Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine - The Art of the Prank

From Naomi Klein:

When I finished The Shock Doctrine, I sent it to Alfonso Cuarà³n because I adore his films and felt that the future he created for Children of Men was very close to the present I was seeing in disaster zones. I was hoping he would send me a quote for the book jacket and instead he pulled together this amazing team of artists — including Jonà¡s Cuarà³n who directed and edited — to make The Shock Doctrine short film. It was one of those blessed projects where everything felt fated.

Here it is:

Here also is a review of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism from Publishers Weekly:

The neo-liberal economic policies””privatization, free trade, slashed social spending””that the Chicago School and the economist Milton Friedman have foisted on the world are catastrophic in two senses, argues this vigorous polemic. Because their results are disastrous””depressions, mass poverty, private corporations looting public wealth, by the author’s accounting””their means must be cataclysmic, dependent on political upheavals and natural disasters as coercive pretexts for free-market reforms the public would normally reject. Journalist Klein (No Logo) chronicles decades of such disasters, including the Chicago School makeovers launched by South American coups; the corrupt sale of Russia’s state economy to oligarchs following the collapse of the Soviet Union; the privatization of New Orleans’s public schools after Katrina; and the seizure of wrecked fishing villages by resort developers after the Asian tsunami. Klein’s economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market shock therapies to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people’s economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

thanks Toni