My Unrequited Love for the Business Press
On a recent visit to Calgary, Alberta, I was taken aback to see my book on disaster capitalism selling briskly at the airport. Calgary is ground zero of North America's oil and gas boom, where business suits and cowboy hats are the de facto uniform. I had a sudden sinking feeling: did Calgary's business class think The Shock Doctrine was a how-to guide -- a manual for making millions from catastrophe? Were they hoping for tips on landing no-bid contracts if the U.S. bombs Iran?
When I get worried about inadvertently fueling the disaster complex, I take comfort in the response the book has elicited from the world's leading business journalists. That's where I learn that the very notion of disaster capitalism is my delusion -- or, as Otto Reich, former adviser to President George Bush, told BBC Business Daily, it is the work "of a very confused person."
Many publications have seen fit to assign business journalists to review the book. And why not? They are the experts. Unabashed fans of the late free-market evangeliser Milton Friedman, these are our primary purveyors of the idea that ballooning corporate profits are on the verge of trickling down to the citizens of the world in the form of freedom and democracy. So in the Times, for instance, the book was reviewed by Robert Cole, who writes the paper's personal investor column and is author of the volume Getting Started in Unit and Investment Trusts (Chapter 7 -- Taxing Questions: Pepping up Your Prospects). Cole was none too pepped by The Shock Doctrine, which disappointed him as "too easy to dismiss as a leftist rant." In The New York Times, the task of explaining why "it's all a grand capitalist conspiracy" fell to Tom Redburn, author of its Economic View column. "That's a lot to lay on poor Milton," Redburn sniffed.
No one took it quite as hard as Terence Corcoran, the business editor of Canada's National Post. Disaster capitalism is apparently my "fevered creation." And how could I have said those things about Friedman, a man Corcoran has described as "the last great lion of free market economics"? In the Financial Times, the unbiased dissection was carried out by John Willman, the paper's UK business editor (who, on the side, advocates shifting healthcare costs to families in Britain and tuition increases in Scotland). Willman declared the book "a polemic" and warned "impressionable readers" not to be fooled by my 60 pages of endnotes. While Cole claims I rely on "partisan contributions from the cuttings library," Willman accuses me of a far greater crime: relying on cuttings from the FT. "She quotes the Financial Times when it suits her, for example, but not when it would be inconvenient."
It's true. I do, in fact, quote the FT when it suits me. In The Shock Doctrine, I cite the paper 26 times. And this is what hurts most about the attacks from the world's business editors: even as they find new ways to dismiss me, I remain a devoted reader of their pages. Sure, financial editors have to do PR for capitalism. Their reporters, however, have a crucial market role. Investors require reliable information, and it's their job to supply it. Without this honest reporting, I would never have understood how economic shock therapy programmes relied on external disasters -- the very disaster capitalism I now learn, from these same pages, does not exist.
It was from the FT that I learned of the so-called Davos Dilemma. Columnist Martin Wolf describes it as "the contrast between the world's favourable economics and troublesome politics." He explains that, in recent years, the economy has faced "a series of shocks" -- from the dotcom crash to September 11 to chaos in the Middle East. And yet the market is in "a golden period of broadly shared growth."
A great deal of light is shed on the Davos Dilemma by the FT. For instance, it reported that Lockheed Martin -- the biggest single winner from the economy of disaster -- has begun "buying companies in the $1,000bn-a-year healthcare market". It's just one glimpse into the exploding economy of privatised disaster, with Lockheed poised to profit not only from making weapons but also from treating the people injured by them -- a new era of morbid vertical integration.
The FT has long explored how politicians harness disasters to push through unwanted economic policies. In 1998, for instance, the FT published an article by Jeffrey Sachs outlining how the IMF took South Korea's democracy hostage, withholding a desperately needed loan until all presidential candidates committed in writing to a harsh austerity plan. Some months later, Hurricane Mitch swept Central America. I learned from the FT that, with countries still knee-deep in rubble, foreign lenders were demanding privatisations.
