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ECONOMIC SHOCK
From Screen Daily comes the news that Michael Winterbottom will work again with Mat Whitecross, his collaborator on The Road to Guantanamo, on a feature film adaptation of Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine. Winterbottom says he’s already begun filming, and Klein will narrate the film.
He should maybe take a breather while Klein appends a new chapter to her book. Her thesis — that late-stage capitalism is reliant on “shocks” that, by dizzying the populace, enable privatization and massive transference of public wealth into private hands by anti-democratic means — is astoundingly relevant to the Wall Street bail-out being proposed this week.
(For the record, I’m not someone who argues that the government should let Wall Street burn — the toxic potential of all this overleveraged bad debt has been plain to see for months if not years. I just agree with Paul Krugman and Robert Reich who think that the taxpayer should actually get something for its money — and that Section 8, which makes the Treasury Secretary a financial czar, is ridiculous.)
Klein wrote about this herself in The Guardian a few days ago, before the details of the bail-out were released. And she recently appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher to discuss her book’s relevance to the current situation. Below is the short film Alfonson Cuaron and Klein made about The Shock Doctrine and then her recent appearance on Bill Maher.
