Excerptsfrom Naomi Klein's much-anticipated new book, "The Shock Doctrine," are being run this week in the Guardian before its U.K. publication date of Sept. 20th.
If today's entry is anything to go by, "The Shock Doctrine" will be an explosive addition to the already groaning bookshelf of analytical exposes on George W. Bush's contribution to the profitability of war commerce.
The billions being spent and earned by the military-industrial-political complex have created, in Klein's clever parlance, the disaster capitalism complex.
On a day when, to our utter despair (particularly for active-duty military families), so many more lies are being bandied about in Congress, it's almost a relief to recognise truth in an economical phrase that rolls off the tongue:
The disaster capitalism complex.
Following 9/11, George W. Bush encouraged everyone to go shopping. That included the security sector, beginning with the military and clear across the intertwining industries of technology, media, communications, prisons, engineering, education and health care, with no spending limits.
As Klein writes:
What happened in the period of mass disorientation after the attacks was, in retrospect, a domestic form of economic shock therapy. The Bush team, Friedmanite to the core, quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through its radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture.
The power grab, she writes, was supported by the omnipresent sense of peril that the White House Rovians created at every opportunity.
Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex - a fully fledged new economy in homeland security, privatised war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatised security state, both at home and abroad. The economic stimulus of this sweeping initiative proved enough to pick up the slack where globalisation and the dotcom booms had left off. Just as the internet had launched the dotcom bubble, 9/11 launched the disaster capitalism bubble. "When the IT industry shut down, post-bubble, guess who had all the money? The government," said Roger Novak of Novak Biddle Venture Partners, a venture capitalism firm that invests in homeland security companies. Now, he says, "Every fund is seeing how big the trough is and asking, 'How do I get a piece of that action?'"
I'll leave you to read the rest online, but be prepared to be shocked all over again by the clarity of her message, especially in light of today's charade by Petraeus & Co:
Through all its various name changes - the war on terror, the war on radical Islam, the war against Islamofascism, the third world war, the long war, the generational war - the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged. It is limited by neither time nor space nor target. From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the war on terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash-in-the-pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture.
With no motivation to turn off a profitable spigot, grunts like my U.S. Marine son and his comrades continue to fight for survival during successive deployments to another country's civil war designed never to be won.
Madness.
Postscript: As a supporting aside, one of the special reports in today's Financial Times covers the defence industry. An analysis of the Pentagon's procurement policy, which provides for the "so-called 'global war on terror'" as well as replacement of ageing weapons and hardware systems, offers figures of US$45 billion (the procurement on war equipment in 2007, up from US$23 billion in 2006) and the Pentagon's budget, "which, with emergency war supplementals, has ballooned by roughly US$130bn-$140bn." The latter figures of course are over and above the DOD's 2007 budget of US$439.3 billion.
Oil, guns, war. Big bidness, to quote Molly Ivins. The biggest, baddest bidnesses of all.