Falun gong & Groupthink

Oppression is the same whether it occurs to silence a protest against the WTO or G8 summits, or whether its goal is to silence Falun Gong protesters from questioning or defying the Communist Party's decisions. Oppressian does not favor one nationality or one country over another; throughout history, both large and small countries have been ruled by elites to the detriment of minorities (or the majority) of their population.

It is as though the saying, 'Absolute power corrupts absolutely.' is proved countless times over every continent and throughout every age. I am not happy about this. What does seem to accompany oppression in every instance is groupthink. Groupthink tends to bring up visions of Human Resource manuals for corporate training; but, is an equally applicable term to political mindsets. Groupthink can be 'right' wing or 'left' wind, capitalist, socialist, communist or within any group that validates itself through repeating its familiar montras over and over to itself to the exclusion or tolerance of any other points of view.

Every once in a while, a person breaks free from the tyranny of groupthink and wakes up to a different reality. The story below is of such a man; a policeman commanded to deal with Falun Gong protesters in 1999 in China. His insights are simple but compelling and very much like those of American policemen who broke from the ranks of the 'blue code' of silence. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of this post below; if you are so inclined to research this, please leave me a comment below as I would be very interested.


In His Own Words: Hao Fengjun Explains Why He Escaped from China, Part I
By Hao Fengjun
Special to The Epoch Times
Jun 09, 2005

Editor's note: Hao Fengjun, 32, a former police officer of the 610 Office of the Tianjin Bureau of State Security, sought political asylum in Australia after he fled China in February, 2005. He left his work because he no longer wanted to be involved in the persecution of Falun Gong and other religious groups. Encouraged by the recent events related to the "Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party" and Chen Yonglin, Hao decided to step forward and tell the public the truth. The following is a transcript of Hao Fengjun's words about why he chose to escape from China.

1. Family Background

I was born late in China's Cultural Revolution. My father was a construction worker and my mother a housewife. I have an elder brother. My father was the only bread winner in the family. My childhood memories were full of political purges and earthquakes. The only good times I could remember were when I played in the mud and had water-fights with the other kids. Fortunately, my loving parents always taught me to be optimistic about the future, gave me moral instruction and told me what is really important in life. They also told me that I should have courage to face any difficulties and be positive in anything I do. My parents paid a lot of attention to the nurture of a child's character by teaching us to be honest, righteous, modest, kind and brave. My growing years were profoundly influenced by my parents and I did well in school.

I had been fascinated by many professions, foremost among them was that of police officer. I wanted to make my contribution to society by fighting the bad guys and crime, and protecting people. I had worked to achieve that goal! In 1985, I got into Nankai High School, one of the five elite high schools in Tianjin City, through a competitive exam after finishing my grade school, and I chose to focus on the humanities.

The June 4th incident that shook the world broke out between the spring and summer of 1989 when I was a junior in high school. News about the student movement in Beijing spread to my school, and we began to care about the situation in Beijing and the students there. One day, led by our homeroom teacher, we took to the street in support of the college students in Beijing. The flyers I took and read while walking in the parade shocked me. I learned from those flyers the notorious acts of corruption by our country's political leaders at various levels.

For instance, Deng Xiaoping's son Deng Pufang held the post of president of China's Federation of the Handicapped; another of Deng's son, Deng Zhifang, was the board chairman of China Northern Inc. (an arms dealer), and so on. Watching the dialogue between China's then premier Li Peng and college students on TV, I felt the questions raised by the students were indeed realistic. Though still in my formative years, I already saw a lot of social ills including graft, disparities between the rich and poor, and favoritism. What those college students stood for reflected exactly how I had felt and inspired my sympathy with the students' just actions and my desire to fight for democracy and against corruption. Then, the central government silenced the whole incident with guns.

I learned afterwards that the personnel files of the college students would include records of their involvement in the June 4 demonstrations, and these students, after graduation, would have to find jobs themselves. Since no one dared to take them, they had to support themselves by doing odd jobs.

2. The Conflict between My Dreams and Reality

I got into the Tianjin Nankai University and became a student in the law department in 1991. Upon graduation in 1994, I was assigned to work in the Tianjin Public Security Bureau. One year of ideological and legal education in addition to military and submission training [training that makes one get used to obeying the order of higher authorities] left in the minds of college graduates that "the organs of the public security are violent apparatus in the state based on people's democratic dictatorship, and the tools serving the Party." We learned, after the brainwashing, to obey orders without asking why. I finished the basic police training at the end of 1994 and was assigned to the anti-riot team of the Heping branch of the Tianjin Public Security Bureau, where I worked for two years.

When I started out, I had wanted to get rid of gangsters and protect people, and arrested some suspects of murders, robberies, and drug trafficking. Meanwhile, many things that happened illogically during work hurt me profoundly. Take for example a case that took place in 1996. I got a report that someone was stabbed at Fulihua Entertainment Center. When we arrived there, we saw the injured man, stabbed four times and bloody, lying on the floor of the center's lobby surrounded by six security guards in black suits.

Before I had a chance to ask about what had happened, the guards asked me to take the victim to the police station for detention. I felt both insulted and puzzled. And then my boss, Zhao Shaozhong, came and also ordered me to take the victim away, first for treatment in a hospital and then for detention. I'd rather have vanished into thin air at that moment! Was I still a police officer charged with the responsibility of protecting people? No way!

I didn't learn the truth until later. Fulihua Entertainment Center was run by Liu Li, sister of Liu Ying who was a standing member of the city committee of Tianjin and Party chief of Heping District. It is well known that China, a socialist state, claims not to allow the existence of brothels. But it's an open secret that Fulihua Entertainment Center was a whore house with patrons like Gao Dezhan, then the Party chief in Tianjin (later removed from the post for visiting prostitutes), and some high-ranking officials from Beijing and dandies of central leaders.

I didn't have the heart to arrest the victim and asked my boss, Zhao Shaozhong, to let others take over. The victim was really held under police custody for 15 days for disturbing public order.

Actually, the victim had come to Fulihua Entertainment Center for his daughter, a college student who had gone back home every weekend until nearly half a year before. His daughter's classmate told him that she worked as a bar girl and even a prostitute at Fulihua Entertainment Center after class every day and he could find her there. This case was a blow to me and I felt confused about my future. I didn't know how to be a good person and a good policeman at the same time.

3. The Persecution of Falun Gong

In 1999 the well-known April 25th incident broke out. The direct cause for this event happened in Tianjin City. As a policeman serving the people, I witnessed the whole event.

At the beginning of April, we received a notice from higher authorities "To be secretly cautious of the scheme of Falun Gong."

On April 11, 1999 an issue of a magazine for youth published by the Tianjin College of Education published an article attacking Falun Gong and its founder. The author of this article was He Zuoxiu, who was a member of an institute affiliated with the institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was one of a few radicals in China who opposed Falun Gong and qigong. Those radicals regarded all the supernatural phenomena of qigong practices as anti-science, superstition and deception. He claimed that Falun Gong caused mental illness, and said that Falun Gong was similar to the Boxers, who tried in the late 1800s to overthrow the government.

He Zuoxiu's article greatly hurt the hearts of the Falun Gong practitioners. Therefore, some practitioners went to the Tianjin College of Education and other related governmental agencies to tell the facts.

At that time all of us were informed by the Tianjin Public Security Bureau to come to the site promptly and to provide traffic control, block any news reports and surround Falun Gong practitioners on the spot. On April 23, over three hundred riot police were redeployed to this area; they beat up and arrested forty-five Falun Gong practitioners. Some practitioners from the crowd went to the Tianjin municipal government directly. The city officials said they could not solve this problem. To do so, the practitioners should go to Beijing. The Falun Gong practitioners had to go to Beijing on April 25 and appeal to the higher authorities to solve the problem.

At that time, when I came to the site in order to do my job, the scene in front of me made me feel at a loss. I absolutely didn't expect the congregated Falun Gong practitioners were going to strike the Tianjin College of Education with lethal weapons in their hands. Instead, they were all the ordinary civilians, former employees who had been laid off and had no money to pay for their medications, and the aged. I myself wouldn't have had a single thought of hurting them. However, the scene didn't last for a long time.

After two or three days of confrontation with the Falun Gong practitioners, the police started to clear the field. No matter how old or how sick the practitioners were, all of them were forcefully taken away from the site. A few critical members were brought to police stations for checkup and registration. Later on, I found that for all those registered Falun Gong practitioners, their behaviors would be recorded in their personal files permanently, which would affect them and their family members in the future regarding all social services.

I also knew that on that day, they had installed video cameras secretly on the surrounding high buildings of Tianjin College of Education, and tape-recorded all of the more than 5,000 Falun Gong practitioners on the spot.

After April 25, 1999, the Chinese government enhanced the work of collecting facts and information on Falun Gong and prepared fully for the persecution of Falun Gong. At that time, the functional departments in the Public Security Bureau and the Religious Affairs Department of the National Security Bureau all immediately became involved. In July, the higher authorities passed down a piece of news of that Falun Gong was going to be banned on July 18. They also informed us that the news was going to be broadcast by CCTV.

Later on, it is said that due to the disagreements among the higher authorities, the news wasn't publicized. Before July 20, my workplace organized people from different levels and ranks to hold meetings and set forth and made firm our understanding of ideology. In those meetings, a few words of an oral order from the General Secretary of the CCP (Jiang Zemin) were passed down to us, claiming that we shouldn't wait any longer to ban Falun Gong, and neither should we focus on solid evidence to do so. Otherwise, Falun Gong will ruin the Party and the nation, etc. On July 20, the news of the crackdown on Falun Gong was finally broadcast by CCTV, and my workplace organized everyone to watch it. From then on, I came to know Falun Gong.

At around eleven o'clock on the evening of July 20th, I was staying at home when my pager rang and I was called to attend a meeting at the police station. We were told that there would be many Falun Gong practitioners appealing the next day. The authority ordered us to stay overnight at the police station. Before five o'clock in the morning of the next day, we arrived at the location where we were assigned to be on duty: the front gate of the Communist Party Committee at Tianjin.

Policemen from our station were grouped into two teams and sent to the Communist Party Committee and the government building. One team was dressed in police uniforms to show they were on duty. The other team was dressed casually, so they could seize the opportunity to mix in the crowd, and, when the time was right, create negative effects.

At the same time, the authorities required us to be strictly disciplined and secretive. We were ordered to completely distance ourselves from the Falun Gong practitioners. At eight o'clock, many practitioners arrived at the Communist Party Committee and the Municipal Government. They lined up in two lines and waited to appeal. They asked why the city government banned Falun Gong. A leader from the appealing office of the Party Committee came out and told the policeman in charge, Mr. Zhou Lanshan, that they would not communicate with the practitioners. The committee member said to Zhou, first, try to persuade the practitioners to leave. If they still would not leave, then use force.

I didn't execute the orders. Instead, I talked to a few practitioners who had come to appeal but had been forcibly taken to the Party Committee backyard. We chatted for a while. Our conversation topics ranged from human life, reality and society to health problems. That was the first impression I had about Falun Gong. On that day, several dozens of trucks carried away Falun Gong practitioners and dispersed them. We punished the main "leaders" of the group for disturbing social security.

The period after July 20 involved both public and underground registration and investigation in the city. The authority required every police station to register and report on Falun Gong practitioners (with emphasis on collecting data on participants in the events on April 25, July 20 and July 22). The authorities also demanded Falun Gong practitioners write a "guarantee letter" saying they would never practice Falun Gong again. Anyone who refused to write the letter would either be sent to education classes that were established by local governments, or be punished for disturbing social stability.

The Falun Gong practitioners who were registered or family members of the practitioners registered would have their rights deprived in many aspects, including university entrance, employment, children's military assignments and pension, etc. They were put under great hardship. Some work units would even fire anybody who had been categorized as a Falun Gong practitioner.

After July 20, to ensure the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic of China would be safe and stable, Tianjin City launched a mass arrest of Falun Gong practitioners. This action was plotted by the first sector of the Tianjin Public Security Bureau (the political and security sector). A few days before the National Day, many Falun Gong practitioners across the country voluntarily went to Beijing to appeal, but were repatriated on a large scale. At that time, because the arrested Falun Gong practitioners refused to reveal their names and where they came from, the Central 610 Office was furious.

The Central 610 Office ordered local 610 Offices to allocate Falun Gong practitioners to each district according to population size. Several hundreds of practitioners were allocated to the Tianjin Public Security Bureau. The Public Security Bureau then allocated practitioners to each district station. Each district station then allocated practitioners to each local police station for investigation. Each local police station sent over somebody to claim practitioners as if claiming cattle. Whichever police station the practitioners were allocated to, the police station officers would collar practitioners with hemp ropes and force them to kneel down.

There were three female practitioners brought back to my police station. They were in their forties and fifties. All three were interrogated by our criminal investigation team. In the next couple of days of interrogation, I could hear extremely tragic crying and screaming every time I went to work. I later heard from a colleague that they received orders to use all means to force Falun Gong practitioners to reveal their names and family addresses.

During the period of Chinese New Year of 2000, in order to strengthen control over Falun Gong practitioners and prevent them from appealing to Beijing, work units, neighborhoods and police stations were ordered to set up brainwashing sessions and open "education classes." Falun Gong practitioners were forced to listen to brainwashing materials together at one place. They must also pay a "study fee." I expressed my dissatisfaction to some governmental officials. I said outlawing Falun Gong was a waste of manpower, material resources and financial resources. They only wanted to be healthy and good people. Why couldn't you let them practice?

Passively Became a Staff in the Bureau of State Security, Started Facing People with Different Beliefs

In October, 2000, to strengthen political stability, the Central Committee of the CCP decided to raise the administrative power of the Political and Security Department in each Public Security Bureau over the country (i.e., the No. 1 department in the Tianjin Public Security Bureau) to sub-bureau level, and combined it with the local 610 Office to formed the current Bureau of State Security.

What is ironic is that although the newly formed bureau has an administrative power of a city bureau, very few wanted to join it. At that time, a tragedy occurred. The bureau requested each branch in the Public Security Bureau to use a computer program to randomly draw names from the roster. Whoever who was selected by the computer must report to the newly formed bureau. Otherwise he would be counted as quitting the job. Unfortunately, I was pulled out by the machine and had to join this bureau that nobody wanted to work with.

In order to support my family, I started working for the newly formed Tianjin Bureau of State Security until February, 2005 when I managed to escape from China. I was in charge of Falun Gong issue, and dealt with other Qigong sects that were labeled cults by the Chinese government.

Later, on October 3, 2001, the Network Monitoring Team of the Tianjin Public Security Bureau discovered that some Falun Gong practitioners surfed oversea Clearwisdon.net by breaking the firewall blockage. They passed this information to police in the 610 Office of the Bureau of State Security. The Falun Gong Investigation Team in the 610 Office was in charge of this case. They asked the No. 1 division (the investigation department) of the Tianjin Public Security Bureau to provide support on monitoring, tracking, secret searching, and secret arresting of Falun Practitioners. At the end of the year, this "103 " case was listed as a special case by Chinese Ministry of Public Security.

My Heart Sunk to the Bottom Witnessing the Miserable Experience of an Innocent Mother and Daughter

In the beginning of 2002, they authority started arresting people involved in the “103” case. In one day, 79 Falun Gong practitioners were arrested and other two escaped. One of the escaped practitioners was a 13 year-old girl named Xu Ziao. This girl’s mother, Sun Ti, was arrested and little Xu hence became homeless at the age of 13. One night in Feb 2002, I received a call asking me to go back to work and accompany a Falun Gong practitioner to see a doctor. I rushed to work and drove with a female officer to the prison of the Nankai Branch of Tianjin Public Security Bureau. When we arrived the prison located at Erwei Rd., Nankai District, I saw Sun Ti sat on a table in an interrogation room. Sun’s eyes were so swollen because of the beating. The police who interrogated Sun was Mr. Mu Ruili, captain of the 2nd division of the 610 Office of the Bureau of State Security. Mu was holding a steel rod (0.6 inch in diameter) with screw thread stained with blood. There was a hi-voltage electric baton sitting on the table. As we entered the room, we asked Mu to leave. Sun burst into tears and was going show us the injuries. I volunteered to leave the room since she was a woman. Sun stopped me and showed me her back. I was terribly shocked. Almost her entire back turned black and there were two cuts about 8 inches long with blood coming out.

After a while, Zhao Yuezeng, the Assistant Director of the Bureau of State Security and the Director of the 610 Office, came. To my surprise, Zhao ordered me not to mention this to anyone and asked me and the female officer to take Sun to the infirmary of the prison. For the next 30 days, we had to apply medicine on Sun. Almost everyday I heard Sun asked about her daughter’s whereabouts and told us how Falun Gong practitioners are good people. I heart was shattered into pieces. I knew Falun Gong practitioners are good people and I cared about her daughter even more. A 13-year-old girl who lost her parents and couldn’t even go to her relatives (all her relatives were monitored), how could she find food and a place to sleep? I regretted I didn’t stop this from happening. My heart became anxious and heavy and I cried.

I often dreamed about what happened to Sun and Xu and the miserable scene I witnessed, and I lost sleep. I was in a total despair about China’s future and my future as a police.

Later I heard that Sun Ti was sentenced to 7 to 10 years and I am not sure whether she is alive now or not. My Sympathy For An Old Scientist Started It All

It was just after the 2004 New Year, in Tianjin State Security Bureau where I serve received a special assignment. Four or five policemen, led by 610 Office chief Shi He, went to Shijiazhuang city in Hebei Province to handle a "special" case.

After they had returned, I saw a white-haired, elderly man hanging from handcuffs in the interrogation room. I later learn that he was Jing Zhanyi, a high level official in Hebei province. After the interrogation, a reporter from China Central Television came to interview Jing Zhanyi. The plan was to show the world how much this official regretted his involvement with Falun Gong.

I was outside the door that day while the interview was being carefully conducted. I heard the Deputy Director of the State Security Bureau, Zhao Yuezeng, told Jing Zhanyi that they would reduce his sentence if he was willing to recite some lines that they had prepared for him, otherwise he would be charged with treason and face either a life sentence or execution by firing squad.

The poor old man complied with their requests and went on TV to criticize Falun Gong with their words. Afterwards, he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

The reporter saw me as she was leaving the interview and asked me for my comment, probably wanting to gather some supporting statements. But to her disappointment I told her, "Aren't these lies?" I walked away leaving her standing there, shocked.

My comment to that reporter brought me enormous trouble. Two days after the incident, Deputy Dirctor Zhao Yuezeng came to me and asked what I had meant by "lies". Without mincing my words, I asked him, "Why did you threaten Jing Zhanyi?" He pounded the table and claimed that I was revolting.

I knew in my heart that to fight him is like throwing an egg at a stone, so I kept silent. He said that I should think the matter through and write a formal self-criticism statement before returning to work.

I was thus kept in solitary confinement in a cell at Tianjin Public Security Bureau 7th Division, where there are solitary confinement cells specifically for policemen. The moment I walked into the cell I was in total despair.

That was the first and only time I have been locked up in a cell. The ten square meter cell has no windows. A light hangs from the ceiling by a cord and stays on 24 hours a day; the toilet in the corner emits a constant foul stench. February was extremely cold in Tianjin, but the cell had no heating.

I lived for nearly a month in these conditions. When I walked out of the cell, my ears and hands had been damaged by the freezing temperatures and my hands were swollen like steamed buns, while my ears constantly emitted pus. During those 30 days, I wasn't even once allowed to call my family. I was tormented mentally and physically by those people to the brink of collapse.

Even then, I did not say or write one word of repentance. Finally one day I was released without given any reason. Later I learned that they were trying to keep the incident low-key, fearing that I might expose their torture of Falun Gong practitioners and other scandals.

After my release I was moved to the mail room, delivering newspapers and mail and doing various chores, until I fled abroad. My fiancée suffered greatly while I was in solitary confinement. She sensed that something was wrong, but when she, my mother and my brother called the office looking for me they told her that I was on a business trip. I was heartbroken when I heard this. They are so deceitful that they would even lie to the family of their own officers! What would they not do? Where is justice?

My Escape To Freedom and Democracy

In China, police officers are not normally allowed to go abroad. If they go abroad, they must do so after a secret-preservation period, which, for an officer in the State Security Bureau, is at least five years following his resignation. Otherwise, one is treated as committing treason. Therefore, getting a passport for me became a major problem since I did not want to alarm my work unit. I approached a friend who changed my work unit details on my household registration document, and I thus smoothly obtained a passport.

