The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth, Part IV

6 April 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Children’s Story, Part 1:

Once there was a wonderful green and pretty valley with lots of boys and girls who all got along with each other. Even brothers and sisters never fought! That’s almost impossible to believe, isn’t it? But that’s what this valley was like. They spent their time in the summer playing games, always playing fair, and making lots of friends. It was a place where everybody had a lot of friends. They played all kinds of games together, and got along a lot better than they sometimes do in school here.

Then one day some strange new people came to the valley. They hadn’t had new people in so long nobody could remember if they’d ever had new people. These people were very short, and that was ok, but they also looked really mean. Their eyes squinted and when they talked to you, you got the idea that they really didn’t care about you at all, they were just looking to see if they could trick you out of anything. And when they talked, they talked too loud, and always seemed angry. They yelled. Just listening to them was kind of scary, you know?

And they said things that just sounded silly. They would say, “You little kids are all very short.” When they were the shortest people in the valley. When one boy spoke up and reminded them that they were short, while the kids in the valley were all taller than they were, they got that squinty-eyed look, and said “That’s because you’re supposed to be walking on your knees. Why are you standing on your feet? You’re supposed to be walking on your knees!” A bunch of kids, while still trying to be polite, pointed out that no, nobody was supposed to walk on their knees, and yes, they really were taller than these new mean people. But the new people just got meaner, and louder. “You’re supposed to walk on your knees!” they would shout. “Get down on your knees!” And that kind of a voice can really scare you, even if you’re right and they’re wrong, you know?

Before too long, one or two of the kids who were really scared by the yelling said, “Well maybe we are supposed to walk on our knees. Maybe we should get down on our knees.” Other kids laughed at them and said that was nonsense, but they’d say, “But they’re yelling it. they’re so loud. They act so sure. Maybe they’re right. Or maybe if we’d walk on our knees, they’d stop yelling.” Some other kids chimed in and said it was worth it to get them to stop yelling. And before you knew it, most of the kids actually began walking on their knees! The other kids told them they were being silly, but the truth is that they were afraid, and sometimes when we’re afraid we do silly things. Before long, every boy and girl in the valley was walking on their knees. Some of the kids even lay down on their backs, or turned over and hid their faces, trying to disappear. And so now these strange new short mean little people really were the tallest people in the valley.

Something is wrong about getting people to walk on their knees. But still, that’s where they are, and they’re going to stay there until next week when we hear the end of the story.

PRAYER:

Let us bow to causes that serve life, truth, justice, the empowerment of the many – all the things that the great prophets and sages of history have preached. Their insights linger in our cultural DNA, and still tempt us to serve such high, deep, broad pleadings of life more abundant.

Let us be appropriately bowed to these transcendent ideals, and yoked to their demands on us, for that kind of bowing and yoking cherish us and put within our souls the breath of a god of life.

But let us never be put into the position of bowing as though we were meant to be on our knees, as though we were inferior beings.

And let us not bow too far or for too long to fear, for fear can so easily be used to paralyze our spirits and enslave us.

We bend to the voices of a high moral calling; we yoke our spirits to serve life, but not the enemies of life.

When we bow, when we consent to be yoked to persons or to causes, let us remember we are children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself, and the hope of our world. Bowing to callings that are worthy of that spark of God within us empowers us. Let us seek to be empowered, and to empower others. Amen.

SERMON: The Most Dangerous Fundamentalism on Earth, Part 4

I want to talk about some more applications of the three-part plan to loot national economies that have been done since 1990. It was Milton Friedman’s economic plan for transferring wealth to the top and disempowering or eliminating the middle class. Ironically, or perhaps cynically, it is called Free Trade. In practice, it looks like this:

First, there needs to be what Friedman called a crisis: something to paralyze or distract the citizens, to get them off-balance for awhile.

1. Then the plan is quickly put into effect, to sell off government assets to privileged private buyers. The code word for this is “privatization.”

2. The second part of the plan is to remove all laws that could get in the way of this easy looting and allow foreign companies – especially U.S. companies – free access to all their markets, without tariffs or taxes meant to protect the local economy. The code word for this is “deregulation.”

