Naomi Klein has written the most important book on Capitalism since Milton Friedman. Klein's Disaster Capitalism lays out a whole new technique for analyzing events in their historical context.

Klein shows us how pschological stress can weaken people and ultimately whole societies that they may alllow or even participate in what was once unthinkable. From the murder of Allende and the takeover of Chile to the days following 9/11, Klein shows how the powers that be used the confusion and fear resulting from traumatic events to enact and enforce actions for their own benefit . These traumatic events can be manmade or natural, deliberate or accidental, but can be used to change societies against their will. Klein explains in detail deliberate and calculated "shocks" that have changed the history of the modern world. China's emergence into Capitalistic Communism, for example ...

John Perkins explained to us how Imperialistic Capitalism used the IMF and the World Bank to cripple and traumatize countries into submission, in his Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Chalmers Johnson laid out the destructive consequences of our Imperial Foreign Policies in Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis. Both hinted at Disaster Capitalism, but Klein has explained the underlying dynamics of the process. Klein has blown away the common understanding of history for the last forty years!!!

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"shock doctrine"

new words for old news...
sells books but does it change anything?

i think they shot william cooper.
he used to say the same sort of things.
i guess 'shock doctrine' is just more palatable than say...
MOB ACTIVITY...CRIMINAL CARTEL…SECRET ORGANIZATIONS
MURDER, MAYHEM, FRAUD and VILLIANY.

lets all thank naomi for inventing a term that has polite society a buzzzz!

really, i would have more faith in naomi had she attempted a citizen's arrest
rather than an interview when she met with alan greenspan, the other week.

Just one more thing…how Alternate is Alternet?
I’m beginning to wonder.

Are there any chinese people in america, if so, do they write books, if so, do other non-chinese americans bother to read them?

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Naomi is putting things in terms which are palatable by the traditional "leftwing" establishment, but in the process negating the exposure of some very fundamental truths.

These truths are what rarely breach the firewall of msm allowance. These are the truths you will discover are being pursued by those researchers and investigative vigilantes who tend to be the most ignored and/or ridiculed by our controlled press.

The lie which deceives best is that which is 98% true. Naomi's analysis adheres to the 98% formula. By this I am not implying any deliberate misdirection on her part. Her success in the publishing of her book, the exposure it has received by innumerable "leftwing" media outlets, is not, as it would seem, due entirely to the quality of the literature itself, nor the originality of its thesis.

Its extreme marketability is the result of its ability to strike a growing chord with a dissatisfied, and increasingly alarmed populace, all the while circumventing information of the most psychologically volatile nature, the information which, if unveiled enmasse, would have the most profound effect upon the body politic, the collective psyche, and the very organizational hierarchy within which our society operates.

Books such as these are phenomenally effective in saying much, but accomplishing little, in satisfying the accumulated desire for answers, as well as the concurrent desire to know answers are being demanded, whilst also protecting those very interests whose subversive and direct influence on the world is at once deliberate and disastrous. They are the pressure valves through which the collective mindset of resistance can be safely channeled, the paradigm of resistance arrested in development, perpetually retarded.

I really like Naomi, and I think she is brilliant in her analyses. The problem arises when people seek complete answers in a single text, by a single author. Naomi has constructed one beautiful piece of a simple enough puzzle. To see past the deception, realize the trick lies in revealing some pieces, and omitting others. Or in dividing the pieces up between factions of a contrived political paradigm, ie- left/right, to make it appear as though the two pieces are in conflict, when in actuality they are congruent. It is the emotionality through which such information is perceived which affects our subsequent appraisal. This emotionality is manipulated easily enough, in one way through polarization. Beware all dichotomy. Division is the people's worst enemy.

The old method of rule is as relevant today as ever, divide and conquer is the name of the game.

You must take it upon yourselves to discover complete, non-dichotomous answers.

One book I must recommend is 'Political Ponerology'. I believe it to be the foundational piece to this 4 dimensional puzzle. You won't find it promoted on Alternet any time soon.

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Rather than inventing a whole new way of looking at the world, Klein has given us a worn-out Marxist analysis of capitalism, but with slicker marketing and design.

She is a bit like an old Vaudville performer, giving the audience the same old songs and jokes, but with extra zip to make it seem fresh again.

The idea that psychological torture is the lynch pin in how capitalism sustains itself is bogus. All political philosophies that seek to dominate (and most of them do) use force at some point to get their way. Socialism and communism killed to get its way (the estimates vary, but so far these two variants of marxism killed the most number of people in human history). Fascism comes in at a close second, with imperial capitalism in third place.

It would be more useful to see a work that delves into human conflict and battles over resources, and then tries to find a way that we can get along (and bump along) on this planet without having to kill each other.

