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| The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | 
 enlarge | Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  318 reviews
Sales Rank: 179
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 720
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 0312427999
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.122
EAN: 9780312427993
ASIN: 0312427999
Publication Date: June 24, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
 Shockingly Powerful July 14, 2008
91 out of 101 found this review helpful
The late Milton Friedman, the renowned economist, believed that democracy and a free-market economy went hand-in-hand, that the greatest threat to both was nationalization, government regulation, and social spending. He preached this philosophy to his disciples at the University of Chicago School of Economics, and they would go forth spreading the Gospel according to the Book of Milton.
There is also the International Monetary Fund, an agency founded after World War II to help struggling countries and their economies get back on their feet. Many of its managers and policy makers will be graduates of the Chicago School of Economics, and they will begin to impose the Friedman creed wherever possible.
There is only one thing wrong. No population seems to vote in the people who support their brand of economics. Its first success is when a socialist, democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, is overthrown and killed when the presidential palace is stormed by fascists. Augusto Pinochet comes into power and immediately places the "Chicago boys" in charge of the economy. With the death of price controls and lunch programs, Chileans find themselves spending one quarter of their monthly salaries just to buy bread. They will leave hours earlier for work than usual because they can no longer afford public transportation. Even Chile's social security program, once a model of efficiency is privatized, becoming virtually worthless overnight. Chilean children begin fainting in school from lack of food or milk and many stop attending altogether.
The story of Chile will be repeated in Argentina, Bolivia, China, Peru, Poland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Russia where the IMF will demand that borrowers meet Draconian conditions before they lend money. In each case these austerity measures will be made overnight, all at once. A shocked population will come to their senses if such radical changes are made over time. They will be able to organize, mobilize and challenge the implementation of such policies. It has to come all at once, right after elections, a coup, or a hurricane when the population will be too dazed and disorganized to respond. This will be the shock, or as author Naomi Klein calls it, shock doctrine. For those who are still lucid, there is the next step in the shock doctrine, terroize, torture, or make them disappear.
In each case, in each country, prices on food and other common items will go through the roof, the number of destitute will increase exponentially, and democracy will be squashed. In China, the communist elite will impose these changes on the masses while ensuring that they will profit handsomely from the economic and social upheaval. President Clinton will cheer the economic shock doctrine instituted by Boris Yeltsin as he dissolves the Court and the Parliament, bringing the Russian army out to attack the latter, which killed more than 300 people and several deputies. A new class of super mega apparatchiks will emerge increasing the divide between the "have mores" and the "have nothings," and Russians will put up with a few KGB murders and disappearances for the promise of stability that Vladimir Putin will provide.
The Polish people, fed up with the broken promises of Solidarity who succumbed to IMF demands to relieve them of their crushing debt, will be thrown out of office in 1996 elections. Nelson Mandela will focus so much on achieving political control of South Africa he will neglect the real political power of controlling the economic engines that run the nation. He soon discovers that without economic power, he has no political muscle. He becomes a slave of economic apartheid. Shanty towns will get larger and people will become poorer. The population is disillusioned with their new-found "equality." The tsunami in Sri Lanka will allow the hoteliers to make a deal with the government, and place security guards around the beaches of what once belonged to villagers who fished from there for hundreds of years. After all, what right did they have to be there? The smell of fish made their guests complain. They will be driven inland where they will be given boats and houses, just no access to water to fish.
But that could never be allowed to happen here, or could it? One of the first things President George W. Bush does after he finally realizes what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina is remove union wage scale that contractors would have to pay to laborers. (After all, it is the corporations that must benefit the most from disaster capitalism, not the people of New Orleans). The shock has begun as developers are already seeing how they can take over the utterly destroyed neighborhoods of the poor and turn them into luxury condos and hotels. Charter schools are replacing the public schools and teachers. Contractors will wake up illegal laborers in the night to tell them that the Immigration officers are coming to arrest them. They will run away without having been paid. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, once a functional, effective, national emergency response unit, has had so much work farmed out to contractors, it cannot mount an effective response to the disaster. They will pay top dollar for roofing that can done at a fraction of the cost. They will supply trailers for homeless that are made of material unsafe to breathe, and people will die in a stadium because no one can take care of them.
