The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | 
 enlarge | Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Rating:  258 reviews
Sales Rank: 133
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 720
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0312427999
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.122
EAN: 9780312427993
ASIN: 0312427999
Publication Date: June 24, 2008
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Amazon.com
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
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."
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| Customer Reviews: Read 253 more reviews...
 A shock for America? August 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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".
Shock is vital August 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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!
Alternate History of Our Lifetimes August 27, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
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!
The Shock Doctrine August 25, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Although this is a significant read, both in length and subject matter, it is actually written so it is an easy read. The words flowed and I have learned so much. I recommend this book to everyone. This is important stuff if you want to be a critical thinker when considering the news of U.S. and world events.
 Complete Garbage August 24, 2008
1 out of 13 found this review helpful
Well the book is written by an anti-American Marxist Canadian author with a long history of capitalism bashing. She's married to the newly hired anchor of Al-Jazeera terrorist network Avi Lewis. Scratch these guys and they bleed hatred for the western civilization. Marxism has influenced the author so much that she is blind to the miseries of marxism and communism. The book has no serious theory. It's all about contempt for what Capitalism has done. Though she is biased. She fails to mention the terrible result of Communism and socialism. She's a Canadian and one can't expect these jealous guys to do better. They hate America out of jealousy. I give this book a zero and its author should be ashamed of herself. Go live in Cuba or North Korea if you don't like capitalist system.
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