Taranne Posté 18 septembre 2007 Signaler Posté 18 septembre 2007 La dame sort un nouveau livre: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine Brainwashed by the market: What drives Naomi Klein? Naomi Klein's critique of 'disaster capitalism' will echo around the world – but its roots lie in a scandal close to her Canadian home By Julie Wheelwright Published: 14 September 2007 The author and activist Naomi Klein has just endured a gentle mauling on the Today programme. Klein had been speaking about her new book The Shock Doctrine, arguing that capitalism's latest incarnation is about profiting from – even creating – crises. Diane Coyle, an economist and BBC trustee (and former economics editor of The Independent), sniffed that this argument was "another example of American imperialism". When we meet an hour later at a Soho hotel, Klein seems unruffled. "I did some research about Diane Coyle," she says, rooting through a file. She hands me a paper entitled "The Role of Mobiles in Disaster and Emergencies", which Coyle wrote for a mobile-phone trade association. "You can see," she says, "that I'm a bit of an obsessive." Ironically, for a woman who has been hailed as the author of a "Das Kapital of the growing anti-corporate movement", there's nothing grungy about Klein. With her sleek hair-cut, immaculate teeth and friendly but down-to-business attitude, she could easily be mistaken for a telecoms exec winding up a power breakfast in the lobby of a boutique hotel. Having tackled the way our affluent lifestyle is a by-product of globalisation's devastating effects on the world's poor in No Logo (2000), Klein now deftly marshals another enormously complex subject into a series of elegantly argued chapters. In a damning critique of Friedmanite economics, The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism (Allen Lane, £25) uses thousands of documents and interviews to expose how governments and corporations have used or even invented disasters to push through laissez-faire market reforms before local populations can recover from the shock. Wars and disaster responses are now so fully privatised that they themselves have become the new markets. Klein traces this Dr Strangelove world back to Milton Friedman, who turned the University of Chicago's economics department into a hotbed of free-market radicalism. With the complicity of the US government and its intelligence services, Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" brought their doctrine to Latin America in the Seventies. Where democratically elected leaders like Salvador Allende were ousted by military dictators, the Chicago Boys moved in to help privatise, de-regulate and clean up. Their greatest weapon, argues Klein, was shock. After their success in Chile, the roadshow moved on to Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay. Later, Friedman's star graduate, Jeffrey Sachs, was parachuted in to Poland and Russia, where democracy was sacrificed for market interests. The rumours that sparked the "Asian Flu" financial crisis of the late Nineties saw the dismantling of state-owned industries. The list goes on, culminating in the new disaster economies that have turned Thai fishing villages into high-end beach resorts, post-tsunami, and New Orleans public schools into privately funded "charter" schools after Hurricane Katrina. But does Klein believe that the often faceless operators believe their rhetoric about free markets being the cornerstone of democracy? She pauses. "There are some true believers who really think that trickle-down economics is the best way to improve the lot of all humanity," she says. "But I think those people are few and far between." Among the most haunting chapters are those dealing with the dismantling of Iraq. While the Bush presidency now seems mired in scandals, Klein takes little comfort in the comeuppance of his closest allies. "I wrote the book because I think we need to be talking about systems rather than individuals," she says. "My worry is that the danger of the Bush years is that these guys are so outrageous that the focus has just been on the bad apples. You gun, gun, gun to get Rumsfeld to resign; you gun, gun, gun to get Cheney to resign, and then do we really think this is going to change things?' Klein recently attended a congressional hearing on private-sector security in Iraq, where military support services are being contracted out to corporations such as Blackwater, Bechtel and Halliburton. The number of private contractors in Iraq now outstrips the number of US forces in the field. Klein found that the politicians were relying on the journalists for their information. "It was amazing how little they knew – they were asking us, 'What's going on?' It was kinda nice that they were asking," she says, widening her eyes with astonishment, "but it was also a little late." What the Bush administration has created are no-go areas for private contractors. Klein relates how two former employees at the security firm Custer Battles accused it of defrauding the government for work at Baghdad International Airport. Even though a federal court found Custer Battles guilty, the verdict was overturned when the company argued it wasn't a part of the US government. So the Bush administration had indemnified US corporations in Iraq from liability under Iraqi or American law. For Klein, "Iraq represented the most extreme expression