In Iraq, the local population rose up after our invasion and began to elect their own leaders and councils. They announced plans to take over city governments, services and industry. When Iraqis were asked what they wanted more of when they were surveyed, they clamored for more government jobs, but L. Paul Bremer wasn't about to allow democracy to get in the way of disaster capitalism. He ordered the military to disband all local democratic initiatives, which he replaced with a council not chosen by the Iraqi people, but by him.
George Bush talks democracy (in Iraq), but walks capitalism by performing a Marshal Plan in reverse. The original plan implemented right after World War II called for keeping foreign investors out of Germany. Our government wanted the Germans to be able to build up their own industry and wealth. Not so in Iraq. Unemployed and starving Iraqis watched how American contractors brought in cheap Asian labor to rebuild their country. Iraqi unemployment remains at approximately sixty percent. American oil companies and American banks make long-term contracts with the new Iraqi government, and the IMF wants Iraq to sell off its own oil industry to foreigners. The second largest military commitment in Iraq, after the Americans, will be mercenaries.
Does anyone wonder why there is an insurgency? "No 'capitalization' without representation!"
The author makes it clear. In every country that holds free elections, no one votes for the shock doctrine of disaster capitalism. No one will vote away social programs, controls, or selling off their industries and companies to foreign investors. Klein's conclusion? Capitalism and democracy are not inherently compatible as Friedman always believed. It was just the opposite.
This book is powerful and moving. As I reread my review, I feel I have not done her book justice in relating the power and depth of Naomi Klein's words. Her documentation is exceptional. Her ability to craft together different events and present them in a coherent and believable hypothesis is necromantic.
Once in a while you find a book, a special book, one you keep as a reference, a "go-to" one. This is such a book. It is one of the two most important I have read for 2008. I have enough admiration for this woman's work that I would buy anything she writes, without hesitation. Her writing will hold your attention.
"The Shock Doctrine" is eye-opening and of course, absolutely shocking.
July 14, 2008
Bastille Day--How Appropriate.
 This book has huge flaws in it. September 30, 2007
87 out of 197 found this review helpful
This book has huge flaws in it. She denounces the Chicago school of economics and Milton Friedman saying that Democracy and Chicago School economics are incompatible with democracy. What she favors is a Scandinavian model.
But Sweden has adopted Milton Friedman's proposals of vouchers system and of public private competition in education 1992. Not the elimination of public education but public choice. Contrary to her thesis Sweden's privatization of public schools did happen democratically in and 15 years after the voucher system Sweden hasn't devolved into a authoritarian fascist state.
It also disproves her theory that there is conflict between Scandinavian model versus Milton Friedman liberalism because Sweden has adopted many of the reforms pushed for by Milton Friedman.
The economist magazine "Free to choose, and Learn" May 3rd 2007
So the private sector, by increasing the total number of places available, can ease the mad scramble for the best schools in the state sector (bureaucrats, by contrast, dislike paying for extra places in popular schools if there are vacancies in bad ones).
The strongest evidence against this criticism comes from Sweden, where parents are freer than those in almost any other country to spend as they wish the money the government allocates to educating their children. Sweeping education reforms in 1992 not only relaxed enrolment rules in the state sector, allowing students to attend schools outside their own municipality, but also let them take their state funding to private schools, including religious ones and those operating for profit. The only real restrictions imposed on private schools were that they must run their admissions on a first-come-first-served basis and promise not to charge top-up fees (most American voucher schemes impose similar conditions).
The result has been burgeoning variety and a breakneck expansion of the private sector. At the time of the reforms only around 1% of Swedish students were educated privately; now 10% are, and growth in private schooling continues unabated.
Anders Hultin of Kunskapsskolan, a chain of 26 Swedish schools founded by a venture capitalist in 1999 and now running at a profit, says its schools only rarely have to invoke the first-come-first-served rule--the chain has responded to demand by expanding so fast that parents keen to send their children to its schools usually get a place. So the private sector, by increasing the total number of places available, can ease the mad scramble for the best schools in the state sector (bureaucrats, by contrast, dislike paying for extra places in popular schools if there are vacancies in bad ones).
