Do your part and boycott products owned by Zionist supporters. Seehere for a good place to start. If it worked on South Africa, it can work here.
Seehere for a comprehensive list of brands to avoid (scroll down about 1/2 way). Spend your hard-earned funds supporting your local businesses.
From the FAQ:
Take the example of Coca-Cola in the middle east, the boycott has hit them so hard that their sales are down 60%. This has created an opportunity for a Muslim alternative, ZamZam Cola of Iran, which is owned by the religious charity the Foundation of the Dispossessed, to take Coca-Colas share of the market. Zam Zam Cola is struggling to keep up with demand - it exceeded all expectations by selling four million cans in its first week. It is now planning to expand by build factories in the gulf states, helping provide local employment. And for the first time even European countries like Denmark, are importing ZamZam Cola.
Similar success stories can be told of Sainsburys closer in Egypt in April 2001, which resulted in a blossoming of local stores which would not have otherwise survived in an unfair market monopolised by a foreign giant.
Blue Ibis ***********************************************************************
Shir Hever, an economist with the Palestinian-Israeli Alternative Information Center (AIC), notes that four recent articles in Ha'aretz' business section, The Marker, have fretted about the impact of boycotts, divestment & sanctions (BDS) on the Israeli economy. Writes Hever in the AIC, March 1:
The growing protest against the atrocities committed by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip have begun to change something in the Israeli political discourse, and the first indication of this can already be seen in the Israeli economic media.
Although the Israeli economic media doesn't concern itself with the moral dimension of the attacks on Gaza, the economic dimension of recent events have created a rising level of concern. In order to demonstrate this trend, here are summaries of four articles that appeared in the Israeli The Marker magazine for economic news:
1. On 2 February, Guy Grimland warned about a growing phenomenon of boycott of Israeli high-tech companies, and several Israeli companies received letters from European and U.S. companies explaining that they cannot invest in Israel for moral reasons.
2. In 3 February, Nehemia Strassler, one of Israel's most famous economic correspondents, attacked the Israeli Minister of Industry, Trade and Labor, Eli Yishai, for calling on the Israeli military to "destroy one hundred homes in Gaza for every rocket that falls in Israel."Strassler had nothing to say about the Palestinians living in these homes or about the loss of life, but he warned:
"[the minister] doesn't even understand how the operation in Gaza hurts the economy. The horror sights on television and the words of politicians in Europe and Turkey change the behavior of consumers, businessmen and potential investors. Many European consumers boycott Israeli products in practice. Intellectuals call for an economic war against us and to enforce an official and full consumer boycott.
Calls are heard in board meetings of economic corporations to boycott trade relations with Israel. So far deals were cancelled with Turkey, the UK, Egypt and the Gulf States, and visits by economic delegations were cancelled. It's much easier now to switch providers while abandoning Israeli providers. Many company boards are required to take wide considerations into account with regards to the good of society and the environment, and they put political considerations in that slot as well.
Of course there is an economic cost to severing diplomatic ties. Qatar cut its trade relations with Israel, Venezuela and Bolivia cut diplomatic relations. Mauritania recalled its ambassador and the relations with Turkey worsened considerably - and this bad ambience seeps into the business sector decisions. Here, just yesterday Dudi Ovshitz, who grows peppers for export, said that 'there is a concealed boycott of Israeli products in Europe.'"
3. On 6 February, Shuki Sadeh wrote about even more companies that have decided to boycott relations with Israel. A Turkish company demanded that Israeli companies sign a document condemning the Israeli massacre in Gaza before they can offer their services for it. Sadeh quoted Naomi Klein's recent call for boycott, the 2005 Palestinian civil society call for boycott and Israeli organizations that support the boycott and provide information for the global BDS movement. Sadeh's article also had concerned quotes by Israeli businessmen who demanded government intervention to protect them from the growing boycott.
4. In 11 February, Ora Koren reported that the Israeli business sectors feel the effects of the attack on Gaza. She reported that Israeli businessmen in Turkey are hiding their names so that the local BDS organizations won't learn about their activities, and that the situation is even worse in the UK.
These four articles are a sign that there is a shift in the effectiveness of the BDS movement against Israel, and that if the momentum is maintained and strengthened, Israeli businessmen may decide to move their headquarters away from Israel, or to begin to put pressure on the Israeli government to begin respecting international law, and ending the occupation.
Hever has written extensively on the economy of the occupation & the usefulness of BDS tactics to fight it, available here.
Once again, it's time to take a step back and look at the larger picture of the mess in the Middle East. SOTT provides a crack analysis of one of the principle drivers of the continuing conflict.
Blue Ibis *************************************************************************
Andrew Lobaczewski studied at close range a deviant category of humans who, when they manage to grab pivotal positions of power, hold a devastating potential for raining death and destruction down on humanity, simply to further their own interests. These individuals are known as psychopaths, and they move skillfully and purposely throughout the higher echelons of the global body politic. And like clockwork, they slot themselves into all the significant seats of power.
One such individual interests us today. It seems that dangerous moves are afoot which threaten the safety of the entire planet, and that he plays a key role.
At present, it is very clear that the global psychopathic manoeuvres gravitate significantly around the state of Israel, which takes its place at the centre of an horrific downward-spiral of violence, blood, despair and devastation almost beyond human imagining, which spews forth across the surrounding areas, and threatens to envelope the entire earth in its darkness.
A significant part of this phenomenon is the astounding ability of denial, to insist that reality is not represented by the evidence, but instead reality must conform to how "I say it is". When a whole society becomes infected with pathological influence then this affliction of denial becomes endemic throughout the general population. But essentially, this is the 'skill' of the psychopath.
They make pronouncements without substantiation. To them, these pronouncements represent what reality is ... pronouncement by pronouncement. The present pronouncement may contradict what they said a moment ago. This means nothing to them. They make no attempt to deal with the contradiction.
They demonstrate a total lack of understanding what we mean by a "fact." In their writings and in their speech, they do not use that word.
We humans find this hard to believe. The use of facts is such a basic part of our lives. We base our conclusions and our actions on them. We go on from there to test things and establish more facts. When we debate, we present facts, and show how we derive our observations and our positions from them.
Without facts, all we have is what we call "fantasy."
Since these creatures have a human appearance, we assume they must think like us ... be aware of what we are aware. We think they MUST know what facts are. When they don't address the facts, we say they are playing a game. We think they do know what the facts are, but don't want to admit it.
Not so! They DON'T know what a fact is. When we speak of facts and ask them to address the facts, they look at us with vacant eyes. They don't know what we're talking about.
They study us because their strategy is to pass as human. They hear us use the words - facts, evidence, substantiation. They lack the human capacity to understand what we mean. What they do is ignore our reference to facts, ignore our requests for them to supply facts, and hope we won't notice it's due to their lack of comprehension.
It is a trademark feature of the Bush Neocon administration, as former Wall Street Journal reporter and author Ron Suskind wrote in New York Times Magazine:
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
Nowhere does this mindset have more of a stranglehold, than in Ehud Olmert's Israeli Zionist administration, with its insistent and increasingly hysterical denial of the worsening Palestinian holocaust.
The war of words against Iran has also definitely intensified lately. And there are other things going on at the same time, so perhaps all these things are linked?
"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
We see this exact same brutal unblinking denial of reality when we study some of the rhetoric being issued from the mouth of Benjamin Netanyahu:
Drawing a direct analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu asserted Monday that the Iranian nuclear program posed a threat not only to Israel, but to the entire western world. There was "still time," however, to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, he said.
"It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs," Netanyahu told delegates to the annual United Jewish Communities General Assembly, repeating the line several times, like a chorus, during his address. "Believe him and stop him," the opposition leader said of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "This is what we must do. Everything else pales before this."
So perhaps we should pay more attention to the skillful adept of the "repeated lies will be accepted as truth" doctrine?
The more one looks, the more one finds that next to Netanyahu, Olmert is nothing but an amateur. Netanyahu has friends in high places - it seems he is high up on the psychopathic power elite hierarchy, with the requesite mindset to match.
If this is so, let's see if we can spot those who buttered his bread and sponsored his meteoric rise to the top of the Israeli political and economical scene. Along with economic achievements, we see his professional track record is characterized by an unusually large number of Intelligence ties. Quite exceptional for a 'bright and ambitious young man'.
21 Oct 1949 - Born in Tel-Aviv
1956 - 58, 1963 - 67 - Grows up in the U.S., where his father, the historian Professor Benzion Netanyahu, taught history. Later, mainstream sources will trace Netanyahu's so called 'philosophy' to his father, who was a proponent of the idea 'that the historic bitterness between Arab and Jew made for a seemingly intractable situation'.
