The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | Naomi Klein

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | Naomi Klein | The second colonial pillage and the essence of dehumanization

books:

The Shock Doctrine...

	The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein Metropolitan Books, 2007 - 576 pages average customer review:based on 290 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Alternate History of Our Lifetimes

Milton Friedman, the diminutive alpha male of the University of Chicago economics department for decades, called himself a "neoliberal." You can be sure his heart wasn't bleeding, however, for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, abortion rights, or any rights at all except the rights of corporations to operate without government regulation or public scrutiny. None of those liberal causes had any meaning for Friedman or his disciples, who used the word in its 19th C British sense of laissez-faire and free trade. What Naomi Klein and other British journalists call "neoliberal" is identical with what Americans call "neo-conservatism." Milton Friedman was the Apostle Paul of neo-conservatism.

Klein describes neo-conservatism as an absolutist sort of ideology - a militant religion of unfettered capitalism, if you will - which is markedly unable to recognize any sense at all in any other religion, and equally unable to admit or learn from mistakes. The central credos of neo-conservatism are: 1) no government regulation of private enterprise, 2) no socialistic government ownership of any enterprise that can possibly be privatized, even police and defense powers, 3) no redistributive taxes; sales taxes being the preferred form if any, 4) withering of the state to what they call, in their own manifestos, a "hollow government" existing only to collect public revenue and redistribute it to private entrepreneurs, 5) above all, no labor laws, no welfare, no "nanny" state, no public education, no environmental restrictions!

The central thesis of Klein's book is that such neoconservative unfettered capitalism has proven to be incompatible with effective democracy, since no population of voters, given honest information and not subjected to such sort of Shock Therapy, would ever vote or elect representatives to foist something so inimical to the interests upon themselves. Beginning with the historical experiences of the Southern Cone nations - Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil - in the 1970s, Klein shows in great detail how coups and putsches, with their subsequent terror, have been perceived as opportunities for radical economic takeover and restructuring by the Chicago Boys. From Latin America, Klein takes us to Indonesia and South Korea, to South Africa, to Poland, Russia, and eventually to Iraq, depicting the violence, corruption, repression and misery which accompanied every one of those "opportunities." In fact, Klein suggests, neoconservative restructuring can ONLY occur in a situation of disaster, whether self-imposed by military traitors, by hyper-inflation cultivated by the IMF and World Bank, or by natural catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina.

If even half of what Klein reports is accurate, compatriots, we've been sold a bill of sordid goods! Klein is a journalist, not a historian. For that reason, I read her book with caution and resistance, checking her quotes and data whenever I felt the least doubt. Thus it took me weeks to get ready to write this review. For what it's worth, I have found her quotes verifiable in every case, and her data subject only to a few quibbles of omission.

Don't suppose that Klein is delivering a party-line polemic. The Clinton Democrats are excoriated equally with the Republicans of the "Washington Consensus." NAFTA Bill was at best an impure neoconservative, though for Friedmanites the slightest impurity is anathema. Madeleine Albright was as much a globalizing neo-con as Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, though a lot less unscrupulous and with far less personal greed at stake. Essentially, since the unregretted collapse of Soviet Communism, neoconservative capitalism has been, as Klein puts it, "the only game in town." What Klein achieves in this book, even for those who disagree with her analyses, is to reveal the abuses and the terrible social costs of Friedmanite world dominion.

You out there! You who proudly proclaim your conservatism and/or libertarianism! You need to read this book! If you're too smug, or too cowardly, in your convictions, how are you to be taken seriously ever again!

for more information click here

The second colonial pillage and the essence of dehumanization

Naomi Klein unveils in this hard-hitting book (naming names) extremely clearly the economic utopia and the shameful realities resulting from the neo-liberal policies of the Chicago School of Economics, also called `The Washington Consensus'.

What
Its defenders claim that the free market is a perfect scientific system, in which individuals acting on their own self-interested desire, create the maximum benefit for all.
But, as no country or city wanted to implement deliberately their policies, its powerful fundamentalist defenders, together with their long arm, the IMF, used and created shocks (wars, military coups, political upheavals, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, epidemics, energy and resource shortages) to force a second shock of radical social and economic engineering on traumatized populations.

Where
Naomi Klein analyzes brilliantly a long list of victims of the shock doctrine of which the most important are: Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Iraq, Russia, Indonesia, Poland, South-Africa, former Yugoslavia and its republics, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Thailand, New Or leans and the US as a whole.

How
This radical economic cure consisted intentionally in eliminating the public sphere, in giving total freedom to private interests and in providing only skeletal social spending. Sometimes with the help of the IMF as their obedient mediator, State and corporate wealth was cut into pieces and sold of for a trifle in debased currencies to private, mostly foreign, interests: airlines, phone and water systems, oilfields, all kind of corporations and factories (sometimes direct competitors), mineral deposits or farmlands.

Private bonanza, public hell
Those policies created a formidable bonanza for transnational corporations, oligarchs and investment banks.
For the majority of the population, the results were less than bleak, rather hellish:
Not democracy, but dictatorship
Not peace, but war, tortures or simply assassinations (the essence of dehumanizing)
Not freedom for the populations, but for the corporations
Not hiring, but mass unemployment (putting people in a starvation position)
Not civil liberties, but aggressive surveillance
Not clean commerce, but rampant corruption
Not broadly based wealth, but turning 25 to 60 % of the population into a permanent underclass
Not clean air and water, but environmental degradation

US
In the US, the core of the governmental tasks (the military, the police, fire departments, power, covert intelligence, disease control, public schools) was subcontracted to private interests.

Future
But the tide is turning against disaster capitalism. The IMF is nearly out of business.
Democratic socialism, always regarded by those in power as a greater threat than totalitarian communism, is clearly on the march, especially in South-America.

Naomi Klein's formidable book is a must read for all those who want to understand the world we live in.

for more information click here

Shock is vital

Naomi Klein has written a vitally important book for anyone who wants to understand recent US history - it gets behind the clutter of propaganda and the hot air of government briefings to reveal the important thrust of US policy at home and abroad - she deserves a pulitzer for this!

A shock for America?

Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" weaves together the systematic oppression of South American countries, the "help" given to Poland, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the current war in Iraq. Spotting the common threads in each instance, she then holds up the tsunami victims alongside the city of New Orleans to show the same benificiaries of government spending getting rich again. In every case, the parallel is drawn between the attempt to shape the client country's future and the medical technique of "shock therapy".
This is s a thick book but the reader intersted in trying to understand the rise of BLACKWATER, the peculiar hype around avian flu, and countless other quirks of disaster capitalism needs to read "The Shock Doctrine".

for more information click here

Shock Doctrine

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE - The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein is a must read book for every American. We have been brainwashed and misinformed for many years. What this country is going through now is no accident. We are now beginning to experience what others have been put through over the years. When will we wake up?

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, page 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

products you might be interested in