| The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | 
 enlarge | Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  261 reviews
Sales Rank: 120
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 256 more reviews...
 Important reading for contemporary understanding today. September 5, 2008
This book gets my highest rating. Probably one of the most important books I've read on contemporary culture. Ranks up there with Noam Chomsky and G. Edward Griffin's "The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve". READ THIS BOOK !!!
Shock Doctrine August 31, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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?
The second colonial pillage and the essence of dehumanization August 30, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
A shock for America? August 27, 2008
2 out of 3 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
2 out of 3 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!
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