Klein´s book documents the history of the idea first espoused by Milton Friedman that "only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change" when it comes to economic policy. She details examples of how the IMF and their elite allies in governments around the world have used the state of shock after natural and man-made disasters to implement unpopular economic austerity measures and privatizations when people are least likely to resist them. From the 1973 coup of Allende in Chile, to Russia in 1993, China in 1989, the Falklands War that gave Margaret Thatcher the popularity to make serious changes in Great Britain, to the ugly aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, to the most privatized war in history in Iraq, this pattern repeats itself.
Klein gave a disturbing description of the way companies took advantage of the aftermath of Hurricaine Katrina to benefit themselves. Blackwater provided policing, other companies found a market in building shelters or selling water. And the reconstruction process has totally changed the face of much of New Orleans, replacing public housing with condos and casinos. Five thousand black families had lived in housing projects on some of the most valuable land in the city before the hurricaine. Klein quoted a New Orleans politician as saying "We couldn't clean out the housing projects, but God did."
Her argument really confronts the assumption that neoliberal economic policy goes hand in hand with democracy. Bolivia was a turning point for this ideology in 1985 because it was the first time that a democratically elected government implemented the neoliberal program. Before it had only worked in dictatorships like Pinochet´s, a marketing problem for Milton Friedman and his "Capitalism and Freedom" thesis.
In Bolivia the "shock" was the terrible inflation crisis caused by the collapse of tin prices and an inept leftist government in the early 1980's. But what get´s left out of the official history is that Bolivian President Victor Paz Estenssoro never mentioned his neoliberal plans to reorganize the economy during his election campaign and designed the whole policy in secret with an emergency economic team. They showed their new policy to the IMF even before his own cabinet or the Bolivian congress had seen it. Apparently the IMF official told them the package was everything they could ever dream of, but that if it didn´t work, he had diplomatic immunity and could hop a plane to Miami.
After the policy was implemented and thousands of miners lost their jobs, Bolivians held huge strikes and protests. The government declared a state of seige and arrested 1,500 protesters and kidnapped 200 of the top labor leaders to the Bolivian jungle. It was hardly a democratic process.
Klein´s message is that being aware of this pattern can help us confront it, instead of deferring to strong leaders in the aftermath of a crisis we can organize, the way that workers did in Argentina after the 2001 economic crisis, when they took over their shuttered factories and started cooperatives to continue producing without the management.
I think we have a lot to learn in the U.S. from a country like Bolivia. As Klein put it, the societies with the most powerful historical memory have stronger resistance to neoliberalism. We´ve become so comfortably indifferent in the U.S. that there´s little protest when public housing's mowed over or private companies win outrageous contracts to repair the destruction we´ve caused in Iraq. But after 500 years of resistance to colonialism, Bolivians are no longer willing to sit quietly in the face of such exploitation.
Here are a few market scenes from my second visit to Potosí, I love the markets here!
These are special honey covered pastries for Corpus Cristi.
Why would you ever go inside to buy anything? :)
Cool mural in Potosí "For brotherhood between the peoples of Latin America."
1 comment:
Kirsten,
Another great post. You are really amazing!!
Tom
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