Goodreads | Blank Is Beautiful: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Hardcover) by Naomi Klein

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Rhyd rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

03/20/08

bookshelves: capitalism-and-its-discontents

Read in March, 2008

I just finished The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein. It came out months ago, and I would’ve read it sooner had it not cost $45 dollars in Canada.

Much of the information meticulously detailed in the book was already available in Harper’s Magazine and DemocracyNow!, though never put together so throroughly. She begins her book with a discussion of a canadian woman who endured several years of experimental psychiatric work under the authority of David Came...more

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Evan rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

11/07/07

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: any intelligent person who has read Thomas Friedman

This is an ambitious book. It tries to tie the economic politics of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia (in the 1970s), Russia, Poland, China, South Africa (in the 1980s and early nineties), the war in Iraq, the tsunami, and hurricane Katrina into a unified theory. Obviously, certain investigative and interpretive biases are required to make this work. Third world nationalism and developmentalism, in general, get off pretty easy in Klein's analysis. As a specialist in Indonesia, I found her portrayal ...more This is an ambitious book. It tries to tie the economic politics of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia (in the 1970s), Russia, Poland, China, South Africa (in the 1980s and early nineties), the war in Iraq, the tsunami, and hurricane Katrina into a unified theory. Obviously, certain investigative and interpretive biases are required to make this work. Third world nationalism and developmentalism, in general, get off pretty easy in Klein's analysis. As a specialist in Indonesia, I found her portrayal of the Suharto regime as a betrayal of the somehow more viable Sukarno regime a bit evasive (let us not foget that Sukarno was also an ideologue who ran the nation's economy into the ground in the name of fighting neo-colonialism). Making me wonder just how she'd cooked the books in analyzing numerous other countries whose histories I don't know so well.

That said, it offers a very provocative perspective tying together some of the most significant events of the past quarter century.

The thesis, simply put, is that the economic theory championed by Milton Friedman and his Chicago School, first play-tested in the third world in the 1970s, has increasingly come home to roost in the West and Bush's America. The gist of the theory, according to Klein, is a total rejection of Keynesian economics (i.e. the New Deal approach to combatting recession through government spending). In contrast, the three guiding principles of the Chicago School are: deregulation, privatization and cutbacks. (Sound familiar yet?) Transferriing as much of the public sector as possible to the private sector, eliminating government regulations of business, cutting back on services, protections and other economic benefits to the workforce.

The problem, as Friedman and his disciples realized early on, is that voting citizens don't actually want any of this, and will not vote for neoliberal policies through any normal, free democratic process. The solution? Make democracy abnormal. Through shock and awe. Wait for (or instigate) a state of crisis and emergency (i.e. war, natural disaster, mass torture, revolution) and then implement neoliberal policies outside (or, in many cases, in direct contradiction to) democratic will. However, as we have discovered most recently in Iraq, such tactics don't tend to "settle down" into widespread prosperity for ordinary people. Rather, neoliberal governments find that if they let democracy operate normally again, they lose power. Which is why the United States ended up supporting so many dictators. In the name of spreading free market democracy.

There are some sharp notions in this book. I'm particularly taken with Klein's generalization of "Red Zone/Green Zone" to talk about zones of normalcy and nightmare created by neoliberal policies from Iraq to post-tsunami Sri Lanka to New Orleans. She also offers a persuasive refutation of the claim that we (the US) did the Marshall Plan in Europe, but when we tried it in Iraq, Arab Muslims just couldn't handle it. Rather, while the Marshall Plan was rooted in Keynesian economics (we rebuilt Europe's governments and public infrastructure), reconstruction in Iraq has been an "anti-Marshall plan," dismantling the Iraqi state and contracting all its functions to US corporations.

The REAL problem of this book is how to present arguments like these to anyone who doesn't already concsider themselves anti-globalization liberals. I think that any intelligent person who has read Thomas Friedman and found his arguments somewhat persuasive, should read this book too, and decide what sounds most persuasive for themselves. Unfortunately, I think most people will look at the jacket cover endorsements from Howard Zinn, Studs Terkel et. al. and make a snap call for the usual ideological reasons.

