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| The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | 
 enlarge | Author: Naomi Klein
Creator: Jennifer Wiltsie
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  318 reviews
Sales Rank: 58106
Format: Abridged, Audiobook, Cd
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Abridged
Number Of Items: 7
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 5.8 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 1427200882
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.122
EAN: 9781427200884
ASIN: 1427200882
Publication Date: September 18, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW
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Amazon.com Review
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 her ground-breaking reporting 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.
Book Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 313 more reviews...
 A Stunning and Well-Researched Indictment of Friedmanian Neoliberalism September 26, 2007
614 out of 716 found this review helpful
Naomi Klein's THE SHOCK DOCTRINE is a stunning indictment of American corporatism and institutionalized globalization, on a par with such groundbreaking works as Harrington's THE OTHER AMERICA and Chomsky's HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL. Comprehensive in its breadth and remarkable for its well-researched depth, Klein's book is a highly readable but disturbing look at how the neoliberal economic tenets of Milton Friedman have been implemented across the world over the last thirty-plus years.
The author's thesis is simply stated: that neoliberal economic programs have repeatedly been implemented without the consent of the governed by creating and/or taking advantage of various forms of national shock therapy. Ms. Klein asserts that in country after country, Friedman and his Chicago School followers have foisted their tripartite economic prescription - privatization, deregulation, and cutbacks in social welfare spending - on an unsuspecting populace through decidedly non-democratic means. In the early years, the primary vehicle was dictatorial military force and accompanying fear of arrest, torture, disappearance, or death. Over time, new organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank were employed instead, using or creating impossible debt burdens to force governments to accept privatization of state-owned industries and services, complete removal of trade barriers and tariffs, forced acceptance of private foreign investment, and widespread layoffs. In more recent years, terrroism and its response as well as natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis have wiped clean enough of the slate to impose these Friedmanite policies on people too shocked and focused on recovering to realize what was happening until it was too late.
According to Ms. Klein's thesis, these revolutionary economic programs were the "medicine" deemed necessary by neoliberal, anti-Keynesian economists to bring underdeveloped countries into the global trading community. Ms. Klein argues her case in convincing detail a long chronological line of historical cases. Each chapter in her book surveys one such situation, from Chile under Pinochet and Argentina under military junta through Nicaragua and Honduras, Bolivia under Goni, post-apartheid South Africa, post-Solidarity Poland, Russia under Yeltsin, China since Tiananmen, reconstruction of Iraq after the U.S. invasion, Sri Lanka after the tsunami, Israel after 9/11, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Along the way, she lets various neoliberal economists and Chicago School practitioners speak for themselves - we hear their "shock therapy" views in their own words. As just one example, this arrogant and self-righteous proclamation from the late Professor Friedman: "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - producs real change...our basic function, to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."
What the author makes inescapably clear is that the world economic order has been largely remade in Milton Friedman's image in the last few decades by adopting programs that would never have been democratically accepted by the common people. Military coups, violence and force, wars, induced hyperinflation, terrorism, preemptive war, climate disasters - these have been the disruptive vehicles that allowed such drastic economic packages to be imposed. Nearly always, they are developed in secrecy and implemented too rapidly for citizens to respond. The end results, as Ms.Klein again makes clear, are massive (and too often, continuing) unemployment, large price increases for essential goods, closing of factories, enormous increases in people living in poverty, explosive concentration of wealth among a small elite, and extraordinary opportunity for rapacious capitalism from American and European corporations.
Ms. Klein argues that from its humble beginnings as an economic philosophy, the neoliberal program has evolved (or perhaps devolved) into a form of corporatism. Particularly in America, government under mostly Republican adminstrations has hollowed itself out, using private sector contractors for nearly every conceivable task. Companies ranging from Lockheed and Halliburton to ChoicePoint, Blackwater, CH2M Hill, and DynCorp exist almost entirely to secure lucrative government contracts to perform work formerly done by government. They now operate in a world the author describes as "disaster capitalism," waiting and salivating over the profits to be made in the next slate-wiping war or disaster, regardless of the human cost. In an ominous closing discussion, Ms. Klein describes the privatization of government in wealthy Atlanta suburbs, a further step in self-serving and preemptive corporatism guaranteed to hollow out whatever is left of major American cities if it becomes a widespread practice.
