Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77 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

The Ida Tarbell of Our Time
Naomi Klein has exposed Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys" just as Ida Tarbell exposed John D. Rockefeller in an earlier time. In other words, beware of those who worship "markets"--usually such worshippers leave out the fact that the only capitalistic enterprises they worship are the ones they control. Any competing companies (or schools of thought) must be destroyed.

Is it any wonder that Friedman became a god at the University of Chicago, the House that Rockefeller built? Rockefeller destroyed the lives of his competitors, and was anything but a free market man. He and men like Carngegie didn't believe in capitalism for others--they were monopolists, and used government to protect their monopolies, just as the multinationals do today.

Klein does an excellent job of ripping off the "free market" mask of Friedman, just as Tarbell did of Rockefeller. You can bet that she has made herself many enemies among the monopolists of today, just as Tarbell did. I appreciate her fearlessness and point of view.

I only give the book 4 stars instead of 5 because, halfway through it, I was needing to come up for air--she proves her point over and over and over again, and it becomes very depressing after a while. I asked myself how Friedman could be such a hero to so many, if only half of what she fully documents is true.

The "free marketers/free traders" want us to be slave of corporations. The socialists/communists want us to be slaves of the state. The fascists want us to be slaves to both. Who wants us to be free? None of the above. Pick your poison, folks. They're all the same in the end, and they all despise the Constitution and the Bill of Rights--whether Bush or Kerry, Obama or McCain, they all will sell us down the river for a mess of pottage.

An important book, one that will change most people's view of so-called "free markets".

The Dark Side of Unrestricted Capitalism
The Shock Doctrine is a fascinating exposé on the dark side of unrestricted capitalism when it is implemented through blackmail, extortion, military force, and the suppression of democracy. Naomi Klein provides numerous examples over the last 50 years of countries who upon falling into financial and economic crises, desperately turn to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund for financial and economic assistance to stabilize and rebuild their economies. These countries soon discover that the World Bank and IMF are staunch promoters of capitalism and free-market economics, and will only provide aid on the condition that unrestricted capitalist policies be instantaneously and shockingly adopted by these countries, using lethal force if necessary, to suppress existing socialist ideologies and organizations, and even to suppress the will of the countries people who may be democratically opposed. This is what Klein refers to as "disaster capitalism", the introduction of unrestricted free-market economics in crisis and disaster situations with the short-term goal of engaging in excessive profiteering, and the long-term goal of assuming absolute control of those economies. And when disaster capitalism is implemented with the shock therapy approach normally associated with modern torture techniques, we have what Klein refers to as the "shock doctrine".

In every example cited by Klein, where countries were literally forced to adopt unrestricted free-market policies (privatization, deregulation, trade liberalization, cessation of government spending, cessation of unionization, suppression of democratic assembly, unrestricted foreign ownership, unwarranted price increases, higher taxation, and intentional mass unemployment) in order to receive financial and economic aid, these countries went into an economic death spiral as their state resources and infrastructure were sold away to foreign owners for cents on the dollar, and the foreign owners were under no obligation to re-invest back into the countries economy. The financial assistance received from the World Bank and IMF was not used to benefit the newly created masses of poor and jobless people who needed it most, but instead was used to benefit the promoters of disaster capitalism.

The only drawback to Klein's book is that she tends to blame disaster capitalism on its economic architects, and not on the governments and corporations who sponsor it. Consequently, Klein's portrayal of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics as evil incarnate is unwarranted. There is nothing wrong with capitalism and free-market economics when it is implemented under the right conditions. Klein fails to recognize the fact that these economists were acting not just as economic agents of the World Bank and IMF, but also as foreign policy agents of the US government, and globalization agents of American multinational corporations. Klein also fails to acknowledge that these same governments and corporations were engaging in dishonest, unethical, undemocratic, and even criminal behavior when promoting their self-serving political, social, and economic agendas. One fact is clear from Klein's book, disaster capitalism as a means to globalization and American world dominance will not work in countries that embody true democracy.

Nothing new here, move along
The only thing that is true, and has been known in fact for a century, is that dramatic events cause change. On this I can agree with Ms. Klein, and only that.

Where this book careens off into left field, is by blaming this all on Milton Friedman and labelling it Friedmanism - all on the basis of a quote, and completely ignoring the history of the Nazis and the Kristallnacht, or the Marxists and the July Days in Russia. Milton Friedman made an observation (why certainly - he's Jewish, the people who suffered disproportionately from the effects of such kinds of propaganda under both regimes), but he surely did not invent the method. Blame the Marxists and the Nazis for perfecting that.

Do yourself a favour, and buy the The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, his thesis is free of partisan politics and delves far further with laser sharp understanding, into how change through improbable events can happen.