The Guns-to-Caviar Index
tracks the sales of fighter jets (guns) and executive jets (caviar). For seventeen years, it consistently found that when fighter jets were selling briskly, sales of luxury executive jets went down and vice versa; when executive jets sales were on the rise, fighter jet sales dipped. Of course, a handful of war profiteers always managed to get rich from selling guns, but they were economically insignificant. it was a truism of the contemporary market that you couldn't have booming growth in the midst of violence and instability.
But that truism is no longer true. Since 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, the index found that spending has been going up on both fighter jets and executive jets rapidly and simultaneously, which means that the world is becoming less peaceful while accumulating significantly more profit.
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
NY: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Co, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7983-8
The Shock Doctrine is a hard book to read, hard to read because it is so disheartening and infuriating. You read about another outrageous and completely cynical scam and put the book down. But you have to pick it up again to understand just who and what we are dealing with:
Once you accept that profit and greed as practiced on a mass scale create the greatest possible benefits for any society, pretty much any act of personal enrichment can be justified as a contribution to the great creative cauldron of capitalism, generating wealth and spurring economic growth - even if it's only for yourself and your colleagues.
A veteran bureaucrat of the Reagan administration and a firm believer in Chicago School economics, Peter McPherson termed the looting in Iraq a form of public sector "shrinkage":
"I thought the privatization that occurs sort of naturally when somebody took over their state vehicle, or began to drive a truck that the state used to own, was just fine," he said.
As Eduardo Galeano wrote about the 1975-1985 Uruguayan coup,
People were in prison so that prices could be free.
You can be sure that the people who were in prison were not the ones who were "privatizing" those trucks but the people protesting such lawlessness.
This is the world we all now live in. This is the world where a car accident is more productive to the Gross Domestic Product than a safe journey and a decades long coma in an ICU is more lucrative than a peaceful death. This is the world where the Invisible Hand picks the pocket of everybody making less than a million a year. At that level, wealth is and should be self-perpetuating, at least if you believe in the magic of the "free market," a divine mechanism untouched by human hands.
The idea that destruction and disaster is and should be the prime growth sector for the economy is new and pernicious. We've known since the days of the Napoleonic Wars that a wise capitalist will buy when there's blood in the streets, as an early Rothschild said, and that "War is the health of the state," as Randolph Bourne wrote. Now we have entered a late stage of capitalism where blood and war, disaster and crisis are the preferred methods of making money.
Len Rosen, a prominent Israeli investment banker, told Fortune magazine. "It's security that matters more than peace." During Oslo, "people were looking for peace to provide growth. Now they're looking for security so violence doesn't curtail growth."
It's a short step from there to where peace becomes a threat to business. War IS the economy and prosperity requires pain, suffering, and death by violent means, just not for the rich. Business as usual includes guns and bombs as in the summer 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah:
as the Israeli journalist and novelist Yitzhak Laor wrote at the time, "the current war is the first to become a branding opportunity for one of our largest mobile phone companies, which is using it to run a huge promotional campaign."
Oddly enough, in 2008, Hezbollah fought back against the Lebanese government when it tried to take control of Hezbollah's independent phone network. Anybody remember a 60s™ movie comedy, "The President's Analyst"? In that movie, it turned out that The Phone Company was the ultimate power behind every conspiracy.
Crisis becomes necessary for profit. Disaster is manufactured to make money. This is what Naomi Klein describes with devastating effect. To an ideology that worships "the market" as if it were God and believes that government must always be wrong, a blithe disregard for human damage is essential. What is new and interesting is that cooking the books wholesale has become part of the package as well. Noam Chomsky used to say that you can get the most accurate news from the business press because businesspeople need accurate information. But with Rupert Murdoch now owning the Wall Street Journal can anyone be sure of the validity of even the stock quotes? After all, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are not honest brokers as the evidence provided by IMF economist Davison Budhoo in his resignation letter proved.
After the letter was published, the government of Trinidad commissioned two independent studies to investigate the allegations [the IMF had cooked Trinidad and Tobago's economic numbers in their reports to generate an artificial crisis there] and found that they were correct: the IMF had inflated and fabricated numbers, with tremendously damaging results for the country.
Even with this substantiation, however, Budhoo's explosive allegations disappeared virtually without a trace; Trinidad and Tobago is a collection of tiny islands off the coast of Venezuela, and unless its people storm the headquarters of the IMF on Nineteenth Street, its complaints are unlikely to capture world attention. The letter was, however, turned into a play in 1996 called Mr Budhoo's Letter of Resignation from the IMF (50 Years Is Enough), put on in a small theater in New York's East Village. The production received a surprisingly positive review in The New York Times, which praised its "uncommon creativity" and "inventive props." The short theater review was the only time Budhoo's name was ever mentioned in The New York Times.
It should not surprise people that one of the resources of Trinidad and Tobago is oil.
The only real criticism I have of The Shock Doctrine is that Klein does not make the link between disaster capitalism and the permanent crisis orientation of addiction. Addicts tend toward crisis not only because their addictive patterns make their lives uncontrollable but also because they begin to crave the adrenalin high that only crisis can give them. Since reading the work of Anne Wilson Schaef, When Society Becomes an Addict and The Addictive Organization, I have operated under the assumption that late stage capitalism is an addictive system. Naomi Klein has described disaster capitalism. Include addiction thinking and we have another tool with which to defeat it.
An armed conflict between nations horrifies us. But the economic war is no better than an armed conflict. This is like a surgical operation. An economic war is prolonged torture. And its ravages are no less terrible than those depicted in the literature on war properly so called. We think nothing of the other because we are used to its deadly effects... The movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot help the gnawing fear that the movement will fail if it does not touch the root of all evil - human greed. MK Gandhi, "Non-Violence - the Greatest Force," 1926
PS: The next book I intend to read on this subject may be even harder to get through, Rogue Economics by Loretta Napoleoni. I've seen her on CSPAN and read some of her columns. She notes that the post-Soviet "rise of democracy" is coincident with the rise in slavery around the world.