Kindle Edition, 720 pages
English language
Published Feb. 6, 2010 by Metropolitan Books.
In her ground-breaking reporting from Iraq, Naomi Klein exposed how the trauma of invasion was being exploited to remake the country in the interest of foreign corporations. She called it "disaster capitalism." Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and 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 …
In her ground-breaking reporting from Iraq, Naomi Klein exposed how the trauma of invasion was being exploited to remake the country in the interest of foreign corporations. She called it "disaster capitalism." Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and 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. By capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, Klein argues that 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.
But in a good way, if one can be upset in a good way about being made aware of the misery that the US & the IMF have inflicted across the globe.
Thanks to this book, I’ll now celebrate the day Milton Friedman died as a holiday (Nov 16).
The book about how we let it get this bad. In a strange way, this book feels shallow because of its ambitious scope, but if you want a proper overview of horrific shit that you need to understand to get the current moment, this is probably the place to start unearthing the contents of the memory hole.
Relentlessly bleak, very well written.
I have to say that the whole bit at the start with the chapter just on the history of torture felt unrelated to the rest of the book, except to change what people might have thought of shock therapy.
Leer este libro en el periodo de aislamiento de la pandemia fue toda una experiencia de conspiración. Hubo demasiadas coincidencias que pondrían a un consipirador nervioso. En todo caso, la calidad de datos históricos y la posibilidad de entender el modelo económico chileno, hizo que este libro valiera la pena.