In February 2005, I finally obtained an Australian travel visa. I began to prepare things. I got to Beijing airport at 9am on February 14 and took a flight on the same day to Shenzhen, intending to go through the customs and get to the Hong Kong side at 6:30pm.

While waiting to go through the border controls at Shenzhen, I was afraid of being searched, because I had with me a large number of files saved in my MP3 player containing information about the organized persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese government. I called my family to say that if I did not phone by 7:30 pm, it meant that I had failed to pass the border controls, and was in danger.

It was with trepidation that my fiancée and I boarded a flight from Hong Kong to Australia. We landed with indescribable relief, on February 15, on such a land of beauty, freedom and democracy.

My work unit has now realized that I've gone missing, and they have begun to pressure my family to convince me to return. They promised that "everything will be taken care of" if I would go back to China. The most wicked is that they also deceive and threaten my fiancé's family. I know we mustn't return. They will use the most despicable methods in dealing with us.

I have sent the work unit a letter of resignation, but they refused to accept it and chose to fire me instead. They also threatened my fiancé and myself, through our families, "not to speak nonsense", or things could happen to our families in China.

Neither my fiancée nor I can phone our families, because the telephones are tapped. The only way that I can communicate back home is to call my brother at his office. On the phone, my brother never talks about the family situation and only tries to comfort me by saying that things are going well. However, I know that they are facing difficulties and danger. It makes me apprehensive that I have brought this kind of hardship to our two families. I've no way of knowing if we will ever meet again.

Inspired By the Nine Commentaries and Chen Yonglin I Decided To Step Forward

I know for certain that the Chinese government will never leave my family or myself alone. Since coming to Australia I have read the Nine Commentaries and been deeply moved. Among the articles and events mentioned in Nine Commentaries, some I have seen and others I have not. But ordinary Chinese citizens would not be able to see such articles. The Nine Commentaries expose the dark aspects of China which are all facts. After reading the Nine Commentaries, I had the urge of stepping out.

A few days ago, at a memorial rally for the June 4th massacre, I learned that Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese Consul General in Australia, stepped out publicly to expose Chinese government's infiltration abroad. I was deeply inspired. I thought that Chen Yonglin as a diplomat of the Chinese Communist regime had made such a (brave) choice; I felt proud for him and I decided to step out to support Chen Yonglin with my action.

I am joyful that I've found my coordinates for life again. I firmly believe that the pursuit of justice is a perpetual goal of my life.

I thank my family and my fiancée's family for giving us courage and strength. I also thank all the kind-hearted people who have helped us.

My Sympathy For An Old Scientist Started It All

It was just after the 2004 New Year, in Tianjin State Security Bureau where I serve received a special assignment. Four or five policemen, led by 610 Office chief Shi He, went to Shijiazhuang city in Hebei Province to handle a "special" case.

After they had returned, I saw a white-haired, elderly man hanging from handcuffs in the interrogation room. I later learn that he was Jing Zhanyi, a high level official in Hebei province. After the interrogation, a reporter from China Central Television came to interview Jing Zhanyi. The plan was to show the world how much this official regretted his involvement with Falun Gong.

I was outside the door that day while the interview was being carefully conducted. I heard the Deputy Director of the State Security Bureau, Zhao Yuezeng, told Jing Zhanyi that they would reduce his sentence if he was willing to recite some lines that they had prepared for him, otherwise he would be charged with treason and face either a life sentence or execution by firing squad.

The poor old man complied with their requests and went on TV to criticize Falun Gong with their words. Afterwards, he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

The reporter saw me as she was leaving the interview and asked me for my comment, probably wanting to gather some supporting statements. But to her disappointment I told her, "Aren't these lies?" I walked away leaving her standing there, shocked.

My comment to that reporter brought me enormous trouble. Two days after the incident, Deputy Dirctor Zhao Yuezeng came to me and asked what I had meant by "lies". Without mincing my words, I asked him, "Why did you threaten Jing Zhanyi?" He pounded the table and claimed that I was revolting.

I knew in my heart that to fight him is like throwing an egg at a stone, so I kept silent. He said that I should think the matter through and write a formal self-criticism statement before returning to work.

I was thus kept in solitary confinement in a cell at Tianjin Public Security Bureau 7th Division, where there are solitary confinement cells specifically for policemen. The moment I walked into the cell I was in total despair.

That was the first and only time I have been locked up in a cell. The ten square meter cell has no windows. A light hangs from the ceiling by a cord and stays on 24 hours a day; the toilet in the corner emits a constant foul stench. February was extremely cold in Tianjin, but the cell had no heating.

I lived for nearly a month in these conditions. When I walked out of the cell, my ears and hands had been damaged by the freezing temperatures and my hands were swollen like steamed buns, while my ears constantly emitted pus. During those 30 days, I wasn't even once allowed to call my family. I was tormented mentally and physically by those people to the brink of collapse.

Even then, I did not say or write one word of repentance. Finally one day I was released without given any reason. Later I learned that they were trying to keep the incident low-key, fearing that I might expose their torture of Falun Gong practitioners and other scandals.

After my release I was moved to the mail room, delivering newspapers and mail and doing various chores, until I fled abroad. My fiancée suffered greatly while I was in solitary confinement. She sensed that something was wrong, but when she, my mother and my brother called the office looking for me they told her that I was on a business trip. I was heartbroken when I heard this. They are so deceitful that they would even lie to the family of their own officers! What would they not do? Where is justice?

My Escape To Freedom and Democracy

In China, police officers are not normally allowed to go abroad. If they go abroad, they must do so after a secret-preservation period, which, for an officer in the State Security Bureau, is at least five years following his resignation. Otherwise, one is treated as committing treason. Therefore, getting a passport for me became a major problem since I did not want to alarm my work unit. I approached a friend who changed my work unit details on my household registration document, and I thus smoothly obtained a passport.

In February 2005, I finally obtained an Australian travel visa. I began to prepare things. I got to Beijing airport at 9am on February 14 and took a flight on the same day to Shenzhen, intending to go through the customs and get to the Hong Kong side at 6:30pm.

While waiting to go through the border controls at Shenzhen, I was afraid of being searched, because I had with me a large number of files saved in my MP3 player containing information about the organized persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese government. I called my family to say that if I did not phone by 7:30 pm, it meant that I had failed to pass the border controls, and was in danger.

It was with trepidation that my fiancée and I boarded a flight from Hong Kong to Australia. We landed with indescribable relief, on February 15, on such a land of beauty, freedom and democracy.

My work unit has now realized that I've gone missing, and they have begun to pressure my family to convince me to return. They promised that "everything will be taken care of" if I would go back to China. The most wicked is that they also deceive and threaten my fiancé's family. I know we mustn't return. They will use the most despicable methods in dealing with us.

I have sent the work unit a letter of resignation, but they refused to accept it and chose to fire me instead. They also threatened my fiancé and myself, through our families, "not to speak nonsense", or things could happen to our families in China.

Neither my fiancée nor I can phone our families, because the telephones are tapped. The only way that I can communicate back home is to call my brother at his office. On the phone, my brother never talks about the family situation and only tries to comfort me by saying that things are going well. However, I know that they are facing difficulties and danger. It makes me apprehensive that I have brought this kind of hardship to our two families. I've no way of knowing if we will ever meet again.

Inspired By the Nine Commentaries and Chen Yonglin I Decided To Step Forward

I know for certain that the Chinese government will never leave my family or myself alone. Since coming to Australia I have read the Nine Commentaries and been deeply moved. Among the articles and events mentioned in Nine Commentaries, some I have seen and others I have not. But ordinary Chinese citizens would not be able to see such articles. The Nine Commentaries expose the dark aspects of China which are all facts. After reading the Nine Commentaries, I had the urge of stepping out.

A few days ago, at a memorial rally for the June 4th massacre, I learned that Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese Consul General in Australia, stepped out publicly to expose Chinese government's infiltration abroad. I was deeply inspired. I thought that Chen Yonglin as a diplomat of the Chinese Communist regime had made such a (brave) choice; I felt proud for him and I decided to step out to support Chen Yonglin with my action.

I am joyful that I've found my coordinates for life again. I firmly believe that the pursuit of justice is a perpetual goal of my life.

I thank my family and my fiancée's family for giving us courage and strength. I also thank all the kind-hearted people who have helped us.

Additional info:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/07/27/falun_gong/
http://www.usp.com.au/fpss/case-falun-gong.html
http://www.usp.com.au/fpss/case-falun-gong.html
http://nomoreccp.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/was-falun-gong-getting-political-or-was-it-defending-itself-from-persecution-a-two-sided-story/
http://www.zhuichaguoji.org/en/index2.php?option=content&task=view&id=149&pop=1&page=0

Lucid Comments - Georgia

The comments section after an article is for me the most honest indicator of the bias of the publisher. In comments, one can see the type of readers using the site, their intelligence and level of analysis. Also, other aspects not included in the article are brought to light, including critical insights.

On occasion I learn much more about a subject from the comments, than from the original article. Below, I have posted some uniquely lucid comments found while reading background material on the Georgia-Russia conflict. http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2008/08/georgia-russia-ukraine-cheney

Of course, these comments are chosen through my own bias.

taghioff.info
14 August 2008 at 13:49

I am sure the EU must take a very, very dim view of the US playing electoral poker in its vicinity.

Is this not a very good reason that the EU should have its own military force and own military alliance apart from NATO, since its interests, in terms of defence, now diverge so strongly from those of the US?

Surely Georgia and the Ukraine are countries that one day might join the EU (though probably not very soon) so American intervention here is ultimately very destabilising for Europe.

The other option is for the EU to ask for NATO to be put under control of the UN Security council, but with no countervailing military power in the world, pigs will fly before that happens...

writeon
15 August 2008 at 17:13

There are some very "interesting" and telling attitudes revealed in some of the above comments towards the inhabitants of South Ossetia, which verge close to something very unpleasant indeed and explain how a regime that purports to embrace freedom and democracy and respect for human rights, can launch such a brutal and deadly attack against it's own people.

This is because the people being bombed and bombarded in South Ossetia aren't really "true" Georgians at all, they are legally foreigners, with no right to self-determination within Georgia or settle there, only in Russia, because they are aliens!

Apart from the absurdity of this kind of argument and it's almost total lack of any real foundation in international law relating to the treatment and status of ethnic minorities, it's also morally repugnant. That people who have lived in a region for centuries can suddenly be arbitrarily defined as "alien" and unwanted, and that this then is used as justification for bombing them, reminds one of some of the darkest periods in European history.

The Caucasus in a patchwork quilt of differing peoples. Peoples with there own histories, languages, cultures, songs, myths, poetry, heroes and illusions. It's also an region where rival empires have confronted each other for thousands of years, much like the Balkans.

This rich cultural tapestry should be a source of pride and strength, but these cultural and etnic differences can also easily exploited and perverted by unscrupulous politicians, which light the torch of nationalism not to lighten our way in the darkness, but as a weapon to burn down the homes of the "others".

At the same time as they use, abuse and prostitute national symbols and feelings, they also make power grabs that have distinct aims, mostly robbing their own ethnic group that they say they care so much about. Nationalism seems to be cover story designed to obscure the fact that they are robbing the treasury and steeped in corruption.

Who really gains from the fighting and destruction? It certainly isn't the ordinary people, who are duped into believing, and killing and dying, for a myth or an illusion, the myth of the pure nation state where one can be "free" and the others, those who one believes are responsible for all ones woes, have been excluded, dominated or "taken care of" in some other way.

Perhaps the biggest lie of the last hundred years, certainly the bloodiest, and most dangerous, has been the lie about the importance of "blood" and "land" and the illusion that the creation of an ethnically "pure" state was the answer to all ones problems. Just give us our own country, no matter how small, no matter the cost in blood and destruction, and the land of milk and honey is just around the corner. What childish rubbish! Only an idiot or a person totally lacking in knowledge could believe such a fairytale. Yet people are fed this nationalist nonsense, over and over again, by corrupt leaders, and they die and kill for a lie.

Nationalism isn't a blessing, it's a curse, and we've had way too much of it in Europe. We've almost drowned in rivers of blood, and for what exactly? For whose real benefit and profit? Certainly not the unhappy dead!

Fortunately in Western Europe, finally after so much war, slaughter and wasteful destruction, we appear to have tamed the monster of brute nationalism. We didn't have much choice as we'd almost destroyed ourselves in two terrible, barbaric and insane wars.

It would be tragic if the people in the Caucasus learnt nothing from our suffering and history. First one has to reject unconditionally the use of violence and military force to settle ethnic differences on all sides, and people have learn to negotiate and compromise. What they can't be allowed to do is go to war. Instead of the great powers selling arms and training new armies in Georgia and elsewhere, they should do the opposite. Fighting wars should be made as difficult as possible and economic sanctions should be imposed on any country that uses violence to compel any ethnic group to remain part of a central state.

My personal feeling is that the United States is using Georgia for its own purposes and doesn't give a damn about the Georgian people or how much they suffer or bleed. The US government doesn't care about "democracy" or "freedom" for the Georgian people, God they don't even care about these things for their own people in the United States, so why would they care about foreigners? The Americans want Georgia as a stepping-stone or military base on their way towards the energy reserves of the Caspian Basin, nothing more. The ordinary Georgians mean nothing to men like Bush. The Georgians have value only as long as they serve a usful purpose for the American ruling elite. This is the harsh truth about the nature of imperialism and how great powers regard their vassal states. Pawns have little value in the Great Game. The sooner the people of Georgia realise this and learn to live together imperfectly, the better in will be for them.

ikotubo
14 August 2008 at 13:59

Mr Gleny's article demonstrates the dangers we all face when power is given to a bunch of lunatics and ideological fantasists - even in a so-called democracy like the United States.

Douglas Chalmers
14 August 2008 at 17:24

The West, or rather the USA and its neocon lapdogs, has pretended that some kind of old Cold War tank battle could be fought and won and that would be the end of it. Forget it!

Treating Russia like another Iran or Pakistan is buying trouble. America has been doing that since 9/11 but the NATO countries are having to 'take delivery', uhh. Half of Europe will freeze in the dark this winter if they don't learn to be polite.

The days of gunboat diplomacy and forcing terms of trade onto others is now over. Russia has aligned itself with China and India and the Shanghai Co-operation Group will supersede the IMF, etc etc. The balance of power has shifted along to the side of USA's creditors.

'taghioff.info' makes an interesting point about the EU but they have actually been following an expansionists agenda themselves for some time. They must give up their dreams and illusions about their missile shields too. Being friendly with your neighbors is important.

With global warming and climate change upon us, continuing to play the old "great game" of Machiavellian politics is childish when more extensive co-operation is needed. Fighting over shrinking resources is also fatal in the nuclear age.

The West can't just pretend that Georgia is another Tibet and rant and rave endlessly. Both are dishonest and ploys to continue the illusions of faded empire and delusions of the now spent "American century". International affairs can no longer be entrusted to the thugs and crooks of the world's military-industrial complexes.

Sasha
15 August 2008 at 07:52

Message form Russia.

I'm russia nad really proud that at alst we kicked this fu..r Saakashvili ass, belive me everyone hates him in giogjia and you know why. I'll tell you. Giorgia is for 99% percent is Christians only 1% are muslims, so he represents this very small group of people, he is a muslim.... all those electionsthat there were are totall fake.. lots of places for elections never at all were opened esprsially far away from Tbilissi..

Russia becomes stronger and stronger and 99% in russia very happy about that.

writeon
15 August 2008 at 21:46

This legalistic approach is tangentally interesting and mildly entertaining, but hardly relevant to the current situation on the ground. It reminds me of the endless debates in the medieval church about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, or whether Jesus Christ was an aristocrat or a commoner.

In the world we live in now, since the destruction of Yogoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the neutering of the United Nations; there really is no international law left standing that's any use anymore. When one systematically shreds and shows contempt for international law, as the United States has done repeatedly, one can hardly appeal to international law without raising howls of laughter. Even the Americans, who think of themselves as exceptional, cannot have it both ways, but of course this is what they demand. They want to dictate and define what parts of international law apply in various circumstances, and they reserve the right to pick and choose which parts international law are "relevant", only that international law doesn't apply to them and cannot be used against them. The hypocracy and double-standards involved in this perverse attitude are obvious and absurd.

The point is that powerful nations, great powers can really do whatever they want regardless of international law, this is the reality of the situation. The entire concept of international law, is in itself, highly debatable and controversial. Today, international law is a device used by powerful countries to punish weaker countries and stigmatize them for propaganda purposes.

For example, it is almost impossible to contemplate the United States allowing one of it's generals or politicians to be tride for their various war-crimes and crimes against humanity, even though there is a veritible mountain of evidence against them, such trials are for the weak and the vanquished, not the powerful and strong.

You go into great detail in relation to the law yet your interpretation of Georgian law is highly debatable and interpreted in partisan fashion which wouldn't stand up to qualified rebuttal in a court of law, something I have no intention of getting into here.

You do seem, in my opinion, to illustrate an attitude towards the people of South Ossetia which is disturbing in its implications. You mean that they have voluntarily chosen to change their nationality and alligance and consequently have not rights, human or otherwise inside Georgia anymore, that they have almost become outlaws with all that implies.

I've questioned your interpretation of Georgian law, which I find flawed and illogical, your partisan twisting and interpretation of international law in relation to the rights of ethnic minorities of whatever nationality, is even more problematic and just plain wrong, though it is, perhaps unintentionally, highly informative.

My main point is that the hapless Georgian people have been led towards disaster by a crazed and corrupt ultra-nationalist gang, who are basically puppets of the Americans, who couldn't care less about what happens to the Georgians as long as they are usful in their struggle with Russia. What's ironic is the gang in charge of Georgia are backing the wrong horse. The United States is an empire that is on it's way down, whilst Russia is a power with a future. When the United States is finished with Georgia it wil be abandoned like a used Kleenex.

writeon
16 August 2008 at 08:51

MichaelP.

In the words of a famous proverb; you can't see the wood for the trees.

Great and powerful nations, like people, do not generally observe laws that constrain their actions and interests. They use the "laws" as they see fit. International law is really a system of conventions that nations agree, up to a certain level, to abide by.

The Big Problem currently is that the United States has systematically undermined international law, a whole raft of treaties, demands exceptonal treatment for itself, and has emasculated the United Nations. The United States has also become a very and openly agressive state, ready to invade weaker states to pursue its national interests. One can substitute the words "freedom 'n' democracy" for "oil and gas" and that is basically the rationale behind their actions.

What this means is that the entire structure of international law has been undermined and has lost the minimal importance it had. Clearly other nations have watched and learnt from the Americans. The Russians certainly have. The American idea that they can dictate and define what international law is and who has to obey it, is, hypocritical, absurd, arrogant and counter-productive.

The current crazed gang which is leading Georgia towards disaster, seems to believe it can turn Georgia into a valuable and indispensible ally of the United States, similar to Israel. I believe this is a fundamental miscaculation and mistake which the Georgian people are going to pay a very high price for, whilst the leadership will go into exile and enjoy their millions in the sun.

writeon
16 August 2008 at 15:32

Mostly I feel sorry for the ordinary people in the Caucasus and Georgia who are caught-up in a deadly "game" between great powers, like two monsterous devils playing chess with real people on the board.

The Georgian people are being used by the Bush administration, and the Georgian government is perfectly content to allow their people to suffer, die, bleed and serve the interests of a foreign power. This I would argue is really a form of high treason or treachery, serving a foreign government before one's own people. But then this is the traditional role of the vassal state leader, to betray his own and serve his imperial master. Some of these "leaders" so stupid and ignorant of the obscene game they are merely pawns in, that they appear to actually believe their own nationalist rhetoric, that they are saving their countries, whilst in reality they are leading them towards disaster and destruction.

writeon
16 August 2008 at 17:48

While I'm at it perhaps the "pawns" in the game would be better off breaking out of their allotted roles and chalenging the very "rules" of the game itself? Given the utter contempt their, oh so patriotic, leaders really have for them, maybe they should rise up like a mighty wind, and instead of killing each other turn their anger on their real enemies, their masters, sitting way behind the lines, manipulating, pulling the strings, making all the money. Smash the board, wipe out the squares, turned the whole damn thing over and start again!

writeon
17 August 2008 at 22:06

Countries, states, great powers, are not people, they don't have "friends". Turkey is not a "friend" of Georgia and will not be using its large army to help its little "friend" against the big, bad, bully to the north.

