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Whistle Stopper - The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
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List Price: $28.00
Our Price: $15.99
Your Save: $ 12.01 ( 43% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Metropolitan Books
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.122
EAN: 9780805079838
ISBN: 0805079831
Label: Metropolitan Books
Manufacturer: Metropolitan Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 576
Publication Date: 2007-09-18
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Release Date: 2007-09-18
Studio: Metropolitan Books
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Nothing new here, move along
Comment: The only thing that is true, and has been known in fact for a century, is that dramatic events cause change. On this I can agree with Ms. Klein, and only that.
Where this book careens off into left field, is by blaming this all on Milton Friedman and labelling it Friedmanism - all on the basis of a quote, and completely ignoring the history of the Nazis and the Kristallnacht, or the Marxists and the July Days in Russia. Milton Friedman made an observation (why certainly - he's Jewish, the people who suffered disproportionately from the effects of such kinds of propaganda under both regimes), but he surely did not invent the method. Blame the Marxists and the Nazis for perfecting that.
Do yourself a favour, and buy the The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, his thesis is free of partisan politics and delves far further with laser sharp understanding, into how change through improbable events can happen.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Eye opening
Comment: I would describe myself as reasonably well informed, economically literate, a Wall Street investor and Democrat. I found this book eye-opening, although I believe Klein is pushing a point of view which is frequently incorrect; e.g. privatization is not always bad, and Great Britain under Thatcher did achieve prosperity, while the Chinese middle class is vastly expanding. It is not so clear as Klein seems to imply that if the US had done the right things, the Iraqi invasion would have resulted in a democratic country.
What Klein does is draw lots of things together, and show the extent to which the extreme free market ideology of Milton Friedman and his many disciples dominated US foreign policy in so many countries, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and also the conduct of government under George W. Bush. Once again ideology, untempered by evidence and practicality, when given free reign, leads to disaster. Many of the practitioners of this ideology were self serving and corrupt, or at least blinded by vanity, but clearly a man like Jeffery Sachs, who is currently doing his best as he sees it for the very poor countries, was genuine in his profession of his goals.
Here are a few of the things which are important and which I hadn't fully known, or known at all: the use of torture to terrorize rather than extract information, and the early CIA interest in it; what happened in Chile to the Allende regime and the Chilean people, with US participation, was not a singular event but was replicated in several other Latin American countries; the pattern of foreign aid which relies on starting from scratch instead of taking advantage of local skills and resources, and the extent to which this occurred in Iraq and also in Sri Lanka and Lebanon; the extent of the waste and corruption in Iraq; how undemocratic Yeltsin was.
Customer Rating:
Summary: More relevant than most Americans will ever know
Comment: This book is an essential read considering the current economic situation. The vast majority of people including me have no idea of the details of how harmful some economic policies been. This book brings many of those details to light in a way that is both understandable and enthralling. The direct role that the American government and University of Chicago economists have played in both Chile and Russia's disastrous attempts at capitalism are shocking. In fact there are so many things that are shocking, I am somewhat surprised that the book was allowed to be published. (If more Americans read books, it probably would not have been.) Probably the most shocking to me was learning of Dr. Jeffery Sach'sThe End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time role in Russia during its rule by Yeltsin. It seems that he has dramatically altered his views on what is a good economic system for a society to thrive.
Disaster Capitalism has been experienced around the world. How much longer will it be before the US gets our shock? If people read this book, hopefully they will be informed and motivated to insist that we have a sound economic system in place.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Essential Reading
Comment: Considering the global political climate and the way policy decisions are created these days (witness the latest "crisis" of the economic variety in the US, for one), this book ought to be required reading for pretty much anyone who can or will at some point cast a vote, think about joining the political process, or breathe some amount of oxygen in the next 40 years. Understanding the underlying principles of who wields and forces agendas and power across the continents seems to be something that everyone ought to be interested in. Klein does a great job of tying some pretty wildly disparate ideas together and makes it not only relevant but essential to comprehending the world that we have wrought before us.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Shockingly Inept Scholarship
Comment: I suggest that everyone interested in this book listen to or read the analysis of this work at Reason magazine. It goes into more detail than I can here.
Let's get a few facts straight before I move on to my major criticism of this book: First, Friedman was opposed to the Iraq invasion. She completely neglects to mention this. Second, the students at Tiananmen Square were not protesting against the free market---they published a list of demands and turning back free market reforms was not on that list. If they had wanted what Klein claims they wanted, wouldn't they have said as much? Klein simply lies about the goals of the Tiananmen Square protests: She desecrates the memory of that glorious incident and those beautiful martyrs of freedom.
Sadly, there is nowhere nearly enough room to deal with every fallacy in this book. I strongly suggest that you track down each quote she uses and see for yourself whether her use of quotations (and facts) is at all accurate. You will see it is, for the most part, not. So I will focus on her main thesis, if it can be called that, since it isn`t much of a thesis and it really isn`t hers.
Naomi Klein's book is little more than a plagiarism of Leninist rhetoric. Lenin too railed on about the "imperial" nature of capitalism---even though the nation he founded would soon become the most "imperial" power in history. Her work is actually little more than a dumbed down version of Lenin's thesis regarding "excess production." It is a shoddy work of scholarship unworthy of a bachelors thesis. There are no facts supporting her ideas beyond a few misinterpreted remarks by Friedman.
There is no shock doctrine of free markets. Libertarians are, for the most part, a pacifistic bunch who only believe in using force when others use force first. Trying to draw a tie between the policies of the Bush administration and the views of economists like Friedman and Hayek is patently absurd---the Bush administration is not pro-markets: We can see that from the massive nationalization and socialization of the banking industry that is happening right now. The purpose of the "Forward Strategy of Freedom" (the quotes are ironic) was to establish unlimited republican democracy---not free markets. It leaves open the possibility of voting the free market down. Indeed, it allows women to vote in the very sharia law that oppresses them.
The real reason that catastrophes sometimes proceed the emergence of a free market is that free markets are able to adapt to changing conditions more quickly than socialized economies. Indeed, free and unregulated exchange is the natural condition of men when there is no interference from the state. Disasters disturb the operations of the state (and are frequently caused by the state) and so---when the big bully of government is gone---people resort to doing what is natural. Furthermore, many of the shocks Klein talks about occur because of the failures of socialism. Once socialism fails of its own accord (as Friedman, Mises, and Hayek all thought they would), people try "the other guy"---namely freedom.
If socialism were so awesome and correct, how could it be so easily disturbed or shocked by conspiratorial Cobdenites? The only answer---and the correct one---is that the failures intrinsic to socialism cause socialism to fail, not the conspiracies of free marketeers.
Any and all opposition to freedom should be suspect (and this work of shoddy scholarship is no exception). That is a sentiment that should ring true in the heart of every American---indeed, in every human heart. The great bullies of the world have all been fascists, communists, and religious communalists: And it should never been forgotten that two of these groups were unrepentant socialists: the fascists (both German and Italian) [Nazi means National Socialist Workers Party] and the communists were socialists.
One can only hope that Naomi Klein will next turn her thesis to an analysis WWII and claim that Churchill decided to attack the Nazis because he wanted to make way for free markets.
[And if some idiot comes on here telling you how free the German economy was, he can shove it. Confiscating the holding of large parts of your population is not freedom. In Germany the government had final say on how everyone used his property---that is not private ownership.]
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Editorial Reviews:
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The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global free market has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq
In her groundbreaking reporting over the past few years, Naomi Klein introduced the term disaster capitalism. Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic shock treatment, losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.
The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman s free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement s peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.
At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.
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