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Author explains the phrase "shock doctrine" and gives examples in U.S. current affairs. (1:47)
 

Full Interview. (11:38)
 

Tavis: Naomi Klein is an award-winning investigative reporter and syndicated columnist for "The Nation" and "The Guardian." She's also a best-selling author whose most recent book is called "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." The book is coming out in paperback next week. Naomi Klein, nice to have you on the program.

Naomi Klein: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Tavis: Glad to have you. Let me start with the obvious question. The shock doctrine is what exactly?

Klein: Well, it's a phrase that I'm using to describe a philosophy of power, a philosophy of power that is shared with many governments around the world including the Bush administration, and it's the idea that, if you have a series of unpopular policies usually in the interests of corporations, the best time to push them through is in the aftermath of some kind of a shock, a crisis.

It could be a natural disaster like Katrina, it could be a terrorist attack, it could be a war. I'm not arguing that they're creating the crisis so that they can exploit it, but I'm arguing that there is a deep understanding that these moments of crisis are the moment to act, to pounce, to just push through everything that you can't get through during normal times.

Tavis: That's almost an anecdotal example. So after 9/11, the Bush administration then did what?

Klein: Well, they declared the war on terror, a war against evil everywhere forever against enemies that we cannot communicate with because they want nothing but our total annihilation. Now from a military perspective, that war doesn't make a lot of sense. You can't win it, but from an economic perspective, it makes a lot of sense because it will go on forever.

So the way in which the Bush administration exploited the shock of September 11 is by, on the one hand, taking all of these powers in the Executive Branch, we know that, but what they also did is they outsourced those powers to a kind of a shadow government, the Blackwaters, the Halliburtons, the Bechtels, taking on functions that had previously been performed in-house, and created a huge industry, the so-called Homeland Security industry. It didn't really exist before September 11.

It's now a $200 billion dollar industry which is bigger than Hollywood and the music industry combined. So that's one of the ways that the shock doctrine was applied after 9/11.

Tavis: So that if in the process you end up wrecking your entire country's economy, it doesn't matter?

Klein: Well, it depends what the interests of that government are. You know, one of the things I look at in the book is, you know, who really makes up the Bush administration? These are card-carrying members of this industry, what I call the disaster capitalism complex.

You look at someone like Rumsfeld. What was he doing before he was in government? Well, he was head of a pharmaceutical company. It chaired the board of Gilead Sciences, which is a company that's really in the disaster business. They have the exclusive patent on the treatment for Avian flu, for instance. One of the interesting things about Rumsfeld is that he never sold his stocks in Gilead Sciences, so every time the talk came to how the country would prepare for an outbreak of the Avian flu and whether they should stockpile Tamiflu, he had to leave the room.

I think they act in the interests of the corporations, to be honest with you, and they have really hollowed the government, which is a real problem for whoever takes over after them because I think the next president is really entering a hollow house. It still looks like a government. They can still play a government on TV, but, you know, you pull the curtain, everything is outsourced, everything is privatized.

Tavis: So example two, Hurricane Katrina. In the aftermath, the administration does what?

Klein: Well, to me, Hurricane Katrina is really the classic example of the shock doctrine. The moment of truth, I suppose, came - I was in New Orleans when the city was still flooded. Everybody was focused on the emergency. Back in Washington, there was a meeting - this is just two weeks after the levies broke and the city was partially flooded - at The Heritage Foundation which, as you know, is a very powerful right-wing think tank.

They brought together members of the Republican study group, the Republican lawmakers, as well as representatives from other so-called free-market think tanks. They came up with a list of what they called "Free-Market Solutions for Hurricane Katrina" and I got a copy of the minutes from that meeting. People can read it on my website, shockdoctrine.org.

There's thirty-two of these ideas and they're everything from don't rebuilt the public schools, give parents vouchers, to turn the whole Gulf Coast into a tax-free free enterprise zone to drill in Anwar, to build new oil refineries. We see it New Orleans today. President Bush acted on many of these recommendations. Whatever he could, he did, and the rest of it he's still trying like drilling in Anwar.

But if you go to New Orleans today, I think what you see is not incompetence as we always hear, you know, "the Bush Administration doesn't know what they're doing." Well, to me, when I go to New Orleans, I see competence. I see a very competently executed plan when I compare that list to what's happened in the city.

Charity Hospital, the largest public hospital that treated people without health insurance, is still closed. It could be opened. There's now only two hundred twenty beds in the entire city to treat people without health insurance. There were five hundred fifty before the storm. New Orleans is the country's leading laboratory for the charter school experiment. There were only seven of these schools before the storm and now there's more than forty.

But the most dramatic example is the public housing. The public housing is being demolished in New Orleans as we speak, five thousand units that could have welcome families back, and many of them sustained minimal flood damage. When I was in New Orleans just ten days after the levies broke, the lobbyists in Baton Rouge were already talking about what a great opportunity this was to - well, Richard Baker, the Republican Congressman, said, "We couldn't clean out the housing projects, but God did."

