from Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/02/1345218
NAOMI KLEIN: This drive to the privatize every aspect of the
state of government is about a 35-year-old campaign. Many people date
it, many historians date it to the 1973 coup in Chile, which is
something that is interesting in terms of Jeremy's research, because
he talks about how Blackwater are now hiring Chileans to go to Iraq,
and I'll let him do that. But the first example of the attempt to
build a fully privatized corporate utopia was in Chile in 1973 after
Pinochet's coup, when he joined up with a team of economists from the
University of Chicago to engage in that experiment.
It is a different kind of colonial project. In Latin America,
this project, which is often called neoliberalism, is referred to as
neocolonialism. The first stage of colonialism was the opening of the
veins of Latin America, as Eduardo Galeano describes it, the pillaging
of raw resources, the exporting of raw resources. The second stage of
colonialism -- and, of course, that first stage never fully goes away
-- was pillaging the state. What had been constructed in the aftermath
of the Great Depression and during the post-war boom years -- the
construction of healthcare systems, education systems, roadways,
railways -- but this is really what was launched in Chile with the
help of the Chicago boys: the strip mining of the state itself.
The way I imagine this corporate project, this privatization
project, is if we imagine the state as a kind of an octopus with all
of these limbs. And for the past thirty years, and certainly in this
country since Reagan, what the privatization campaign has really been
doing is lopping off the limbs of the state -- the phone system, the
roadways, these sort of non-essential services, if you will. And after
you've chopped off all the limbs, all you have left is the center, is
what they call the core.
And what the Bush administration has really been doing is going
for the core, privatizing those core essential government services
that are so inherently part of what we think of as the state, that it
almost seems impossible to imagine that they could be privatized, like
the government itself, like cutting Social Security checks, like
welfare, like prisons, like the army, which is where Blackwater fits
in.
What's so extraordinary about what has happened in Iraq -- and
Amy mentioned the "Baghdad Year Zero" article -- is that you really
have all of these layers of colonialism and neocolonialism, this quest
for privatization, forming a kind of a perfect storm in that country.
On the one hand, you have sort of old-school colonial pillage, which
is, let's go for the oil. And as many of you know, Iraq has a new oil
law. It's passed through cabinet, hasn't yet passed through
parliament. But, really, it legalizes pillage. It legalizes pillage.
It legalizes the extraction of 100% of the profits from Iraq's oil
industry, which is precisely the conditions that created the wave of
Arab nationalism and the reclaiming of the resources in the 1950s
through the '70s. So it's an undoing of that process and a straight-up
resource grab, old-school colonialism.
Layered on top of that, you have sort of colonialism 2.1, which
is what I was researching when I was in Iraq, which is the looting of
the Iraqi state, what was built up under the banner of Arab
nationalism, the industry, the factories. The kind of rapid-fire,
shock therapy-style strip-mining privatization that we saw in the
former Soviet Union in the '90s, that was the idea, that was Plan A
for Iraq, that the US would just go in there with Blackwater guarding
Paul Bremer and would sell off all of Iraq's industries. So you had
the old-school colonial, then you had the new school.
And then you had the post-modern privatization, which was the
idea that the US military was actually going to war, the US Army was
going to war, to loot itself, which is a post-modern kind of
innovation, right? If we remember, Thomas Friedman told us less than a
decade ago that no two countries with a McDonald's have ever gone to
war. Now, we go to war with McDonald's, Taco Bell, Burger King, in
tow. And so, the process of waging war is a form of self-pillage. Not
only is Iraq being pillaged, but the United States coffers of this
government are being pillaged. So we have these three elements, all
converging this perfect storm over this country.
And one of the things that I think is most important for
progressives to challenge is the discourse that everything in Iraq is
a disaster. I think we need to start asking and insisting, disaster
for who, because not everybody is losing. It's certainly a disaster
for the Iraqi people. It's certainly a disaster for US taxpayers. But
what we have seen -- and it's extremely clear if we track the numbers
-- is that the worse things get in Iraq, the more privatized this war
becomes, the more profitable this war becomes for companies like
Lockheed Martin, Bechtel, and certainly Blackwater. There is a steady
mission creep in Iraq, where the more countries pull out, the more
contractors move in, which Jeremy has documented so well and will talk
more about.
The danger. These are the stakes that I think we need to
understand. And I really do want to keep this brief, so that we have a
fruitful discussion afterwards. What are the stakes here? The stakes
could not be higher. What we are losing is the incentive, the economic
incentive, for peace, the economic incentive for stability. When you
can create such a booming economy around war and disaster, around
destruction and reconstruction, over and over and over again, what is
your peace incentive?
There was a phrase that came out of the Davos conference this
year. Every year, there's always a big idea to emerge from the World
Economic Summit in Davos. This year, the big idea was the Davos
dilemma. Now, what is the Davos dilemma? The Davos dilemma is this:
for decades, it's been conventional wisdom that generalized mayhem was
a drain on the global economy, that you could have an individual shock
or a crisis or a war that could be exploited for privatization, but on
the whole -- and this was the Thomas Friedman thesis -- there needed
to be stability in order to have steady economic growth; the Davos
dilemma is that it's no longer true. You can have generalized mayhem,
you can have wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, threats of nuclear war with
Iran, a worsening of the Israeli occupation, a deepening of violence
against Palestinians, you can have a terror in the face of global
warming, you could have increased blowback from resource wars, you can
have soaring oil prices, but, lo and behold, the stock market just
goes up and up and up.
In fact, there's an index called the Guns-to-Caviar index, which
for seventeen years has been measuring an inverse relationship between
the sale of fighter jets and executive luxury jets. And for seventeen
years, this index, the Guns-to-Caviar index -- the guns are the
fighter jets, the caviar are the executive jets -- has found that when
fighter jets go up, executive jets go down. When executive jets go up,
fighter jets go down. But all of a sudden, they're both going up,
which means that there's a lot of guns being sold, enough guns to buy
a hell of a lot of caviar. And Blackwater is, of course, at the center
of this economy.
The only way to combat an economy that has eliminated the peace
incentive, of course, is to take away their opportunities for growth.
And their opportunities for growth are ongoing climate instability and
ongoing geopolitical instability. Their threats -- the only thing that
can challenge their economy is relative geopolitical and climatic
peace and stability, so I suppose we have our work cut out for us to
fight the war profiteers.