THE SHOCK DOCTRINE is truly a head-shaking read. One can only marvel at the imperiousness of past (mostly) American governmental behavior, the grievous callousness of it all, the massive human despair and suffering created for no other reason than economic imperialism, and the nauseating greed of (mostly Republican) politicians, former political operatives, and corporate executives who prey like pack wolves on people's powerlessness and insecurity. Reading this book, one can no longer ask the question, "Why do they hate us?" The answer is obvious, and no amount of hyperventilation from Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, or Fox News can erase the facts and consequences of behavior that we as a country have implicitly or explicitly endorsed.
THE SHOCK DOCTRINE proves itself as shaming of modern American governmental policy as Dee Brown's epic of 19th Century America, BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE. It is an essential read for intelligent citizens who want to understand the roots of globalization and its blowback effects on our lives.
The New "New Economy" September 18, 2007
260 out of 329 found this review helpful
In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein brilliantly proposes a compelling counter-story to the prevailing fable of free market infallibility. Buttressed by painstaking and wide-ranging research, and an ability to see connections where others only see coincidence, Ms. Klein amply shows that profit-making is not the essence of democracy as Milton Friedman and his minions would have it. She shows instead that the machinery of the state and the requirements of "disaster capitalism" are now so tightly synchronized in their exploitation of disasters both man-made and natural as to be virtually one in the same.
Citing pertinent examples to prove her thesis that "disaster capitalism" is now rampant around the world - in Russia, in China, in Iraq to name just a few - she describes how in times of crisis, elites everywhere have learned that they can profit by implementing policies, e.g., "shock therapy" or "shock and awe," that would have been vigorously opposed in normal times. When these changes to Friedmanite free-market dicta are opposed, as they were in Chile, a third shock is implemented. This, according to Klein is a shock that is entirely man-made - the torture and murder of those who would stand in the way of the takeover of the public sector, or, as neo-liberal economists would have it, the bringing forth of a new birth of freedom.
During the "Reagan Revolution," Klein argues, the notion of the `Entrepreneur As Hero' was buffed to a high gloss though the influence of right-wing think tanks whose pronouncements were reported by a cowed and obedient media. A decade later in the dot.com era, entrepreneurs were burnished to blinding sheen when the media fed the world images of swashbuckling venture capitalists who were touted as bringing forth a new millennium through the Internet. Klein maintains that George W. Bush's "public offering" -- the War on Terror - covered slavishly and avidly by the media, has been wildly successful, lining the pockets of investors in the new Homeland Security sector as promises of taxpayer money everlastingly flowing into the coffers of the military-industrial-energy complex have been fulfilled. This is the new "new economy:" the looting of the public sector through the now tried-and-true methods of disaster capitalism.
THE SHOCK DOCTRINE reveals the many wounds that disaster capitalism has inflicted upon the body politic both here in the U.S. and throughout the world over the past 25 years. It is a breathtaking achievement. Highly recommended.
 Ambitious, but deeply flawed November 2, 2007
228 out of 395 found this review helpful
I enjoyed Klein's previous effort, "No Logo." She was better qualified to comment on advertising and the media than on macroeconomics and international political history.