3. The third part is to disempower and begin to dismantle the middle class, the workers, as obstacles, by eliminating their social support services – and transferring the money from them to privileged private buyers. The code words for this are “cuts to social spending.”

If you’ve been here for even one or two of the three earlier sermons, you know the plot, and you know what’s going to happen each and every time, though it may happen a bit differently each time, as they react creatively to each kind of crisis.

One thing you can count on is that the stories we got from our media were never the whole story. Another is that beneath all the stories of robbery, manipulation and violence, we’re really talking about the gods we are serving as we shape and misshape our world. As a theologian, that’s what most interests me. Let’s start with a country we all remember being excited about in the 1990’s: South Africa after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and the African National Congress was given a certain kind of power in 1994. I remember it as an exciting, positive time, but never heard the deeper economic story. See how much of the rest of this you remember getting from the media, and ask yourself what values, what gods, are being served.

To summarize it, the story is that after Nelson Mandela was released from prison, F. W. De Klerk and others made much of the “freedom,” while secretly writing the economic and legal agreement that would insure that blacks received no economic freedom, and in fact had to pay the whites huge sums, so the whites were still supported by the blacks, whose economic condition became worse. Mandela and the others had been snookered, and so were the rest of us, through the misleading or uninformed media coverage.

Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s right hand during his presidency and his successor, introduced the Chicago agenda in June 1996, even saying “Just call me a Thatcherite” to signal that South Africa was largely for sale to foreigners (The Shock Doctrine, p. 209). How has it worked for the people? You know the plot by now, so the general picture won’t surprise you, though the details might.

Forty percent of the government’s annual debt payments go to the country’s massive pension fund. The vast majority of the beneficiaries are former white apartheid employees. So in the end, South Africa has wound up with a twisted case of reparations in reverse, with the white businesses that reaped enormous profits from black labor during the apartheid years paying not a cent in reparations, but the victims of apartheid continuing to send large paychecks to their former victimizers. And how do they raise the money for this generosity? Through taxes, and by selling off the government’s assets – a modern form of the very looting that the ANC had been so intent on avoiding (The Shock Doctrine, p. 213).

Since 1990, the year Nelson Mandela left prison, the average life expectancy for black South Africans has dropped by thirteen years (The Shock Doctrine, p. 206).

– Since 1994, the year the ANC took power, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million in 2006.

– Between 1991 and 2002, the unemployment rate for black South Africans more than doubled, from 23 percent to 48 percent.

– Of South Africa’s 35 million black citizens, only five thousand earn more than $60,000 a year (that’s one in 7,000). The number of whites in that income bracket is twenty times higher, and many earn far more than that amount.

We must not pretend that it is a coincidence or aberration when these economic disempowerments happen in any society, including our own. This awareness of the design behind the destruction – the master narrative – is the greatest source of our hope, and of our power.

Now let’s leave Africa, though its tragic stories may stay with you, as they have stayed with me. But there’s more to tell, for the 1990’s saw another dramatic and far-reaching new tactic emerge, that you probably didn’t know about.

On January 13, 1993 the new Friedmanite rulers were at a small invitation-only conference at the Carnegie Conference Center, near the White House, the IMF, and the World Bank. John Williamson, the powerful economist known for shaping the missions of both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, had convened the event as a historic gathering of the Chicago School tribe. In his address, he raised a stunning, nearly paralyzing, question:

One will have to ask whether it could conceivably make sense to think of deliberately provoking a crisis so as to remove the political logjam to reform.

Williamson’s remarks represented a major leap forward for the shock doctrine: the idea of actively creating a serious crisis so that Friedman’s economic shock therapy could be pushed through was now being openly discussed by people who could and did influence economies around the world (The Shock Doctrine, p. 256).

The first country to do this was Canada. The financial community circulated rumors that Canada’s currency was in trouble and the stocks were a dangerous investment – these were all lies. They wanted to create a false deficit crisis. By the time Canadians learned that the “deficit crisis” had been invented and grossly manipulated by the corporate-funded think tanks, it no longer mattered – the budget cuts had already been made and locked into law. As a direct result, social programs for the country’s unemployed were radically reduced, successfully robbed, and have never recovered, despite many subsequent surplus budgets.