The blank slate analysis (the Klein approach) assumes US imperialism is a natural given, and that it is all bad. But in fact, the US arose at the end of the second world war as much by historical accident and luck as by design. Since then the US has in good and bad ways sought to cast its net of influence in the world wide.

Can Klein, hand on heart, claim she is successful as she is without having stepped on others along the way?

What I think we see here is a mix-up between strategy and tactic. Overwhelming your enemies with everything you've got is something learned as a tactic. The ancients applied this technique in battles, and in the modern age, we saw with Hitler's Blitzkreig this applied to the machine age.

Sometimes it is worth looking at how as much of our world and our society is a product of events than design. Conspiracy theories work only as long as you ignore something called 'unintended consequences'. For every conspiracy to hoard power and wealth has provoked a force that pushes back.

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The greatest wealth engine the world has ever known is being undermined by dishonesty. Capitalism should be transparent or the shareholders are screwed. Enron can only attract investors in a climate of lies and corporate protectionism.

What we are seeing is disingenuous capitalism buttressed by "free market" ideology. It is akin to a child molester wearing ecclesiastical vestments.

There is nothing wrong with honest business, big or small.

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On the one hand, this is a very depressing interview. They have all the power and there is not much that can be done. The next disaster is inevitably coming and yet another big chunk of civil society will be expropriated. However, there was one nugget of hope buried in the interview. She correctly points out that the first lab for this school of economic fundamentalism was in South America in the '70's and early 80's. What is left unsaid is what is happening in those countries today. The system simply doesn't work and only last about 20 or 30 years. Then people strike back. All the spin in the world can no longer hide the truth; The emperor indeed has no clothes. It is going to be an interesting couple of decades!

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And thanks to hitler, the jews got Palestine...
Ends justifying means is a pretty standard totalitarian tactic.

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Klein and others are certainly on to something, but the essential limitation to their views are found in their postwar inheritance of social democratic ideology. This ideology supposed that a grand social bargain can be democratically struck between capital and society (democratically represented in the State), presupposing the coexistence of State and Capital in two separate, equal and mutually autonomous spheres.

Such a settlement appeared to have been arrived at in the postwar, but the last 35 years have decisively refuted that view. Nevertheless the postwar experience is still recent enough to appear to Klein and most of the Left as the "norm", and Friedmanite "neoliberalism" as the deviation, conceived as an "inevitable" Hegelian-style historical supersession of classical "savage capitalism". But I think if we look at the longer history of capitalism - requiring only that we look back before the Second World War - we'll see that the opposite is the case: that the postwar settlement was the deviation, and that "shock" capitalism IS capitalism.

What, after all, was the British Opium Wars on China but a classic case of "shock capitalism"? One could go on to cite endless cases over the 250 year period until the conclusion of WW2. The point here is that figures as different as Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Polyani long ago established disequilibrium as the essence of capitalism - and history has proved them right. What Klein seeks, therefore, is a utopia.

Finally, another feature of "neoliberalism" that Klien's view tends to overlook: the increasing "statification" embedded in "privatization". We have not simply "returned to the past" of the classical limited state 19th century laissez faire capitalism. To distinguish our times from that past, it may be better to call our own times a "baroque" return, a "Baroque Age" of capitalism. For we are not only experiencing the "privatization" of a "public sphere", but at the same time the penetration of the State into the so-called sphere of "civil society", both to prop and subsidize capital and to secure capital from the rest of society, aka against "the masses". It is, in short, a process of the dissolution of the most basic organic division of the capitalist social order: the distinction between State and Civil Society so carefully conceived and implemented by modern Enlightenment political philosophy. As such, it is the epitome of capitalism as a decayed and historically finished order.

I believe that the "classical fascism" of the interwar period - Itialian Fascism, the Nazis, and especially the much overlooked Japanese Fascism, the most perfected form of this period - were the first systematic attempts at a "Baroque Capitalism", as the State underwent a massive political privatization as fiefdoms in the hands of the Nazi and Fascist party bosses, while a monetarist-style austerity was imposed upon the peoples of those countries, even as all financial sense was abandoned in the interest of providing the biggest capitals superprofits by means of an insane war buildup . Sound familiar?

That "experiment" failed then, of course, opening the way temporarily for Klein's social-democratic settlement, at least until capital and its state could regain political strength. But do we really need to go through yet another bout of Fascism before we arrive at Klein's Promised Land? I think not.

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Finally a description of why suddenly Strife in Burma

And of course, the people of Nigeria have fared no better for the crime of being born on soil above petroleum reserves coveted by Big Oil.

It's a disease.

