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	The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
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Product Details Binding Paperback Dewey Decimal Number 330.122 EAN 9780312427993 ISBN 0312427999 Manufacturer Picador Number Of Items 1 Number Of Pages 720 Publication Date June 24, 2008 Publisher Picador Release Date June 24, 2008 Availability Usually ships in 24 hours 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.' 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 The neo-liberal economic policies—privatization, free trade, slashed social spending—that the Chicago School and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses, argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are disastrous—depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth, by the author's accounting—their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market reforms the public would normally reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo) chronicles decades of such disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia's state economy to oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the privatization of New Orleans's public schools after Katrina; and the seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the Asian tsunami. Klein's economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market shock therapies to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people's economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Naomi Klein offers an antidote to those who herald globalization as the great equalizer of nations. The author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Klein links disparate events throughout the 20th and 21st centuries—the collapse of the Soviet Union, the atrocities in Chile under Pinochet, the post-tsunami crises in Sri Lanka, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the invasion of Iraq—to reveal the two-faced nature of capitalism. Critics agreed that the book—accessible and impeccably researched—is an important contribution to the debate over globalization. Some were less taken with Klein’s thesis, however. The Washington Post noted that Klein sees too many conspiracies instead of 'the all-too-human pattern of chaos and confusion, good intentions and greed, playing out in the wake of catastrophes.' Yet even Shashi Tharoor, a former UN Under-Secretary General, admitted Klein’s great usefulness in helping us understand 'the shape and direction of our current Age of Uncertainty.' Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. Both admirers and detractors agree that the late Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman was an extraordinarily influential economist. Canadian Klein assails Friedman's free-market precepts as their exponents have applied them to a series of formerly state-dominated economies since 1975, when Friedman persuaded Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to adopt his program. Klein's entirely negative interpretation of the results of 'shock therapy' only lays the foundation for her book's thesis: that Friedman's prescriptions require a crisis and are ineluctably bound with the application of violence. This perspective informs her criticism––condemnation, in fact––of reform programs in the last three decades that have aimed to separate the state from the economy in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, China, the UK, and elsewhere. The process of market liberalization, Klein maintains, has created a 'disaster capitalism complex,' consisting of corporations that thrive on catastrophe; the author particularly arraigns security and logistics firms in the U.S. and Israel. Assiduously researched, energetically expressed, Klein's report bears an ideological perspective that won't leave readers neutral about her economic interpretations. Taylor, Gilbert 'Her argument is well-documented, logical, riveting, and convincing.' -- Jane Smiley, author of A Thousand Acres and Ten Days in the Hills 'Naomi Klein is . . . a muckraker who digs in where others accept the surface. I love her stuff.' -- Studs Terkel, historian and author of Working 'Naomi Klein's exposé of neo-liberal economics is certain to be sensational. Hers is a long-needed analysis...' -- Chalmers Johnson, author of the Blowback Trilogy 'This beautifully written, very readable book will change the disgusting history it so calmly chronicles.' -- Peter Carey, author of Oscar and Lucinda and Theft: A Love Story 'This masterful book is a measured but furious call to arms.... A spectacular triumph.' -- John Cusack, actor/filmmaker 'Impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary as hell.'--John le Carré 'Bold and brilliantly conceived . . . Klein may well have revealed the master narrative of our time.'--William S. Kowinski, San Francisco Chronicle 'This is a brilliant book, one of the most important I have read in a long time.'--Howard Zinn 'Klein provides a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries and of the human toll. She paints a disturbing portrait of hubris, not only on the part of Friedman but also of those who adopted his doctrines, sometimes to pursue more corporatist objectives.'--Joseph E. Stiglitz, The New York Times Book Review 'A brilliant, brave, and terrifying book. It's nothing less than the secret history of what we call the 'free market.' It should be compulsory reading.'--Arundhati Roy 'Pulls the curtain back on free-market myths and exposes the forces that are really driving our economy . . . Klein's book is powerful and prophetic. . . . A brilliant dissection.'--Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post 'Naomi Klein is one of the most important new voices in American journalism today.'--Seymour M. Hersh 'The Shock Doctrine is the defining, covert history of our era.'--Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army 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.' In her ground-breaking reporting from Iraq, Naomi Klein exposed how the trauma of invasion was being exploited to remake the country in the interest of foreign corporations. She called it “disaster capitalism.” Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and 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. By capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, Klein argues that 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. NAOMI KLEIN is an award-winning journalist, author, and filmmaker. Her first book, the international bestseller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, was translated into twenty-eight languages and called “a movement bible” by The New York Times. She writes an internationally syndicated column for The Nation and The Guardian and reported from Iraq for Harper’s Magazine. In 2004, she released The Take, a feature documentary about Argentina’s occupied factories, co-produced with director Avi Lewis. She is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws degree from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia. I met Jamar Perry in September 2005, at the big Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dinner was being doled out by grinning young Scientologists, and he was standing in line. I had just been busted for talking to evacuees without a media escort and was now doing my best to blend in, a white Canadian in a sea of African- American southerners. I dodged into the food line behind Perry and asked him to talk to me as if we were old friends, which he kindly did. Born and raised in New Orleans, he'd been out of the flooded city for a week. He and his family had waited forever for the evacuation buses; when they didn't arrive, they had walked out in the baking sun. Finally they ended up here, a sprawling convention centre now jammed with 2,000 cots and a mess of angry, exhausted people being patrolled by edgy National Guard soldiers just back from Iraq. The news racing around the shelter that day was that the Republican Congressman Richard Baker had told a group of lobbyists, 'We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did.' Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans' wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: 'I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities.' All that week Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a 'smaller, safer city' - which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects. Hearing all the talk of 'fresh starts' and 'clean sheets', you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway. Over at the shelter, Jamar could think of nothing else. 'I really don't see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn't have died.' He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us overheard and whipped around. 'What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn't an opportunity. It's a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?' A mother with two kids chimed in. 'No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine.' One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, 'Uncle Miltie', as he was known to his followers, found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. 'Most New Orleans schools are in ruins,' Friedman observed, 'as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity.' Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions. In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools. The Friedmanite American Enterprise Institute enthused that 'Katrina accomplished in a day ... what Louisiana school reformers couldn't do after years of trying'. Public school teachers, meanwhile, were calling Friedman's plan 'an educational land grab'. I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, 'disaster capitalism'. Privatising the school system of a mid-size American city may seem a modest preoccupation for the man hailed as the most influential economist of the past half century. Yet his determination to exploit the crisis in New Orleans to advance a fundamentalist version of capitalism was also an oddly fitting farewell. For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock. In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism's core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as 'the shock doctrine'. He observed that 'only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change'. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the 'tyranny of the status quo'. A variation on Machiavelli's advice that 'injuries' should be inflicted 'all at once', this is one of Friedman's most lasting legacies. Friedman first learned how to exploit a shock or crisis in the mid-70s, when he advised the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock after Pinochet's violent coup, but the country was also traumatised by hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy - tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending and deregulation. It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a 'Chicago School' revolution, as so many of Pinochet's economists had studied under Friedman there. Friedman coined a phrase for this painful tactic: economic 'shock treatment'. In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or 'shock therapy', has been the method of choice. I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington's failed attempts to follow 'shock and awe' with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering. Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. 'When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself,' said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called 'reconstruction' began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere. When I began this research into the intersection between super-profits and mega-disasters, I thought I was witnessing a fundamental change in the way the drive to 'liberate' markets was advancing around the world. Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at WTO summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the IMF. As I dug deeper into the history of how this market model had swept the globe, I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Friedman's movement from the very beginning - this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance. What was happening in Iraq and New Orleans was not a post-September 11 invention. Rather, these bold experiments in crisis exploitation were the culmination of three decades of strict adherence to the shock doctrine. Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past 35 years look very different. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the intent of terrorising the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for radical free-market 'reforms'. In China in 1989, it was the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the arrests of tens of thousands that freed the Communist party to convert much of the country into a sprawling export zone, staffed with workers too terrified to demand their rights. The Falklands war in 1982 served a similar purpose for Margaret Thatcher: the disorder resulting from the war allowed her to crush the striking miners and to launch the first privatisation frenzy in a western democracy. The bottom line is that, for economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint, some sort of additional collective trauma has always been required. Friedman's economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy - the US under Reaga... Customers who bought this item also bought The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Revised and Updated] The Conscience of a Liberal No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals Customer Reviews for: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Rating - Very Important Book A great composite history of neoliberal political economy and the ways it has been instituted worldwide. Rating - The Truth Hurts as an American This book truly broke my heart. I believed that the United States was the shining beacon on the hill, a light for all to see and aspire to. I learned that we are not. We have been a participant in every ugly war and battle that has stolen freedom from others that has ever occured. We have stolen what is good in other cultures and mad it ugly. We have done this in the name of money and power. We have been guilty of these crimes inspite of the pretty propaganda slogans and powerful words we have chosen to believe are ... Read More Rating - understand capitalism and how the markets affect everyday life I read this book last spring and was both fascinated and appalled at what I learned. This book is a thoroughly documented chronology of the implementation of Friedman free market economics theory and the methods and extent in which economists have gone to implement this theory into working practice. The author spotlights numerous historical incidents that our media glossed over and in many instances completely misrepresented. This book opened my eyes to some of the things that have been happening without the general public's ... Read More Rating - A re-packaging of ideas expressed better elsewhere Like Malcolm Gladwell, Naomi Klein is expert in taking well-established, complex ideas and reducing and re-packaging them as if they were her own. Brilliant marketing, but not deep thinking. Still, a decent introduction to the concept, but if you want to know more, just google "creative destruction" or look up Friedrich Nietzsche, Mikhail Bakunin, or Joseph Schumpeter. Also Werner Sombart's War and Capitalism: "again out of destruction a new spirit of creativity arises". see more reviews See all books by author Naomi Klein

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