligarchical tyranny is that it sows the seeds of its own destruction as Naomi so aptly illustrates.
The beauty of democratic communitarian movements is that (when they are truly democratic and reflect the consensus of the overwhelming majority of the populace)is that they can sow the seeds of their own evolution.
In other words exactly what Castro, Chavez, Ortega, Correa, Morales, Lula DeSilva, and Kirchener do is far less important than whether they have a mandate from the majority of their electorate to do it. With the mandate they can go to their electorate and say “we made a mistake” and not worry about getting the Tonto to Lone Ranger retort (”what you me we kimosabe?”).
Tyranical Oligarchies (whether of the right or left)must constantly find others to demonize to explain the failure of their plans and programs.
Poet–you are so right. Must be why there is so much blame avoidance and finger pointing and saber rattling with this current bunch of thugs. They will not prevail. They can’t lock up or kill us all. The Light is more powerful than the darkness, and I believe the legions who support and amplify the Light are with us through these dark days.
“‘Shock Doctrine’ also made me realize that the Repugs are a coalition of religious and economic fundamentalists and that no fundamentalist can be reasoned with. The GOP must be defeated and driven from power; only then can we take back our country and enact the reforms we all desire.”
Yeah, I can agree that the Reps are fundamentalists and should go. The problem with the “get rid of the GOP first” attitude is that human nature is to relax once the perceived threat is gone. Witness the incredibly simplistic and vapid comments here on CD about “just voting for Democrats.” Yeah, there is usually some comment about more work after that, but it seldom happens - people just want to get on with their lives after an election.
The problem - the elephant in our living room - is that once you get rid of the Reps, you will have the Dems. As Naomi Klein and others know, this is not so much a political problem, as one of ideology. The ideologues are fundamentalists and what they worship in this country is corporatism and what corporatism worships is power, money, and cheap labor. Corporatism is one major part of fascism.
It’s a dilemma, to be sure. I don’t think anyone (well, there must be a troll or two here) on CD really wants the Reps to continue in power. Yet, most of us also realize that merely replacing one corporate stooge with another gets us…
“Meet your new boss, same as your old boss!” as The Who presciently sang.
We need local cooperatives, paying fair wages, reinvesting in their communities, and trading with each other, here in the United States. It is the only way we can replace the mall-ocracy, the push to the bottom, the feeding of the billionaires on the living body of our democracy, our culture, and our very existence as a nation.
Local is strongest, cheapest, hardest to destroy, most creative.
We have been hoodwinked into thinking that only the national, transcendent art, products, and ideas are important and valuable. If a business or an artist or an idea does not transcend, or at least aspire to transcend, the local… it is a failure by definition.
Death to showbiz! Death to mall capitalism! Death to global energy companies! Death to agribusiness!
Life to small collectively owned ventures! Life to municipally owned energy grids! Life to local art and music! Life to locally grown food!
Something that lends credence to what Naomi Klein and others (including me) have been saying:
By William Greider
“In terms of economic consequences, the new trade agreement with Peru is trivial. In political terms, however, it delivers an ominous message. When faced with a choice between money and their own rank-and-file, the Democratic leaders in the House will go with the money, even if it requires them to pass legislation with Republican votes. Even if a majority of their own caucus is opposed. Even if it means handing the shrinking president, George W. Bush, a rare legislative victory.”
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=250042
Economics is a pseudo-science elaborated by individuals such as David Ricardo, who in his early retirement sought to justify the role of the investor class by designing an elaborate economic machine that would efficiently deliver profits to that class.
Milton Friedman, no less useless and parasitical than David Ricardo, developed an economic machine Naomi Klein describes in terms of her shock doctrine, a kind of directed energy weapon few understand because it is camouflaged as “science” and awarded a Nobel Prize.
Friedman’s honor should have been termed the “Nobel Prize For Economic Propaganda & Obfuscation”.
