Marshalling resilience: A review of the Shock Doctrine

This is from rabble.ca. This is a very favorable review of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. From other reviews I have read the descriptive aspect is reasonably accurate but there is little criticism in this review. I think that the book rather sensationalises the issue. Much of the radical change in capitalism has taken place gradually and in response to globalisation and has little to do with disasters. This is not to deny that Klein is right that in many cases disasters or crisis have been used to introduce strong free market capitalistic measures to an economy.
Being an oldster a Marxist and not much of an activist now the hope and resilience factors applauded in Klein seem to me to be tinged with idealism. As a Marxist I regard idealism as a negative term since it gives primacy of ideas over material conditions. It is the underlying economic circumstances that primarily determine consciousness not vice-versa. It is the economic crises that advanced capitaism engdenders that will change people's consciousness and capitalism not vice versa even though consciousness is certainly a factor. As the jargon goes the relation is dialectical but with the material conditions the primary determinant of outcomes.


Marshalling resilience
Finding hope in a shock-filled era


The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein (Knopf Canada, 2007; $36.95)
I sit to write this review, somewhat dazed, in the mental aftermath of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Klein presents a powerful re-write of economic history threading around the globe in a 560-page work. It is a compelling description of the economic ‘shock doctrine’ that has developed within what she calls ‘disaster capitalism.’ Picking up the hefty volume is a bit intimidating — the image of a bullet hole through the ‘O’ of ‘Shock’ on the cover is not subtle — and I worry whether it will be a conspiracy doc — but it quickly sucks you in.

The book is shocking, it is despair inducing, but in the final moments of reading, I understand her intention — this book is about hope. Naomi Klein wants the rest of us to be shock resilient.

Klein’s thesis is a response to the kind of “shock therapy” advocated by free-market guru, Milton Friedman. Friedman promoted a globalised world including no subsidies or state-run enterprises, and the complete deregulation of trade. The Shock Doctrine comes from his realization that the implementation of such extreme free market policies, that are mostly opposed by and detrimental to the general (working class) populace, is most successful (i.e. meets with the least popular and political resistance) after intense shocks to a society, such as war, extreme inflation, natural disasters.

At these times, a state of chaos can allow for democratic rights to be suspended in a ‘state of siege.’ Unpopular economic policies can be pushed through while the public is preoccupied with survival. In Friedman’s words: “Only a crisis, actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. …the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable” (166).

Proponents of the shock doctrine from Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics were sent around the world to spread these ideas to dictators and world leaders who could push these controversial economic mandates through during states of siege. During the 1980s the Chicago School infiltrated the World Bank and IMF, heralding the first of the structural adjustment programs. A new era of privatization was founded. And Klein cites event after event where the shock doctrine has been applied: Chile, Argentina, Poland, Louisiana, and on the list goes.

The Shock Doctrine is part of what Klein calls ‘disaster capitalism’: a type of capitalism that benefits from disasters, such as wars, hurricanes, or fear of terrorism. It is on the extreme end of a spectrum of capitalism, far from the socialist economics of Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes after the Depression. She lists examples of disaster capitalism where economies have done better with more warfare (Israel) and where a nation’s increasing fear has led to the huge economic gains in security industries (the U.S. following September 11, 2001).

While there have always been war profiteers, disaster capitalism is a somewhat new phenomenon. In the past corporations have required a certain degree of political and social stability to invest. But Klein’s examples are disaster situations where corporations can come in and rewrite the economic rules of a country or state to their advantage, and therefore “instability is the new stability.” Klein does not claim that disaster capitalists create the disasters (although she documents several statements that large shock events are positive for furthering the free market ideology). Her argument is that there is a clear mandate to take advantage of a state of shock to push forward an agenda whose true aims and beneficiaries are protected from democratic process.

Most of the paper in this volume is spent carefully gathering an impressive (and scary) amount of evidence of how individuals and companies have used disasters to shift economies. For someone like me, who grew up in the anti-globalization era, the thesis makes sense, but by the end of the book, the reader is embattled, and depressed: I already know that evil free market forces have taken over nations with disastrous human toll. The most important part of the book, for me, was in the briefly outlined stories of resilience to the shock doctrine.

Klein leaves us with a glimpse of Latin American nations that are beginning to refuse and push back the economic policies imposed in the 1970s, and even notes instances of countries have resisted the demands of the International Monetary Fund. While it might have added another few hundred pages, more of these accounts would have been appreciated. What of India, or the other former Soviet States during all of this history? What developing countries have not undergone disaster capitalism? However, I understand her intention, and it is a hopeful one: by arming us with all of this information, Naomi Klein wants us to become shock resilient.

Shock depends on surprise, confusion and disorientation. Once the storyline and context is regained, individuals can begin to develop a response to the situation. Klein states that the most powerful tool against shock is knowing your history. She argues that it is because of the memory of war and dictatorship, countries such as Britain and Spain have resisted the descent into chaos and suspension of rights and freedoms when terrorist acts have occurred. As well, Klein briefly alludes to rebuilding from the ground up, from the rubble instead of a “clean slate,” as healing for victims of disaster. She cites the powerful local movements in Thailand to reclaim land appropriated by corporations immediately after the 2006 tsunami, and the inspiration they have provided for parallel hurricane Katrina victims, who have started to ‘reinvade’ their homes in New Orleans.

This is the key message for us: become shock resilient. Resilience means to retain strength and stability in the face of crisis, and an ability to recover. Klein’s Shock Doctrine theory will make sense to people familiar with the conspiracies of ‘fundamentalist capitalism’, but it is the resilience idea that is inspiring. For an activist tired of being shocked, I like this rationale for her writing, and inherent solution.

Readers who pick up The Shock Doctrine will likely already be versed in an understanding of corporate globalization. But the story she outlines is a powerful contribution to our understanding of this process. It’s up to us to know our history, to understand disaster capitalism and the Shock Doctrine, its terminology and its proponents, so that we can ensure a greater degree of resilience when the inevitable calamities of the 21st century come our way.

Greenspan and the myth of the True Believer: Naomi Klein

This isnt exactly Canadian but Naomi Klein is and the article is interesting. It is from Rabble. I find Klein's comparison of Ayn Rand to Adam Smith simplistic. Adam Smith was a very complex thinker and his Theory of Moral Sentiments is in contrast to the Wealth of Nations and in contrast to almost everything that Rand thought. Of course both hold in common belief in the virtues of free markets.


Greenspan and the myth of the true believer
>by Naomi Klein
October 1, 2007
The tall graduate student, visiting the United States from Sweden, would not be satisfied with a quip. He wanted answers.

“They cannot only be driven by greed and power. They must be driven by something higher. What?”

