Shock Doctrine

In her ground-breaking reporting from Iraq, Naomi Klein exposed how the trauma of invasion was being exploited to remake the country in the interest of foreign corporations. She called it "disaster capitalism." Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment" losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence to implement its economic policies globally, from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. Central to disaster capitalism is using cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization, including privatizing disaster response itself. By capitalizing on crises, Klein argues that the disaster capitalism complex has become a booming economy and a violent culmination of a fifty-year radical economic project.