Because the pseudo-science of economics rationalizes the damage inflicted by investor-driven greed for profit without productive activity ( money for nothing )as “externalized costs”, leaving the dead babies and polluted rivers out of the equation, it is worse than useless. It is a genus of bullshit that is home to many species, such as “the war on terror”, “the Monroe Doctrine”, “Zionism”, “psychoanalysis” and many other intellectual elaborations that have nothing at all to do with reality, truth, and the sacredness of life.
It is time to recognize the pseudo-science of economics for the transparent investor class propaganda it is and turn our attention to those who are struggling to create a genuine economic science, individuals such as Hazel Henderson, who are attempting to do for economics what Howard Zinn has done for history.
Each of us has been programmed and conditioned by the propaganda of the investor class ( economic 101 ) to one day become investors ourselves. It is called “the American Dream”.
When you can listen to the august Ben Bernanke, the latest incarnation of Alan Greenspan, who was Paul Volker Lite, when you know that these Fed Chairman, these financial Dalai Lamas are mumbling pure bullshit designed to sabotage your common sense and kill off your neurons, then you will take the first step into enlightenment and cast off the delusional Ponzi scheme of the vicious investor class. This may not be easy if your Dad is one of “them”.
Good-bye American Dream! Hello……what? “Democratic Socialism”?
I know, but I ain’t saying. I don’t want you thieving rascals to be snatching my ideas.
Thanks for some great comments above you guys.
And of course, thanks too to Naomi, -such a brilliant mind, (I’m glad she’s on *our* side!)
Starofthesea writes:
“They will not prevail.
They can’t lock up or kill us all.
The Light is more powerful than the darkness, and I believe the legions who support and amplify the Light are with us through these dark days.”
~ I just couldn’t agree with you more Star, I believe that 100%.
“Just one small candle lights up a lot of darkness” etc. And also… there are *loads* more of us, than there are of *them*!
We, -the ones who hunger for, *and persistently demand the right to live a sane and safe life, freed of all tyranny* -are the majority.
And as those folk (who at present still slumber under the heel of their corrupt mis-leaders) likewise awaken from their personal ’sleep of ages’ -our ranks swell even more.
On that basis, it would appear that the odious villains who’ve been ruling the roost for so long don’t stand a chance. Their days are numbered! And it’s only a matter of time before WTP (we the people) finally -and internationally- shrug off the remnants of their horrendously oppressive and destructive reign, and we get to live more autonomously, ~at long last.
__________________________________
We are very much caught up in the maelstrom of our present worries and difficulties, (’twas ever thus!) ~ but I have a notion that, -were we to view our current situation from the perspective of say, some 30 years hence, we would realise that all our current efforts to dispense with the ‘Deadly Dinosaurs’ are very much not in vain, and that, -(contrary to how it sometimes appears) - we ARE actually winning the battle!
Naomi Klein points out that even such sinister megaliths as the *IMF and World Bank* are losing power and influence.
Wow! ~If such giant ogres as *those* are on their way out, then doesn’t it show the veracity of the notion that we ARE (slowly but surely) winning the fight?
And yes, the ‘cornered rats’ will get nasty, but the likes of Hugo Chavez (et al) have a lot of clout and savvy these days :::
Happily the *Pied Piper of Venezuela* has developed some neat strategies to deal with such sulphurous-smelling rodents!
A scheme is brewing. It is the incorporation of Canada, US and Mexico into a “North American Union” to resuscitate and prolong the life of this monster “liberal capitalism”. It is an answer to the new found radicalization of South America and we can expect a hard fight on our hand.
What we need would be our own version of the “Monroe Doctrine” whereby we work to exclude, and if necessary chop off, the intrusive hands of intervention from the North.
If the US failed in its attempt to conquer the oil rich regions of Middle East and West Asia it would turn its thwarted imperial fury on its southern neighbours. It is imperitive that we start getting ready for this eventuality now. We could even consider somekind of military alliance of the South.
As Bernanke said in congressional testimony before congress on Nov 8, 2007 something to the affect:
-The Chinese are saving at the rate of 50% of their personal income due to lack of social safety nets and we (US oligarcy) have been encouraging them to save less, spend more (for imports and in domestic market) AND institute more state social safety net spending to induce this out of the $1.4 Trillion pile of reserve cash sitting. The fate of America awaits the answer.