If the people want government spending Keynesian economics and market economics can only be implemented through authoritarian regimes why was Ronald Reagan ever elected and reelected President? But you would never get idea by reading her book she describes the Chicago school as radicals far right ideas that are incompatible with democracy. But right or wrong Chicago School ideas of having the free market rule over government regulation and central planning are not radical they are US policy of the last 27 years.
The 1980 election central issue was the role of government and government spending.
Jimmy Carter's platform was a classic Keynesian during the recession he pushed for higher government spending the spend your way out of a recession philosophy. Price and wage controls focus on unemployment and not inflation. He was a classic Keynesian
Ronald Reagan's platform was for less government spending fighting inflation privatizations and deregulation and market liberalism.
Reagan was a classical liberalism.
In order for her thesis to hold Klein must prove that Ronald Reagan was not democratically elected and ruled by authoritarian means. She does neither and her thesis fails.
What bothers me about the book is that she selects facts that only conform to her world view. She provides the account that Nixon opposed the Chicago School economics because he feared he would loose the election. Whether Nixon would have lost is anybody's guess and to theorize the outcome is a to make a counter-factual argument. This is precisely what Naomi Klein has done and her entire argument rests on. What we do know is that the last 4 Presidents Reagan GHW Bush Clinton GW Bush ran on a pro market deregulation and all of them won the election. All of these facts and that Sweden and a long list of democratically elected governments pushed through Chicago School reforms point the opposite conclusion.
Naomi Klein in her book only includes evidence that conforms to her world view and rejects the rest. Therefore she is either misinformed (which is not likely) or she is trying indoctrinate people regardless of the facts.
I am not alone in this the Tom Redburn of the NY Times in the article "Its All Grand Capitalist Conspiracy" September 29 2007 described the book as "Ms. Klein's goal in writing "The Shock Doctrine" is not so much to persuade others to join her anti-globalization, anti-corporatist cause as it is to reinforce the dreams of those already convinced of its righteousness. "
He goes on to say that the book is "her argument constantly overreaches, because her goal is not really to tame capitalism so much as to taunt it.
While Ms. Klein occasionally nods to Scandinavian-style social democracy as an alternative to the "neo-liberal" American-style model she condemns, it turns out that nothing short of a socialist utopia -- an economy of worker collectives running environmentally benign enterprises with nationalized banks to direct investment -- will actually do.
What she is most blind to is the necessary role of entrepreneurial capitalism in overcoming the inherent tendency of any established social system to lapse into stagnation, as all too many socialist countries -- and some nonsocialist ones, too -- have shown. Like it or not, without strong economic growth and its inevitable disruptions , there is little hope for creating the healthy middle classes necessary to sustain democracies, much less an improvement in the lot of the poor and dispossessed Ms. Klein seeks to represent. And yes, that means some people will become rich and powerful."
Another flaw in her argument is that she insinuates the shock doctrine is the brain child of one person Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman's was the brain child of Chicago School Economics. But the term shock therapy was coined by Jeffery Sachs of Harvard. Sachs was not a intellectual disciple of colleague Friedman.
The other claim that Milton Friedman advocated the use of torture. Friedman never advocated the use of force to compel people to conform. In fact he argued against it. All Governments compel people to divulge their property through taxes. The larger the government more state intervention the more government must compel people through force or the threat of force. Socialism cannot exist with out Government compelling people to divest their property. From the leftist perspective taking property from individual is theft but taking property from the individual in order for it to be given back to the collective is social justice.
Capitalism in its best form and relies on voluntary exchanges. No one is compelling you to buy this book from Amazon.com both the buyer and the seller voluntarily agree to the terms the price and the shipping arrangement. That same fundamental right is not available in highly regulated economies or state owned socialist utopias because your compelled to follow the rules of the state.
We should not be compelled as the poor are in the inner city to give our money to schools that are inefficient corrupt and mismanaged. Individuals should have the right to give their tax dollars to the school that represents their best interests. This is one of the core believes of the Chicago School is that you can spend your money more efficiently than the government can.
In the book the words she uses to describe the Chicago School are extreme radical but the ideas of market economics free trade zones have a long a track record of being successful implemented around the world. In an ironic twist many of the Chicago School proposals are more popular in Europe than the are in the US.
