Brad’s Reviews > The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism > Status Update

"the Israeli state openly embraced a new national economic vision: the growth provided by the dot-com bubble would be replaced with a homeland security boom. It was the perfect marriage of the Likud Party's hawkishness and its radical embrace of Chicago School economics, as embodied by Sharon's finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu."

"Unlike Palestinian workers, whose presence in Israel challenged the Zionist project...the hundreds of thousands of Russians who came to Israel...had the opposite effect...On March 30, 1993, Israel began its policy of 'closure,' sealing off the border between Israel and the occupied territories."

An important historical connection between the USSR's overthrow and emboldened Zionism.

"Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market's invisible hand. This is one area in which it actually delivers."

"A year and a half into the Iraq occupation, the U.S State Department launched a new branch: the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization. On any given day, it is paying private contractors to draw up detailed plans to reconstruct twenty-five different countries that may...find themselves the target of U.S-sponsored destruction, from Venezuela to Iran."

"There was another obstacle to Washington's privatization dreams: the free-market fundamentalism that shaped the structure of the occupation itself...In short, the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] was itself too privatized to privatize Iraq.

I noted previously how Graeber reveals a mirror image of this contradiction in 90s Russia. Forcing "pure capitalism" demands a state bureaucracy.

"The best time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground," I was told earnestly by a delegate at the "Rebuilding Iraq 2" conference in Washington, D.C."

That's it. That's the perfect distillation of this nightmare system, spelled out as explicitly as possible.

the political state does not take the form of the simple ratification by force of the socio-economic interests, in the strict sense, of the dominant classes or class fractions…but must assume a specifically political mediated form and appear to embody the general interest of society as a whole

- Nicos Poulantzas, Preliminaries to the Study of Hegemony in the State

"By 1949, [the U.S. was] tolerating from the West German government all kinds of policies that were positively uncapitalist: direct job creation by the state, huge investment in the public sector, subsidies for German firms and strong labour unions."

Defining those as "uncapitalist" policies presumes the very Friedmanian concept of capitalism Klein's critiquing.

A couple of missing points re: post-Soviet privatization:

Graeber's book came later, but data on the expansion of bureaucracy in post-Soviet Russia to facilitate privatizations (notwithstanding unchecked corruption and rapidity) was available. Wonder how that would fit into Klein's picture.

For a further case study surprisingly absent here, see Austin Murphy's Triumph of Evil on the former DDR's "Treuhand".