Tell me again repubs about that “personal responsibility” factor at play here.
HA
“The problem - the elephant in our living room - is that once you get rid of the Reps, you will have the Dems. As Naomi Klein and others know, this is not so much a political problem, as one of ideology. The ideologues are fundamentalists and what they worship in this country is corporatism and what corporatism worships is power, money, and cheap labor. Corporatism is one major part of fascism.”
iammyself, you’re totally right on!
We all know that the traitors to our Constitution, Republican or Democrat, are beholden to the corporatists. They desire the perpetual war of our warfare state. It lines their pockets. In the short span of fifty years the United States has gone from a manufacturer of products and builder of infrastructure, for use by society and the good of humankind, to a manufacturer of war products for the sole purpose of destroying infrastructure and killing humankind.
The movement towards unfettered free market agendas over the few decades, as propagated by the corporatists, has changed the face of America dramatically. As the Keynesian approaches have been dismantled, and replaced by Friedmanism, our safety nets are increasingly being shredded and discarded. As we are forced (or “shocked”, as The Shock Doctrine, explains) into increasingly more privatization, from formally publicly-performed functions (i.e., disaster response and raising armies), our freedoms, democratic values, and quality of life have fallen in the United States.
The Shock Doctrine will continue to cause shockwaves in the conservative community around the world. If you haven’t already, make a point to read it. It’s that important. I believe it’ll prove to be ground-zero, in coming years, when historians point to what created the tipping-point allowing the recapture of our eroding freedoms and democracies, and the dismantling of the corporatist paradigm.
“In the years since, that renewed courage has spread to other former shock labs in the region. And as people shed the collective fear that was first instilled with tanks and cattle prods, with sudden flights of capital and brutal cutbacks, many are demanding more democracy and more control over markets. These demands represent the greatest threat to Friedman’s legacy because they challenge his central claim: that capitalism and freedom are part of the same indivisible project.”
And if they, against all-odds, can ‘do it’ — why can’t N.Americans?
Rrivera: “12-20 million illegal immigrants have bailed their own backward, corrupt governments to live in the USA. If their country-building skills were so advanced, then why are they bailing their OWN countries like sinking ships?”
Rrivera: “If we Latinos never stop race baiting, white-guilt trippin’, and promoting our victim status, then Latin countries will continue to under preform on the international market, especially compared to some European and Asian countries.
Yes, I know folks. Self-reflection, constructive criticism, and accountability is sometimes painful work!”
You must be one of those “Viva Bush” latinos. Sickening.
I say good for Chavez, Morales and Correa. These are real leaders, not IMF/Drug War pro-US puppets.
To Juan Carlos of Spain (when he rudely interrupted Chavez at the Latin summit): Why don’t you STFU, who elected you pendejo?!!
The empire’s legs are getting weak. It’s starting to fall.
When the U.S. stock markets totally collapse, celebrate!
From the ashes an economic system fair to everyone will be built. Watch and see. Democracy is coming for many radical changes for the people.
————–
======================
Watch/hear
KUCINICH: Takes House Floor, Moves for Cheney Impeachment
27 min -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJYbgouqlMw
Ms Klein has “knocked one out of the park”, as they say with her recent work, highlighted by “the shock doctrine”, the alternative history of the last 50 years.
the mind numbing hatred and the heartless murder of american corporations has now been exposed for all to see.
the republic is rotten to the core and i think the cast of galliwags who comprise the dem and rep roster for the presidency shows how bereft of ideas this rancid scrum has left.
while the rest of the world gets hip to this, the amercian public is infatuated with amercian idol and the world according to jim.
nice.
bush is eviscerating the government services as quickly as he can - and one can only expect disaster but the public, which is racist at its core, has been hoodwinked into thinking that all government is bad.
people think that it is the blacks who sit on their fat asses and suck up the public funds while having child after child.