Great powers don't have permanent friends, they have only have permanent interests, and their own interests come first. Great powers use smaller nations and when they no longer find them useful, they are caste aside. Empires as large, rich and powerful, like the United States, don't have "allies", they don't need them. What they have is states that serve their interests to varying degrees or one doesn't, then one is effectively the enemy of the United States and then one had better watch out.

The world functions pretty much like the movie "The Godfather" only on a even bloodier and bigger, global scale. For centuries the West, in its accendancy, has resembled a group of Mafia families carving up "territory" between them.

The European Union is an attempt to replace the rival Mafia clan model with something else, to stop them launching eternal "turf wars" over territory, wars that risk burning everything down so there is nothing left of any value to fight over anymore.

Russian tanks are not going to role over the borders of Germany heading for the English Channel, not only would this be insane, it would, more importantly, be unproductive and unprofitable. Who would then buy Russia's oil and gas? It makes no sense for kill one's best customer. Why bother to take over Western Europe with tanks when one can just buy it?

Germany is building a longterm strategic alliance with Russia not confronting Russia. In the last couple of years alone German exports to Russia have boomed, Russia is now one of Germany's best markets. The Russians have the money and Germany has the manufactured goods. The idea that Germany would sacrifice it's relationship to Russia for Georgia is ridiculous. This is not the way the world works, at least not as long as one can keep the nationalist lunatics and their dangerous mythology under control, which is fundamentally what the European Union is all about.

Europe can become even wealthier and successful in an integrated economic partnership with - Russia, which has a vast storehouse of resources which we need. However, the United States doesn't want this mutually beneficial relationship to happen, because this will mean Power moving away from the United States and towards Europe and Russia.

The United States is trying to split Europe in two, it has mobilized it's most loyal vassal states; notably Great Britain, Poland, Georgia, in a cold war aimed at Russia, talk to people in Bruxelles in private, off the record, and they will tell the same basic story. A new cold war aimed at Russia isn't in Europe's interests, but it is in the interests of the United States. At least that's the attitude of powrful groups in the ruling elite, the most ignorant, the most nationalistic, the most dangerous.

The desire to confront Russia is also echoed in right-wing nationalist groups in some parts of Europe, though especially in "new europe". These groups don't have much else to sell but the nationalist myth and Russia is an easy target for them. But none of this has anything to do with democracy, or freedom or human rights. It's about power and wealth and who has it and who doesn't.

What's gratifying is that there are powerful elements in the European elite; in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Holland, Sweden, who realize what's happening and why, and have no intention of joining the American confrontation crusade against Russia. A crusade that will eventually lead to war. A war fought in Europe, wiping out Europe once and for all.

War Crimes and the Hague: a moot process.

Georgia and Russia are now going to duke it out in the International Court of Justice, each accusing the other of 'war crimes'. Ostensibly, this will take months to investigate on the ground, with Human Rights Watch observers getting an earful from both sides. In the end, there will likely be a stand off as both parties have incidences which they cannot justify.

This seems rather like the Judge Judy type of infraction when one considers the horrendous violation of human rights committed by the USA in Iraq. The Bush Administration has smugly redefined torture so that none of it's atrocities are war crimes; not the horrible pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib, not the 'rendition' flights kidnapping prisoners all over the world, not the years of incarceration and torture of 'detainees' at Guantanamo, not the displacement of four million Iraqi citizens, not the bombing and destruction of irreplaceable historical sites in Iraq, not the rape and murder of an entire family in Haditha, to name but a few of the horrors USA troops have visited upon innocent people, guilty only of trying to live.

If any country should be the focus of the Hague Court, it should be the USA. There is a good reason why the Bush Administration refuses to recognise the authority of the international war crimes court; it is the most guilty of all. Is there a person in the world, besides Americans and their neo-con buddies, who does not know this? Yet the media conveniently ignores this elephant in the room.

This of course does not take into account the million of people who have suffered and died as a result of America's corporate imperialism in Central America, South America, Indonesia, Africa
and Central Asia. First come the American corporations looking for resources; next comes the American military to guarantee access. This story has been repeated for a hundred years of USA's 'foreign policy' in dozens of countries. In each case, the gullible public is flooded with propaganda about the spreading of democracy and USA championing it. If the measure of democracy is what America has, then the rest of the world had better take a pass.

The real reason for this debacle in Georgia is an oil pipeline. All the world leaders know this: how many people realize this when they are reading the fairytale propaganda the media feeds us about democracy? WW3 is coming up surely; but it is not about democracy, it is about the rights of oil companies like BP and Exxon, Shell to politically occupy countries where they have laid pipelines. It's just 'good business'.

The problem is that the human cost of this 'good business' is tremendous. Real people have suffered, starved, been maimed, lost family and homes to implement the long term business interests of the Oiligarchy which now runs the USA. These corporations are now multi-national and can sustain loss on one continent while tapping into new markets on another. The suffering of any given people, be it Americans at the gas pump or Iraqi women and children, homeless or dead, is just the cost of doing business for these masters of the universe.

It is unimaginable that many people still think Georgia-Russia is about democracy and war crimes. To a great extent, this view is force fed to the people, as journalism, a term which today has become synonymous with corporate and government 'public relations'. People get to read the version of events they are meant to read to manipulate public opinion, while the powers that be can comfortably assume most people are too busy to research issues for a truer perspective.

They say the first casualty of war is truth; forgetting that is a critical mistake. This ought to be listed amoung the war crimes under jurisdiction at the Hague. When Europe and the USA start huffing about war crimes, perhaps they had better start with their own first. George Bush is guilty of so many war crimes that directly violate the Geneva Convention, it would be too lengthily to enumerate them here. It hardly seems relevant to examine Georgia-Russia claims with the overwhelmingly atrocities of the Americans in Iraq.

People of the world are getting smarter, and hopefully, Americans will. Bush has lied about every issue he has taken a stand on since he was elected, from WMD in Iraq to denying his own countries National Intelligence Estimate, which clears Iran of any intentions to produce nuclear weapons. And what kind of lie is this 'Mission Accomplished' rhetoric? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The way the world can tell if Bush and Rice are lying, is if their mouths are moving.

If the International Court of Justice cannot condemn the worst perpetrators of war crimes, the Bush Administration, then is has no moral standing to judge or condemn any other country. Worse than that; it is moot.

Chinese Capitalism and Globalisation

PAUL JAY: Welcome back to our series of interviews with Naomi Klein. Hi, Naomi.

NAOMI KLEIN: Hi.

JAY: So the argument, I think, if we were sitting down with some of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, they might make is that what's the alternative to this hard-centralized party? Look what happened to the Soviet Union. That if we didn't have this kind of surveillance and this kind of strong leadership, what you would have is the falling apart of the country, the mafia-ization of the country; corruption would run rampant; China would break off into little fiefdoms. If they wanted to give a bit of a Marxist spin to the defense, they would say that Marx and Engels teach you need to exhaust capitalism before you get to socialism, so that's what we're doing. Of course, I never read in Marx and Engels that you should allow multimillionaires into the party. But, at any rate—.

KLEIN: And open Hooters bars in Shanghai, all on the road to socialism.

JAY: But what's your answer to that, that without this, they'd be looking at a capitalist anarchy, rather than at least a planned capitalism.

KLEIN: I think it in many ways is where I think a lot of societies are leading, including Russia. I think that same argument was made by Putin in Russia and why Russia has steadily been becoming more authoritarian. And my feeling, when I was in the Pearl River Delta, which has always been the laboratory and always sort of further ahead. My feeling when I was in the Pearl River Delta, which has always been the laboratory for these ideas—this was where capitalism was allowed on a test basis in 1979 and where now probably half or three-quarters of everything we own is made.

JAY: So they would say the alternative is capitalism and anarchistic capitalism, rather than the planned capitalism. Number two, they might argue that you need to have this planned capitalism to sort of exhaust itself, and then you can transition in a planned way to some form of socialism, 'cause they still claim to have that as an objective.

KLEIN: Well, I don't think they're transitioning to any kind of socialism, and I think we should just sort of take that out of the discussion. I mean, they are the most successful capitalist economy in the world. And to me the question is: what are we willing to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and in the name of economic growth? Because by those measures, China is the most successful economy in the world right now by the measures that we use in our own countries. And so, to me, my interest in this model is that I see it as a warning. I see it as actually the global trend. I mean, you know, you're talking about Russia, and it is true that Russia had a democratization, opening-up period and a very anarchic economic reform process. China's response to that was, "We're not going to have the democratization. We're just going to ram through the reforms, and as brutally as we want." And the Tienanmen Square Massacre created a terrified population for many, many years, where they were able to socially re-engineer a communist country into a capitalist one, and have people just accept that because they had seen that this is a government that is willing to roll tanks over their elite university students. So imagine what they would do to factory workers.

JAY: And what you're suggesting is, instead of Rupert Murdoch's vision of his satellites and televisions bringing democracy to China, China's in fact going to be exporting this what you called Web 2.0 communist capitalism to us.

KLEIN: Well, what I see is that China is becoming more like us, the West, in many ways, and we're becoming more like China in many ways. And I wouldn't say that we are the same society yet, but what we see are these sort of steady trends, and a kind of an odd sort of meeting in the middle, where they embrace the side of our society of extreme consumer capitalism, and our leaders start to embrace many of their tools of social control—indefinite detention, loss of civil liberties—that their leaders are embracing. And I think the more successful China is, the more persuasive this argument becomes. Absolutely. India gets beaten up all the time by business people who are working in China and India, and going, "Look, it's a hell of a lot easier to do business in China." Well, it is. But the question is: what are we willing to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and growth?

JAY: One of the things that didn't get exported in globalization and in the Chinese model that does exist in the United States, still, to some extent, was antitrust legislation. They used to do all these labor-free market reforms in these countries in Latin America, and in Mexico, I guess, is the best example, where you introduce all kinds of market reforms without any antitrust legislation. And I wonder if you think perhaps the Chinese model and some of these other models are going to put pressure on the North American model to weaken antitrust legislation, under the argument, "We need big, state-defended monopolies to compete with theirs."

KLEIN: On any standard we see that downward pressure—environmental standards, labor standards, antitrust. Absolutely. And it's the story of globalization is multinational businesses being able to pit governments against each other or say, "We'll relocate completely."

Naomi Klein - China 2

PAUL JAY: Welcome back to the next segment of our interviews with Naomi Klein. Naomi, we saw this tremendous explosion of celebration at the Olympics, fireworks and such, and as close to, perhaps, a Big Brother society as one could imagine. And then we see this sort of image of millions and millions of people marching into consumer paradise, led by a benign leadership—you worry about consuming; we will worry about the politics. But if it's all so harmonious, just why are there so many cameras and so much security? So talk a little bit about the real state of conflict in China. And why is there such a security apparatus?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, the Chinese leadership is incredibly worried about unrest. That's the emphasis on harmony is a response to the fact that this has become an enormously unequal society. And it's a very precarious political situation, because you do still have a political leadership that pays lip service to the idea of equality, and it calls itself a communist party. So it is a very precarious situation. Now, surveillance has always been a huge part of the communist system in China, of people keeping under control. But as China has transitioned into this booming capitalist economy, it has had to displace millions and millions of people. A hundred and thirty million Chinese people are classified as migrants, migrant workers, which means that they had chosen to leave their rural communities to look for work in cities like Shenzhen or Guangzhou, or they were forced to leave because their community was just leveled by the state and turned into a new shopping mall, a new highway. So this presents a challenge for social control, because when people are living and rooted in their community, then you have all the usual party structures that keep an eye on you. There's the old lady down the street who's actually keeping track of the last time somebody had their period, and whether or not they're adhering to the one-child policy or not. I mean, it's that level of nosiness. But that level of nosiness requires knowledge of your neighbor. It requires that sort of gossip that is so familiar.

JAY: And maybe a certain amount of buy-in for the reason for doing it.

KLEIN: Buy-in, yeah, but also it does require kind of a tight-knit community and a culture of snitching. The fact that there are 130 million people roaming China looking for work has broken down that system of social control and snitching, because when you are an economic migrant and you're going to a new city, nobody knows you and nobody can keep an eye on you. So replacing this system of snitching has been a technological upgrade, where the Chinese regime has embraced all of the technologies of the so-called war on terror, like biometric identification, facial recognition software embedded in network CCTV cameras. And all of this is very familiar, because we're seeing it in Dulles Airport. We're seeing it in the streets of London, where we're seeing it with the increased use of GPS. So all of these technologies have been normalized in the post-September 11 context.

JAY: And there was a regulation against American countries selling this type of police technology to China.

KLEIN: There is a regulation. After the Tienanmen Square Massacre, Congress made it illegal for US companies to sell police equipment or technology to China, any equipment that could be used for policing, because the police in China were seen as a repressive force, and there was no way of knowing whether, you know, you could sell them fingerprinting technology, and that could be used to fingerprint student demonstrators and send them into the gulags. So that's why the laws were on the books. What's interesting is that at the time—this was 1990—they came up with a list of all of the possible police equipment, and that list really hasn't been kept up to date. So all of these very high-tech sort of post-9/11 technologies are slipping in, really, through loopholes. It's not clear at all that it is legal, but one example, which I found when I was researching this in China recently, was that on the list you have fingerprinting technology—you cannot sell it to China. But L-1, which is a very large Homeland Security contractor in the United States, has been selling to Chinese companies facial recognition software, which is the ability to make a print of someone's face and run it through surveillance cameras. Now, that was in the realm of sci-fi in 1989 when the Tienanmen Square Massacre happened. And so it's sort of traveling through this loophole. But I think it's quite deliberate that that loophole has been allowed to stay as open as it has. The Olympics has been the mother of all loopholes, and that's because in the name of Olympics security, in the name of securing the games for international VIPs like George Bush, in the name of making it safe for international athletes, in the name of fighting terrorism, all of this equipment has been flooding in with seemingly no regulation at all.

JAY: Yeah. I think you quote the number $12 billion spent on security.

KLEIN: Well, this is the new disaster-capitalism trough. You know, Iraq was the trough for awhile. The Department of Homeland Security has been a pretty good trough. Building Fortress Europe has been a good trough. And what I mean by public money that is just transferred to private corporations in the name of fighting an endless war on terror. And we see it in this feeding frenzy around the world. The Green Zone is sort of, maybe, the epicenter of this feeding frenzy. But China is the new trough, because basically what the government in Beijing has said is, "We will spend whatever it takes to secure our country, and we want the latest technology and the best toys." So, you know, I interviewed an executive in Guangzhou, who works for one of the big security contractors, named Abell Technology, and he said, you know, "London is so dated. London is ten years ago. We are the future." Right? And, you know, they see themselves as really wanting—the Chinese government really wants to show that when it comes to surveillance, just like it comes to everything else, they are ahead of the West. So they are saying, "We're not doing anything different than London is doing with their cameras, and we're not doing anything different than George Bush is doing with his Patriot Act, but we're going to do it more and we're going to do it better, because we're China and we do everything better.

JAY:In the next segment of our interview, let's explore further why there are such intense levels of security in China. Please join us for the next segment of our interview with Naomi Klein.

Naomi Klein - China 1

Naomi Klein on the Olympics

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR: Welcome to our first in a series of interviews with Naomi Klein. Welcome, Naomi.

NAOMI KLEIN: Thanks, Paul.

JAY: The fireworks have been bursting at the most expensive opening to an Olympic ceremonies in history. Just what is being celebrated? You've called what's happening in China the communism. What do you mean?

KLEIN: The communism, Stalinism, market Stalinism, authoritarian capitalism, I think this is an incredibly efficient, actually, a scarily efficient way of organizing society that's actually being celebrated here, which is a hybrid of some of the worst elements of authoritarian communism—mass surveillance of the population, total lack of civil liberties, lack of a free press, lack of democratic rights, authoritarian central planning, all harnessed not to advance the goals of social justice, even in name, although there may be some lip service still paid to that, but to advance the goals of global capitalism. So it is Stalinism meets global capitalism. And it works. China is the most successful capitalist economy in the world: 11 percent growth, year after year after year. It is the most successful economy in the world. And that efficiency, that success, is intimately tied, I would argue, to the suppression of democratic rights. It's not successful despite the fact that it's not a democracy, despite the fact that you don't have independent trade unions; it is successful in large part because of that, because workers can't organize independent unions, [coughing] because Beijing, if they want to build a new export processing zone or a new shopping mall or a new Olympic stadium, can just raise whatever they want to raise and build whatever they want to build and displace as many people as they want to displace.

JAY: Now, the counterargument would be that if you compare the development of China and India over a somewhat similar time period, especially since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, that this methodology of this authoritarianism with market capitalism has actually alleviated poverty in a faster rate than India has, that maybe people are willing to give up free speech and various things for a better standard of living. So the argument is is that it's been effective. The alleviation of poverty is progressing at a faster rate in China than in India. So what if people don't have some of these rights? They're kind of phony anyway in many of the countries that claim to have them.

KLEIN: Well, that's true. They are phony in many of the countries where we claim to have them. But, you know, in China, people haven't agreed to this. It's an authoritarian system—it's imposed on people. And there is a great deal of dissent in China; there's an incredible level of protest, actually, in China.

JAY: So, if these rights are relatively artificial or not as meaningful in some of these other countries, then maybe people are happy with the development in China.

KLEIN: Look, there is absolutely no doubt that many people have been lifted out of poverty in China. But the biggest challenge facing the Chinese government is the incredible levels of inequality in that country. And this is really the obsession of the central government, how to deal with the gap between the winners and losers of this economic model, which is, you know, not incidental. It isn't a question of just lifting everyone up; it is built into the model that when you raze a village, you create an army. When you raze village after village and displace community after community to build yet another export zone, yet another shopping mall, yet another highway, you create this massive population of internal migrants who are essentially—. It's really a system of two-tiered citizenship. The people who have residency in these booming cities, and the people who are part of the army of, really, the landless, the homeless, who come to cities like Shanghai, like Shenzhen, Guangzhou, looking for work. And in a sense they're almost like the Mexicans of China, the migrant workers, in the sense that the government has said, "We can't afford to give you the same rights as we give to people with urban residency.

JAY: I mean, I guess one indication that perhaps things aren't so harmonious as we're told is the extent of surveillance and the kind of money that's being spent on surveillance. And you make an interesting argument about this in a recent piece you wrote. Can you talk about the kind of collaboration, investment, of American intelligence apparatus companies and what's happening in China?

JAY: So one of the arguments will be that the splendor of the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games is really a symbol that this system works, and perhaps works even better than the kinds of democracies that we have, in that what they have is a wise, benign leadership, which in some ways, they would argue, is more responsive to the population, partly because they don't have elections to let off steam and they are worried about unrest. So what are we seeing in terms of the balance between political rights, democracy, and capitalism?

KLEIN: Well, it's definitely a tug-of-war, and there's definitely more freedom, more access to information, a level of access to information that would have been unheard of for an earlier generation. I mean, you're talking about young people now who've grown up online, who have their own blogs, their own websites, who are texting constantly, incredibly techno savvy, and there are some websites that they simply can't go to. So it is restricted, but they're still swimming in a sea of information that their parents never had access to. And they push, and then they get pushed back, and it's not clear who's going to win this war. But if we think of—but what's really struck me about the corporate media coverage of what's going on in China is that all the negatives of the system—the crackdown on activists, the lack of freedom of speech, the fact that journalists can't access the Internet in the ways that they're used to. There's the fact that there are 100,000 security officers just on Olympic duty. And to put that into perspective, the stadium itself, the Bird's Nest Stadium holds 90,000. So there's 90,000 spectators and 100,000 secret police keeping control of things in Beijing. So this is an incredible operation. But when you hear people like Lou Dobbs and other commentators talking about the problems in China, it's always red China, communist China, or the Chi-coms. And it's really this blast from the past of—you know, it's almost as if the Cold War never ended. And there's this amazing unwillingness to talk about what this is actually serving, because this isn't North Korea. It isn't about showing the strength of the benevolent leadership and the benefits of a communist system over a capitalist system; this whole infrastructure, this whole security, central planning, surveillance state that we're seeing now in China is in the interests of creating the ultimate consumerist, capitalist cocoon. And you see that so clearly in the context of the apex of our consumer culture, which is the Olympics. So it's the ultimate consumer cocoon for Coca-Cola, Mastercard, all of the Olympic sponsors.

JAY: In our next segment, let's talk about whether in fact the Chinese people want this corporate paradise, and if so, just why is there so much security? Please join us for the next segment of our interview with Naomi Klein.

