Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-24
• Released on: 2008-06-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 720 pages

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

From Publishers Weekly
The neo-liberal economic policies—privatization, free trade, slashed social spending—that the Chicago School and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses, argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are disastrous—depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth, by the author's accounting—their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market reforms the public would normally reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo) chronicles decades of such disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia's state economy to oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the privatization of New Orleans's public schools after Katrina; and the seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the Asian tsunami. Klein's economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market shock therapies to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people's economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Naomi Klein offers an antidote to those who herald globalization as the great equalizer of nations. The author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Klein links disparate events throughout the 20th and 21st centuries—the collapse of the Soviet Union, the atrocities in Chile under Pinochet, the post-tsunami crises in Sri Lanka, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the invasion of Iraq—to reveal the two-faced nature of capitalism. Critics agreed that the book—accessible and impeccably researched—is an important contribution to the debate over globalization. Some were less taken with Klein’s thesis, however. The Washington Post noted that Klein sees too many conspiracies instead of "the all-too-human pattern of chaos and confusion, good intentions and greed, playing out in the wake of catastrophes." Yet even Shashi Tharoor, a former UN Under-Secretary General, admitted Klein’s great usefulness in helping us understand "the shape and direction of our current Age of Uncertainty."
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Essential Reading
Considering the global political climate and the way policy decisions are created these days (witness the latest "crisis" of the economic variety in the US, for one), this book ought to be required reading for pretty much anyone who can or will at some point cast a vote, think about joining the political process, or breathe some amount of oxygen in the next 40 years. Understanding the underlying principles of who wields and forces agendas and power across the continents seems to be something that everyone ought to be interested in. Klein does a great job of tying some pretty wildly disparate ideas together and makes it not only relevant but essential to comprehending the world that we have wrought before us.

Shockingly Inept Scholarship
I suggest that everyone interested in this book listen to or read the analysis of this work at Reason magazine. It goes into more detail than I can here.

Let's get a few facts straight before I move on to my major criticism of this book: First, Friedman was opposed to the Iraq invasion. She completely neglects to mention this. Second, the students at Tiananmen Square were not protesting against the free market---they published a list of demands and turning back free market reforms was not on that list. If they had wanted what Klein claims they wanted, wouldn't they have said as much? Klein simply lies about the goals of the Tiananmen Square protests: She desecrates the memory of that glorious incident and those beautiful martyrs of freedom.

Sadly, there is nowhere nearly enough room to deal with every fallacy in this book. I strongly suggest that you track down each quote she uses and see for yourself whether her use of quotations (and facts) is at all accurate. You will see it is, for the most part, not. So I will focus on her main thesis, if it can be called that, since it isn`t much of a thesis and it really isn`t hers.

Naomi Klein's book is little more than a plagiarism of Leninist rhetoric. Lenin to railed on about the "imperial" nature of capitalism---even though the nation he founded would soon become the most "imperial" power in history. Her work is actually little more than a dumbed down version of Lenin's thesis regarding "excess production." It is a shoddy work of scholarship unworthy of a bachelors thesis. There are no facts supporting her ideas beyond a few misinterpreted remarks by Friedman.

There is no shock doctrine of free markets. Libertarians are, for the most part, a pacifistic bunch who only believe in using force when others use force first. Trying to draw a tie between the policies of the Bush administration and the views of economists like Friedman and Hayek is patently absurd---the Bush administration is not pro-markets: We can see that from the massive nationalization and socialization of the banking industry that is happening right now. The purpose of the "Forward Strategy of Freedom" (the quotes are ironic) was to establish unlimited republican democracy---not free markets. It leaves open the possibility of voting the free market down. Indeed, it allows women to vote in the very sharia law that oppresses them.

The real reason that catastrophes sometimes proceed the emergence of a free market is that free markets are able to adapt to changing conditions more quickly than socialized economies. Indeed, free and unregulated exchange is the natural condition of men when their is no interference from the state. Disasters disturb the operations of the state (and are frequently caused by the state) and so---when the big bully of government is gone---people resort to doing what is natural. Furthermore, many of the shocks Klein talks about occur because of the failures of socialism. Once socialism fails of its own accord (as Friedman, Mises, and Hayek all thought they would), people try "the other guy"---namely freedom.

If socialism were so awesome and correct, how could it be so easily disturbed or shocked by conspiratorial Cobdenites? The only answer---and the correct one---is that the failures intrinsic to socialism cause socialism to fail, not the conspiracies of free marketeers.

Any and all opposition to freedom should be suspect (and this work of shoddy scholarship is no exception). That is a sentiment that should ring true in the heart of every American---indeed, in every human heart. The great bullies of the world have all been fascists, communists, and religious communalists: And it should never been forgotten that two of these groups were unrepentant socialists: the fascists (both German and Italian) [Nazi means National Socialist Workers Party] and the communists were socialists.

One can only hope that Naomi Klein will next turn her thesis to an analysis WWII and claim that Churchill decided to attack the Nazis because he wanted to make way for free markets.

[And if some idiot comes on here telling you how free the German economy was, he can shove it. Confiscating the holding of large parts of your population is not freedom. In Germany the government had final say on how everyone used his property---that is not private ownership.]

Truth may hurt you
The best thing about this book is that neither the book nor its author will ever be dismissed as another case of conspiracy-mania - it is so well built, researched and argumented. In my mind, it obviously follows in the steps of "The Prince" by Machiavelli, since it says not what men should do but what they are actually doing (I am paraphrasing somebody else's praise of Machiavelli's work). For this reason, I believe that this book is a must read for anyone interested in serious understanding of modern politics.
I was tempted though to rate the book not with five but with four stars. I admired the exposure - sometimes even painful to read - of the latest techniques developed by the richest interests in modern powerplays. But I did not find any clear recognition of the fact that society at both national and international levels has to have a rightful place for these interests, since they are an integral part of it. Nor did I see any ideas about a reasonable way forward and a means for other parts of society to engage these rich and powerful interests - in a truly democratic way; that is, ways and means which will allow us to prevent all the worst effects of, and to keep in check greed-driven disaster-capitalistic policies, while at the same time respecting all the democratically legitimate rights of the super-rich who are and, I am convinced, will always be an indispensable and useful part of any modern society - if it is to be free.
How does modern free and democratic society develop media, think tanks, etc, that would be on a par with those put in place by the super-rich?
How does it organise a political action that would be as well staffed and run - and as efficient?
These - and many others - are the very tough questions to be answered. Without answers to them, books like this one hurt us - as they should - but don't provide much help.