no one gave a shit about the black people in new orleans, did they.
quite the racist display.
a load of crap to be sure but drunk like a glass of nectar.
soon, the us will be the only country in the world without public health care, social services and public pensions.
you will be shock victims from the cradle (if you can afford one) to the grave (if you can afford one of those).
and in the sap’s finest tradition you will be proud of it.
a toast to the death of the IMF, world bank and the other tentacles of the evil of the american rape of the planet.
enough, it is over.
the only strategy left is to kill every one in the world.
oh yes, and that will be done in the finest tradition of bringing democracy and freedom to them.
bless your bombs yanks, it is all you have left.
Why can’t we get this kind of rejection of corporate capitalism here? Maybe it is because we are too well off, we do not suffer the inhumane treatment that those in other countries suffer. The time is coming when those who are ony concerned with profits and pillage in other countries will fail, more and more people are seeing the futility of allowing an economic model that is only based on profits. The first christians shared what they had, and worked to help each other, how shocking, sounds like socialism to me.
We have been duped into thinking it is only about us, and not anyone else, and this kind of self-absorbed life-style is what has brought us to where we are.
If the US had dealt honestly and fairly with other nations from the start of its being a world power, it would now have friends all over the world, instead, it got OPEC for one. It is encouraging to see what is happening in South America, to see the shackles of unfettered capitalism being tossed off the backs of the poor and middle classes, and rejected as a desireable model. Those who have advanced capitalism as a desireable economic ideal have failed too many people in other countries, and it was doomed to fail, because it was only benefitting a few, not most of the citizens. Any economic system based on ignoring the poor and disadvantaged will always fail, eventually, there is a God and he will not tolerate it, and after thousands of years we still do not realize that.
Naomi Klein’s suggestion that Latin America has always been the prime laboratory for shock doctrine is true only in part. Lets not forget about North America. In 1491 there were more people on the South American Continent than existed in Europe. North and South America were populated with civilizations, not savages, when Colombus arrived. Those civilizations were ancient and their world views were rooted in Spirit not science. Colombus introduced both physical and moral disease to the Americas. Pope Gregory the 6th through the issuance of the Papal Bull Inter Caetera granted to the Kings of Europe the right to the Americas as if they were merely a franchise of the Catholic Church. The Inter Caetera granted to the Europeans the right to kill any Indigenous person in the America’s who did not accept Christianity, and kill they did. Through disease and genocide it is estimated that one hundred twelve million Indigenous Americans were killed in the name of Christianity. This is the greatest genocide in the World in the last 500 years, yet it scarcely exists in the consciousness of contemporary Americans. For the last five hundred years Euro’s and Americans have enforced Christian dominion upon the Americas, at the point of a gun.
What you are seeing in South America today is nothing less than a throwing off of the chains of Euro/American/Christian dominion. Indigenous Peoples worldwide are now reasserting their rights to live and worship as they believe absent the continued genocidal interference of America and Europe. Despite the negative votes of America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the United Nations passed the Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples this year. The passing of this declaration is a watershed event and signals the end of western dominion over Indigenous Peoples, their land, and their resources. America’s denial of genocide forces twisted Euro American views of social and political events that result in wrong-headed conclusions. The suppression of Indigenous beliefs and the absence of those understandings in the minds of Americans is evident in American intellectual thought.
The gatekeepers of American History have sanitized the history. The gatekeepers of the media have blocked serious American Indian writing and commentary. The genocidal message is that Indigenous Americans are a quaint and unimportant relic of the past doomed ultimately to be assimilated.
Americans learned how to build an Empire in North America. Thomas Jefferson was the architect of Indian removal. It was accomplished by building military posts on the frontiers and extracting from the Indians their lives their land and their resources. Modern American empire finds seven hundred plus military bases spread across the world. Perhaps this similarity of policy is lost on Americans. It is not lost on foreign peoples. Indigenous Peoples worldwide are today leading the fight against American hegemony. That is precisely the reason Hugo Chavez openly speaks against American aggression. That is also the reason that the American military base in Manta Ecuador will not be renewed.
