Book: The Shock Doctrine.
Over the last few decades the United States, along with international economic institutions, most notably the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), has devastated developing nations in the name of capitalism. From Argentina in the 1970s, to Poland and Russia in the early 1990s, to Iraq and New Orleans in the new millennium, The Shock Doctrine reveals what Naomi Klein calls the “disaster capitalism complex,” a theory that disasters—either natural or financial—create an environment conducive to private business profiteering and the abdication of social welfare (such blatant disregard is made possible by the widespread desperation and vulnerability that disaster victims endure). Klein’s book incisively criticizes the ideology behind the disaster capitalism complex pioneered by the late Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” —neoliberalism—that has been fueled and promulgated more for its pro-business, anti-Communist tenants than on any actual trickling down of wealth.
Friedman’s ideology relies on the principle of free market economics, which entails the privatization of nationally owned entities, government deregulation , and the liberalization of trade and capital markets. Wealth is often analogized to a pie, and in theory, the bigger the pie the more there is to go around. Friedmanite’s claimed that by taking away things like high taxes and government bureaucracy (that lead to inefficiencies in the market and disallow large corporations from generating the most possible revenue) a bigger pie could be shared by all; neoliberalism has certainly created a bigger pie, unfortunately, it has fattened the rich and emaciated the poor.
Provided that you read Klein’s first section on electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), The Shock Doctrine’s six other sections can mostly be read individually and in any particular order. Klein explores the advent of ECT on psych patients at McGill University in the 1950s, CIA-funded treatments that involved heavy dosages of drugs, electrical shocks, and sensory deprivation. It was the belief of the administrators that drugs, electricity and white-washed, brightly-lit rooms would “wipe the slate clean” and allow them to rebuild the psychologically troubled from the ground up. The belief that erasing a patient’s memory left them more malleable and susceptible to cooperation translated to the evolving field of “interrogation,” or more aptly, torture. The United States, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, along with countries that it’s influenced (eg. Pinochet’s Argentina) have used this form of brutal interrogation in exchange for cooperation and at the expense of human decency. It is this method, an idealized renaissance from the ashes of a depleted mind, that Klein believes our foreign policy has projected onto foreign governments and our own: our form of the “disaster capitalism complex.”
In this new world of corporatism, Klein illuminates the hypocritical promotion of the US’ Cold War sentiment: democracy at all cost. In what is known as “the southern cone” of South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay) she notes that the United States used the pretext of left-wing governments in the region being funded by the USSR as reason to fund multiple military coups. The US has helped overthrow several democratically elected Latin American governments to create puppet-military regimes whose mandate was to open up their economies to US investment (benefits to the native country were deemed irrelevant). The southern cone is still recovering from the economic impropriety of policies put forth by the US and IMF, not to mention the tens of thousands of deaths from totalitarian rule.
Klein continues to describe post-Soviet Poland and post-apartheid South Africa, two countries that emerged from oppressive political regimes. Unfortunately, poor and underdeveloped, both countries were in desperate need of foreign assistance and thus at the mercy of global lending institutions like the IMF. The IMF , along with the World Bank, was created after WII to be the world’s “lender of last resort” and to ensure global stability. Unfortunately, being the Western creation that it is, the IMF has imposed its tremendous leverage on impoverished countries through coercion: if you don’t follow our rules, we won’t give you the money. The rules have always been based in neoliberal thought of privatization, deregulation, and liberalization, things that developing countries do not always benefit from. Their lack of institutions to ensure the legality of these transactions and their domestic sectors simply cannot compete with large multinational corporations that now have free access to their country’s markets.
The combination of large-scaled ECT and the disaster capitalism complex at its worst leads Klein to the crux of her book: 9/11 and the Iraq War. Klein argues that 9/11 gave the government permission to create a disaster in Iraq. The American public had received its electric shock and was ready to believe and support nearly anything—the societal foundation of human rights and democracy was wiped clean as the government declared the “War on Terror.” Next came the ECT for Iraq in the form of all-out war. Bombs electrocuted Baghdad and, like the American public, Iraqis were supposed to lay down and allow multinational corporations privatize, deregulate, and liberalize their country. However, Iraqi culture and pride runs too deep to make this steam-rolling simple. Government spending on Defense skyrocketed, and along with the privatization of our own government large contractors were experiencing a war-boom even though nothing was getting better—disaster capitalism at its most devastatingly effective.
In her book, Klein is never without a self-incriminating quotation from a CEO or factual evidence to support her criticisms of globalization. It is the magnitude of information and length of the book (nearly 500 pages) that requires the reader to put it down after every chapter or two. Fortunately, Klein works her facts in well and seldom complicates economic jargon outside of an average citizen’s understanding—saving everyone a supply-and-demand sized headache.
However, amidst Klein’s factually-grounded march against Big Business there is an unreasonable degree of personal criticism towards supporters of neoliberalism. Often times I found her dislike for Friedman (and her constant grouping him with Pinochet) to be a bit unreasonable; her constant comparison between the father of neoliberalism and murderous dictators felt out of place with her otherwise level-headed reportage. Moreover, she is also quick to lambast Jeffrey Sachs, a world-renown economist who teaches at Columbia, when his policy prescriptions at the IMF yielded mixed results in Bolivia and Poland; however, she only briefly acknowledges that Sachs has done a 180, now a large proponent for foreign aid and in conflict with the big international economic institutions.
The fact that the United States sits atop the world’s power hierarchy is evidence for how influential its foreign policy can be. Klein, although sometimes too harsh on neoliberal thinkers, colorfully and thoroughly chronicles a big niche of US foreign policy over the last several decades: a for-profit response to crises. If you’re interested in Argentina, Chile, Poland, Russia, China, Korea, Indonesia, Israel, Iraq, and/or South Africa I highly recommend The Shock Doctrine; it’s sure to stimulate your senses.
