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

[marmar]

from Guardian UK's Comment is Free, via AlterNet:



The Business Press and Me: a Case of Unrequited Love

By Naomi Klein, Comment Is Free. Posted October 25, 2007.


Finance journalists have attacked my book, but I remain devoted to their papers. After all, they supplied the facts I used.



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"?

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." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/66106/

[Chalco]

1. I'm reading Shock Doctrine right now.

I will have to say that after only reading about 140 pages I now feel that I know the absolute truth.

Naomi Klein puts meat on the bones of what Greg Palast and John Perkins (Economic Hit Man) have written about the real reasons behind current events.

The book is not for the faint of heart, however, because even though I'm more cynical than most I will never be the same after reading this book. I wasn't sure I trusted before, now I'm afraid that I hate. It's not a comfortable feeling. But, I am a believer in the truth. And so, I accept the consequence of knowing.

[marmar]

2. I just picked up the book yesterday....

I haven't even cracked it open yet. :scared:

[Chalco]

3. Get ready to weep. nt

[fasttense]

4. Well said Chalco.

I'm in the middle of the book myself and can only stand to read a few pages at a time because it is so overwhelmingly painful. It is so well documented and researched that once you start reading it, you can't hide from the truth of the horrors "free trade", globalization or neoliberal capitalism has created.

It connects the dots between once puzzling behaviors of world leaders, the WTO and IMF. It carefully and meticulously lays bear the soul of Friedman's theories and shows you how corporations have systematically and intentionally destroyed democracy in order to fatten their bottom line.

[Lisa]

5. there's also a video up at her website

http://www.shockdoctrine.org/

"Not for the faint of heart" -- well put, Chalco. If you have a chance to hear one of the author's talks, it's well worth going. Not just because it's so interesting when she explains and updates the book, but it's comforting to see so many other people in the audience and realize that you're not alone. As you put it, "the consequence of knowing" can be painful, but it's better to see the truth than to pretend it doesn't exist.

I thought I'd heard a lot of things -- about Chile, or the CIA experiments in Canada -- but this book brings it home in a way I hadn't encountered before. My co-worker fled South America during the time of the generals, and she still has PTSD because of what happened to her family and friends. I begged her not to tell me anything if it hurt too much for her to remember it, but she said that these things have to be told.

[applegrove]

7. I read it in bits and pieces. Was alot to take in. I believe much of what

she says. I just read today in a magazine that England was the only industrialized country in the world to become so without protecting their industries for a bit..and when Enlgand did it there were not many competitors of any size (or corporations for that matter) that could move in and dominate an economy.

I also read another book that comes to the same conclusion: income has to be redistributed to the people through various measures (take your pick) in order to ensure democracy lasts in emerging ones.

[Joanne98]

6. K&R!