It is time now for America to admit it’s great moral blot of genocide, apologize openly for it, and amend it’s policies toward Indigenous Peoples both at home and worldwide. We are now living in a post-colonial age and this reality must now be faced.
edited for spelling
Ahhh, flirting with censorship are we. This sounds like a Rove playbook tactic. If I’ve learned anything from my years of being schooled, trained, and educated in progressive ideology, I’ve learned we progressives love our freedom of speech and loath censorship.
Well, we can always go live in Cuba and Venezuela and take comfort in knowing that they’ll staunchly defend our freedom of speech, assembly, and the press. After all, these countries are highly evolved and socially advanced. We know this because Michael Moore tells us so.
BTW, the audacity of that Spanish king to tell Chavez the “shut up!” Didn’t that king know who he was talking to? He was talking to the greatest revolutionary in the 21st century, a true leader of our time.
Ahhh, freedom of speech is so sweet, isn’t it folks?
I’m in the middle of The Shock Doctrine and don’t want to stop. This book gives information that anti-imperialists around the globe can use to build a strong global movement. It is so true that the only thing capitalists want is everything. Latin America is giving hope to the world that another way is possible.
rrivera: troll much?
a progressive you most clearly are not.
you fool no one here.
Hello rrivera,
YOU ARE A TROLL
Your subject pronouns are obviously substituted and used for self delusional thought patterns enamating from a nature entirely understood from practitioners of group-think programming.
Perhaps you should exercise freedom of thought to self diagnose these conditions as my free speech permits me to say.
Good-bye rrivera.
{ To freinds Hex and Clear-think: }
-Someone’s obviously not had their pill today.
We ought leave him be till the meds have cut in!
Doom n Gloom—- I have responded to your eloquent post on another piece here. just think what a huge evolutionary step the mass consciousness could make, were we all to recognize what you have so passionately and eloquently described.
It will come, but I suspect at a time when there are far fewer of all of “us” here on Mother Earth. Genocide and matricide have been marching side by side for 500 years.
Thanks Naomi I’ve been enjoying your book and your website particularily how you apply this concept to Iraq.
Reading today’s postings makes me feel I am back in college sharing in a particularly evocative discussion with a group of interesting, well-informed fellow “students.”
POET: One of your best postings ever!
STAR OF SEA & UNCOMMON DREAMS: Faith is contagious. Thanks for expanding mine!
CRUX PUPPY & DOOM n GLOOB: Excellent postings!
DEEPA: Ditto!
Not out of the woods yet, dear.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18541.htm
“The notion that populism swept Latin America in the new century is pure fantasy. In fact, there’s a “quadrangle of competing and conflicting” regional forces with Washington having less market leverage than in the 1990s “Golden Age of Pillage” but still enough to be dominant and able to keep business flourishing.
Petras continues his analysis with detailed examples of key center-left regimes in Brazil under Lula, Argentina under Kirchner, Uruguay under Vazquez, Bolivia under Morales plus some comments on Peru and Ecuador under leaders preceding their current ones. Each case substantiates the fantasy that these regimes represented “new winds from the Left” sweeping the region. Hot air maybe, but little, if anything, in the way of progressive change despite the beliefs of many intellectuals on the left.
However, that’s not to say leftist forces aren’t strong enough to bubble up and bring change. Insurrectionary forces brought Evo Morales to power in Bolivia and can take him down if he fails them as he’s now doing. The same is true in other countries with Hugo Chavez their model. He challenged US imperialism, brought real social change, has mass public support and thus far withstood US efforts to oust him. In Cuba, Fidel Castro thwarted every Washington effort against him since 1959 and is still in charge, larger than life, although frail and weak following his protracted illness from which he’s still recovering. Petras sees a new generation of young committed leaders emerging in the region. “They are the ‘Left Winds’ of Latin America,” and it’s in them that hope lies.
Foreign Investment (FI) in Latin America
Petras demystifies FI’s impact, explains the risks in attracting it, and exposes six myths about its benefits.
