The Shock Doctrine
Last Updated on Wednesday, 02 February 2011 21:00 Written by Barb Wednesday, 10 October 2007 00:00
Milton Friedman, one of the most famous economists of the 20th century, was a big believer in the power of crises (of the economic sort) to induce a generalized state of shock in a population. A crisis makes people vulnerable and desperate and thereby opens them up to ideas and changes that might not be in their best interests --such as the restructuring of their economy to a format more beneficial to Western industrialized super powers (e.g. us!).
"Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change" he said.
Friedman was talking about economic crises but natural disasters can do the same thing: terrorize a population, make them desperate and open the doors of opportunity for the economic restructuring of a society. Naomi Klein explains it all in her new book The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism.
When [a] crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, [Friedman] was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the "tyranny of the status quo".
Some examples:
After the 1973 coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende, 50,000 people were tortured, 80,000 imprisoned, unknown numbers of folks were disappeared and the income of the wealthy rose 83%.
The 1989 crackdown in China killed hundreds, jailed thousands and ushered in a new era of sweatshops and free market capitalism.
And right here at home in the US of A, after Katrina:
"Most New Orleans schools are in ruins," Friedman observed [in an editorial he wrote three months after the disaster], "as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity."
[pause to shudder...before Klein explains]:
Friedman's radical idea was that instead of spending a portion of the billions of dollars in reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans' existing public school system, the government should provide families with vouchers, which they could spend at private institutions.
In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.
Privatize. Privatize everything, everywhere until the whole world is run by the dictates of the profit margin. And if people don't want to give up things like public education and national safety nets such as social security and medicare, well, that's where the shock doctrine comes in. It's brutal but that's exactly the nature of global capitalism.
But there is hope, she says. "The best way to resist shock is to know what is happening to you and why". Click the screen below to watch a short video based on the book.