Don't knock power and greed, I tried to suggest—they have built empires. But he wanted more.

“What about a belief that they are building a better world?”

Since I began touring with my book The Shock Doctrine, I have had a number of exchanges like this, revolving around the same basic question: When hard-right political leaders and their advisers apply brutal economic shock therapy, do they honestly believe the trickle-down effects will build equitable societies—or are they just deliberately creating the conditions for yet another corporate feeding frenzy? Put bluntly, Has the world been transformed over the past three decades by lofty ideology or by lowly greed?

A definitive answer would require reading the minds of men like Dick Cheney and Paul Bremer, so I tend to dodge. The ideology in question holds that self-interest is the engine that drives society to its greatest heights. Isn't pursuing their own self-interest (and that of their campaign donors) compatible with that philosophy? That's the beauty: They don't have to choose. Unfortunately, this rarely satisfies graduate students looking for deeper meaning. Thankfully I now have a new escape hatch: quoting Alan Greenspan.

His autobiography, The Age of Turbulence, has been marketed as a mystery solved: The man who bit his tongue for eighteen years as head of the Federal Reserve was finally going to tell the world what he really believed. And Greenspan has delivered, using his book and the surrounding publicity as a platform for his “libertarian Republican” ideology, chiding George W. Bush for abandoning the crusade for small government and revealing that he became a policy-maker because he thought he could advance his radical ideology more effectively “as an insider, rather than as a critical pamphleteer” on the margins. Yet what is most interesting about Greenspan's story is what it reveals about the ambiguous role of ideas in the free-market crusade. Given that Greenspan is perhaps the world's most powerful living free-market ideologue, it is significant that his commitment to ideology seems rather thin and perfunctory—less zealous belief, more convenient cover story.

Much of the debate around Greenspan's legacy has revolved around the matter of hypocrisy, of a man preaching laissez-faire who repeatedly intervened in the market to save the wealthiest players. The economy that is Greenspan's legacy hardly fits the definition of a libertarian market but looks very much like another phenomenon described in his book: “When a government's leaders routinely seek out private-sector individuals or businesses and, in exchange for political support, bestow favors on them, the society is said to be in the grip of 'crony capitalism.'” He was talking about Indonesia under Suharto, but my mind went straight to Iraq under Halliburton.

Greenspan is currently warning the world about a dangerous looming backlash against capitalism. Apparently, this has nothing at all to do with the policies of negligent deregulation that were his trademark. Nothing to do with stagnant wages due to free trade and weakened unions, nor with pensions lost to Enron or the dot-com crash, or homes seized in the subprime mortgage crisis. According to Greenspan, rampant inequality is caused by lousy high schools (which also has nothing to do with his ideology's war on the public sphere). I debated Greenspan on Democracy Now! recently and was stunned that this man who preaches the doctrine of personal responsibility refuses to take any at all.

Yet ideological contradictions are only relevant if Greenspan really is a true believer. I'm not convinced. Greenspan writes that as a student he had no interest in big ideas. Unlike his classmates who were in the thrall of Keynesianism with its promise of building a better world, Greenspan was simply good at math. He started doing research for powerful corporations; it was profitable, but Greenspan made no claims to a higher social contribution.

Then he discovered Ayn Rand. “What she did...was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral,” he said in 1974.

Rand's ideas about the “utopia of greed” allowed Greenspan to keep doing what he was doing but infused his corporate service with a powerful new sense of mission: Making money wasn't just good for him; it was good for society as a whole. Of course, the flip side of this is the cruel disregard for those left behind. “Undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment,” Greenspan wrote as a zealous new convert. “Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.” Was it this mindset that served him well as he supported shock therapy in Russia (72 million impoverished) and in East Asia after the 1997 economic crisis (24 million pushed into unemployment)?

Rand has played this role of greed-enabler for countless disciples. According to the New York Times, Atlas Shrugged, her novel that ends with the hero tracing a dollar sign in the air like a benediction, stands as “one of the most influential business books ever written.” Since Rand is simply pulped-up Adam Smith, her influence on men like Greenspan suggests an interesting possibility. Perhaps the true purpose of the entire literature of trickle-down theory is to liberate entrepreneurs to pursue their narrowest advantage while claiming global altruistic motives—not so much an economic philosophy as an elaborate, retroactive rationale.

What Greenspan teaches us is that trickle-down isn't really an ideology after all. It's more like the friend we call after some embarrassing excess so that they will tell us, “Don't beat yourself up: You deserve it.”

Naomi Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This column has appeared in The Nation

Review of Klein's "Shock Doctrine"

Cockburn makes some excellent points against the view that this is a special stage of disaster capitalism. As he notes both capitalists and those opposed to capitalists have tried to turn disasters to their own ends. Some of the shock and awe cases illustrated by Klein such as the initial Iraq war attack on Baghdad may have worked in the short run to some degree but over the longer term they just achieved a stubborn and continuing resistance to occupation. The crackdown in China against pro-democracy demonstrators had nothing to do with resistance to capitalism in China per se so much as a crackdown on attempts to establish bourgeois democratic freedoms that often go along with it! They were objecting to the specific characteristics of transition to a capitalistic market economy in China namely the continued monopoly of the Communist Party and the lack of civil rights common in western capitalist countries. Certainly these days there are many protests against the actual effects of capitalism but it is not clear that the regime finds them of much use!
None of these criticisms negate the value of Klein's discussion of many other specific instances of the shock doctrine as Cockburn points out. I am not sure that capitalism is in some special stage or in decline. What does seem clear is that manycapitalists are cashing in on the increased aggressiveness of the US as the capitalist hegemon both as arms suppliers and suppliers of private armies and security forces. Worldwide as well areas for investment in health care, water provision, prison labor and management, and countless other areas are being transferred from state to the private sector thus providing new outlets for capital and areas for profit taking. This is from CounterPunch.CounterPunch
On Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Leftists used to think that at least as a general axiom, if not by a precise deadline, capitalism was doomed. When I first arrived in the United States in the early 1970s, there was enough exuberance in the air even for mild-mannered reformers to be pushing plans for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, World Bank and kindred institutions.

But today most of these same leftists deem capitalism invincible and fearfully lob copious documentation at each other detailing the efficient devilry of the executives of the system. The internet serves to amplify this pervasive funk into a catastrophist mindset. It imbues most of the English-speaking left west of the Atlantic after seven years of Bush and Cheney, and frames Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism."

At the outset Klein permits herself a robust trumpet blast as intrepid pioneer:

"This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story -- that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies."