Women of Iraq

U.S.-Occupied Iraq: Women suffer untold violence


by: isiria, in political structure, war and violence

The radio news magazine “Between The Lines” interviewed Yifat Susskind, communications director with MADRE, an an international women’s human rights organisation based in New York City. Yifat is also author of a report on violence against Iraqi women titled, “Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq.” The report, made public on March 6 at a meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations, exposes what it calls “the incidence, causes, and legalization of gender-based violence in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.”

violence against iraqi womenII.jpgThe situation for Iraqi women since that invasion four years ago has deteriorated dramatically by every measure of daily survival: lack of access to clean water, electricity, food, education and jobs. And, as a result of the absence of personal security, women have virtually disappeared from public life in Iraq - yet their disappearance has been barely noted by media coverage of the war, which is not surprising. Our male dominated societies impose violence on women not just through physical brutality but also in a very silent way that makes womens’ submission almost appear to be natural. Pierre Bourdieu called it ‘a symbolic violence’, “a violence that is hardly noticed, almost invisible for the victims on whom it is perpetrated; a violence which is exercised principally via the purely symbolic channels of communication and knowledge (or, to be accurate, mis-knowledge).” While Iraqi women suffer from rape, torture, abduction and murder, the media, ignoring their plight, exclusively focuses on crazed males on both sides playing deadly war games. And when it counts the dead, it only mentions the combatants; women and children literally are un-accounted for.

According to the report, systematic attacks on women and sectarian cleansing are deeply intertwined. One of the main support mechanisms for the violence is a constitutionally enshrined ‘gender apartheid’. Iraq’s constitution, scripted and enacted under the oversight of the U.S. occupation force, has created Sharia law inspired separate and unequal laws for men and women, purely on the basis of gender. And Sharia law also allows unelected, and in some cases self-appointed, people posing as religious authorities to determine the constitutionality of law, on the basis of sometimes very arbitrary and often quite reactionary interpretations of Islamic law.

Women, who under Saddam Hussein’s secular regime had a lot of freedom, access to education and a wide range of jobs, are saying across the board that their lives are much, much worse now than they were under the previous regime. For example, in much of Iraq so-called punishment committees of Islamist militias are patrolling the streets and attacking women who don’t dress to their liking. In a lot of places, they kill women who wear pants or appear in public without a head scarf. Most Iraqi women are virtually confined to their homes now, because of the likelihood of being beaten or raped or abducted in the streets. But it’s not only the radical fundamentalists terrorising women; cases are being reported of Sunni women raped by the U.S.-trained and sponsored Shia police. That of course is not surprising, given the U.S’. own terrible record of rape and gender-based torture at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq.

Finally, the report criticises the media, including the so-called alternative media for not listening to Iraqi women. Their voices have been shut out despite the fact that women comprise, as they do in many countries, over half of Iraq’s population. Listening to their plight would give us a much truer picture of what is really happening in that country, including that women’s human rights and democratic rights really go hand in hand. It would also show that the Bush led administrations of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, for all their rhetoric, really have contempt for both genuine democracy and women’s rights.

The interview is available in RealAudio or can be accessed on the Between The Lines website.

Further links:

* “Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq Executive Summary,” MADRE report presented at the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations, March 6, 2007
* “Iraqi Police Commit Rape Armed, Trained, and Funded by the U.S.” by Yifat Susskind, www.commondreams.org, Feb. 22, 2007
* Madres Yifat Susskind: The context of the Iraqi rape allegations, Feminist Peace Network

War and Sex

INSTITUTIONALIZING SEXUAL AGGRESSION IN THE MILITARY - Part 4


17th July 2005,
Stan Goff

The United States armed services take the self-same masculinity-defined-as-sexual-aggression that the liberal state reflects (but can not openly acknowledge without blowing its cover as objective'') and actually institutionalizes it. It polishes that masculinity up and smoothes over its ugliest parts “ in much the same way film and other ideological media do “ but the military is actually defined by its potential for and willingness to employ violent aggression. In a typically bureaucratic turn-of-phrase, we taught cadets at West Point that they were training to become œmanagers of violence.�

Violence can be aggression, and it can also be unavoidable self-defense against aggression. Ascribing some kind of equivalence to all ˜violence' merely confuses every issue in which violence is a factor. Violence is not intrinsically anything, except whichever definition you choose for it “ there are eight different definitions available from a simple Google search. If we say shooting someone is an example of violence, we cannot infer much beyond that it was a ˜violent' act, a shooting, until we ascertain the specific circumstances of the shooting. Military violence in the US is always dressed up as a morality tale, with an assumed male protector defending the feminized (helpless, childlike, damsel in distress) defenseless from the likewise feminized (sensuous, cowardly and irrational) enemy. It is important that we not accept any of the premises of this morality tale.

The military's justification for combat exclusion has been that women (1) have a limited aptitude for violence that calls into question whether they will function effectively in combat (there is a ton of evidence that flatly contradicts this), (2) that women will react fearfully to violence and therefore not have the self-discipline for combat. The same evidence rebuts this, with the additional point that men “ even after training “ still experience intense fear in combat, and many in current conflicts have hidden, fled, or otherwise reacted in perfectly understandable ways when faced with combat violence. This is often overlooked or covered up. (3) The military claims that the average woman does not possess the physical strength to perform combat functions “ another baseless claim that has been disproved. There is some heavy lifting involved in every job, but nothing that any reasonably fit, grown woman can not do. (4) That the inclusion of women with men in combat will cause the men to jeopardize themselves as they revert to their inherently chivalrous ways to protect the wee females. The same people who tell us this, also say that soldiers don't fight for abstractions, but for their buddies, and various creeds in the military proclaim that no comrade will ever be abandoned on the battlefield. If the buddy is a woman, then apparently the woman, by virtue of being a woman, is somehow culpable for the soldier's dereliction in doing what he has been told he is supposed to do for male comrades. (5) That women who are captured on the battlefield¦ will be raped.

The latter is considered a self-evident argument. Yet, as I have shown above, the military itself goes to a great deal of trouble to suppress and conceal rape charges, at the expense of rape victims who are themselves military members.

So the military is caught in its own paradox. They conduct combat training with a heavy emphasis on male-identified aggression, as any honest veteran can tell you “ constantly exhorting one to œbe a man,� œsound off like you got a pair,� and describing the most physically courageous males as having œbig, brass balls.� At the same time, in the face of social pressure developed by women since the feminist struggles of the 60s and 70s, and faced with the constant necessity to legitimize itself to a controversy-allergic Congress, they have to tie themselves in knots to represent military masculinity as simultaneously sexual (the province of males) but not sexist (as most military people understand the term, in purely liberal terms).

The reality for the military comes to the surface under combat pressure.

In some of the most graphic and disturbing (for me, especially, as a combat veteran) stories and images coming out of Iraq are the uncensored accounts of GIs interacting with Iraqi detainees. There is a boiling-point anger visible among the GIs, one they often have to conjure up to do their jobs, and when they address their detainees, there is one epithet that is far and away more common than all the others. Bitch!

Anyone who doesn't think this is indicative of how sex and aggression are merged as masculinity, and reflected in military practice, needs to go watch the last Denzel Washington male-revenge fantasy, Man on Fire, where one of the defining moments of his righteous male revenge-energy was when he symbolically raped his captive by placing explosives up his captive's ass. This feminization of the victim “ in this case a wicked foreigner who could reflect the War on Terror to the US public “ invited the audience to participate by exulting at the (climactic!) explosion.

And, of course, we remember the œsexual humiliations� of Abu Ghraib, which were in fact sexually assaultive, pornographic feminizations.

Masculinity constructed as sexualized-violence and violent-sexuality is not some alpha-male genetic defect; it is not natural. It is an historically evolved reflection of a division of labor and a division of social power. The military “ an organization within the state “ simply took this construction into itself, and made itself in masculinity's image.

The state and the military are institutions that are articulated and fused with other institutions and social entities, and with the military inside the state as one of its fundamental constituent parts. And specific histories of development give unique characteristics to each and every state.

The US state is a liberal regime, and it is implicitly capitalist, male, and white nationalist. Its capitalist character, I contend, is the least flexible aspect of its character, based on the forces of civil society that wield the most power to œestablish the limits and conditions of state power.� We can look at churches, and universities, and NGOs, etc., etc., but the most powerful non-state actors influencing the US state are capitalist enterprises “ defined here as organizations constituted to invest money for the primary purpose of gaining a return-plus on their investments “ for the accumulation of capital. For an in-depth discussion of œthe poles of capital,� productive and speculative, and how that balance of power is shaping the world, I recommend Gowan's The Globalization Gamble “ The Dollar Wall Street Regime. For this discussion, it will suffice to point out “ if there is any doubt of my assertion “ that a review of the campaign finance records of any state or federal election will bear me out.

Capitalism is a highly complex international social system “ its international politico-economic dimension is one I call ˜imperialist' for shorthand “ that is, it requires the domination by economic and military means of other countries as the basis of its continued ability to accumulate capital. (On the left, imperialism has long been called œthe highest stage of capitalism,� which is fine, but fails to account for the many changes in form and practice that it has taken “ which leads one to ask what is the highest, or last, stage of imperialism?)

Economically, capitalism is now necessarily encumbered with regulations and bureaucracy by the state to stabilize and protect the advantages of the dominant classes. Capitalism has always been regulated by, and in fact was built up directly in its initial phases by, the state. The state is the only body with the monopoly on legal force required to enforce property relations, to print currency, to make the laws, protect the dominant class from insurrections, strikes, etc., that make the system function in its economic dimension.

The pure ˜capitalism' espoused by capitalist-utopians such as Ayn Rand and Reason Magazine has never existed and can never exist. It is the reductio ad absurdum utopian fantasy of a Jeffersonian liberal concept that is ahistorical, having never been actualized anywhere or at any time in history, and abstract, the principles of which would allow, for example, any citizen to own a nuclear weapon so long as s/he didn't actually use it.

Actual capitalism was built up on war, plunder, state-sanctioned piracy, the slave trade, and the expropriation of millions of square miles of land from various peoples “ often accompanied by campaigns of genocide. It has been developed and maintained using similar methods, and its juridical consolidation has only been possible by the liberal-state mechanism of false neutrality and feigned ignorance of power inequalities that exist prior to law, just as we discussed above. This system includes the continued validation of claims to ˜property' that was taken through conquest and extermination.

In the concrete and current world capitalist system, one state holds pivotal power “ the US. This power is guaranteed monetarily through dollar hegemony, and militarily through the US armed forces.

In a seeming paradox, the US itself, as an economic society, is producing fewer and fewer commodities “ what used to be the basis of relative capitalist power in the world system “ but consumes a wildly disproportionate share of the world's commodities. This is important to note, because there is also no abstract universal state except in our taxonomies. In the world, there are only real, historically contingent states, and the US is uniquely-unique among them right now. Historical allusions are inadequate, not to mention downright inaccurate, to describe the United States of 2005 because, in many highly significant respects, no such state has ever existed before.

And the US state, in particular the military as a constituent part of it, is in a condition of deep disequilibrium.

One of the peculiarities of capitalism, often ignored by both right and left, is its dependence on non-capitalist sectors of society. Pro-capitalists have been inclined to describe the system strictly by market mechanisms. Anti-capitalists have been inclined to describe the exploitative appropriation of surplus-value in the production process, and leave it at that. But if the system depends on non-capitalist sectors to (1) realize a return on investment, or (2) exploitatively valorize capital, then what are these non-capitalist sectors, and how important is it that we understand them?

What work and what resources are drawn into the total social effort to ensure its continued and stable functioning that are neither bought nor paid for? Eco-feminist Maria Mies has answered this (correctly, by my reckoning) with three things: colonies, nature, and women.

I want to add one more “ the state.

While the US state is capitalist, male, and white nationalist in its reflection of the power and material interests of those who dominate civil society, as an organization the state categorically can not function in a capitalist way. Not only would it not be able to show a profit “ the sine qua non of ˜capitalist' activity, it would abdicate its most important function of providing stability for the whole capitalist class if it were incapable of a degree of autonomy from individual capitalist enterprises and the market itself. The attention span of a productive capitalist is one business cycle, and for speculative capitalists it is sometimes measured in minutes. The state is responsible for ensuring the long term conditions for the continuing power of the class as a whole, and therefore must be something of both a political manager on a world scale and an umpire.

So what has all this digression got to do with rape in the US military?

The military, an absolutely essential constituent part of the state, is even less capable of working in a capitalist way than the state at large. The attempt of the Rumsfeld Department of Defense to introduce more ˜capitalism' into the military through contracting-out much of the military's work and attempting to impose capitalist values “ that is, a market ideology “ on the military has significantly contributed to weakening the institution, precisely because the military mission has nothing intrinsically to do with return on investment or valorization of capital. In fact, the contrary is true. Effective militaries exhibit such institutional norms as mutual-dependence, collectivity (enforced if necessary), cooperation as opposed to competition, subordination of the individual to the requirements of the group, cohesion, etc. The military produces nothing. It is in no way designed to create profit “ even if extrinsically in a capitalist society it is the guarantor of capital.

The military can and must operate outside the articulated patterns of economic life without directly threatening either the (gendered) social relations of the civilian sector upon which the economic system rests or the complex, almost-impenetrable, liberal legal regime of the state. Odd as it may sound, given the macho culture of the current military, the military might be the state institution that is most vulnerable to a social movement against rape.

The questions raised by rape about the entire social architecture of gender are so deep and so resonant that they could be disruptive of the ideological legitimacy not only of a highly gendered accumulation regime in the economic sphere of society, but they could challenge the feigned neutrality which forms the foundation of liberal law.

The liberal state and its laws have achieved such a high level of complexity, and are so utterly insulated within the associations that form civil society, and the legitimation of the gender order is now so vulnerably dependent on this liberal faux-neutrality “ a neutrality that has been turned on the women who have attempted to use it, that there are layers upon bureaucratic, legislative, and judicial layers that have to be penetrated to get only incremental results.

But, as the military demonstrated when it was ordered to integrate the armed forces, if the Department of Defense is ordered to solve a problem, for the uniformed services this becomes nothing more or less than a question of command emphasis and will. And because military law is not negative-law, not precedential law¦ because it is outside the Constitution in many ways, and because the decisions in the military do not have a direct impact on the socials structures of accumulation that are immediately threatening to dominant sectors of civil society, the armed forces have a greater institutional potential to redress rape.

We are catching a glimpse of this ability to respond by the military's latest response with new directives and policies to the latest rape scandal in Iraq and Kuwait.

I do not advocate relinquishing the struggle against rape and the practice of the liberal state with regard to rape. On the contrary, I do not believe there is any more urgent issue in US society than stopping the widespread and systematic violence against women as women. But I want to make a specific proposal about how to respond to rape in the military.

The Evil Eye of Bush

Politicians are well trained actors; they can produce a laugh or any facial expression upon will, depending on what is called for in a situation. In the days of yore, photographs were planned and the technology was cumbersome. But today, with a camera in every cell phone, every expression and movement of our politicians can be recorded, even the ones they don't want us to see.

I like to look a faces; not for beauty, but for truth and spirit. Most of us will never meet the Masters of the Universe face to face. So we will never have the luxury of observing all the subtle cues that provide meaning to our personal opinions of those in power; we instead get the well marketed media image they wish us to believe.

Below is a compilation of moments in time the Bushites have revealed themselves for the camera and told us some truth about themselves that perhaps they did not mean for us to see. Granted, these photos are taken out of context in an openly biased way here. But the photos reveal some truth; you can judge for yourself what that is.

Naomi & Alan

Alan Greenspan vs. Naomi Klein on the Iraq War, Bush’s Tax Cuts, Economic Populism, Crony Capitalism and More

In a Democracy Now! exclusive debate, former federal reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and journalist Naomi Klein square off on the Iraq war, oil, President Bush tax cuts, social security, economic populism in Latin America, corruption and crony capitalism. Greenspan headed the central bank in the United States for almost two decades. He has written a new 500-page memoir titled, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.” At one point in the debate, Klein asks Greenspan, " The policies that you pursued—deregulation, privatization, free trade—have contributed to this extraordinary division of income that is really the fuel for this economic populism that you’re now denouncing. Aren’t you the one that has caused this crisis of faith in capitalism?"

AMY GOODMAN: As the credit crisis continues to grow and the US dollar hits a new low, we turn today to the former Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan headed the central bank in the United States for almost two decades. He was first appointed to this position in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan. Greenspan retired in January 2006, after deciding the fate of national interest rates under four different presidents. Dubbed “the Maestro,” he was widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential economic policymakers. He has just written a new 500-page memoir; it’s called The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.

Alan Greenspan joins us now on the phone. And in our studio we’re joined again by journalist Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Welcome, Alan Greenspan.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Thank you very much. I’m delighted.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. You worked with six presidents, with President Reagan, with both President Bushes. You worked with President Ford, and you worked with Bill Clinton, who you have called a Republican president; why?

ALAN GREENSPAN: That was supposed to be a quasi-joke.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about it.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, Clinton?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, I stated that I’m a libertarian Republican, which means I believe in a series of issues, such as smaller government, constraint on budget deficits, free markets, globalization, and a whole series of other things, including welfare reform. And as you may remember, Bill Clinton was pretty much in the same—was doing much that same agenda. And so, I got to consider him as someone—as he described it, we were both an odd couple, because he is a centrist Democrat. And that’s not all that far from libertarian Republicanism.

AMY GOODMAN: About how much would you say you agreed with him?

ALAN GREENSPAN: On economic issues, I would say probably 80%.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about President Bush?

ALAN GREENSPAN: President Bush had the wonderful characteristic of knowing that it was not to his advantage or to ours to interfere with the actions of the Federal Reserve. And I must say, through all of his years, he never once second-guessed what the Fed was doing. And that was very important to us, and we’ve been very much appreciative of that.

But, as I say in the book, he did not clamp down, as I thought was necessary, on what was a wayward Republican-controlled Congress, which I thought lost its way and started to spend and create all sorts of fiscal imbalances. And, essentially, what I hold—where I thought the administration could have done far better is if the veto were employed. And as you may remember, he did not use the veto at all. And that, what I thought, would have created a much more balanced procedure in the Congress. So it’s a mixed case in this regard.

AMY GOODMAN: Alan Greenspan, let’s talk about the war in Iraq. You said what for many in your circles is the unspeakable, that the war in Iraq was for oil. Can you explain?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Yes. The point I was making was that if there were no oil under the sands of Iraq, Saddam Hussein would have never been able to accumulate the resources which enabled him to threaten his neighbors, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. And having watched him for thirty years, I was very fearful that he, if he ever achieved—and I thought he might very well be able to buy one—an atomic device, he would have essentially endeavored and perhaps succeeded in controlling the flow of oil through the Straits of Hormuz, which is the channel through which eighteen or nineteen million barrels a day of the world eighty-five million barrel crude oil production flows. Had he decided to shut down, say, seven million barrels a day, which he could have done if he controlled, he could have essentially also shut down a significant part of economic activity throughout the world.

The size of the threat that he posed, as I saw it emerging, I thought was scary. And so, getting him out of office or getting him out of the control position he was in, I thought, was essential. And whether that be done by one means or another was not as important, but it’s clear to me that were there not the oil resources in Iraq, the whole picture of how that part of the Middle East developed would have been different.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined in studio by Naomi Klein, author of the book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Your response to that, Naomi Klein?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I’m just wondering if it troubles Mr. Greenspan at all that wars over resources in other countries are actually illegal. Mr. Greenspan has praised the rule of law, the importance of the rule of law, in his book. But in his statements about the reasons why this has not been publicly discussed, he has said that it’s not politically expedient at this moment. But it’s not just that it’s not politically expedient, Mr. Greenspan. Are you aware that, according to the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Conventions, it is illegal for one country to invade another over its natural resources?

ALAN GREENSPAN: No. What I was saying is that the issue which, as you know, most people who were pressing for the war were concerned with were weapons of mass destruction. I personally believed that Saddam was behaving in a way that he probably very well had, almost certainly had, weapons of mass destruction. I was surprised, as most, that he didn’t. But what I was saying is that my reason for being pleased to see Saddam out of office had nothing to do with the weapons of mass destruction. It had to do with the potential threat that he could create to the rest of the world.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yes, I realize that, but he was not simply deposed. The US invaded Iraq, occupied it and took control over its resources. And under international law, that it is illegal to wage wars to gain access to other countries’, sovereign countries’, natural resources.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Yes. No, I’m fully aware of the fact that that is a highly, terribly important issue. And as I said in other commentaries, I have always thought the issue of what essentially amounts to what is often called pre-emptive, preventive action on the part of some countries to secure resources or something else like that, it’s an issue that goes back to the Cold War, when we had the very difficult moral dilemma of what do you do when you think a missile is coming in our direction and you’re not sure whether it’s an accident or not an accident. And that is a problem which I think is a deep moral problem in civilized society. And the issue is one which I don’t think we’re going to resolve very easily. And as you point out, yes, I am a believer in the rule of law, and I think it is a critical issue, not only for domestic economies, but for the world economy as a whole.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein?

