Saturday, September 22, 2007


Emir Olivares Alonso

Los abusos cometidos por el Ejército, acreditados por la Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (CNDH), demuestran que la actual administración federal aplica una “dictadura policiaco-cívico-militar”, en la que su guerra contra el narcotráfico es en realidad una guerra contra toda la sociedad, pues con los operativos “creen que todos somos traficantes”, señaló Augusto Sánchez Sandoval, especialista en seguridad nacional y política criminal de la Facultad de Estudios Profesionales Acatlán de la UNAM.

“Lo que estamos viendo con estos abusos es una represión grande; una especie de guerra civil en la que se usa al Ejército contra los mismos ciudadanos”, señaló el académico al referirse a los hechos de Coahuila, Michoacán y Sinaloa, donde el organismo encabezado por José Luis Soberanes acreditó graves violaciones a los derechos humanos, tales como asesinatos, abuso sexual y tratos inhumanos.

Para el universitario, las acciones que Felipe Calderón aplica contra la delincuencia organizada son un símbolo “no de gobierno, sino de ejercicio de poder, pues quiere demostrar que él lo ostenta”.

Sánchez Sandoval subrayó que Calderón está otorgando todo tipo de libertades a los militares, lo cual rebasa el estado de derecho. “El mismo Estado vulnera el estado de derecho, con lo que se concluye que estamos en una guerra en regiones específicas, en la cual los soldados hacen lo que se les da la gana: destruyen casas, incendian lo que está a su paso, asesinan, violan, eso es parte de una guerra”.

Señaló que pese a las recomendaciones emitidas ayer por la CNDH no solucionan la problemática, debido a que estos exhortos se quedan sólo en eso sin que se les pueda dar seguimiento. “El discurso respecto a los derechos humanos oculta en realidad la violencia que se ejerce detrás de ese mismo discurso; (en este caso) las garantías fundamentales sirven como parapeto para ocultar la represión”.

En ese sentido, adujo el especialista universitario, actualmente y con la política federal contra la delincuencia organizada “vivimos en una sociedad en la que el ciudadano está desnudo de derechos, pues no hay posibilidad de que el derecho pueda parar al poder pues está al servicio de éste”; y agregó que las comisiones de derechos humanos (estatales y nacional) deben asumir un papel más activo, de denuncia y seguimiento porque de lo contrario los abusos de poder “no los va a parar nadie”.

Por separado, David Mendoza, especialista en asuntos de seguridad, guerra y terrorismo de la Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales de la UNAM, consideró que tras las revelaciones de la CNDH, el Ejército no puede exculpar a sus elementos y debe dar seguimiento y sanción a los responsables y no sólo darlos de baja.

Asimismo, propuso que para evitar que los militares continúen vulnerando las garantías de la ciudadanía, las autoridades federales deben plantear la posibilidad que a los responsables de estos delitos, también se les juzgue en tribunales civiles para crear antecedentes y evitar la impunidad.

El investigador universitario aseveró que tras las conclusiones de la CNDH, la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional tiene que atender las recomendaciones, además de dar seguimiento, en estos y otros casos, a los juicios en contra de sus soldados y no sólo darlos de baja de la institución.




jorge carrasco araizaga México, D.F. (apro).- Los atentados contra instalaciones de Pemex han derivado en trilladas críticas al Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (Cisen), lo que ha desviado la atención de los principales responsables de la alegada ineficiencia: la Presidencia de la República y el secretario de Gobernación, Francisco Ramírez Acuña.

Sin duda que al director del Cisen, Guillermo Valdés, amigo personal del presidente Felipe Calderón, se le puede atribuir, por su ignorancia en materia de seguridad nacional, una alta responsabilidad en la ocurrencia de los atentados formalmente reivindicados por el Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR) en Guanajuato, Querétaro, Veracruz y Tlaxcala en los dos meses recientes.

Al igual que el ahora titular de la PGR, Eduardo Medina Mora, quien durante cuatro años del gobierno de Vicente Fox ocupó el cargo de director del Cisen, Valdés es un improvisado en la delicada tarea de elaborar inteligencia para la seguridad del Estado mexicano, pues su mérito es el de haber sido el encuestador que ayudó a Calderón a llegar a Los Pinos.

Además, está al frente de un organismo al que desde 2005 Medina Mora se ha encargado de desmantelar.

No es el único, pues el secretario de Seguridad Pública (SSP) federal, Genaro García Luna, ha hecho lo propio, pero el ahora procurador general de la República sacó a importantes funcionarios para llevárselos primero a la SSP y luego a la PGR.

Más allá del encuestador, la responsabilidad de la recurrencia de los atentados recae de forma directa en Calderón y Ramírez Acuña, quien en su comparencia de este martes ante la Cámara de Diputados tendría que explicar lo que se ha presentado como una inoperancia del aparato de seguridad a su cargo.

Calderón es un responsable directo porque la Ley de Seguridad Nacional aprobada por el Congreso a fines de 2005 creó el Consejo de Seguridad Nacional (CSN), cuyo titular es él mismo.

El secretario ejecutivo de ese importante Consejo en el que participan nueve secretarías de Estado y el director del Cisen es nada menos que el exgobernador de Jalisco, como titular de Gobernación.

El CSN cuenta además con un poderoso secretario técnico, que es el encargado de coordinar el funcionamiento de dicho consejo, proponer políticas y lineamientos en seguridad nacional, presentar la Agenda Nacional de Riesgos al mismo, realizar el inventario de la infraestructura estratégica del país y mantener la relación con la comisión bicameral de Seguridad Nacional –integrada por tres senadores y tres diputados–, a la que en teoría el Ejecutivo le debe rendir cuentas.

La designación de ese funcionario es facultad exclusiva del titular del Ejecutivo. Calderón llevó a ese importante cargo a una académica especializada en la materia, Sigrid Arzt Colunga, quien cuenta con recursos propios para el funcionamiento de su oficina adscrita a Los Pinos, y a la que en su primer año de operación le fueron autorizados más de 12 millones de pesos.

Superiores a las atribuciones de Arzt son las de Ramírez Acuña, quien como secretario ejecutivo del Consejo es el encargado, entre otras tareas, de concentrar la información en materia de seguridad nacional producida por las autoridades del país, no sólo las del ámbito federal, sino también los estados y municipios.

De acuerdo con el reglamento de “Coordinación de acciones ejecutivas en materia de seguridad nacional” publicado por Fox el 29 de noviembre de 2006, un día antes de dejar la Presidencia, el secretario ejecutivo del CSN tiene también la responsabilidad de proponer acciones para enfrentar las amenazas de seguridad nacional, como lo sería la actuación de grupos que atenten contra el Estado.

El secretario ejecutivo tiene además la tarea de promover las políticas públicas para responder a acciones como las alegadas por el EPR y que, de ser ciertas, estarían exhibiendo fallas de todo el aparato de seguridad del Estado mexicano, incluidos los servicios de inteligencia militar.

Calderón y Ramírez Acuña, que hasta ahora han tenido como escudo de las críticas públicas al director del Cisen, tienen una responsabilidad política y legal directa, por lo que deben dar la cara ante la incierta situación en materia de seguridad en que se encuentra el Estado mexicano. (21 de septiembre de 2007)

Comentarios: jcarrasco@proceso.com.mx




josé gil olmos México, D.F., 19 de septiembre (apro).- Hace cuatro meses Edmundo Reyes Amaya y Gabriel Alberto Cruz Sánchez, militantes del Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR), fueron capturados en Oaxaca y, hasta la fecha, no se sabe de ellos. Son los primeros desaparecidos políticos del gobierno de Felipe Calderón, el que al parecer está dispuesto a reeditar los instrumentos de la guerra sucia de los años setenta.

En un sistema presidencialista como el de México, es muy difícil creer que el jefe del Ejecutivo desconozca el paradero de los dos activistas del EPR, sobre todo después que dicho grupo ha concretado dos series de sabotajes a ductos de Pemex, con costos millonarios.

Por eso suenan a burla las declaraciones del gobierno federal, del Ejército, aunadas a la comparsa del ombudsman nacional, en el sentido de que no tienen idea de dónde estarán los dos milicianos del EPR desaparecidos desde el 25 de mayo en Oaxaca, y de que no están ni han estado en cárceles militares, como si en éstas se llevara un registro público de los detenidos.

También suenan a burla las declaraciones del secretario de Marina, almirante Mariano Francisco Sáynez, así como las del procurador general de la República, Eduardo Medina Mora, de que todo se reduce a un ajuste de cuentas entre la guerrilla.

Es verdad que entre los grupos insurgentes ha habido estos ajustes internos, y que en algunos casos éstos han derivado en asesinatos. Pero siempre han sido en sigilo, para no llamar la atención, y en esta situación en particular, todo indica que se trata de una operación del gobierno federal.

Hay muchas versiones de cómo se dio la captura. La primera fue que policías de Oaxaca los detuvieron fortuitamente en un hotel de la capital llamado “El Arbol” y, cuando descubrieron quiénes eran los activistas, los entregaron a los militares, los que los torturaron varios días, a tal grado que los sacaron en camilla para transportarlos a las instalaciones de la Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (Sedena) en la Ciudad de México.

Felipe Edgardo Canseco, exguerrillero, abogado e integrante de la organización política Izquierda Democrática Popular, reveló a Proceso esta semana (edición 1611) que el 9 de agosto, poco después del mediodía, un militar de uniforme, que se identificó con credencial del Ejército, acudió a sus oficinas para decirles que había visto a los dos miembros del EPR ingresar a las instalaciones del Campo Militar Número 1, un hecho que el gobierno de Calderón y la propia Sedena han negado en varias ocasiones.