The strategy of intentionally creating crises was used again and again in this period. In September 1995, a video was leaked to the Canadian press of Ontario’s minister of education, telling a closed-door meeting of civil servants that before cuts to education and other unpopular reforms could be announced, a climate of panic needed to be created by leaking information that painted a dire picture. He called it “creating a useful crisis” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 258-259).

Two years later, Michael Bruno, chief economist of development economics at the World Bank, re-emphasized John Williamson’s new plan, again without attracting media scrutiny. In a lecture to the International Economic Association in Tunis in 1995, later even published as a paper by the World Bank, Bruno addressed five hundred assembled economists from sixty-eight countries. He said that there was a growing consensus about “the idea that a large enough crisis may shock otherwise reluctant policymakers into instituting productivity-enhancing reforms.”

And just in case the audience missed the point, Bruno said, “I have emphasized one major theme: the political economy of deep crises tends to yield radical reforms with positive outcomes.”

Remember to unpack the code words. “Productivity-enhancing” does not mean plans to increase production by raising workers” salaries and benefits. It means those legal reforms making it easy for high-level investors to loot the economies of target nations – including their own nation, as Canada had shown. There is no national loyalty in this scheme; it is only about making money.

To help create these wonderful profit-taking opportunities, Bruno argued that international agencies needed to do more than just take advantage of existing economic crises to push through Friedman’s fundamentalist capitalism – they needed to preemptively cut off aid to make those crises worse”. Bruno conceded that this was frightening – government salaries would go unpaid, public infrastructure would rot – but, Chicago disciple that he was, he urged his audience to embrace this destruction as the first stage of creation. “Indeed, as the crisis deepens,” he said, “the government may gradually wither away” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 259-260).

This, of course, was seen as a good thing for predatory investors. The effects of a withered government, robbed of its ability to provide social support or infrastructure services to protect its citizens – these things were never considered. They didn’t matter. Once you choose the gods you will serve, you find that all gods are jealous gods, and serving them automatically eliminates some actions even from being seen, let alone considered.

These are the plans for economic looting that have run much of the world and been used to devastate and rob country after country under the Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations in an uninterrupted, bipartisan line since Nixon’s 1973 CIA-funded coup in Chile – or even going back to the Johnson administration and our CIA-backed coup installing Suharto as the brutal dictator of Indonesia in 1965.

It usually involves finding people within a country who are willing to sell it out, betray it or even attack it. They may do it for great personal wealth, as the rulers get, or in service of a far right-wing ideology in which they believe, and which they believe demands violence in order to succeed. And of course, some of them are simply psychopaths, drawn by the violence and lawlessness.

Some of the backstory of a lot of the violence and terrorism in the West since 1953 has only come to light during the past decade. There is an important book called NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe by Daniele Ganser (published September 2001).

It is a detailed study of the secret right-wing armies formed by our CIA and the secret services of nearly all West European countries after WWII and continuing into recent times – perhaps to the present day.

The stated purpose of the violence – which involved the murders of thousands of their own citizens – was both to suppress the Left and to induce such fear and terror in the citizens that they would willingly give up more of their rights, helping to create a more autocratic state. In Ganser’s detailed research, both former CIA operatives and those active or in charge of the many secret armies planted throughout western Europe stated that all terrorism in western Europe since 1953 was done by the secret intelligence agencies within the victims” own governments, with the tactical and economic aid of our own CIA. They were killing their own people to create the atmosphere of terror that makes people easier to command and control.

Ganser says, “The secret armies were involved in a whole series of terrorist operations and human rights violations that they wrongly blamed on the Communists in order to discredit the left at the polls. The operations always aimed at spreading maximum fear among the population and ranged from bomb massacres in trains and market squares in Italy, the use of systematic torture of opponents in Turkey, the support for right-wing coup d’etats in Greece and Turkey, to the smashing of opposition groups in Portugal and Spain.” (Ganser, p. 2)

So these bold plans to pro-actively cripple entire societies and induce an atmosphere of fear or terror that were spoken out loud by influential Chicago school economists in the 1990s were not new plans, just new variations on old and established plans, just as their economic shock therapy had footnotes to the electroshock experiments at McGill University in the 1950s.

