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Naomi Klein articulates how the global "free market" has taken advantage crises and shock for 30 years, ranging from places like Chile to now Iraq. At the heart of "disaster capitalism" is the exploitation of catastrophes to move forward and implement radical privatization and to couple with that, such as the mother of all disaster capitalist moves -- the war in Iraq -- the privatization of the disaster response as well. In all these places and after meeting all these people (whom she saw still trying to recover from the first catastrophe was hit by a second one) hit again with economic `shock treatment.' At the core of the tragedy of this "shock doctrine" is people losing their livelihood, their homes, and their land to the rapacious demand of corporate development and similar opportunistic modalities.
occupation, Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the tsunami, or New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The promise of untrammeled practice of Friedmanesque (both Milton and Thomas) economics broken; Naomi Klein articulates how economic elites took advantage of times when people are too confused to react due to shock and were taken advantage of. Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Klein takes this worldview from her experience covering such places as Baghdad after the U.S.
The Shock Doctrine is the story of the most hegemonic and destructive economic model of our time, Milton Friedman's unrestrained free market economic revolution. Klein revisits old and new events in The Shock Doctrine writing about such events and places like the Pinochet coup and Chile, China and Poland, South Africa, Russia, Asia, Bolivia, New Orleans, Iraq, Israel, the UK, and the USA throughout the book. She shows how capitalism does not simply develop in the way that it pleases, but how it has to overcome the resistance capitalism itself has created.
Moreover, she explains how in times of severe violence economic policies are implemented in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq under the tutelage and constraints of IMF and World Bank. Klein contends that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, "disaster capitalism complex" is now a thriving new economy, and is the violent zenith of the radical Chicago School Milton Friedman economic.
Buy this book. Naomi Klein is a careful and thorough researcher who leads us through the maze of corporate domination and individual hubris associated with the past, present and future economic state of our democracy. Buy extra ones for your friends. This is one of the most important books of the last 20 years. What we may have suspected becomes revealed truth. Follow the trail of brigands well known to all of us.
This book is amazing. Meticulously researched - truly - no intellectual dishonesty here. Fiery and direct - it is almost impossible to overstate how important and incisive this book is.
The book open a new door to understand the reality of the power of money in our society and the corruption that create in goberments around the word. It open my eyes to a few realities.
There are so many inaccuracies in this book I don't know where to begin. The "facts" in this book should be taken with a huge handful of salt.
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