Word: shock
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein, best known for her 2000 book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, explores how capitalism came to dominate the world, from Chile to Russia, China to Iraq, South Africa to Canada, with the help of violent shock tactics in times of natural disaster or tragedy. Released in the U.S. September 18 and throughout Europe and Canada the week before that, the book counters the theory that unfettered capitalism and a successful democracy go hand-in-hand. TIME sat down with Klein to discuss her conclusions, the research process...
TIME: How did you come up with such a theory and what turned it into a book? Naomi Klein: I went to Iraq a year into the occupation and was researching the intersection between the shock and awe invasion and how it was supposed to have laid the psychological groundwork for [Bush's Iraq envoy]Paul Bremer's extreme country makeover that first summer. And what I was looking at, the tail end of Bremer's stay, was how shock therapy had backfired in Iraq - and by shock therapy I'm referring to the economic policies that were really seen...
...became interested in this idea of what happens to our minds when we go into a state of shock and why was this is such a powerful metaphor for both the military and the economic architects of the war. But I still wasn't sure that this was something that went beyond Iraq. When I first used the phrase "disaster capitalism" it was because I had found out that something very similar was happening in Sri Lanka after the Asian tsunami where just days after the tsunami hit the government started pushing a very unpopular privatization agenda of water privatization...
...just some twisted invention of the Bush White House. That actually there is a history. Every time there has been a major leap forward for this fundamentalist version of capitalism that really doesn't see a role for the state, the ground has been prepared by some kind of shock...
...left in Latin America, then you had a wave of military coups, often supported by the CIA, and many of these U.S.-trained Chicago boys, as they're called in Latin America, rose to prominent levels of governments - heads of the central bank or finance ministers - where the economic shock therapists were working hand-in-hand with the very real shock therapists who are in control in these countries through repressive means, including torture...