THis is a short film narrated by Naomi Klein and based on her book The Shock Doctrine, which is probably the most must-read book to come out in years.
I'm not going to comment on it too much. I'll let the video speak for itself. But I will say, Klein's book is not just another well crafted depiction of how screwed up things are. There are plenty of those. This book, however, is, as Tim Robbins says, "a revelation". I've yet to see another work so completely encapsulate the dark forces shaping our world, and their origins. This little movie, while shocking in itself, is just hint of what the book contains. It is required reading for any citizen who desires to be informed.
I recently bought Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. Reading it has informed me and infuriated me to the point of action. This is the first action I am taking. I am going to spread the word. I believe every American citizen has the obligation to read and thoroughly digest this wonderful work of art. (ALthough, I'll settle for every kossack)
To begin with, corporatism is a political system designed to support corporations. It has its beginnings in the laissez-faire economic theory of Milton Friedman. A better term for this whole system would be disaster capitalism. The reason being that corporatism requires a disaster to exist and/or sustain itself. For example, in the US 9/11. Indeed, the Neocons
here in the US are the party which most promote these ideas of disaster capitalism.
Disaster capitalism is the economic theory that is the true ideological opposite to marxist economic theory. There is a middle road called Keynesianism(pronounced: canezeeinism), named after John Keynes. Disaster capitalists relish in the fact that they have taken the place of keynesianism as the predominant economic theory among politicians
Did a book or a writer change your life? One changed mine. It was Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, a slim volume first published in 1845 and lent to me when I was 14 by the editor of a newspaper where I had a sweeping-up job. Frederick Douglass became my hero and remains so today.
Two other books also spun me around..
One was The Invisible Government, written by David Wise and Thomas Ross, and published in 1964. Theirs was the first exposé of the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and other covert operations, written at a time when spooks and "ex"-spooks didn’t appear as cable-channel analysts and 95% of Americans didn’t know that their government was overthrowing other governments. The CIA tried to censor their book, and when that failed, sought to get bad reviews written. This was, of course, before it became known how many journalists the CIA used to get its message into the media.
Then, in 1969, Custer Died for Your Sins was written by Vine Deloria Jr., a member of the Dakota and Lakota peoples of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. That book spurred me to join the American Indian Movement, of which I was a member until 1986.
Yesterday, I finished for the second time (and I rarely read books twice these days – does anyone have that much spare time?) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. This book has had a greater impact on me than anything I have read in many years. Not that I didn’t know anything about what she wrote, but seeing it all together brought so much into focus in a rarely done way.
So, back to where I started, what about you? Did a book or writer change you?
As I understand it, the economy is in trouble because people have stopped spending money. People buying stuff gets sellers to sell stuff and make money, and order new stuff so suppliers make money, and hire people to make the stuff so they make money, so they can buy stuff. Lather, rinse, repeat - sort of like a perpetual motion fur farm.
Leaving aside for the moment the fundamental flaws inherent in that whole economic model, one of the things that broke down in that chain is that the last guys mentioned above weren't getting paid enough money to keep up, BUT they could borrow money - against homes - to keep up, and the government and the banks loosened up the rules to make it easy to lend to them. Then they tied a ribbon around all the loans - some of them not very good - and magically declared them really good deals and resold the total package. Kind of like making sausage - really tasty as long as you don't think about what goes in to it. (more)
As we all know, Suharto was another of the 20th Century class of scumbag dictators supported by Western imperialists. Like Augusto Pinochet, Suharto managed to escape prosecution for his crimes by claiming ill health. I'm sure the same mercy was extended to his victims.
I'm reading THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, and the ''free market'' scam of forced debt, privatization, deregulation, and dissolving of government services looks scarcely less destructive than what Bush is doing with bombs and bullets in Iraq.
I'm no fan of communism. I think the Keynesian balance between business and government is good enough though euro social democracy would be better.
What the corporate elite have done to the rest of the world the last couple of decades and has finally tried to turn on the US in full force after 9/11 has more in common with Mao's Great Leap Forward or Pol Pot chasing everybody out of the cities into the fields in Cambodia than it does with any rebalancing of the business/government relationship in the West.