THAT is not good for America....less

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Mark rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

03/30/08

Read in December, 2007

Dear Naomi Klein,
I recently finished reading your latest book, The Shock Doctrine. Your detailed account of the connections between neoliberal economic policy and the use of violent repression, the decline of welfare states, and the rise of corporatized war and disaster capitalism is compelling. You thread together the recent histories of military brutality in the Southern Cone of South America, union busting in Margaret Thatcher’s England, and the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. Thr...more Dear Naomi Klein,
I recently finished reading your latest book, The Shock Doctrine. Your detailed account of the connections between neoliberal economic policy and the use of violent repression, the decline of welfare states, and the rise of corporatized war and disaster capitalism is compelling. You thread together the recent histories of military brutality in the Southern Cone of South America, union busting in Margaret Thatcher’s England, and the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. Through these histories you make explicit that acts of violent political repression against leftist organizers were not chance occurrences during periods of economic transition. On the contrary, you show that they were deliberate acts of “shock therapy” used by governments to numb and eliminate those opposed to the implementation of neoliberal policies such as the privatization of public services, the elimination of spending on social programs, and the deregulation of industry wage, safety and environmental standards.

You demonstrate the “constricted freedom” of post cold-war governments in Poland, Russia, and South Africa, who, in spite of initial aspirations to build social democratic welfare states, ended up implementing neoliberal economic reforms with disastrous consequences for the majority of their people. You then bring your analysis of neoliberalism to the United States, describing the rise of the privatized war machine and the parallel emergence of the occupation of Iraq as a profitable market for investments in military technology, homeland security, and the rebuilding of basic infrastructure destroyed by the aforementioned military technology. Finally, you tie it all together by concluding that the neoliberal economic model, in its thirst for new markets, is now preying upon areas struck by natural disasters to accumulate the profits it desires. “Disaster capitalism,” as you aptly name it, was evident in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Sri Lanka after the tsunami when large numbers of poor people were prevented from returning to their weather damaged homes in order to create lucrative new investment opportunities on the land they previously inhabited. The most sinister part of neoliberalism’s trajectory, as you note at the end of your book, is that when war and disaster are profitable enterprises, there are increased incentives to start wars and allow natural phenomena to deteriorate into social catastrophes.

To begin, I want to say that I learned a lot from reading your book. I was continually impressed by your ability to organize complex historical events into easily understandable patterns. You have clearly demonstrated neoliberalism’s historical dependence on political, economic, and physical “shock.” I am writing you, however, because despite my deep appreciation for the work you have done, I also have a major concern. You do an excellent job of describing many of the problems that come with neoliberalism, but I am afraid your analysis does not give a good account as to why neoliberal ideas are being implemented in the first place. Without a clear understanding of why neoliberalism is the policy of choice for many governments and economists today, you fail to put forward a comprehensive vision for how neoliberalism can be transformed.

For these reasons, I am concerned that many people will read your book and become motivated to make change, but will not be equipped with the right tools to do so. I am concerned that without the right tools, these motivated people will continue to focus on pressuring governments and/or economists to make change but will have little success persuading them to do so. I am concerned that these motivated people, after not having much success, will start to believe those who say that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union prove that free market capitalism is the final stop on the train of economic history. Moreover, I am concerned that these motivated people, frustrated by their inability to make change, will reluctantly give into the idea that capitalism (and the neoliberal ideology that now accompanies it) is the only way to organize economies after all.