1967 - 1972 - Returns to Israel in order to serve in the IDF in the years 1967-72, and reaches the rank of captain in the elite unit, "Sayeret Matkal", the fighting branch of the Israeli Intelligence Services. He participates in a number of missions including the Beirut Airport operation and the rescue of hijacked Sabena Airlines hostages.
One wonders if it wasn't an early rehearsal and stage preparation for Operation Entebbe.
1972 - 1976 - Studies in the U.S. and receives a first degree in Architecture and a second degree in Business Administration at M.I.T, and also studies political science at MIT and Harvard University.
Then he takes a position at the Boston Consulting Group - where his boss is Ira Magaziner, a later aide and policy advisor to President Clinton. Magaziner is best known for leading, along with Hillary Clinton, the failed 'Task Force to Reform Health Care' in the early Clinton administration.
04 July 1976 - His brother Jonathan (Yonni), regarded as something of a war hero having already been awarded the Medal of Distinguished Service in Yom Kippur, is killed in the course of Operation Entebbe. Recently released documents show that it was Shin Bet/Mossad cover operation. Netanyahu's brother was the leader of the assault, and the only Israeli military casualty of the raid.
Was his death a necessary sacrifice in order to inculcate in Israelis psyche Netanyahu's image as a brother of a hero?
1979 - Returns once again to Israel, leaving his blossoming career at prestigious consulting firm behind him; sets up the 'Jonathan Institute for the Study of Terrorism' and organises an international Anti-Terrorism Conference, which is attended by various high profile and powerful figures such as George Bush, George Shultz (U.S. Secretary to the treasury, and professor at the infamous Chicago Graduate School of Business), and Richard Perle (President Reagan's Assistant secretary of Defense). In this way he rapidly becomes established on the global stage, making key connections in politics, economics and the military.
After such apparent success he makes a surprising move and takes a senior position at Rim Industries (furniture manufacturer) in Jerusalem, as marketing manager.
Another bit of trivia: Shultz, who's considered to be Netanyahu's protégé, is called the father of Bush doctrine, which evidently advocates fabricating evidence and staging false flag operations in order to embark on so called 'preemptive wars'.
Today Shultz is the chairman of the JPMorgan Chase. The same JPMorgan that is a shareholder in the Federal Reserve, and the one who bought Bear Stearns for 2$ a share after it was funded up to $30 billion of Bear Stearns' less liquid assets.
1982 - Rises instantly through the diplomatic ranks to a highly visible position: he is invited by Israel's Washington Ambassador, Moshe Arens, to be his deputy.
It looks as though Arens was directed by the same people in the Reagan administration who attended Netanyahu's conference three years earlier. He was quoted saying:
"People got a good laugh when they heard I phoned a furniture factory to find a deputy. What sold me on Bibi was his organization of the anti-terror conference and the strong impression he made on American leaders who participated."
1984 - 1988 - Rapid political climb continues: he is appointed as Israel's ambassador to the UN, where he becomes a media figure, with regular TV appearances on Ted Koppel's Nightline and Larry King Live.
The Washington conference, held on June 24-27, 1984, was a mega-event. Some 36 experts on terrorism spoke during the four-day conference, including the self-described universal fascist Michael Ledeen, and many others from the U.S. neo-con stable who would later play an essential role in spreading the intelligence lies that were used for the invasion of Iraq.
Netanyahu continues to expand his circle of friends who later will play a major role in his election to the Prime Minister post.
[Stephen] Friedman, a 50-year-old attorney from Philadelphia, serves as the lawyer for the Likud Party in the United States. He is one of Netanyahu's oldest childhood pals and also part of whole new cast of American Jewish players that might be called the Friends of Bibi, or FOBB.
Like the celebrated inner circle surrounding Bill Clinton, Netanyahu's American friends, a small fraternity of influential and like-minded Jewish lawyers, businessmen, financiers and columnists, have been helping finance his ambitions and carrying Netanyahu's political water ever since he set his sights on the Israeli premiership in the early 1980s. [...]
FOBB can be divided into two distinct categories: his small inner circle of close male pals, some of whom date back to his high school days outside Philadelphia in the 1960s, and the somewhat larger second string of associates who met and bonded with Bibi while he served as Israel's deputy ambassador to Washington and ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s.[...]
One of those Netanyahu met at this time and brought into his inner circle was Merv Adelson, ex-husband of TV journalist Barbara Walters and former head of Lorimar studios.[...] Adelson became Netanyahu's Hollywood connection.
Another member of Netanyahu's inner circle is Ronald Lauder, a former U.S. ambassador to Austria and wealthy international businessman. [...] Lauder, 50, has hosted a number of gatherings at his Manhattan apartment, where he introduced Netanyahu to State Department officials, members of Congress, wealthy investors and financiers.
1988 - 1993 - After returning from the U.S. and acquiring powerful neocon allies, Netanyahu is elected to the 12th Knesset as Likud member and appointed as Deputy Foreign Minister and later the Prime Minister's spokesman.
His close ties with big-shots of the mainstream media turned out to be worthwhile. During the Gulf War he practically dominates CNN network's airtime.
According to a March 1991 story in the Washingtonian, a Palestine Liberation Organization official phoned CNN's headquarters in Atlanta during the first week of the war. "This Israeli has been on the air for more than half an hour," he fumed, referring to Netanyahu. "CNN is becoming a propagandist for the Israelis."
March 25, 1993 - Netanyahu elected as Likud Party Chairman and the party's candidate for Prime Minister.
1996 - 1999 - Acts as Israel's 9th Prime Minister.
By winning the election, Netanyahu surprised many who thought that pre-election favorite Shimon Peres was going to win. But it seems that his election wasn't exactly based on luck. Apart from being supported and helped behind the scenes by U.S. businessmen, lawyers and Hollywood moguls, there was one additional curious element, a wave of suicide bombing shortly before the election. This fact was considered as a main catalyst in Peres' downfall. As described by the National Review:
Before the assassination, Netanyahu was running neck and neck with Rabin in opinion polls. This despite the fact that Netanyahu had only a fraction of Rabin's enormous experience as a soldier and statesman. Netanyahu and his strategists were confident of victory. But after Rabin's death, Netanyahu at once plunged 20 to 30 points behind Peres. It took the slaughter of dozens of Israelis in a wave of Arab bomb attacks to switch the momentum back to Netanyahu, who had repeatedly warned of such attacks.
This makes an astounding preview of the events of 9/11, in which it also took an unprecedented attack on home soil with numerous casualties, to turn around Bush's failing popularity in the US. We see the telltale signs of the ubiquitous Mossad 'false flag' operation. As always, one has to ask "who benefits?" This opens up a horrific window into the possibilities of the psychopathic mindset: where lives are sacrificed without hesitation, in order to further one's own agenda.
But, like Bush's presidency, Netenyahu's reign as Prime Minister will be marked as a period of record levels of failure and embarrassment. Such was the failed assassination of Hamas leader Khalid Meshal. Considering that Hamas was a creation of Mossad and frequently used in order to maintain the myth of Palestinian bomber, we get a story with an additional manipulation twist.
The attack on Khalid Meshal by five or six Israeli agents disguised as Canadian tourists looked like of a rushed mission mounted without Mossad's usual meticulous preparation, suggesting someone high up ordered an immediate hit.[...]
[W]hat would killing Meshal have accomplished? His murder would certainly have triggered new Hamas bombings.[...] Two days before attempting to kill Meshal, Israel apparently received a message from Hamas offering a 10-year cease fire in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and ending Jewish settlements. Netanyahu claims he only got this exceptionally important message after the botched assassination. His supporters blame Mossad chief Danny Yatom for sitting on the message. Yatom denies it.
This is part of a furious battle of leaks raging between Mossad and Netanyahu's cabinet. Some Netanyahu supporters claim the Mossad hit was a rogue operation never authorized by the prime minister.
Mossad partisans leak back that it was all Netanyahu's harebrained idea - and that he's now trying to make Mossad chief Yatom fall guy for the fiasco. Other critics say a hard-line cabal inside Mossad is determined to thwart any peace with Palestinians - which is likely true.
Meanwhile, the failed plot has ignited a train of strange events. To divert blame from Israel, a former Canadian ambassador to Israel endangered his countrymen's lives by suggesting Canada was involved in the plot.
In another bizarre twist, while publically ordering Arafat to keep arresting Hamas members, Netanyahu freed from prison Hamas founder Sheik Yassin, and 70 other Hamas 'terrorists' in order to get his Mossad assassins back from Jordanian custody.
