The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism, by Naomi Klein

I sought out this title after seeing a short interview with the author on The Daily Show. The interview took place during the protests in Madison Wisconsin over the union-busting bill proposed by the Governor and Republican legislature. In the interview, Klein described how disasters, such as the current recession and Hurricane Katrina are used by political and corporatist entities to advance their agendas: i.e., while People are disoriented, rush in and pass new rules. The book is a very detailed treatise documenting how economic shock therapy has been forced on countries and economies from Chile in 1973 to Russia in 1991, to most recently Iraq. The ‘shock therapy! is based on Milton Friedman's free market doctrines, but often incorporating forceful suppresion of local populations and resulting in throwing thousands into Poverty for decades. Klein is a journalist, not an economist: the work is billed as investigative journalism. I don't have a sufficient breath of understanding of economics or history to judge the theory as presented, but if even half of the examples described in the treatise are true, it’s no wonder much of lhe rest of the world looks at the U.S., IMF, and western capitalism and our offers of aid’ wilh great skepticism. I intend to look up some reviews of this work. Published in 2oo7. 466 Pages, with 6o Pages of notes.