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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
written by Naomi Klein
Studio : Metropolitan Books
by Metropolitan Books
Release Date : 2007-09-18
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
Released : 2007-09-18
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780805079838
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 232 reviews)
List Price : $28.00
Our Price : $16.39
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Americancivilwar.com |
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Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine advances a truly unnerving argument: historically, while people were reeling from natural disasters, wars and economic upheavals, savvy politicians and industry leaders nefariously implemented policies that would never have passed during less muddled times. As Klein demonstrates, this reprehensible game of bait-and-switch isn't just some relic from the bad old days. It's alive and well in contemporary society, and coming soon to a disaster area near you. "At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq'' civil war, a new law is unveiled that will allow Shell and BP to claim the country's vast oil reserves… Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly outsources the running of the 'War on Terror' to Halliburton and Blackwater… After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts… New Orleans residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be re-opened." Klein not only kicks butt, she names names, notably economist Milton Friedman and his radical Chicago School of the 1950s and 60s which she notes "produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today." Stand up and take a bow, Donald Rumsfeld. There's little doubt Klein's book--which arrived to enormous attention and fanfare thanks to her previous missive, the best-selling No Logo, will stir the ire of the right and corporate America. It's also true that Klein's assertions are coherent, comprehensively researched and footnoted, and she makes a very credible case. Even if the world isn't going to hell in a hand-basket just yet, it's nice to know a sharp customer like Klein is bearing witness to the backroom machinations of government and industry in times of turmoil. --Kim Hughes |
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Product Description |
The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global free market has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq
In her groundbreaking reporting over the past few years, Naomi Klein introduced the term disaster capitalism. Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic shock treatment, losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.
The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman s free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement s peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.
At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.
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Socialist Propaganda and Misrepresentation |
From Johan Norberg, "The Klein Doctrine."
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine purports to be an exposé of the ruthless nature of free-market capitalism and its chief recent exponent, Milton Friedman. Klein argues that capitalism goes hand in hand with dictatorship and brutality and that dictators and other unscrupulous political figures take advantage of "shocks"--catastrophes real or manufactured--to consolidate their power and implement unpopular market reforms. Klein cites Chile under General Augusto Pinochet, Britain under Margaret Thatcher, China during the Tiananmen Square crisis, and the ongoing war in Iraq as examples of this process.
Klein's analysis is hopelessly flawed at virtually every level. Friedman's own words reveal him to be an advocate of peace, democracy, and individual rights. He argued that gradual economic reforms were often preferable to swift ones and that the public should be fully informed about them, the better to prepare themselves in advance. Further, Friedman condemned the Pinochet regime and opposed the war in Iraq.
Klein's historical examples also fall apart under scrutiny. For example, Klein alleges that the Tiananmen Square crackdown was intended to crush opposition to pro-market reforms, when in fact it caused liberalization to stall for years. She also argues that Thatcher used the Falklands War as cover for her unpopular economic policies, when actually those economic policies and their results enjoyed strong public support.
Klein's broader empirical claims fare no better. Surveys of political and economic freedom reveal that the less politically free regimes tend to resist market liberalization, while those states with greater political freedom tend to pursue economic freedom as well. |
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A Poor and Dishonest Effort |
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Naomi Klein dishonestly cherry picks her anecdotes in her efforts to disparage Economist Milton Friedman, and what Adam Smith dubbed the "Natural System of Liberty" (otherwise known as free market capitalism). While capitalism has its share of critics, and critical literature - this particular work traffics almost entirely in inaccuracy and hyperbole. |
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Not a Good Book |
It's not a very good book. Among other things, Klein conflates Friedman's libertarianism with those of other movements, such as corporatism, merchantilism, and neoconservatism. It's not well (or even honestly) argued.
For example, she claims Friedman was a "neoconservative". One can argue about what exactly "neoconservatism" entails, but on domestic policy they are quite often in favor of significant government intervention in the economy and the lives of citizens, hardly the position of Friedman. In foreign policy they were typically in favor of the Iraq war. But she ignores many explicit statements by Friedman that he opposed the war. One suspects that she doesn't even realize there is a difference between the schools.
Anyway, Johan Norberg at Cato has a devastating review up at the Cato site, "The Klein Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Polemics". Google it. |
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Wow! |
Wow! And all along I thought the Bush administration was filled with inept, blundering fools. The truth is much darker and scarier. To realize that there is an actual logic/philosophy behind their actions that ties the past 8 years together was a shocking and sickening revelation. And that the roots go much deeper into the 1950's. Articulate, damning, forceful....it was truly a shocking doctrine to read, but one all Americans should read before November 2008.
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Shockingly Powerful |
The late Milton Friedman, the renowned economist, believed that democracy and a free-market economy went hand-in-hand, that the greatest threat to both was nationalization, government regulation, and social spending. He preached this philosophy to his disciples at the University of Chicago School of Economics, and they would go forth spreading the Gospel according to the Book of Milton.
There is also the International Monetary Fund, an agency founded after World War II to help struggling countries and their economies get back on their feet. Many of its managers and policy makers will be graduates of the Chicago School of Economics, and they will begin to impose the Friedman creed wherever possible.
