This book challenges the myth of the infallibility of neo-liberal, free market theory, aggressively advanced by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School since the 1960s. Privatization, deregulation, free trade, and decreased social spending comprise the package of neo-liberal economic policies, but, she argues, as these are impossible to be instituted without massive public resistance owing to the insecurity it causes (loss of jobs, social security, etc), political upheavals and natural disasters, in short, periods when the society is most vulnerable, have become the pretext to coerce governments to adopt these otherwise inadmissible policies.

By citing numerous well-researched examples from Latin America (during the era of US-propped dictatorships in the 1970s) to Eastern Europe and Russia (after the fall of Communism), and right on to the US's own backyard, New Orleans after Katrina, and to the biggest mess disaster capitalism has wrought, the Iraq War, Klein makes vivid and and convincing her argument that unfettered capitalism has and will not hesitate to have blood in its hands. ( )

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
(Rahm Emmanuel, Obama's Chief of Staff)

This motto has been applied before, and this book tells you what the effects were. ( )

Klein builds the book around different kinds of shock, which she argues are increasingly exploited by powerful corporate interests at the expense of the lives and well-being of everyone else. Briefly, the collective shock of a disaster, Klein argues, is analogous to the shock which in individuals results in post-traumatic stress disorder. It is in this vulnerable state that a society is vulnerable (or "ready" if you're Milton Friedman) to the radical free-market "shock therapy" which was first put into practice in Chile following the CIA-backed coup of Pinochet, by the direction of economists from the University of Chicago led by Friedman. This therapy basically involves privatization of industry, opening trade barriers so US corporations can take over industry, and massive layoffs as a necessary consequence of it all. (Klein goes into much more gory and engrossing detail.) The result, in every country this neoliberal program has been successfully instituted, has been massive transfers of public wealth into the hands of US corporations and poverty and desperation for the objects of the therapy. Klein recounts the stories of Chile, Argentina, Mexico, China, the former Soviet republics, and others that support her thesis. She uses the Iraq invasion and reconstruction and the responses to Hurricane Katrina as examples as well.This book is a great synthesis of several decades of major global economic and political events which the US has initiated and benefited from and about which most American are completely ignorant. ( )

Klein (http://www.naomiklein.org) describing Obama's dismantling of the American economy. "The idea that market crashes can act as catalysts for revolutionary change has a long history on the far left, most notably in the Bolshevik theory that hyperinflation, by destroying the value of money, takes the masses one step closer to the destruction of capitalism itself (p. 175, referring to "The ABC of Capitalism," p. 613, no. 35).

After describing how dismantling has worked elsewhere the same procedure is applied to the U.S. with Obama. Klein (http://blogsmithconsulting.blogspot.c...) has stated that there is a continuity between the Bush and Obama economic policies.

Good idea, but the book drags on a bit. ( )