With these concerns in mind, I would like to suggest that you take a look at another book that maps the rise of neoliberalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. The book is The Dilemmas of Social Democracies by two Peace Studies Professors at Earlham College, Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger. Instead of focusing on the violence and repression associated with neoliberal economics, Richards and Swanger focus on rules. They would argue that your book takes a wrong turn on the second to last page of the introduction when you make the claim that there is no reason that market-based economies are incompatible with decent wages, free health care, and quality public education. They would say that there is a very good reason that markets and government led social welfare programs do not mix: the basic cultural rules that shape our current economy do not allow them to. They would explain that until the basic rules of our economy are changed, governments have few options for making economic policies that serve the needs of all of their people...

Read the entire "open letter to Naomi Klein" at: www.markporterwebb.blogspot.com
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James rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

03/01/08

Read in February, 2008

“The lucky get Kevlar, the rest get prayer beads.”

This is a chilling, writhing outrage of a book. A hideous, squealing beast of a book that cannot and should not be ignored.

Klein has dropped the curtain on an ugly, malevolent Wizard. When these kind of curtains drop, we never like what we see. Like so many of these kinds of leftist exposes on conservatives, the Bush Administration, the neocons and their rabble, this book needn’t have been written. Orwell wrote it already. But better th...more

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Trevor rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

05/25/08

There is a part of me that would like to make this review a bit funny. This is a deeply disturbing book. I’ve a preference for humour as a means of confronting the deeply disturbing. But I can’t bring myself to say anything remotely funny about this book.

Klein compares some psychological experiments (torture by any reasonable definition of the word) carried out in the 1950s in Canada (funded by the CIA off US soil so they could plausibly deny they were researching torture) in which pa...more

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David rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

06/15/08

bookshelves: political-theory

Read in June, 2008

I only got about ¼ into this. I don't like the shifty way Klein argues her points. I felt like I was being propagandized rather than educated.

Much of her main “shock doctrine” argument seems to be just sort of a tightly-woven set of linguistic parallels that are meant to suggest causation. Something like: Hitler had the autobahn built. The autobahn allowed drivers to finally race where they wanted to go. Hitler crafted what he thought of as the final solution to a race problem. So you see, highway systems are part and parcel of genocide. ...more

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Zeph rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

02/08/08

bookshelves: politics

Read in February, 2008

This book is enlightening and infuriating. My Mom sent it to me for Xmas, claiming that it "shocked" her, and she's no dummy. Though criminal greed masquerading as free trade ideology doesn't surprise me, Klein cuts through the abstract haze surrounding economics with enough hard evidence, individual narratives and damning quotes to explosively personalize global events.

A forty year history of international finance negotiations and dry economic theory take on riveting practical int...more

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Cat rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

01/01/08

Read in January, 2008

In the aftermath of the San Diego fires this volume caught my eye. Mostly, it was the subheading "The rise of disaster capitalism." Published in 2007, the summary promised a thorough indictment of the Milton Friedman inspired economics of "disaster capitalism" i.e. the method by which governments and corporations use natural & man made disasters to push through radical neo-liberal reforms during a period when the population, which normally would vociferously object to ide...more In the aftermath of the San Diego fires this volume caught my eye. Mostly, it was the subheading "The rise of disaster capitalism." Published in 2007, the summary promised a thorough indictment of the Milton Friedman inspired economics of "disaster capitalism" i.e. the method by which governments and corporations use natural & man made disasters to push through radical neo-liberal reforms during a period when the population, which normally would vociferously object to ideas like privatising the water supply, are in a such a state of shock they are helpless to object.

This book begins and ends with Milton Friedman, and if you are reading this review without a clear idea of who he is & what he stands for in the history of the 20th and 21st century, either google the man or stop reading now, because to describe The Shock Doctrine as anything other then one journalist's attempt to hold Friedman responsible for nearly all the ills of the post-cold war world (and many of the ills which occurred during the cold war) is to do this book a great disservice.

Friedman is best known as an apostle of free markets, privatisation and globalization. As a professor at the University of Chicago, he articulated an anti-kenseyian economic program that was near and dear to the hearts of our favorite republican presidents- Ronald Reagan, George Bush (the younger) and their advisers- Donald Rumsfeld was a student. Friedman also trained the economists who "revised" the post coup economies of Chile under the Junta, of Argentina under Pinochet.

