Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein trav els 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 or ganized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining.

What emerges through Loewenstein’s re porting is a dark history of multinational corpo rations 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 valu able commodity.