Esta misma información coincide con la que el EPR ha repetido en al menos la mitad de un total de 32 comunicados emitidos desde el 2 de junio pasado, cuando denunció por primera vez que sus dos militantes habían sido detenidos en Oaxaca el 25 de mayo, “entre las 20:00 y 22:00 horas en una acción fortuita de la policía”.

La desaparición de los dos eperristas ha sido desdeñada por el gobierno de Calderón Hinojosa, el cual se ha concentrado en denostar los ataques del grupo rebelde. Pero tendría que responder primero a la clara violación de los derechos humanos que se está perpetrando contra Reyes Amaya y Cruz Sánchez, quienes se encuentran desparecidos por pertenecer a un grupo social armado, cuyos objetivos esenciales pugnan por abatir la pobreza, marginación y olvido para más de 50 millones de mexicanos sumidos en la miseria.

Calderón se equivoca, como lo hicieron por 40 años los gobiernos priistas, en utilizar la fuerza militar y policiaca para enfrentar a los grupos insurgentes. Es poco inteligente repetir tácticas que han demostrado su ineficacia: la represión y la violencia institucional sólo radicaliza más a la sociedad y alienta la proliferación de grupos armados. La lección de los setenta es la prueba más fehaciente de que el camino es otro.

Se trata de buscar vías para el diálogo con el EPR, presentar con vida a sus dos activistas para que sean juzgados si son encontrados responsables de algunos delitos y, sobre todo, desplegar programas agresivos contra la pobreza en las regiones marginadas del país.

Es en estos lugares donde se encuentran las bases de apoyo de la guerrilla y también los cultivos del narcotráfico, el que de paso también saca provecho de esta deplorable situación.




... 1300 days isolated.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Hand-to-brand-combat



As a teenager, Naomi Klein was a dedicated mall rat, fixated on designer labels. A bare decade later, the author of a life-changing book on anti-corporatism and the new politics, she is at the heart of the protest at the current World Bank summit in Prague. She tells Katharine Viner how everything turned around for her

Saturday September 23, 2000
The Guardian


From the age of six, growing up in Canada, Naomi Klein was obsessed with brand names, and what she could buy. She had a thing about the bright signs she saw from the back-seat window of the family car: McDonald's, Texaco, Burger King and, especially, the fluorescent yellow gorgeousness of Shell: "So bright and cartoon-like I was convinced that, if I could climb up and touch it, it would be like touching something from another dimension - from the world of TV." She used to stitch little fake alligators on to her T-shirts so they would look like Lacoste, had a Saturday job in Esprit (they had the best logo), and her biggest fights with her parents were over Barbie and the price of designer jeans. In her high-school yearbook - where some are labelled "most likely to succeed" - she was "most likely to be in jail for stealing peroxide". She was defined by the products she used to change the colour of her hair.

But now, aged 30, Klein has written a book, No Logo, which has been called "the Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement". The teenager fixated on brand names has become a campaigner against our over-branded world, and a populariser of the kind of anti-corporate ideas that are currently fuelling protesters against the IMF/World Bank meeting in Prague. The book has been a word-of-mouth sensation, giving voice to a generation of people under 30 who have never related to politics until now. The band Radiohead were so inspired by No Logo that they have banned corporate advertising from their British tour, deeming all venues "logo-free" - Ed O'Brien, the guitarist, says, "No Logo certainly made me feel less alone. She was writing everything I was trying to make sense of in my head. It was very uplifting."

As a chronicler of what she calls "the next big political movement - and the first genuinely international people's movement" - Klein writes that Nike paid Michael Jordan more in 1992 for endorsing its trainers ($20 million) than the company paid its entire 30,000-strong Indonesian workforce for making them; why, in her opinion, this makes people angry; and why that anger is expressed in rallies outside the Nike Town superstore, rather than outside government buildings or embassies. She shows how globalisation has hit the poor the most, and how this new political movement is both historically informed and absolutely of the moment, like nothing that has gone before.

And, as we shall see, it was bound to be some- one such as Naomi Klein who would be both at the heart of anti-corporatism and interpret it for everyone else. The anti-corporate movement is resolutely disparate, and has no leaders; but it is no coincidence that its most prominent populariser should be a 30-year-old woman from North America (the heart of wealth and power), whose political background is a leftwing family and a teenage rebellion through shopping. As we shall see, she is perfectly placed to reflect these times.

Klein's argument starts with what we all recognise. Logos, she says, are "the closest thing we have to an international language, by force of ubiquity". Most of the world's six billion people could identify the McDonald's sign, or the Coca-Cola symbol - we are united by what we are being sold. And the selling, these days, isn't just in magazines or on billboards: Gordon's gin fills British cinemas with the smell of juniper berries; in some Scandinavian countries, you can get "free" long-distance calls if you consent to ads cutting into your telephone conversations; Nasa has solicited ads to run on its space stations. There's no escape.

Furthermore, advertising today is not merely about selling products; it is about selling a brand, a dream, a message. So Nike's aim is not to sell trainers but to "enhance people's lives through sports and fitness". IBM doesn't sell computers, it sells "solutions". And as for Polaroid, well, it's not a camera - it's a "social lubricant". You sell the message of your brand, not your product, and you can expand as widely as you like. As Richard Branson says, you "build brands not around products but around reputation" - and leap from record shops to cola to banking to trains.

But Branson's trains show how fragile this strategy might be - if Virgin trains don't run on time, why should you trust his bank? Or look what happened to Nike - from being "the spirit of sports" in the early 90s, the campaign against its use of atrocious sweatshops in developing countries led CEO Phil Knight to confess in 1998 that his shoes "have become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse". When it's no longer just about trainers, when the corporations have promised so much more - a way of life! - they have very much more to lose.

What's more, says Klein, people start to resent the colonisation of their lives. Fine, they say, I'll buy my shoes from you, but I don't want you to take over my head. Young activists, says Klein, feel that their cultural and political space has been taken away and sold back to them, neatly-packaged, as "alternative" or "anti-sexist" or "anti-racist". So Seattle grunge (including its star, Kurt Cobain) implodes through commercialisation, and the designer Christian Lacroix says, "It's terrible to say, very often the most exciting outfits are from the poorest people." So the Body Shop displays posters condemning domestic violence and Nike runs an ad saying, "I believe high heels are a conspiracy against women." So Nike signs up black stars such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, and then adorns the walls of Nike Town with quotes from Woods saying, "There are still courses in the US where I am not allowed to play, because of the colour of my skin." It's anti-racism without the politics; 50 years of civil-rights history reduced to an anodyne advertising slogan.

Next, the big brands effectively force out small businesses and take over as much physical space as possible, with mergers and synergy being the business buzzwords. Starbucks coffee shops (once they have co-opted a right-on, third-world-loving, world-music-playing milieu) operate by "clustering": an area becomes saturated with branches, local cafes close down (preferably well-liked independent ones in groovy areas) and the big brands take over. Meanwhile, McDonald's wages a 26-year battle against a man called Ronald McDonald whose McDonald's Family Restaurant in a small town in Illinois was founded in 1956. How dare he be born with the same name as a corporate giant?

And while the corporations are busy doing what they think is important - branding a way of life, putting the squeeze on independent shopkeepers, and the like - someone, somewhere, has to make the stuff. This may be a time of "degraded production in the age of the superbrand", as Klein puts it, but corporations do tend to need a product somewhere along the line. The "death of manufacturing" is only a western phenomenon - as we're consuming more products than ever, someone must be making them. But it's difficult to find out who. As Klein says, "the shift in attitude toward production is so profound that, where a previous era of consumer goods corporations displayed their logos on the facades of their factories, many of today's brand-based multinationals maintain that the location of their production operations is a 'trade secret', to be guarded at all costs." Very often, it seems, they are produced under terrible conditions in free-trade zones in Indonesia, China, Mexico, Vietnam, the Philippines and elsewhere.

The sweatshops Klein visited in Cavite, the largest free-trade zone in the Philippines, have rules against talking and smiling. There is forced overtime, but no job security - it's "no work, no pay" when the orders don't come in. Toilets are padlocked except during two 15-minute breaks per day - seamstresses sewing clothes for western high-street chains told Klein that they have to urinate in plastic bags under their machines. Women like Carmelita Alonzo, who sewed clothes for the Gap and Liz Claiborne, had a two-hour commute home, and died after being denied time off for pneumonia, a common illness in these factories. As Klein says, people are now demanding to know why, if the big brands have so much power and influence over price and marketing, they do not also have the power to demand and enforce ethical labour standards from such suppliers.

And don't think, says Klein, that the developing world is the only place for exploitation by western industry. "Cavite may be capitalism's dream vacation, but casualisation is a game that can be played at home," she writes. Europe and North America have played host to the most extraordinary rise in impermanence at work over the past two decades. The "McJob" is a contemporary template: low-paid, no benefits, no union recognition and no guarantee that your job will be there in the morning. At Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer which opened its first British shop in July after buying Asda, "full time" in its US branches means just 28 hours a week; the average annual wage is a barely-livable $10,920. "You can buy two grande mocha cappuccinos with my hourly salary," says Laurie Bonang, a worker in Starbucks. Microsoft, the gleaming testament to the hi-tech products of our future, has an extraordinary one-third of its workforce working as temps. As Klein says, "It was Microsoft, with its famous employee stock-option plan, that developed and fostered the mythology of Silicon Gold; but it is also Microsoft that has done the most to dismantle it."

So what happens when working conditions and modes of production fail to match up to a glorious, positive, right-on brand identity? People start to get angry.

