Marauding multinationals and their enablers in the U.S. government have a worthy adversary in Naomi Klein, a Canadian social critic whose books puncture the underlying assumptions that have made big business such a dominant, unchecked force in the economy and popular culture.  

Equal parts skilled journalist and clever polemicist—and an unabashed leftist liberal to boot—the 38-year-old Klein is providing an intellectual arsenal for those who would like to replace today's capitalist robber barons with something apparently more benign and people-friendly, and would celebrate what they see as the common good over the grubby business of making a profit.

Klein's latest bestseller The Shock Doctrine, has become a rallying cry for opponents of President Bush's economic and foreign policies, much as her 2000 book, No Logo (which harpooned the brand-worshiping corporate culture that allowed big business to exploit third-world workers) became a focus for the anti-globalization movement. The irony is not lost on Klein that she has become rich herself in the process. In the middle of a tour for the paperback edition of The Shock Doctrine last week, Klein gave an exclusive interview to Portfolio.com.

Lloyd Grove: The hardcover of The Shock Doctrine came out in September. So what has happened since then that sort of puts meat on the bones of your theories? For instance, oil was skyrocketing to $80 when the book was published. 

THE KLEIN DOCTRINE On Friedman’s Followers: ”A very difficult time [for them]...because of George Bush.” On Katrina: “The mainstream press was surprised that there were poor people in America.” As a Consumer: ”I lead a deeply unpure life, filled with contradictions.”

Naomi Klein: Right, and has continued to skyrocket. I definitely feel that the timing of the paperback in many ways has people seeing The Shock Doctrine in action more vividly, and the best example is the way in which the oil shock is being so cynically exploited by the Bush administration, and a lot of people in the media who are reporting the talking points of the oil and gas industry, to use people's desperation essentially to push for these policies that were already on the books, but that were politically impossible when oil was even at $80. And that's off-shore drilling, and drilling in [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge], so what we're hearing, I get a ton of emails from readers saying, "look, they're doing it again." But we started a website when the book came out,  and the idea for the website was for it to be a companion to the book and just put a lot of the resources online. But it ended up being this great way for me to follow the evolution of this thesis, because readers were sending e-mails all the time saying, "look, they're using this food crisis to push genetically modified foods," and "they're using the subprime mortgage crisis to go after the remaining rent control apartments in New York." So almost all of the news articles that we post on the website come from readers actually.

L.G.: Why don't you just quickly and concisely as possible explain The Shock Doctrine?

N.K.: Well, The Shock Doctrine is the phrase I use to describe the political strategy of deliberately using a crisis—not deliberately creating a crisis, but deliberately using the fear, panic, and desperation that is induced by a cataclysmic event, whether it's a natural disaster or war or terrorist attack or an economic crisis, to very rapidly push through economic shock therapy. And so that's what The Shock Doctrine is—using one shock to push through an economic shock.

L.G.: And this is what you refer to as "disaster capitalism."
 
N.K.: Yes, which is the way in which The Shock Doctrine plays out on the ground. It's the harnessing of disasters to push through extreme, unregulated forms of capitalism like we saw in Iraq immediately after the invasion. Paul Bremer coming in and rewriting the country's entire economic architecture, for instance. I look at how the tsunami in Asia was used to push through a range of privatization laws to relocate the small-fishing people from the desirable coastal land and hand it over to resort developers. But I'm also looking at the fact that the final frontier for privatization are those basic state functions, those core state functions, that actually are there to respond to disasters. So it's also the creation of the disaster industry, and that's everything from private security to corporate fire fighters, which is another thing that we're hearing a lot about from readers, the explosion of the private fire-fighting industry.

L.G.: Let me ask you a cheap question. Your book in hardcover has sold more than a million copies by now, hasn't it?
 
N.K.: I don't actually know the numbers. [Laughs]
 
L.G.:  The checks are coming in regular, or your agent will know the reason why. And I'm sure the paperback will do equally well. But if you're not a disaster capitalist yourself, to what extent are you the beneficiary of this phenomenon?