The arc of triumph she is alluding to spans the half century from the Eisenhower administration's onslaughts on political and economic nationalism in Iran and Guatemala in the early 1950s, to the US attack on Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation. These are not decades where official apologetics have been entirely without challenge until Ms. Klein embarked on her researches. There are shelves worth of books on the ghastly consequences of the covert interventions and massacres organized or connived at by the United States in the name of freedom and the capitalist way. Klein's own bibliography attests that there has plenty of detailed work on the neoliberal onslaught that gathered strength from the mid-70s on, marching under the intellectual colors of one of her arch villains, the late Milton Friedman, the Chicago School economist.

Where Klein would presumably claim originality is in identifying the taxonomy of this "shock doctrine", the latest in capitalism's phases of "creative destruction", as Schumpeter described the soul of the system. So she describes the shock of a sudden attack, whether the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 or the bombing of Baghdad in 2003; the shock of torturers using sensory deprivation techniques and crude electrodes to instill fear and acquiescence; Friedman's economic "shock treatment." Methodically combined and elaborated, these onslaughts now amount, on Klein's account, to a new and frightful chapter in the history of capitalist predation.

Klein begins with a chapter on the CIA-sponsored psychic "de-patterning" experiments of that monster, Dr Ewen Cameron of McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute, and states explicitly that torture, aside from being a tool, is "a metaphor of the shock doctrine's underlying logic". To use shock literary tactics to focus attention on the deliberate and sadistic engineering of collective social trauma is certainly no crime. But, as often happens after a shock, one eventually retrieves a sense of proportion, one that is not entirely flattering to the larger pretensions.

Capitalism, after all, as always been a shock doctrine of selfish predation, as one can discover from Hobbes and Locke, Marx and Weber, none of them saluted by Klein. Read the vivid accounts of the Hammonds about the English enclosures of the eighteenth century, when villagers would find nailed to the door of the parish church an announcement their common lands had been privatized. Protesters may not have "depatterned", but were briskly hanged or relocated to Botany Bay. Klein could have used Karl Polanyi to better effect than as an epigraph. The wrenching conversion of peasant societies to cash economics, private property, the job regime, has always been brutal.

The Chicago Boys laid waste the southern cone of Latin America in the name of unfettered private enterprise, but 125 years earlier a million Irish peasants starved to death while Irish grain was exported onto ships flying the flag of economic liberalism. Klein writes about "the bloody birth of counter-revolution" in the 1960s and 1970s, but any page from the histories of Presidents Jackson, Polk or Roosevelt discloses a bleak and blood-stained continuity with the past. Depatterning? Indian children were taken from their families and punished for every word spoken in their own language, even as African slaves were given Christian names and forbidden to use their own, or to drum. Amid the shock of the Civil War the Republicans deferred by several years the freeing of slaves, while hastening to use crisis to arrange a banking and monetary system to their liking.

Just as there is continuity in capitalist predation, there is continuity in resistance. Here's where Klein's catastrophism distorts the picture. Her controlling metaphor for the attack on Iraq is the initial "shock and awe" bombardment, designed to numb Saddam's forces and the overall civilian population into instant surrender and long-term submission. But "shock and awe" was a bust. It didn't work. Its value even as a metaphor is useless, except as illustration of what parlor wargamers in Washington DC can hype. Having sensibly decided not to fight or die on an American timetable, many of Iraq's soldiers regrouped to commence an effective resistance. Iraqi civilians struggle along as best they can under awful conditions and, un-numbed, tell pollsters that they wish the Americans would leave at once.

"Shock therapy" neoliberalism really isn't most closely associated with Milton Friedman, but rather with Jeffrey Sachs, to whom Klein does certainly give many useful pages, even though Friedman remains the dark star of her story. Sachs first introduced shock therapy in Bolivia in the early 1990s. Then he went into Poland, Russia, etc, with the same shock therapy model. Sachs' catchy phrase then was that "you can't leap over an abyss step-by-step," or words to that effect. This is really where contemporary neoliberalism took shape. And, it wasn't just Sachs.

It was also other slightly left of center mainstream economists, most notably Summers and Paul Krugman as well. To his credit, Krugman has now recanted; Sachs also, but only partially. It's true that you can make a case that this all goes back to Friedman. David Harvey's book, A History of Neoliberalism, actually traces the origins of neoliberalism to Friedman in Chile. It's an interesting perspective. But, as the left economist Robert Pollin remarks, to blame Friedman for the whole thing, and not how the entire economics mainstream went along--including the "liberals" like Sachs, Krugman, and Summers--is to let these people off the hook and to misrepresent history.

As Pollin, a brilliant and creative economist who spends much of his time advancing progressive counter-models--both for African nations and for advanced capitalist countries--emphasizes, "it's important to pummel the Sachs's of the world on this point, because they are changing, slowly. To get the world to change, their 1980s-1990s views need to be totally discredited. It's not enough to just say Milton Friedman was an ultra right winger and leave it at that."

There are huge third world economies that have been ravaged by neoliberalism that haven't endured "the shock doctrine", in the torments that phrase, as defined by Klein. India in the early Nineties was not on the receiving end of physical 'shock and awe' bombardment. Tortures were not inflicted by electric shock devices or techniques of sensory deprivation. Death squads have not rampaged through the countryside. If Friedman counseled the Congress Party or the BJP this is not recorded by Klein, who only gives India one brief mention. Yet the neoliberal policies advanced by the World Bank and other multilateral agencies and also enthusiastically seized upon by home grown politicians and government officials--many springing from a Keynesian (or further left) tradition--have certainly been sweeping and savage in consequence. Month after month on our CounterPunch site P. Sainath has described the immiseration of half a billion peasants from circumstances that were bad in the first place, along with the suicides of ruined farmers--a total now running well above 100,000. India has no place in Naomi Klein's model of the "shock doctrine" and "the rise of disaster capitalism", which suggests that model's limitations.

Capitalists try to use social and economic dislocation or natural disaster--New Orleans is only the latest instance - to advantage, but so do those they oppress. War has been the mother of many a positive social revolution, as have natural disasters. The incompetence of the Mexican police and emergency forces after the huge earthquake of 1985 prompted a huge popular upheaval. In Latin America there has been shock attacks and shock doctrines for 500 years. Right now, in Latin America, the pendulum is swinging away from the years of darkness, of the death squad and Friedman's doctrines. Klein's outrage is admirable. Her specific exposes across six decades of infamy are often excellent, but in her larger ambitions her metaphors betray her. From the anti-capitalist point of view she's too gloomy by half. A capitalism that thrives best on the abnormal, on disasters, is by definition in decline. As Cassius put it, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings".

