The Richest Man in Babylon or Shock Doctrine

The Richest Man in Babylon

Author: George S Clason

OVER 2 MILION IN PRINT

The success secrets of the Ancients-the most inspiring book on wealth ever written

What can a book written in the 1920s tell modern investors about their finances? A whole lot if it's George Clason's delightful set of parables that explain the basics of money.

Los Angeles Times

What can a book written in the 1920s tell modern investors about their finances? A whole lot if it's George Clason's delightful set of parables that explain the basics of money.

Book review: Verhandlungsanalyse: Die Wissenschaft und Kunst der Zusammenarbeitenden Beschlussfassung

Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Author: Naomi Klein

The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq

In her groundbreaking reporting over the past few years, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.

The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.

At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

Author Biography
Naomi Klein is the award-winning author of the acclaimed international bestseller No Logo and the essay collection Fences and Windows. An internationally syndicated columnist, she co-created with Avi Lewis, The Take, a documentary film.

The New York Times - Joseph E. Stiglitz

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.

The Washington Post - Shashi Tharoor

The Shock Doctrine is a valuable addition to the corpus of popular books that have attempted to rethink the big ideas of our post-Cold War age. Francis Fukuyama's notion of the "end of history"—the idea that all societies would be governed by liberal democracy and free markets—started the process of reflection; Samuel Huntington's concept of the "clash of civilizations" underpinned much of the anxiety that followed the realization that reports of history's demise were exaggerated. Thomas Friedman's celebration of the flatness of the globalized world is now countered by Klein's argument that when disasters flatten societies, capitalists see opportunities to profit and spread their influence. Each thesis has its flaws, but each contributes to the contest of ideas about the shape and direction of our current Age of Uncertainty. For this reason, and for the vigor and accessibility with which she marshals her argument, Naomi Klein is well worth reading.

Mark Engler - Dissent

This is an ambitious book, an accomplished book, and an important one, too. It makes contributions in several key ways.

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. (Sept.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

Klein (Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, 2002, etc.) tracks the forced imposition of economic privatization, rife with multinational corporate parasites, on areas and nations weakened by war, civil strife or natural disasters. The author follows John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 2004) and others in pointing an alarmed finger at a global "corporatocracy" that combines the worst features of big business and small government. The difference is that Klein's book incorporates an amount of due diligence, logical structure and statistical evidence that others lack. As a result, she is persuasive when she links past and present events, including the war in Iraq and trashing of its economy, to the systematic march of laissez-faire capitalism and the downsizing of the public sector as both a worldview and a political methodology. Klein fully establishes the influence of U.S. economist Milton Friedman, who died in November 2006, as champion of the free-market transformations that occurred initially in South America, where Friedmanite minions trained at the University of Chicago in the 1960s worked their wiles on behalf of some of the 20th century's most repressive regimes. On to China's Tiananmen Square, then to the collapsed Soviet Union, where oligarchs soared and the underclass was left to starve in the 1990s. More recent developments include forcing private development on the tsunami-ravaged beachfronts of South Asia and junking the public-school system in favor of private charter schools in post-Katrina New Orleans. Just as provocative is Klein's analysis of the Bush administration's rampant outsourcing of U.S. governmentresponsibilities, including the entire "homeland security industry," to no-bid corporate contractors and their expense-laden chains of subcontractors. Her account of that methodology's consequences in Iraq, as mass unemployment coincided with the disbanding of a standing army whose soldiers took their guns home, leaves little doubt as to why there is an enduring insurgency. Required reading for anyone trying to pierce the complexities of globalization.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Blank Is Beautiful: Three Decades of Erasing and Remaking the World     3
Two Doctor Shocks: Research and Development     27
The Torture Lab: Ewen Cameron, the CIA and the Maniacal Quest to Erase and Remake the Human Mind     29
The Other Doctor Shock: Milton Friedman and the Search for a Laissez-Faire Laboratory     59
The First Test: Birth Pangs     89
States of Shock: The Bloody Birth of the Counterrevolution     91
Cleaning the Slate: Terror Does Its Work     121
"Entirely Unrelated": How an Ideology Was Cleansed of Its Crimes     144
Surviving Democracy: Bombs Made of Laws     161
Saved by a War: Thatcherism and Its Useful Enemies     163
The New Doctor Shock: Economic Warfare Replaces Dictatorship     177
Crisis Works: The Packaging of Shock Therapy     194
Lost in Transition: While We Wept, While We Trembled, While We Danced     213
Slamming the Door on History: A Crisis in Poland, a Massacre in China     215
Democracy Born in Chains: South Africa's Constricted Freedom     245
Bonfire of a Young Democracy: Russia Chooses "The Pinochet Option"     275
The Capitalist Id: Russia and the New Era of the Boor Market     310
Let It Burn: The Looting of Asia and "The Fall of a Second Berlin Wall"     332
Shocking Times: The Rise of the Disaster Capitalism Complex     355
Shock Therapy in the U.S.A.: The Homeland Security Bubble     357
A Corporatist State: Removing the Revolving Door, Putting in an Archway     389
Iraq, Full Circle: Overshock     409
Erasing Iraq: In Search of a "Model" for the Middle East     411
Ideological Blowback: A Very Capitalist Disaster     431
Full Circle: From Blank Slate to Scorched Earth     456
The Movable Green Zone: Buffer Zones and Blast Walls     485
Blanking the Beach: "The Second Tsunami"     487
Disaster Apartheid: A World of Green Zones and Red Zones     513
Losing the Peace Incentive: Israel as Warning     535
Conclusion: Shock Wears Off: The Rise of People's Reconstruction     560
Notes     591
Acknowledgments     667
Index     677