Book Alert / The Shock Doctrine

The Shock Doctrine -- The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, Metropolitan Books '07, 558 pages, ISBN #0805079831. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

At the time of the Iraqi invasion in 2003, President Bush spoke of the anticipated "shock and awe" the Saddam Hussein regime would experience, causing it ultimately to topple. But it was not only the Iraqis who felt shock and awe; the manmade disaster caused a shock effect in America as well and offered a signal opportunity for American business to rush in and exploit the resultant chaos. Predictably, leftist journalist Naomi Klein devotes much ink to the Halliburton Corporation, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, which profited wildly from contracts to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure in the wake of the invasion.

Klein doesn't see Iraq as a stand-alone example of what she calls "the shock doctrine" but rather the fruition of an economic strategy devised some 35 years ago by the late University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, who first learned how to exploit a large-scale government crisis when he advised Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s. "Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy -- taax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation," she writes.

Along the way, Friedman's classrooms created a diaspora of like-minded economists, spreading the shock doctrine throughout  the world. Along the way, it picked up such followers as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. She explains "how moments of collective crisis -- 9/11, the tsunami, or Hurricane Katrina for example -- have been used as opportunities for rapid-fire corporate raids on societies reeling from shock," a phenomenon she labels "disaster capitalism."

Klein's remedy for shock treatment is information that will allow societies to anticipate it in the wake of disasters and thus make them shock resistant. Klein is a columnist for The Nation and The Guardian and the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.