Anticorporate activism is on the rise precisely because branding has worked so well, believes Klein, in a neat example of the Marxist idea that capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. "Multinationals such as Nike, Microsoft and Starbucks have sought to become the chief communicators of all that is good and cherished in our culture: art, sport, community, connection, equality. But the more successful this project is, the more vulnerable these companies become. When they do wrong, their crimes are not dismissed as the misdemeanours of another corporation trying to make a buck. This is a connection more akin to the relationship of fan and celebrity: emotionally intense, but shallow enough to turn on a dime." Having lived that relationship with consumer goods herself, Klein knows just how it feels.

She says that anti-brand activism is taking place on two fronts. "On the one hand, it's throwing bricks through McDonald's window in Seattle. On the other, it's saying that we actually want the real thing, the real 'third place' [not home, not work] that Starbucks tries to sell to us, the real public space. People are saying: 'I do want real community, this is a strong and powerful idea, and I resent the fact that this idea has been stolen from me.' You've got these products that are held up on insane pedestals - all of the collective longings of our culture have been projected on to lattes or trainers. So there's a process of actively denting the facade of the brand with the reality of the production."

This deconstruction takes many forms, some more successful than others. The activism includes "culture jamming", whereby ads are subverted by "guerrilla artists" to send anti-corporate messages out to the public; jammers paint hollow skulls on the faces of Gap models, or change an Apple ad featuring the Dalai Lama and the slogan "Think Different" to "Think Disillusioned". It includes the campaign group Reclaim The Streets, which started in Britain partly in response to the 1994 Criminal Justice Act and which focuses its concerns on environmentalism and the removal of public space; they stop cars, block a road and have a party on it. Reclaim The Streets is now an international movement - on May 16, 1998, 30 Global Street Parties took place around the world.

Students in North America, meanwhile, have been active in anti-sweatshop campaigns, most noticeably since 1995-96, which Andrew Ross, author of anti-sweatshop textbook No Sweat, calls "the year of the sweatshop". It was a year that brought many revelations. One typical example: a factory manager making clothes in El Salvador for a major US clothing firm announced that "blood will flow" if anyone joined a union. And another, more shocking for the American public: the named-brand clothes line of TV presenter Kathie Lee Gifford (a bit like Lorraine Kelly, only cheesier) was manufactured by child labourers in Honduras and in illegal sweatshops in New York. (She cried on TV and became an anti-sweatshop campaigner herself.) Guess, Mattel, Disney and Nike were the targets of similar exposés.

The tactics of many of these anti-sweatshop groups involve "head-on collisions between image and reality", says Klein, whether it is filming an Indonesian Nike worker gasping as she learns that the trainers she made for $2 a day sell for $120 a pair in San Francisco Nike Town, or comparing the hourly salary of Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney ($9,783), with that of a Haitian worker who stitches Disney merchandise (28 cents).

Other brand tactics simply hit companies where it hurts most. Nike didn't seem too bothered about the campaign against it that took off so vehemently in the US in the mid-90s, until a group of black 13-year-olds from the Bronx, the company's target market and the one exploited by it to get a street-cool image, learned that the trainers they bought for $180 cost $5 to make, which led to a mass dumping of their old Nike trainers outside New York's Nike Town. (One boy, reports Klein, looked straight into the TV news camera and, showing a brand understanding that should alert his elders, said, "Nike, we made you. We can break you.")

The UK's McLibel trial, which began in 1990, hurt McDonald's so seriously - even though the firm eventually won the case - because it forced the hamburger giant to be open about its business practices. After suing two British environmentalists for libel, the firm was forced to spend a humiliating 313 days in court, the longest trial in British history, defending every last detail of its business and making a number of spectacu- lar gaffes along the way, such as one executive's claim that Coca-Cola is nutritious because it is "providing water, and I think that is part of a balanced diet"; and another's that McDonald's burial of rubbish in landfill sites is "a benefit, otherwise you will end up with lots of vast empty gravel pits all over the country".

Some activists use the courtroom; others, such as those opposed to Shell's involvement with the Nigerian military government that devastated the Ogoni lands and executed their champion, the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1994, focus on issues of freedom of expression. Others humiliate corporations on TV, take over roads, jam ads, gather wherever there is an international summit (Auckland, Vancouver, Manila, Birmingham, London, Geneva, Kuala Lumpur, Cologne, Washington DC, Seattle, Prague), wreck a McDonald's before it has even been built (the Peasant Confederation in Millau, France). And in the developing world, home to the main victims of the global economy, rural activists burn GM seeds and hold laughing protests (Karnataka state farmers in India, who claim to number 10 million), revolt against the privatisation of the water system (Bolivia), strike and take over the national university over a World Bank edict to raise student fees (Mexican students). The protest in Seattle was so huge because it was diverse; the US union movement marched side by side with the head of the Filipino peasant movement. It is global, anarchic and chaotic, like the internet it uses to organise; it is, says Klein, "the internet come to life".

When we meet, Klein serves a fruity drink that, its maker's claim, is packed with intelligence-boosting herbs. (I don't remember the brand name.) She is shy at first, and then not shy at all. She doesn't wear Gap or drink Starbucks, and is a lively and witty speaker (in public, too); her conversation is full of pop culture vernacular and jokes against herself. We sit in her backyard in Toronto, which has a flourishing 'No Logo' clematis (named to celebrate finishing her book), and are interrupted a couple of times: first by her husband, Avi Lewis, a big TV star in Canada for his hugely successful, four-times-a-week political discussion programme; then by his mother, Michele Landsberg, one of Canada's foremost radical feminists, bearing gossip and a salmon. Klein and Lewis married because they wanted to "have a big party", but they don't wear rings because they don't want to be branded as married. Entertaining, political, down-to-earth, they clearly have a great time together; Lewis says that, since he met Klein, he's "got a lot more serious and had a lot more fun".

Klein grew up with politics all around her. Her grandparents were American Marxists in the 30s and 40s; her grandfather was an animator at Disney who was fired and blacklisted for organising the company's first strike. Her parents, who are also American, moved to Canada in protest at the Vietnam war. Her father is a doctor and her mother, Bonnie Klein, made the seminal anti-pornography film, This Is Not A Love Story, in 1980. "My mother was really involved in the anti-pornography movement, and when I was at school I found it very oppressive to have a very public feminist mother - it was a source of endless embarrassment. When This Is Not A Love Story came out, there was a lot of backlash against my mother. The headline in the Toronto Globe And Mail was "Bourgeois Feminist Fascist", and she was made Hustler magazine's asshole of the month; they took my mother's head and put it on the back of a donkey. It was not cool in 1980 to be making films about pornography. Not at my elementary school, anyway."

This, she says, is part of the reason she wanted nothing to do with politics when she was growing up. "I think it's why I embraced full-on consumerism. I was in constant conflict with my parents and I wanted them to leave me the hell alone." Her brother, who is two years older, did not go through the same kind of rebellion: "I don't think he was quite so much a victim of the 80s as I was. We had no culture growing up. We had Cyndi Lauper."

So, after years of obsession with Barbie, Girl's World and Disneyland, what brought about the change? "I know the only way that I escaped the mall - which is not to say that I don't ever go, or enjoy it - the only way I got consumerism and vanity into a sane place in my life, though I don't think we are ever rid of them, was just by becoming interested in other things. It's that simple. Saying that you're a bad person for buying this or wanting this only turns people off." Klein was all set to go to the University of Toronto to study English and philosophy when her mother had a very severe stroke aged 46. She took a year off to care for her. "I think that's what stopped me from being such a brat."

Read part two of Hand-to-brand-combat here

• No Logo, by Naomi Klein, is published by HarperCollins, priced £14.99. For links, visit the book's website.


Hand-to-brand-combat (part two)



As a teenager, Naomi Klein was a dedicated mall rat, fixated on designer labels. A bare decade later, the author of a life-changing book on anti-corporatism and the new politics, she is at the heart of the protest at the current World Bank summit in Prague. She tells Katharine Viner how everything turned around for her

Saturday September 23, 2000
Guardian Unlimited


When she went to university a year later, a major news event ensured that her politicisation was inevitable. "The pivotal moment politically for me was in December 1989, when there was a massacre at the University of Montreal. A man went into the engineering school - he had failed to get a place - and he separated the men from the women, shouted, 'You're all a bunch of fucking feminists', and opened fire. He killed 14 women. There was nothing like that incident in Canadian history - this is not America, where serial murders happen all the time - and it was a hate crime against women. It was a cataclysmic moment. It politicised us enormously. Of course, after that you call yourself a feminist."

It was also at university that Klein learned what it's like to be attacked for her opinions. She is Jewish, and during the intifada she wrote an article in the student newspaper called Victim To Victimiser, in which she said "that not only does Israel have to end the occupation for the Palestinians, but also it has to end the occupation for its own people, especially its women". As a result of this one 800-word article, Klein received bomb threats at her home and at the newspaper office - "and to this day I have never been more scared for my life".

"After the article came out, the Jewish students' union, who were staunch Zionists, called a meeting to discuss what they were going to do about my article - and I went along, because nobody knew what I looked like. And the woman sitting next to me said, 'If I ever meet Naomi Klein, I'm going to kill her.' So I just stood up and said, 'I'm Naomi Klein, I wrote Victim To Victimiser, and I'm as much a Jew as every single one of you.' I've never felt anything like the silence in that room after that. I was 19, and it made me tough."

Klein became an outspoken feminist activist at college, campaigning on issues of media repre- sentation and gender visibility that constituted feminism at the end of the 80s - she received rape threats as a result - and, rather than finish her degree, she dropped out to work as an intern on the Toronto Globe And Mail. She left to become editor of an alternative political magazine, This Magazine. "When I was there [in the early 90s], I did not feel that we were part of a political movement in any way - in that there was not a left. We had to kind of invent it as we went along. The stress of it was the stress of the left. It burned us out." The left that did exist Klein found depressing. "The only thing leftwing voices were saying was stop the cuts, stop the world we want to get off. It was very negative and regressive, it wasn't imaginative, it didn't have its own sense of itself in any way."

