Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it. Lots of interesting thoughts, but I think she could try to write with a more objective tone. At times it felt like she might as well be screeching in my ear, "Milton Friedman is the devil!" She makes good arguments but with the tone she sets, I'm afraid, she might end up just being read by people who already agree with her. For Michael Moore or Ann Coulter, that's fine, but she can do better.
So the first part of the book was about how there are a number of Canadians running around with all kinds of mental issues because the CIA found doctors to run psycho experiments on our neighbors to the North, instead of our own citizens. At one point it was believed to brainwash people, you need to deconstruct a person before you could build them the way you wanted. It turns out, that it's a lot people to break people into little pieces than to put them together. Things like sensory deprivation were studied which eventually led to the CIA's interrogation methods. Needless to say, these methods have been used over and over again for all the wrong reasons. This was about shock at the personal level.
At a more macro level, these shocks were used on countries. Starting in Latin America, but spreading to all corners of the globe, Uncle Milton and his Chicago boys, used political repression to implement their free market political systems. A couple people got rich, but hundreds of millions if not billions were tossed out of jobs, tossed into jail and or killed for this system to spread. She labels it disaster capitalism. And she has several real world examples of how this works.
Eventually, it extended beyond just waiting for disasters. The Iraq war was manufactured just to keep this capitalist system flowing. Our government farmed out all its responsibilities to Cheney, Haliburton and other contractors who stole billions. Again after Katrina, billions of dollars were lost.
It's no real surprise that you need a shock to a system for any change to happen. There's always a natural tension to keep things the way they are until something rises to the level of "crises. Barrack is using the economy the same way. When people are running around without know what to do, they tend to listen better. But her premise goes a little beyond that. That all kinds of free market types are just waiting around for these opportunities to remake the world they want. And the poor always lose out. Should the hotel industry really be the big beneficiaries after a tsunami strikes? Probably not.
