“Where the Iraq experiment entered bold new terrain was that it transformed the invasion, occupation and reconstruction into an exciting, fully privatized new market. This market was created, just as the homeland security complex was, with a huge pot of public money. For reconstruction alone, the boom was kicked off with $38 billion from the […]
“Public pronouncements and photo ops aside, Bush and his inner circle had no intention of converting to Keynesianism. Far from shaking their determination to weaken the public sphere, the security failures of 9/11 reaffirmed their deepest ideological (and self-interested) beliefs––that only private firms possessed the intelligence and innovation to meet the new security challenge. Although […]
“Two months after the IMF came to its final agreement with South Korea, The Wall Street Journal ran an article headlined ‘Wall Street Scavenging in Asia-Pacific.’ It reported that Pelosky’s firm, as well as several other prominent houses, had ‘dispatched armies of bankers to the Asia-Pacific region to scout for brokerage firms, asset management firms […]
“For years, there had been rumors that the international financial institutions had been dabbling in the art of ‘pseudo-crisis,’ as Williamson put it, in order to bend countries to their will, but it was difficult to prove. The most extensive testimony came from Davison Budhoo, an IMF staffer turned whistle-blower, who accused the organization of […]
“The movement that Milton Friedman launched in the 1950s is best understood as an attempt by multinational capital to recapture the highly profitable, lawless frontier that Adam Smith, the intellectual forefather of today’s neoliberals, so admired––but with a twist. Rather than journeying through Smith’s ‘savage and barbarous nations’ where there was no Western law (no […]
“When I arrived in South Africa, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Freedom Charter was approaching and the ANC had decided to mark the event with a media spectacle. The plan was for Parliament to relocate for the day from its usual commanding home in Cape Town to the far more humble surroundings […]
“Orville Schell, a China scholar and journalist, summarized Deng Xiaoping’s choice: ‘After the massacre of 1989, he in effect said we will not stop economic reform; we will in effect halt political reform.’ For Deng and the rest of the Politburo, the free-market possibilities were now limitless. Just as Pinochet’s terror had cleared the streets […]
“The IMF issued its first full-fledged ‘structural adjustment’ program in 1983. For the next two decades, every country that came to the fund for a major loan was informed that it needed to revamp its economy from top to bottom. Davison Budhoo, an IMF senior economist who designed structural adjustment programs in Latin America and […]
“The occupation could not be done humanely; there is no humane way to rule people against their will. There are two choices, Beauvoir wrote: accept occupation and all the methods required for its enforcement, ‘or else you reject, not merely certain specific practices, but the greater aim which sanctions them, and for which they are […]
“It all came back to Friedman’s single-minded message: everything went wrong with the New Deal. That’s when so many countries ‘including my own, got off on the wrong track.’ To get governments back on the right track, Friedman, in his first popular book, Capitalism and Freedom, laid out what would become the global free-market rulebook […]