NAOMI KLEIN: You have also advocated economic shock therapy and supported IMF programs that have transformed economies very, very quickly. And then, you say that you are in support of the rule of law. But I’m just wondering how, in a country like Russia, there could be rule of law when it’s being transformed in fast-forward in that way.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember that you don’t get a market economy merely by eliminating central planning. And remember, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated, you didn’t have a market economy. What you basically had was a black market economy. And they tried to develop the institutions of the democratic society, and it’s not something which they have had back for generations. And as you can see now, there’s an increasing authoritarianism. It’s a very—it’s a society which has very different trends at different levels of that society. And I don’t know exactly where they’re coming up, but I don’t like the direction it’s been going in in recent years.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to Iraq and ask you about, well, a piece by Jim Steele and Don Barlett that came out in Vanity Fair, where they’re talking about the billions lost in Iraq. And they begin their piece by saying, “Between April 2003 and June 2004, [$12 billion] in US currency—much of it belonging to the Iraqi people—was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed.”

Alan Greenspan, when you were head of the Federal Reserve, how much knowledge do you have of this? And did you investigate this? Were you aware of this at the time?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, let me say that what we were involved in was essentially endeavoring to create a viable currency for the central bank of Iraq. And what we did do was—I think very successfully—create what is a viable financial system, even under the circumstances that currently exist. There was, as far as I can judge, a huge drain of the resources into areas which nobody to this day can understand or follow. It had nothing to do with the central bank. In our relationships with them, we were merely acting as an intermediary to assist them in creating a system, which they now have, which is working reasonably well, despite all of the problems that are going on. The issue which you are referring to had nothing to do with the Federal Reserve in any of our relationships with the central bank.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, they are talking about, in one day, for example, the East Rutherford operation center of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 100 Orchard Street in East Rutherford, a tractor-trailer truck pulling up, and though accustomed to receiving and shipping large quantities of cash, the vault had never before processed a single order of this magnitude: $2.4 billion in $100 bills. But ultimately, again, $9 billion of $12 billion gone missing in Iraq.

ALAN GREENSPAN: I am not familiar with any such evidence. And it was certainly not brought to my attention. I, frankly, find it very unlikely that those orders of magnitude were involved in any of the numbers that we were dealing with. You have to make certain that—there’s been a lot of confusion about losses, and people have used the dinar, the basic currency unit of Iraq, and assumed they were American dollars. And, of course, that gives you a highly distorted view. There’s been, I’ve seen, several reports fairly recently in which that sort of mistake was being made. But what I can tell you is that no such numbers of any order of magnitude of the type you are discussing came to the attention of the Federal Reserve.

AMY GOODMAN: This is based on that award-winning article in Vanity Fair, or the team who have won—

ALAN GREENSPAN: Let me put it this way, award-winning doesn’t necessarily—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, no, no. I mean Don Barlett and Jim Steele, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists. I’m sure you know their work. But Naomi Klein?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I would just add that it’s quite surprising, actually, that Mr. Greenspan is unaware of this scandal around Iraq’s missing billions, because Paul Bremer had to testify before Congress and was asked directly about those missing billions. It’s been the subject of very high-level investigations. There is a huge paper trail around it. So this is hardly a secret, and it’s hardly just a matter that’s confined to Vanity Fair. This is—

ALAN GREENSPAN: Oh, I’m not saying that the losses are not real. I think they are, because, obviously, we can’t account for all the oil revenues. I’m just merely saying it’s not something which was directly related to any of the actions which the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to which we were referring, was involved, as far as I know.

AMY GOODMAN: Alan Greenspan, we have to break for sixty seconds, but we’ll be back with you. Alan Greenspan, the former Chair of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. His memoir is out now; it’s called The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. We’ll be back with him in one minute. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, and Alan Greenspan, the former head, Chair, of the Federal Reserve, his book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. In fact, you were a classical and jazz musician, weren’t you, Alan Greenspan, before you went into economics?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, I studied at Julliard, which means you’ve become a classical musician. And, indeed, that is still my fundamental interest in music. But I went on as a teenager to play in a dance band and spent a year and a half traveling around the country as a jazz musician.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to move forward to your work as head of the Fed, as head of the Federal Reserve Bank, and ask you about that piece by Paul Krugman called “Sad Alan’s Lament,” that goes to that issue of supporting President Bush’s tax cuts. In his piece, Paul Krugman says, "Mr. Greenspan has just published a book in which he castigates the Bush administration for its fiscal irresponsibility.

“Well, I’m sorry,” says Paul Krugman, “but that criticism comes six years late and a trillion dollars short.”

He says that "Mr. Greenspan now says that he didn’t mean to give the Bush tax cuts a green light, [and] that he was surprised at the political reaction to his remarks. "

He goes on to say the first big chance you had to clarify yourself came a few weeks after your initial testimony in 2001, when you appeared before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

He says that, again and again you were offered the opportunity to say something that would help rein in runaway tax-cutting; each time evading the question, often replying by reading from your own previous testimony.

He said, “If anyone had doubts about Mr. Greenspan’s determination not to inconvenience the Bush administration, those doubts were resolved two years later, when the administration proposed another round of tax cuts, even though the budget was now deep in deficit. And guess what? The former high priest of fiscal responsibility did not object.”

And he goes on from there. He says in 2004, you “expressed support for making the Bush tax cuts permanent—remember, these are the tax cuts he now says he didn’t endorse—and argued that the budget should be balanced with cuts in entitlement spending, including Social Security benefits, instead. Of course, back in 2001 he specifically assured Congress that cutting taxes would not threaten Social Security.”

Your response, Alan Greenspan?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, I find it very unfortunate. Paul is a good economist. I have known him for years. He is wrong as fundamentally in many of the facts—in fact probably all of the ones you’ve just cited.

First of all, I was in favor of tax cuts of any type when it looked as though, according to all the technical experts, we were confronted with very large potential increases in surpluses. If we allowed those surpluses to run when the debt of the United States essentially went to zero, we would find that the federal government was beginning to accumulate huge amounts of assets of corporate business. There was to be no alternative to that. And if you look at the possibilities of what Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon would have done under those circumstances, it becomes extremely scary. It was only when it appeared that the forecasts were false, that, indeed, we were not running in—or not likely to run into these large surpluses, and, indeed, they disappeared.

At that point, I reverted to my older position: namely, I was in favor of tax cuts, but only if they are matched by cuts in spending. And I, therefore, reverted to that position in congressional testimony in 2002 and 2003, in fact, to the point where I recall a number of congressmen asked me, “Do I understand you correctly? You’re saying that you are in favor of the tax cuts, but only if spending is cut. If spending is not cut, were we to read from you that you are not supporting the tax cuts?” And I said, ‘That is correct." So Paul Krugman’s view that somehow I didn’t change my mind until after I got out of office is factually false. And, indeed, I did change my mind. I changed my mind in 2002 and 2003, largely because the whole notion of which fundamentally got me in favor of significant tax cuts without offsetting expenditures was a very special event which probably had not occurred in the United States for 150 years—namely, division of our total federal debt effectively going to zero.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein?

NAOMI KLEIN: Just another piece of the puzzle here that I think is important to remember is that, Alan Greenspan, in your book, you make it clear that you are ideologically very much a supporter of the principle of privatizing Social Security and, in fact, were very disappointed that the Bush administration did not pick this up after the elections in 2000. Even though they hadn’t campaigned on privatization of Social Security, you felt that they should have pushed this forward. So doesn’t creating a shortfall because of tax cuts bolster the case for privatization of Social Security that you have written you are an ideological supporter of?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, first of all, ideology is not what I hold. I try to learn what are the facts, and I let my opinions, judged on the facts, not by some preconception, which I regret is what ideology as a notion means.

First of all, let me just suggest something to you. Social Security, as it now exists and is now currently funded, will be a very small part of overall retirement income in the years ahead. There is no—in fact, no alternative, as things now stand, that a very substantial part of the so-called replacement of income that one talks about when one retires is going to have to come from the private sector. And so, no matter what is done with federal Social Security, the average person is going to have to rely ever more increasingly on private sources of income, whether it’s private savings or working or whatever. But if you look at the future of Social Security and the demographics we’re now dealing with, the extent to which it replaces lost income when you retire is decreasing.

AMY GOODMAN: Alan Greenspan, the issue of whether we have enough money in this country, do you think that that also calls into question the war in Iraq, how the US can afford to continue this war?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, the issue is, basically, the question of the commitments of Social Security, relative—and Medicare, I might add—relative to the costs of the war. There is no question that a significant amount of money is being wasted in war. That is what happens in war. And that’s—clearly we’re talking hundreds of billions. The issue here is that—

AMY GOODMAN: I believe the figure is in the trillions.

ALAN GREENSPAN:—even if the war spending were not there, we would have these problems. So it’s true that there’s a good deal of waste going on. But the problems to which I’m referring to existed before the war and will continue after the war.

AMY GOODMAN: The sub-prime crisis that we are seeing today, many saying that you seriously contributed to this, laid the foundation with keeping the interest rates low.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, the sub-prime crisis did occur as a result of lower interest rates. The lower interest rates, however, are, if one takes a look at the whole context of rising home prices throughout the world, is clearly a global issue. It is the result of fundamental changes that occurred as a consequence of the end of the Cold War, and that housing bubbles appear in more than two dozen countries around the world, which screams for an explanation that is global, not individual. So we in the United States—

AMY GOODMAN: I know that you’re going to have to leave soon.

ALAN GREENSPAN: May I just finish?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Go ahead.

ALAN GREENSPAN: We in the United States basically try to get mortgage interest rates up and slow the bubble. And remember, it’s the bubble which created a goodly part of the problem which we have had in the sub-prime market. And we failed. And that tells us, basically, that it’s the global forces that are at play here.

But just going—taking a step back, I think it would be a terrible mistake if we look at the sub-prime market and decide it should be eliminated, because I think it’s been a very successful market to allow many people in this country to have homes, which wouldn’t otherwise be able to have them. The sub-prime market has a lot of technical problems wrong with it, and there are many issues that are involved with financial securitization alike, which created difficulties. I hope in the process we don’t eliminate the sub-prime market.

AMY GOODMAN: Alan Greenspan, you write in the end of your book, “A Federal Reserve System that will be confronted with the challenge of inflation pressure and populist politics that have been relatively quiescent in recent years” is something that is very significant. You say the year—the United States in 2030 is likely to be characterized by populist politics that have been relatively quiescent in recent years. How important is populist politics, and what do you envision those to look like?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, remember what populist politics is. It’s a very special brand of short-term focus, which invariably creates very difficult long-term problems. A goodly part of the book, as you know, is written about how populism has gripped, say, many Latin American countries to their detriment. And the term “populist politics” is essentially another way of saying short term versus longer term. And people who emphasize short-term benefits for long-term costs end up with very little in the way of economic growth and prosperity.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein?

NAOMI KLEIN: Mr. Greenspan, I’m wondering whether you feel that you share any responsibility in the rise of this economic populism, because, of course, you took over the Federal Reserve during the Reagan administration, and when Reagan took office, CEOs earned forty-three times more than their workers, and when you left the Federal Reserve, they made more than 400 times more than their workers. So the policies that you pursued—deregulation, privatization, free trade—have contributed to this extraordinary division of income that is really the fuel for this economic populism that you’re now denouncing. So aren’t you the one that has caused this crisis of faith in capitalism? Or, at least, don’t you share some of that responsibility?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, look, the whole issue of what has happened in this country with respect to the increasing inequality of income is an issue I address and abhor in the book, and I point out that what is causing it to a very significant extent is the fact that skilled labor is under extraordinary demand as the technologies increase, and we’ve had a dysfunctional education system in this country, both in primary and secondary schools, which is showing up in all of the studies, which indicate that while our children in the fourth grade are doing fairly well relative to international comparisons, by the end of high school, they are in terrible shape. And as a consequence of that, we are not putting the proper number of people into the education cycle to get them up to skill levels, which creates much less, or would create a good deal less, in the way of income inequality.

And I also argue in the book that we ought to be opening up our borders to skilled labor from all sorts of—from all parts of the world, because if we were to do that, we would increase the supply of skilled workers, which our schools have been unable to create, and as a consequence of that, we would lower the average wage of skills and reduce the degree of income inequality in this country. It’s a very important issue, and it’s a very important issue which I raise in my book. And we have to confront this both at the education level and on the immigration level.

And it’s not anything to do with what I am proposing. And just remember that the type of globalized economy that I support has taken hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It’s created a standard of living throughout the world which is unprecedented in history. And to assume that that is something we should be apologizing for, I find, is wholly inappropriate.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, you mentioned Latin America, and, of course, there is a rise in leftwing political parties and movements in Latin America. But this is after decades of adherence to IMF structural adjustment policies, and it’s precisely because those policies failed to lift people out of poverty in countries like Bolivia that you have this rise of what you’re calling economic populism. It’s because trickle-down economics was seen to have failed. But you also mentioned economic populism in Latin America in your book, and you blame it for inflation episodes and the collapse of regimes and the toppling of governments, and one of your examples was Chile in the 1970s. Was Chile—was Salvador Allende’s regime toppled because of inflation, or didn’t the CIA have something to do with that?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, look, let’s—I’m using Latin America as an example. The key question is not Latin America. Let’s get back to the United States. Let’s get back to the world at large and face the issue of populism here. Remember, the populist issue in Latin America goes back to the roots of Spanish and Portuguese colonization.

NAOMI KLEIN: I’m aware of that, Mr. Greenspan, but there are many developmentalist policies that were trying to address those colonial disparities. They were called it import substitutions. And those leaders were systematically eliminated in a series of coups.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, let me ask you a question, which—you are just taking the capitalist system, to state it very bluntly, and say it’s deficient here, it’s deficient there, it’s deficient every other place. The capitalist system has created more economic wealth in the last seven or eight years around the world. And as I said before, it’s had huge effects in the developing world. Hundreds of millions of people have come out of poverty. And as a consequence of this, not on the basis of populist policies, but on the basis of policies which relate to markets, it strikes me that—you know, you can say all of the problems that exist in market economies—and in my book, you will find, I am very much aware of all of them in great detail.

The question you have to answer, however, is: what system works better? And I think the evidence going back to the Enlightenment of the early part of the eighteenth century and all of the events that occurred with respect to what’s happened to the world since then has demonstrated that this system is the only one that seems to work well. I mean, all forms of socialist structure, which you seem to be implicitly in favor of, have failed. So the question is—

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein?

NAOMI KLEIN: Actually, I am referring to mixed economies here. I’m not—

ALAN GREENSPAN:—what is [inaudible] issue here?

NAOMI KLEIN: Actually, I’m referring to mixed economies here. I’m not referring to state socialism.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, the question is, when you begin to talk in terms of changing what you’re implicitly saying—and I’ve heard this story before—you have to say, what are you changing in favor of? And we’ve had regrettable problems throughout the world every time we’ve moved in the direction you’re implying. The poverty level has gone up, not down.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, Mr. Greenspan, I think it’s worth remembering that the word “populist” simply means popular. So, obviously, a lot of people disagree with your assessment of the benefits of—

ALAN GREENSPAN: A lot of people disagree with my assessment, a lot of people disagree with yours.

NAOMI KLEIN: And are interested in another economic model.

ALAN GREENSPAN: That’s what makes democracy work.

NAOMI KLEIN: There is something that I was quite interested in in your book, which was your definition of corruption and crony capitalism. You said, “When a government’s leaders or businesses routinely seek out private sector individuals or businesses and, in exchange for political support, bestow favors on them, the society is said to be in the grip of crony capitalism.” You say, “The favors generally take the form of monopoly access to certain markets, preferred access to sales of government assets, and special access to those in power.” I kept thinking about Halliburton, Blackwater, Lockheed and Boeing. You were referring to Indonesia at the time, but I’m wondering, according to your definition—and we’re seeing these extraordinary—we’re seeing contracting emerging, as in the words of the New York Times, a fourth arm of government. Front page of the New York Times talks about $6 billion being investigated for criminal activity in contract allocation in Iraq. I’m wondering whether you think the United States is a crony capitalist economy, according to your definition?

ALAN GREENSPAN: Every economy exists, no matter what the level of democracy, has elements of crony capitalism. It’s—given human nature and given the democratic structures, which we all, I assume, adhere to, that is an inevitable consequence. The major issue is, is it the dominant force within an economy? It was the dominant force under Suharto. It is not the dominant force in this country.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, how about this: in 2003, when you were head of the Federal Reserve, the US government handed out 3,500 contracts to companies to perform security functions. In 2006, the year that you left the Federal Reserve, they handed out 115,000 such contracts. It seems to me that it is becoming a dominant force.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Are you talking about the contracts that the Federal Reserve put out?

NAOMI KLEIN: I’m talking about the crony capitalist system of a Republican government handing out an extraordinary level of contracts to private companies, who then support these politicians with the political favors that you’re describing in your book, in your definition of crony capitalism.

ALAN GREENSPAN: [inaudible] Federal Reserve is doing this or the government?

NAOMI KLEIN: You’ve overseen an explosion of the contract economy.

AMY GOODMAN: Final word, Alan Greenspan.

ALAN GREENSPAN: I’m sorry. I misunderstand what you’re saying. Are you saying the Federal Reserve is doing that or the government is doing it?

NAOMI KLEIN: I’m saying that the US government is doing it.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, the US government has to purchase equipment from the private sector. It doesn’t produce it itself. And you may characterize it in many different ways. And, obviously, I’m not going to deny that there’s all sorts of corruption, which goes on in every country. The problem, essentially, for a democratic society is to maintain the civil liberties of the society and suppress that. Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on that note, we’ll have to wrap up this discussion, because I know you, Alan Greenspan, have to go. But I hope this is just part one of this discussion. Alan Greenspan’s new book is called The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. Naomi Klein, award-winning investigative journalist, is author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. I want to thank you both for being with us today.

ALAN GREENSPAN: You’re welcome.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you.

Namoi Klein - Oil & Food

With Crises in Fuel, Food, Housing and Banking, What Gvt. Policies Are Being Pushed Through? Naomi Klein Reexamines “The Shock Doctrine”

July 15, 2008
As the country and the world reel from crises ranging from skyrocketing oil prices and global food shortages to housing and climate change, how best to understand the government policies being pushed through? We spend the hour with Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein also discusses Barack Obama’s economic advisory team, whom she calls “Obama’s Chicago Boys”; why she’s suing the US government for spying on journalists like her; as well as her recent trip to China, where she says the government is building a high-tech police state with the help of US military contractors.

AMY GOODMAN: President Bush has lifted an almost two-decade-old executive order banning offshore and natural gas drilling. With prices at the pump over $4 a gallon, Bush has been pushing to allow more drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf and the Arctic Wildlife National Refuge, amidst strong opposition from environmentalists. The executive drilling ban was issued by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. His son’s lifting of the ban yesterday is largely symbolic, because a separate congressional ban has prohibited offshore drilling since 1981. Speaking on the White House lawn Monday, the President urged lawmakers to lift the ban.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The failure to act is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable to me, and it’s unacceptable to the American people. So today I’ve issued a memorandum to lift the executive prohibition on oil exploration in the OCS. With this action, the executive branch’s restrictions on this exploration have been cleared away. This means that the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources is action from the US Congress. Now the ball is squarely in Congress’s court.

AMY GOODMAN: In President Bush’s final months of office, the economy is at the top of the agenda. Oil prices now exceed $140 a barrel, more than double $70 a year ago. The high cost of oil has helped exacerbate the global food crisis that threatens to push over 100 million people below the poverty line due to rising food prices. This all comes amidst an ongoing housing crisis, with the US Treasury and Federal Reserve unveiling sweeping steps to possibly bail out the nation’s two largest mortgage lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Amidst these multiple crises, how best to understand government policies being enacted?

