The Shock Doctrine - The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

Author:Naomi Klein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Social Science, Government & Business, 21st century, Globalization, Middle East, Political Science, International, Middle East - General, Modern - 21st Century, Financial crises, Finance, Business, Economic Conditions, Economic History, Current Events, Economics, Capitalism, Disaster Relief Services, Business & Economics, History, Modern, Disasters & Disaster Relief, General, Nonfiction, Politics, Free Enterprise
ISBN: 9780805079838
Publisher: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt
Published: 2007-05-14T20:00:00+00:00

They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

—Michael Ledeen,The War against the Terror Masters, 2002

George's answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chain saw—which I think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well.

—Laura Bush, White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, April 30, 2005

CHAPTER 14

SHOCK THERAPY IN THE U.S.A.

THE HOMELAND SECURITY BUBBLE

He's a ruthless little bastard. You can be sure of that.

—Richard Nixon, U.S. president, referring to Donald Rumsfeld, 19711

Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us.

—Richard Thomas, U.K. information commissioner, November 20062

Homeland security may have just reached the stage that Internet investing hit in 1997. Back then, all you needed to do was put an "e" in front of your company name and your IPO would rocket. Now you can do the same with "fortress."

—Daniel Gross, Slate, June 20053

It was a muggy Monday in Washington, and Donald Rumsfeld was about to do something he hated: talk to his staff. Since taking office as defense secretary, he had solidified his reputation among the Joint Chiefs of Staff as high-handed, secretive and—a word that kept coming up—arrogant. Their animosity was understandable. Since setting foot in the Pentagon, Rumsfeld had brushed aside the prescribed role of leader and motivator and acted instead like a bloodless hatchet man—a CEO secretary on a downsizing mission.

When Rumsfeld accepted the post, many wondered why he would even want it. He was sixty-eight years old, had five grandchildren and a personal fortune estimated at as much as $250 million—and he had already held the same post in the Gerald Ford administration.4 Rumsfeld, however, had no desire to be a traditional defense secretary, defined by the wars waged on his watch; he had greater ambitions than that.

The incoming defense secretary had spent the past twenty-odd years heading up multinational corporations and sitting on their boards, often leading companies through dramatic mergers and acquisitions, as well as painful restructurings. In the nineties, he had come to see himself as a man of the New Economy, directing a company specializing in digital TV, sitting on the board of another promising "e-business solutions," and serving as board chairman of the very sci-fi biotech firm that held the exclusive patent on a treatment for avian flu as well as on several important AIDS medications.5 When Rumsfeld joined the cabinet of George W. Bush in 2001, it was with a personal mission to reinvent warfare for the twenty-first century— turning it into something more psychological than physical, more spectacle than struggle, and far more profitable than it had ever been before.

Much has been written about Rumsfeld's controversial "transformation" project, which prompted eight retired generals to call for his resignation and eventually forced him to step down after the 2006 midterm elections. When Bush announced the resignation he described the "sweeping transformation" project—and not the war in Iraq or the broader "War

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