Many of your might know Naomi Klein as the author of NO LOGO. A lot of time has passed since and she has been busy!
Already in 2008 she has published another book called the Shock Doctrine, which today is more appealing then ever.
“The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s ‘free market’ policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.”
In the book Klein travels back in time to when Milton Friedman was preaching his neo-liberal ideas at the university of Chicago. Fifty years later we can see what Friedman’s idea has brought us. An example from the book:
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.
If you are interested, get the book. Personally, I totally have to read it. In the meantime, watch Naomi Klein’s talk about the BP oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico and how our society is handling risk nowadays:
