“The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” by Naomi Klein
Two articles about Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
Why Can’t the U.S. Have the Debate about Naomi Klein’s Book That Europe Has?
Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, tells the history of how the American version of “free market” capitalism has spread in moments of crisis and catastrophe, when societies are too traumatized and disoriented to challenge the introduction of radical economic policies that go against their own interests.
The Shock Doctrine has already been published and translated in several countries. Excerpts from Klein’s book were published in the British newspaper, The Guardian, and discussion about the book has raged onThe Guardian’s online site, Comment Is Free as well as in the German, French and Canadian press. I attended Klein’s U.S. book launch event at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on September 17 where she described her work and her experiences dealing with a foreign press frequently hostile to her arguments.
At least the foreign press is willing to tangle with writers who offer critiques the capitalist system. There is plenty of economic coverage in the U.S., but fundamental questions on issues such as whether privatization of public assets benefits the public and if the focus on short-term economic growth is harmful in the long run are simply not discussed. I wondered how Klein’s book, which has hit the best-seller lists all over Europe, would fare in the U.S. and what Klein’s expectations were for the U.S. audience. I spoke with her on the phone about this and the issues she raises in The Shock Doctrine on September 19.
Jan Frel: Your book has 70 pages of footnotes and has citations from over 1,000 sources. At the book launch in New York, you referred to this as your “body armor.” The thinking seems to be that if you can back up what you’re saying, then it has to be accepted. Is this what will give it legitimacy in the mainstream media?
Naomi Klein: It’s more for the debate about my work. In the attempts to dismiss my work as conspiracies theories, the footnotes help.
Frel: It’s often times the case that books that make powerful and damning claims with complete accuracy still don’t break into public debate or hit the audience that ought to confront them. Isn’t there something else that prevents radical interpretations of society and economics and buried history from reaching public debate?
Klein: I think that’s true — it’s certainly true in this country. I wasn’t talking about the problem my book would have getting into the mainstream; it’s more about the debates around it. My books do get into the mainstream — outside the U.S. That doesn’t mean they aren’t contested, but in Canada for example, The Shock Doctrine is already at No. 3 on Amazon. [Currently at No. 43 in the United States.]
Another book I did, No Logo, was a mainstream book in most of the countries where it was published, except for the U.S. In the U.S. it never was. The context I talked about the need for support for my arguments is in cases where my book is being debated and argued. So in the U.S., I totally agree that having solid footnotes are no guarantee that you can start a mainstream debate. I don’t have any confidence that this book will be in the mainstream debate in the United States.
Frel: A lot of what you’re taking on in The Shock Doctrine is a concept that is fused in deep into a big part of the American psyche — that “the free market” and “free enterprise,” which we don’t typically debate or condemn in the mainstream but are to blame for a lot of the things the public does discern as problems, like our healthcare system. But how do you get people to see that they are being screwed by their own dominant economic beliefs?
Klein: It’s actually not that hard. The hard part is getting past the media wall.
Frel: At your U.S. book launch on Monday you talked about getting past the “intellectual police lines” that prevent discussion.
Read it all HERE
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Can Radical Capitalism Survive the Disasters It Creates?
By John Gray, The Guardian. Posted September 22, 2007.
The era of “free market” economic policies forced on societies after disasters happen as detailed in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine may be on the verge of ending.
Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market. Soviet-style economies left an inheritance of human and ecological devastation, while neo-liberal policies have had results that are not radically dissimilar in many countries. Yet, while the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.
Many writers have pointed to the havoc and ruin that have accompanied the imposition of free markets across the world. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale. Anyone who has watched a country lurch from one crisis to another as the bureaucrats of the IMF impose cut after cut in pursuit of the holy grail of stabilisation will recognise the process Naomi Klein describes in her latest and most important book to date. Visiting Argentina not long before the economic collapse of 2002, I found the government struggling to implement an IMF diktat to roll back public spending at a time when the economy was already rapidly contracting. The result was predictable, and the country was plunged into a depression, with calamitous consequences in terms of poverty and social breakdown.
Klein believes that neo-liberalism belongs among “the closed, fundamentalist doctrines that cannot co-exist with other belief-systems … The world as it is must be erased to make way for their purist invention. Rooted in biblical fantasies of great floods and great fires, it is a logic that leads ineluctably towards violence.” As Klein sees it, the social breakdowns that have accompanied neo-liberal economic policies are not the result of
incompetence or mismanagement. They are integral to the free-market project, which can only advance against a background of disasters. At times, writing in a populist vein that echoes her first book No Logo, published seven years ago, Klein seems to suggest that these disasters are manufactured as part of a deliberate policy framed by corporations with hidden influence in government. Her more considered view, which is also more plausible, is that disaster is part of the normal functioning of the type of capitalism we have today: “An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dotcom collapse all demonstrate.”
Read it all HERE
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ADDED:
Naomi Klein Debates Alan Greenspan
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted September 25, 2007.
Naomi Klein goes head to head with Alan Greenspan on the Iraq war, Bush’s tax cuts, economic populism, crony capitalism and more
AMY GOODMAN: As the credit crisis continues to grow and the US dollar hits a new low, we turn today to the former Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan headed the central bank in the United States for almost two decades. He was first appointed to this position in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan. Greenspan retired in January 2006, after deciding the fate of national interest rates under four different presidents. Dubbed “the Maestro,” he was widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential economic policymakers. He has just written a new 500-page memoir; it’s called The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.Alan Greenspan joins us now on the phone. And in our studio we’re joined again by journalist Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Welcome, Alan Greenspan.
ALAN GREENSPAN: Thank you very much. I’m delighted.AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. You worked with six presidents, with President Reagan, with both President Bushes. You worked with President Ford, and you worked with Bill Clinton, who you have called a Republican president; why?
ALAN GREENSPAN: That was supposed to be a quasi-joke.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about it.
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, Clinton?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, I stated that I’m a libertarian Republican, which means I believe in a series of issues, such as smaller government, constraint on budget deficits, free markets, globalization, and a whole series of other things, including welfare reform. And as you may remember, Bill Clinton was pretty much in the same — was doing much that same agenda. And so, I got to consider him as someone — as he described it, we were both an odd couple, because he is a centrist Democrat. And that’s not all that far from libertarian Republicanism.
AMY GOODMAN: About how much would you say you agreed with him?
ALAN GREENSPAN: On economic issues, I would say probably 80 percent.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about President Bush?
ALAN GREENSPAN: President Bush had the wonderful characteristic of knowing that it was not to his advantage or to ours to interfere with the actions of the Federal Reserve. And I must say, through all of his years, he never once second-guessed what the Fed was doing. And that was very important to us, and we’ve been very much appreciative of that.
But, as I say in the book, he did not clamp down, as I thought was necessary, on what was a wayward Republican-controlled Congress, which I thought lost its way and started to spend and create all sorts of fiscal imbalances. And, essentially, what I hold — where I thought the administration could have done far better is if the veto were employed. And as you may remember, he did not use the veto at all. And that, what I thought, would have created a much more balanced procedure in the Congress. So it’s a mixed case in this regard.
AMY GOODMAN: Alan Greenspan, let’s talk about the war in Iraq. You said what for many in your circles is the unspeakable, that the war in Iraq was for oil. Can you explain?
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Posted: September 25th, 2007 under Alan Greenspan, Books, Economics, Naomi Klein.
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