Toss in a few interviews and some vividly reported anecdotes. Collect facts and quotes found mostly in stories from the popular media (and the occasional academic publication). The Shock Doctrine confirms that Klein, much like those Chicago School economists, has developed a successful formula. However, the considerable attention she gives to the torture techniques used during the horrific experiments carried out on psychiatric patients at McGill University in the 1940s and ’50s is unwarranted, since the subject seems only tenuously connected to her central topic, and is given too much space, especially in a book that already comes in at 561 pages, not including copious footnotes and eight (!) pages of acknowledgements.įans of No Logo are very likely to enjoy this book. Klein’s argument is most compelling when she brings The Shock Doctrine into the more recent past, incorporating the events of 9/11, the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami, and even last summer’s Israel-Hezbollah conflict into her narrative. To ensure the success of the project, these forces enlisted brutal dictators or coerced elected leaders to create crises – whether financial or political – that would allow free-market types to more easily implement their program of downsizing and deregulation. government, and other, primarily American, business interests, largely succeeded in remaking the economic world order. She shows how Friedman and other economists from the Chicago School, along with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the CIA, the U.S. Klein brings a new perspective to what is otherwise common knowledge.
The Sylvester McBean of Klein’s story is Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning neo-liberal economist from the University of Chicago, and his many acolytes, who spent the last half-century implementing their often destructive version of economic reform in virtually every corner of the globe, promising prosperity but producing mainly profits for rich multinationals. The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein’s much-anticipated follow-up to No Logo, is, like “The Sneetches,” about capitalists being capitalists. Once all the Sneetches are with star, McBean produces a machine to remove them, starting a vicious cycle that continues until his pockets are lined and the Sneetches finally decide to look past their own bellies.
Seuss’s story “The Sneetches,” the star-bellied Sneetches discriminate against those plain-bellied Sneetches with “none upon thars.” That is, until arch-capitalist Sylvester Monkey McBean rolls into town with a machine that puts stars on the bellies of Sneetches.
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