Now we have to move on again. The next happy accident that opened doors for this now-perfected scheme of looting a society came through crises that were neither militarily nor economically imposed, but through natural disasters. The first natural disaster this Chicago school group took advantage of was Hurricane Mitch.

In 1998, Hurricane Mitch lashed the coasts and mountains of Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, swallowing up villages whole and killing more than nine thousand people. University of Chicago-trained economists immediately flew there to help. Within two months, the Honduran congress passed laws – now you’ll be able to see this coming – selling off government-owned airports, seaports and highways, the state telephone company, the national electric company and parts of the water sector. It overturned progressive land-reform laws, making it far easier for foreigners to buy and sell property, and rammed through a radically pro-business mining law (drafted, as you would now expect, by the mining industry) that lowered environmental standards and made it easier to evict people from homes that stood in the way of new mines (The Shock Doctrine, p. 395).

By the time the big tsunami hit on December 26, 2004, Washington was ready to take the Hurricane Mitch model to the next level – aiming not just at rewriting the laws and looting the country’s assets, but now also at our direct corporate control over the reconstruction (The Shock Doctrine, p. 396), squeezing even more money out of disasters.

A year after the tsunami, the respected non-governmental organization ActionAid, which monitors foreign aid spending, published the results of an extensive survey of fifty thousand tsunami survivors in five countries. The same patterns repeated everywhere: residents were barred from rebuilding, but hotels were showered with incentives to build on their land; temporary camps were miserable militarized holding pens, and almost no permanent reconstruction had been done. The study concluded that the setbacks could not be chalked up to the usual villains of poor communication, underfunding or corruption. The problems were structural and deliberate: “Governments have largely failed in their responsibility to provide land for permanent housing,” the report concluded. “They have stood by or been complicit as land has been grabbed and coastal communities pushed aside in favor of commercial interests” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 399).

Backed up by the guns of local police and private security, it was militarized gentrification, class war on the beaches (The Shock Doctrine, p. 402).

This is only partly about a violent economic scheme born in the University of Chicago School of Economics that has wreaked havoc all over the world. More fundamentally, it is about the gods we serve the gods our country is serving, and the terrible cost of serving gods not worth serving.

If you can ignore the plight of the vast majority of people, you see what a terrific opportunity for profit intentionally created military and economic crises and natural disasters can offer to those prepared to capitalize on them, as Milton Friedman had written back in 1982. But to think that way, you have to serve a god whose heart has been ripped out and replaced by a safety deposit box.

Everywhere the Chicago School crusade has triumphed, it has created a permanent underclass of between 25 and 60 percent of the population. It is always a form of war, always a form of economic genocide (The Shock Doctrine, p. 405).

Let’s spend a few final minutes on Katrina. It won’t surprise you to learn that Milton Friedman wrote in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, that Katrina was “also an opportunity” (The Shock Doctrine, p. 410), because now you know exactly what he meant by that.

In New Orleans, as in Iraq – which I’ll talk about next week – no opportunity for profit was left untapped. For example, Kenyon, a division of the huge funeral conglomerate Service Corporation International (and a major Bush campaign donor), was hired to retrieve the dead from homes and streets. The company charged the state, on average, $12,500 per victim (The Shock Doctrine, p. 411).

Who pays for all this? In order to offset the tens of billions of dollars going to private companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress announced that it needed to cut $40 billion from the federal budget. Among the programs that were slashed were student loans, Medicaid and food stamps. In other words, the poorest citizens in our country subsidized the contractor bonanza in New Orleans twice – first when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, and second when the few programs that directly assist the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills. Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however, disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival (The Shock Doctrine, p. 413). While the assets and social programs of a government – including our own – are plundered, laws are rewritten to make the plundering technically legal, and social supports are cut, helping to weaken and eliminate the middle class.

Here’s another way to put this. A small but powerful group of moral midgets has invaded our world. Through tactics of fear and terror, they have put hundreds of millions of people who are their moral and spiritual superiors on their knees or on their backs. It is not right. Can so many good people really be kept on their knees and their backs forever? Would any decent gods sanction such brutality? Could any people of decent and healthy faith abide such an unfair and immoral state?

Well, as you’ve also seen coming, this story is continued until next week.