The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock, then quickly making the “reforms” permanent.

“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.”

whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or “shock therapy,” has been the method of choice.

The global “homeland security industry”—economically insignificant before 2001—is now a $200 billion sector.

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.

in Argentina, however, that the involvement of Ford’s local subsidiary with the terror apparatus was most overt.

The legendary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges scathingly described the land dispute as “a fight between two bald men over a comb.”20

Colmentario de Borges so bre la Guerra de Malvinas

in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine: “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.”

Crises are, in a way, democracy-free zones—gaps in politics as usual when the need for consent and consensus do not seem to apply.

The U.S. secretary of state, Warren Christopher, traveled to Moscow to stand with Yeltsin and Gaidar and declared, “The United States does not easily support the suspension of parliaments. But these are extraordinary times.”

One of the first booms for the homeland security industry was surveillance cameras, 4.2 million of which have been installed in Britain, one for every fourteen people, and 30 million in the U.S., shooting about 4 billion hours of footage a year.

when Rumsfeld left his post as defense secretary, he did so a significantly wealthier man than when he arrived—a rare occurrence for a multimillionaire in public office.

During the Second World War, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke out strongly against war profiteers, saying, “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.”

Public service is reduced to little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex.

“The best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground,”

the process of writing a constitution is among the most wrenching any nation can go through, even a nation at peace. It brings every tension, rivalry, prejudice and latent grievance to the surface.