Naomi Klein: The Business Press and Me: A Case of Unrequited Love

[babylonsister]

The Business Press and Me: A Case of Unrequited Love
Finance journalists have attacked my book, but I remain devoted to their papers. After all, they supplied the facts I used
by Naomi Klein

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 US 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”?

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/25/4808/

[izquierdista]

1. Naomi need to be doing the play-by-play

I'd like to see her as a recurring guest on a weekly TV show, where she points out how disaster capitalism goes by-the-book after the fires in Southern California. Since this is the first event that would qualify as a disaster after the publication, she can point out "yes, see this move? This is on p.147." She could predict with with accuracy that even Nostradamus would be jealous of, what the next move would be, and how the haves leave the have-nots out in the cold.