Naomi Klein Exposes the Dangerous
Side of Free Market Radicals

By Kate Lancaster

Nooo: Klein, author of No
Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies,
recently released her latest book,
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism. And she says she’s
viciously enjoying the fact that she’s
currently beating both Brian Mulroney
and Alan Greenspan on the North
American best seller lists. No doubt
she’s enjoying the controversy and
debate the book is stirring up as well.

Klein spoke in Vancouver on
October 4 as a guest of the Vancouver
International Writer’s Festival. She
is using the capital of a best seller to
affect change away from corporate
greed and the radical free market ideas
of economists like Milton Friedman,
and toward a workable economic
model based on grass-roots collective
endeavors and the strength of the public
sphere.

An award-winning investigative
journalist, Klein is also recognized as
one of the leading intellectuals of our
time. In 2000, No Logo, her exposé on
corporate branding, became a bible for
the anti-globalization movement, as
well as a respected business handbook
for the new millennium.

This time, she’s put her considerable
intelligence toward exposing the
opportunistic, and often-violent nature
of radical free market fundamentalism
when it is applied to disaster zones such
as post-tsunami Sri Lanka, post-Katrina
New Orleans, and present day Iraq.

So what does Klein mean by the
term “shock doctrine?” She says, “It is
a philosophy of power that holds that
the best way, the best time, to push
through radical free-market ideas is in
the aftermath of a major shock.” The
shock can take many forms: natural
disasters, terrorist attacks, war—
anything that causes extreme shock
within a population. These crises open a
window of opportunity because people
in shock are vulnerable and more easily
manipulated. As a result, it’s easier for
elites to push through radical changes,
or what economists call “economic
shock therapy.”

Klein is not suggesting that market
fundamentalists conspire to create these
opportunities —she forcefully denies
that she’s a conspiracy theorist— but
that they take advantage of disasters to
promote their economic agenda. Their
interests are served by deliberately
planned and executed privatization
policies that are easier to push through
during times of crisis than during the
Status quo.

Shock Doctrine traces and compares
two kinds of shocks: economic shock,
which arose from the Chicago school
of Economics headed by Friedman,

and psycho/corporeal shock, or shocks
to the body. These shocks are the kind
used in the “creative interrogation
techniques” of psychiatrist Ewen
Cameron at McGill University in the
1950s.

Funded by the CIA and backed by
the Canadian government, Cameron
used patients at McGill’s Allan

utterly shattered. But they provided the
CIA with the information needed to
create a manual for torture, which Klein
discovered while researching the book.
This manual is filled with techniques
now being practiced in terrorist
detention centres such as Guantanamo
Bay and Abu Ghraib.

Klein compares Cameron’s deeds to

TH oe OF

Biss TER

 

“Klein is not suggesting that market
fundamentalists conspire to create these
opportunities, but that they take advantage of
disasters to promote their economic agenda.”

Memorial Hospital as guinea pigs to
prove his controversial and unorthodox
theories on mental illness. He believed
the mentally ill needed to be completely
broken down and rebuilt back to health.

To accomplish this, he administered
severe and frequent electro-shock
treatments and massive amounts of
psychotropic and psychedelic drug
cocktails to his patients. He deprived
them of sleep for days or alternately
induced sleep, leaving them near
comatose for as long as a month. Once a
“complete depatterning” was achieved,
Cameron used taped messages to
re-pattern his patient’s memory and
personality. As Klein says, it was
“shock and awe” therapy.

Of course, Cameron’s experiments
were abject failures in terms of mental
health—his patient’s lives were often

disaster capitalism, where countries in
shock are repatterned using economic
shock therapy. For instance, in Sri
Lanka after the tsunami, poor fishermen
whose families had lived on the ocean
for generations were moved inland “for
their own safety.” While they were still
in a state of shock, foreign investors
scooped up their property and auctioned
it off to the tourist industry. They
repatterned the seaside for the sake of
profit.

In New Orleans, the public school
system has been systematically erased
and replaced by “Charter” schools:
privately run, for-profit organizations.
Big Education may prosper, but how
many of the refugees of Katrina will be
able to afford to send their children to
these schools? The entire school system
has been repatterned for the sake of

profit.

As for Iraq, Klein calls the war “the
most egregious and disgraceful example
of economic shock therapy.” Since
the war started in 2002, the number of
private contractors working in Iraq has
risen from three to a startling 180,000.

At the beginning of the war, even
Paul Bremer, the Presidential Envoy
to Iraq who privatized just about
everything in the country, refused to
touch the oil industry because he feared
a public backlash. However, once Iraq
disintegrated into so-called civil war,
the Bush-sponsored Iraqi government
instituted a law that allows private oil
companies to export 80 percent of their
output.

Klein argues that disaster capitalism
is not a theory, it is a reality; and she
uses the above examples and more to
support her statement. Interestingly, few
are stepping up to debate her this time,
as opposed to the strong opposition she
felt to No Logo.

It may be because Klein and her
highly skilled research team have done
more than their share of homework.

Or it may be because Klein is really a
centrist with detractors on both the right
and the left. She’s too socialist for the
right wing and too moderate for the left.

Indeed, she openly admits that
markets are not necessarily bad. It is
the insinuation of the market into every
aspect of life that she opposes, and
the exploitation of the disenfranchised
or the shocked by radical free market
capitalists. As Klein said in her address
to striking Vancouver library workers
on October 5, “There are areas where
we know the market should not apply:
health care, education and libraries.
These things are too important, too
fundamental to our democracy to
allow the profit motive to govern those
transactions.”

Surprisingly, Klein is not all doom
and gloom. She is extremely positive
and hopeful for the future. It is her
belief that the proponents of right-wing
market economics are themselves in
a time of crisis. She says, “The IMF
is going broke, the WTO has been
derailed, and there is a crisis of faith in
trickle down economics.”

Mostly, Klein encourages us to
communicate and to remember history
because, as she says, “We need our
stories because they make us strong and
build resistance.” Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism is one hell
of an act of resistance. It says, “Brian
Mulroney and Alan Greenspan, your
time has come,” and the battle won’t
just be fought on the bookshelves at
Chapters.