 
N.K.: I think I absolutely am—and in the same way that during the Bush years, all the alternative press has seen their subscriptions go up, and the blogs have done very well, because people are hungry for this analysis. And I think the book is succeeding because it's an antidote to disaster capitalism, because people feel that it makes them more resistant. But, you know, I came up against this when I wrote a book called No Logo as well.
 
L.G.: When you yourself were in danger of becoming a brand.

N.K.: Exactly, that was my first book, when I was a brand. And now I'm a disaster capitalist. I live with contradictions.

L.G.: Well, good. Is there any kind of response to disaster in the last half-century or so that you approve of? Government and corporate response that you've seen in history? Do you approve of the way F.D.R. responded to the Depression? I mean, of course he took some measures that were judged unconstitutional, and tried to pack the Supreme Court, then later put Japanese-Americans in internment camps, but is there anything that you can point to and say that this is the right way to respond?
 
N.K.: Well, I think there were a lot of things about the way F.D.R. responded that were right. I draw a distinction between disaster capitalism and disaster populism, but I don't think the left by any means is immune to cynically exploiting shocks and crises to push through undemocratic measures. To me, the core issue is democracy. It's whether there is support for the policies that are being pushed through in these moments of crisis. Because these crises are messages, they're telling us that something is wrong, so by definition they require decisive action and require change. I mean, there are some crises that are just fluke events, like the tsunami. But if we're talking about an economic meltdown, if we're talking about the market crash of 1929, if we're talking about the subprime-mortgage crisis today, we're talking about a system that is failing and is crying out for a solution. So my objection to what I'm calling disaster capitalism in The Shock Doctrine is precisely that it is a strategy. It is a democracy-avoidance strategy. I start the book quoting Milton Friedman talking about the opportunity to remake the New Orleans school system, when the parents and the teachers and the students were scattered throughout the country. And that to me is a highly antidemocratic impulse, because a huge amount of public funds, of taxpayer money, was released in the name of reconstruction. And what I've seen from spending a lot of time in disaster zones like Iraq, like Sri Lanka after the tsunami, New Orleans, Argentina after the economic meltdown, is that, actually, people are desperate to participate in the reconstruction process. And that's actually the best antidote to the shocks that they have just lived through.
 
L.G.: But you talk about the New Orleans school system, and the dismantling of public education in New Orleans, and you don't really give much shrift to the fact that they were perhaps the worst school system in the United States, and that the teacher's union, extremely powerful, was playing a role in sustaining that system. Isn't that also a factor in why the people who wanted to privatize the school system were able to do that?
 
N.K.: Well, I don't agree that I give it a short shift. I absolutely say that New Orleans schools were a disaster before the disaster hit, as was Charity Hospital, as were the public-housing projects. And these were victims of the ideology of dismantling the state in the same way. The fact that the levees gave way was part of the same failure to keep up the public infrastructure. What I object to is not the fact that charter schools emerged in New Orleans after the hurricane. It's that the teachers and the parents and the students weren't part of that process. And I think that is an affront to democracy and it's an affront to the people who were most victimized by this disaster, in whose name billions of dollars of public money was released—and it ended up going to these pet ideological projects.
 
L.G.: I guess the unsympathetic questioner might ask—and that's not me, I'm just putting a point across-why should lousy teachers and poor administrators participate in the reconstruction of a disaster they created?

N.K.: I think there's certainly an impulse to vilify teachers unions, and I realize that.
 
L.G.: Have you seen the headquarters of the National Education Association in Washington?
 
N.K.: Look, I don't have more faith in the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute. I generally believe that the people-

L.G.: I think the N.E.A. actually has a more luxurious building than the Heritage Foundation.
 