In the first months after the U.S. "shock and awe" attack on Iraq, the FT reported on U.S. envoy Paul Bremer's shock therapy programme. The paper stated his decrees "make Iraq one of the most open economies in the developing world and go beyond even legislation in many rich countries." It's a concise summary that I often draw upon.
But now, after all these years of fruitful (if one-way) collaboration, the FT calls my thesis "ultimately dishonest." Stinging as this may be, I stand behind the honesty of the FT's reporting, which has been so very helpful in the evolution of my world view.
I wish disaster capitalism were a product of my fevered imagination. I have recently, however, come across more evidence to support its existence. It comes from Paul B Farrell, author of publishing sensations such as The Millionaire Code and The Lazy Person's Guide to Investing. "Hot tip: Invest in 'disaster capitalism'," begins his review in Dow Jones Business News. Farrell acknowledges that an economy built on disaster "is a hot-button political issue. But for the moment, let's put aside partisan politics ... Let's look at this strictly as investors and briefly consider what may also be a guide for aggressive investors." Many unmentionable stock tips follow.
It is just as I had feared -- The Shock Doctrine as a how-to-guide. At the end, however, Farrell shows some misgivings. "Is 'Disaster Capitalism' merely a hot short-term investment opportunity for you? Or is it a national 'crisis,' a warning bell, a 'shocking' call to ... rein in the 'military-industrial complex' mindset that's pushing America into a disastrous, self-destructive future?"
Moral confusion in the business pages? Where am I supposed to get my news now?
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The Shock Doctrine is a tour de force. For anyone who hasn't already done so, I highly recommend that you buy it; read it. Thank you, Naomi, for this brilliant, amazing work. It's stunning! The 'business press' can't even hope to stop this one.
I have Unrequited Love for Naomi Klein! Yes I do…
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair
I'm buying your book, Naomi!
Naomi
Have been a fan of yours for a couple of years now. What luck you came about. Is there something in the water up there is Canada?
I'm was educated as an economist and historian and I've wanted to write, in book form, about some of the phenomena you have written about. I have seen it but haven't had the drive or talent to get it down on paper.
So Good for You and Thank you so very much.
Thank you, for writing this book and bring this under discussed topic onto the public forum. People have confused unfettered capitalism with Democracy. Our foreign policy is nothing but an enforcer for the pirates who own both parties.
The capitalist PR machines that condemned you is a good sign, good in that your book struck a cord with them and your book contains the ugly truth. The main problem with Shock capitalism is to create disasters, such as 9/11 for which their was no incentive for the Bush maladministration to stop or prevent the attacks. While I don't think they initiated the 9/11 defeat of America by 19 hijackers, they simply didn't want to stop or prevent it from happening. For instance on 6/1/07 Cheney changed the hijacking intercept authorization to a centralized system, meaning it would have to go thru Washington for approval before intercept. Had the decentralized intercept authorization remained the 9/11 hijacked planes would have been intercepted and the outcome likely different, not so disastrous. In December the intercept authorization reverted back to the decentralized system. It almost seems that Cheney changed the intercept authorization for the purpose of letting the 9/11 hijackings be successful.Finally, the most apt historical comparison for OBL and the 9/11 attacks is to Pancho Villa, his declaration of war on the USA and his invasion of New Mexico where there were casualties. This would not be dramatic enough for PNAC to implement its plan for a soviet-fascist type government of the USA though. Villa was pursued by Gen. Black Jack Pershing and never caught just as OBL was pursued and never caught. Both pursuits were terminated for other wars, WW1 AND the Iraq invasion.
I watched your ten points video, I am in France awaiting your book so I may have jumped the gun here.
Where I think you are wrong or over optimistic, is the last tipping point has been and gone. The American people will not resist. Goebbels did not have access to the propaganda machine that is the MSM. Nor did they have an MIC so mature as to be the bedrock of all research and industry carried out in the US. The vetting and censoring of government scientists reports was the last step.
