The Shock Doctrine is best selling book by author Naomi Kline. It documents the increase in corporate power and influence that comes on the heels of major catastrophic events. 

Based on the principles of the late economist Milton Friedman, adherents of this doctrine constantly advocate for an unrestricted “free market” that will allow for market based economies to correct themselves when problems arise. If this sounds familiar it should. The mantra of unregulated and unrestricted free markets has been one of the hallmarks of republican ideology. Not to be left out, democrats, ushered in by Bill Clinton and wholeheartedly subscribed to by Barack Obama, have also bought the free market paradigm hook, line and sinker.

Kline points to the opportunities in recent history where countries have given the Friedmanites full reign to implement their policies. The results in Chile, The Balkans, the former Soviet Union, Iraq, and even New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina are all indictments of this failed approach. And we can add one more example of the corrupt Friedman doctrine of unregulated free markets, the collapsed U.S. economy. In all of these situations a major catastrophe has occurred (wars, coups, hurricanes or tsunamis) that gives corporations justifications to implement extreme policies that would never have been acceptable before the disaster.

 

Overall, The Shock Doctrine is a thorough look at the economic principles that have held sway over the world for the last thirty-some years. What is truly remarkable is Kline’s ability to link the “shock doctrines” goals and principles to CIA backed brainwashing experiments of Dr. Ewen Cameron and the modern day torture practices at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

 

A must-have book for the library, The Shock Doctrine is an inside look at the principles and outcomes of most dominant economic theory in the last thirty years, “disaster capitalism.”

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