The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | 
| Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Category: Book
List Price: $28.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  211 reviews
Sales Rank: 480
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 576
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0805079831
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.122
EAN: 9780805079838
ASIN: 0805079831
Publication Date: September 18, 2007
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Amazon.ca
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
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 206 more reviews...
 Corporations gone wild May 21, 2008
This book presents a gripping portrait of what corporations seek to do when they have no restraints upon them. Klein's analysis of corporations and the Iraq war is the best I have seen. The book is worth buying for this alone.
Much of the book is devoted to historical analysis of events over the last few decades in Chile, Argentina, Russia, and the like. I don't have enough background in the recent history of these countries to be certain how much of what Klein describes is accurate. Her analysis strikes me as plausible enough, though, to be worth serious consideration at the very least.
I have a long-standing interest in economics, so that I feel qualified to comment on Klein's approach. Klein is quite correct that modern mainstream economics has lost its way. Mainstream economics worships the global free market, in the face of a remarkable lack of evidence that worldwide free markets make ordinary citizens happier or more prosperous. For more on this, I would suggest Robert Lane's book The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. Most economic development schemes today assume that the best way to develop an economy is through increasing long-distance export and import. Unfortunately, basing a local economy on long-distance shipment of goods leaves a country's prosperity completely vulnerable to events occurring thousands of miles away. It also undermines local social cohesion, which is based in large part on local economic interdependence. The doctrine of comparative advantage, which is drummed into every first-year economics student today, takes none of this into account.
I have no quarrel with the idea that some government regulations are stupid and destructive. Some are. Unfortunately, many of today's politicians and economists are too lazy to do the necessary work to sort out which regulations are good and which bad. Therefore they want to toss out all government regulation and privatize as many government functions as possible. This idea is more dangerous than many people realize. Taken to an extreme, it is essentially feudalism.
One of Klein's main points is that for any country's economy, rapid change is usually extremely destructive. This is true even if the changes are valuable and necessary in themselves. I think Klein is convincing here.
Klein does miss some things. She puts too much emphasis on GDP as a measure of economic prosperity. The problem with GDP is that it is calculated essentially by counting up what people spend. GDP ignores population increases, the drawdown of natural resources, and declining quality of life. GDP is essentially the corporate view of what an economy should be like. Ordinary people should feel free to ignore GDP statistics.
Klein is correct that often the people do know better than corporations what they need. Unfortunately, in some cases the people have had the wool pulled over their eyes by corporations for so long that corporate-friendly policies are more popular than they should be. While Klein does not mention this, an example is the long-standing love affair of the American people with the automobile. Automobiles are great for corporations. Corporations build cars, parking lots, and highways. Unfortunately, a transportation system based largely on cars is extremely destructive to American cities, to social and family life, and even to government, which subsidizes cars to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Worse, this corporate-friendly transportation system has resulted in making the country utterly dependent on ever-shrinking oil reserves. For more on this, see James Kunstler's books The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape and The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, and Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking.
Overall, though, Klein's book should not be missed. Read it even if you don't agree.
 Has she read Friedman or did she do a "find word" and copy? May 20, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
In "Shock Doctrine," I nod my head in agreement of many of Klein's ideas- namely that deliberately creating or relishing in disaster to pursue corporate interests or to exploit a country's resources is horrifically unethical.
So what's the problem then?
Klein makes a strawman's argument that does not actually speak to anything Friedman actually believed or wrote. She is arguing against a phantom opponent, whose ideology she made up. This would be obvious to anybody who actually read his works, in which he makes a case for individual liberty free of government intrusion, eliminating government handouts or special deals for corporations, and and organized democratic process that reflects the will of the people, while maintaining individual rights. Klein gets the whole order reversed. Friedman never said that the fall of Communism should call for any foreign intervention to implement capitalism. He said that the failure of Communism RESULTED from the fact that people preferred to take control of the individual liberties that Communism once denied them. It was descriptive of the past, never prescriptive for the future. He descried imperialist takeoevers, corporate theft, or government usurption of power. To Friedman, the less power the better, especially because he knew that excess power disproportionately trampled on the rights of the poor. Friedman was suspicious of tyranny in all its forms, and believed that a government that gave special benefits to businesses (such as in eminent domain), over the property rights of the people, was despotic.
And saying that Friedman was happy with Katrina because afterwords individuals got to choose their schools is like saying that I'm happy that my dad died, because afterward I make sure to keep my health in check. Katrina was just one horrific example of how the government failed people. And criticizing the effectiveness of government, and the people demanding change after a tragedy like that is hardly celebrating the tragedy.
(It so happens, that according to polls, the parents and children in the new charter LA schools LOVE them, because they are now empowered to choose and control their education, rather than be forced to suffer the same garbage education the goverment usually imposes on poor kids).
Friedman believed that all actions should be voluntary and with consent, and that taking resources that belongs to the people of a particular region is nothing less than brutal theft.
All I ask for readers of this book is to read "Free to Choose" by Friedman. Then decide if you think he was fairly represented in this sloppily researched book. If you still believe Klein's interpretation Friedman's ideas are correct, so be it, but I highly doubt you will.
Fundamental Misunderstanding of Economics May 18, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
To conflate Chicago School economics with despotic governments, one must suspend objectivity and ignore contravening facts, as Ms. Klein has obviously done. And to insult perhaps the greatest intellectual freedom fighter of the 20th Century with this intellectually dishonest, leftist screed, is unforgiveable. I would very much like to see Ms. Klein debate the Peruvian economist Hernando DeSoto.
Read Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman, and The Mystery of Capital by Hernando DeSoto. In them you will find sound economic analyses and logic, none of which you will find in The Shock Doctrine.
Most informative book I have read all year May 16, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Naomi Klein has done brilliant research as a journalist. With firsthand accounts and the use of primary resources she unveils the truth of the so-called "free market," and it's devastating effects on the world. She connects how intrinsically tied corporations and political players use coercive and sometimes brutally violent tactics to privatize public spheres and are in fact de-constructing democracy in all its forms. A must read.
How the Washington Consensus was rammed down unwilling throats May 12, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is important, excellent and deeply moving. I think it's best read as an account of the origins of neoliberalism plus an inventory of the ways that neoliberal governments have undemocratically imposed unpopular, harmful economic "reforms" over the angry objections of their populations. Since almost all our politicians are neoliberals now, and since most Americans don't know what neoliberalism is (amazon.com's spell checker claims it's not even a word), this book should be widely read, though it may not be. It tells the story of the rise of the world's reigning economic ideology, and Klein zeroes in on what is perhaps that ideology's greatest contradiction: while neoliberals extol freedom of choice, populations that are free to choose reject neoliberalism. Thus, in a succinct, poignant and accurate formulation of Eduardo Galeano's that Klein repeatedly quotes, "People were in prison so that prices could be free." However, I found Klein's thesis-type thing, the parallels she draws between electroshock therapy and economic shock therapy, shocks to the body and shocks to the body politic, to be shallow and unconvincing. It's an analogy, not an analysis. With that said, Klein gave me a clearer understanding of the ANC's sellout than I had after studying abroad in South Africa, and her first 128 pages is the most powerful and moving passage of political writing I've ever read. So get it, read it and think about it: this is the history of the present.
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