The multinational corporations have intertwined with governments around the world, democracy is fading fast as people are to scared to even stand up for themselves in the work place. The words trade union have successfully be demonised as a fall towards communism.
The war is over, the resistance must start.
Ms. Klein,
The Harris fire started in Potrero, and is till burning.
You think Blackwater will benefit from fire sale prices on land there? That's where they want to build a training facility.
Of course, not all critics of the "shock doctrine" thesis belong to the business press.
Stephen Marshall:
http://www.alternet.org/story/63066/?page=entire
"The second reason he [Engler] rejects the idea that the invasion of Iraq represents a new phase in neoliberalism is that global capital is against the war. It wasn't just European banks and traders -- whose CEOs loudly voiced their objections to Bush's Iraq strategy at the 2003 World Economic Forum in Davos a few months before the war -- that stood to lose, but also companies like Disney and Coca-Cola... And this goes for a majority of the companies in the financial and services sectors that trade on Wall Street."
How is the "shock doctrine" thesis compatible with the fact that American business lobby groups like the National Foreign Trade Council work to lift sanctions and normalize relations with "rogue states," rather than pushing for war?
See, for example this 2003 Mother Jones article on US corporate lobbying and terror-sponsoring regimes
http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2003/07/ma_452_01.html
Why do Robber Barons fund charities?
It's so that they can control their money and not have to pay taxes. You can bet it's a scam although many do good works.
Perhaps you should read the southern classic tale "Brer Rabbit" regarding a certain briar patch. It might enlighten you on this.
It's not a question sanctions or war. No sanctions means more business in general on the one hand. Conveniently, no sanctions also makes it even easier to arm future enemies. It's been done over and over and over again. Setting them up and knocking them down is a standard in the game of jockeying for global dominance.
Marshall's assertion you quoted is just an example of the business that stood to lose (and their host economies, I might add), or didn't have the right connections to benefit in the aftermath if the US invaded Iraq. Making the claim that global capital was against the war is an oversimplification, however.
Ms. Klein,
Your book had a huge impact on me.
The only way I can describe it is that it had the same effect on me that reading The Jungle did when I was in the 9th or 10th grade. Hearing pundits saying things like we should have no minimum wage and we should let the markets decide everything, I have always thought, "we already did that. Have we learned nothing from the squalid working conditions, indentured servitude, poor pay, robber barons and all the rest?" I couldn't understand why these were even topics on TV until you explained it all in your book.
I think your book should be a standard reading text, at least in college.
It definitely shifted my perspective about global modern history as we have been told it. It could not have had that effect on me unless there was a lot of truth to be recognized in your book.
You did an excellent job, and thank-you for writing it.
Naomi, I just finished your book and I recommend it to everyone (everyone with an open mind, that is). It's time to stop pretending that disaster capitalism isn't going on. Thanks for articulating the situation so well, I'm now a big fan. Keep the pressure on the neo-cons and force them to show their true, greedy, un-democratic colors.
The business press produces amusing headlines
The headline writing rule is simple and applied consistently.
1. Note the direction of the major U.S. stock market indexes.
2. Note what most are saying is the significant financial story of the day.
3. Write a headline that implies that #1 above is caused by the #2 story above.
Examples:
"Stocks sink after oil prices rise"
"Markets rise sharply as the dollar slumps"
"Markets mixed after new home sales rise"
Other Examples:
"Stocks soar as oil tops $85"
"Markets fall in response to the diminishing dollar"
"Markets mixed after new home sales fall"
Well done on your book. Do as many talk shows as possible? Please?
I've been recommending 'the two Naomi's' (you and Naomi Wolf)to everyone, as the most relevant and important writers to read right now.
The Shock Doctrine, and The End Of America, as well as our Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence.
Vital reading.
Here in San Diego I predict that since Wal-Mart was so helpful down at the stadium there soon will be lost grocer's union jobs.
Jeez, I'll bet my folks can't get back into their house because of Bush's photo op.
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