Myth 1.
It’s untrue FI creates new enterprises, market opportunities and more. Most, in fact, aims to buy privatized and other enterprises while crowding out local capital and public initiative.
Myth 2.
FI doesn’t increase export competitiveness. It buys mineral resources for export with little done to create jobs or stimulate the local economy.
Myth 3.
It’s false to think FI provides tax revenue and hard currency. An FI export model creates more indebtedness and a net loss.
Myth 4.
It’s false believing debt repayments to international lenders is key to a good financial standing. Much foreign debt is odious and repaying it harms borrower countries.
Myth 5.
It’s false believing FI provides developing countries needed capital. It’s used instead to buy local companies and control a country’s markets.
Myth 6.
It’s false believing FI attracts further investment. Capital freely moves to wherever it gets the best returns and is anchored nowhere.”
“Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire”
By Stephen Lendman
10/12/07 “ICH” — - -James Petras is Binghamton University, New York Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Careful with that myth, Eugene!
Oh dear comrades, I never engage in hostile dialog. It doesn’t become me. Instead, I prefer jovial banter. It’s far more stimulating. Don’t you agree?
CD wouldn’t want to censor me. I’m a mere simpleton who is fortunate to ever string together two coherent sentences.
Unlike me, some of the posts here are well crafted. Some of you contributors could quite easily fetch a brood of disciples. I, for one, am looking for a progressive mentor. I’d like to think I came to the place rich with mentorship opportunities.
And you’re still a silly troll rrivera. (apparently the meds haven’t kicked in yet)
Splendid article from Naomi Klein; I’m pushing friends and family to read her latest book.
It’s fascinating that her comments about Friedman and the University of Chicago also apply to a number of other intellectual lowlifes that have gestated at that institution. Consider that the University of Chicago was also home to the patron saint of the Neocons — Leo Strauss.
http://www.logosjournal.com/mason.htm
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=drury_24_4
There’s a long list of Chicago types that Francis Boyle skewers here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/boyle08022003.html
(Right-wing columnist David Brooks, a relative lightweight, also emerged from the Chicago swamp.)
Although not precisely related to Chicago, it is fascinating to see how these people are intellectually “in-bred” with each other:
http://www.alternet.org/story/15481/
Yet more Chicago connections with Strauss:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5010.htm
So by promoting Friedman and Strauss and their cohorts, the University of Chicago has destroyed a multitude of lives around the world. And their baleful influence is still formidable despite some modest resurgence of resistance in Latin America.
Still, Naomi Klein offers some persuasive grounds for guarded optimism. Thank you Naomi.
Hello rrivera
I understand your sentiments. However, I think it’s really important we don’t generalize about immigrants “bailing” on their corrupt countries.
I can’t speak for immigrants from other countries, but in Mexico, the government enthusiastically embraces policies that favor free trade policies where transnationals profit and the population is plunged further into poverty. For example, since NAFTA passed in 1994 wages have gone down, poverty has risen, drug cultivation has risen as an alternative means to make money, and immigration to the U.S. has increased. Also as part of NAFTA, small Mexican family farms can’t compete with the cheap heavily subsidized agribusiness produce that now floods Mexico, and Mexico was forced to cut its agricultural subsidies.
Mexico is where most U.S. illegal immigrants come from. The mostly indigenous peasants who struggle to stay on their land are intimidated by corrupt government officials or paramilitaries who are condoned by the government. Soldiers regularly rape women, kidnap, and sometimes kill people with impunity. Many flee because they don’t want to live with the violence. It’s a difficult decision to decide to stay and risk death or torture. Others simply can’t survive on the minimum wage of 42 pesos (about $4 a day), which is also another aspect that attracts transnational corporations who want cheap labor to make clothes or electronics.
In short, corrupt neoliberal policies are destructive, whether it is white people in the corrupt U.S. government enforcing them or Mexican people in the corrupt Mexican government enforcing them. In Mexico, at least, “free” trade policies that favor transnational corporations are to blame for the increased poverty and immigration problem.