Summer of the Shock

Naomi Klein does a nice job of defending The Shock Doctrine in the A.V. Club. She seems to be backing off from the idea that there is an evil THEY in control of everything, and works much harder to emphasize that powerful people are much more opportunistic in their exploitation of the little people, and that it is a sales pitch rather than a totalitarian power grab. There's no grand conspiracy just death by a thousand manipulations. Moreover, she acknowledges that sometimes it works and sometimes the people fight back.

Here's a good example:

AVC:
Arguably, we're currently experiencing a few crises—a housing crisis, an
energy crisis, a climate crisis. Are any of these being exploited in a way that fits your model?

NK: Yeah, I think with offshore oil drilling and opening up ANWAR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge], it's a pretty classic example of this deliberate strategy. It's almost like McCain has a moral responsibility now to sell these policies that would be unsellable with oil at 40 dollars a barrel, just because he can. The fact that opening up ANWAR or offshore oil drilling will have no impact on the price of oil is completely
beside the point. The point is you can sell it now and you couldn't sell it
then so you should sell it now.

The attempts by the oil companies (and the politicians that work for them) to exploit the oil crisis have been a pretty obvious political gambit. But, it still remains to be seen how far it will go because we've already seen the benefit of people driving less and switching to more fuel efficient vehicles. Conservation is working. Emphasis on new technologies is working. So we may be our own best defense against these scare tactics. She also rightly points out that if we do drill in ANWAR, there's nothing to stop the oil companies from selling the oil to whomever they like. There is no American oil:

On that Fox show, the thing that was driving me crazy was, at one point I said, "I'd like to ask you guys a question." And they were like, "And we have to go." But what I wanted to ask them was whether they're advocating nationalizing ExxonMobil, because this whole idea that we'll drill and then we'll get the oil is insane because we don't have a national oil company. Norway does, Mexico does, Brazil does, Saudi Arabia does, Iraq does! Most countries with significant oil reserves have an oil company. So if China does drill off the coast of Cuba—which they're not doing—but if they did, they could actually direct the oil back to the Chinese market because they have a national oil company. But the U.S. Government has no power over Exxon to force them to not sell the oil that they drill offshore to China. So the idea that somehow this is our oil is this weirdly nationalist concept that has absolutely nothing to do with the economic policies they so enthusiastically embrace.

Our dependence on the free market means there's no such thing as energy independence. It's just another bit of libertarian nonsense. Good stuff.