of the anti-state revolution: a hollow state." I ask Klein if she feels grateful to have spent her childhood in Montreal during the tail-end of prime minister Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government. "Oh yeah," she says. "I feel very fortunate to be a Canadian, and when I talk to my American friends about these issues, it's very abstract for them. They don't really know what 'public' means because this agenda has triumphed so completely." Klein's parents had left the US in protest against the Vietnam war, and headed for a country where public services were flourishing. She had impeccable "red diaper" credentials. Her grandfather Philip Klein, an animator at Disney, was blacklisted for organising a strike in the Fifties. Her father, Dr Michael Klein, taught at McGill University's medical department, while her mother Bonnie Sherr Klein became a celebrated feminist film-maker. But if Canada proved a haven, Klein has drawn on a sinister episode from her neighbourhood as a central metaphor for the book. The Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill, had been a place that people had whispered about, says Klein. A family friend was a chief intern who refused to participate in the experiments of its director, Dr Ewan Cameron. "I never knew the history, even though I had these close connections." Since the Eighties, there have been revelations about the horrific abuse of mostly female patients, who were subjected to a regime of drugs, ECT and sensory deprivation to erase and "repattern" their personalities. Further research revealed that Cameron's experiments were funded by the CIA to create a handbook for torture. Known as Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, the techniques – first used on women suffering from post-partum depression – became standard torture practice: sensory deprivation, stress positions, hooding, electric shock. But it was only as Klein was leaving Iraq in 2004, when photos documenting the torture at Abu Ghraib prison were being leaked, that she made the connection with Cameron. "There's something about putting populations into a state of shock that these architects of war are drawn to," she says. "So it made me want to understand what happens when a brain goes into a real state of shock." Klein interviewed Gail Kastner, a former McGill nursing student who had sought psychiatric help for anxiety. After receiving a cocktail of drugs and ECT, Kastner left the clinic with a badly damaged memory and a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. After their meeting, "it was as if I'd been talking about a photocopy and now I was talking about the real thing". That "real thing" was a method of shocking individuals and nations into a state of submission, wiping out memories and filling them with what doctors saw fit. This emblem of Klein's book has also become a through-line for a short documentary film she has made with Alfonso Cuaron, the Mexican director of Children of Men. "We sat down and wrote the script in one day," says Klein. "I loved this process because Alfonso is so creative and he sets the bar so high." The Cuaron film, screened at the Toronto and Venice film festivals, was also released on YouTube. Her book will be published in 10 languages. She'll spend the next year travelling the globe to promote its message. Whatever her critics might say, Klein's work is taking a generational pulse, and possibly lifting the veil on a perilous post-Bush future. Biography: Naomi Klein Naomi Klein, 37, grew up in Montreal, the daughter of activists who had moved from the US to Canada. A journalist who began as editor of the University of Toronto's newspaper The Varsity, in 2000 she published No Logo: taking aim at the brand bullies. It became a "movement bible" for anti-corporate protesters, translated into 28 languages. In 2002, she published her essays, Fences and Windows. She has collaborated with her husband Avi Lewis on a film about factory workers in Argentina, The Take, and writes a syndicated column. She was ranked 11th in the 2005 Global Intellectuals poll – the highest-ranking woman. Her new book is The Shock Doctrine (Allen Lane). She lives in downtown Toronto http://arts.independent.co.uk/books/featur…icle2959456.ece A lire aussi: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2169201,00.html http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_03/846 http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/we…40-fe546ae3671d http://www.ledevoir.com/2007/09/06/155750.html Et si vous n'êtes pas convaincu, si vous pensez que la demoiselle exagère un brin et tombe dans la théorie du complot, voici la réponse du Guardian. Rien n'y manque, pas même le soutien de Friedman à la dictature chilienne. Crying conspiracy is no replySeumas Milne September 13, 2007 8:00 PM http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/seumas…_no_answer.html There's something slightly desperate about the tendency of neo-liberal apologists to cry "conspiracy theory" whenever anyone lifts the curtain on the political and corporate forces driving their devastating crusade to remake the world. It's long been a tendency of Anglo-Saxon culture to sign up to the "cock-up" rather than the "conspiracy" view of history, of course, but the refusal to accept that powerful interests and ideologies have shaped the post-1991 world - rather than simply random events - is just