Disaster Capitalism Quotes

“I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.”
― Edwidge Danticat

“The future of the next generation relies on astronomers obtaining a full understanding of
the rapidly changing human environmental conditions and the halting of biologically toxic corporate
government policies. The overloading of the electromagnetic environment is one of these disastrous
policies that must stop.”
― Steven Magee

“The slogan for contemporary capitalism--fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward”
― Naomi Klein

“With all this hoarding, alarm, deceit, lack of information, plethora of disinformation, ambiguity, and confusion, I wonder whether it is time for us to start drafting a post-coronavirus manifesto? Perhaps it should contain all the things we don’t want the world to become after this pandemic is over. There are many alienating powers out there that thrived on keeping us quarantined, at distance, and distrustful of each other way before COVID-19. There are systems that thrive on our loneliness and fear. There are institutions dedicated to make sure that we don’t help each other so that we turn to them for help… Let’s not allow them to get their way once this pandemic is over! Let’s make sure that we create a world in which such blood suckers are not needed in the first place. Oh, my friends, let’s beware of the ways disaster capitalism is using the pandemic for its benefit.”
― Louis Yako

“The Fukushima nuclear complex went on to become the worst man-made engineering disaster in all of human history, outside of war.”
― Steven Magee, Health Forensics

“Much of U.S. foreign policy...is an exercise in projection, in which a tiny self-interested elite conflates its needs and desires with those of the entire world.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“For decades, the exploitative capitalist system and neoliberalism have been trying to persuade the world that it is for our best interest to reduce (or even erase) the public sector and give more power to the greedy private sector. They have been pushing -with great success – for the privatization of every service that can benefit the poor and marginalized people. They have and still are trying to get rid of universal healthcare anywhere their hands can reach. Why do they do so? The answer is simpler than we think: it is to keep people at the mercy of the greedy capitalist system that sees individuals as either potential cheap laborers to benefit from or a burden to dispose of when no longer usable. This global pandemic should be a wake-up call to all of us about how duped the world has been all along by this narrative. How many more disasters and pandemics will it take for the world to wake up?”
― Louis Yako

“Corruption has been as much a fixture on these contemporary frontiers as it was during the colonial gold rushes. Since the most significant privatization deals are always signed amid the tumult of an economic or political crisis, clear laws and effective regulations are never in place - the atmosphere is chaotic, the prices are flexible and so are the politicians. What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting locations from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“That is the untold story of what the IMF calls "stabilization programs," as if countries were ships being tossed around on the market's high seas. They do, eventually, stabilize, but that new equilibrium is achieved by throwing millions of people overboard: public sector workers, small-business owners, subsistence farmers, trade unionists. The ugly secret of "stabilization" is the vast majority never climb back aboard. They end up in slums, now home to 1 billion people; they end up in brothels or cargo ship containers. They are the disinherited, those described by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke as "ones to whom neither the past nor the future belongs.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social levelling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“It is precisely because the dream of economic equality is so popular, and so difficult to defeat in a fair fight, that the shock doctrine was embraced in the first place.”
― Naomi Klein

“The universal experience of living through a great shock is the feeling of being completely powerless: in the face of awesome forces, parents lose their ability to save their children, spouses are separated, homes - places of protection - become death traps. The best way to recover from helplessness turns out to be helping - having the right to be part of a communal recovery.”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism