Naomi Klein responds to recent attacks upon her work by the 'free market' think-tanks whose insidious subversion of democracy in the service of their corporate benefactors was lucidly exposed in her book The Shock Doctrine published one year ago.

Original article at www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/09/response-attacks.

See also: Online Opinion discussions in which The Shock Doctrine is discussed: NSW power without pride and Winning the war in Iraq.

Two of the articles to which Naomi Klein's article is in response to are The Klein Doctrine - The Rise of Disaster Polemics (663K PDF file here) published by The Cato Institute on 14 May and Dead Left by Jonathan Chait published in The New Republic of 30 July 08

The disempowerment of the modest middle classes and the poor in the industrialised world is, through mass immigration, extending the third world into the Richworld, and shoring up the exploiting classes and their corporate servants - the banks, property developers, international tourism, the military, the mass-media - the whole globalisation machine.

“I am angered with the liberal/left's collusion with the neo-liberal agenda of open immigration, of its misuse of the hackneyed phrase "solidarity" to justify support for importing cheap migrant labour to crush the living standards of local workers and despoil our national environment and multiply the ecological footprint of the migrants themselves. But I am also frustrated by the blindness of the red neck wing of the American anti immigration movement that takes no responsibility for the factors which PUSH migrants out of their third world countries.”

See also: Closing our borders can't mean turning our backs of 25 Oct 07

I hate to resort to clichés, but this is a ‘must read’ book – the kind that only gets published once in a hundred years.

The theory Klein develops is that the main reason for the rise of democracy and social-welfare with its old age pensions, public hospitals, public housing, and universal education after the Great Depression of the 1930s was that the beneficiaries of the robber-baron culture which had dominated until then were aware that if people were kept sufficiently miserable, they would turn to communism and socialism.

Reading of the desecration and live dismemberment of Iraq and seeing the name KPMG, I could not help but think of how our recent Premier, Steven Bracks, who was so fond of public-private partnerships, and whose government gave away 20 ha of public land in Royal Park to private 52% owned Singapore developer, Australand. In a move which even the departing Queensland Premier criticised, Bracks recently began to work for KPMG Peat Marwick, which, incidentally, is involved in reconstruction efforts in East Timor.

Also published on Web Diary.