NAOMI KLEIN

Naomi Klein, she was born on May 8, 1970, Montreal, Quebec, Canada). She is a Canadian
author and activist.
Klein was born in a politically active family. Her grandfather, was an animator for Disney,
he was fired and blacklisted for attempting to organize a labour union. Her parents moved
to Canada from the United States to protest the Vietnam War, and her mother, Bonnie,
directed the feminist antipornography documentary Not a Love Story which was
published (1981). Klein studied philosophy and literature at the University of Toronto but
she left before completing her degree and took a job at the Toronto newspaper The Globe
and Mail.
In 2000 Klein published No Logo, an analysis of the marketing and branding practices of
global corporations. In this work she examined the ways in which contemporary capitalism
sought to reframe individuals’ consciousnesses along branded lines. No Logo was
translated into dozens of languages, and it made Klein into an international media star.
She followed with Fences and Windows (2002), a volume of essays on antiglobalization
topics that ranged from World Trade Organization protests to a study of the Zapatista
uprising in Chiapas, Mexico

With her husband, director Avi Lewis, Klein wrote and coproduced The Take (2004), a
documentary about the occupation of a closed auto-parts plant by Argentine workers.
Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007) was a scathing critique of neoliberalism—particularly of
Milton Friedman’s “Chicago school” of economics. The book examined what Klein termed
“disaster capitalism,” a form of extreme capitalism that advocated privatization and
deregulation in the wake of war or natural catastrophe. The Shock Doctrine was adapted
as a feature-length documentary film by director Michael Winterbottom in 2009.
 Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman is the twentieth century's most prominent economist advocate of free
markets. He was born in 1912 to Jewish immigrants in New York City. He studied at
Rutgers University, where he received his Bachelor’s Degree. at the age of twenty, then
he went on to earn his Master of Arts from the University of Chicago in 1933 and his
Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1946. In 1951 Friedman won the John Bates Clark
Medal honoring economists under age forty for outstanding achievement. In 1976 he
won the Nobel Prize in economics for "his achievements in the field of consumption
analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of
stabilization policy.
Before that time, he had served as an adviser to President Nixon and was president of the
American Economic Association in 1967. Since retiring from the University of Chicago in
1977, Friedman has been a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University.
Imagine a fantastic film in which the main character is the Nobel Prize winner Milton
Friedman and who in the end appears as a mad doctor who manipulated countries in
trouble as laboratories for their 'radical' ideas. Well, this is the thesis that Naomi Klein
uses in her book The Shock Doctrine.

only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the
actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our
basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and
available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.