Apparently top psychopaths don't like amateurs, especially if it is one of their own. The failed assassination triggered harsh response from the White House, expressing dissatisfaction with Netanyahu's performance.
It is being called the worst fiasco in the history of Israel's once-vaunted intelligence service, the Mossad. It raises, once again, serious questions about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's mental fitness. It provoked unprecedented expressions of disgust from the Clinton administration --"we loathe him," one White House official remarked -- and left experienced observers to wonder what other disastrous pratfalls the Israeli leader has in store for the dying Middle East peace process.
Perhaps that might explain forced resignation of the agency's then chief, Danny Yatom after another bungled operation, this time in Switzerland in 1998. Netanyahu was eager to set the record right.
But this spy fever weirdness was only the tip of the iceberg. There was another curious story uncovered by Biranit Goren and Einat Berkovitch journalists from Ha'ir who tried to dig into Natanyahu's past.
They discovered that in 1987, Netanyahu applied for credit using his American social security number 020364537. There were four requests and each request applied with a different name: Benjamin Netanyahu, Benjamin Nitai, John Jay Sullivan and John Jay Sullivan, Jr.
Binyamin Netanyahu is the name Israel's current prime minister was given at birth and which he now uses. In June 1973, during his studies at MIT, Netanyahu submitted a petition to the Boston court, asking to change his name from Netanyahu to Nitai; "I prefer a shorter name", he wrote on the request form. The petition was approved, thus the second name has an explanation. The last two names, however, remain a mystery. Furthermore, the address attached to these names - somewhere in Malibu, California - does not exist. Who, then, is John Jay Sullivan?
Biranit Goren and Einat Berkovitch from Ha'ir tried to find out. They looked into Netanyahu's credit account. This file is supposed to hold information regarding bank accounts, loans, credit cards and so forth; yet, surprisingly, the file was empty. It is as if Netanyahu never had a debt, had never taken out a loan, and always paid his bills up front and in cash.
Goren and Berkovitch then attempted to examine Netanyahu's social security file, but were denied access. They did, however, find out that Netanyahu's file has a different classification than most. They were denied access not merely due to the 1974 privacy act, but because the file had a "confidential" classification. Goren and Berkovitch have explained that such a classification only applies to five categories of people: those who work for one of three federal agencies - FBI, CIA, IRS - or those who are considered to be terrorists or criminals. Since it is unlikely that Netanyahu fits the latter two categories, or that he worked for the IRS,it appears that he was on the payroll of a security agency - the CIA or FBI.
Obviously, an official explanation and denial were offered without delay, but the bad taste remained, especially when Netanyahu's Intelligence ties were popping up from all directions.
Benjamin Gilman, one of Netanyahu's closest allies in Congress, had close relations with Shabtai Kalmanovitch, 'a charming, tanned Russian-Israeli entrepreneur'. He was an operative for Mossad until 1988 when Mossad discovered that Kalmanovitch wasn't such a valuable asset as they thought. He was arrested in Tel Aviv and charged with being a KGB spy.
Perhaps the most secret and worrying ties concern what is supposedly a high-tech services company. Yediot Ahronot relates how Netanyahu wooed a local Likud leader. "He was invited by Netanyahu to a meeting in his office at Systematics in Ramat Gan. The head of the company, Oded Levental is a candidate for a financial post in the new government."
Systematics is at the core of serious research by American alternative publications, including the usually reliable Media Bypass. In short, the allegations are that the National Security Agency had handed Systematics stolen software called Promis that opened a trap door to the world's secret banking transactions. About 250 Americans, mostly politicians, had their illegal foreign accounts emptied of over $3.5 billion in the operation. It is claimed that Colin Powell dropped out of the presidential race after his account electronically vanished.
Leading figures in the operation included George Bush, Caspar Weinberger and two Arkansas attorneys, Vince Foster Jr. and Hillary Rodham Clinton on behalf of Clinton financier Jackson Stephens. The research invariably concludes that Foster was murdered because he knew too much about the scam.
A leading investigative writer, Sherman Skolnick, writes:
"Some contend Systematics is an NSA proprietary and spies on banks overseas. Can Systematics rightfully deny spying actually done by buffers or cut-outs between Systematics and NSA? Systematics, through a spokesperson, vigorously denies Foster assisted it in any spying on foreign banks but remains apparently silent on whether Hillary Rodham Clinton assisted Systematics in some nefarious activities."
Is it fair to ask why Systematics provided Netanyahu office space and if this was the sum total of its involvement with him?
The Economic angle: But having his hand in various clandestine operations was only part of his activities. In the position of Prime Minister he begins to implement a controversial free market economy program.
As discussed here he 'transferred the Israeli economy towards free market principles'. And when we refer to 'free market principles' we are talking about the very same Friedman Chicago School of Economics that has been used to systematically rape and pillage the entire planet, as Naomi Klein describes in 'The Shock Doctrine'
One of Netanyahu's immediate actions after taking the post was to introduce an aggressive policy of privatization backed by two economic think-tanks. One of the think tanks is Hoover Institution with George Shultz as one of his high profile conservatives.
By taking the road of mass privatization, Netanyahu mimicked his U.S. and British progenitors - Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
After being defeated by Ehud Barak in the 1999 election for Prime Minister, Netanyahu decided to 'retire' from politics. Perhaps he was requested to retreat into the background for a while in order to make preparations for the next round. He conveniently surfaced again right after 9/11.
12 September 2001 - In the aftermath of 9/11, Netanyahu starts to show his true colors. He can hardly contain his delight. Compare his reaction (as reported by the New York Times):
"It's very good." Then he edited himself: "Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel]."
to that of his Palestinian counterpart:
Yasir Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Authority, looked shaken as he appeared before reporters in Gaza to deplore "this terrible act." "We are completely shocked," Mr. Arafat said. "Completely shocked."
2002 - 2005 - In 2002 appointed as Minister of Foreign Affairs and then, in the course of 2003, as Minister of Finance.
07 July 2005 - During the London 7/7 bombings, again Netanyahu appears to be more than just a neutral bystander, though the relevant events were conspicuous only by their absence from the mainstream press. SoTT observed:
Guess where Rudolf Giuliani just happened to be on the morning of July 7th 2005? Rudy was lounging at the Great Eastern hotel just a few yards from Liverpool street station where one of the bombs went off. In the same Great Eastern hotel where Giuliani was staying, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange just happened to be hosting its economic conference. Guess who the keynote speaker was? Israel's then Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
As it turned out, Netanyahu never arrived at the Great Eastern Hotel because, as news reports in the days after July 7th informed us, Netanyahu had in fact received a warning from the Israeli embassy, (by way of the British Metropolitan police) that bombings were to occur and that he should stay in his hotel in Mayfair. Again, the official British government report makes no attempt to address how British police knew at least 6 minutes (probably longer) in advance that the bombings were to occur when, 'officially', British authorities were not even aware that they were dealing with bombs, believing that the explosions were the result of a power surge, until the bus bombing one hour after the first train explosion.
Undoubtedly, one of his friends in high places has tipped him off.
August 2005 - He resigns from Mr Sharon's cabinet in protest at Israel's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
May 2006 - His popularity among the ranks of the pathocracy (rather than the 'average Israeli'), and his affinity with Dick Cheney are clearly visible during AIPAC's annual meeting, as described by Rabbi Bruce Warshal:
Let's zero in on AIPAC. It is controlled by right-wing, rich Jewish neo-conservatives. As one manifestation of the truth of this assertion one merely has to look at its annual meeting this past month. At a time when Vice President Cheney's popularity has dropped below 20 percent, the 4,500 delegates to the AIPAC convention gave him a standing ovation for almost a minute before he even opened his mouth and then proceeded to give him 48 rounds of applause in a 35-minute speech. (As my colleague Leonard Fein pointed out, that's once every 43.7 seconds). Considering that 75 percent of American Jews voted for Kerry, it is obvious that these people are out of the mainstream of Jewish thought.
At the same conference, preceding the recent Israeli elections, these delegates were addressed by Ehud Olmert (Kadima), Amir Peretz (Labor) and Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) by video link from Israel. Olmert and Peretz received polite applause. The AIPAC delegates cheered enthusiastically for Netanyahu, especially when he presented his hard line that was overwhelmingly rejected by the Israeli electorate. Once a great organization, today AIPAC does not even represent the feelings of the average Israeli, let alone the average American Jew.
2005 - 2007 - From the political background, he continues to exert his significant influence for the Zionist cause. He visits London (causing considerable scandal over his funding) on a personal mission to patch up the media image in England during the bombing of Lebanon, In his own words:
"During my trip in August 2006, I worked 20 hours a day giving interviews, lecturing, meeting journalists, editors, political leaders and Jewish leaders to repel Arab propaganda."