N.K.: The Heritage Foundation is pretty luxurious. I think that there is a principle here, and it's not about a competition between who has nicer headquarters. It's a competition of the right of the displaced people to be part of their own reconstruction, to have a say in how the money is spent, to get jobs in the reconstruction. And all of this was just swept away. And by the way, who's to say if there was a democratic process for the people of New Orleans to reimagine their public education system, that they wouldn't have questioned many things about the teachers' union, and seize that opportunity to have real change themselves? I'm suggesting a democratic process of reconstruction. I saw this same attitude when I was in Baghdad, after the invasion, where, under Paul Bremer, there was just the wholesale desire to dismiss any expertise, any knowledge, on the part of Iraqis. And, you know, the de-Baathification measure where the entire civil service was fired, or a great part of the civil service was fired in one fell swoop, was a huge part of what created the insurgency. But among regular people, there was such a profound offense at the very idea that a 24-year-old who had been an intern with Dick Cheney, who had never been to the Middle East before, would have greater knowledge and expertise about how to rebuild their country than the people who had built it in the first place.

L.G.: You hang a lot on Milton Friedman as the sort of creator and promulgator of this way of thinking and doing things—
 
N.K.: Well, I think Milton Friedman is incredibly important as a popularizer of the ideology, of this extreme version of capitalism.
 
L.G.: And he coined the "shock therapy" term, and he has advised nasty dictators in putting it into practice.
 
N.K.: But I think the major importance is his articulation of the post-New Deal extreme capitalism that has spread throughout the world—not in as pure a form as he would've liked, but he was the chief popularizer of that ideological campaign. And he also had some interesting tactics, including writing about the use of shock in crisis, but I think that's not his most important role. His most important role is as the popularizer of the ideology itself.

L.G.: Have you heard from his admirers and partisans about what you might be doing to his legacy, and are you perhaps afraid that the ghost of Milton Friedman will haunt you?
 
N.K.: Um, I have heard from some of them, I'm not-
 
L.G.: You don't believe in ghosts?
 
N.K.: When Friedman died [in November 2006 at age 94], the memorials, the stories that were told about his legacies, were so one-sided, so unbalanced. I would say 99 percent exclusively laudatory when we think about the mainstream U.S. press, which wasn't true in other parts of the world. There was a more critical examination of his role in the articles written in Latin America and Russia and so on. But in the United States, it was incredibly one-sided, and I think the book has been a corrective. And it was a corrective that was needed, which isn't to say that this is the only story, but given that the story that we had before was so incredibly one-sided, this is inserting some of the facts that have been missed from that official story. But Milton Friedman was personally very preoccupied with the question of legacy, and his followers and admirers know that. It's also a very difficult time for the true Milton Friedman fanatics, not because of my book, but because of George Bush. They have had this unfortunate problem of having had a president who hired straight out of the think tanks. The hallways of the American Enterprise Institute echoed; there was no one left after the Bush administration hired everyone.

L.G.: Would you say Bush is a 62-year-old intern in Dick Cheney's office?
 
N.K.: [Laughs] I like that. And he echoed the ideology, the spreading of free markets and free people throughout the world. They had Milton Friedman's birthday party on Capitol Hill when he turned 90, and so this administration, even though places like the Cato Institute are desperately trying to distance themselves from it now when they look at the disaster of the exploding budget and corporate welfare that this administration has come to stand for, now they need to distance themselves, but—
 
L.G.: Certainly Milton Friedman would be inveighing against that.
 
N.K.: Sure, but the problem is that this is the result of an administration that embraced wholeheartedly this ideology. The result is rampant corruption, corporate welfare, crony capitalism—it's really ugly to look at. So I think reality is really causing the crisis for the true Friedman fanatics. There's kind of a retreat going on into sacred text. They don't want to deal with reality because for a long time it was just about trying to get policymakers to accept their ideology. But now they had those policymakers and they've created such a disaster, and indicted the ideology with their legacy, now there's just a desire to go back to the sacred text and say that everything was a distortion. And what I see is a really striking similarity that I've seen on the left, on the far left, where you've had these kind of Trotskyite people who sell newspapers outside of my events, and they have no interest in looking at the reality of authoritarian communism in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, anywhere. These are all distortions and what they want to do is, they just want to go back to the sacred texts, and say that we have nothing to learn from these lived experiments. The Cato Institute now, essentially, they are Friedmanite Trotskyites.