The Shock Doctrine Website

Naomi Klein has a website for her new book the Shock Doctrine. I clicked on the links to excerpts of the book but with no luck. I got to the sites but could not find the excerpts. Maybe I am just not that computer savvy! There are lots of reviews and also a whole resources section. A lot of research went into the book.

The Shock Doctrine
Welcome to ShockDoctrine.com. This website is more than a promotional tool for a book, although you can receive the latest news about The Shock Doctrine, read reviews, and see where you can purchase a copy.

The process of researching The Shock Doctrine was so fascinating and revelatory that I was left with a strong desire to share as much of my own discovery experience as possible -- to steer readers to the books, essays, documentary films and primary documents that did so much to shape The Shock Doctrine. In that spirit, ShockDoctrine.com is designed to serve as a living companion to the book for readers -- particularly students and educators -- who want to delve deeper into the book's material and themes, and who want to see the evidence for themselves.

Debra Levy, a trained librarian, was the primary researcher for The Shock Doctrine, working for years on the project. After the book was complete, she dedicated herself to opening up our research files and putting them online, curating, along with designer Andrew Childs, this remarkable website.

The Resources section, offers a full interactive bibliography and filmography as well as declassified CIA reports, dozens of historical documents, and links to terrific online material, much of it organized by chapter so they can serve as supplementary readings. We all hope you find this to be a useful tool for your studies and research and welcome your feedback. Keep in mind that this is a work in progress, with new material going up everyday.

Best wishes,
Naomi Klein

The Shock Doctrine

Here is the Random House info on Klein's new book. The review quotes are certainly effusive in their praise of the book. From just reading the description it sounds to me rather simplistic and exaggerated at times. However it should provide needed antidote to the even more simplistic views of the market as panacea (or perhaps God!)


About this Book
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"Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around."
—Milton Friedman

The shock doctrine is the unofficial story of how the "free market" came to dominate the world, from Chile to Russia, China to Iraq, South Africa to Canada. But it is a story radically different from the one usually told. It is a story about violence and shock perpetrated on people, on countries, on economies. About a program of social and economic engineering that is driving our world, that Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism."

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically, and that unfettered capitalism goes hand-in-hand with democracy. Instead, she argues it has consistently relied on violence and shock, and reveals the puppet strings behind the critical events of the last four decades.

"The shock doctrine" is the influential but little understood theory that in order to push through profoundly unpopular policies that enrich the few and impoverish the many, there needs to be some kind of collective crisis or disaster – either real or manufactured. A crisis that opens up a "window of opportunity" – when people and societies are too disoriented to protect their own interests – for radically remaking countries using the trademark tactic of rapid-fire economic shock therapy and, all too often, less metaphorical forms of shock: the shock of the police truncheon, the Taser gun or the electric prod in the prison cell.

Klein vividly traces the origins of modern shock tactics back to the economic lab of the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman in the 60s, and beyond to the CIA-funded electroshock experiments at McGill University in the 50s which helped write the torture manuals used today at Guantanamo Bay. She details, in this riveting – indeed shocking – story, the well-known events of the recent past that have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine: among them, Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; and, more recently, the September 11 attacks, the "Shock and Awe" invasion of Iraq, the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. And she shows how – in the hands of the Bush Administration – the "war on terror" is a thin cover for a thriving destruction/ reconstruction complex, with disasters, wars and homeland security fuelling a booming new economy. Naomi Klein has once again written a book that will change the way we see the world.

"The world is a messy place, and someone has to clean it up."
—Condoleezza Rice, September 2002, on the need to invade Iraq

"George’s answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chainsaw. Which I think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well."
—Laura Bush

From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free market crusade. But torture is more than a tool used to enforce unwanted policies on rebellious peoples; it is also a metaphor of the shock doctrine’s underlying logic. Torture, or in CIA language "coercive interrogation," is a set of techniques designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation and shock in order to force them to make concessions against their will. ...The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely, attempting to achieve on a mass scale what torture does one on one in the interrogation cell. ...The original disaster – the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane – puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies much as the blaring music and blows in the torture cells soften up prisoners. Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.
—from Shock Doctrine

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Review Quotes
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"Klein tracks the forced imposition of economic privatization, rife with multinational corporate parasites, on areas and nations weakened by war, civil strife or natural disasters….pointing an alarmed finger at a global “corporatocracy” that combines the worst features of big business and small government…. Klein’s book incorporates an amount of due diligence, logical structure and statistical evidence that others lack….[P]persuasive…Provocative…. Required reading for anyone trying to pierce the complexities of globalization."
—Starred Kirkus review

"Impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary as hell."
—John le Carre

"Naomi Klein is one of the most important new voices in American journalism today, as this book make clear. She has turned globalism inside out, and in so doing given all of us a new way of looking at our seemingly unending disaster in Iraq, and a new way of understanding why we got there."
—Seymour M. Hersh, Pulitzer prize winning investigative journalist for The New Yorker

"This beautifully written, very readable book will change the disgusting history it so calmly chronicles"
—Peter Carey, author of Oscar and Lucinda and Theft: A Love Story

"Her argument is well-documented, logical, riveting, and convincing."
—Jane Smiley, author of A Thousand Acres and Ten Days in the Hills

"This masterful book is a measured but furious call to arms. Naomi Klein is Antigone before the King, the antidote to the feeling of inevitability that says that we must accept murder as a legitimate economic policy… A spectacular triumph."
—John Cusack, actor/filmmaker

"The Shock Doctrine is, simply put, a book without peer, an epic and riveting work whose message must be heard. With the persistence of a journalist, in the best sense of the word, and the rigor of a scholar, in its truest incarnation, Naomi Klein offers nothing short of a new paradigm for understanding politics…. Her book is honest, urgent and necessary to read. Through its eloquent writing, searing analysis and remarkable breadth, we confront the hubris and zealotry of envisioning a blank slate and being left, time and again, with a scorched earth. The Shock Doctrine is an essential book; only Klein could write it."
—Anthony Shadid, Pulitzer Prize winning Iraq correspondent for The Washington Post

"Naomi Klein is in the best tradition of I.F. Stone and Upton Sinclair, a muckraker who digs in where others accept the surface. I love her stuff and as a 20th Century man, I salute a 21st Century woman."
—Studs Terkel, historian and author of Working

"A revelation! With unparalleled courage and clarity Naomi Klein has written the most important and necessary book of her generation. In it she exposes liars, murderers and thieves, ripping the lid off the Chicago School economic policy and its connection to the chaos and bloodshed around the world. The Shock Doctrine is so important and so revelatory a book that it could very well prove a catalyst, a watershed, a tipping point in the movement for economic and social justice."
—Tim Robbins