bizarre. It's certainly already been one persistent response to the Guardian's extracts from Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine - in John Lloyd's blog, on the threads and in some broadcast interviews. Lloyd calls Klein's account of Russia's path to catastroika and social meltdown under the tutelage of free-market fundamentalists and their western sponsors "conspiratorial" - and even grossly tries to link it with the Tsarist anti-semitic forgery Protocol of the Elders of Zion. If you're short on arguments, portraying your critics as paranoid unsophisticates and somehow akin to "Elvis lives" freaks may be the best you can do. But it's got nothing to do with Klein's chilling rehearsal of the deliberate destruction of Russia's economic and social infrastructure and its developing democratic culture under Gorbachev in the name of the free market. Russia's own Chicago boys were unashamed admirers of General Pinochet's Friedmanite immolation of Chilean society. And the parallels and connections Klein meticulously draws between Latin America's original 1970s economic shock treatment under rightwing dictatorships and the shock therapy imposed on Russia and eastern Europe in the 1990s lay the basis for an unanswerable thesis: namely, that radical neoliberal policies have thrived and depended on social crises and violence for their dramatic advance across the globe over the past generation. This is the "disaster capitalism" that Klein argues has reached its apogee in the war on terror and the corporate feeding frenzy it has involved both in Iraq and the US itself. Klein has been criticised in the past few days for trying articifially to force varied and complex experiences to fit her thesis - including that of monetarism and privatisation under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. But the wider picture she paints in fact illuminates familiar territory. Thatcher's free market transformation of the British economy followed the Chilean model pretty closely. But full-scale privatisation only took off on the back of the Falklands war and the huge turnaround in her political fortunes it brought about. The war unleashed a wave of jingoistic fervour, but it also delivered a jolting shock to the political culture of the time. Epitomised by the defence ministry spokesman Ian McDonald's almost nightly dead-pan statements to camera on the TV news, there was a powerful sense of the state reasserting itself after years of social disorder. That would then be followed through after the 1983 election with the state-driven assaults on the miners and other centres of labour movement resistance to the new order. Conor Foley is right that Klein's book is the most creative attempt yet to draw out the links between the global corporate takeover and the US-led imperial wars that have been the focus of international protest over the past decade. And it is precisely because she is so effective at both reporting and dramatising those links to a new generation of activists that she is attacked and patronised by those who would prefer they were never made.
Taranne Posté 19 septembre 2007 Auteur Signaler Posté 19 septembre 2007 Tiens elle existe encore elle? Oui, hélas. Et en plus elle tourne.
Chitah Posté 19 septembre 2007 Signaler Posté 19 septembre 2007 J'avais lu No Logo de cet auteur. Finalement, sa spécialité, c'est de choper un thème dans l'air du temps, et d'écrire un livre religieux sur la question. Je dis religieux parce dès la sortie, un fan club s'auto-organise, et des milliers de personnes citent et re-citent l'ouvrage.
Jesrad Posté 19 septembre 2007 Signaler Posté 19 septembre 2007 C'est plutôt effrayant d'être déconnecté du monde réel comme ça. Une réalité-tunnel aussi puissante, c'est un défi monumental à détruire, pour un Discordien. The Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill, had been a place that people had whispered about, says Klein. A family friend was a chief intern who refused to participate in the experiments of its director, Dr Ewan Cameron. "I never knew the history, even though I had these close connections." Since the Eighties, there have been revelations about the horrific abuse of mostly female patients, who were subjected to a regime of drugs, ECT and sensory deprivation to erase and "repattern" their personalities.Further research revealed that Cameron's experiments were funded by the CIA to create a handbook for torture. Known as Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, the techniques – first used on women suffering from post-partum depression – became standard torture practice: sensory deprivation, stress positions, hooding, electric shock. But it was only as Klein was leaving Iraq in 2004, when photos documenting the torture at Abu Ghraib prison were being leaked, that she made the connection with Cameron. Et de ça, elle arrive à tirer une critique du capitalisme ? Pourquoi pas lui mettre aussi sur le dos l'extinction des dinosaures tant qu'on y est ?
José Posté 19 septembre 2007 Signaler Posté 19 septembre 2007 La dame sort un nouveau livre… http://www.liberaux.org/index.php?showtopic=32888&hl=
Bob Posté 19 septembre 2007 Signaler Posté 19 septembre 2007 Le "teaser" de présentation du livre est un incroyable concentré de propagande (comme quoi l'auteur connaît effectivement son sujet), suivi d'un "et surtout achetez mon livre" (comme quoi le marché finit toujours par triompher).