It was around this time that advertising and branding started to co-opt alternative politics and culture. "On the one hand, there was this total paralysis of the left. But, at the exact same time, all these ideas that I had thought were the left - feminism and diversity and gay and lesbian rights - were suddenly very chic. So, on the one hand, you're politically totally disempowered, and on the other all the imagery is pseudo-feminist, Benetton is an anti-racism organisation, Starbucks does this third-world-chic thing. I watched my own politics become commercialised." This imagery was, she says, a "mask for capitalism. It was making it more difficult to see the power dynamics in society. Because this was a time when there was a growing income gap between rich and poor that was quite staggering all over the world - and yet everything looked way more equitable, in terms of the imagery of the culture."

Klein went back to university in 1995 to try to finish her degree, and something very clearly had changed. "I met this new generation of young radicals who had grown up taking for granted the idea that corporations are more powerful than governments, that it doesn't matter who you elect because they'll all act the same. And they were, like, fine, we'll go where the power is. We'll adapt. It didn't fill them with dread and depression. When I was at university before, we thought our only power was to ban something - but they were very hands-on, DIY, if you don't like something change it, cut it, paste it, download it. Even though I don't think culture jamming by itself is a powerful political tool, there's something about that posture that's impressive - it's unintimidated hand-to-brand contact. The young activists I know have grounded their political activism in economic analysis and an understanding of how power works. They're way more sophisticated than we were because they've had to be. Because capitalism is way more sophisticated now.

"I think I'm lucky because I got to witness a significant shift, something that changed, and I wanted to document that shift. And it seemed very, very clear to me that if there was going to be a future for the left it would have to be an anti-corporate movement."

And so, Seattle in November last year - where 50,000 demonstrators actually prevented a major WTO meeting from happening - did she expect it to be so big? "Oh no. Seattle surprised me with its militancy. It surprised the organisers. It surprised everyone. I mean, this was the States . There were all these underground networks of activism, and it just came to life. Right now, the movement is at the stage of grassroots ferment - and it'll either degenerate into chaos or it'll come together organically into something new."

The first thing people tend to ask Klein is where she shops. Does she buy Nike trainers? Does she never nip into Starbucks for a grande cappuccino? Is her wardrobe certifiably sweatshop-free? "I'm the worst person to ask these questions," she says, "because since the book came out people really are watching what I buy. If I walked around Toronto with a Starbucks, it would be seen that I was endorsing that brand." But, she says, for anyone who hasn't written a book about corporations and sweatshops, it's a different matter. "I firmly believe that it's not about where you shop. I'm lucky in that I happen to live a few blocks from some great independent designers, so I actually can shop in stores where I know where stuff is produced. But I can't say that to a 17-year-old girl in the suburbs who can only shop at the mall. It's not a fair message.

"This is not a consumer issue; it's a political issue. There is a way for us to respond as citizens that is not simply as consumers. Over and over again, people's immediate response to these issues is: what do I buy? I have to immediately solve this problem through shopping. But you can like the products and not like the corporate behaviour; because the corporate behaviour is a political issue, and the products are just stuff. The movement is really not about being purer-than-thou and producing a recipe for being an ethical consumer. That drains a lot of political energy."

Is this why she published in Britain with Flamingo, part of the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins, a major corporation if ever there was one? "To be honest, I really did not have my pick of publishers in Britain. Only one wanted the book. What I said when I signed with HarperCollins was that I was going to go out of my way to write about Murdoch, more than I would have done otherwise. I did, and they didn't touch it."

As a populariser of the movement's arguments, does Klein consider herself an activist or a journalist? "I see myself as an activist journalist," she says. "I became a journalist because I'm not comfortable being an activist. I hate crowds - I know, great irony - and I'm physically incapable of chanting. I'm always slightly detached, so I write about it to feel more comfortable. I like to believe that I can be part of this movement without being a propagandist. There's a really strong tradition of this, like Gloria Steinem, Norman Mailer, Susan Faludi. I do think that there's so much fragmentation in this movement that if someone tries to work out a coherent thesis - even if you don't agree with all or even much of it - it can be helpful by making something more solid."

In Prague, at the protests against the IMF/World Bank, she will be speaking at today's counter-summit, but she is concerned that the media has already portrayed the protesters as mad terrorists crossing continents with the sole intention of kicking some Czech police. "Months ago we were already seeing the most extreme attempts to criminalise protest. This is a protest about the IMF and the World Bank, and the effects they're having on poorer countries. We must not let the reaction of the state and the police entirely define the message. I'm going to Prague because I believe it is a crucially important opportunity to show the world what this movement really is - the first genuinely international people's movement."

There are some who wonder, though, whether the IMF and corporations are the right target. Isn't it governments that we should be aiming at, since it is governments, initially led by Reagan and Thatcher with their dramatic lowering of corporate taxes, which gave the corporations such power in the first place? "I think these corporations are not really targets, they are metaphors," says Klein. "They're being used by this generation of young activists as a popular education tool to understand the global economy. When I was at university, we were intimidated and didn't understand anything about globalisation. So we tuned out from that and turned in on ourselves and became more and more insular - which is the great irony of those years, because that was when all this accelerated globalisation was happening. We weren't watching. And what I see happening with, say, the campaign against Nike is a tactic on the part of activists who've decided to turn these companies into metaphors for the global economy gone awry."

In other words, when the global economy is so huge, so forbidding, the corporations are an accessible way in. "When the WTO was created in Uruguay in 1995, there were no protesters outside. These trade bureaucrats created a world of incredibly complex institutions and arcane trade agreements written by policy wonks with no interest in popularising. So I believe that anti-corporate campaigns are the bridge: they're the first baby-step to developing an analysis of global capitalism."

Indeed, an important and fascinating aspect of the movement has been popular education - groups holding mass teach-ins on global politics, international economics, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO (the "iron triangle of corporate rule"); Naafta, the EU, Gatt, Apec, G-8, the OECD, structural adjustment. At Seattle, activists in their 20s sat for eight hours at a stretch listening to speakers from around the world decode globalisation for them.

Is this a re-invention of left politics? After a decade in the wilderness, is anti-corporatism the post-cold war new New Left? "I think it is," says Klein, "but it's only at the early stages of re-invention. Sometimes, I think it's moving towards creating a global new deal, and sometimes I think it's way more radical than that. And it might be - I don't know." I mention the impact of the very word "capitalism", which had gone resolutely out of fashion until June 18, 1999, when demonstrators staged an "anti-capitalist" demonstration in the City of London. "Since June 18, the comeback of the word 'capitalism' is just extraordinary," laughs Klein. "It's like Santana - what the hell's going on? Suddenly they're talking about 'capitalism' on CNN, and in Washington there are all these little girls wearing caps with 'Capitalism Sux' on them. For a long time, the very word has been invisible - it's just the economy, the way the world works." And that change has happened in little over a year. "That's why I feel optimistic, and I'm not impatient about the pace of change."

The trouble is, we're used to thinking that something that is anti-capitalist must be straightforwardly socialist or communist, which is not the case with this movement. It is, instead, "an amalgam of environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anarchy and the kitchen sink", says Klein - which leads us to the central criticism levelled at all the anti-corporate protests. What do they stand for? What are their goals? Where is their vision?

"I think I have more patience for finding this out than most people," says Klein. "I've been following this movement for five years, and I know where we were at five years ago and I know where we are now. We were nowhere. That a genuine political movement can begin to emerge in that timespan, organically, on its own - it's extraordinary. I think a lot of those demanding a manifesto or a leader are people of a different generation who have an idea in their mind of what a political movement looks like, and they want Abbie Hoffman or Gloria Steinem and where are they?"

Even such diverse campaigns - from groups fighting against Nike, or agribusiness, or world debt, or the Free Trade Area of the Americas - "share a belief that the disparate problems with which they are wrestling all derive from global deregulation, an agenda that is concentrating power and wealth into fewer and fewer hands". And the fragmentation of the campaigns, says Klein, is a "reasonable, even ingenious adaptation of changes in the broader culture". The movement, with its hubs and spokes and hotlinks, its emphasis on information rather than ideology, reflects the tool it uses - it is the "internet come to life". This is why it doesn't work well on television, unlike the anti-Vietnam protests of the 60s with their leaders, their slogans, their single-issue politics.

When people say that the movement lacks vision, believes Klein, what they really mean is that it is different from anything that's gone before, that it is a completely new kind of movement - just as the internet is a completely new kind of medium. "What critics are really saying is that the movement lacks an overarching revolutionary philosophy, such as Marxism, democratic socialism, deep ecology or social anarchy, on which they all agree." But the movement should not, says Klein, be in a hurry to define itself. "Before they sign on to anyone's 10-point plan, they deserve the chance to see if, out of the movement's chaotic, decentralised, multi-headed webs, something new, something entirely its own, can emerge."

No Logo has been leapt upon by some commentators who are thrilled by Naomi Klein's rejection of the identity politics of her youth, and so see it as anti-feminist. "This is not a rejection of feminism," she says. "It is a return to the roots of feminism - early feminism was very involved in anti-sweatshop action, and the current anti-sweatshop movement very much sees it as a feminist issue, since it is overwhelmingly women of colour who are being abused by the systems. I feel that we lost our way in the late 80s, when feminism became disengaged from its roots, which originally had critiques of capitalism and of consumerism. I am a feminist and this is a feminist book."