"Naomi Klein is an investigative reporter like no other. She roams the continents with eyes wide open and her brain operating at full speed, finding connections we never thought of, and patterns which eluded us. She shows us, in clear and elegant language, how catastrophes -- natural ones like Katrina, unnatural ones like war -- become opportunities for a savage capitalism, calling itself “the free market,” to privatize everything in sight, bringing huge profits to some, misery for others. To ensure the safety of such a system, it becomes necessary to constrict freedom, to assault human rights. The torture chambers for some then match the torturing of the larger society. This is a brilliant book, one of the most important I have read in a long time."
—Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United State

"Naomi Klein has written a brilliant, brave and terrifying book. It's nothing less than the secret history of what we call the 'Free Market'. It should be compulsory reading."
—Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

"Naomi Klein as a writer is an accusing angel. This life-saving book, packed with thinking dynamite, provokes and instills a calm. It reveals a striking parallel between CIA prisoner interrogation technique and the blackmailing technique of the World Bank and I.M.F. for imposing disaster capitalism across the world; both want to induce by shocks a loss of identity. Hence calm is a form of resistance. A book to be read everywhere."
—John Berger, author of G, winner of the Booker Prize, and Ways of Seeing

"Naomi Klein's exposé is certain to be sensational…. She rips away the 'free trade' and globalization ideologies that disguise a conspiracy to privatize war and disaster and grab public property for the rich few. She is brilliant on the malevolent influence of Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago's Economics Department in promoting global privatization. She offers an excellent explanation for the failure to repair New Orleans after Katrina. Hers is a long-needed analysis of our headlong flight back to feudalism under the guise of social science and 'freedom.'"
—Chalmers Johnson, author of The Blowback Trilogy.

Naomi Klein's New Book

The introduction to this article can be skipped but the rest of it gives an interesting history of Naomi Klein and sketches the subject matter of her new book. The book sounds as if it provides a good antidote to the conventional view of the great beneficence of free markets. It remains to be seen whether this book will ever have the success of No Logo, somehow I doubt it.


Globe and Mail (Toronto) - August 31, 2007

Shocked and appalled
JOHN ALLEMANG

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

August 31, 2007 at 11:57 PM EDT

If there's anyone who knows the ins and outs of a successful
marketing campaign, it's Naomi Klein.

So why is the author of the bestselling No Logo, the 2000 book that
tore apart the pretensions of "Just Do It" brand-building while
inspiring the social-justice spirit in young consumers, walking away
from a screening of the video for her long-awaited new book, The
Shock Doctrine?

"It's too disturbing," she says, as she closes the door to the small
room that started off as our meeting place but now feels more like an
isolation chamber.

Of course, if you're a truly discerning consumer of the commodity
that is intellectual culture, you're focusing less on Ms. Klein's
sudden disappearance from her own promotional gathering and more on
the fact that her massive new tome (to be published on Tuesday in
seven languages) comes with its own trailer – if trailer is a word
that can begin to describe this dense and darting six-minute
documentary created by Ms. Klein and Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron
( Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien), which will shortly make a more
public appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Book videos "are the hot new thing in publishing," according to the
37-year-old Canadian author, whose particularly successful brand of
activism-for-our-times has always had a soft spot for the hot new
thing. And why not? Why should left-wing politics be preachy and
above-it-all, which is certain death for any movement that is
sincerely committed to reaching the masses, whoever they now may be?

Those are particularly relevant questions when the subject is as
difficult and unsettling as the one Ms. Klein has chosen for her No
Logo follow-up – no less a theme than the human devastation caused by

the unrelenting propagandists for the free-market economy over the
last 35 years, from the torture chambers of Augusto Pinochet's Chile
and the murderous disappearances in Argentina's military rule to the
morass of Hurricane Katrina and the shock-and-awe destruction of Iraq.

No wonder Ms. Klein flees her own video. Reduced to a film-festival
format, The Shock Doctrine scours the vulnerable brain, as the
jarring noises of crying babies and wailing cats surround images of
pain and torture that are meant to represent the shock-therapy
metaphors peddled by unsparing market economists – in the most
visceral and literal way.

This, to Ms. Klein's sensitive eye, is the ugly face of capitalism,
and it's a sight she can't stand to see.

We're a long way from No Logo, a book that exposed the cruel ruses of
global branding, true, but didn't implicate us quite so much in the
writhing bodies and twisted souls of the market's innocent victims.
Smart 17-year-old girls latched on to it and found in its breezy
pages the substance to go with their style. Hundreds of them wrote
personal letters to Ms. Klein, thanking her for opening them up to
the world of politics, a place from which they thought they were
barred.

No Logo was upbeat, empowering, effortlessly superior to the
globalized economy it described (to the point where some critics
accused it of being just an elevated version of consumer snobbery).
The 662-page Shock Doctrine, as you might guess from its subtitle,
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is much more prickly and much less
eager to please.

As such, it is a risky venture for a woman who found a devoted
worldwide audience with her previous book, including praise from
British and American rock stars and a paparazzi following in Italy,
where unlicensed No Logo boutiques honour her fame. She deliberately
resisted writing an obvious sequel – to the point of investing over
$200,000 of her advance payments in research operations, building a
virtual academic institute in order to get the goods on such unsexy
free-market gurus as the late University of Chicago economist Milton
Friedman. Her acknowledgments alone run to eight pages.

"I did feel some pressure to write another No Logo," she says,
returning to the meeting room after the video's cacophony has given
way to a more bookish calm. " Politics … but fun!" she says, in a
parody of the marketing voice that can reduce every bright idea to
its most lucrative and inane. " 'Easier than Chomsky,' someone said.
Well, this isn't that."

No utopia

The Shock Doctrine, in her analysis, is "the secret history of the
free market." The concepts that economists such as Prof. Friedman and
institutions such as the World Bank so zealously promoted –
deregulation, privatization, free trade, debt reduction, huge cuts in
the public sector, targeting trade-union movements – have become so
mainstream that they seem inevitable for any political office-seeker
in a Western democracy, even if they lead to lower wages and less
protection for the working classes.

But Ms. Klein is determined to show that this free-market utopia,
designed to benefit big corporations and their allies in government,
is neither inevitable nor democratic nor a good thing. And by doing
so, in her detailed histories of those political and economic crises
where the free marketeers overplayed their hand (Prof. Friedman is
disturbingly tight with the repressive Pinochet, for example), she
also wants to shake us out of our deference to crisis-capitalism's
shock therapy and lead us back to the more humane values of
democratic socialism.