The Shock Doctrine condemns "Chicago School" economics and Milton Friedman in particular. I won't go into the specifics, but the basic idea here is that democracy is incompatible with capitalism, and that free markets (which according to Klein are evil things indeed) result from catastrophic events such as natural disasters and revolutions. Within the book, Klein asserts that Friedman and his ideas were essentially behind the atrocities of Pinochet in Chile. This is not supported by the historical record, and as Timothy Lee points out:
"just as Michael Moore's endorsement of Cuba's health care system doesn't constitute endorsement of Castro's dictatorial rule, so Friedman's endorsement for Chilean tax or pension policies don't constitute an endorsement of coups, purges, or torture."
The Shock Doctrine, and the film by the same name, uses a number of specious rhetorical techniques, such as slippery slope, post hoc ergo proptor hoc reasoning, and blatant pathetic appeals. The film mimics the style of conspiracy theorist films (see "Spare Change").
Friedman maintained that freedom depends upon the ability to make unfettered economic choices. In other words, there is a connection between economic liberty and personal liberty. Klein is not interested in this. She wants government guarantees, and puts more emphasis on wanting than deserving. Capitalism is an economic theory, not an ethical system--to criticize it for not being inherently ethical is like complaining that the Easter Bunny didn't bring you presents, when that is the job of Santa Claus. Are there problems in capitalism? Absolutely. These problems are not the result of free trade--they are the result of corruption, and in many cases, government interference in the private sector (see the S&L scandal to see what I mean).
Klein apparently wants some kind of mixed system of free market economics with socialist policies and guarantees. This describes France, where the unemployment rate has been consistently around 8-12% for the last 10 years (double the U.S. rate), young people are basically barred from the workforce, ethnic discontent and violence is rising (lots of burning cars and riots), and productivity is falling. And yes, France has plenty of corruption.
The text is at best anecdotal and polemical. When one finally gets through the 400 pages, they may quickly recall G.K. Chesterton's remark:
"The reformer is always right about what is wrong, but seldom right about what is right."
The best thing to do is to read Friedman in the original and make up your own mind.
An amazing look at "democracy" and "freedom" September 20, 2007
210 out of 293 found this review helpful
My copy was barely delivered yesterday, and I slept last night, so I haven't finished it. That will come soon, though.
This is an expose of the evil that is the modern American policies. The descriptions of how torture is used in implementing radical economic change are enough to make you feel sick to your stomach. The author tries hard to expose what goes on underneath the friendly veneer of public policy and shows that history is repeating itself. The people the CIA tortured in MKUltra were just guinea pigs for the people that the US Government is torturing now. The people of Chile, who had their government overthrown by US influence and support, were just guinea pigs for the people that the United States is currently overthrowing and democratizing. And it just goes on and on, as if there is a never ending spigot of evil that is washing over the world.
I find this to be an altogether frightening look at the world today, and it makes me even more ashamed to be a citizen of the United States of America. Everyone should read this book.
More old wine in new bottles September 29, 2007
97 out of 282 found this review helpful
There is nothing new or original, and certainly nothing even remotely well-reasoned in Klein's vitrolic, stupid, tirade. She once again rolls out the tired libel against Friedman that he offered advice to Pinochet- as if he was advising Pinochet to be a brutal dictator- and then attempts to use this as the cornerstone of her indictment of capitalism, and of free society.
Hard-core radical socialists like Klein constantly confound capitalism- which is precisely what is practiced ion the third world village markets they so admire- with a form of government. Yet they remain curiously ignorant of the crimes committed by large scale socialist workers paradises they so admire- like Mao's China, Stalin's USSR, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, who killed millions of their own citizens in the name of building their own particular ideal society.
There is nothing in this book that would convince a thoughtful person of the truth of Klien's thesis, but that's not the audience for her book. She's writing for the mass of young radicals, entranced by what Arendt called the "eroticism of terror", who are ignorant of history, of economics, and of human behavior, and who are more than willing to buy into any thesis, no matter how poorly supported, that attacks Western society. And these readers will eat this stuff up.
Open minded readers might pass by this, and other contemporary and fashionable rants, and take a look at Hayek's 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, to learn just what comes from societies of the type that Klein so admires.
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