And he appears to be very much in control, though at arm's length, within Israel too:
Although Olmert thinks he has out-maneuvered his great rival, in reality he has become Bibi's puppet. Aluf Benn, the leading political correspondent for Ha'aretz, wrote on Oct. 25:
"Olmert has adopted the positions of Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu [who] is steering the government policy from the opposition benches. The hands are the hands of Ehud, but the voice is the voice of Bibi. Now Olmert is carrying out the Netanyahu policy, point by point. The Prime Minister is sending veiled threats to Iran, burying the convergence plan [withdrawal from the Occupied Territories] and allowing accelerated construction in settlements. His social economic policy, too, was copied from Netanyahu...."
Israeli political observers say that Netanyahu is biding his time, while Olmert's own Kadima Party continues to be on the verge of splitting, with half its members likely to return to the Likud. The Labor Party, sitting at the same table with fascist Lieberman, could self-destruct before the year's end, these sources say, and the next government will be led by Bibi, with Lieberman by his side.
Well, he is not only 'biding his time', but is playing out his role within his particular circle of friends, which includes those in the U.S.:
"According to Israeli intelligence sources, since the end of the Lebanon war, Cheney and his neo-con allies have been working to bring into power their real candidate as Israel's Mussolini, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, chairman of the Likud Party and protégé of U.S. synarchist George Shultz."
August 14, 2007 - Reelected as chairman of the Likud.
So we reach recent times, and there are various related and converging threads. Everything points towards a consolidation of psychopathic power, for whatever may follow.
Netanyahu continues to play a significant role in 'foreign relations', which on the surface would be rather surprising, given that he is only the leader of the opposition, but makes perfect sense in light of his pathocratic tendencies and the nature of his 'friends'. Clearly, he has an important part to play in whatever plan is to unfold.
The present - Now we have the recent round of political scandals surrounding both Olmert and Netanyahu. What is interesting that while there was a gag order imposed on revealing any details about Olmert's investigation, the New York Post posted an exclusive with the name of this 'businessman' - Morris Talansky. The indications are that this is weakening Olmert's position, to leave the way clear for Netanyahu to regain power:
"It's the straw that broke the camel's back, considering all the previous investigations," said Eytan Cabel, secretary general of the Labour party said on Friday.[...]
The justice ministry said on Thursday that Olmert was being investigated over suspicions he unlawfully received payments from a foreign businessman during his time as mayor of Jerusalem and as industry minister. [...]
Olmert: "If the attorney general decides to file an indictment against me I shall resign immediately, even though I am not required to do so by law."
When a premier resigns it is up to the president, currently Shimon Peres, to pick a successor who can try to form a government. Failing that, early elections must be held. [...]
Former prime ministers Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu also faced corruption investigations, none of which ever led to indictments.
"Israel has no better friends in the world than Christian Zionists", Likud opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
"This is a friendship of the heart, a friendship of common roots, and a friendship of common civilization," Netanyahu told a conference of American Evangelicals in Jerusalem.
The event, which was organized by the San Antonio, Texas-based Christians United for Israel, drew 1,000 Israel supporters led by the conservative evangelical Pastor John Hagee, who has been a stalwart supporter of Israel for the past three decades.
Hagee on Sunday announced donations of $6 million to a number of Israeli causes and declared that Israel must remain in control of all of Jerusalem. [...]
Hagee has united evangelical Christian supporters of Israel in the US under one umbrella organization, dubbed the Christian Aipac, which focuses solely on support for Israel and does not work to convert Jews to Christianity.
Netanyahu's remarks come just days after the head of the left-leaning Reform Movement in the US Rabbi Eric Yoffie said that Israel should not deal with Christian Zionists like Hagee, calling him an "extremist" who rejected territorial compromise with the Palestinians and disparages Catholics.
Hagee has vehemently denied being anti-Catholic and said his remarks have been mischaracterized, and based on statements that were "totally false." The head of the Knesset's increasingly influential Christian Allies Caucus MK Benny Elon (National Union-National Religious Party), who has spearheaded Israel's relations with the evangelical Christian world, called Yoffie's politically based remarks "shameful," and called Hagee a "visionary man of courage" and an "outstanding spiritual leader." [text-cache]
It seems that every leader who comes to Israel, goes to see Netanyahu. It is not a normal thing in politics to have a meeting with the opposition leader every time someone makes a diplomatic visit. So who really calls the shots and runs things behind the curtain?
All the while, the warmongering rhetoric ramps up, with the continued propaganda campaign from both Israel and the U.S. over Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program (Saddam Hussein's WMD's, anyone?). Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter predicts that some kind of attack on Iran is a "virtual guarantee". The description of Iran as the world's "worst Hitlerite nightmare", does not bode well, when we consider the psychopath's penchant for projecting their own qualities onto their intended victim.
The future? - It looks that Netanyahu's rise to power will be the final step before the total collapse. Because he is a full blown unashamed psychopath. And just like a true psychopath, he cannot see that his action will lead to his own doom - and to everyone else's doom.
"The following question thus suggests itself: what happens if the network of understandings among psychopaths achieves power in leadership positions with international exposure? This can happen, especially during the later phases of the phenomenon. Goaded by their character, such people thirst for just that even though it would conflict with their own life interest... They do not understand that a catastrophe would ensue. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing."
Critics and challengers of Naomi Klein's work had better take a close look at her latest book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," before launching their attacks. This is one writer whose research and documentation are so exhaustive that would-be detractors will not only find her analysis to be dauntingly watertight, even if they don't share her views about the unnatural disasters enabled by free-market capitalism, but they might also discover that some of her source material seems strangely familiar.
That's because she took a page - or several hundred pages, rather - from just the sort of think tanks, government officials, scholars and publications that would seem to oppose her ideas most forcefully. But instead of trying to explain recurring socioeconomic patterns in the wake of various global crises by using a familiar "lefty" lens to justify her claims, Klein looks to the likes of Milton Friedman, the Cato Institute, Henry Kissinger and the Financial Times to bolster her argument about how "disaster capitalism" was cooked up decades ago and how it can explain what happened following Hurricane Katrina, Augusto Pinochet's 1973 Chilean coup, and more recent events like Burma's cyclone and the floods in the American Midwest.
The inner workings and key subscribers of disaster capitalism were exposed when the book first came out last September. Klein called in just before the June 24 paperback release of "The Shock Doctrine" to discuss with Truthdig's Associate Editor Kasia Anderson this scary piece of nonfiction, as well as the resource-rich Shock Doctrine Web site, and how she believes the notion of disaster capitalism is, unfortunately, still relevant at this moment.
Kasia Anderson: So, I have read your book and was very alarmed, and I think it was a nice wake-up call for me. But let's start out by talking a little bit about disaster capitalism, which is the central idea of your book. I was reading your L.A. Timesarticle from earlier this year and you say, "Over the last four years, I have been researching a little-explored area of economic history: the way that crises have paved the way for the march of the right-wing economic revolution across the globe. A crisis hits, panic spreads and the ideologues fill the breach, rapidly reengineering societies in the interests of large corporate players. It's a maneuver I call 'disaster capitalism.' " So that lays the groundwork a little bit.
Now, with all due respect to your keen perception, why do you think this is a "little-explored area of economic history" when you're looking at events that go back as far as five decades?
Naomi Klein:Well, I think largely because this is our contemporary history, and there hasn't been that much looking back at how ... the economic model that has been dominant since Reagan - how it has spread throughout the world, and when there is a look back, the people doing the looking back are the people who imposed the policies in the first place. It's been a victor's history, and it's been a history told by the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and there have been some important left-wing academics who have begun to provide a counter-history like David Harvey at CUNY University ... a couple of years ago [he] wrote "A Brief History of Neoliberalism," which was really the first alternative history of how these ideas swept the globe.
But, in terms of why the crisis has not been understood by popular audiences before - popular readers before - has to do with the fact that, not that this is a secret, but that it's a tactic that has been discussed exclusively in technocratic circles. So my sources on this are, you know, Washington conferences attended by central bank presidents, think tanks, the International Monetary Fund. And there is a kind of an armor that goes up around how highly technical and specialized the language is around these discussions - it's almost designed to make laypeople's eyes roll back into their heads.
