Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : blank is beautiful : three decades of erasing and remaking the world -- The torture lab : Ewen Cameron, the CIA and the maniacal quest to erase and remake the human mind -- The other Doctor Shock : Milton Friedman and the search for a laissez-faire laboratory -- States of shock : the bloody birth of the counter-revolution -- Cleaning the slate : terror does its work -- "Entirely unrelated" : how an ideology was cleansed of its crimes -- Saved by a war : Thatcherism and its useful enemies -- The new Dr. Shock : economic warfare replaces dictatorship -- Crisis works : the packaging of shock therapy -- Slamming the door on history : a crisis in Poland, a massacre in China -- Democracy born in chains : South Africa's constricted freedom -- Bonfire of a young democracy : Russia chooses "the Pinochet option" -- The capitalist ID : Russia and the new era of the boor market -- Let it burn : the looting of Asia and "the fall of the second Berlin Wall" -- Shock therapy in the U.S.A. : the Homeland security bubble -- A corporatist state : removing the revolving door, putting in an archway -- Erasing Iraq : in search of a "model" for the Middle East -- Ideological blowback : a very capitalist disaster -- Full circle : from blank slate to scorched earth -- Blanking the beach : "the second tsunami" -- Disaster apartheid : a world of green zones and red zones -- Losing the peace incentive : Israel as warning -- Conclusion : shock wears off : the rise of people's reconstruction.

Journalist Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka after the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed remarkably similar events: people still reeling were hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to corporate makeovers. This book retells the story of Milton Friedman's free-market economic revolution. In contrast to the myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies. At its core is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.--From publisher description.