Naomi Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The book is out in paperback this month. It was first published in September, and in some ways, much of what Naomi writes about in the book is more relevant today. Naomi Klein joins us in our firehouse studio for the hour. Welcome to Democracy Now! KLEIN: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Food, fuel, housing, climate change—talk about these crises. First, start with oil.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, it’s—I mean, there really is a kind of a tsunami of shocks facing not just the economy but people’s lives, people’s real lives. They’re all intersecting. They’re making each other worse. And I think we really are seeing some very live examples of what a write about in the book, which is how there is a strategy. And this is what I mean by “the shock doctrine.” There is a clear political strategy, and has been for several decades, to exploit these moments when people are desperate for quick-fix solutions and more inclined to believe in a kind of a magical cure, to push through very, very unpopular policies that don’t actually solve the crisis at hand, that don’t actually help people, but are incredibly profitable for multinational corporations.

And I think we are seeing a very vivid example of this with this speech from George Bush yesterday, where he is taking a very real crisis, which is demanding complex and profound changes in the way we live, in the way we organize our economy, but particularly in the need to diversify our energy sources. And I think there’s a tremendous actual amount of support for this idea from the public. And he comes in—and I call him in my recent column the “extortionist-in-chief.” Basically what he’s saying is he’s holding the country ransom. He’s not taking any of these long-term policy routes to dealing with climate change, to dealing with high oil prices. It’s just let us drill, or, you know, nobody can go on summer vacation. And he’s selling a myth, which is that by allowing drilling, the price at the pump is going to go down, which is really interesting, because just yesterday, in response to Bush’s announcement, oil went up, and oil futures went up. And so, the price of oil is going to keep going up.

AMY GOODMAN: What would—how long would it take the oil drilled offshore, if he succeeds in getting his father’s ban reversed, to get into the supply?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. Well, first of all, I think it’s really important for people to understand that we are being subjected to an incredibly aggressive media campaign sponsored by the oil and gas industry. And, you know, it’s to the point where it really is impossible to tell the difference between the paid advertisements, which we’re being bombarded with on cable news from the oil and gas industry, talking about how they can solve the problem of high prices with more drilling, and all of these commentators, from Larry Kudlow to Sean Hannity, repeating these talking points, and not to mention Dick Cheney, who just propagated a complete lie, saying that China was drilling off the coast of Cuba, and the Vice President’s office actually had to retract that. It turns out his source was George Will, who also had to issue a correction. China is not drilling off of Cuba. And so, there’s a very aggressive campaign going on.

The reality is, it would take between five to ten years to see any of that oil. Everybody admits this. Everyone knows this. You have to do the exploration, then you have to build the rig, which takes a huge amount of time. So it takes—we’re talking about as long as a decade to see any of this oil. So when you press people who are selling this drill in ANWR, more offshore oil drilling, also drilling into the shale in places like Montana, what they actually say is that the reason why it will lower prices at the pump, you know, soon, this summer, is because it will send a message to the stock market, it will send a message to the oil speculators that more supply is on the way.

So, essentially, what they’re saying is, let’s play the market, let’s collectively play the market. And that’s why it’s significant that yesterday, in the face of Bush’s announcement—and it was a significant announcement, because it was a real indication of the seriousness of this administration to really make this their, you know, final push in office, and they could well win, because this media campaign is really bringing public opinion on side, and we know that the Democrats are pretty weak in the face of that public opinion, and the only thing that they could fight this with is with real commitment to green policies. And, you know, don’t hold your breath.

AMY GOODMAN: What does this offshore drilling, lifting the ban—how would you relate this to what’s happening in Iraq right now and what’s happening at the Oil Ministry and the pushing through the permanent occupation that the Bush administration is pushing hard for?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I think we’re seeing the Bush administration in its final months just handing out a series of gifts to the oil and gas industry, both at home, pushing for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and then in Iraq, the prize, the biggest prize of all, which is allowing foreign multinationals to gain control of Iraq’s oil fields. And we’re seeing a two-stage process now, and it isn’t over yet, where first there was the service—the short-term service agreements, no-bid contracts, that were announced. They haven’t been signed yet, but they’re going to the big oil companies that were kicked out of Iraq in the ’70s. They’re coming back.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain how that works, these no-bid contracts, how it is—who’s signing these contracts?

NAOMI KLEIN: OK. Well, at the moment, Iraq does not have an oil law, so Iraq can’t sign long-term exploration agreements, although they are doing it in Iraqi Kurdistan, and we’ve heard about this with Hunt Oil. But that’s—those are illegal contracts. They’re very precarious. There could be future expropriations. It’s really risky to go that route, because there isn’t a law. And we know it’s been a major push of this administration to get the Iraqi parliament to accept a US-backed oil law. This has been sold as a symbol of Iraqi unity. That’s not the way it’s seen in Iraq. In Iraq, the reason why it has been years in resisting this oil law is because nationalizing the oil in Iraq was the centerpiece of the anti-colonial struggle, as it was in neighboring nations throughout the Arab world.

And it is not just a pro-Saddam idea. It is not just a Baathist idea. It’s the core of Arab nationalism. And that victory is being protected by many political forces in Iraq, and most notably by the oil workers’ unions in Iraq, who said, “We don’t need these foreign multinationals to get the oil out of the ground. We can do it ourselves. We can bring in technical support without giving away management control, without giving away ownership control.” And, I mean, but let’s stress here that unlike the oil offshore, unlike the shale, this is very difficult oil to extract. It’s extremely—it requires a huge amount of technology. It requires a huge amount of investment. And that’s part of the problem with what the Bush administration is selling. These—actually, they—the oil companies need the price of oil to stay high in order for it to be economically viable to do these—to get oil out of solid rock, for instance, which is very hard, very expensive.

Offshore oil drilling, also very, very expensive—you have to build the rigs and so on. Iraq, no. Iraq, stick a straw in the ground and suck. I mean, this is incredibly accessible oil. And Iraqis actually know how to extract this oil themselves. So this idea that they need these foreign multinationals to come in is yet another myth. And not only have companies like BP and Texaco been offered these no-bid contracts, but what’s strange about it is that they’re service contracts, and these are not oil service companies. So what’s significant about these contracts is that they appear to be giving these oil companies the right of first refusal on future, more significant contracts. So, one week after these smaller service agreements were announced, the Iraqi Oil Ministry announced that they also will be handing out longer-term management agreements, which will give oil companies the ability to manage existing fields in Iraq and hold onto 75 percent of the worth of those contracts and leave only 25 percent for Iraqis, which is absolutely unheard of in the region, where 51 percent for the country is the baseline for new exploration, for new fields. These are existing fields. They’re already working. The technology is already there. And these foreign companies are going to be taking 75 percent of the worth of those existing fields in Iraq. So it’s daylight robbery. It’s armed robbery, actually, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Naomi Klein. Her book is just out in paperback, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. We’ll keep talking about oil. She’s a Canadian journalist, and we’re going to find out about, well, the largest supplier of oil to the United States. No, it’s not Saudi Arabia; it is Canada. And, well, Naomi is just back from China, so we also want to find out what she’s been investigating there, what she says is the building of a police state with the help of US military contractors. And we’ll find out why she’s suing the US government. Stay with us. [break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Naomi Klein, the award-winning journalist and bestselling author. Her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is just out in paperback. It’s being translated now into twenty-five languages. And by the way, she’s speaking here in New York at Barnes & Noble, Union Square, tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. We’re talking oil. Naomi, how is it that the oil prices are, well, among the highest they have ever been, and yet so are the oil company profits—ExxonMobil, Chevron—why?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, they have a captive market, and the fact that the price is high means that they are earning more profits.

AMY GOODMAN: But supposedly the price is high because it’s harder to get, not to give them more money.

NAOMI KLEIN: There’s a speculative bubble going on right now, and this market is being played. I mean, I think this is really the new bubble. Actually, it’s replacing the housing bubble. And, you know, any time anything bad happens in the world, that’s the indication for speculators to drive the price up. It happened yesterday. Bush announced that he would be opening up to offshore oil drilling, but at the same time, there was an oil strike in Brazil, so the price of oil went up. So everything drives the price of oil up. I think it’s really a classic bubble. Certainly, there are some supply issues, but I actually don’t think that that is the main reason why the price of oil is going up.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re from Canada. Talk about Canada being the major supplier of oil to the United States. I think most people in this country would not understand this. And I also want to talk about ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. Well, it’s really striking, because in all of these discussions—and we heard this just now from President Bush—it was, we need to drill offshore to get away from our dependence on foreign oil, and there is still an overwhelming perception that most of the oil in the United States is coming from countries like Saudi Arabia. There has been, since the invasion of Iraq—and this is the period where the price of oil has skyrocketed—this has already changed.


The number one supplier of oil to the United States is not Saudi Arabia, it’s not Mexico—it’s Canada. And it has all of the elements that these new initiatives that are being proposed—offshore, ANWR, shale—possess. It’s close. It is an absolutely secure source of oil for the United States, and the reason for that is because locked into the North American Free Trade Agreement, locked into NAFTA, is a clause that we Canadians are really not very pleased with, which actually makes it illegal, impossible, under NAFTA, for Canada to turn off the tap, even if we face an oil crisis and are not able to supply oil for our citizens. We have to keep supplying the United States. So it’s a legally binding agreement that this tap will stay open. So Canada is now the number one supplier. And the other that it holds in common is that it’s ecologically devastating, what’s going on in Canada, because the majority of this new oil coming to the United States is coming from the Alberta tar sands, which are often called the “oil sands.” We call them the “tar sands,” because it’s a more accurate description. And this is another oil industry talking point, to get you to stop calling it the “tar sands” and start calling it the “oil sands.” But essentially, the oil in Alberta is very linked to the high price of oil, which is to say that when oil was at $30 a barrel, the tar sands, this huge oil deposit, was not counted as part of the global oil reserves.

And the reason for that is that it was so expensive to process this very, very thick tar-like substance into liquid oil. It costs between $25 and $30 a barrel, so it just didn’t make sense to count it as part of the global oil reserves, because who was going to make the investment required if they were obviously not going to get a return on their investment? So once the Iraq war started and the price of oil started skyrocketing, oil was discovered in Canada. Everyone knew it was there, but it became part of the global oil reserves. More than that, it is now counted as the largest oil deposit in the world. These are the tar sands. And, you know, I would argue that this oil should be left in the ground. Environmentalists are calling for a moratorium on the tar sands, because it takes three times the amount of fossil fuels, of burning fossil fuels, to process one barrel of oil from the tar sands as it does to process the kind of oil that they have in Iraq, for instance, which is already in liquid form.

AMY GOODMAN: So you dramatically increase emissions.

NAOMI KLEIN: It’s why Canada has become a climate renegade, along with the United States, because our emissions are increasing because of the tar sands, because it is so carbon-intensive and water-intensive—which is another issue—to do this very, very dirty processing of this tar-like substance into liquid form. So the argument is that it should actually be left alone. But the other argument that we see is that even with this huge boom going on in Canada—and this is the reason why our economy is actually doing better than the US economy, because of the tar sands—is that it in no way has affected the price of oil. So, here you have a paradigm to look at of what is being proposed right now with ANWR, what’s being proposed with offshore, what’s being proposed with shale. We can see it right now in Canada. And as this huge boom is taking place, the price of oil has gone up month after month after month, and it has had absolutely no effect on the price at the pump.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Naomi Klein. Naomi, you’ve been writing a lot on a number of issues. One of them is about what you call Obama’s Boys.

NAOMI KLEIN: Obama’s Chicago Boys, yeah. I just want to add one more point, and I just want to take this opportunity, because I feel like people are being so bombarded with these oil industry talking points, and it really is changing public opinion. I mean, people need to know this. There’s—polls are being commissioned that are finding that 67 percent of Americans support offshore oil drilling, because they think it’s going to lower the price at the pump. What’s actually going on is the oil companies may not even bother drilling. What they’re doing is they’re stockpiling leases. And what that means is that the oil companies will have a much greater control over the oil supply. When the oil companies have a much larger control over the oil supply, they can turn it on and off. They can control price. They can fix the price. So, in fact, what this is doing is the opposite of what they’re saying. It’s actually giving the oil industry much more power to drive the price of oil up by controlling supply, by just giving them all of these leases. And we keep hearing, well, they have all these leases already, and they’re not using them, and they want more. Why? Why do they want all these leases? Because that is what gives them control over supply. That’s what allows them to fix prices.

AMY GOODMAN: In fact, this has united you with people across the political spectrum. You’ve been invited on a number of right-wing radio talk shows, because everyone is deeply concerned about the price of oil. They just have different solutions for what should happen.

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. But, you know, there was this little window, Amy, where even Bill O’Reilly was talking about the obscene profits of the oil industry—it was like three days—where people were—where the logic of the situation was just so glaring, where, you know, you have Shell reporting $7 billion in profits in one quarter. People are very concerned about climate change. And it just makes sense to take some of those profits in the form of a windfall profit tax or some other measure and—because these are the companies that have created this crisis for us—and using this moment. And let’s remember that this is what countries around the world are doing. They’re using this moment of high oil prices to invest in alternative energy and alternative infrastructure. The way to make solar and wind work, you know, is not just to do venture capitalism for startup solar and wind companies. These companies need major investment, need states to make major investments in infrastructure that can carry these new energy sources, new grids. This can only be done by the public sector. And this is actually a moment of opportunity, when there is such high prices, when people are so angry at the oil companies, to actually take some of this money and invest it in the public sphere, so that alternative energy becomes viable. And there was a moment where there seemed to be some agreement about that, even on the right. And then, it just shifted because of this very aggressive barrage coming from the oil and gas industry, which is selling this false hope of “drill now, pay less.”

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, Obama’s Chicago Boys, who are they?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, one of them is Obama. Obama spent ten years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, which is a very conservative law school. You know, I wrote a column recently talking about how conservative Obama’s economic roots are, with his ties to the University of Chicago. His first response to the mortgage crisis, let’s remember, was he was worried about the government taking action to keep people from being evicted from their homes, because that would create moral hazard. And he was not talking about the big companies, the big mortgage lenders; he was talking about individual low-income people being thrown out of their homes. He was worried about moral hazard. That’s a very University of Chicago take on the situation. And yeah, one of his—his chief economic adviser was Austin Goolsbee, this University of Chicago economist.

And, you know, now his chief economic adviser is Jason Furman, who is not a University of Chicago-affiliated economist, but is certainly on the right of the economic—Democratic economic spectrum, has defended Wal-Mart, has attacked critics of Wal-Mart, saying that they’re doing more harm than good, that actually Wal-Mart is a progressive institution that is helping low-income people with their low prices, and that living wage campaigns, for instance, are actually hurting low-income people. So these are pretty conservative ideas, and I think it is important for people to understand that this is who Obama has chosen to take his advice from.

AMY GOODMAN: This is very interesting, because, of course, he really slammed Hillary Clinton when it came to her tenure on the board of Wal-Mart.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And he said he wouldn’t shop there.

NAOMI KLEIN: It’s true. He said both of those things, and it is a political campaign, and we’re seeing a lot of double talk on these issues. Austin Goolsbee, for instance, got himself into some trouble after he met with Canadian consulate officials. And they left that meeting with the distinct impression that he had told them that they shouldn’t listen to what Obama’s saying about NAFTA and renegotiating NAFTA for labor and environmental standards, because it’s just an election campaign. So it would seem that perhaps we should take Obama’s Wal-Mart comments in the same spirit. But, you know, my message on—

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, you have him speaking—Obama himself being quoted in Fortune magazine, after he had said that that whole—well, what became a sort of little scandal there, with Goolsbee going to the Canadian consulate—

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —at the time when he was going through the states where labor was stronger, where he was really slamming NAFTA, saying this wasn’t true, that he was telling them, “Don’t worry. It’s just overheated rhetoric.” And then he said that precise thing, Senator Obama himself, in Fortune.

NAOMI KLEIN: That it was overheated rhetoric. Yeah, exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: That he supports NAFTA and free trade.

NAOMI KLEIN: And it’s—you know, it’s shades of Bill Clinton’s first campaign, where he also campaigned very actively about labor and environmental standards and NAFTA. NAFTA had already been signed, but it hadn’t come into law. And then there was a turnaround, and there was a turnaround in the transition period, after the election but before he took office, where there was a sort of fateful meeting. And I think the fear is that some of the same people, like Rubin, responsible for, you know, Rubinomics, which turned into Clintonomics, which was, you know, the Democratic full-scale embrace of the ideology of privatization and so-called free trade, that this same sort of group of people are following—are now surrounding Obama. And Jason Furman is a Rubin protégé and worked with him at the Hamilton Project, which is a sort of sub-think tank of the Brookings Institution, which emerged a few years ago to prevent the Democratic Party from embracing what they saw as populist economic policies, the centerpiece of which would have been a reexamine of the ideology of free trade, which is being discredited around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: So, you have Obama on NAFTA, people perceiving that he’s changing his position. And then you have the major issue of FISA, where even on his own website—and many say—

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, just to be clear on economics, I mean, I think what we actually saw with Obama is that he started pretty much at a conservative point on economic policy, and Clinton—and the campaign with Clinton, because she was moving so far to a populist position, he then moved. And as soon as she dropped out of the race, he moved back. So I think there are some real points of disagreement, and I think that there are some places to point to much more progressive outlook in Obama’s roots, particularly on foreign policy, but I don’t think economic policy is one of them.

AMY GOODMAN: He had called the free trade agreement, in the debates with Hillary Clinton and with John Edwards, “a mistake.” He called it “an enormous problem,” but now, with Fortune, said, “Sometimes during campaigns rhetoric gets overheated and amplified. My core position has never changed. I’ve always been a proponent of free trade,” which you say actually is true.

NAOMI KLEIN: And he appointed Jason Furman the day after Hillary dropped out of the race. Yeah. So, it was—as I said, I really think he’s moving back to actually where he started, with his first reaction, as I said, to the subprime mortgage crisis being, well, we can’t keep low-income people from being evicted, because we have the moral hazard of encouraging them to make bad loans, essentially blaming them for having been—having accepted these mortgages in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: So now you have FISA, and you’re suing on this issue. But on December 17th, a press release from Obama’s Senate office read: “Senator Obama unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies and has cosponsored Senator Dodd’s efforts to remove that provision from the FISA bill. Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same.” Ultimately, of course, he supported the bill, and it just passed, and the telecommunications companies got the retroactive immunity that they had sought.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, and I think we should see this as part of these parting gifts that the Bush administration is handing out to their cronies in the oil and gas industry and also in the telecommunications industry. And we really see the priorities of this administration. It’s a tremendous disappointment. The lawsuit that you mentioned is, I think, a really forward-looking initiative from the ACLU, where they’ve been anticipating, hoping that this wouldn’t happen, that there would be a legal defeat of this—of the bill in Congress and the Senate.

But, of course, they were realistic and knew that there was a good chance of a cave, and so the ACLU has been preparing a lawsuit, and I think it’s really the ACLU at its best, which is defending the law when the lawmakers decide not to. And they’ve brought together coalition of human rights groups, different NGOs, who do a lot of international work, as well as journalists, who—and we’re all saying—I’m one of the complainants on behalf of The Nation, me and—Chris Hedges and I and The Nation are named in this lawsuit, and we are all saying that the fact that our communications with international sources, with international colleagues, are now open to absolute, free surveillance, with no restrictions whatsoever, severely limits our ability to do our job. And I think the most disappointing thing about the way in which Obama and other Democrats have defended their reversal on this law is that there’s a tremendous amount of dishonesty about what is in the law. I mean, they’re having to say that they’ve gotten all of these improvements, that it’s much better, that there’s much less to worry about, in order to justify their, I think, deeply immoral position.