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I once asked a zealot Denver-based, evangelical Christian leader why he and his group, The Worldwide Evangelical Allicance, proselytized so aggressively. He stated, "In order to protect our high standard of living." (And he likes his more affluent Christian sect's "society within a society, here in this country" to continue to flourish and advance!)
Upon hearing that from one who also truly backs George W. Bush's foreign policy, I guess you could assume that's most likely the real reason why we are in the Iraq...trying to keep our hands on their oil! It has nothing to do with bringing peace, liberty, freedom, safety, or democracy to the people of Iraq! It has nothing to do with teaching the world the message of "brotherly love" and "forgiveness." So much for religious proselytizing & the phoney Bush-Cheney Neocon War in Iraq! Let's End It!

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I've recently speed-read Shock Doctrine at a local B&N. Been a fan of her work for yrs. While I agree with much of the premise as presented in the book, none of this is new; the Left ridiculed some genuinely conservative researchers on the Right, when massive privatization effort in US, in the form of North American Union recently came to light.

While they can believe some privatization effort occured in the wake of Katrina against historically poor black neighborhoods, the likes of The Nation Magazine, which Ms. Klein often writes for, have hard time admitting what a North American Union (NAU)/SPP.gov, would do to residents along the corridor, privatization of water, abuse of eminent domain, selling off of taxpayer paid roads to private companies, most notably Cintra, which is owned by King of Spain, in order to toll roads that are already paid for by the taxpayers, and is free.

Many so called "alternative press" like The Nation Mag, cannot even honestly admit to the very existence of SPP.gov, aka North American Union (NAU) even in the face of massive evidence, as supplied by Bob Dacy, just because he is a member of the John Birch Society; Truth is the truth, no matter who reports it.

The NAU/SPP is a surreptitious private entity parading as a govt entity, a secret plan to merge US, Mexico and Canada into one huge colossal bureaucracy called the North American Union; NAU will lead to loss of national sovereignty, and a unified currency called the "Amero," in which collectivist laws of the Union will supercede the US Constitution, as the EU have done much to undermine laws of respective individual sovereign nations of Europe.

The current economic downturn, subprime, and derivative crises are not accidents, but a consequence of institutional investors manipulating the market, in an attempt to wipe out the dollar; history shows that every paper currency backed by nothing or mere credit crashes back down to what it's really worth, NOTHING. Thus in order to merge the three North American currencies, the dollar must collapse and a shift to all electronic currency is a priority, if one is to offset a hyperinflation, which prolonged low interest rates foment; there aren't enough space in the world to place all the zeros arising out of a hyper-inflated currency. Think this is new? Just look up pictures of Germans in early 1900's carrying a barrel full of Deutsch Mark to buy a single loaf of bread. To naively believe this cannot happen to our dollar is a simple matter of delusion of a childish intellect.

Plus, as Naomi says "this is no conspiracy, ... there's a paper trail." Well, much evidence in the form of video, audio, documents, and monetary trail exist which implicate that criminal elements in the US & NATO, and Mossad orchestrated the 9/11 false flag terror, yet much of the Left "alternative" press refuse to independently investigate 9/11. Apparently the post traumatic trance of 9/11, the very Shock Doctrine she described, is still hypnotizing her and her progressive journalist colleagues.

Many noted engineers, architects, like Richard Gage, physicists, like Dr.Steven E.Jones, former CIA clandestine operatives like Syrianna's Bob Baer, Bill Christianson (fmr head of European ops), Robert Steele (fmr European desk), and many more who walked the corridors of power like the father of Reaganomics Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, and several generals, diplomats like Andreas von Bulow (fmr Defense Minister of Germany) are ON RECORD IN STATING THAT 911 WAS AN INSIDE JOB.

-cont'd

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Yet the sychophants of the official govt conspiracy theory that 19 Arab men directed from a 6'4" tall Saudi from cave in Afghanistan who needs to walk along a kidney dialysis machine, with a satellite phone, which was being constantly monitored can orchestrate 4 airline hijackings with 4 pilots who could barely fly a propeller powered Cessna, who coincidentally infiltrated a $44 billion US intel apparatus deeply enough to give the NORAD a stand downown order into NOT taking out stray commercial airliners on 911. And coincidentally also knew that the US military would be conducting up to 25 + secret military drills that involved the very scenario that played out, on the day of 9/11. That is some coincidence. The statistical anomaly of such coincidence happening all concurrently lies in the trillions. That is some lottery win.