L.G.: My view, as a member of the news media, is anybody who's able to sell newspapers in this day and age, God bless them. But Barack Obama, you have recently called him "one of the Chicago boys."
 
N.K.: No, no—
 
L.G.: As far as I know, you've tried to make some sort of connection between the University of Chicago way of thinking and Obama. As far as I know, he taught a bit in the law school, but how was he infected by the Chicago way of doing things?
 
N.K.: Well, he was associated with the law school, taught part-time for a decade. It's not a casual connection. But I think the major connection is Austan Goolsbee, who's a University of Chicago economist, his chief adviser.
 

L.G.: The one who got himself into a spot of bother with the Canadians. [During the primary campaign, Goolsbee's private meeting with Canadian government officials caused a flap when reports surfaced that he told them not to take seriously Obama's criticisms of the North American Free Trade Agreement.]
 
N.K.: Yes. Austan Goolsbee, as I said in a recent column, is certainly to the left of the very narrow spectrum at the University of Chicago—he's by no means a Friedmanite. It's a very conservative place, and the range of debate at the business school, in the economics department, and even in the law school, is notably narrow. And, there's a way in which the fundamentals of the Chicago school are shared by everyone. And I think we saw a little of this from Obama himself, with his first reaction to whether or not the government should be involved in keeping people from being evicted from their homes in the subprime mortgage crisis. He said he was worried about moral hazard. He wasn't talking about the lenders, he was talking about low-income people and the moral hazard of them not dealing with the eviction from having accepted these mortgages—which is a pretty "University of Chicago" reaction.

L.G.: And what's your critique from what we know of his economic ideas? What is your critique of Obama today, and how do you compare him with McCain? Is he too much of a free trader?
 
N.K.: Well I think the biggest problem we have is that we just don't know enough, and there's far too much ambiguity.
 
L.G.: Isn't ambiguity the way people win the presidency?
 
N.K.: [Laughs] It would seem, it would seem, but it makes it difficult to offer a cogent critique.
 
L.G.: But you have a critique of McCain. That's less ambiguous to you?
 
N.K.: Well, I do think that with McCain, there's not going to be a major departure from what we have now with Bush, and I think what we have now is a disaster.
 
L.G.: And you've expressed concern about Obama's current economic adviser, Jason Furman, saying that he was a protégé of Bob Rubin.
 
N.K.: Look, the point is that I think this is a political moment where, precisely because of the multiple crises that we are facing, there is a real opportunity to question some of the fundamentals that have been in place since Reagan: about what the role of government should be, in terms of simply enabling economic growth at all, and equating any kind of economic growth with benefits for everyone. And this is essentially what is being questioned. It's what somebody like Jim Webb, and also John Edwards, managed to articulate so well—the fact that the problem is not that the economy wasn't growing, it's that there was a major crisis that trickle-down didn't solve. And you did end up with two countries, to the extent where when the levees broke in New Orleans, the mainstream press was surprised that there were poor people in America. They were going, "Who are these people?" And suddenly there was a discussion for a few days about class. But the very fact that there can be that disconnect, this is what inequality means. It means that it is possible to feel and be absolutely convinced that everything is going fine, and that anybody who doesn't see this is a bunch of whiners, to quote one of McCain's advisers.

L.G.: "A nation of whiners," Phil Gramm said.
 
N.K.: I'm sure it seems that way. I think the disappointment with Obama is less than the specifics of Goolsbee and Furman. It is that this is a moment where there could be a real boldness in economic policy and environmental policy, and I actually think it's bad political strategy to triangulate, to move to the center. I think that the energy of the Obama campaign had to do with the fact that people were able to project this idea of real change onto him. He's an incredibly skilled politician, and was able to be vague enough about what that change was.
 
