The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

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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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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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

The Shock Doctrine, 2008-07-24
This is a really important book as a review of current history and as a cautionary tale about the way that a very few self-designated elites can control financial markets and bring about the destruction of entire societies without any regard to the people devastated. It is a shocking portrayal of the callous, malicious, and sadistic people engaged in remaking global economies to meet their needs, whether they be social domination or greed. The players almost always claim to have higher goals in mind, at least that how it seems, but maybe not. Maybe simply advocating for unfettered free market economies and letting the people pray for their own political freedom is really the game itself. It is always a mistake to think that anyone involved in economic reform has anything like morality in mind.

Unfortunately for Naomi Klein (and my apologies to her), the rest of this review is about me. What she describes in the beginning of her book about the psychiatric torture techniques applied on a mass scale in South America and Asia and adapted to so-called economic reform, are also being applied to me. I am a victim of psychiatric torture: I am being illegally drugged, deprived of sleep, electroshocked, exposed to life-threatening diseases, raped and aborted monthly, isolated, stalked and imitated, and humiliated/life-raped, and the external world is being distorted in my experience (lights are shined into my apartment at all hours and noise is broadcast at unbearable frequencies at all times to name some of the offenses) to such an extent that I am being regressed. I am denied employment and privacy. All of this is happening for no reason - what reason could justify any of it? Dr. Cameron lives again in Seattle, but it started in Ann Arbor, continued to Oakland, CA, Newport, OR (at the Bay Area Hospital - a deeply scary place where all the patients are tortured), and even to Alaska. It is a mobile torture community and someone should stop them.

I am grateful to Naomi Klein for elucidating what is happening to me, though I am sure she did not intend her book to be an individual therapy tool. It describes the horrific events of the past 50 years clearly, thoughtfully, and in tremendously researched detail and is a must read for any student of the 20th and 21st centuries who recognizes that morality is dead but thrill-killing is alive and well.


5 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

Socialist Propaganda and Misrepresentation, 2008-07-17
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.


4 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

A Poor and Dishonest Effort, 2008-07-16
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.


4 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

Not a Good Book, 2008-07-15
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.


3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

Wow!, 2008-07-14
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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