http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/reviews/shock-wave-troopersShock Wave Troopers
Brian Lynch, Georgia Straight, September 6, 2007
Naomi Klein exposes the economic ambulance chasers who take advantage of natural and economic disasters worldwide.
Milton Friedman, the Nobel-laureate economist and champion of unfettered global markets, was a great believer in preparing for disaster. As he wrote in the opening of his 1962 manifesto, Capitalism and Freedom , "only a crisis–actual or perceived–produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around." And Friedman worked his long career to ensure that the economic ideas lying closest to powerful politicians and bureaucrats in times of trouble were the ones he espoused most fervently: deregulation of industry, privatization of state-owned companies and resources, the shrinking of government to its barest essentials, and the complete freedom of capital to move according to its whims.
Friedman's success in this lifelong campaign can be gauged by the glowing eulogies he received from politicians, economists, and pundits around the globe when he died last year at the age of 94. But the true mark of his influence, according to Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein, is in the cynical opportunism of those committed to laissez faire capitalism. As she argues in her wide-ranging, caustic new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Knopf Canada, $36.95), Friedman's followers have learned to take swift advantage of public disorientation in the wake of large-scale catastrophes in order to perform what Friedman himself called economic "shock therapy".
In an extended interview with the Georgia Straight , Klein explains that she first noticed this pattern during a trip to Sri Lanka in the summer of 2005 to report on the devastation the Asian tsunami had wreaked on that country's shores six months before. What she saw there, she says by phone from Toronto, was "a sort of amping up of a corporate agenda from free-trade light to free-trade heavy, with no veneer of consent–just exploiting people in their deepest moment of vulnerability and disorganization, when there's no possibility of democratic participation".
Within mere days of the disaster, Klein says, the Sri Lankan government passed a bill opening the way for the privatization of water and began creating legislation to sell off the national electricity company. Moreover, by the time she arrived in the battered country, government officials had set up a "buffer zone" that stretched the length of the island's east coast, preventing traditional fishing communities from returning to the waterfront to rebuild their shattered homes. The ruling was ostensibly for the sake of public safety, in case of another monstrous wave. But, as Klein argues in detail in her book, the motives behind it seemed questionable, given that the tourism industry was exempted from such restrictions. Resort owners in Sri Lanka had long sought to have the fishing villages removed from the otherwise pristine beaches; in fact, they had increased the pressure in early 2003, when the government began touting an economic-growth program, formulated in part by the World Bank, that singled out high-end tourism as the key to the country's future prosperity in the global marketplace.
"The force of that natural disaster," Klein tells the Straight , "was immediately harnessed by international lenders…and the need for tremendous aid was used as leverage to make many of the countries hit by the tsunami, including Sri Lanka, submit to what used to be called 'structural adjustment'–privatization and deregulation."
Continued>>>>>
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/reviews/shock-wave-troopers
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