The fact that the head of the National Security Council in 2001, Condeleeza Rice, could not have possibly imagined that the US intel community would NOT be creative enough to prepare for a possibility of hijacked airliners crashing into American targets, when a one season X-Files spin-off comedy series on FOX called The LoneGunMen, whose pilot episode debuted in March of 2001, that had the same exact scenario of a rogue govt elements through remote control, hijacked a Boeing 757, crash it into WTC to blame it on terrorists to start illegal wars and increase military funding, is simple laughable.

So while the likes of Naomi Klein, Greg Palast, and John Perkins shed light on consequences of "disaster capitalism," they cannot seem to understand how our very system of fiat currency, the Federal Reserve, influences such freemarket fundie idealogues and Neocons. The Federal Reserve is as federal as the FedEx. It is a private bank, which holds membership of its member banks secret from We the People; no data can be had by Congress for oversight. And the very foundation of our so called Free-Market hangs on the testimony of one man, who is selected by a Bd. of Governors selected by private banks, to wield such astonishing power with a monetary terror instrument known as the interest rate.

This is no Free Market economy, not even by NeoCon's own definitions. It is a private corporatist monopoly. A sham.

When a currency is based on fractional reserve banking as much of US and UK commonwealth nations, and by proxy, rest of the world are, the very foundation of world economy is built on lies, shaky ground, and apt to manipulation of monopolies, international bankers and the military industrial complex.

When the dollar, as such is still the current world reserve currency, is based on nothing, you need a military with overwhelming might to ensure that every nation on earth will accept our dollars, at the muzzle of a nuclear barrel. The very essence of our currency system undermines democracies, and further contributes to the dominance of the military industrial complex. So the only way to maintain that is by Shock Doctrine. Yet, Naomi and much of the Left fail to understand the real geo-political implications of it all. It is not some game solely played against "3rd World Nations," or poor blacks in this country. Their ultimate target is the American Middle Class, and all middle classes of the world.

Simply put, in order to maintain our Anglo-American empire, illegal undeclared wars, occupation abroad, and a police state at home, you need a fiat currency like the Federal Reserve.

-Cont'd-

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In order to keep paying for welfare programs we cannot afford on cash, genuinely reflective of a real commodity, you need the Federal Reserve. The only way to keep funding cashless American consumers to buy cheap goods made abroad at slave wages, at the expense at the rest of the world, you need the FedRes. In order for corporatists to promote strong economy, to sell to the delusional public of a strong economy, and parade vast deficits as a good thing, when in reality, trade deficit does not accurately reflect the truth as goods produced under American brands overseas that are sold in Walmarts are considered "imports," you need the FedRes.

In fact, "Shock Doctrine," is the necessary tool to ensure the very existence of our corrupt private central banking system known as the Federal Reserve. Unless you understand that, you have no hope of changing or ridding the world of it.

Ms. Klein somehow thinks Shock Doctrines are applied after an opportunity present themselves, when in fact, the very example she sites, like Chile, the coup, the military and economic shock doctrines are orchestrated concurrently.

As the world is in constant need of bogeyman to justify vast militarism, in a post Soviet era, a new one is needed. Terrorism. And Terrorism is as phony as the Cold War.

Lies are everywhere; while most on the left refuse to believe a single word out of GWB, they naively accept the very premise that these criminals site to justify their international militarism, implementation of economic and military shock doctrines, the 9/11 excuse.

The Left refuses to question the official conspiracy that 19 hijackers with box cutters can hijack 4 commercial airliners in one morning without the NORAD scrambling a jet for over 2hrs; that the hijackings somehow coincidentally played out just like the actual secret military drills that were going on, on the morning of 9/11.

And what is ultimately insulting, coming from the mouths of liberals and so called progressives, is that Naomi Klein, Greg Palast, and Jeremy Scahill are all on record, in stating that a truly independent 9/11 investigation will be "a waste of time" and "a distraction," when each of the three so called "independent journalists" have yet to spend an ounce of time on the publicly available evidence and witness accounts.

It is ultimately ironic to me that the very author who titles her book "The Shock Doctrines," is one of the biggest victim of the said "shock doctrine" herself in the form of 9/11, the Federal Reserve, and the principles and misguided philosophy of socialist collectivism.

And it wouldn't surprise me in the least, if most of the Left buys the recent CBS report of the timely "rescue" of Polish Ambassador by Blackwater as a genuine accounting of the fact. This is packaged news propaganda at its best. This is proof positive that most people who ridicule non-progressives, and non-liberals of drinking the Kool-aid, are some of the biggest suckers of them all.

And if we are to have a shred of hope of keeping, while flawed, the best Republic this world has ever seen, at least in the last 10,000yrs, we need a truly honest and independent media, and informed, educated public. That also means the need for the likes of ACLU to defend all ten Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, not just the First.

"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who believe that they are free." -Goethe.

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