Does that make sense? In Ms. Klein's world, these are givens. Free-
market ideals are undemocratic by nature and can be imposed only
against the will of the people at "a moment of collective vertigo"
when the ordinary rules of political behaviour are suspended – one
classic example being Sept. 11, 2001, when right-wing think tanks
rolled in with readymade agendas to take advantage of what she calls
"a period of disorientation, when you trust authority figures and
think Rudy Giuliani is your long-lost daddy."

Her project is a secret history because so much free-market rhetoric,
in her view, is at odds with the way these economic "reforms" have
been carried out. Since people won't choose a more precarious
economic life willingly, they have to be fooled or shocked or
tortured into being compliant – which sounds accurate in describing
Pinochet's Chile and post-9/11 Iraq, both of which submitted under
duress to the delusions of free-market ideologues, but doesn't quite
correspond with the usual view of the divisive but freely chosen
Margaret Thatcher and Mike Harris.

Ms. Klein will point out that Mrs. Thatcher's government arranged for
striking mine workers to be beaten and spied on, and that Ontario's
Mr. Harris had an education minister who was actually videotaped
talking about the need to prepare the way for cuts by "creating a
useful crisis." But she's not about to entertain the idea that Mrs.
Thatcher or Mr. Harris came to power because a mass of people
actually preferred their ideology to the alternative – we must have
been bullied or duped or metaphorically tortured.

As a secret history of capitalism, The Shock Doctrine, for all its
hefty research and convincing connect-the-dot revelations about the
money men's back-room machinations, doesn't purport to be even-
handed. Being balanced and boring just isn't Ms. Klein's style, in
activism as in the rest of her life.

This leaves her wide open to challenges from free-market defenders
such as National Post columnist Andrew Coyne, who comments: "It is
true that radical changes in economic policy are usually only
possible in conditions of crisis: Chile under Pinochet, Thatcher
after the Winter of Discontent, New Zealand after the currency
crisis. Israel and Ireland are more recent examples. But that is true
not only of free-market reforms: Communism was only imposed in
Russia, Cuba etc. after the 'crisis,' albeit self-inflicted, of
revolution.

"And whereas communism has everywhere been renounced at the first
democratic opportunity, I note that none of the free-market
experiments I mentioned have been reversed, though different parties
have come to power."

But such polite observations from the other side are not about to
waylay Ms. Klein.

" The Shock Doctrine is an alternative history," she says with
amiable defiance. "This is the part of the story that's been left
out. Hundreds of books talk about the other version of history, about
the ineffectiveness of big government and the corruption of big
labour and the problems of stagflation. This is not that kind of book."

Red-diaper baby

Ms. Klein's left-wing certainties, her refusal to lie down and accept
the fact that the business mentality has triumphed, are rooted in her
family history: "I don't question being a leftist any more than I
would question being a Jew – it's the culture I got taught as a kid."

Her upbringing, she believes, is responsible for The Shock Doctrine's
theme of resistance against the privatized world. Her American
parents, who came to Montreal during the Vietnam War, both thrived in
publicly funded occupations – her mother as a feminist National Film

Board director, her doctor father as the founder of a natural-
childbirth clinic who also taught at McGill University and worked at
a large public hospital. But when Ms. Klein was a baby, the family
moved to Rochester, N.Y., and suddenly her mother was working out of
a trailer for a local public-access station, while her father treated
uninsured patients at a tiny clinic on the edge of town.

"They faced the choice of whether they'd be totally marginal in the
United States or part of the mainstream in public institutions in
Canada," says Ms. Klein.

After five years in the United States, the choice seemed more clear-
cut, and so Ms. Klein came of age as a serious-minded Montrealer –
auspiciously, she wrote a Grade 9 essay on the CIA's responsibility
for Pinochet's 1973 military coup. Clearly, talk in the Klein
household was dominated by big issues. Her grandparents on her
father's side were ardent old-school lefties, both of whom supported
Stalin out of unassailable faith in the communist cause. Her
grandfather, who worked on Fantasia, led a strike at the Disney
studios, and Ms. Klein grew up hearing tales of her father, age 13,
joining in the protests.

"These are my childhood stories, what we heard on car trips," she
says, "about my grandfather getting blacklisted, about my father
screaming 'scab' on the picket line at Disney." Her grandparents
joined a rural left-wing community in New Jersey called Nature's
Friends, where Woody Guthrie would show up to sing to the converted.
This is where she spent her childhood vacations, giving the lie to
the much-repeated description of her in her teens as just another
"mall rat" – a recurring image that makes her wince.

"It's pure propaganda. Yes, I really was a teenager in high school,
but the truth is I was a pretty serious kid. It was played up as an
interesting angle when No Logo was published" – the phrase "mall-rat

memoir" even found its way to the dust-jacket – "and I didn't do
enough to hide it. It will haunt me forever. I do think it's silly,
though. Do men who write fairly serious books get this kind of
treatment?"

Having grown up in a Jewish socialist family where politics was table
talk, she married into another where the bar may have been set even
higher. Her husband, the hyper-articulate CBC television host Avi
Lewis, is the son of former Ontario NDP leader and UN AIDS envoy
Stephen Lewis and of legendary feminist columnist Michele Landsberg.
He is also the grandson of the late federal NDP leader David Lewis –

the last of the supremely confident Canadian socialists, who coined
the phrase "corporate welfare bums."

Ms. Landsberg first came across Ms. Klein, then the editor of The
Varsity at the University of Toronto, when the young writer called
for reassurance after drawing fire for criticizing Israel in the
student newspaper. "It was very brave of her to take on the Jewish
establishment," Ms. Landsberg says. "She said what she believed
without softening the blow, and I was very impressed by her courage."

As a regular at family colloquies, Ms. Klein most often ends up
trading ideas with Stephen Lewis. "Both of them are at a loss for
small talk," says Ms. Landsberg. "They're both thinking about stuff,
and there's this great engagement around issues."

Still, Ms. Landsberg feels that Ms. Klein's greatest similarity is to
David Lewis. "We have these old snapshots of David at the Socialist
International meetings before the war, as a very young man, and
there's the same intellectualism of the left, and the same passion.
That's the tradition Naomi is a part of, and I see hope in that."

Moving with the time

The left in Canada has been suffering from a crisis of confidence for
many years. Ms. Klein encountered it head-on in her early 20s when
she led a pack of her university-journalism friends in the effort to
remake a long-standing but faltering left-wing Toronto publication
called This Magazine – only to be met with complaints that she was
dumbing it down and selling out by directing some of the magazine's
attention (however critical) to popular culture.

"There are always people on the left who are resistant to change,"
she says, "who are terribly nostalgic for a mythic moment when
everything was figured out. … But while I feel a part of the
tradition, I'm also trying to evolve it. This Magazine was in
trouble, and that's why it was handed to a gang of 22-year-olds. It
had not changed with the culture."