And so, there’s a lot of misunderstanding now about just how bad this law is. And it’s just as bad as we feared, not just on the immunity for the telecoms, which is a disaster, but, more importantly, the fact that there, you know, is no burden of proof, except to say that the party being put under surveillance is outside of the United States. So if I’m communicating—I’m in the United States and I’m communicating with somebody in Argentina, they don’t—the government does not have to prove that they have reason to believe that that person in Argentina is affiliated with a terrorist group, is a suspected terrorist, has information about terrorism. All they have to prove is that they are not an American.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Naomi Klein. We’re going to come back to this conversation. If you’d like a copy of the broadcast, a DVD, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Naomi Klein’s book has just been launched in paperback, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The Olympics are coming back. Naomi Klein is just back from China. We’re going to talk about what she found there. She’s talking about the rise of a police state with the help of US military contractors. Stay with us. [break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Naomi Klein. Her book is just out in paperback. It’s called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. We were talking about Obama changing, or not, his positions—also have to talk about Iraq, both Obama and McCain. And then we’re going to go to the food crisis, as well as China, what’s happening there.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, on Iraq, Obama does not have a plan to end the occupation; he has a plan to downsize the occupation slowly. He’s been clear that he wants to keep the Green Zone intact. You’ve covered this extensively on the show. And that means, as Jeremy Scahill has made clear, that means that they have to keep Blackwater in Iraq. So, I think that the point of this is not just to bash Obama. I mean, what I’ve been trying to—the point I’ve been trying to make is that Obama needs more than super fans. He needs pressure from his base, because he has all the energy of the antiwar movement and the antiwar infrastructure. I mean, you’ve got groups like MoveOn that really built their infrastructure out of the huge anger and desire for change around Iraq, and now the infrastructure of the antiwar movement largely is going to support Obama, but there aren’t clear demands being made of him to deserve that support.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s now calling for 10,000 more troops to go to Afghanistan.

NAOMI KLEIN: And, you know, the corporations who are funding Obama’s campaign, one of—somebody who I referred to as one of Obama’s Chicago Boys, I was talking about Ken Griffin, who is a Chicago hedge fund manager who used to be a Bush campaign pioneer, was a Republican, and has switched to Obama, basically because he’s run the numbers and he believes Obama is going to win. But I think what we have to understand is, with all the Wall Street money coming to Obama, with the weapons money coming to Obama, with the hedge fund money coming to Obama, these players have leverage. They can go to the Republicans. And so, what’s the leverage of the antiwar movement? You know, what’s the leverage of the grassroots supporters of Obama who have given him their trust, because they want change so badly on the environment, in Iraq, on domestic economic policy?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, isn’t the alternative, McCain says a hundred years in Iraq?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, that’s the alternative. And I think, you know, this is part of the problem of this two-party system. And, you know, I saw Ralph Nader recently, and he said, “You know, progressives and liberals don’t know how to play poker. There has to be somewhere to go.” And, you know, I think that’s part of it. But I don’t think it’s just about third parties. It’s also about having independent movements that provide conditional support to candidates and not this sort of blank check, rock star, we’ll support you no matter what.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, of course, people do have some place else to go, which is—we’ve seen it over and over—the American people have made it very clear: stay home.

NAOMI KLEIN: Stay home. That’s true, and that’s a credible threat. But I think Obama needs to hear a much more conditional, much more critical, much more demanding kind of support from his base, because his base is far to the left of the types of policies that we’re seeing and that we’re talking about here, whether it’s the mortgage crisis, whether it’s NAFTA, or whether it’s Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Food crisis now around the world.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. Well, this is—you know, this is another example of how the shock doctrine, the strategy that I document in the book of using a crisis, using a situation of desperation, often a situation where developing countries need foreign aid, because they’re facing a disaster, to leverage very, very unpopular pro-corporate policies. Now, you know in the book the examples that I give are, for instance, how the tsunami in Asia was used and the fact that countries like Sri Lanka needed aid, and in that moment you had international lenders coming in and saying, “Oh, well, we’ll give you aid, but we want you to privatize your water, your electricity system, hand the coastline over to resorts.”

Well, we’re seeing a version of this. We’re seeing a version of disaster capitalism in the context of the food crisis, where you have that same desperation, you have a need for aid, for debt forgiveness, for new policies, and now we’re hearing another sort of echo chamber response from the World Bank, from the US State Department, from the agribusiness companies, and that refrain is, the cause of the food crisis is that too many of these countries don’t allow genetically modified foods, and genetically modified crops can feed the world and solve the food crisis, so trying to use this crisis to break through a legislative barrier that exists for good reason, just as domestically in the United States the oil crisis is being used by the Bush administration to try to break through the bans on offshore oil, on ANWR. So now we have this other talking point that we’re hearing again and again, which is genetically modified foods can feed the world. There is no scientific evidence for this. Quite the opposite. Genetically modified seeds do not increase yields for crops. They increase profits for agribusiness companies. They simplify farming. But they don’t increase yields, and in many cases they decrease yields.

AMY GOODMAN: Because?

NAOMI KLEIN: Because this is actually not what they’re genetically modified to do. I mean, if you think about Roundup Ready, I mean, what it’s genetically modified to do is be compatible—

AMY GOODMAN: You mean the soy and the fertilizer?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, to be compatible with Monsanto’s [herbicide]. It’s not about increasing crop yields. And they haven’t actually figured out the technology for how to increase crop yields. One of the things that I find really worrying is that companies—and similar to the oil crisis, Amy, we’re seeing record profits from Monsanto, from Cargill, from all the big players, in the context of the food crisis. We’re also seeing something else, which is that these companies are buying up hundreds of patents on seeds that they claim are “climate-ready.” “Climate-ready” is—we’ve heard about Roundup Ready, which means they’re ready for roundup [herbicide]; now, the new phrase is “climate ready,” which means they’re ready for climate change, which means that these seeds apparently can grow in the context of drought, can grow in the context of highly salinated earth because there’s been a flood.

And Monsanto and Syngenta, other of these big biotech companies, have bought up hundreds of these patents. And this is worrying on many levels. I think it’s worrying, because, once again, we’re seeing a disincentive to actually get us out of a future of climate chaos, because we see ways to profit. But then, when we look at how aggressively we know a company like Monsanto protects its patents, when it comes to their Roundup Ready seeds, the suing of small farmers, the surveillance of farmers—there was an incredible story recently in Vanity Fair about the heavy-handed legal tactics and use of private security, just harassing farmers who dare to save their seeds from one growing season to the next, breaking Monsanto’s patent.

So if they really are developing seeds that are climate ready and they’re also patenting them and buying them up, then really what we’re seeing is not a future of feeding the world, but once again a future of a kind of climate apartheid, where it becomes less accessible and more expensive to have the crops that will grow in this future. And so, I think people need to identify this right away, and the discussion needs to be about the right to food, about food being a human right. This is far too important to allow players like Monsanto to privatize the future of the crops that can grow within a context of climate change.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, we only have five minutes, and I really want to get to the piece you did in Rolling Stone—you just returned from China—“China’s All-Seeing Eye.” “With the help of US defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.” Tell us what you found?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, yeah, I was in China a couple months ago, and the piece came out recently, and you can read it still on the Rolling Stone website. And I concentrated on the Pearl River Delta, on the city of Shenzhen. And, you know, this is the part of China that is really the—I guess the sweatshop to the world, their workshop to the world. This is where probably half of everything most us own is made. Hundreds of thousands of factories, a lot of technology, a lot of garments. It is now a new kind—it’s always been a laboratory for this manufacturing model, for the globalization manufacturing model, and it was born as a laboratory.

The city of Shenzhen didn’t exist in 1980. It was a collection of fishing villages. And now it’s a city of more than 12 million people. And there’s a new experiment happening in Shenzhen, where a high-tech police state is being built. And there are hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras, of surveillance cameras, in the city. There are plans to have two million cameras in the city of Shenzhen and to network them, which is the key, so that they’re all part of the same network. They can be monitored from a centralized police location. And it isn’t just the cameras on the streets. It’s cameras in internet cafes, cameras in private restaurants, so a total convergence between the private and the public when it comes to putting the people under surveillance. And the money for building this high-tech police state—and it includes also biometric IDs, facial recognition software.

It’s sort of the future that has already been imagined in multiple sort of science fiction films, but that we actually don’t yet have in North America yet, because there are still some civil liberties and privacy protections that prevent all of the technologies from being networked together to create this all-seeing eye. In China, you have the perfect situation, because you have a government that actually makes no claims for the rights to privacy of its citizens. And so, corporations like General Electric, Honeywell, have been flocking to China, and they’ve been delighted that, first of all, they’ve been able to get contracts—

AMY GOODMAN: And General Electric, which owns NBC.

NAOMI KLEIN: Which owns NBC. A lot of the contracts have been issued in the name of Olympic security. Olympic security is—you know, we know the Olympics are always massive corporate welfare endeavors, with new stadiums, new infrastructure. Well, now, in the post-9/11 context, Olympics are also huge business for the security industry. The Olympics provides the excuse for massive new investments in cameras on public transit, checkpoints and subways, biometric identification cards. And we’re seeing this in Vancouver, which has the 2010 Olympic Games.

But in China, it’s completely out of control. Just to put this in context, the estimate is that China is spending $13 billion in the name of security for the Olympics. And let’s remember, all of these toys that are being sold to the Chinese government by companies like General Electric are staying after the Olympics and to be used against the domestic population. So it gets installed in the name of protecting the athletes, protecting the foreign dignitaries, but it stays and is able to be used against the local population, and I think in violation of the sanctions policies that were passed after the Tiananmen Square massacre, which actually made it illegal for American companies to sell police equipment to the Chinese government, precisely because it can be used to repress the population.

But now, because it’s being packaged as antiterrorism security in the context of an international event, they’ve sort of found a backdoor way into it. But, yeah, once again, to put it in context, Amy—and I know we’re running out of time—$13 billion for Olympic security in Beijing this summer. The first Olympics after 9/11 were in Athens, and they spent $1.5 billion. So, since Athens, the increase in security spending has gone from $1.5 billion to $13 billion.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about Police State 2.0 not looking good from the outside, but on the inside it appears to have passed the first major test.

NAOMI KLEIN: Right. And that was a reference to the ways in which these technologies were used in Tibet during the crackdown against protesters in riots. What we saw is that the Chinese government really let the riots get out of hand in Lhasa. And what they did is they just concentrated on filming. So there was a lot of violence, and the CCTV cameras that had been installed in Lhasa—

AMY GOODMAN: Closed-circuit TV.

NAOMI KLEIN: The closed-circuit TV cameras. Also the police and military did a lot of their own filming. And then they cut together this sort of “Tibetans Gone Wild” videos, and that’s what passed for journalism, because, of course, they kept the foreign journalists out of Lhasa, and so it was just the surveillance footage that they showed to the world to try to turn public opinion against the Tibetans. But more than that, we also saw the ways in which the internet companies cooperated with the Chinese government. So they used the surveillance cameras to extract photographs and made a most-wanted list of twenty-one Tibetans who they wanted to arrest, and then those wanted lists were posted on all of the portals in China, including briefly Yahoo’s portal and MSN’s portal.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does that mean? They posted them, and then…?

NAOMI KLEIN: And then they took them down, because, of course, there’s been a lot of controversy about American companies, like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft, cooperating with the Chinese government to go after dissidents and so on. So they’ve been called before Congress on this. It’s been a public relations disaster for Yahoo. And this was another example of that kind of cooperation.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, as we move into the Olympics, we’re going to have you back, Naomi. Thank you so much for being here. Her book is called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, just out in paperback.

* Disaster Capitalism: State of Extortion
* Obama's Chicago Boys
* China's All-Seeing Eye

Naomi Klein - China 3

China's All-Seeing Eye

With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

NAOMI KLEIN
Posted May 29, 2008 3:24 PM Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn't exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples. That was before the Communist Party chose it — thanks to its location close to Hong Kong's port — to be China's first "special economic zone," one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a trial basis. The theory behind the experiment was that the "real" China would keep its socialist soul intact while profiting from the private-sector jobs and industrial development created in Shenzhen.

The result was a city of pure commerce, undiluted by history or rooted culture — the crack cocaine of capitalism. It was a force so addictive to investors that the Shenzhen experiment quickly expanded, swallowing not just the surrounding Pearl River Delta, which now houses roughly 100,000 factories, but much of the rest of the country as well. Today, Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops, sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair, possibly your car and almost certainly your printer.

Hundreds of luxury condominiums tower over the city; many are more than 40 stories high, topped with three-story penthouses. Newer neighborhoods like Keji Yuan are packed with ostentatiously modern corporate campuses and decadent shopping malls. Rem Koolhaas, Prada's favorite architect, is building a stock exchange in Shenzhen that looks like it floats — a design intended, he says, to "suggest and illustrate the process of the market."

A still-under-construction superlight subway will soon connect it all at high speed; every car has multiple TV screens broadcasting over a Wi-Fi network. At night, the entire city lights up like a pimped-out Hummer, with each five-star hotel and office tower competing over who can put on the best light show. Many of the big American players have set up shop in Shenzhen, but they look singularly unimpressive next to their Chinese competitors.

The research complex for China's telecom giant Huawei, for instance, is so large that it has its own highway exit, while its workers ride home on their own bus line. Pressed up against Shenzhen's disco shopping centers, Wal-Mart superstores — of which there are nine in the city — look like dreary corner stores. (China almost seems to be mocking us: "You call that a superstore?") McDonald's and KFC appear every few blocks, but they seem almost retro next to the Real Kung Fu fast-food chain, whose mascot is a stylized Bruce Lee.

American commentators like CNN's Jack Cafferty dismiss the Chinese as "the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years." But nobody told the people of Shenzhen, who are busily putting on a 24-hour-a-day show called "America" — a pirated version of the original, only with flashier design, higher profits and less complaining.

This has not happened by accident. China today, epitomized by Shenzhen's transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called "market Stalinism," it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism. Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment.

Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment.

Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.) The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as "Golden Shield." The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald's Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out.

With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world's attention at Tiananmen Square.

Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie.

It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen.

Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you. Zhang Yi points to an empty bracket on the dashboard of his black Honda. "It used to hold my GPS, but I leave it at home now," he says. "It's the crime — they are too easy to steal." He quickly adds, "Since the surveillance cameras came in, we have seen a very dramatic decrease in crime in Shenzhen."

After driving for an hour past hundreds of factory gates and industrial parks, we pull up to a salmon-color building that Zhang partly owns. This is the headquarters of FSAN: CCTV System. Zhang, a prototypical Shenzhen yuppie in a royal-blue button-down shirt and black-rimmed glasses, apologizes for the mess. Inside, every inch of space is lined with cardboard boxes filled with electronics parts and finished products. Zhang opened the factory two and a half years ago, and his investment has already paid off tenfold.

That kind of growth isn't unusual in the field he has chosen: Zhang's factory makes digital surveillance cameras, turning out 400,000 a year. Half of the cameras are shipped overseas, destined to peer from building ledges in London, Manhattan and Dubai as part of the global boom in "homeland security." The other half stays in China, many right here in Shenzhen and in neighboring Guangzhou, another megacity of 12 million people. China's market for surveillance cameras enjoyed revenues of $4.1 billion last year, a jump of 24 percent from 2006. Zhang escorts me to the assembly line, where rows of young workers, most of them women, are bent over semiconductors, circuit boards, tiny cables and bulbs.

At the end of each line is "quality control," which consists of plugging the camera into a monitor and making sure that it records. We enter a showroom where Zhang and his colleagues meet with clients. The walls are lined with dozens of camera models: domes of all sizes, specializing in day and night, wet and dry, camouflaged to look like lights, camouflaged to look like smoke detectors, explosion-proof, the size of a soccer ball, the size of a ring box.

The workers at FSAN don't just make surveillance cameras; they are constantly watched by them. While they work, the silent eyes of rotating lenses capture their every move. When they leave work and board buses, they are filmed again. When they walk to their dormitories, the streets are lined with what look like newly installed streetlamps, their white poles curving toward the sidewalk with black domes at the ends. Inside the domes are high-resolution cameras, the same kind the workers produce at FSAN. Some blocks have three or four, one every few yards.

One Shenzhen-based company, China Security & Surveillance Technology, has developed software to enable the cameras to alert police when an unusual number of people begin to gather at any given location. In 2006, the Chinese government mandated that all Internet cafes (as well as restaurants and other "entertainment" venues) install video cameras with direct feeds to their local police stations. Part of a wider surveillance project known as "Safe Cities," the effort now encompasses 660 municipalities in China. It is the most ambitious new government program in the Pearl River Delta, and supplying it is one of the fastest-growing new markets in Shenzhen.

But the cameras that Zhang manufactures are only part of the massive experiment in population control that is under way here. "The big picture," Zhang tells me in his office at the factory, "is integration." That means linking cameras with other forms of surveillance: the Internet, phones, facial-recognition software and GPS monitoring.

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data.

This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces. Shenzhen is the place where the shield has received its most extensive fortifications — the place where all the spy toys are being hooked together and tested to see what they can do.

"The central government eventually wants to have city-by-city surveillance, so they could just sit and monitor one city and its surveillance system as a whole," Zhang says. "It's all part of that bigger project. Once the tests are done and it's proven, they will be spreading from the big province to the cities, even to the rural farmland." In fact, the rollout of the high-tech shield is already well under way.

When the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was set alight in March, the world caught a glimpse of the rage that lies just under the surface in many parts of China. And though the Lhasa riots stood out for their ethnic focus and their intensity, protests across China are often shockingly militant. In July 2006, workers at a factory near Shenzhen expressed their displeasure over paltry pay by overturning cars, smashing computers and opening fire hydrants. In March of last year, when bus fares went up in the rural town of Zhushan, 20,000 people took to the streets and five police vehicles were torched.

Indeed, China has seen levels of political unrest in recent years unknown since 1989, the year student protests were crushed with tanks in Tiananmen Square. In 2005, by the government's own measure, there were at least 87,000 "mass incidents" — governmentspeak for large-scale protests or riots. This increased unrest — a process aided by access to cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model of command-and-control capitalism.

China's rapid economic growth has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text messaging to launch a mountain-people's-rights uprising with each new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other parts of the country, China's dizzying expansion could grind to a halt. At the same time, the success of China's ravenous development creates its own challenges. Every rural village that is successfully razed to make way for a new project creates more displaced people who join the ranks of the roughly 130 million migrants roaming the country looking for work.

By 2025, it is projected that this "floating" population will swell to more than 350 million. Many will end up in cities like Shenzhen, which is already home to 7 million migrant laborers. But while China's cities need these displaced laborers to work in factories and on construction sites, they are unwilling to offer them the same benefits as permanent residents: highly subsidized education and health care, as well as other public services. While migrants can live for decades in big cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, their residency remains fixed to the rural community where they were born, a fact encoded on their national ID cards.

As one young migrant in Guangzhou put it to me, "The local people want to make money from migrant workers, but they don't want to give them rights. But why are the local people so rich? Because of the migrant workers!" With its militant protests and mobile population, China confronts a fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system based on two dramatically unequal categories of people: the winners, who get the condos and cars, and the losers, who do the heavy labor and are denied those benefits? More urgently, how can it do this when information technology threatens to link the losers together into a movement so large it could easily overwhelm the country's elites?

The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests recently, the surveillance system was thrown into its first live test, with every supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age — cellphones, satellite television, the Internet — transformed into a method of repression and control. As soon as the protests gathered steam, China reinforced its Great Firewall, blocking its citizens from accessing dozens of foreign news outlets.

In some parts of Tibet, Internet access was shut down altogether. Many people trying to phone friends and family found that their calls were blocked, and cellphones in Lhasa were blitzed with text messages from the police: "Severely battle any creation or any spreading of rumors that would upset or frighten people or cause social disorder or illegal criminal behavior that could damage social stability." During the first week of protests, foreign journalists who tried to get into Tibet were systematically turned back. But that didn't mean that there were no cameras inside the besieged areas.

Since early last year, activists in Lhasa have been reporting on the proliferation of black-domed cameras that look like streetlights — just like the ones I saw coming off the assembly line in Shenzhen. Tibetan monks complain that cameras — activated by motion sensors — have invaded their monasteries and prayer rooms. During the Lhasa riots, police on the scene augmented the footage from the CCTVs with their own video cameras, choosing to film — rather than stop — the violence, which left 19 dead.

The police then quickly cut together the surveillance shots that made the Tibetans look most vicious — beating Chinese bystanders, torching shops, ripping metal sheeting off banks — and created a kind of copumentary: Tibetans Gone Wild. These weren't the celestial beings in flowing robes the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere had told us about. They were angry young men, wielding sticks and long knives. They looked ugly, brutal, tribal. On Chinese state TV, this footage played around the clock.

The police also used the surveillance footage to extract mug shots of the demonstrators and rioters. Photos of the 21 "most wanted" Tibetans, many taken from that distinctive "streetlamp" view of the domed cameras, were immediately circulated to all of China's major news portals, which obediently posted them to help out with the manhunt. The Internet became the most powerful police tool. Within days, several of the men on the posters were in custody, along with hundreds of others. The flare-up in Tibet, weeks before the Olympic torch began its global journey, has been described repeatedly in the international press as a "nightmare" for Beijing.

