Shock cops
Stuart Trew
Naomi Klein through Robocop's visor
Picture this: It's near-future Detroit. The greedy logic of global capitalism has left an entire city without industry, in total poverty, and crime stricken. Rather than addressing the economic root of the problem - jobs - a mega-company called OCP plans to demolish what's left of the community and build Detroit's small but enormously wealthy elite a glittering new consumer paradise called Delta City. The problem for OCP is that the city's current residents can't simply be forced out before construction starts. So the company buys the local police department, provokes a citywide crime spree, then cracks down on the villains with high technology and extreme prejudice. It vacates the area, creating a blank slate, so to speak, on which to build a new private city, serviced by private utilities, policed by private security guards.
Okay, so this is the backdrop to the 1997 blockbuster movie Robocop, but it could easily have fit into Chapter 20 of Naomi Klein's new book on "the rise of disaster capitalism," The Shock Doctrine, which is largely about blank slates and the violence that the captains of capitalism will do in order to produce them again and again, all over the world. I bring up the movie, probably one of the best U.S. films of the '80s, to show that while Klein's critical theory isn't exactly new, if two Hollywood writers could come to the same conclusion 20 years ago, there's got to be something to it.
To very roughly paraphrase Klein, whose 550 pages of evidence (not
including endnotes) cannot be shrugged off as ideological hallucination, when you offer people a choice between a society where markets determine who makes how much money, and one where wealth and resources are more equitably distributed among the population, they will reject the market society nine times out of 10. If the world today is full of market societies whose politicians faithfully espouse the virtues of global capitalism and still get elected, it is because somewhere along the line those societies have been shocked into embracing that system as the only choice. For Britain it took a war with Argentina, for the United States it was the "Volker shock" and Reaganomics. Even Canada had its "deficit crisis" in the mid-'90s, which made it possible for the Liberals to gut the public sector in order to structurally adjust Canada along more market-friendly lines.
But Klein focuses on the really gruesome acts of capitalism - on the macro level of South America, where market reforms were rammed through by ruthless dictators whose persecution of socialism as terrorism, with torture and executions, virtually eliminated an entire generation in many countries; and on micro levels like post-tsunami Sri Lanka and post-Katrina New Orleans, where coastal communities became the target of disaster capitalists who saw in the sanitized shorelines a blank slate on which to build high-end hotels and condos - their own Delta Cities.
But I emphasized Chapter 20 because that's where we hear from John Robb, a former Delta Force commander about how the Delta Cities may not even need disasters anymore.
"Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life," Klein quotes the former Delta Force commander, now a management consultant, before adding, "The process is already well under way."
Some Atlanta-area well-to-dos have contracted their future to CH2M Hill, a real-life OCP, which has pledged to build a new city from the ground up, manage its utilities and keep it secure with private guards.
Since The Shock Doctrine came out, Klein has also written about how private firefighters kept the wealthy from burning in the recent California fires.
And in a very disturbing Robocop-type scenario, mega-utility companies like GE, which co-owns NBC Universal, are buying up homeland security firms like InVision. Klein described the possibilities of this corporate combination in Harper's Magazine last month: "The more panicked our societies become, convinced that there are terrorists lurking in every mosque, the higher the news ratings soar, the more biometric IDs and liquid-explosive-detection devices the complex sells, and the more high-tech fences it builds."
So is it a coincidence that Klein's book was released almost 20 years to the day since Robocop came out? I can almost guarantee it! But if you don't have the patience to slog through 600 pages on disaster capitalism, the ultra-violent dystopic thriller is as good a starting point as any - or listen to Naomi Klein in person, since she will be in Ottawa on Monday, November 12, to talk about her book. A short film, Shock Doctrine, by Klein and Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men, Y tu mamá también), will also be screened at the event, 7 p.m., $5 advance, $10 at the door.
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This article and this vivid nightmarish book about the future of both democracy and capitalism is giving me some goose bumps, baby !
But, you know, as usual, we are only focusing on the Beast and forgeting too fast about the Beauty of life itself.
You know, we are living in a great country.
Why ?
Because of the "Belle Province". Because of Quebec and its perpetual identity syndrom.
You do not believe me ?
Look at Nicolas Sarkozy. He knows how to create a mythologie around his own private idea of what is so cool to be a french connection man with Georgie.
And Georges W. Bush himself. What is he doing when comes the time to talk in front of the Nation after September 11 ? Simple, he is using a Canadian writer from the conservative think thank from the Prairie.
And what about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown ? They can do some miles on the nationalist idea of what in the world is an honorable English citizen.
But when you look at Canada, the capitalism charm is being broken every now and then because the magical and neverending Constitutional story is surfacing each time we are trying to go up Right, once an for all, for good and forever.
It was true till very recently though.
Now, it is being different because Mario Dumont and the Action Démocratique du Québec is re-connecting the Quebecers to their ancient religious demons.
And by doing that, they are covering "le chemin du Roi" with a beatiful red carpet so Stephen Harper can conquer Canada by defeating the Parti Québécois.
Why is it so important in regard of the New Economical Philosophy being showned by Naomi Klein ?
Because once you open this kind of Pandora Box, you are opening a coffin that can be your last resort, as a Prime Minister.
Why ? Because the more you are playing with nationism in Quebec, the more you are blowing oil on a fire that is going to destroy the Northern Canadian Way of Living in a rainbow ark society.
So, do not worry about the iron heel. ;-)
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Steve Roussel
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Hi all,
Just thought it would be important to mention that Naomi Klein's visit to Ottawa, organized by Octopus Books, is completely SOLD OUT.
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Taraneh Bayat
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