0100011 Posté 19 septembre 2007 Signaler Posté 19 septembre 2007 C'est plutôt effrayant d'être déconnecté du monde réel comme ça. Une réalité-tunnel aussi puissante, c'est un défi monumental à détruire, pour un Discordien.Et de ça, elle arrive à tirer une critique du capitalisme ? Pourquoi pas lui mettre aussi sur le dos l'extinction des dinosaures tant qu'on y est ? C'est par ce que c'est de l'alter-logique que tu ne comprends pas le raisonnement sous-jascent. Le principe fondamental n'est pas le modus ponens (si je montre A et A implique B je peux en déduire B ) mais le principe de juxtaposition (Si A et B se produisent en même temps que C j'en déduis qu'il y a équivalence logique entre A,B et C). Ainsi si des tortures ont lieu sur terre alors que certains régimes sont capitalistes c'est que le capitalisme implique et est impliqué par la torture
Vestapoch Posté 19 septembre 2007 Signaler Posté 19 septembre 2007 surtout qu'elle doit rouler sur la thune la petite, je me demande si elle culpabilise pour ca.
Bob Posté 19 septembre 2007 Signaler Posté 19 septembre 2007 C'est plutôt effrayant d'être déconnecté du monde réel comme ça. Refus du réel à rapprocher du mythe du paradis originel et de la chute, présents sous des formes diverses dans plusieurs civilisations. Il est inconcevable (trop angoissant) de penser qu’un Dieu créateur de toutes choses ait délibérément placé ses créatures dans un monde de souffrances : Dieu n’est pas sadique tout de même. Donc initialement c’était sûrement pas prévu comme ça ; il a dû se passer quelque chose, un incident, qui a projeté l’homme dans cette longue vallée de larmes. Quel rapport ? Naomi Klein semble incapable de penser qu’un régime socialiste puisse s’effondrer de lui-même (par le rejet populaire de l’autoritarisme ou du totalitarisme et par la faillite économique) car dans la religion marxiste, le collectivisme c’est le paradis. Il a dû se passer quelque chose, un complot, un truc pas clair, réellement diabolique, sinon on ne comprend pas la chute d’Allende, la fin de l’URSS, pourquoi les chinois préfèrent s’essayer au capitalisme, etc. En tout cas NK, elle, visiblement, elle comprend pas : Qui a saboté toutes ces magnifiques expériences si prometteuses pour le bonheur de l'humanité? Elle a trouvé c'est Milton Friedman + la CIA (et pas les extra terrestres ??) Autre thème révélateur : le lavage de cerveau des masses. Le peuple pour les antimondialistes est constitué d’individus illogiques ou lobotomisés sinon pourquoi reconduirait-il des dirigeants politiques (supposés crypto, néo, ou ultra libéraux) responsables de la dégradation de leurs conditions de vie au lieu de voter en masse pour l’extrême gauche : le peuple est vraiment con ! L’un des meilleurs textes sur le sujet (la logique paranoïde de la perception d’un complot de doctrinaires libéraux fanatiques comme moteur de l’histoire) est celui d’Alain Wolfesperger sur l’ « ultra antilibéralisme » : http://ac.matra.free.fr/FB/ultraantiliberalisme.htm
Taranne Posté 29 septembre 2007 Auteur Signaler Posté 29 septembre 2007 Devinez quoi? Stiglitz a adoré: Bleakonomics By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ Skip to next paragraph THE SHOCK DOCTRINE The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. By Naomi Klein. 558 pp. Metropolitan Books. $28. There are no accidents in the world as seen by Naomi Klein. The destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina expelled many poor black residents and allowed most of the city’s public schools to be replaced by privately run charter schools. The torture and killings under Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile and during Argentina’s military dictatorship were a way of breaking down resistance to the free market. The instability in Poland and Russia after the collapse of Communism and in Bolivia after the hyperinflation of the 1980s allowed the governments there to foist unpopular economic “shock therapy” on a resistant population. And then there is “Washington’s game plan for Iraq”: “Shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all O.K. with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food,” not to mention a strong stock market and private sector. “The Shock Doctrine” is Klein’s ambitious look at the economic history of the last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world. “Disaster capitalism,” as she calls it, is a violent system that sometimes requires terror to do its job. Like Pol Pot proclaiming that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was in Year Zero, extreme capitalism loves a blank slate, often finding its opening after crises or “shocks.” For example, Klein argues, the Asian crisis of 1997 paved the way for the International Monetary Fund to establish programs in the region and for a sell-off of many state-owned enterprises to Western banks and multinationals. The 2004 tsunami enabled the government of Sri Lanka to force the fishermen off beachfront property so it could be sold to hotel developers. The destruction of 9/11 allowed George W. Bush to launch a war aimed at producing a free-market Iraq. In an early chapter, Klein compares radical capitalist economic policy to shock therapy administered by psychiatrists. She interviews Gail Kastner, a victim of covert C.I.A. experiments in interrogation techniques that were carried out by the scientist Ewen Cameron in the 1950s. His idea was to use electroshock therapy to break