Several foreign leaders have pledged to boycott the opening ceremonies of the games, the press has hosted an orgy of China-bashing, and the torch became a magnet for protesters, with anti-China banners dropped from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. But inside China, the Tibet debacle may actually have been a boon to the party, strengthening its grip on power. Despite its citizens having unprecedented access to information technology (there are as many Internet users in China as there are in the U.S.), the party demonstrated that it could still control what they hear and see.

And what they saw on their TVs and computer screens were violent Tibetans, out to kill their Chinese neighbors, while police showed admirable restraint. Tibetan solidarity groups say 140 people were killed in the crackdown that followed the protests, but without pictures taken by journalists, it is as if those subsequent deaths didn't happen. Chinese viewers also saw a world unsympathetic to the Chinese victims of Tibetan violence, so hostile to their country that it used a national tragedy to try to rob them of their hard-won Olympic glory.

These nationalist sentiments freed up Beijing to go on a full-fledged witch hunt. In the name of fighting a war on terror, security forces rounded up thousands of Tibetan activists and supporters. The end result is that when the games begin, much of the Tibetan movement will be safely behind bars — along with scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human-rights defenders who have also been trapped in the government's high-tech web.

Police State 2.0 might not look good from the outside, but on the inside, it appears to have passed its first major test. In Guangzhou, an hour and a half by train from Shenzhen, Yao Ruoguang is preparing for a major test of his own. "It's called the 10-million-faces test," he tells me. Yao is managing director of Pixel Solutions, a Chinese company that specializes in producing the new high-tech national ID cards, as well as selling facial-recognition software to businesses and government agencies. The test, the first phase of which is only weeks away, is being staged by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing.

The idea is to measure the effectiveness of face-recognition software in identifying police suspects. Participants will be given a series of photos, taken in a variety of situations. Their task will be to match the images to other photos of the same people in the government's massive database. Several biometrics companies, including Yao's, have been invited to compete. "We have to be able to match a face in a 10 million database in one second," Yao tells me. "We are preparing for that now."
The companies that score well will be first in line for lucrative government contracts to integrate face-recognition software into Golden Shield, using it to check for ID fraud and to discover the identities of suspects caught on surveillance cameras. Yao says the technology is almost there: "It will happen next year."

When I meet Yao at his corporate headquarters, he is feeling confident about how his company will perform in the test. His secret weapon is that he will be using facial-recognition software purchased from L-1 Identity Solutions, a major U.S. defense contractor that produces passports and biometric security systems for the U.S. government. To show how well it works, Yao demonstrates on himself. Using a camera attached to his laptop, he snaps a picture of his own face, round and boyish for its 54 years. Then he uploads it onto the company's proprietary Website, built with L-1 software. With the cursor, he marks his own eyes with two green plus signs, helping the system to measure the distance between his features, a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery. The first step is to "capture the image," Yao explains.

Next is "finding the face." He presses APPLY, telling the program to match the new face with photos of the same person in the company's database of 600,000 faces. Instantly, multiple photos of Yao appear, including one taken 19 years earlier — proof that the technology can "find a face" even when the face has changed significantly with time. " It took 1.1 milliseconds!" Yao exclaims. "Yeah, that's me!"

In nearby cubicles, teams of Yao's programmers and engineers take each other's pictures, mark their eyes with green plus signs and test the speed of their search engines. "Everyone is preparing for the test," Yao explains. "If we pass, if we come out number one, we are guaranteed a market in China." Every couple of minutes Yao's phone beeps. Sometimes it's a work message, but most of the time it's a text from his credit-card company, informing him that his daughter, who lives in Australia, has just made another charge. "Every time the text message comes, I know my daughter is spending money!" He shrugs: "She likes designers."

Like many other security executives I interviewed in China, Yao denies that a primary use of the technology he is selling is to hunt down political activists. "Ninety-five percent," he insists, "is just for regular safety." He has, he admits, been visited by government spies, whom he describes as "the internal-security people." They came with grainy pictures, shot from far away or through keyhole cameras, of "some protesters, some dissidents." They wanted to know if Yao's facial-recognition software could help identify the people in the photos.

Yao was sorry to disappoint them. "Honestly, the technology so far still can't meet their needs," he says. "The photos that they show us were just too blurry." That is rapidly changing, of course, thanks to the spread of high-resolution CCTVs. Yet Yao insists that the government's goal is not repression: "If you're a [political] organizer, they want to know your motive," he says. "So they take the picture, give the photo, so at least they can find out who that person is."

Until recently, Yao's photography empire was focused on consumers — taking class photos at schools, launching a Chinese knockoff of Flickr (the original is often blocked by the Great Firewall), turning photos of chubby two-year-olds into fridge magnets and lampshades. He still maintains those businesses, which means that half of the offices at Pixel Solutions look like they have just hosted a kid's birthday party. The other half looks like an ominous customs office, the walls lined with posters of terrorists in the cross hairs: FACE MATCH, FACE PASS, FACE WATCH.

When Beijing started sinking more and more of the national budget into surveillance technologies, Yao saw an opportunity that would make all his previous ventures look small. Between more powerful computers, higher-resolution cameras and a global obsession with crime and terrorism, he figured that face recognition "should be the next dot-com." Not a computer scientist himself — he studied English literature in school — Yao began researching corporate leaders in the field.

He learned that face recognition is highly controversial, with a track record of making wrong IDs. A few companies, however, were scoring much higher in controlled tests in the U.S. One of them was a company soon to be renamed L-1 Identity Solutions. Based in Connecticut, L-1 was created two years ago out of the mergers and buyouts of half a dozen major players in the biometrics field, all of which specialized in the science of identifying people through distinct physical traits: fingerprints, irises, face geometry. The mergers made L-1 a one-stop shop for biometrics. Thanks to board members like former CIA director George Tenet, the company rapidly became a homeland-security heavy hitter. L-1 projects its annual revenues will hit $1 billion by 2011, much of it from U.S. government contracts. In 2006, Yao tells me, "I made the first phone call and sent the first e-mail." For a flat fee of $20,000, he gained access to the company's proprietary software, allowing him to "build a lot of development software based on L-1's technology." Since then, L-1's partnership with Yao has gone far beyond that token investment. Yao says it isn't really his own company that is competing in the upcoming 10-million-faces test being staged by the Chinese government: "We'll be involved on behalf of L-1 in China."

Yao adds that he communicates regularly with L1 and has visited the company's research headquarters in New Jersey. ("Out the window you can see the Statue of Liberty. It's such a historic place.") L1 is watching his test preparations with great interest, Yao says. "It seemed that they were more excited than us when we tell them the results." L-1's enthusiasm is hardly surprising: If Yao impresses the Ministry of Public Security with the company's ability to identify criminals, L-1 will have cracked the largest potential market for biometrics in the world.

But here's the catch: As proud as Yao is to be L-1's Chinese licensee, L-1 appears to be distinctly less proud of its association with Yao. On its Website and in its reports to investors, L-1 boasts of contracts and negotiations with governments from Panama and Saudi Arabia to Mexico and Turkey. China, however, is conspicuously absent. And though CEO Bob LaPenta makes reference to "some large international opportunities," not once does he mention Pixel Solutions in Guangzhou. After leaving a message with the company inquiring about L-1's involvement in China's homeland-security market, I get a call back from Doni Fordyce, vice president of corporate communications.

She has consulted Joseph Atick, the company's head of research. "We have nothing in China," she tells me. "Nothing, absolutely nothing. We are uninvolved. We really don't have any relationships at all." I tell Fordyce about Yao, the 10-million test, the money he paid for the software license. She'll call me right back. When she does, 20 minutes later, it is with this news: "Absolutely, we've sold testing SDKs [software development kits] to Pixel Solutions and to others [in China] that may be entering a test." Yao's use of the technology, she said, is "within his license" purchased from L-1.

The company's reticence to publicize its activities in China could have something to do with the fact that the relationship between Yao and L-1 may well be illegal under U.S. law. After the Chinese government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989, Congress passed legislation barring U.S. companies from selling any products in China that have to do with "crime control or detection instruments or equipment."

That means not only guns but everything from police batons and handcuffs to ink and powder for taking fingerprints, and software for storing them. Interestingly, one of the "detection instruments" that prompted the legislation was the surveillance camera. Beijing had installed several clunky cameras around Tiananmen Square, originally meant to monitor traffic flows. Those lenses were ultimately used to identify and arrest key pro-democracy dissidents. "The intent of that act," a congressional staff member with considerable China experience tells me, "was to keep U.S. companies out of the business of helping the Chinese police conduct their business, which might ultimately end up as it did in 1989 in the suppression of human rights and democracy in China." Pixel's application of L-1 facial-recognition software seems to fly in the face of the ban's intent.

By his own admission, Yao is already getting visits from Chinese state spies anxious to use facial recognition to identify dissidents. And as part of the 10-million-faces test, Yao has been working intimately with Chinese national-security forces, syncing L-1's software to their vast database, a process that took a week of intensive work in Beijing. During that time, Yao says, he was on the phone "every day" with L-1, getting its help adapting the technology. "Because we are representing them," he says. "We took the test on their behalf."

In other words, this controversial U.S. "crime control" technology has already found its way into the hands of the Chinese police. Moreover, Yao's goal, stated to me several times, is to use the software to land lucrative contracts with police agencies to integrate facial recognition into the newly built system of omnipresent surveillance cameras and high-tech national ID cards. As part of any contract he gets, Yao says, he will "pay L-1 a certain percentage of our sales." When I put the L-1 scenario to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security — the division charged with enforcing the post-Tiananmen export controls — a representative says that software kits are subject to the sanctions if "they are exported from the U.S. or are the foreign direct product of a U.S.-origin item." Based on both criteria, the software kit sold to Yao seems to fall within the ban. When I ask Doni Fordyce at L-1 about the embargo, she tells me, "I don't know anything about that." Asked whether she would like to find out about it and call me back, she replies, "I really don't want to comment, so there is no comment." Then she hangs up.

You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it "captures" more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security's massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with "mobile iris and multimodal devices" so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department's "largest facial-recognition database system"; and produces driver's licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal.

Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in "extremely general" terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company's CEO would only say, "Stay tuned." It is L-1's deep integration with multiple U.S. government agencies that makes its dealings in China so interesting: It isn't just L-1 that is potentially helping the Chinese police to nab political dissidents, it's U.S. taxpayers. The technology that Yao purchased for just a few thousand dollars is the result of Defense Department research grants and contracts going as far back as 1994, when a young academic named Joseph Atick (the research director Fordyce consulted on L-1's China dealings) taught a computer at Rockefeller University to recognize his face.

Yao, for his part, knows all about the U.S. export controls on police equipment to China. He tells me that L-1's electronic fingerprinting tools are "banned from entering China" due to U.S. concerns that they will be used to "catch the political criminals, you know, the dissidents, more easily." He thinks he and L-1 have found a legal loophole, however. While fingerprinting technology appears on the Commerce Department's list of banned products, there is no explicit mention of "face prints" — likely because the idea was still in the realm of science fiction when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. As far as Yao is concerned, that omission means that L-1 can legally supply its facial-recognition software for use by the Chinese government.

Whatever the legality of L-1's participation in Chinese surveillance, it is clear that U.S. companies are determined to break into the homeland-security market in China, which represents their biggest growth potential since 9/11. According to the congressional staff member, American companies and their lobbyists are applying "enormous pressure to open the floodgates."

The crackdown in Tibet has set off a wave of righteous rallies and boycott calls. But it sidesteps the uncomfortable fact that much of China's powerful surveillance state is already being built with U.S. and European technology. In February 2006, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on "The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?" Called on the carpet were Google (for building a special Chinese search engine that blocked sensitive material), Cisco (for supplying hardware for China's Great Firewall), Microsoft (for taking down political blogs at the behest of Beijing) and Yahoo (for complying with requests to hand over e-mail-account information that led to the arrest and imprisonment of a high-profile Chinese journalist, as well as a dissident who had criticized corrupt officials in online discussion groups).

The issue came up again during the recent Tibet uproar when it was discovered that both MSN and Yahoo had briefly put up the mug shots of the "most wanted" Tibetan protesters on their Chinese news portals. In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China.

Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It's a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China. "Come help us spy!" the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world's leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.

As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working with Chinese police to "set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing's most populated districts." General Electric is providing Beijing police with a security system that controls "thousands of video cameras simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running." IBM, meanwhile, is installing its "Smart Surveillance System" in the capital, another system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a "2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010." By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has allocated for reconstructing Iraq. "We're at the start of a massive boom in Chinese security spending," according to Graham Summers, a market analyst who publishes an investor newsletter in Baltimore. "And just as we need to be aware of how to profit from the growth in China's commodity consumption, we need to be aware of companies that will profit from 'security consumption.' . . . There's big money to be made."

While U.S. companies are eager to break into China's rapidly expanding market, every Chinese security firm I come across in the Pearl River Delta is hatching some kind of plan to break into the U.S. market. No one, however, is quite as eager as Aebell Electrical Technology, one of China's top 10 security companies. Aebell has a contract to help secure the Olympic swimming stadium in Beijing and has installed more than 10,000 cameras in and around Guangzhou. Business has been growing by 100 percent a year. When I meet the company's fidgety general manager, Zheng Sun Man, the first thing he tells me is "We are going public at the end of this year. On the Nasdaq." It also becomes clear why he has chosen to speak with a foreign reporter: "Help, help, help!" he begs me. "Help us promote our products!"

Zheng, an MBA from one of China's top schools, proudly shows me the business card of the New York investment bank that is handling Aebell's IPO, as well as a newly printed English-language brochure showing off the company's security cameras. Its pages are filled with American iconography, including businessmen exchanging wads of dollar bills and several photos of the New York skyline that prominently feature the World Trade Center. In the hall at company headquarters is a poster of two interlocking hearts: one depicting the American flag, the other the Aebell logo. I ask Zheng whether China's surveillance boom has anything to do with the rise in strikes and demonstrations in recent years. Zheng's deputy, a 23-year veteran of the Chinese military wearing a black Mao suit, responds as if I had launched a direct attack on the Communist Party itself. "If you walk out of this building, you will be under surveillance in five to six different ways," he says, staring at me hard.

He lets the implication of his words linger in the air like an unspoken threat. "If you are a law-abiding citizen, you shouldn't be afraid," he finally adds. "The criminals are the only ones who should be afraid."

One of the first people to sound the alarm on China's upgraded police state was a British researcher named Greg Walton. In 2000, Walton was commissioned by the respected human-rights organization Rights & Democracy to investigate the ways in which Chinese security forces were harnessing the tools of the Information Age to curtail free speech and monitor political activists.

The paper he produced was called "China's Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's Republic of China." It exposed how big-name tech companies like Nortel and Cisco were helping the Chinese government to construct "a gigantic online database with an all-encompassing surveillance network — incorporating speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records and Internet surveillance technologies."

When the paper was complete, Walton met with the institute's staff to strategize about how to release his explosive findings. "We thought this information was going to shock the world," he recalls. In the midst of their discussions, a colleague barged in and announced that a plane had hit the Twin Towers. The meeting continued, but they knew the context of their work had changed forever. Walton's paper did have an impact, but not the one he had hoped. The revelation that China was constructing a gigantic digital database capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases sparked neither shock nor outrage. Instead, Walton says, the paper was "mined for ideas" by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools.

For Walton, the most chilling moment came when the Defense Department tried to launch a system called Total Information Awareness to build what it called a "virtual, centralized grand database" that would create constantly updated electronic dossiers on every citizen, drawing on banking, credit-card, library and phone records, as well as footage from surveillance cameras. "It was clearly similar to what we were condemning China for," Walton says. Among those aggressively vying to be part of this new security boom was Joseph Atick, now an executive at L-1. The name he chose for his plan to integrate facial-recognition software into a vast security network was uncomfortably close to the surveillance system being constructed in China: "Operation Noble Shield."

Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams hatched by men like Atick have already been put into practice at home. New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now routine, and the images collected can be mined for "face prints," then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases. Although Total Information Awareness was scrapped after the plans became public, large pieces of the project continue, with private data-mining companies collecting unprecedented amounts of information about everything from Web browsing to car rentals, and selling it to the government.

Such efforts have provided China's rulers with something even more valuable than surveillance technology from Western democracies: the ability to claim that they are just like us. Liu Zhengrong, a senior official dealing with China's Internet policy, has defended Golden Shield and other repressive measures by invoking the Patriot Act and the FBI's massive e-mail-mining operations. "It is clear that any country's legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information," he said. "We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front." Lin Jiang Huai, the head of China Information Security Technology, credits America for giving him the idea to sell biometric IDs and other surveillance tools to the Chinese police. "Bush helped me get my vision," he has said.

Similarly, when challenged on the fact that dome cameras are appearing three to a block in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Chinese companies respond that their model is not the East German Stasi but modern-day London. Human-rights activists are quick to point out that while the tools are the same, the political contexts are radically different.

China has a government that uses its high-tech web to imprison and torture peaceful protesters, Tibetan monks and independent-minded journalists. Yet even here, the lines are getting awfully blurry. The U.S. currently has more people behind bars than China, despite a population less than a quarter of its size. And Sharon Hom, executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China, says that when she talks about China's horrific human-rights record at international gatherings, "There are two words that I hear in response again and again: Guantánamo Bay."

The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any government can change rapidly — which is why the Constitution places limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today.

The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.

In Shenzhen one night, I have dinner with a U.S. business consultant named Stephen Herrington. Before he started lecturing at Chinese business schools, teaching students concepts like brand management, Herrington was a military-intelligence officer, ascending to the rank of lieutenant colonel. What he is seeing in the Pearl River Delta, he tells me, is scaring the hell out of him — and not for what it means to China. "I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home," he says. "We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras.

Once you have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful tracking system. I'm worried about what this will mean if the U.S. government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies more than they are already. I'm worried about the threat this poses to American democracy." Herrington pauses. "George W. Bush," he adds, "would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could." China-bashing never fails to soothe the Western conscience — here is a large and powerful country that, when it comes to human rights and democracy, is so much worse than Bush's America.

But during my time in Shenzhen, China's youngest and most modern city, I often have the feeling that I am witnessing not some rogue police state but a global middle ground, the place where more and more countries are converging. China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).

What is most disconcerting about China's surveillance state is how familiar it all feels. When I check into the Sheraton in Shenzhen, for instance, it looks like any other high-end hotel chain — only the lobby is a little more modern and the cheerful clerk doesn't just check my passport but takes a scan of it. "Are you making a copy?" I ask. "No, no," he responds helpfully. "We're just sending a copy to the police."
Up in my room, the Website that pops up on my laptop looks like every other Net portal at a hotel — only it won't let me access human-rights and labor Websites that I know are working fine. The TV gets CNN International — only with strange edits and obviously censored blackouts. My cellphone picks up a strong signal for the China Mobile network. A few months earlier, in Davos, Switzerland, the CEO of China Mobile bragged to a crowd of communications executives that "we not only know who you are, we also know where you are." Asked about customer privacy, he replied that his company only gives "this kind of data to government authorities" — pretty much the same answer I got from the clerk at the front desk.

When I leave China, I feel a powerful relief: I have escaped. I am home safe. But the feeling starts to fade as soon as I get to the customs line at JFK, watching hundreds of visitors line up to have their pictures taken and fingers scanned. In the terminal, someone hands me a brochure for "Fly Clear." All I need to do is have my fingerprints and irises scanned, and I can get a Clear card with a biometric chip that will let me sail through security. Later, I look it up: The company providing the technology is L-1. [From Issue 1053 — May 29, 2008]

Bog Wood

Bog wood is found in bogs, an anaerobic medium which preserves it for thousands of years. It is oftened used by artists and artisans for creative expression now, though during the Famine, it became building materials, tools and fuel. More here: http://www.ipcc.ie/infobogwood.html

A Drop of Blood

Sitting with Horses

The Irish Stove

This is my cousin's stove. These stoves are the center of the Irish house even now. A seat next to the stove is an honoured place to give guests coming in.



This is the source of heat and my stove for cooking in the winter. I burn mostly turf and coal, though both are becoming very dear. This stove was installed in many council houses throughout the decades and is still widely used in the west. Most homes have other heating now also but I refuse to buy the oil, so use this and a propane heater as well as an electric one for the back bedroom.

My Road
Looks like this in the other direction too.

Herd at the Lake
Never know quite where they will be around the lake.

Pretty typical pub session out west.

One of the gates at the lake where the herd sometimes hangs.

The new colt down the road.