This, I believe, is crucial to understanding both why the movement is so popular with young people and why Klein is so perfectly placed to be its chief populariser. In the 60s and 70s, activists concentrated their anti-racism and feminism on matters of equality - equal rights and equal pay. In Klein's 80s and 90s, they campaigned instead on issues of culture and identity: portrayal in the media, who gets to the board. But the new generation of activists is taking the best bits of both: developing a radical critique of the global economy, while incorporating identity politics as a matter of course. So, whereas Sheila Rowbotham was greeted with a barrage of wolf-whistles and guffaws when she got on stage to speak about education at a leftist conference in 1968, no one is surprised that this movement's main theorist is a woman. This is a far more inclusive movement than those that have gone before.

There's a personal recollection in No Logo in which Klein talks about being 17 and wondering what to do with her life. She was frustrated, because if you wanted to be a traveller Lonely Planet had got there first; if you wanted to be an avant-garde artist, someone had done it all already, and put the image on a mug for you to take home. "All my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper," she writes. "That was enough escape for them." Now it feels as if there is "no open space anywhere". It is as if this generation's culture is being sold out as they are living it; there is nothing left to discover.

Her thesis is about trying to find some space that hasn't been bought up by anyone; trying to rediscover our identities as citizens, and not just consumers. It is about globalisation, and the power corporations have over our lives. But it is also about being 30, having spent your youth in a disaffected age. Her grandfather, the animator blacklisted by McCarthy, would be proud: Naomi Klein might just be helping re-invent politics for a new generation.

• No Logo, by Naomi Klein, is published by HarperCollins, priced £14.99. For links, visit the book's website.



... Thumb Sucker

The age of disaster capitalism



In the days after 9/11, America's firefighters, nurses and teachers were hailed as the country's heroes. But President Bush's embracing of the public sector didn't last long. As the dust settled on the twin towers, the White House launched an entirely new economy, based on security - with the belief that only private firms could meet the challenge. In this exclusive extract from her new book, Naomi Klein reports on those who see a profitable prospect in a grim future

Monday September 10, 2007
The Guardian


A firefighter at ground zero of the World Trade Centre in New York
A firefighter at ground zero of the World Trade Centre in New York. Photograph: Matt Moyer/AP


As George Bush and his cabinet took up their posts in January 2001, the need for new sources of growth for US corporations was an urgent matter. With the tech bubble now officially popped and the DowJones tumbling 824 points in their first two and half months in office, they found themselves staring in the face of a serious economic downturn. John Maynard Keynes had argued that governments should spend their way out of recessions, providing economic stimulus with public works. Bush's solution was for the government to deconstruct itself - hacking off great chunks of the public wealth and feeding them to corporate America, in the form of tax cuts on the one hand and lucrative contracts on the other. Bush's budget director, the think-tank ideologue Mitch Daniels, pronounced: "The general idea - that the business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided - seems self-evident to me." That assessment included disaster response. Joseph Allbaugh, the Republican party operative whom Bush put in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) - the body responsible for responding to disasters, including terrorist attacks - described his new place of work as "an oversized entitlement programme".

Then came 9/11, and all of a sudden having a government whose central mission was self-immolation did not seem like a very good idea. With a frightened population wanting protection from a strong, solid government, the attacks could well have put an end to Bush's project of hollowing out government just as it was beginning.

For a while, that even seemed to be the case."September 11 has changed everything," said Ed Feulner, old friend of Milton Friedman, the guru of unfettered capitalism and president of the Heritage Foundation, 10 days after the attack, making him one of the first to utter the fateful phrase. Many naturally assumed that part of that change would be a re-evaluation of the radical anti-state agenda that Feulner and his ideological allies had been pushing for three decades, at home and around the world. After all, the nature of the September 11 security failures exposed the results of more than 20 years of chipping away at the public sector and outsourcing government functions to profit-driven corporations. Much as the flooding of New Orleans exposed the rotting condition of public infrastructure, the attacks pulled back the curtain on a state that had been allowed to grow dangerously weak: radio communications for the New York City police and firefighters broke down in the middle of the rescue operation, air-traffic controllers didn't notice the off-course planes in time, and the attackers had passed through airport security checkpoints staffed by contract workers, some of whom earned less than their counterparts at the food court.

The first major victory of the Friedmanite counter-revolution in the United States had been Ronald Reagan's attack on the air-traffic controllers' union and his deregulation of the airlines. Twenty years later, the entire air transit system had been privatised, deregulated and downsized, with the vast majority of airport security work performed by underpaid, poorly trained, non-union contractors. After the attacks, the inspector general of the department of transportation testified that the airlines, which were responsible for security on their flights, had skimped significantly to keep costs down.

On September 10, as long as flights were cheap and plentiful, none of that seemed to matter. But on September 12, putting $6-an-hour contract workers in charge of airport security seemed reckless. Then, in October, envelopes with white powder were sent to lawmakers and journalists, spreading panic about the possibility of a major anthrax outbreak. Once again, 90s privatisation looked very different in this new light: why did a private lab have the exclusive right to produce the vaccine against anthrax? Had the federal government signed away its responsibility to protect the public from a major public health emergency? Furthermore, if it was true, as media reports kept claiming, that anthrax, smallpox and other deadly agents could be spread through the mail, the food supply or the water systems, was it really such a good idea to be pushing ahead with Bush's plans to privatise the postal service? And what about all those laid-off food and water inspectors - could somebody bring them back?

The backlash against the pro-corporate consensus only deepened in the face of new scandals such as that of Enron. Three months after the 9/11 attacks, Enron declared bankruptcy, leading thousands of employees to lose their retirement savings while executives acting on insider knowledge cashed in. The crisis contributed to a general plummeting of faith in private industry to perform essential services, especially when it came out that it was Enron's manipulation of energy prices that had led to the massive blackouts in California a few months earlier. Friedman, aged 90, was so concerned that the tides were shifting back toward Keynesianism that he complained that "businessmen are being presented in the public as second-class citizens".

While CEOs were falling from their pedestals, unionised public sector workers - the villains of Friedman's counter-revolution - were rapidly ascending in the public's estimation. Within two months of the attacks, trust in government was higher than it had been since 1968 - and that, remarked Bush to a crowd of federal employees, is "because of how you've performed your jobs". The uncontested heroes of September 11 were the blue-collar first responders - the New York firefighters, police and rescue workers, 403 of whom lost their lives as they tried to evacuate the towers and aid the victims. Suddenly, America was in love with its men and women in all kinds of uniforms, and its politicians - slapping on NYPD and FDNY baseball caps with unseemly speed - were struggling to keep up with the new mood.

When Bush stood with the firefighters and rescue workers at Ground Zero on September 14 he was embracing some of the very unionised civil servants that the modern conservative movement had devoted itself to destroying. Of course, he had to do it (even Dick Cheney put on a hard hat in those days), but he didn't have to do it so convincingly. Through some combination of genuine feeling on Bush's part and the public's projected desire for a leader worthy of the moment, these were the most moving speeches of Bush's political career.

For weeks after the attacks, the president went on a grand tour of the public sector - state schools, firehouses and memorials, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention - embracing and thanking civil servants for their contributions and humble patriotism. He praised not only emergency services personnel but teachers, postal employees and healthcare workers. At these events, he treated work done in the public interest with a level of respect and dignity that had not been seen in the US in four decades. Cost-cutting was suddenly off the agenda, and in every speech the president gave, he announced some ambitious new public programme.

But far from shaking their determination to weaken the public sphere, the security failures of 9/11 reaffirmed in Bush and his inner circle their deepest ideological (and self-interested) beliefs - that only private firms possessed the intelligence and innovation to meet the new security challenge. Although it was true that the White House was on the verge of spending huge amounts of taxpayer money to launch a new deal, it would be exclusively with corporate America, a straight-up transfer of hundreds of billions of public dollars a year into private hands. The deal would take the form of contracts, many offered secretively, with no competition and scarcely any oversight, to a sprawling network of industries: technology, media, communications, incarceration, engineering, education, healthcare.

What happened in the period of mass disorientation after the attacks was, in retrospect, a domestic form of economic shock therapy. The Bush team, Friedmanite to the core, quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through its radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture.

It was a bold evolution of shock therapy. Rather than the 90s approach of selling off existing public companies, the Bush team created a whole new framework for its actions - the war on terror - built to be private from the start. This feat required two stages. First, the White House used the omnipresent sense of peril in the aftermath of 9/11 to dramatically increase the policing, surveillance, detention and war-waging powers of the executive branch - a power-grab that the military historian Andrew Bacevich has termed "a rolling coup". Then those newly enhanced and richly funded functions of security, invasion, occupation and reconstruction were immediately outsourced, handed over to the private sector to perform at a profit.

Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex - a fully fledged new economy in homeland security, privatised war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatised security state, both at home and abroad. The economic stimulus of this sweeping initiative proved enough to pick up the slack where globalisation and the dotcom booms had left off. Just as the internet had launched the dotcom bubble, 9/11 launched the disaster capitalism bubble. "When the IT industry shut down, post-bubble, guess who had all the money? The government," said Roger Novak of Novak Biddle Venture Partners, a venture capitalism firm that invests in homeland security companies. Now, he says, "Every fund is seeing how big the trough is and asking, 'How do I get a piece of that action?'"

It was the pinnacle of the counter-revolution launched by Friedman. For decades, the market had been feeding off the appendages of the state; now it would devour the core.

Bizarrely, the most effective ideological tool in this process was the claim that economic ideology was no longer a primary motivator of US foreign or domestic policy. The mantra "September 11 changed everything" neatly disguised the fact that for free-market ideologues and the corporations whose interests they serve, the only thing that changed was the ease with which they could pursue their ambitious agenda. Now the Bush White House could use the patriotic alignment behind the president and the free pass handed out by the press to stop talking and start doing. As the New York Times observed in February 2007, "Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government."

