num_pages: 558
description: In her ground-breaking reporting from Iraq, Naomi Klein exposed how the trauma of invasion was being exploited to remake the country in the interest of foreign corporations. She called it "disaster capitalism." Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment" losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. By capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, Klein argues that the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.
language: English
title: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
titlecomplete: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
characters: Boris Yeltsin, Jeffrey Sachs, Thabo Mbeki, Nelson Mandela, Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Wałęsa, Ewen Cameron, Hajji Suharto, Vladimir Lenin, Augusto Pinochet, Mikhail Gorbachev
genres: Nonfiction, Society, Social Justice, Business, Economics, Political Science, History, Philosophy, Sociology, Politics
ratings_count: 50268
places: Brazil, Iraq, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, New Orleans, Louisiana, United Kingdom, Argentina, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Russia, Indonesia
awards: awardedAt: 1230796800000
name: Warwick Prize for Writing, awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award
category: Non‐Fiction Book, awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: OLA Evergreen Award, awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction
publisher: Metropolitan Books