I find it odd that anti-globalization anti-large corporations critics use large corporate websites such as amazon.com and youtube google to disseminate their anti-corporate dogma.
If Naomi Klein is this wrong, Milton Friedman must be right October 5, 2007
67 out of 188 found this review helpful
To quote Beck: in the age of Friedman I was no Chicago boy. I am sympatetic of neoliberals and pragmatic democrats. I loathe sad little men like Norquist or other pseudo-intellectual point men. However, whenever I read more than 50 pages of any book authored by Klein, I am always on the verge of joining the Freemen of Montana. Before you make my mistake, may I recommend that you watch the short documentary of the same name (directed by none other than A. Cuaron), listen to her speech to the NAACP (on YouTube), and to the "debate" between her and Greenspan (on Democracy Now!, and YouTube). Klein's book is really a palimpsest, whose original text is "The Corporation" (both a book and a movie). The metaphor is the same (capitalism as illness); so is the rethoric, and the use of linguist cliches ("the ground zero of counterrevolution"). But the main conceptual flaw is that the book is incredibly biased. It's very hard to ignore the tangible benefits of market-based reforms in great part of Asia, in the UK, in Chile. Yet, Klein pulls it. There are no statistics, no hard data or sources. Everything is portrayed to fit into a fantastically coordinated capitalist conspiracy theory in which the IMF and Global Warming are buddies, almost on a par with "Confession of an Economic Hit Man". The funniest thing though is to see Friedman portrayed as the intellectual puppet-master of the whole enterprise. What about Hayek, then? Milton is the real Dr. Evil, and his acolytes are sharks with laser beams on their backs. Unfortunately, Naomi Klein's insight into economic theory is worse than Austin Power's insight into female psychology.
This book is of course not aiming for serious scholarship. But even as a well-reasoned polemic, it falls short. Too self-righteous, and just a bit too ranting. Are this the best arguments the left have to offer? Read Amartya Sen, or Brookings Institution's papers for a reasoned view from the left. You may even read Friedman.
Has she read Friedman or did she do a "find word" and copy? May 20, 2008
64 out of 96 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 against a phantom opponent, whose ideas don't resemble anything Friedman actually believed or wrote. This would be obvious to anybody who actually read his works, in which he makes a case for individual liberty free of government intrusion, elimination of government handouts for corporations, and and organized democratic process that reflects the will of the people, while maintaining individual rights. 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. Klein gets the whole order reversed.
Milton decried imperialist takeoevers, corporate theft, or governments usurping power. To Friedman understood that excessive central power tends to disproportionately trample 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 afterwards individuals got to choose their schools is like saying that someone would be happy that his dad dies, because afterward he makes sure to keep his health in check. Katrina was just one horrific example of how the government failed people. And criticizing the effectiveness of government, or the people demanding change after such a tragedy hardly constitute as 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 government usually imposes on poor kids).
Friedman believed that all actions should be voluntary and consensual, 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.
Easily one of the top ten on the death of the American dream October 1, 2007
62 out of 82 found this review helpful
I read this book while crossing the Atlantic. The author has done something extraordinary, the equivalent of Silent Spring for industrial-era capitalism as an immoral form of human organization. This book is unique but also tightly linked to the books that I list below.
The conclusion of the book focuses on how Wall Street has discovered how to profit from mega-disasters and financial melt-downs, and contrary to popular belief, Wall Street makes money from these economic down-turns. It is the individual, and the indigenous owners who are forced to sell below market, that lose, every time.
The author's opening focus is on privatization, deregulation, and deep cuts in social spending, each as mandated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, with other nasty triggers demanded by the World Trade Organization, that have been systematically used to loot entire nations and their commonwealths--this is apart from the immoral predatory capitalism that uses bribes to clear areas of indigenous peoples so they can steal all the gold or other natural resources, and their only cost is the bribe, while the host peoples lose billions in natural resources.
The author teaches us that "disaster capitalism" is the next step above immoral predatory capitalism, in which wars and disasters have been privatized and the global military-industrial-prison-hospital complex has moved one step closer to displacing all governments.