But this is a left-wing thinker who can change with the culture – and

even manages to change the culture herself. With No Logo, she helped
foster a more critical and nuanced understanding of global business
practices at a time that she calls "the high-water mark of corporate
triumphalism."

With The Shock Doctrine, both her goals and her challenges are much
greater, despite the fact that the triumphs now seem much less
secure, after Enron and the conspicuous failures of the Iraq master
planners – one of whom, Paul Wolfowitz, went on to run the World
Bank.

"We're living in a moment of unbelievable defeatism and passivity,"
she says, with more animation than that blanket statement should allow.

But instead of rounding on the overly passive masses – somebody must

be electing all these duplicitous leaders, or yielding quietly to the
corporate cuts or nodding off when so-called terrorists are held for
years without trial – Ms. Klein spreads what she calls her
"mobilizing stories" in order to rewrite the history of the free
market's triumph, so that left-wingers can realize how they were
outmanoeuvred and learn from their mistakes.

The brief sense of victory that No Logo seemed to promise to
thoughtful shoppers now seems a long way off, after the post-9/11
arrogance of the disaster capitalists in Iraq, who paid no attention
to Ms. Klein's arguments that the policies of globalization would
come crashing down.

"They made the transition from Free Trade Lite, opposing the anti-
globalization movement through arm-twisting and bullying, to 'Who
needs the International Monetary Fund? We'll treat this bombed-out
country like a blank slate, with no government and no negotiating.' "

In response, Ms. Klein offers up encouraging examples of people who
have refused to play along, like the Germans who didn't buy into the
economists' miracle cures at the difficult time of reunification:
"They know from their history how dangerous it is to shock society.
The forces unleashed are volatile, and they're not forces you can
control."

This is not the bravado of a David Lewis, not even close. But for the
endlessly marginalized left, it's a start.

"Almost no one I know has the confidence David had," Ms. Klein says.
"We've internalized the narrative that our ideas have been tried and
have failed – which is why we have strong critiques, but when it
comes to producing alternatives, we go weak."

Even a bright, audacious, bestselling leftist Naomi Klein can admit
to carrying around the idea that "when we're in power, we're a
disaster." And despite the hopes of her Lewis in-laws, she doesn't,
so far, have any interest in running for elected office – a
generational difference Michele Landsberg finds hard to accept, even
as she acknowledges the shock-resistant activist's lesson that there
are many different ways to change the world.

---

John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.


___________________________________

Naomi Klein on Montebello and the world of total surveillance

Sometimes Klein tends to exaggerate and engage in rhetorical extravagance but she is usually perceptive. I like this:
In the Bush era, security doesn't trump big business; it may be the biggest business of all.

The provision of cameras for protestors to send their messages inside is really priceless. No doubt it enables the intelligence services to add to their already bulging database about protesters. It is passing strange while this equipment was provided that the meeting refused to accept the huge petition that the Council of Canadians tried to present. Wouldn't it be helpful for security to add those names to their database of protesters. Shame on them. Missed opportunity.

Democracy's new dawn is on CCTV: the security state as infotainment


So keen are America's leaders to hear dissent they're videotaping the dissenters. Welcome to a world of total surveillance

Naomi Klein
Friday August 24, 2007
The Guardian


As protesters gathered recently outside the Security and Prosperity Partnership summit in Montebello, Quebec, to confront George Bush, Felipe Calderón, the Mexican president, and Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, Associated Press reported this surreal detail: "Leaders were not able to see the protesters in person, but they could watch the protesters on TV monitors inside the hotel ... Cameramen hired to ensure that demonstrators would be able to pass along their messages to the three leaders sat idly in a tent full of audio and video equipment ... A sign on the outside of the tent said, 'Our cameras are here today providing your right to be seen and heard. Please let us help you get your message out. Thank You.'"





Yes, it's true: like contestants on a reality TV show, protesters at the SPP meeting were invited to vent into video cameras, their rants to be beamed to "protest-trons" inside the summit enclave. It was security state as infotainment - Big Brother meets, well, Big Brother. The spokesperson for Prime Minister Harper explained that although protesters were herded into empty fields, the video link meant that their right to political speech was protected. "Under the law, they need to be seen and heard, and they will be."
It is an argument with sweeping implications. If videotaping activists meets the legal requirement that dissenting citizens have the right to be seen and heard, what else might fit the bill? How about all the other security cameras that patrolled the summit - the ones filming demonstrators as they got on and off buses and peacefully walked down the street? What about the mobile phone calls that were intercepted, the meetings that were infiltrated, the emails that were read? According to the new rules set out in Montebello, all these actions may soon be recast not as infringements on civil liberties but the opposite: proof of our leaders' commitment to direct, unmediated consultation. Elections are a crude tool for taking the public temperature - these methods allow constant, exact monitoring of our beliefs. Think of surveillance as the new participatory democracy; of wiretapping as the political equivalent of MTV's Total Request Live.

Protesters in Montebello complained that while they were locked out, chief executives from about 30 of the largest corporations in North America - from Wal-Mart to Chevron - were part of the official summit. But perhaps they had it backwards: the CEOs had only an hour and 15 minutes of face time with the leaders. The activists were being "seen and heard" around the clock. So instead of shouting about police-state tactics, maybe they should have said: "Thank you for listening." (And reading, and watching, and photographing, and data-mining.)

The Montebello "seen and heard" rule also casts the target of the protests in a new light. The SPP is described in the leaders' final statement as an "ambitious" plan to "keep our borders closed to terrorism yet open to trade". In other words, a merger of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the homeland security complex - Nafta with spy planes. The model dates back to September 11, when Paul Cellucci, the US ambassador to Canada, pronounced that in the new era, "security will trump trade". But there was an out clause: the trade on which the economies of Canada and Mexico depend could continue uninterrupted, as long as the governments of those countries were willing to welcome the tentacles of the US war on terror. Canadian and Mexican business leaders leaped to surrender, aggressively pushing their governments to give in to US demands for "integrated" security in order to keep the goods and the tourists flowing.

Almost six years later, the business leaders at Montebello - under the banner of the North American Competitiveness Council, an official wing of the SPP - were still holding up "thickening borders" as the bogeyman. The fix? According to the SPP website, "technological solutions, improved information-sharing, and, potentially, the use of biometric identifiers". From experience we know what this means: continent-wide no-fly lists, integrated databases, as well as the $2.5bn contract to Boeing to build a "virtual fence" on the northern and southern borders of the United States, equipped with unmanned drones.