So, I was fortunate to work with some wonderful researchers, graduate students, who were working in these areas of researching World Bank policies, and came across this sort of cache of literature, of technocratic literature, and we found the smoking-gun quotes like John Williamson, who was the man who coined the term the Washington consensus, a very powerful Washington economist, admitting that there had never been a case of a developing world country accepting the Washington consensus without a crisis, and he gave a name for this, he called it "The Crisis Hypothesis." And it turns out that there had been all these studies conducted by think tanks, by academic economists, studying the interrelationship between what they call deep crisis and deep reform. And once again, if you didn't know what you were looking for, you wouldn't necessarily read a paper with that title, you know?
Anderson: Yeah.
Klein:But once I knew what I was looking for, I started to see it all over the place.
Anderson:So, can you briefly walk us through how a seemingly politically unrelated disaster, like a natural disaster, creates the condition for economic shock therapy and how it plays out from there?
Klein:Yeah, I think what this comes out of is a profound understanding that the more radical pieces of the right-wing economic program like privatizing Social Security or privatizing water just don't enjoy popular support, and that creates a problem in a democracy - it doesn't create a problem in a dictatorship, because you can do it anyway in a dictatorship.
Anderson: Right.
Klein:In fact, it was only dictatorships that were willing to impose these policies for the first decade in the '70s. It was Pinochet's Chile, Videla's Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay under military regimes that experimented with Chicago-school economics. It wasn't until the '80s that democratic governments started imposing them. And that's when Milton Friedman wrote this sentence that I quote in the book: "Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change, and when that crisis occurs, the change that occurs depends on the ideas that are lying around."
And I think that phrase, "ideas that are lying around," is really key to understanding how this works. Because it's essentially a mission statement for the Washington think tanks, which Friedman was tremendously instrumental in building and inspiring and supporting. And, you know, what we saw in the '70s and early '80s was an explosion of right-wing think tanks whose mission statement really was to get the ideas ready for when the next crisis hits. And in some cases, what we see from a lot of these think tanks is that they also create atmospheres of crisis.
Just for fun, I would look at the list of papers published by the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, looking for how many times the word crisis appears in a paper - "the coming crisis in Medicare," "the coming crisis in Social Security" - so, they really specialize in claiming that countries are just doomed unless they follow this set of unwanted reforms.
But, to answer your question about natural disasters, the think tanks are instrumental in having the ideas ready, and the best example to me is Hurricane Katrina ...
Anderson:Yeah.
Klein:... because the levees broke, and the state - all three levels of government failed - municipal, state, federal. And really, the whole thing was an indictment of this very ideology. Everyone was saying, "Where is the government? Where's the government when you need it?" And maybe this whole idea of vilifying the state wasn't such a great idea after all. And even people like Jonah Goldberg were saying, you know, "Where's big government when you need it?"
And I think a lot of people assumed that Katrina would be a wake-up call, an ideological wake-up call. There was one writer who said it should be for the neocons, the breaking of the levees should be for the neocons what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Communists. And you know what, it should have been, but it wasn't, and it's for two reasons: One, progressives were tentative and unwilling to really, I think, fill the breach with ideas of our own for how to reconstruct New Orleans in a completely different way, in a much more democratic way, and also to talk about global warming when there was a feeling of, you know, we don't want to be. ... You often heard people say ... "This isn't a time for politics."
Anderson:Right.
Klein: Well, meanwhile, at the Heritage Foundation, two weeks after the levees broke, they had a meeting - and we have the minutes from this meeting, which we can link to. ...
Klein:Yeah, yeah - we definitely should link to this one. The heading on the document is. ... Well, first of all, the people who attended the meeting were from a variety of right-wing think tanks, as well as the Republican Study Group - highly placed Republican congresspeople. And they came up with 32 free-market solutions for Hurricane Katrina. And it was everything from give parents school vouchers instead of rebuilding the public schools; mixed-use housing instead of repairing the public housing; drill in ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] ...; build more oil refineries. I mean, it was just the wish list!
And so what you see there is just, you know, the readiness of the right - aided by these think tanks, funded by multinational corporations and the richest families in the United States - to seize on a crisis that they themselves created with their ideology to push for more of the same. I mean, Katrina was a catastrophe, the flooding of New Orleans was a catastrophe created by heavy weather linked to global warming, because the increase in category 5 hurricanes is directly linked to warming ocean temperatures, and weak infrastructure, which is linked to the systematic neglect of the public sphere as a result of the campaign to destroy the New Deal.
And what is their solution? It's more fossil fuels ... and destroying the public infrastructure altogether. And the fact is much of this has happened. The public housing in New Orleans is being destroyed. The hospitals - the public hospital in New Orleans is still not open, Charity Hospital. The school system ... has been handed over to charter schools.
Anderson: So you would say that think tanks having these ideas lying around is kind of a way of cuing each other with their inside language to potential future opportunities?
Klein:Well, I mean, the ideas are the same no matter what the crisis is. They just get rebranded to meet the crisis, right? So, suddenly privatizing Social Security is an economic stimulus to deal with the recession. And suddenly, you know, school vouchers are part of reconstructing from a hurricane. It's the same ideas. So, it's easy to have them lying around, because you've got the same answers to every problem.
And we're seeing it now with this huge push, led by [Newt] Gingrich, now picked up by Bush and McCain, to deal with the cost of high gas prices by drilling offshore, and they want to drill in ANWR - Gingrich does, and a lot of the right-wing think tanks. So whatever the crisis is, it's an opportunity to just push harder for the same old policies that they haven't been able to get through without a crisis. ... As soon as ... people started to really talk about recession, [Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson started talking about privatizing Social Security - a huge piece of the Bush platform that they could not get through without a crisis.
Anderson: I could see how maybe some followers of Milton Friedman might say you're drumming up conspiracy theories, but it's hard to argue with the evidence that you're presenting here and in your book. So, what do you say, or what might you say, to critics who think you're making connections and seeing deliberate actions on the part of these governments that just aren't there?
Klein: Well, everything in my book is documented. And calling me a conspiracy theorist is just a political strategy. It's not actually an argument - it's a way to not have an argument. It's an argument avoidance strategy. And, you know, I'm really careful not to make any claims that I can't source. And my sources are the right-wing economists themselves, which is what I think drives them most crazy. I mean, one of my most favorite reviews for the book was a negative review in the Financial Times where he says, "The worst thing she does is quote the Financial Times to bolster her argument."
Anderson:Consider the source.
Klein: It's true! I found the Financial Times enormously [helpful]. ... And, you know, I don't quote other "lefty," you know, analysts to support my claims, much as I may enjoy reading their writing. That's not what's supporting this argument. Now, I think there is a real pushback now from the true, you know, hard-core Friedman fanatics, like the Cato Institute has published an attack paper on the book, and ... Reason [magazine] has sort of an unnatural obsession and so on.
But this is really about the Friedman legacy. ... It's not really about my book, because my book really isn't about Milton Friedman. My book talks about where Friedman fit into large historical forces. And I'm very clear in the book that if Milton Friedman hadn't played this role, somebody else would have let the counterrevolution against the New Deal, because it wasn't just his idea - it was a revolt of the elites who were tired of big trade unions, and they were tired of paying high taxes. It was a pushback after many, many victories from the left.
And the University of Chicago, for various reasons, became ground zero for that pushback, for that counterrevolution. And Milton Friedman, because he is a tremendous popularizer, really led the way and played an important historical role, meeting with many political leaders, acting as their adviser.
But this isn't about him. And, for instance, in this Cato Institute background paper, the writer talks a lot about how Milton Friedman only went to Chile once and met with Augusto Pinochet once, you know, that hardly constitutes influence. Well, first of all, I make that clear in my book that he only went there once, but the whole point of those three chapters is that there was a massive program that was started by the U.S. State Department to bring hundreds of Latin American students to the University of Chicago to study.
Anderson: Right, the exchange program.
Klein:Yeah, and then to go back to Chile and take up top positions in Pinochet's government as finance minister, head of the Central Bank. So, this is so much bigger than Friedman, and the response is only focused on Friedman. And it's only focused on redeeming his name. And ... the truth is that the far right doesn't have, or the far economic right, doesn't have a lot of gurus, right ... [they] don't have a lot of heroes like this. There's Reagan ... but intellectual heroes - there really aren't many, right?
Anderson: Right.
Klein: I mean, who - Ayn Rand? It's a thin bunch. And Friedman and his family are really quite obsessed with legacy. In one of his last interviews - I just saw a clip of it on the Cato Institute Web site - he talks about how the real test of his influence is not what people think of him now but what they'll think of him in 25 years. So, there was, you know, a great deal of consciousness about securing a place in history. And when Milton Friedman died in 2006, it seemed that his place was pretty secure, I mean, the obituaries and memorials were just across-the-board hagiography. And that's changing, you know, and that's threatening. And so now there's this pushback that I think is really not about the economic legacy of these policies but much more about a man and his fans and his family wanting to protect their version of the role he played in history.
And what's interesting is that ... the fiercest fight is actually happening right now at the University of Chicago, where it was announced three weeks ago that there's going to be a Milton Friedman Institute - a $200-million Milton Friedman Institute - to carry his legacy forward, and it was launched by Gary Becker, who was one of his students and a real disciple - a true Chicago-school ideologue who still teaches at the school. And what's interesting is that there's been a little bit of a rebellion of academics at the University of Chicago. And more than 100 of these professors, faculty members, have signed a protest letter talking about how it's already so difficult for them ... and these are not economists - they're anthropologists, they're historians, political scientists ... how difficult it is for them to travel in the global South, like in Latin America and Africa, and be associated with the Chicago School of Economics, because it is seen as having done so much damage around the world. This is really unprecedented - the idea that Milton Friedman's name would be seen as a liability at his own alma mater!
And what's striking to me is, when I read the letter, is that, you know, at the height of the Pinochet controversy in the '70s, when Orlando Letelier accused Milton Friedman of being complicit in the human rights abuses and Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize, there was like a sort of flurry of protests, but only three professors at the time signed their names to this protest letter. So, even at the height of these huge debates about torture, only three people sign their names, but now in 2008, more than 100 faculty members at the University of Chicago are willing to sign their names.
Anderson: Do you think it was out of fear before - or maybe losing their position, at the lower end of the crisis scale?
Klein:Well, I don't know, I think it still would be risky, right?
Anderson:Yeah, sure.
Klein:I mean, especially because this is a $200-million, you know, endowed gift to the university that it's easy to fundraise for precisely because Milton Friedman's policies are so very profitable! And, you know, in this day and age, it's actually really rare for any building to be named after an academic, you know.
Anderson: Mmm-hmm.
Klein:Usually they're named after corporations or donors. So, I mean, it says something about Milton Friedman in a sense that ... I think that it's because he has been such a gift to corporate America that corporate America is willing to give back.
Anderson:In the form of a building.
Klein:Yeah.
Anderson:Now, speaking of more recent events - on your Shock Doctrine Web site I've been following updates and stories about more recent crises and catastrophes, and I thought of you yesterday because I read a headline about President Bush visiting flood-damaged Iowa and saying, "You'll come back better!" from the damage and the floodwaters. So can you talk a little bit about other events that have happened since the release of your book and contextualize them according to your ideas?
Klein: Well, first of all, always be afraid when George Bush says he's going to build back better, because we've heard that line before. What happens after disasters is that - it's not mysterious - what we need to do is look at what the pre-existing agenda was, right?
Anderson: Yeah.
Klein:And what was it that the business lobby in any given area wanted to do but couldn't because of people - because of people being there to defend their interests. And it's a pretty good bet that those ideas will immediately resurface after the crisis hits and when people are least able to organize an effective opposition. The most dramatic example of this is right now in Burma. There was recently a piece in The Washington Post about how the Burmese regime immediately started parceling out the highly fertile land of the Irrawaddy Delta, which was the hardest-hit region by the cyclone, to their cronies, and just essentially treating the disaster ... in the same way the tsunami was treated - as if it cleared the land and was now free to be parceled out. ...
Anderson:To fancy resorts.
Klein:Yeah, or more profitable agribusiness companies and industrial fishing because that area - which is Burma's rice bowl, the most fertile agricultural land - was like the coasts of Sri Lanka, was inhabited by small-scale farmers and fishing people. They were in the way. And it was an immediate shock doctrine move.
The other thing, of course, that generals did was use the disorientation and chaos to push through this constitutional referendum, which would have been, according to Burmese activists - it would've been a focal point for a new wave of protests after the protests had been so brutally repressed last September. But of course, there was no chance of that happening in the midst of the disaster. So that's a pretty classic example of what I write about in the book - a really tragic one.
You know, China is a really interesting example, because, I think. ... One of the things I write about in the book is that the crises are volatile, and they can go either way, and the right has developed this shock doctrine strategy to have their ideas ready and move immediately when a crisis hits precisely because the fear is that the left will move - that it will unleash forces that are quite damaging.
Milton Friedman developed his crisis philosophy in response to watching how progressives responded to the Great Depression. As far as Milton Friedman was concerned, everything went wrong with the response to the Great Depression, because that was what created the New Deal; it was what created all the social programs that his ideological movement has been bent on dismantling for the past half-century.
So, he was well aware that these sort of market shocks can go in progressive directions, and there's many cases of this. One example is Mexico in 1985 where there was an earthquake - terrible earthquake hit Mexico City. But what happened was that the buildings that immediately fell apart, immediately collapsed, were overwhelmingly public housing, housing for poor people. And buildings right next to those public housing buildings - privately owned or government buildings - sustained minimal damage.
So what the earthquake showed was what people suspected already, which was that the government had been cutting corners in building homes for poor people, that they hadn't respected safety codes, that they had probably taken all kinds of bribes along the way. And it launched a democracy movement in Mexico that ultimately unseated the PRI - the 60-year rule of the PRI. And there's a whole analysis in Mexico about how everything started with that earthquake, and there's a book I read while I was researching "The Shock Doctrine" called "Cracking Open Mexico" that talks about the role of the earthquake.
So, if we look at what's happening in [China's] Sichuan province, it's quite striking, because you have this same phenomenon with the schools, where many schools have collapsed - an estimated 10,000 children were killed in the earthquake. And you have all these photographs of a school that just collapsed completely right next to a building that's standing intact. And then you have the rage of the parents, and you have this added factor in China which is that the state told these parents that they could only have one child. That was a state policy. And you have these children who represent the hope for six adults - the grandparents and the parents - and now the state that forced these parents to have one child now appears to not have taken care of that child, neglected that child. And, you know, there's something extremely powerful about the rage of the parent with nothing left to lose. ...
Anderson: I've seen those photos.
Klein:Amazing, right?
Anderson:Yeah.
Klein:So, China could end up being a counter-example to the shock doctrine, where I think the predictable response is what the Chinese government has already said, you know, we're going to build back better, with even bigger factories, you know, and they've been very open about this, and we should expect nothing less. China's economic development model is extraordinarily land-hungry. Any land that is cleared they will obviously redesign, and they will put to the use of their vision of economic development. So, that wouldn't be a surprise if that happened. They pretty much do that anyway.
But what would be really interesting is if this kick-started a democracy movement in China, and I don't think it's out of the question, because China's in a really tough position right now in terms of timing with the Games. We are seeing repression and a locking down of critical coverage of the earthquake in the Chinese press, but I really feel like there's only so much they can do. I mean, the Games are in two months, and I think after the crackdown in Tibet, they're very wary of more backlash.
Anderson: What do you think about what's going to happen in the Midwest? Any prognostications?
Klein:You know, I don't have any yet. What do you think?
Anderson:Well, I think that there will be parts of big cities that might be hard-hit, and that might find themselves restructured differently later. I don't know too much about the city layouts of these places that were affected most, like Cedar Rapids, places like that. So, I'm interested, in kind of a morbid way, unfortunately, to see if something like what's gone on in New Orleans and other places that you describe in your book - if that's going to be the case. ...
Klein:Well, I think that ... what's gonna happen is that it's intersecting with the global food crisis and the fact that the price[s] of crops are at record highs right now, because of scarcity, and the agribusiness companies like Monsanto and Cargill are reporting record profits in the midst of a food crisis. And I think there will be more land grabs; I think that the few small-scale farmers, independent farmers, that are left are probably going to be gobbled up.
Anderson:Are you at all optimistic about a possible regime change in the U.S., if a Democrat in the White House would, in fact, represent this ... ?
Klein:You know, I'm optimistic about the possibility of social movements in the U.S. demanding a change in ideology. I'm optimistic because I've been blown away by the responses I've been getting from the book and just how receptive people are to talking about systems as opposed to just people. And I feel like the electoral campaigns - even though [Barack] Obama's campaign has been inspiring in many ways, it's also been a way of not talking about politics at a moment when we have so many urgent issues calling out for real policy debates. And instead we have been stuck in the political equivalent of "American Idol," right?
So, my optimism is entirely contingent on whether we can build counter-movements of the type that generated the New Deal, because I don't really think it's about the man in power. I think if we look at Obama's economic inclinations, this is not where he's prone to take risks. I think he's prone to take some risks with foreign policy much more than with domestic economic policy.
Anderson: Well, I think that just about does it for me. We will certainly direct our readers and listeners to your Shock Doctrine Web site to look at all the documents and also all the updates. ...
Klein:Great. I'm so pleased that this is happening. Thank you.
