'Disaster Capitalism'

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein - I've been so pre-occupied by this book lately that I almost seemed to neglect all my other vices, PSP and such. Everywhere I've been, if I've got as much as 10 mins of free time on my hands, so will this book be. Despite me being so captivated, it's still pretty much a love-hate relationship because I can't really comprehend sometimes what the book is saying.

This really kinda frustrates me because I guess I've never encountered something like this in my life, yet. In school, I usually can understand all the subjects that I want to.Those that I can't (read: Chemistry, Physics, IT-related), I'll tell myself not to bother even trying to understand it. Just try to pass it. With this book it's a totally different ball game. I want to understand every single detail it's saying, but I just ... can't. I just don't get it somehow, sometimes.

In case you're still wondering what this book is all about, it's a non-fictional, should I say investigative-journalism-esque thesis on capitalism in modern history. Disaster capitalism, to be exact. It details how economies around the world have succumbed to free market ideologies envisioned and perpetrated by a certain group of very smart, powerful and eager men. From Chile to Bolivia to China, how the radical transformation from state-regulated economies to capitalism utopia is often imposed through what is called the 'Shock Doctrine', whereby a crisis is used to create the vacuum necessary for the acceptance to take place. Very often, a trail of blood and massacre is left in its wake.

What I really wanna know is, was what had been done necessary? With and without the benefit of hindsight, were the policy-makers really feeding the economies bitter medicine or merely their insatiable greed for more power and money? But in order to understand how it all worked, I guess I needed to know what it was in the first place. Sure, the book took great pains to explain complex economic policies in layman's terms, but even so somehow I find difficulty in linking such information together to make sense of it all.

However, I'm quite convinced that this is just one side of the story. I'm gonna get my hands on a pro-capitalism book after I'm done with this to get a full idea of what's really going on. But going by what this book is saying, we've already been hearing that other side of the story all along.

I've been doing alot of newspaper cutting these 3 days to update our 'revered' SIA Library. It's no doubt a thankless task, but at least I got to read more Business Times than I did in my last, no, my entire life so far. And it all sort of links up, looking at all the financial and economic news in the past year and trying to find a connection to this book. Makes me all the more interested in finding out what had happened in order to make sense of the present and hopefully the future.

Just a little preview of what Shock Doctrine really means, this is a quote taken from the book, from John Williamson, a 'powerful economist known for shaping the missions of both the bank (World Bank) and the fund (IMF)' at that time:

"One will have to ask if it could conceivably make sense to think of delibrately provoking a crisis so as to remove the political logjam to reform. For example, it has sometimes been suggested in Brazil that it would be worthwhile stoking up a hyperinflation so as to scare everyone into accepting those changes ... Presumably no one with historical foresight would have advocated in the mid-1930s that Germany and Japan go to war in order to get the benefits of the supergrowth that followed their defeats. But could a lesser crisis have served the same function? Is it possible to conceive of a pseudo-crisis that could serve the same positive function without the cost of a real crisis?"

For better or worse, I'm only 267 pages into the book and still got just a little over half to go. Will share more of it later, if I can finally grasp anything.

Back to reading.