The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism |
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| Title: | The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism |
| Author: | Naomi Klein |
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Type: | Book / Paperback |
| Publication Date: | 24 June, 2008 |
| ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0312427999 / 9780312427993 |
| List Price: | $16.00 |
| You Save: | $5.12 |
| Amazon Price: | $10.88 |
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Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
In this groundbreaking alternative history of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free-market economic revolution, Naomi Klein challenges the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory. From Chile in 1973 to Iraq today, Klein shows how Friedman and his followers have repeatedly harnessed terrible shocks and violence to implement their radical policies. As John Gray wrote in The Guardian, "There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books."
Amazon.com Review
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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Customer Reviews:
• A Shocking Education
18 February, 2010
The Shock Doctrine is about exactly what it says, shock. It is about big business and government cashing in when countries experience turmoil such as war or natural disasters. Naomi Klein outlines major examples from the mid-twentieth century until now. If you are not current on world affairs, this book will catch you up. If you are current, you may want to read this book for the background of why current events are what and where they are. Shock Doctrine is not about relaxation and chocolate, it is about gaining knowledge about the history of our economic systems throughout the world.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Exactly What Obama Is Doing
17 March, 2010
The author likes to think that only Milton Friedman disciples would ever stoop so low as to use the shock of a natural disaster, economic disaster, or security threat, etc to take advantage of frightened citizens to enact deep changes in either human rights, freedoms, or government control. Well, with the most recent economic disaster, Obama is using the "shock", to enact unusual control over business, unusual levels of taxation, and taking unusual control, limiting our freedoms, and taking over some private enterprises.
While I agree with the concept - it is easier to get a group of frightened citizens to accept extreme changes that would never happen in a steady state - this tactic is not limited to just the "devil worshippers" (re: Capitalists), it has been done and will be done by any one that is in power with an extreme agenda and an opportunity (extreme shock). The author seemed to have left out that this concept applies to all political persuasions.
- Amazon Customer Review
• A No-holds-barred Look At The Disasterous Impact Of Chicago School Economics
14 February, 2010
In this chilling history of deregulated capitalism gone wild, Naomi Klein shows how Milton Friedman and his followers have taken advantage of chaos--caused by coups d'etat, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters--to transform tragedies into lucrative profit ventures.
The strategy? When the population is in a state of shock and trauma, quickly push through your desired economic policies: privitization, deregulation, and cuts in government services. If some brutality is required along the way, so be it.
While this topic has been covered by others, Klein offers a detailed chronicle of "shock treatment" doled out by Friedman and his friends from the Chicago School of Economics (with help from the World Bank and the IMF) over the last several decades, beginning in the wake of Pinochet's bloody coup in Chile, then moving on to other South American countries, followed by countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In case after case, she offers a peek at the players behind the scenes and the heartbreaking human costs.
Klein gives nods to Keynesianism here and there (wish that would have been explored more), but her own orthodoxy does bleed through in parts, thus the deducted star. It's only a few pages before the end of the book that she briefly acknowledges, for instance, that pure socialism has also often been implemented and maintained using brual methods.
Still, it's a compelling book and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand more about the innerworkings of this ongoing phase of history.
- Amazon Customer Review
• The Veil And The Mask
04 March, 2010
Klein's book has been extensively reviewed and much quoted. Its well worth a read for anyone interested how the Right has captured public policy over the last few decades.
Klein demonstrates with many case studies how a highly organized resurgent Right, financed mostly by think-tanks supported by a committed coterie of very wealthy donors, have systematically prepared the agendas of global neo-liberal capitalism and used catastrophes, natural and man-made, to advance those agendas whenever and wherever the opportunities arise. From the murderous regime imposed by General Pinochet in 1970s Chile to the "clean slate" presented by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and beyond, this highly organized intelligentsia of the Right and the politicians, policy-makers and moneyed interests who support them have been ready to move into devastated areas of the world at a moment's notice to create "test cases" for their vision of a world in which society-equals-the market. Klein argues convincingly that this approach is based on the advocates' understanding that their policies and ideas would never command a democratic consensus and must therefore be imposed, for the good of those who resist them and the world at large of course.
Klein's critique of this process adds an interesting and important dimension to understanding how power operates in contemporary global capitalism. While it is sometimes true to say that powerful interests and those who represent them depend on opacity, that is hardly an explanation of how policies genuinely harmful to working people actually gain traction and become public policy. This analysis documents with very specific proofs one important way that process operates in actually existing capitalism. It is essential reading for anyone interested in how a viable counter-strategy to it might be generated.
- Amazon Customer Review
• The Future As Fredrick Pohl Forecast It
05 March, 2010
Pohl's 1950's book opens with an advertising agency's army forcing Outer Mongolia to accept billboards. His prediction was right on the nose, only, as Klein points out, the U.S. taxpayer paid for the effort not the corporations whom such wars benefited. The great thing about Iraq and post-Katrina Louisiana for that matter is that contractors paid for by taxpayer dollars were never subject to taxpayer oversight. Klein successfully reviews the more than half a century of tax payer subsidies of wars that benefited only the corporations. Do not be aroused by what you will read in this book; you can always tell other people that you were a "good" American and were never a member of the Nazi party.
Message to Klein: Surely an updated second edition is called for in which you point out that Bush and Cheney were never prosecuted for War Crimes and that Obama running on a "Get Out of Iraq" platform expanded the war effort into neighboring countries. Oh, and whereas the Taliban had banned the growth of poppies, Bush put heroin back on the streets of America.
- Amazon Customer Review
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