Anderson: Yeah, me too, and thanks so much for your time - I've really enjoyed talking to you.
Klein: My pleasure.
Additional links:
Klein's key resources from her book are archived and updated on The Shock Doctrine Web site.
See how disaster capitalism is still figuring into current events in the news.
Also, check out the extensive collection of Shock Doctrine documents archived on the site.
Watch "The Shock Doctrine" film by Klein and director Alfonso Cuarón:
Excellent presentation of the core ideas of Dr. Lobaczewski's ground-breaking work. I heartily recommend all of Time for a Change's articles found at Democratic Underground. Oh yeah. The trolls did come out for, but the DU folks are a wise bunch. The critters didn't really get up to much of anything and have since slunk off.
A pathocracy is a social movement, society, nation, or empire wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people. The pathological minority habitually perpetrates evil deeds on its people and/or other people.
Almost everyone knows that pathocracies have been responsible for tremendous death and destruction throughout history. What less people are willing to acknowledge is that pathocracies continue to perpetrate death and destruction today. Billions of people throughout the world live in perpetual poverty and hunger or lack access to safe water, despite the fact that the resources exist to provide adequate food and safe water to all of the world's citizens. Millions of others are perpetually exposed to the horrors of war.
Therefore, it would behoove us all to understand how pathocracies develop and perpetrate their damage, and how to recognize them. A book on that subject, titled Political Ponerology - A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, was written by Andrew M. Lobaczewski. Lobaczewski, a psychiatrist, began the research that eventually led to the book more than half a century ago, in collaboration with other researchers, all who are all now dead. The research was conducted in secret, as the researchers were all victims of Joseph Stalin's totalitarian regime, which obviously provided fodder for much of the book's content.
I've previously posted twice on DU on this subject, drawing heavily from Lobaczewski's book. My first post was titled "Political Ponerology: A Science of Evil Applied for Political Purposes". In that post I discussed human evil and its effects, why many people find evil so difficult to recognize, and psychopaths in position of great power.
In my second post on the subject, titled "The Role of Ideologies in the Development of Evil Regimes (Pathocracies)", I briefly summarized the first post and emphasized the role of ideology in the development of pathocracies. The main thing to understand about that is that the ideology serves as a mask, to hide the actual intentions of the group, and as a motivational factor for group members. Lobaczewski explains:
Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one's conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one's own or those of others. If such a ponerogenic union could be stripped of its ideology, nothing would remain except psychological and moral pathology, naked and unattractive. Such stripping would of course provoke "moral outrage", and not only among the members of the union.
In this post I go into much more detail about the development of pathocracies (referred to in Lobaczewski's book as the ponerogenic process). Since much of the material in the book is somewhat abstract, my goal here is to relate the principles he discusses to current day (and past) examples, in order to help make them more understandable. Lobaczewski speaks both in terms of small group processes and large scale (macrosocial) processes. It seems that most of the basic principles are similar regardless of the scale of the process.
An overview of the development of pathocracy
I thought it best to start with an overview and then come back to the specifics. This is what Lobaczewski has to say about the general process of a society regressing into a pathocracy:
Disparagement of one's "inferiors"
Children of the privileged classes learn to repress from their field of consciousness the uncomfortable ideas suggesting that they and their parents are benefiting from injustice against others. Such young people learn to disqualify and disparage the moral and mental values of anyone whose work they are using to over-advantage.
When you read this, think of the slave masters who justified their treatment of their slaves by explaining to their children that white supremacy over black people is natural because black people are inherently inferior or uncivilized. And think of the fact that the deaths of over a million Iraq civilians resulting from our invasion and occupation of their country have barely entered our national discussion. Some Harvard economists explain the long-lasting effects of racism in our country with respect to current economic policies:
Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor. Since minorities are highly over-represented amongst the poorest Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute particularly minorities. The opponents of redistribution have regularly used race based rhetoric to fight left-wing policies... America's troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.
Growing hysteria
Lobaczewski continues his description of the initial stages of developing pathocracy:
Young minds thus ingest habits of subconscious selection and substitution of data, which leads to a hysterical conversion economy of reasoning. They grow up to be somewhat hysterical adults who... transmit their hysteria to the next generation... The hysterical patterns for experience and behavior grow and spread downwards from the privileged classes until crossing the boundary.
Does that remind you of the state of Congress under Republican rule, and the general attitude of radical conservatives? Alan Wolf describes the mood of conservatives over the last couple of decades:
Conservatives have viewed politics as an extension of war, complete with no-holds barred treatment of the enemy, iron-clad discipline in the ranks, cries of treason against those who do not support the effort with full-throated vigor, and total control over any spoils won.
Contempt for truth and objective thinking
Lobaczewski continues:
When the habits of subconscious selection and substitution of thought-data spread to the macrosocial level, a society tends to develop contempt for factual criticism and to humiliate anyone sounding an alarm. Contempt is also shown for other nations which have maintained normal thought-patterns and for their opinions.
Lobaczewski's description of societal disintegration under pathocracies reminds me of the ever expanding income gap in our country, and should serve as a warning that things can get a whole lot worse for us than they are now:
The feeling of social links and responsibility toward others disappear, and the society in question splinters into groups ever more hostile to each other... This opens the door for activation of the pathological factors of a various nature to enter in... A huge bloody tragedy can be the result....
Individual psychopath
Now let's consider the process from the standpoint of the individual psychopath. Laura Knight-Jadczyk, the editor of Lobaczewski's book, quotes Martha Stout, noting that the defining characteristic of a psychopath is a lack of conscience:
Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.
The defining talents of the average psychopath
Most psychopaths don't have much general intelligence or even any particular skills of a productive nature. But the ones who pose great danger to society are quite good at manipulating people and political infighting. Lobaczewski explains:
Once the process of poneric transformation... has begun and advanced sufficiently, they perceive this fact with almost infallible sensitivity: a circle has been created wherein they can hide their failings and psychological differentness, find a world where they are in power and all those other, "normal people", are forced into servitude.
This reminds me of a biography of Joseph Stalin. One by one, over a period of several years, he isolated and the eliminated all of his minions who posed the slightest danger to his unchallengeable power. So by 1937 Stalin's purges had eliminated all of the original Russian Communist Party but himself.
The role of sycophancy
Can you imagine John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, or David Petraeus going against the will of GeCorge Bush on any matter? Of course not. Their positions of high power depend entirely on putting all their energy into anticipating the needs of and pleasing the "leader". George Bush started out the same way. As governor of Texas, all his efforts went into pleasing his corporate cronies. In return, they rewarded him handsomely by ensuring his material wealth and serving as a power base for his climb to the presidency. Lobaczewski describes the process:
They initially perform subordinate functions in such a movement and execute the leaders' orders, especially whenever something needs to be done which inspires revulsion in others. GTheir evident zealotry and cynicism gives rise to criticism on the part of the union's more reasonable members, but it also earns the respect of some its more extreme revolutionaries. They thus find protection among those people who earlier played a role in the movement's ponerization, and repay the favor with compliments or by making things easier for them. Thus they climb up the organizational ladder, gain influence, and almost involuntarily bend the contents of the entire group to their own way of experiencing reality and to the goals derived from their deviant nature.
Psychopaths after they've climbed to the pinnacle of power
Lobaczewski explains that psychopaths always feel terribly insecure, even after they've climbed to the pinnacle of power:
The pathological social structure gradually covers the entire country, creating a "new class" within the nation. This privileged class of deviants feels permanently threatened by the "others", i.e. by the majority of normal people. Neither do the pathocrats entertain any illusions about their personal fate should there be a return to the system of normal man.... Pathocrats never possessed any solid practical talent, and the time frame of their rule eliminates any residual possibilities of adapting to the demands of normal work. If the laws of normal man were to be reinstated, they and theirs could be subjected to judgment... they would be threatened by a loss of freedom and life, not merely a loss of position and privilege. Since they are incapable of any kind of sacrifice, the survival of a system which is the best for them becomes a moral imperative. Such a threat must be battled by means of any and all cunning and implemented with a lack of scruples with regard to those other "inferior" people that can be shocking in its depravity.
In other words, we should all be very worried about the lengths to which the Bush administration will go to ensure that either a Republican with benign intentions towards the Bush clique is installed as our next president or that no elections take place at all.
Turning reality upside down
As previously noted, psychopaths of any stripe or level of power cannot afford to allow others to perceive the reality of their character. Therefore, a prerequisite of attaining power is to throw everyone else into a state of confusion. Some of them are quite good at that. Lobaczewski explains:
Any human group affected by the process described herein is characterized by its increasing regression from... the ability to perceive psychological reality.... A ponerological analysis of this process indicates that pressure is being applied to the more normal part of the association by pathological factors present in certain individuals who have been allowed to participate in the group because the lack of good psychological knowledge has not mandated their exclusion....