And so, in November 2001, just two months after the attacks, the department of defence brought together what it described as "a small group of venture capitalist consultants" with experience in the dotcom sector. The mission was to identify "emerging technology solutions that directly assist in the US efforts in the global war on terrorism". By early 2006, this informal exchange had become an official arm of the Pentagon: the Defence Venture Catalyst Initiative (DeVenCI), a "fully operational office" that continually feeds security information to politically connected venture capitalists, who, in turn, scour the private sector for start-ups that can produce new surveillance and related products. "We're a search engine," explains Bob Pohanka, director of DeVenCI. According to the Bush vision, the role of government is merely to raise the money necessary to launch the new war market, then buy the best products that emerge out of that creative cauldron, encouraging industry to even greater innovation. In other words, the politicians create the demand, and the private sector supplies all manner of solutions.

The department of homeland security, as a brand-new arm of the state created by the Bush regime, is the clearest expression of this wholly outsourced mode of government. As Jane Alexander, deputy director of the research wing of the department of homeland security, explained, "We don't make things. If it doesn't come from industry, we are not going to be able to get it."

Another is Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa), a new intelligence agency created under Donald Rumsfeld that is independent of the CIA. This parallel spy agency outsources 70% of its budget to private contractors; like the department of homeland security, it was built as a hollow shell. As Ken Minihan, former director of the National Security Agency, explained, "Homeland security is too important to be left to the government." Minihan, like hundreds of other Bush administration staffers, has already left his government post to work in the burgeoning homeland security industry, which, as a top spy, he helped create.

Every aspect of the way the Bush administration has defined the parameters of the war on terror has served to maximise its profitability and sustainability as a market - from the definition of the enemy to the rules of engagement to the ever-expanding scale of the battle. The document that launched the department of homeland security declares, "Today's terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon," which conveniently means that the security services required must protect against every imaginable risk in every conceivable place at every possible time. And it's not necessary to prove that a threat is real for it to merit a full-scale response - not with Cheney's famous "1% doctrine", which justified the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that if there is a 1% chance that something is a threat, it requires that the US respond as if the threat is a 100% certainty. This logic has been a particular boon for the makers of various hi-tech detection devices: for instance, because we can conceive of a smallpox attack, the department of homeland security has handed out half a billion dollars to private companies to develop and install detection equipment.

Through all its various name changes - the war on terror, the war on radical Islam, the war against Islamofascism, the third world war, the long war, the generational war - the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged. It is limited by neither time nor space nor target. From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the war on terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash-in-the-pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture.

That was the business prospectus that the Bush administration put before corporate America after September 11. The revenue stream was a seemingly bottomless supply of tax dollars to be funnelled from the Pentagon ($270bn in 2005 to private contractors, a $137bn increase since Bush took office), US intelligence agencies and the newest arrival, the department of homeland security. Between September 11 2001 and 2006, the Department of Homeland Security handed out $130bn to contractors - money that was not in the private sector before and that is more than the GDP of Chile or the Czech Republic.

In a remarkably short time, the suburbs ringing Washington, DC became dotted with grey buildings housing security "start-ups" and "incubator" companies, hastily thrown together operations where, as in late-90s Silicon Valley, the money came in faster than the furniture could be assembled. Whereas in the 90s the goal was to develop the killer application, the "next new new thing", and sell it to Microsoft or Oracle, now it was to come up with a new "search and nail" terrorist-catching technology and sell it to the department of homeland security or the Pentagon. That is why, in addition to the start-ups and investment funds, the disaster industry also gave birth to an army of new lobby firms promising to hook up new companies with the right people on Capitol Hill - in 2001, there were two such security-oriented lobby firms, but by mid-2006 there were 543. "I've been in private equity since the early 90s," Michael Steed, managing director of the homeland security firm Paladin told Wired, "and I've never seen a sustained deal flow like this."

Like the dotcom bubble, the disaster bubble is inflating in an ad-hoc and chaotic fashion. One of the first booms for the homeland security industry was surveillance cameras, 30m of which have been installed in the US, shooting about 4bn hours of footage a year. That created a problem: who's going to watch 4bn hours of footage? So a new market emerged for "analytic software" that scans the tapes and creates matches with images already on file.

This development created another problem, because facial recognition software can really make positive IDs only if people present themselves front and centre to the cameras, which they rarely do while rushing to and from work. So another market was created for digital image enhancement. Salient Stills, a company that sells software to isolate and enhance video images, started by pitching its technology to media companies, but it turned out that there was more potential revenue from the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies. And with all the snooping going on - phone logs, wire-tapping, financial records, mail, surveillance cameras, web surfing - the government is drowning in data, which has opened up yet another massive market in information management and data mining, as well as software that claims to be able to "connect the dots" in this ocean of words and numbers and pinpoint suspicious activity.

In the 90s, tech companies endlessly trumpeted the wonders of the borderless world and the power of information technology to topple authoritarian regimes and bring down walls. Today, inside the disaster capitalism complex, the tools of the information revolution have been flipped to serve the opposite purpose. In the process, mobile phones and web surfing have been turned into powerful tools of mass state surveillance by increasingly authoritarian regimes, with the cooperation of privatised phone companies and search engines, whether it's Yahoo assisting the Chinese government to pinpoint the location of dissidents or AT&T helping the US National Security Agency to wiretap its customers without a warrant (a practice that the Bush administration claims it has discontinued). The dismantling of borders, the great symbol and promise of globalisation, has been replaced with the exploding industry of border surveillance, from optical scanning and biometric IDs to the planned hi-tech fence on the border between Mexico and the US, worth up to $2.5bn for Boeing and a consortium of other companies.

As hi-tech firms have jumped from one bubble to another, the result has been a bizarre merger of security and shopping cultures. Many technologies in use today as part of the war on terror - biometric identification, video surveillance, web tracking, data mining - had been developed by the private sector before September 11 as a way to build detailed customer profiles, opening up new vistas for micromarketing. When widespread discomfort about big-brother technologies stalled many of these initiatives, it caused dismay to both marketers and retailers. September 11 loosened this log jam in the market: suddenly the fear of terror was greater than the fear of living in a surveillance society. So now, the same information collected from cash cards or "loyalty" cards can be sold not only to a travel agency or the Gap as marketing data but also to the FBI as security data, flagging a "suspicious" interest in pay-as-you-go mobile phones and Middle Eastern travel.

As an exuberant article in the business magazine Red Herring explained, one such program "tracks terrorists by figuring out if a name spelled a hundred different ways matches a name in a homeland security database. Take the name Mohammad. The software contains hundreds of possible spellings for the name, and it can search terabytes of data in a second." Impressive, unless they nail the wrong Mohammad, which often seems to happen, from Iraq to Afghanistan to the suburbs of Toronto.

This potential for error is where the incompetence and greed that have been the hallmark of the Bush years, from Iraq to New Orleans, becomes harrowing. One false identification coming out of any of these electronic fishing expeditions is enough for an apolitical family man, who sort of looks like someone whose name sort of sounds like his (at least to someone with no knowledge of Arabic or Muslim culture), to be flagged as a potential terrorist. And the process of putting names and organisations on watch lists is also now handled by private companies, as are the programs to crosscheck the names of travellers with the names in the data bank. As of June 2007, there were half a million names on a list of suspected terrorists kept by the National Counterterrorism Centre. Another program, the Automated Targeting System (ATS), made public in November 2006, has already assigned a "risk assessment" rating to tens of millions of travellers passing through the US. The rating, never disclosed to passengers, is based on suspicious patterns revealed through commercial data mining - for instance, information provided by airlines about "the passenger's history of one-way ticket purchase, seat preferences, frequent-flyer records, number of bags, how they pay for tickets and even what meals they order". Incidents of supposedly suspicious behaviour are tallied up to generate each passenger's risk rating.

Anyone can be blocked from flying, denied an entry visa to the US or even arrested and named as an "enemy combatant" based on evidence from these dubious technologies - a blurry image identified through facial recognition software, a misspelled name, a misunderstood snippet of a conversation. If "enemy combatants" are not US citizens, they will probably never even know what it was that convicted them, because the Bush administration has stripped them of habeas corpus, the right to see the evidence in court, as well as the right to a fair trial and a vigorous defence.

If the suspect is taken, as a result, to Guantánamo, he may well end up in the new 200-person maximum-security prison constructed by Halliburton. If he is a victim of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" programme, kidnapped off the streets of Milan or while changing planes at a US airport, then whisked to a so-called black site somewhere in the CIA's archipelago of secret prisons, the hooded prisoner will likely fly in a Boeing 737, designed as a deluxe executive jet, retrofitted for this purpose. According to the New Yorker, Boeing has been acting as the "CIA's travel agent" - blocking out flightplans for as many as 1,245 rendition voyages, arranging ground crews and even booking hotels. A Spanish police report explains that the work was done by Jeppesen International Trip Planning, a Boeing subsidiary in San Jose. In May 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union launched a lawsuit against the Boeing subsidiary; the company has refused to confirm or deny the allegations.

Once the prisoners arrive at the destination, they face interrogators, some of whom will not be employed by the CIA or the military but by private contractors. According to Bill Golden, who runs the job website IntelligenceCareers.com, "Over half of the qualified counter-intelligence experts in the field work for contractors." If these freelance interrogators are to keep landing lucrative contracts, they must extract from prisoners the kind of "actionable intelligence" their employers in Washington are looking for. It's a dynamic ripe for abuse: just as prisoners under torture will usually say anything to make the pain stop, contractors have a powerful economic incentive to use whatever techniques are necessary to produce the sought-after information, regardless of its reliability.

