Alternate History of Our Lifetimes

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	• The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein Metropolitan Books, 2007 - 576 pages average customer review:based on 262 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Shock Doctrine

Although this is a significant read, both in length and subject matter, it is actually written so it is an easy read. The words flowed and I have learned so much. I recommend this book to everyone. This is important stuff if you want to be a critical thinker when considering the news of U.S. and world events.

Alternate History of Our Lifetimes

Milton Friedman, the diminutive alpha male of the University of Chicago economics department for decades, called himself a "neoliberal." You can be sure his heart wasn't bleeding, however, for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, abortion rights, or any rights at all except the rights of corporations to operate without government regulation or public scrutiny. None of those liberal causes had any meaning for Friedman or his disciples, who used the word in its 19th C British sense of laissez-faire and free trade. What Naomi Klein and other British journalists call "neoliberal" is identical with what Americans call "neo-conservatism." Milton Friedman was the Apostle Paul of neo-conservatism.

Klein describes neo-conservatism as an absolutist sort of ideology - a militant religion of unfettered capitalism, if you will - which is markedly unable to recognize any sense at all in any other religion, and equally unable to admit or learn from mistakes. The central credos of neo-conservatism are: 1) no government regulation of private enterprise, 2) no socialistic government ownership of any enterprise that can possibly be privatized, even police and defense powers, 3) no redistributive taxes; sales taxes being the preferred form if any, 4) withering of the state to what they call, in their own manifestos, a "hollow government" existing only to collect public revenue and redistribute it to private entrepreneurs, 5) above all, no labor laws, no welfare, no "nanny" state, no public education, no environmental restrictions!

The central thesis of Klein's book is that such neoconservative unfettered capitalism has proven to be incompatible with effective democracy, since no population of voters, given honest information and not subjected to such sort of Shock Therapy, would ever vote or elect representatives to foist something so inimical to the interests upon themselves. Beginning with the historical experiences of the Southern Cone nations - Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil - in the 1970s, Klein shows in great detail how coups and putsches, with their subsequent terror, have been perceived as opportunities for radical economic takeover and restructuring by the Chicago Boys. From Latin America, Klein takes us to Indonesia and South Korea, to South Africa, to Poland, Russia, and eventually to Iraq, depicting the violence, corruption, repression and misery which accompanied every one of those "opportunities." In fact, Klein suggests, neoconservative restructuring can ONLY occur in a situation of disaster, whether self-imposed by military traitors, by hyper-inflation cultivated by the IMF and World Bank, or by natural catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina.

If even half of what Klein reports is accurate, compatriots, we've been sold a bill of sordid goods! Klein is a journalist, not a historian. For that reason, I read her book with caution and resistance, checking her quotes and data whenever I felt the least doubt. Thus it took me weeks to get ready to write this review. For what it's worth, I have found her quotes verifiable in every case, and her data subject only to a few quibbles of omission.

Don't suppose that Klein is delivering a party-line polemic. The Clinton Democrats are excoriated equally with the Republicans of the "Washington Consensus." NAFTA Bill was at best an impure neoconservative, though for Friedmanites the slightest impurity is anathema. Madeleine Albright was as much a globalizing neo-con as Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, though a lot less unscrupulous and with far less personal greed at stake. Essentially, since the unregretted collapse of Soviet Communism, neoconservative capitalism has been, as Klein puts it, "the only game in town." What Klein achieves in this book, even for those who disagree with her analyses, is to reveal the abuses and the terrible social costs of Friedmanite world dominion.

You out there! You who proudly proclaim your conservatism and/or libertarianism! You need to read this book! If you're too smug, or too cowardly, in your convictions, how are you to be taken seriously ever again!

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Shock is vital

Naomi Klein has written a vitally important book for anyone who wants to understand recent US history - it gets behind the clutter of propaganda and the hot air of government briefings to reveal the important thrust of US policy at home and abroad - she deserves a pulitzer for this!

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