L.G.: He just announced that he raised $52 million dollars in June, average contribution $68, so apparently it's working.
 
N.K.: We'll see. I hope so.
 
L.G.: So you can't vote but you're supportive of Obama anyway?
 
N.K.: I support Obama over McCain, yeah. But I think we've seen this strategy with the Democrats fail time and time again, and I really hope they're not making the same mistakes.
 
L.G.: Okay, are there any big corporations that you think are doing things the right way? Or are they just inherently evil by definition?

 
N.K.: I don't think corporations are inherently evil. I think that they need to be regulated, and I think that there are some areas that are too important for the profit motive to be the governing force. And when the profit motive becomes the governing force, the effects are deeply corrosive. So I don't think that corporations are evil. It's just that I think that spaces that are not controlled by corporations are also important, and this possibly comes from being a Canadian and the fact that we do have a national health-care system, and have a functioning public education system, and that this is true for many, many countries, where we've just made a collective decision where we don't want the profit motive to apply. So, you know, I have always seen my work, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, as being about defending the idea of the common, the idea of the public. Not saying that corporations are evil, but saying that maybe they shouldn't be running the school system, maybe they shouldn't be running the health-care system. There are some spaces where it isn't just about buying and selling. Other values should govern.
 
L.G.: Are there any corporations that you admire?
 
N.K.: Are there any corporations that I admire? I mean there's no corporation that I feel like doing an ad for right now—
 
L.G.: [Laughs] I just want you to point me to the model of the way things should be done!

N.K.: There are certainly corporations that I buy things from and whose products I like. I'm not in the corporate-endorsement business.
 
L.G.: Do you invest in the stock market?
 
N.K.: No.

L.G.: You do not? Where do you put your money? Under your mattress?
 
N.K.: I don't invest in the stock market.
 
L.G.: Is that because of reasons of your beliefs about the markets and corporations, or just for other reasons?
 
N.K.: I just made the decision before I published No Logo. I've stayed with it.
 
L.G.: I see. So in other words, as kind of a moral statement?
 
N.K.: Um...you know, I don't hold myself up as anything, that you know, I think real estate is immoral. I don't. You asked me a question and I answered it. I don't believe that this is a model for other people to follow, or that this makes me a particularly good or interesting person.

L.G.: No, no, I'm just curious. It's interesting to see that you put your money where your mouth is, or where your pen is!
 
N.K.: I don't think I do. I mean, unless you go grow your own vegetables, you know, and live in the gulf islands of British Columbia, you are not putting your money where your mouth is. I lead a deeply unpure life, filled with contradictions.
 
L.G.: You're a loyal consumer. You buy brands like everyone else.
 
N.K.: It's happened.
 
L.G.: It's happened. What do you suggest people in the United States do to respond to the threat of Canadian cultural imperialism?
 
N.K.: [Laughs]
 
L.G.: People like you, the "axis of evil" guy, [former Bush speechwriter] David Frum, Lorne Michaels, Mike Myers-
 
N.K.: You need to be very careful about Canadian right-wingers.
 
L.G.: But just the whole thing. I mean, when Peter Jennings was alive and doing his broadcast, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, it's all over the place. It's really freaking me out, man.
 
N.K.: Yeah, well, there's a lot of us who you don't even know. By the way, I have dual citizenship.
 
L.G.: So you can vote?
 
N.K.: I can vote.
 
L.G.: Will you?
 
N.K.: I haven't decided yet.
 
L.G.: Okay. I bet you she more often gets confused with you than the other way around, but is there ever any confusion between you and Naomi Wolf?
 
N.K.: I'm not confused. Are you confused?
 
L.G.: Not at all. Not in the least.
 
N.K.: Much better hair than me.