She spends time discussion torture by dictators as a silent partner to the free-market crusade, and this is a good time to mention that the book is a standing condemnation of all that Milton Friedman and "the Chicago boys" inserted into the IMF and World Bank via their students.
She provides a helpful discussion of how believers in Armageddon, including the neo-conservatives, are motivated by the belief that there is such a thing as a clean slate, and that Africa without Africans, or Iraq without Iraqis, are both desirable for that reason.
She does a tremendous job of outlining the three shock waves of disaster capitalism:
1.Government Disaster/War out-sourced
2.Corporate looting
3.Police terrorism
A portion of the book focuses on the urgency of restoring unions and the middle class, unions because they protect fair wages that create a middle class. She stresses that the 1970's through the 1990's saw a global (but particularly southern hemisphere) campaign to use the cover of counter-terrorism to murder and terrorize union leaders. As a graduate of the Central American and Andean wars, I can certainly testify to the fact that government death squads were as about looting and killing opposition leaders, and I for one saw no terrorists, only indigenous people's at the end of their rope.
Interestingly the author singles out visionaries as being among the top targets for being hunted down and "disappeared." Visionaries counter the government lies that seek to rule by secrecy, impose scarcity, and concentrate wealth within a small elite.
The author damningly documents how eager corporations have been to work with dictators to create police states that eliminate unions and enslave peoples at wages that cannot support a family, much less create a middle class.
She focuses on national debt and on government corruption as the two pillars of social destruction. As a student of E. O. Wilson and Medard Gabel, and many others, I can testify that there is plenty of money for all of us to be virtual billionaires, but it is corruption and greed at the top, enabled by secrecy, that have allowed a handful to create a global class war and impoverish the 90% that do the hard work (see my list on this one).
I am utterly blown away by the author's overall assessment, in the middle of the book, to wit, that crisis is now used routinely to side-step reasoned democracy and completely halt political and social reform while furthering the ends of those who seek to concentrate wealth and power exclusive of the larger body of We the People.
The author is damning across the board of the failures of neoliberalism, which has been a "second pillage" of the looting of state-owned enterprises, following the first pillage, the looting of the natural resources of the commonwealth being targeted.
As part of this the author explicitly accuses the IMF of deliberately fostering crises in part by fabricating and manipulating statistics, or as the author puts it, "statistical malpractice."
The author suggests that unlike the Mexican bail-out, when Rubin was seeking to protect Wall Street investments, Asia was allowed to collapse financially because the US wanted to put an end to the prospects of their being a "third" way that was more balanced than either capitalism for the few on one side, or socialism for all on the other. This is especially noteworthy because Latin America is today pursuing a similar "third way" and very likely to succeed.
The author declares that Donald Rumsfeld's over-riding objective as Secretary of Defense was the privatization of war. The author tells us that he declared war on the Pentagon bureaucracy on 10 September (this is the same day that Congresswoman McKinney's was grilling him on the missing 2.3 trillion dollars). On 11 September the missile won Rumsfeld his war with the Pentagon bureaucracy *and* it destroyed the computers with all the records on the missing money.
The author goes on to document how the Bush Administration privatized Homeland Security across the board.
As the book draws to a close she reviews the history of corporate-driven foreign policy, summing it up in three steps:
1.Corporation suffers set-back in a foreign country
2.Politicians loyal to the corporation demonize the foreign country
3.Politicians "sell" US public on the need for regime change.
The author scorns political appointees, noting that their "service" these days is little more than a pre-raid reconnaissance.
She concludes by suggesting that disaster apartheid is leaving 25-60% of the populations as an underclass, destroyed middle classes, and creating walled cities for the elite, death and suffering for everyone else. Dubai is one such walled city.
Corporations are red-lining the world, using stocks, currency, and real estate markets to crash economies, buy cheap, and then restore with a sharp re-concentration of wealth.
Ending on a positive note, she suggests that We the People are in the process of reconstructing our own world, and while I did not see mention of the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER) or Interra and the other community-oriented systems, I believe she is correct, and that the Earth Intelligence Network, the Transpartisan Policy Institute, the People's Budget Office, are all part of taking back the power and the commonwealth.
This is a great and necessary book. Others (the first two DVDs) listed below reinforce her findings.
The Corporation
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
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