09.30.07
Shock Doctrine and that ‘fascist pig’ Mr. Friedman
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Hardcover)
by Naomi Klein (Author)
I am finishing up Klein’s superb Shock Doctrine, and if you are anyone not connected with the economic elite I recommend reading this book to figure if you have been fooled lately.
I try hard to withstand the disinformation rife in the major media on the issues of politics, economy and ideology, have studied Marx on ideology with its warning to not be fooled, but I know from hard experience that one’s batting average here is comparable to that of baseball players (i.e. always below .500, at best, etc…)
Klein’s tour de force does something that has become rare for leftists: produces a critique of economic issues that is clear, not laden with leftwing shibboleths, and able to get down to cases with what should have been obvious to all of us, but which never fully connects as we sluggishly process disinformation and half-truths.
I was worried at first that Klein’s generalization about ’shock doctrine’ would be one-sided, or put the data into false analogy mode, but was surprised at the deft way she makes her case, connecting the dots on both the legacy of ‘mind control’ (so-called) research, and Milton Friedman’s brand of economics, so heavily disguised behind its mesmerizing ‘freedom’ pitch. The portrait of the influence of Friedman (often with his direct intervention) and the Chicago School is a story that needed to be told, one that few can seem to tell, and the sheer mass of new information here makes an overwhelming case. The latter is the key value of the book, the simple facts of the history of neo-liberalism and the laundered economic history we get from the News, NY Times certainly not excepted.
There are a lot of devastating revelations of fact in this book for anyone not ‘fully informed’ in a busy world (that means me, you speak for yourself), starting with the Pinochet era, moving to the Russian shock doctrine case, and coming to the truly mind-boggling case of the shock doctrine in Iraq.
I can assure that you have been brainwashed here, and I am sure you are sure you are not, so read the book.
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.)
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