There is only one thing wrong. No population seems to vote in the people who support their brand of economics. Its first success is when a socialist, democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, is overthrown and killed when the presidential palace is stormed by fascists. Augusto Pinochet comes into power and immediately places the "Chicago boys" in charge of the economy. With the death of price controls and lunch programs, Chileans find themselves spending one quarter of their monthly salaries just to buy bread. They will leave hours earlier for work than usual because they can no longer afford public transportation. Even Chile's social security program, once a model of efficiency is privatized, becoming virtually worthless overnight. Chilean children begin fainting in school from lack of food or milk and many stop attending altogether.
The story of Chile will be repeated in Argentina, Bolivia, China, Peru, Poland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Russia where the IMF will demand that borrowers meet Draconian conditions before they lend money. In each case these austerity measures will be made overnight, all at once. A shocked population will come to their senses if such radical changes are made over time. They will be able to organize, mobilize and challenge the implementation of such policies. It has to come all at once, right after elections, a coup, or a hurricane when the population will be too dazed and disorganized to respond. This will be the shock, or as author Naomi Klein calls it, shock doctrine. For those who are still lucid, there is the next step in the shock doctrine, terroize, torture, or make them disappear.
In each case, in each country, prices on food and other common items will go through the roof, the number of destitute will increase exponentially, and democracy will be squashed. In China, the communist elite will impose these changes on the masses while ensuring that they will profit handsomely from the economic and social upheaval. President Clinton will cheer the economic shock doctrine instituted by Boris Yeltsin as he dissolves the Court and the Parliament, bringing the Russian army out to attack the latter, which killed more than 300 people and several deputies. A new class of super mega apparatchiks will emerge increasing the divide between the "have mores" and the "have nothings," and Russians will put up with a few KGB murders and disappearances for the promise of stability that Vladimir Putin will provide.
The Polish people, fed up with the broken promises of Solidarity who succumbed to IMF demands to relieve them of their crushing debt, will be thrown out of office in 1996 elections. Nelson Mandela will focus so much on achieving political control of South Africa he will neglect the real political power of controlling the economic engines that run the nation. He soon discovers that without economic power, he has no political muscle. He becomes a slave of economic apartheid. Shanty towns will get larger and people will become poorer. The population is disillusioned with their new-found "equality." The tsunami in Sri Lanka will allow the hoteliers to make a deal with the government, and place security guards around the beaches of what once belonged to villagers who fished from there for hundreds of years. After all, what right did they have to be there? The smell of fish made their guests complain. They will be driven inland where they will be given boats and houses, just no access to water to fish.
But that could never be allowed to happen here, or could it? One of the first things President George W. Bush does after he finally realizes what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is remove union wage scale that contractors would have to pay to laborers. (After all, it is the corporations that must benefit the most from disaster capitalism, not the people of New Orleans). The shock has begun as developers are already seeing how they can take over the utterly destroyed neighborhoods of the poor and turn them into luxury condos and hotels. Contractors will wake up illegal laborers in the night to tell them that the Immigration officers are coming to arrest them. They will run away without having been paid. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, once a functional, effective, national emergency response unit, has had so much work farmed out to contractors, it cannot mount an effective response to the disaster. They will pay top dollar for roofing that can done at a fraction of the cost. They will supply trailers for homeless that are made of material unsafe to breathe, and people will die in a stadium because no one can take care of them.
In Iraq, the local population rose up after our invasion and began to elect their own leaders and councils. They announced plans to take over city governments, services and industry. When Iraqis were asked what they wanted more of when they were surveyed, they clamored for more government jobs, but L. Paul Bremer wasn't about to allow democracy to get in the way of disaster capitalism. He ordered the military to disband all local democratic initiatives, which he replaced with a council not chosen by the Iraqi people, but by him.
George Bush talks democracy (in Iraq), but walks capitalism by performing a Marshal Plan in reverse. The original plan implemented right after World War II called for keeping foreign investors out of Germany. Our government wanted the Germans to be able to build up their own industry and wealth. Not so in Iraq. Unemployed and starving Iraqis watched how American contractors brought in cheap Asian labor to rebuild their country. American oil companies and American banks made contracts with the new Iraqi government that gave them rights and access in perpetuity. Iraqi unemployment remains at approximately sixty percent.
Does anyone wonder why there is an insurgency? "No 'capitalization' without representation!"
The author makes it clear. In every country that holds free elections, no one votes for the shock doctrine of disaster capitalism. No one will vote away social programs, controls, or selling off their industries and companies to foreign investors. Klein's conclusion? Capitalism and democracy are not inherently compatible as Friedman always believed. It was just the opposite.
This book is powerful and moving. As I reread my review, I feel I have not done her book justice in relating the power and depth of Naomi Klein's words. Her documentation is exceptional. Her ability to craft together different events and present them in a coherent and believable hypothesis is necromantic.
Once in a while you find a book, a special book, one you keep as a reference, a "go-to" one. This is such a book. It is one of the two most important I have read for 2008. I have enough admiration for this woman's work that I would buy anything she writes, without hesitation. Her writing will hold your attention.
"The Shock Doctrine" is eye-opening and of course, absolutely shocking.
July 14, 2008
Bastille Day--How Appropriate. |
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