Early in her seminal book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein quotes influential right-wing economist Milton Friedman as saying, “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. . . .  The politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Friedman’s quote helps to explain the success of what Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” which she defines as “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities.”

Most of the examples of disaster capitalism in The Shock Doctrine, first published in 2007, focus on crises in poorer countries, often violently manufactured by the US government or American corporations. Klein also examines in great detail how the Bush administration used the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to privatize core functions of government and, more or less, create a new and lucrative “national security industry.”