In short, under the SPP vision of the continent, "thick" borders will soon be replaced with a nearly invisible web of continental surveillance - almost all of it run for profit. Two members of the SPP advisory group - Lockheed Martin and General Electric - have already received multibillion-dollar contracts from the US government to build this web. In the Bush era, security doesn't trump big business; it may be the biggest business of all.

In the run-up to the SPP summit, a spate of surveillance scandals helped paint a fuller picture. First, Congress not only failed to curtail the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping but opened the door to snooping into bank records, phone call patterns and even physical searches - all without any onus to prove the subject is a threat.

Next, the Boston Globe reported on plans to link thousands of CCTV cameras on streets, subways, apartment buildings and businesses into networks capable of tracking suspects in real time. And on August 15 confirmation came that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency - the arm of the American military that runs spy planes and satellites over enemy territory - would be fully integrated into the infrastructure of domestic intelligence gathering and local policing, becoming the "eyes" to the National Security Agency's "ears".

Add a few more hi-tech tools - biometric IDs, facial-recognition software, networked databases of "suspects", GPS bundled into ever more electronic devices - and you have something like the world of total surveillance most recently portrayed in The Bourne Ultimatum.

Which brings us back to the Security and Prosperity Partnership. Who needs clumsy old border checks when the authorities are making sure we are seen and heard at all times - in high definition, online and off, on land and from the sky? Security is the new prosperity. Surveillance is the new democracy.

· Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is published next month; a version of this article appears in the Nation www.thenation.com
www.naomiklein.org

Naomi Klein on Alberta Oil development.

It is certainly part of US plans to wean the US from Middle East oil and replace that with production from more secure and friendly regimes. Alberta is a perfect place. Alberta is Texas with snow but with a similar right wing political climate.

Baghdad Burns, Calgary Booms
by Naomi Klein
June 01, 2007




The invasion of Iraq has set off what could be the largest oil boom in history. All the signs are there: multinationals free to gobble up national firms at will, ship unlimited profits home, enjoy leisurely "tax holidays" and pay a laughable 1 percent in royalties to the government.

This isn't the boom in Iraq sparked by the proposed new oil law--that will come later. This boom is already in full swing, and it is happening about as far away from the carnage in Baghdad as you can get, in the wilds of northern Alberta. For four years now, Alberta and Iraq have been connected to each other through a kind of invisible seesaw: As Baghdad burns, destabilizing the entire region and sending oil prices soaring, Calgary booms.



Here is how chaos in Iraq unleashed what the Financial Times recently called "north America's biggest resources boom since the Klondike gold rush." Albertans have always known that in the northern part of their province, there are vast deposits of bitumen--black, tarlike goo that is mixed with sand, clay, water and oil. There are approximately 2.5 trillion barrels of the stuff, the largest hydrocarbon deposits in the world.



It is possible to turn Alberta's crud into crude, but it's awfully hard. One method is to mine it in vast open pits: First forests are clear-cut, then topsoil scraped away. Next, huge machines dig out the black goop and load it into the largest dump trucks in the world (two stories high, a single wheel costs $100,000). The tar is diluted with water and solvents in giant vats, which spin it around until the oil rises to the top, while the massive tailings are dumped in ponds larger than the region's natural lakes. Another method is to separate the oil where it is: Large drill-pipes push steam deep underground, which melts the tar, while another pipe sucks it out and transports it through several more stages of refining, much of it powered by natural gas.



Both techniques are costly: between $18 and $23 per barrel, just in expenses. Until quite recently, that made no economic sense. In the mid-1980s, oil sold for $20 a barrel; in 1998-99, it was down to $12 a barrel. The major international players had no intention of paying more to get the oil than they could sell it for, which is why, when global oil reserves were calculated, the tar sands weren't even factored in. Everyone but a few heavily subsidized Canadian companies knew that the tar was staying put.



Then came the US invasion of Iraq. In March 2003, the price of oil reached $35 a barrel, raising the prospect of making a profit from the tar sands (the industry calls them "oil sands"). That year, the United States Energy Information Administration "discovered" oil in the tar sands. It announced that Alberta--previously thought to have only 5 billion barrels of oil--was actually sitting on at least 174 billion "economically recoverable" barrels. The next year, Canada overtook Saudi Arabia as the leading provider of foreign oil to the United States.



All this has meant that Iraq's oil boom has not been delayed; it has been relocated. All the majors, save BP, have rushed to northern Alberta: ExxonMobil, Chevron and Total, which alone plans to spend $9-$14 billion. In April, Shell paid $8 billion to take full control of its Canadian subsidiary. The town of Fort McMurray, ground zero of the boom, has nowhere to house the tens of thousands of new workers, and one company has built its own airstrip so it can fly in the people it needs.



Seventy-five percent of the oil from the tar sands flows directly to the United States, prompting Brian Hall, an energy consultant with Colorado-based IHS, to call the tar sands "America's energy security blanket." There is a certain irony there: The United States invaded Iraq at least in part to secure access to its oil. Now, thanks partly to economic blowback from that disastrous decision, it has found the "security" it was looking for right next door.



It has become fashionable to predict that high oil prices will spark a free-market response to climate change, setting off an "explosion of innovation in alternatives," as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently. Alberta puts the lie to that claim. High prices have indeed led to an R&D extravaganza, but it is squarely focused on figuring out how to get the dirtiest possible oil out of the hardest-to-reach places. Shell, for instance, is working on a "novel thermal recovery process"--embedding large electric heaters in the deposits and literally cooking the earth.



And that's the Alberta tar sands for you: The industry already contributing to climate change more than any other is frantically turning up the heat. The process of refining bitumen emits three to four times the greenhouse gases produced by extracting oil from traditional wells, making the tar sands the largest single contributor to Canada's growth in greenhouse gas emissions. Nonetheless, the industry plans to more than triple production by 2020, with no end in sight. If prices stay high, it will soon become profitable to extract an additional 141 billion barrels from the tar sand, which would place the largest oil reserves in the world in Alberta.



Developing the sands is devouring trees and wildlife--the Pembina Institute, the leading authority on the tar sands' environmental impact, warns that boreal forests covering "an area as large as the State of Florida" risk being leveled. Now it turns out that the main river feeding the industry the massive quantities of water it needs is in jeopardy. Climate scientists say that dropping water levels are the result--fittingly enough--of climate warming.



Contemplating the collective madness in Alberta--a scene even the Financial Times has labeled "some dystopian fantasy"--it strikes me that Canada has ended up with more than Iraq's displaced oil boom. We have its elusive weapons of mass destruction too. They are out near Fort McMurray, in the jet-black goo beneath the earth's crust. And with the help of trucks, pipes, steam and gas, these weapons are being detonated.