An Interview With Naomi Klein

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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.

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