Posted by bg on September 21, 2007
Update: 9/20/07
Katrina, 9/11 and disaster capitalism
Naomi Klein talks about how governments and corporations take advantage of floods, wars and other crises to implement “shock and awe” economics.
Sep. 21, 2007 | Naomi Klein is one of North America’s most lucid translators of globalization and its defects. Her book “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies” (2000) landed just after demonstrators in Seattle put demands for international economic justice on the front page. In “No Logo,” Klein critiqued multinational corporations for creating poor labor conditions in the developing world, all to further “the brand.”
9/18/07
The Shock Doctrine: Naomi Klein on the Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Pinochet’s coup in Chile. The massacre in Tiananmen Square. The collapse of the Soviet Union. September 11th, 2001. The war on Iraq. The Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Award-winning investigative journalist Naomi Klein brings together all of these world-changing events in her new book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” In her first national broadcast interview since the publication of “The Shock Doctrine,” Klein joins us in our firehouse studio for the hour. Klein writes, “The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks.”
Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist and activist, spoke February 22, 2007 about her new book, The Shock Doctrine before an audience at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. In that speech she describes how world crisis, either real or fabricated, are used by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank to push through neo-liberal economic policies in countries around the world.
News Features | Shock wave troopers | Straight.com Vancouver
Washington’s response to the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of New Orleans inspired Klein to review 35 years of disaster profiteering.
Naomi Klein exposes the economic ambulance chasers who take advantage of natural and economic disasters worldwide.
Milton Friedman, the Nobel-laureate economist and champion of unfettered global markets, was a great believer in preparing for disaster. As he wrote in the opening of his 1962 manifesto, Capitalism and Freedom , “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.” And Friedman worked his long career to ensure that the economic ideas lying closest to powerful politicians and bureaucrats in times of trouble were the ones he espoused most fervently: deregulation of industry, privatization of state-owned companies and resources, the shrinking of government to its barest essentials, and the complete freedom of capital to move according to its whims.
Friedman’s success in this lifelong campaign can be gauged by the glowing eulogies he received from politicians, economists, and pundits around the globe when he died last year at the age of 94. But the true mark of his influence, according to Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein, is in the cynical opportunism of those committed to laissez faire capitalism. As she argues in her wide-ranging, caustic new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Knopf Canada, $36.95), Friedman’s followers have learned to take swift advantage of public disorientation in the wake of large-scale catastrophes in order to perform what Friedman himself called economic “shock therapy”.
Related Content:
Tigana’s Blog Cruel Greed: Milton Friedman and The Shock Doctrine
Posted in "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism", Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, economic "shock therapy", www.straight.com | Leave a Comment »
Posted by bg on September 20, 2007
Update: 9/20/07
Katrina, 9/11 and disaster capitalism
Naomi Klein talks about how governments and corporations take advantage of floods, wars and other crises to implement “shock and awe” economics.
Sep. 21, 2007 | Naomi Klein is one of North America’s most lucid translators of globalization and its defects. Her book “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies” (2000) landed just after demonstrators in Seattle put demands for international economic justice on the front page. In “No Logo,” Klein critiqued multinational corporations for creating poor labor conditions in the developing world, all to further “the brand.”
9/18/07
The Shock Doctrine: Naomi Klein on the Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Pinochet’s coup in Chile. The massacre in Tiananmen Square. The collapse of the Soviet Union. September 11th, 2001. The war on Iraq. The Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Award-winning investigative journalist Naomi Klein brings together all of these world-changing events in her new book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” In her first national broadcast interview since the publication of “The Shock Doctrine,” Klein joins us in our firehouse studio for the hour. Klein writes, “The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks.”
Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist and activist, spoke February 22, 2007 about her new book, The Shock Doctrine before an audience at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. In that speech she describes how world crisis, either real or fabricated, are used by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank to push through neo-liberal economic policies in countries around the world.
News Features | Shock wave troopers | Straight.com Vancouver
Washington’s response to the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of New Orleans inspired Klein to review 35 years of disaster profiteering.
Naomi Klein exposes the economic ambulance chasers who take advantage of natural and economic disasters worldwide.
Milton Friedman, the Nobel-laureate economist and champion of unfettered global markets, was a great believer in preparing for disaster. As he wrote in the opening of his 1962 manifesto, Capitalism and Freedom , “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.” And Friedman worked his long career to ensure that the economic ideas lying closest to powerful politicians and bureaucrats in times of trouble were the ones he espoused most fervently: deregulation of industry, privatization of state-owned companies and resources, the shrinking of government to its barest essentials, and the complete freedom of capital to move according to its whims.
Friedman’s success in this lifelong campaign can be gauged by the glowing eulogies he received from politicians, economists, and pundits around the globe when he died last year at the age of 94. But the true mark of his influence, according to Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein, is in the cynical opportunism of those committed to laissez faire capitalism. As she argues in her wide-ranging, caustic new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Knopf Canada, $36.95), Friedman’s followers have learned to take swift advantage of public disorientation in the wake of large-scale catastrophes in order to perform what Friedman himself called economic “shock therapy”.
Related Content:
Tigana’s Blog Cruel Greed: Milton Friedman and The Shock Doctrine
Posted in "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism", Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, economic "shock therapy", www.straight.com | Leave a Comment »