An extensive and active indoctrination system is built, with a suitably refurbished ideology constituting the vehicle or Trojan horse for the purpose of pathogolizing the thought process of normal individuals and society. The goal - forcing human minds to incorporate pathological experiential methods and thought patterns, and consequently accepting such rule - is never openly admitted.
Thus it was that Hitler needed his Goebbels to indoctrinate the German people into a way of thinking that was conducive to Nazi attainment and maintenance of power. Thus it is that the Bush administration uses taxpayer money to provide us with propaganda disguised as news. And thus it is that we repeatedly hear "We have to fight them over there if we don't want to fight them here", while our confused and sycophantic corporate news media rarely challenges such inanely stupid assertions.
I often wonder if this phenomenon also partially explains why Congress is so reluctant to proceed with impeachment. Could it be that they are so confused or intimidated that they can't differentiate reality from the fairy tales spewed out by the Bush administration?
The marginalization and exclusion of normal people
Psychopaths cannot tolerate the presence of normal people because normal people are not at all conducive to their plans. Lobaczewski explains:
Rigorous selective measures of a clearly psychological kind are applied to new members. So as to exclude the possibility of becoming sidetracked by defectors, people are observed and tested to eliminate those characterized by excessive mental independence or psychological normality... Individuals manifesting doubt or criticism are subject to paramoral condemnation... Leadership discusses opinions and intentions which are psychologically and morally pathological....
A mysterious disease is already raging inside the union. The adherents of the original ideology feel ever more constricted by powers they do not understand; they start fighting with demons and making mistakes....
If such a movement triumphs by revolutionary means and in the name of freedom, the welfare of the people, and social justice, this only brings about further transformation of a governmental system thus created into a macrosocial pathological phenomenon. Within this system, the common man is blamed for not having been born a psychopath, and is considered good for nothing except hard work, fighting and dying to protect a system of government he can neither sufficiently comprehend nor ever consider to be his own. An ever-strengthening network of psychopathic and related individuals gradually starts to dominate, overshadowing the others. Characteropathic individuals who played an essential role in ponerizing the movement and preparing for revolution, are also eliminated. Adherents of the revolutionary ideology are unscrupulously "pushed into a counter-revolutionary position". They are now condemned for "moral" reasons in the name of new criteria whose paramoralistic essence they are not in a position to comprehend. Violent negative selection of the original group now ensues.... It remains characteristic for the entire future of this macrosocial pathological phenomenon.
Even though psychopaths are greatly outnumbered in the general population (about 4% - 6%), the development of pathocracies are an all too frequent phenomenon in world history. Clearly, normal individuals frequently fail to adequately counteract the problem. One of their biggest mistakes is to adopt an uncritical attitude towards psychopaths, as Lobaczewski explains:
Thus, whenever we observe some group member being treated with no critical distance, although he betrays one of the psychological anomalies familiar to us, and his opinions being treated as at least equal to those of normal people, although they are based on a characteristically different view of human, we must derive the conclusion that this human group is affected by a ponerogenic process and if measures are not taken the process shall continue to its logical conclusion.
As I've previously noted, exposure to psychopaths is frequently a very disorienting event for normal people. They can respond in one of three ways: adopt the alternate reality of the group; leave; or, remain confused and in a state of psychological terror. Lobaczewski describes the situation:
Once a group has inhaled a sufficient dose of pathological material to give birth to the conviction that these not-quite-normal people are unique geniuses, it starts subjecting its more normal members to pressure characterized by corresponding paralogical and paramoral elements. For many people, such pressure of collective opinion takes on attributes of a moral criterion; for others, it represents a kind of psychological terror ever more difficult to endure... Individuals with a more normal sense of psychological reality leave after entering into conflict with the newly modified group; simultaneously, individuals with various psychological anomalies join the group and easily find a way of life there.
What normal members of the group need
Lobaczewski explains what normal people need under such circumstances (and this applies for whole societies as well as small groups):
What they need is good psychological information in order to find the path of reason and measure. Based on a ponerologic understanding of their condition, psychotherapy could provide rapid positive results.
And I will add here that this is why so many of us DUers love people like Dennis Kucinich (who publicly told us the obvious but unmentionable reason for the Iraq War), Keith Olbermann, Naomi Klein, and Naomi Wolf. Many or most normal people sense that something terrible is happening, but they just can't bring themselves to acknowledge it even to themselves. But when some brave soul has the courage to announce that the emperor has no clothes after all, that helps to bring a sense of reality back to anyone who has the courage to listen. As an example, here is a quote from one of Keith Olbermann's special comments:
Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise... it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers... In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental compact between yourself and the majority of this nation's citizens... you ceased to be the president of the United States... You became merely the president of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party. And this is too important a time, sir, to have a commander in chief who puts party over nation. This has been, of course, the gathering legacy of this administration...
Our leaders in Congress ... must now live up to those standards which echo through our history: ... Impeach - get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our democracy, away from the helm.
The terror phase
As a society regresses to pathocracy, it is inevitable that at some point the majority of normal members of society will catch on. The salient question is whether they will do so before it is too late to prevent massive and irreparable harm. Lobaczewski explains this process:
The rejected majority and the very forces which naively created such power to begin with, start mobilizing against the block of psychopaths who have taken over. Ruthless confrontation with these forces is seen by the psychopathic block as the only way to safeguard the long-term survival of the pathological authority. We must thus consider the bloody triumph of a pathological minority over the movement's majority to be a transitional phase during which the new contents of the phenomenon coagulate. The entire life of a society thus affected then becomes subordinated to deviant thought criteria....
To mitigate the threat to their power, the pathocrats must employ any and all methods of terror and exterminatory policies against individuals known for their patriotic feelings. Individuals lacking the natural feeling of being linked to normal society become irreplaceable...
The generals knew that their hold on power depended on Chileans being truly terrified...The trail of blood left behind over those four days came to be known as the Caravan of Death. In short order the entire country had gotten the message: resistance is deadly... In all, more than 3,200 people were disappeared or executed, at least 80,000 were imprisoned, and 200,000 fled the country.
Nor was that the end of it. Over the next several months and years, anyone whose independent thoughts were considered to pose a danger to Pinochet's regime were systematically tortured or eliminated.
Why pathocracy cannot be permanent
Pathocracies cannot be permanent, because of their many inherent deficiencies. Lobaczewski explains:
The achievement of absolute domination by pathocrats in the government of a country cannot be permanent since large sectors of the society become disaffected by such rule and eventually find some way of toppling it. This is part of the historical cycle. Such a system of government has nowhere to go but down. In a pathocracy, all leadership positions must be filled by individuals with corresponding psychological deviations... However, such people constitute a very small percentage of the population and this makes them more valuable to the pathocrats. Their intellectual level or professional skills cannot be taken into account, since people representing superior abilities are even harder to find.....
Under such conditions, no area of social life can develop normally... Pathocracy progressively paralyzes everything. Normal people must develop a level of patience... pathocracy progressively intrudes everywhere and dulls everything. Thus, the pathological minority's attempts to retain power will be threatened by the society of normal people, whose criticism keeps growing....
The entire effort only results in producing a general stifling of intellectual development and deep rooted protest against hypocrisy. The authors and executors of this program are incapable of understanding that the decisive factor making their work difficult is the fundamental nature of normal human beings - the majority. The entire system of force, terror, and forced indoctrination, or, rather, pathologization, thus proves effectively unfeasible... Reality places a question mark on their conviction that such methods can change people in such fundamental ways so that they can eventually recognize this pathocratic kind of government as a normal state......
Pathocracies in perspective
But we should not take much satisfaction in the inevitable fall of pathocracies, since they so frequently do such tremendous harm before they fall. It would be far better if we could learn to prevent their rise in the first place.
One of the many great insights of the founders of our country is that they anticipated the rise of pathocracy in the nation that they founded. They therefore wrote into its Constitution numerous plans for the balancing of power and for the peaceful removal from office of chief executives or others who proved to put their own needs and desires above those of our nation.
It was a great idea. But it can only work to the extent that our elected government officials have the courage to open their eyes to the danger and take action against it, as so clearly prescribed in our Constitution. It is now long past the time that those with open eyes and minds should have seen and understood the gathering danger.
If our Congress fails to take the appropriate action, they'll have set a terrible precedent for our nation. In that event, even if our current government does not perpetrate substantially more harm to us before they leave, Congress will have left the door wide open for future governments to do so.