When I set out to write a book about the natural history of breasts, I knew I'd have to answer some awkward questions about my book topic. At a...
Continue »
After several years, and at the urging of Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers' Union, I have finally read this important book. Klein explains how economic Neoliberal elites use (or create if necessary) shocks (wars, coups d'etat, natural disasters, financial crises) to extract wealth from the public sphere and funnel it up to the 1%. In many cases situations that may appear like bonehead mistakes which caused chaos and great misery (the Iraq War; American support for the looting of government enterprises in the former Soviet Union, for two examples), were planned and happily used by the capitalists who were pulling the strings to help them consolidate their financial power. The ideology of Neoliberalism - the worldview that everything the government does should be privatized, that greed is good and the more greed there is the better, and that poor people deserve what they've got - demands of its disciples a blank slate on which to work, because normal people left to themselves are not going to go with the program. Hence the use of crises as opportunities to remove all obstacles to creating a new system. To me (Klein doesn't make the comparison), this sounds a lot like the Khmer Rouge's plans for Cambodia - in order to create a truly rational and beneficial state, they had to clear out everything first. Sorry for all the people that had to be killed, but that's the price of progress! Neoliberalism doesn't work much better than Pol Pot's regime - a permanent immiseration of 30% - 60% of the population, the creation of an extremely wealthy class of owners/powerbrokers, and hell with everybody else. That is, unless this is what "success" looks like to a Neoliberal economist. For normal, non-sociopathic people, Klein helps us focus on what we have to fight against to maintain a society whose goal is to benefit all of us.
Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.
Don't Miss
Customer Comments
Peter Henry has commented on (1) product.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
Peter Henry, January 1, 2012
After several years, and at the urging of Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers' Union, I have finally read this important book. Klein explains how economic Neoliberal elites use (or create if necessary) shocks (wars, coups d'etat, natural disasters, financial crises) to extract wealth from the public sphere and funnel it up to the 1%. In many cases situations that may appear like bonehead mistakes which caused chaos and great misery (the Iraq War; American support for the looting of government enterprises in the former Soviet Union, for two examples), were planned and happily used by the capitalists who were pulling the strings to help them consolidate their financial power. The ideology of Neoliberalism - the worldview that everything the government does should be privatized, that greed is good and the more greed there is the better, and that poor people deserve what they've got - demands of its disciples a blank slate on which to work, because normal people left to themselves are not going to go with the program. Hence the use of crises as opportunities to remove all obstacles to creating a new system. To me (Klein doesn't make the comparison), this sounds a lot like the Khmer Rouge's plans for Cambodia - in order to create a truly rational and beneficial state, they had to clear out everything first. Sorry for all the people that had to be killed, but that's the price of progress! Neoliberalism doesn't work much better than Pol Pot's regime - a permanent immiseration of 30% - 60% of the population, the creation of an extremely wealthy class of owners/powerbrokers, and hell with everybody else. That is, unless this is what "success" looks like to a Neoliberal economist. For normal, non-sociopathic people, Klein helps us focus on what we have to fight against to maintain a society whose goal is to benefit all of us.