Then there is the low-tech version of this application of market "solutions" to the war on terror - the willingness to pay top dollar to pretty much anyone for information about alleged terrorists. During the invasion of Afghanistan, US intelligence agents let it be known that they would pay anywhere from $3,000 to $25,000 for al-Qaida or Taliban fighters handed over to them. "Get wealth and power beyond your dreams," stated a typical flyer handed out by the US in Afghanistan, introduced as evidence in a 2002 US federal court filing on behalf of several Guantánamo prisoners. "You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces...This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life."

Soon enough, the cells of Bagram and Guantánamo were overflowing with goat herders, cab drivers, cooks and shopkeepers - all lethally dangerous, according to the men who turned them over and collected the rewards.

According to the Pentagon's own figures, 86% of the prisoners at Guantánamo were handed over by Afghan and Pakistani fighters or agents after the bounties were announced. As of December 2006, the Pentagon had released 360 prisoners from Guantánamo (out of 759 held between 2001 and the end of 2006). The Associated Press was able to track down 245 of them; 205 had been freed or cleared of all charges when they returned to their home countries. It is a track record that is a grave indictment of the quality of intelligence produced by the administration's market-based approach to terrorist identification.

In just a few years, the homeland security industry, which barely existed before 9/11, has exploded to a size that is now significantly larger than either Hollywood or the music business. Yet what is most striking is how little the security boom is analysed and discussed as an economy, as an unprecedented convergence of unchecked police powers and unchecked capitalism, a merger of the shopping mall and the secret prison. When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information, but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.

When new economies emerged in the past, from the Fordist revolution to the IT boom, they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production of wealth were also altering the way we as a culture worked, the way we travelled, even the way our brains process information. The new disaster economy has been subject to none of this kind of far-reaching discussion. There have been and are debates, of course - about the constitutionality of the Patriot Act, about indefinite detention, about torture and extraordinary rendition - but discussion of what it means to have these functions performed as commercial transactions has been almost completely avoided. What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand-wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors - rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatised war built to have no end.

Part of the problem is that the disaster economy sneaked up on us. In the 80s and 90s, new economies announced themselves with great pride and fanfare. The tech bubble in particular set a precedent for a new ownership class inspiring deafening levels of hype - endless media lifestyle profiles of dashing young CEOs beside their private jets, their remote-controlled yachts, their idyllic Seattle mountain homes. That kind of wealth is being generated by the disaster complex today, though we rarely hear about it. While the CEOs of the top 34 defence contractors saw their incomes go up an average of 108% between 2001 and 2005, chief executives at other large American companies averaged only 6% over the same period.

Peter Swire, who served as the US government's privacy counsellor during the Clinton administration, describes the convergence of forces behind the war on terror bubble like this: "You have government on a holy mission to ramp up information gathering and you have an information technology industry desperate for new markets." In other words, you have corporatism: big business and big government combining their formidable powers to regulate and control the citizenry.

· Extracted from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, published by Allen Lane on September 20, priced £25. © Naomi Klein 2007. To order a copy for £23.00 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.


· Naomi Klein will be discussing The Shock Doctrine at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre on Thursday 13 September at 7.30pm.
shockdoctrine.com


http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2167229,00.html


Why failure is the new face of success



It may have been the military that invaded but, with Iraq completely dismantled, the reconstruction was to be the preserve of US corporations ... Thus was born 'disaster capitalism', where oil companies profit from a broken country and private security firms grow rich on political chaos, says Naomi Klein in this final extract from her new book

Wednesday September 12, 2007
The Guardian


A Burger King in al-Asad air base, 100 miles west of Baghdad
A Burger King in al-Asad air base, 100 miles west of Baghdad. Photograph: Charles J Hanley/AP


On my flight leaving Baghdad, every seat was filled by a foreign contractor fleeing the violence. It was April 2004, and both Falluja and Najaf were under siege; 1,500 contractors pulled out of Iraq that week alone. Many more would follow. At the time, I was convinced that we were seeing the first full-blown defeat of the corporatist crusade. Iraq had been blasted with every shock weapon short of a nuclear bomb, and yet nothing could subdue this country. The experiment, clearly, had failed.

Now I am not sure. On one level, there is no question that parts of the project were a disaster. US chief envoy Paul Bremer was sent to Iraq to build a corporate utopia; instead, Iraq became a ghoulish dystopia where going to a simple business meeting could get you lynched, burned alive or beheaded. By May 2007, more than 900 contractors had been reported killed and "more than 12,000 wounded in battle or injured on the job", according to a New York Times analysis. The investors Bremer had done so much to attract had never showed up - neither HSBC, nor Procter & Gamble, which put its joint venture on hold, as did General Motors. New Bridge Strategies, the company that had gushed about how "a Wal-Mart could take over the country", conceded that "McDonald's is not opening any time soon". Bechtel's reconstruction contracts did not roll easily into long-term contracts to run the water and electricity systems. And by late 2006, the privatised reconstruction efforts that were at the centre of the "anti-Marshall Plan" [by which western corporations would remake Iraq in their own image rather than help Iraqis rebuild their own economy, as the US did in Germany after the second world war], had almost all been abandoned. And some rather dramatic policy reversals were in evidence.

Stuart Bowen, US special inspector general for the reconstruction of Iraq, reported that in the few cases where contracts were awarded directly to Iraqi firms, "it was more efficient and cheaper. And it has energised the economy because it puts the Iraqis to work". It turns out that funding Iraqis to rebuild their own country is more efficient than hiring lumbering multinationals who don't know the country or the language, surround themselves with $900- a-day mercenaries and spend as much as 55% of their contract budgets on overhead. Jon C Bowersox, who worked as the health adviser at the US embassy in Baghdad, offered this radical observation: the problem with Iraq's reconstruction, he said, was its desire to build everything from scratch. "We could have gone in and done low-cost rehabs, and not tried to transform their health-care system in two years."

An even more dramatic about-turn came from the Pentagon. In December 2006, it announced a new project to get Iraq's state-owned factories up and running - the same ones that Bremer had refused to supply with emergency generators because they were Stalinist throwbacks. Now the Pentagon realised that instead of buying cement and machine parts from Jordan and Kuwait, it could be purchasing them from languishing Iraqi factories, putting tens of thousands to work and sending revenue to surrounding communities. Paul Brinkley, US deputy under-secretary of defense for business transformation in Iraq, said, "We've looked at some of these factories more closely and found they aren't quite the rundown Soviet-era enterprises we thought they were", though he did admit that some of his colleagues had begun calling him a Stalinist.

Lieutenant General Peter W Chiarelli, the top US field commander in Iraq, explained that "we need to put the angry young men to work .... A relatively small decrease in unemployment would have a very serious effect on the level of sectarian killing going on." He couldn't help adding, "I find it unbelievable after four years that we haven't come to that realisation ...To me, it's huge. It's as important as just about any other part of the campaign plan."

Do these about-turns signal the death of disaster capitalism? Hardly. By the time US officials came to the realisation that they didn't need to rebuild a shiny new country from scratch, that it was more important to provide Iraqis with jobs and for their industry to share in the billions raised for reconstruction, the money that would have financed such an undertaking had already been spent.

Meanwhile, in the midst of the wave of neo-Keynesian epiphanies, Iraq was hit with the boldest attempt at crisis exploitation yet. In December 2006, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group fronted by James Baker issued its long-awaited report. It called for the US to "assist Iraqi leaders to reorganise the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise" and to "encourage investment in Iraq's oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies."

Most of the Iraq Study Group's recommendations were ignored by the White House, but not this one: the Bush administration immediately pushed ahead by helping to draft a radical new oil law for Iraq, which would allow companies such as Shell and BP to sign 30-year contracts in which they could keep a large share of Iraq's oil profits, amounting to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars - unheard of in countries with as much easily accessible oil as Iraq, and a sentence to perpetual poverty in a country where 95% of government revenues come from oil. This was a proposal so wildly unpopular that even Bremer had not dared make it in the first year of occupation. Yet it was coming up now, thanks to deepening chaos. Explaining why it was justified for such a large percentage of the profits to leave Iraq, the oil companies cited the security risks. In other words, it was the disaster that made the proposed radical law possible.

Washington's timing was extremely revealing. At the point when the law was pushed forward, Iraq was facing its most profound crisis to date: the country was being torn apart by sectarian conflict with an average of 1,000 Iraqis killed every week. Saddam Hussein had just been put to death in a depraved and provocative episode. Simultaneously, Bush was unleashing his "surge" of troops in Iraq, operating with "less restricted" rules of engagement. Iraq in this period was far too volatile for the oil giants to make major investments, so there was no pressing need for a new law - except to use the chaos to bypass a public debate on the most contentious issue facing the country. Many elected Iraqi legislators said they had no idea that a new law was even being drafted, and had certainly not been included in shaping its outcome. Greg Muttitt, a researcher with the oil-watch group Platform, reported: "I was recently at a meeting of Iraqi MPs and asked them how many of them had seen the law. Out of 20, only one MP had seen it." According to Muttitt, if the law was passed, Iraqis "would lose out massively because they don't have the capacity at the moment to strike a good deal".

Iraq's main labour unions declared that "the privatisation of oil is a red line that may not be crossed" and, in a joint statement, condemned the law as an attempt to seize Iraq's "energy resources at a time when the Iraqi people are seeking to determine their own future while still under conditions of occupation". The law that was finally adopted by Iraq's cabinet in February 2007 was even worse than anticipated: it placed no limits on the amount of profits that foreign companies can take from the country and placed no specific requirements about how much or little foreign investors would partner with Iraqi companies or hire Iraqis to work in the oil fields.