Tavis: I saw that quote. Let me offer this as a quick retort. If I said to you that, after a catastrophe, after every major disaster, the shock doctrine, your text notwithstanding, if after every disaster, somebody is going to be advantaged and somebody is going to be disadvantaged, if after every catastrophe, leaders, for lack of a better word, are left with bad choices, some of those choices are by chance and some of those choices are by their own choice, but they're left with a series of bad choices.

The point of that is that it doesn't necessarily mean that there is some grand plan here, some scheme, some design to use this moment as a sort of example of another shock doctrine. Do you follow me?

Klein: Yes, totally. But what I show in the book and I based the thesis of the book not on something I cooked up myself, but a body of research coming from top level economists in Washington and at prestigious universities like the University of Chicago or Harvard talking about the need for crisis to push through these policies.

I start the book with a quote from Milton Freedman, the guru of the free-market revolution, who says, "Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change and, when that crisis occurs, the change depends on the ideas that are lying around," which is really a mission statement for the think tanks. You know, keep the ideas ready so that The Heritage Foundation is ready to go.

We're seeing it right now with the oil shock, with the oil crisis. Once again, the same ideas being dusted off. Offshore drilling, drilling in Anwar. We see how the food crisis is being used by the agribusiness companies to push for controversial policies that they can't get through during normal circumstances.

But, you know, I think that these crises are opportunities and, more than that, in many cases, they're messages. They're telling us something about a system that isn't working. You know, there are some cases where the disasters are just totally random, like the Asian tsunami. You know, that just happened. It's just one of those events.

But Katrina, that wasn't a natural disaster. That was a collision between heavy weather and weak, neglected infrastructure, and the heavy weather is connected to our use of fossil fuel. So these are disasters that are trying to tell us something and we should use those as opportunities, but we should use those as opportunities to build a real advantage for everyone in society, not just to push through more of the same.

Tavis: That's where I want to go now, which is to ask how it is - I don't mean to be naïve in the asking of this question - but how it is or is it in fact, put another way possibly, for us to use this same doctrine to advantage those who have not, the least among us, as opposed to the persons you've listed in this conversation?

Klein: Well, not only can we, but we have. If we think back to the Great Depression, to the ultimate market shock. We're dealing with a lot of smaller shocks right now, but the ultimate market shock of the Crash of 1929. That was responded to by progressives across this country and around the world to say, "Look, this system isn't working. We can't leave the market to regulate itself. We can't leave people to just fall through the cracks and be jumping out of windows and sleeping under bridges. We need another vision."

That was really the opposite of disaster capitalism because the disaster capitalists, I think what's wrong with their opportunism, is it's about taking advantage of people in the moment of crisis when they can't participate. In New Orleans, it's so dramatic, they weren't even there. They were scattered throughout the country.

What I'm talking about is, how do we use disasters to bring more people into the political process? Because actually people are capable and extremely motivated in moments of crisis to become more involved and build alternatives.

Tavis: How might something like that have happened after New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina?

Klein: Well, New Orleans should have had a green new deal that would have given jobs to the people who had lost everything and to build their city back in an ecologically sustainable way that addressed the core issues behind the crisis.

You know, the teachers of New Orleans should have been at the center of the rebuilding of their education system. I mean, their education system was a disaster before Katrina hit. No one wanted those schools rebuilt as they were before. But the tragedy of it is that these disasters actually unleash a huge amount of public funds, a huge amount of taxpayer money.

So after all of these years of New Orleans teachers and parents and students being told that their dreams are unaffordable, that they can't have anything better than what they already have, suddenly there's billions of public dollars and the possibility to dream, to imagine a better system. Instead of that, you have all these think tanks coming in and saying, "No, we're gonna do this for you."

Tavis: What's the abiding lesson in this for everyday people?

Klein: Well, you know, I wrote the book because this is a strategy, this idea of pouncing on that window of opportunity after a crisis. It's a strategy that is about our disorientation. It's about the fact that, you know, if we think about how we felt after September 11, we lost our narrative. We didn't know who or where we were, so we turned to people like Bush and Giuliani to guide us and we put unfortunate amounts of trust in people like Dick Cheney.

I think in retrospect there's a lot of regret about that and we're only now realizing how much was lost in terms of civil liberties and democratic capacity. So the lesson is, be ready and stay out of that state of shock. Anticipate these tactics and, in a crisis, that's the moment where you need to be most adult and most aware.

Tavis: I don't know how you put a price tag on disaster capitalism, but I know it'd be awfully high, perhaps too high to even compute. The new book by Naomi Klein is called "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" out next week in paperback. Naomi, nice to have you on the program.

Klein: Thank you so much.

Tavis: It's my pleasure.