More from this Interview. Part 1: Naomi Klein Warns Europe May Water Down Paris Accord to Win Support from Trump; Part 2: Naomi Klein: We Are Seeing the Shock.
Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine Metropolitan Books 576 pages ISBN: Edition - 2007 PDF 7,5 MB 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.
Naomi Klein
A shocking investigation of “disaster capitalism”, based on Naomi Klein’s proposition that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance. The Shock Doctrine is the latest documentary from acclaimed director Michael Winterbottom, co-directed by Mat Whitecross. Based on Naomi Klein’s bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine argues that America’s ‘free market’ policies have come to dominate the world through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries. Read more on next page. We’re all familiar with economic shock therapy, the idea that sometimes a massive destabilisation of the economy is the first step towards recovery.
What Naomi Klein argues in her book, ‘The Shock Doctrine’, is that chaos is not just an occasionally necessary precursor of reform, but it rather exploited or at worst engineered by reform’s proponents, because the consequences of the changes proposed would not be accepted by the people if offered to them a la carte in a less pressured environment. Both the film and the book argue that governments all over the world exploit natural disasters, economic crises and wars to push through radical free market policies.
Klein calls this ‘disaster capitalism’ and in her view, disaster capitalism is as effective as psychiatric shock therapy at wiping our collective memory. The film concludes that the result is often catastrophic for ordinary people and hugely beneficial to big corporations.
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The documentary also adds to Klein’s thesis – which was written before the recent market turmoil – and includes an analysis of how the financial world got into its current troubled state.