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Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine": Corporatism in Extremis
By Bernard Weiner (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Bernard Weiner - Writer
Most of the books I've read about the awfulness of the Bush presidency remind me of the old story about the blind men trying to figure out what an elephant looks like. Each one feels the part in front of him and describes the elephant within that singular context. The blind men's descriptions are correct but they don't really capture "elephant-ness," the totality of what such an animal might be.
"The Shock Doctrine" by The Nation/Guardian writer Naomi Klein gets the pieces of the elephant right, but, more importantly, the book displays the author's deep understanding of the dangerous political/economic philosophies that undergird U.S. domestic and foreign policy.
In this, "The Shock Doctrine" is the most compelling, intelligent, meticulously researched and wholistic book I've yet read about how the U.S., over the past fifty years, got itself into the unholy mess it's in today.
A large part of Klein's book, as you might guess, involves the catastrophe that is Iraq and the "war on terror" in general. But those military misadventures, she says, are but symptoms of the more all-encompassing ideological mindset that breeds the reckless policies being pursued today both domestically and internationally.
PROFITEERING ON HUMAN TRAGEDY
In the main, that ideology rests on a narrow, greed-oriented economic and political philosopy that barely recognizes the concept of a "public good." Instead, the goal is what can be gained by private corporations and individuals if the "public good" is removed from the equation so that "free market" forces are permitted to act unconstrained.
The idea is to return to some imagined "clean slate" where those free-market forces can be allowed to do their stuff absent governmental interference and oversight. The economic "shock therapy" visited upon developing Latin American countries and the Iraq War/Occupation provide just two examples of such human intervention.
Often, however, Mother Nature through earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc. wipes the slate clean so that the greed paradigm can be allowed to flourish by removing (usually poorer) residents who get in the way of corporate desires. Klein incisively and movingly relates the tale of what happened in Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami disaster, where the local fishing villages were turned into luxurious tourist sites by money-hungry government officials in cahoots with Western developers. (Page 385)
Klein uses the term "disaster capitalism" to refer to these "orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events," where the forces of greed view such tragedies "as exciting market opportunities." (p.6) She quotes a Republican leader in Louisiana: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Katrina, Klein says, is a clear example of the new "preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering." (p.8)
In short, in "disaster capitalism" there are huge profits to be made from other peoples' misery, and since the welfare of the public is of no import in this economic/political theory, all that is needed for full control and enhanced profits are ways to optimally manage that misery.
MAN-MADE TRAUMA AND CHAOS
If nature doesn't provide that trauma, humans can. According to Klein, that's what "Shock & Awe" was all about in Iraq and which will be used in other attacks as well. The idea is to traumatize an entire culture through death, destruction, deprivation, fright, and often torture. One U.S. entrepreneur in Iraq stated it baldly: "fear and disorder offer real promise" in the marketplace. (p.9) This is reminiscent of Condoleezza Rice's famous comment after 9/11 that the terrorist tragedy offerred conservatives a good "opportunity" to move quickly on their business and political agendas.
Much of the rationale for this type of thinking was born from Milton Friedman's economic model developed at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and beyond. Klein, oddly enough, doesn't even mention the complementary teaching by political philosopher Leo Strauss, the Machavellian godfather of neo-conservative extremism, who also was on the Chicago faculty; many of Strauss' students became key players in the CheneyBush Administration. Strauss in a nutshell: grab what you can get by whatever means necessary.
While Friedman's tough, corporate model can be, and has been, imposed on democratic cultures, Klein notes, "authoritarian conditions are required for the implementation of its true vision." (p.11) And thus aggressive, tough strictures are often employed, often by dictators or invading armies or world financial institutions.
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