So how long will this last compared to the Soviet model's 70-ish years?
I would urge anyone puzzling over our current political fix, to read The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. Not only does it name and frame current events, domestic and international, clearly and usefully, but it offers an implicit explanation for the feeble Democratic resistance to neo-con policies.Furthermore, it makes clear to me at least, what will be required of us in the future if we wish to preserve our civil society and fundamental guarantees and rights.
Ms. Klein's premise is that a parallel exists between torture, ("'coercive interrogation designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation and shock to force them to make concessions against their will") and what she calls "The Shock Doctrine" political manipulations designed "to achieve on a mass scale what torture does one on one in the interrogation cell."
Only a crisis⎯actual or perceived⎯produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.
This is the statement that lies at the heart of what Naomi Klein calls "The Shock Doctrine" in her new, brilliant, courageous and genuinely frightening book on Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys’ repackaging of feudalism. Shape shifters, she calls them. (I've been a fan of Klein's gift for wording things since I discovered her in 2004.) From the atrocities in Chile that began on September 11, 1973 to Iraq to the Tsunami to Katrina, Friedmanomics has shape shifted, Klein says, into "disaster capitalism". But whatever shape it takes it remains committed to the unholy "policy trinity" of "the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending."
This is a review of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, a detailed, journalistic history of neoliberalism which emphasizes its connection to "shock therapy," torture, and other means of tearing down people and society so that they can be rebuilt along the lines of "perfect," ideological models. My review differs from others in that it focuses upon important themes and close analysis of key quotes within the book.
The Shock Doctrine The Rise of Disaster Capitalism By Naomi Klein
Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company
New York, 2007
... the [Milton Friedman] Chicago School strain of capitalism does indeed have something in common with other dangerous ideologies: the signature desire for unattainable purity, for a clean slate on which to build a reengineered model society.
**
Far from freeing the market from the state, these political and corporate elites have simply merged, trading favors to secure the right to appropriate precious resources previously held in the public domain—from Russia’s oil fields, to China’s collective lands, to the no-bid reconstruction contracts for work in Iraq.
A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.
The world would be a far, far better place if what had happened in Chicago 50 years ago had stayed in Chicago, as Naomi Klein’s riveting The Shock Doctrine makes abundantly clear. In this mind-bending masterwork, the lauded Canadian journalist has reached the apex of her analytical and explanatory powers, creating a bone-chilling narrative tracing superficially unrelated events—Katrina, Iraq, Chile’s Pinochet regime, Poland’s remaking, Russia’s lurch toward capitalism, brutal Indonesian crackdowns, China’s human rights violations, South Africa’s failure to enact its Freedom Charter—back to the fountainhead of right-wing economist Milton Friedman’s slash-and-burn corporatist ideology promulgated at the center of the laissez-faire universe, the University of Chicago.
In Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism she lays bare the truth behind George Bush's Modus operandi in pushing through radical free-market reforms. The entire Bush Presidency has been about economics and the playbook was written by Milton Friedman.
Friedman believed in a radical vision of society in which profit and the market drive every aspect of life, from schools to healthcare, even the army. He called for abolishing all trade protections, deregulating all prices and eviscerating government services.
These ideas have always been tremendously unpopular, and understandably so. They cause waves of unemployment, send prices soaring, and make life more precarious for millions. Unable to advance their agenda democratically, Friedman and his disciples were drawn to the power of shock.
Shock and Awe was not just a clever turn of phrase. It was a peak inside their playbook!
If you've seen "Children of Men," you know that Alfonso Cuaron can create incredibly disturbing images. If you've read any Naomi Klein, you know that she writes with incredible insight.
Well, in advance of Klein's new book "Shock Doctrine," about...well, you'll see....Cuaron has produced a short (6+ min) film outlining her premise...basically that harsh and widely unpopular economic/social policies are easiest to push through after a traumatic disaster. Sound familiar, huh?
Check out the amazing film here.