A large part of what Klein seeks to do is hold Friedman and his disciples responsible for the torture & repression unleashed by the politicians and dictators seeking to implement his vision. At the heart of her argument is the simple idea that the neo-liberal program is a corporatist give away that loots the state in favor of hand outs to large corporations, that this project is profoundly unpopular to politicians in democracies because there are more poor voters then rich voters & ipso facto the neo-liberal economists are forced to created conditions of "shock" where vulnerable populations are unable to resist. These shocks can either take the form of coups (think Pinochet), political turmoil (eastern europe post cold war), currency crises (Mexico in the 90s) or, in fact, a military invasion by the United States (Irag, the second time.)

All of these shocks result in the implementation of the same program: sale of state assets, opening of markets to foreign investments, elimination of price controls for stable supplies.

There is no pretense of objectivity in Klein's writing, she is quite clearly a left leaning journalist of the 60s variety. Save the last chapter, which speaks of the revival of resistance to the neo-liberal program in places like Venezuela (yeah Hugo Chavez!), to read this book is to read an unending litany of disaster, repression, and, let's face it, malevolent evil doing by Friedman, the World Bank, the IMF & the current President (and his cronies). In short, it's pretty much a book length write up of the discussion that dope smoking undergraduates have been having in the dorm rooms since the 60s. To her credit, Klein appears to have actually gone to many of the places she is writing about. She footnotes extensively.

However, almost nothing in this book was new to me, and on behalf of Milton Friedman, the Bush administration and the giant corporations of American and the West, I would enter a demurrer to Ms. Klein's accusations. A "demurrer" is when you file a response to a law suit that basically says, "Yeah, so what?"

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Lynn rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

10/12/07

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: college students

The central thesis of this book is that Freidman neo-liberal economics (privatization, deregulation,cutbacks in social spending) has been implemented around the world by creating or taking advantage of national shocks. Created as in coups in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, taking advantage as in the natural disasters in Sri Lanka and New Orleans and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the U.S. Neo-liberals have been able to impose this shock therapy undemocratically by taking advantage of populations...more

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Sara rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

12/03/07

recommends it for: anyone ignorant of the dangers of capitalism

You can't have capitalism without capitalists. The intentional pervasive spread of capitalism is proven as no evolutionary process that begets an economic system out of the blue only because it is a natural progression. What Naomi Klien illustrates is how intentional and manipulated ,and how dependent upon suppression and violence, this "progression" turned out to be. Through spreading their influence to countries such as Chile, Russia and now Iraq the Chicago School economists pur...more

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Hank Horse rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

12/16/07

bookshelves: leftylucy

recommends it for: those who think capital=god=evolution

Klein provides trenchant analysis of the human costs of fundamentalist free-market privatization policies. She gives case after outrageous case.

This book is a valuable tool for understanding the politics and history of the last 50 years.

One aspect of the book I think especially timely is her analysis of torture as a state policy designed to intimidate populations resistant to neoliberal economic schemes. It makes anyone who uses that old "But what if you had a terrorist who knew wh...more

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Gemma rated it:

(review of isbn 0676978002)

11/21/07

Excellent and compellingly written book about how Milton Friedman's Chicago school of free market capitalism has been imposed on countries following shocks, whether caused by natural or contrived disasters, and how the initial shock and followup shocks in the form of repression and frequently torture have been used to impose these deeply unpopular measures. Takes in Chile, Columbia, Russia, Poland, Britain under Thatcher and the war on terror. Points out how disaster capitalism profits from crea...more

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Kerry rated it:

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11/25/07

bookshelves: non-fiction-favourites

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: Everyone

A very disturbing read even with the positive ending. As someone who has taught History and Politics since the 1970s this book made sense of a lot of the seeming absurdities of US foreign policy through that period. Sad that Friedman died before he could be indicted for war crimes but it was never going to happen anyway. The US only allows very low level people to be brought to justice for this sort of thing. The section on tsunami aid was simply sickening and really shows how morally bankrupt t...more

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Grant rated it:

(review of isbn 0676978002)

12/01/07

bookshelves: activism, issues, thinking

Read in December, 2007

recommends it for: every human on the planet

I would seriously like to see every human on this planet read this book. I can’t think of any other book I would more highly recommend today.

