Disaster Capitalism

Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe

Paperback, 384 pages

Published Jan. 5, 2015 by Verso, imusti.

ISBN:
978-1-78478-118-7
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2 stars (1 review)

How Capitalism makes a fortune from disaster, poverty and catastrophe

Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein trav­els across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on or­ganized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining.

What emerges through Loewenstein's re­porting is a dark history of multinational corpo­rations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world's most valu­able commodity.

2 editions

Mediocre presentation of an important subject

2 stars

This is a good book that could have been shorter. While useful to expose the closer relationship between governments and private companies, the stories often felt repetitive and the chapters lacked a clear flow. The point was made, and made again, and made again, but the successive iterations didn't really develop a deeper analysis or enhance understanding. Overall, while an interesting read, I found it to be underwhelming.