Book 67 - Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine"
Oct. 4th, 2018 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveNaomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine" (Penguin)
Naomi Klein is very good at connecting the dots left unconnected by our corporate media. In The Shock Doctrine, she takes on an even bigger subject: something she dubs "disaster capitalism."
The book's anti-hero is Milton Friedman, the recently deceased Nobel-winning economist who championed "free markets" while deriding any and all government control over big business. For this Friedman was lionized by corporate America (of course), and by the seventies, his disciples had control of the U.S. government...which is proof, among other things, that government is merely the shadow cast by big business over society (as said John Dewey).
Friedman's scorched-earth economic theories are often championed as a force for "freedom," but Klein lays out the plentiful evidence that "free markets" really only create freedom for capital and the tiny minority that controls it -- everyone else is left destitute. So how have they come to dominate large sections of the globe, from Russia to Asia to South America? Through shocks -- coups, economic blackmail (cf. the IMF and World Bank), natural disasters like recent tsunamis, 9/11, and so on. Basically, since policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many cannot be made attractive to a democratic majority, democracy must be subverted in order to set markets free.
Klein explicitly compares economic shock to the torture methods developed for the CIA in the 20th century, the same ones that were used in Iraq and at Guantanamo right now and the techniques of an economic/military power must use in order to enforce the kind of free-market subcontractor zone we've created in Iraq. People will not accept slavery, not even economic slavery unless broken -- and so proponents of Chicago School economics have happily collaborated with despots like Pinochet, Yeltsin, or Putin calmly accepting the murder of innocents and the impoverishments of millions as the cost of creating a pure, unfettered marketplace (for themselves).
A lot of things made a lot more sense to me once I read this book -- economics is not a science (no matter what economists say), but it is truly dismal, and my ignorance of free-market theory made it impossible for me to understand many "shocks" that have happened in my lifetime. The Shock Doctrine is an essential book, in my opinion.
Naomi Klein is very good at connecting the dots left unconnected by our corporate media. In The Shock Doctrine, she takes on an even bigger subject: something she dubs "disaster capitalism."
The book's anti-hero is Milton Friedman, the recently deceased Nobel-winning economist who championed "free markets" while deriding any and all government control over big business. For this Friedman was lionized by corporate America (of course), and by the seventies, his disciples had control of the U.S. government...which is proof, among other things, that government is merely the shadow cast by big business over society (as said John Dewey).
Friedman's scorched-earth economic theories are often championed as a force for "freedom," but Klein lays out the plentiful evidence that "free markets" really only create freedom for capital and the tiny minority that controls it -- everyone else is left destitute. So how have they come to dominate large sections of the globe, from Russia to Asia to South America? Through shocks -- coups, economic blackmail (cf. the IMF and World Bank), natural disasters like recent tsunamis, 9/11, and so on. Basically, since policies that benefit the few at the expense of the many cannot be made attractive to a democratic majority, democracy must be subverted in order to set markets free.
Klein explicitly compares economic shock to the torture methods developed for the CIA in the 20th century, the same ones that were used in Iraq and at Guantanamo right now and the techniques of an economic/military power must use in order to enforce the kind of free-market subcontractor zone we've created in Iraq. People will not accept slavery, not even economic slavery unless broken -- and so proponents of Chicago School economics have happily collaborated with despots like Pinochet, Yeltsin, or Putin calmly accepting the murder of innocents and the impoverishments of millions as the cost of creating a pure, unfettered marketplace (for themselves).
A lot of things made a lot more sense to me once I read this book -- economics is not a science (no matter what economists say), but it is truly dismal, and my ignorance of free-market theory made it impossible for me to understand many "shocks" that have happened in my lifetime. The Shock Doctrine is an essential book, in my opinion.
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