The whole text was rich in the exposing of history and deep analysis. I strongly encourage anyone reading it to stick through to the end. The bulk of the book covers quite terrible things in the world, but the last chapter actually made me very hopeful and inspired.

Utterly brilliant!

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Bill rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

10/08/07

Read in October, 2007

Using shock treatment as a metaphor, Klein analyzes the importance of economic dislocations and disasters to the success of Milton Friedman's free market philosophy. This is a very important book, and shows why the apparent stupidities of the Bush administration in Iraq and Katrina are actually deliberate measures designed to daze and demoralize people into accepting a radical free-market agenda.

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Laylo rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

08/16/08

bookshelves: politics--economics--history

One of the most important political reads of our time. I realize this is a bold statement, but this thesis is prescisely that- a bold, shocking, and terrifying examinization that reappraises the myth that capitalism, under the guise of being a global "free" market, has triumphed democratically. Capitalism has historically been imposed at gunpoint, via neo/colonialism, but today, its forced reception has taken on more insidious and veiled means- namely exploitation of disasters, natural...more One of the most important political reads of our time. I realize this is a bold statement, but this thesis is prescisely that- a bold, shocking, and terrifying examinization that reappraises the myth that capitalism, under the guise of being a global "free" market, has triumphed democratically. Capitalism has historically been imposed at gunpoint, via neo/colonialism, but today, its forced reception has taken on more insidious and veiled means- namely exploitation of disasters, natural (Hurricane Katrina, 2004 tsunami, ect.) and manufactured (South American coups, Iraq War, ect.). Government is no longer a colletive institution with the primary goal of serving the populace. Rather, it has become the greatest coporatist racket, contracting out its services to colluding coporations who then overcharge, impose business (and related politcal) interests at the cost of humanity, and fail miserably at providing the basic services requisite for human survival. All in the name of profit. The world economy is no longer about the free exchange of goods and services regulated by supply and demand (if it ever was at all), it is now a privatized disaster economy, with new markets emerging every time people are devastated and in thus, in need of basic services.

As a fervent political jinkie with a degree in economics, I was familiar with much of the history, but I too was shocked by a few of the lesser-known scams. The one that really got me concerned the tsunami of 2004, that hit the Sri Lanken coast. The public support that poured forth in sympathy for those devastated by this was astounding, and the donations that poured forth were record-breaking. Yet, the money did not go to the people it was intended to help. Instead, they had their traditional homeland stolen from them, via corporatist political manueverings, and were forced to relocate into ghetto tin shanties while what was left of their ancestral fishing villages were demolished, to make room for astronomically expensive resorts and hotels.

Everything we once counted on our government to provide- care, support, basic services, protection- is no longer fueled by a humanistic sense of communal well-being. They are all being contracted out with the primary objective of making a profit. Even national security has been privatized, with a few cities in the U.S. even hiring private security forces. This is modeled after the "green zone" in Iraq, a lush oasis of western affluence amidst a landscape of devastation and strife. This now occurs in many war-zones where capitalist interests are at stake, where capital stands to be made, at any and every cost. and what's more valuable than a human life? ...less

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Christopher rated it:

(review of isbn 0805079831)

07/11/08

Read in July, 2008

Conservatives will call this book conspiracy theory, and the inside jacket flap made me hesitate for about six months before I read it. But this is not the stuff of "George W. Bush planned, plotted, and carried out 9/11" conspiracy theory (as if Bush wouldn't have messed that up too). The shock doctrine essentially asserts that governments use the

Blank Is Beautiful: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

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