Rent The Shock Doctrine

Synopsis

In BLANK IS BEAUTIFUL, Klein explores the deeply-rooted impulse to erase what is inconvenient and start over from scratch. This journey takes her back to two formative experiments in the 1950s, both funded by the U.S. government. One was a covert university research project in Montreal that blanked the minds of psychiatric patients through sensory deprivation and electroshockand became the foundation of torture techniques from Pinochets Chile to Guantnamo Bay.The other was a program at the University of Chicago that turned its economics department into a factory for developing world politicians. Under the tutelage of Milton Friedman, students learned that their countries could be remade as laissez-faire utopiasbut first what was there needed to be wiped clean. Tracing the imposition of these ideas in the decades since, Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed peacefully and democratically. Instead, she argues, it has consistently relied on violence and shock, resulting in the rise of disaster capitalism.

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