down patients. Once “complete depatterning” had been achieved, the patients could be reprogrammed. But after breaking down his “patients,” Cameron was never able to build them back up again. The connection with a rogue C.I.A. scientist is overdramatic and unconvincing, but for Klein the larger lessons are clear: “Countries are shocked — by wars, terror attacks, coups d’état and natural disasters.” Then “they are shocked again — by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy.” People who “dare to resist” are shocked for a third time, “by police, soldiers and prison interrogators.” In another introductory chapter, Klein offers an account of Milton Friedman — she calls him “the other doctor shock” — and his battle for the hearts and minds of Latin American economists and economies. In the 1950s, as Cameron was conducting his experiments, the Chicago School was developing the ideas that would eclipse the theories of Raul Prebisch, an advocate of what today would be called the third way, and of other economists fashionable in Latin America at the time. She quotes the Chilean economist Orlando Letelier on the “inner harmony” between the terror of the Pinochet regime and its free-market policies. Letelier said that Milton Friedman shared responsibility for the regime’s crimes, rejecting his argument that he was only offering “technical” advice. Letelier was killed in 1976 by a car bomb planted in Washington by Pinochet’s secret police. For Klein, he was another victim of the “Chicago Boys” who wanted to impose free-market capitalism on the region. “In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the ‘war on terror’ was a war against all obstacles to the new order,” she writes. One of the world’s most famous antiglobalization activists and the author of the best seller “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies,” Klein provides a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries, and of the human toll. She paints a disturbing portrait of hubris, not only on the part of Friedman but also of those who adopted his doctrines, sometimes to pursue more corporatist objectives. It is striking to be reminded how many of the people involved in the Iraq war were involved earlier in other shameful episodes in United States foreign policy history. She draws a clear line from the torture in Latin America in the 1970s to that at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. Klein is not an academic and cannot be judged as one. There are many places in her book where she oversimplifies. But Friedman and the other shock therapists were also guilty of oversimplification, basing their belief in the perfection of market economies on models that assumed perfect information, perfect competition, perfect risk markets. Indeed, the case against these policies is even stronger than the one Klein makes. They were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets — for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always. Klein isn’t an economist but a journalist, and she travels the world to find out firsthand what really happened on the ground during the privatization of Iraq, the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, the continuing Polish transition to capitalism and the years after the African National Congress took power in South Africa, when it failed to pursue the redistributionist policies enshrined in the Freedom Charter, its statement of core principles. These chapters are the least exciting parts of the book, but they are also the most convincing. In the case of South Africa, she interviews activists and others, only to find there is no one answer. Busy trying to stave off civil war in the early years after the end of apartheid, the A.N.C. didn’t fully understand how important economic policy was. Afraid of scaring off foreign investors, it took the advice of the I.M.F. and the World Bank and instituted a policy of privatization, spending cutbacks, labor flexibility and so on. This didn’t stop two of South Africa’s own major companies, South African Breweries and Anglo-American, from relocating their global headquarters to London. The average growth rate has been a disappointing 5 percent (much lower than in countries in East Asia, which followed a different route); unemployment for the black majority is 48 percent; and the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled to four million from two million since 1994, the year the A.N.C. took over. Some readers may see Klein’s findings as evidence of a giant conspiracy, a conclusion she explicitly disavows. It’s not the conspiracies that wreck the world but the series of wrong turns, failed policies, and little and big unfairnesses that add up. Still, those decisions are guided by larger mind-sets. Market fundamentalists never really appreciated the institutions required to make an economy function well, let alone the broader social fabric that civilizations require to prosper and flourish. Klein ends on a hopeful note, describing nongovernmental organizations and activists around the world who are trying to make a difference. After 500 pages of “The Shock Doctrine,” it’s clear they have their work cut out for them. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a university professor at Columbia, was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 2001. His latest book is “Making Globalization Work.”
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