Most brazenly, it excluded Iraq's elected parliamentarians from having any say in the terms for future oil contracts. Instead, it created a new body, the Federal Oil and Gas Council, which, according to the New York Times, would be advised by "a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq". This unelected body, advised by unspecified foreigners, would have ultimate decision-making power on all oil matters, with the full authority to decide which contracts Iraq did and did not sign. In effect, the law called for Iraq's publicly owned oil reserves, the country's main source of revenues, to be exempted from democratic control and run instead by a powerful, wealthy oil dictatorship, which would exist alongside Iraq's broken and ineffective government.

It is hard to overstate the disgrace of this attempted resource grab. Iraq's oil profits are the country's only hope of financing its own reconstruction when some semblance of peace returns. To lay claim to that future wealth in a moment of national disintegration was disaster capitalism at its most shameless.

There was another, little discussed, consequence of the chaos in Iraq: the longer it wore on, the more privatised the foreign presence became, ultimately forging a new paradigm for the way wars are fought and how human catastrophes are responded to.

This is where the ideology of radical privitisation at the heart of the anti-Marshall Plan paid off handsomely. The Bush administration's steadfast refusal to staff the war in Iraq - whether with troops or with civilian administrators under its control - had some very clear benefits for its other war, the one to outsource the US government. This crusade, while it ceased to be the subject of the administration's public rhetoric, has remained a driving obsession behind the scenes, and it has been far more successful than all the administration's more public battles combined.

Because Rumsfeld designed the war as a just-in-time invasion, with soldiers there to provide only core combat functions, and because he eliminated 55,000 jobs in the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first year of the Iraq deployment, the private sector was left to fill in the gaps at every level. In practice, what this configuration meant was that, as Iraq spiralled into turmoil, an ever-more elaborate privatised war industry took shape to prop up the bare-bones army - whether on the ground in Iraq or back home treating soldiers at the Walter Reed Medical Centre in Washington.

Since Rumsfeld steadfastly rejected all solutions that required increasing the size of the army, the military had to find ways to get more soldiers into combat roles. Private security companies flooded into Iraq to perform functions that had previously been done by soldiers - providing security for top officials, guarding bases, escorting other contractors. Once they were there, their roles expanded further in response to the chaos. Blackwater's original contract in Iraq was to provide private security for Bremer, but a year into the occupation, it was engaging in all-out street combat. During the April 2004 uprising of Moqtada al-Sadr's rebel movement in Najaf, Blackwater actually assumed command over active-duty US marines in a day-long battle with the Mahdi Army, during which dozens of Iraqis were killed.

At the start of the occupation, there were an estimated 10,000 private soldiers in Iraq, already far more than during the first Gulf war. Three years later, a report by the US Government Accountability Office found that there were 48,000 private soldiers, from around the world, deployed in Iraq. Mercenaries represented the largest contingent of soldiers after the US military - more than all the other members of the "Coalition of the Willing" combined. The "Baghdad boom", as it was called in the financial press, took what was a frowned-upon, shadowy sector and fully incorporated it into the US and British war-fighting machines. Blackwater hired aggressive Washington lobbyists to erase the word "mercenary" from the public vocabulary and turn its company into an all-American brand. According to its CEO, Erik Prince, "This goes back to our corporate mantra: We're trying to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did for the postal service."

When the war moved inside the jails, the military was so short of trained interrogators and Arabic translators that it could not get information out of its new prisoners. Desperate for more interrogators and translators, it turned to the defence contractor CACI International Inc. In its original contract, CACI's role in Iraq was to provide information technology services to the military, but the wording of the work order was vague enough that "information technology" could be stretched to mean interrogation. The flexibility was intentional: CACI is part of a new breed of contractor that acts as a temp agency for the federal government - it has ongoing, loosely worded contracts and keeps large numbers of potential workers on call, ready to fill whatever positions come up. Calling in CACI, whose workers did not need to meet the rigorous training and security clearances required of government employees, was as easy as ordering new office supplies; dozens of new interrogators arrived in a flash.

The corporation that gained most from the chaos was Halliburton. Before the invasion, it had been awarded a contract to put out oil fires set by Saddam's retreating armies. When those fires did not materialise, Halliburton's contract was stretched to include a new function: providing fuel for the entire nation, a job so big that "it bought up every available tanker truck in Kuwait, and imported hundreds more". In the name of freeing up soldiers for the battlefield, Halliburton took on dozens more of the army's traditional functions, including maintaining army vehicles and radios.

Even recruiting, long since seen as the job of soldiers, rapidly became a for-profit business as the war wore on. By 2006, new soldiers were being recruited by private headhunting firms such as Serco, or a division of the weapons giant L-3 Communications. The private recruiters, many of whom had never served in the military, were paid bonuses every time they signed up a soldier. One company spokesperson bragged, "If you want to eat steak, you have to put people in the army." Rumsfeld's reign also fuelled a boom in outsourced training: companies such as Cubic Defense Applications and Blackwater ran soldiers through live combat training and war games, bringing them to privately owned training facilities, where they practised house-to-house combat in simulated villages.

And thanks to Rumsfeld's privatisation obsession (as he first suggested in his speech on September 10 2001), when soldiers came home sick or suffering from post-traumatic stress, they were treated by private health care companies for whom the trauma-heavy war in Iraq generated windfall profits. One of these companies, Health Net, became the seventh-strongest performer in the Fortune 500 in 2005, owing largely to the number of traumatised soldiers returning from Iraq. Another was IAP Worldwide Services Inc, which won the contract to take over many of the services at the Walter Reed military hospital.

The greatly expanded role of private companies was never openly debated as a question of policy (much in the way Iraq's proposed oil law suddenly materialised). Rumsfeld did not have to engage in pitched battles with federal employees' unions or high-ranking generals. Instead, it all just happened on the fly in the field, in what the military describes as "mission creep". The longer the war wore on, the more it became a privatised war, and soon enough, this was simply the new way of war. Crisis was the enabler of the boom, just as it had been for so many before.

The numbers tell the dramatic story of corporate mission creep. During the first Gulf war in 1991, there was one contractor for every 100 soldiers. At the start of the 2003 Iraq invasion, the ratio had jumped to one contractor for every 10 soldiers. Three years into the US occupation, the ratio had reached 1:3. Less than a year later, with the occupation approaching its fourth year, there was one contractor for every 1.4 US soldiers. But that figure includes only contractors working directly for the US government, not for other coalition partners or the Iraqi government, and it does not account for the contractors based in Kuwait and Jordan who had farmed out their jobs to subcontractors.

British soldiers in Iraq are already far outnumbered by their countrymen working for private security firms at a ratio of 3:1.

When Tony Blair announced in February 2007 that he was pulling 1,600 soldiers out of Iraq, the press reported instantly that "civil servants hope 'mercenaries' can help fill the gap left behind", with the companies paid directly by the British government. At the same time, the Associated Press put the number of contractors in Iraq at 120,000, almost equivalent to the number of US troops. In scale, this kind of privatised warfare has already overshadowed the United Nations. The UN's budget for peacekeeping in 2006-2007 was $5.25bn (£2.6bn) -that is less than a quarter of the $20bn (£9.8bn) Halliburton got in Iraq contracts, and the latest estimates are that the mercenary industry alone is worth $4bn (£2bn).

So while the reconstruction of Iraq was certainly a failure for Iraqis and for US taxpayers, it has been anything but for the disaster capitalism complex. Made possible by the September 11 attacks, the war in Iraq represented nothing less than the violent birth of a new economy. This was the genius of Rumsfeld's "transformation" plan: since every possible aspect of both destruction and reconstruction has been outsourced and privatised, there is an economic boom when the bombs start falling, when they stop and when they start up again - a closed profit-loop of destruction and reconstruction, of tearing down and building up. For companies that are clever and far-sighted, such as Halliburton and the Carlyle Group, the destroyers and rebuilders are different divisions of the same corporations.

The Bush administration has taken several important and little-examined measures to institutionalise the privatised warfare model forged in Iraq, making it a permanent fixture of foreign policy. In July 2006, Bowen, the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, issued a report on "lessons learned" from the various contractor debacles. It concluded that the problems stemmed from insufficient planning and called for the creation of "a deployable reserve corps of contracting personnel who are trained to execute rapid relief and reconstruction contracting during contingency operations" and to "pre-qualify a diverse pool of contractors with expertise in specialised reconstruction areas" - in other words, a standing contractor army. In his 2007 State of the Union address, Bush championed the idea, announcing the creation of a brand-new civilian reserve corps. "Such a corps would function much like our military reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," he said. "It would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time."

A year and half into the Iraq occupation, the US State Department launched a new branch: the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization. On any given day, it is paying private contractors to draw up detailed plans to reconstruct 25 different countries that may, for one reason or another, find themselves the target of US-sponsored destruction, from Venezuela to Iran. Corporations and consultants are lined up on "pre-signed contracts" so that they are ready to leap into action as soon as disaster strikes. For the Bush administration, it was a natural evolution: after claiming it had a right to cause unlimited pre-emptive destruction, it then pioneered pre-emptive reconstruction - rebuilding places that have not yet been destroyed.

So in the end, the war in Iraq did create a model economy - it was just not the "tiger on the Tigris" that the neo-cons had advertised. Instead, it was a model for privatised war and reconstruction - a model that quickly became export-ready. Until Iraq, the frontiers of the Chicago crusade had been bound by geography: Russia, Argentina, South Korea. Now a new frontier can open up wherever the next disaster strikes.

Links

Explore further The Shock Doctrine and the ideas behind it, including a video interview with Naomi Klein, commentary from leading writers, and the chance to post your response, links to further reading and a short film by Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón at guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine.

Naomi Klein's homepage: naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

·Extracted from: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, published by Allen Lane on September 20, priced £25. © Naomi Klein 2007. To order a copy for £23 with free p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.

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... una nuova alianza con la natura.