Naomi Klein at Firedoglake

by Ben Greenberg

The discussion appears to be over, but earlier today Naomi Klein was fielding questions about her new book at the weekly Firedoglake book salon.

What is the shock doctrine? Klein explains:

I started researching the free market's dependence on the power of shock four years ago, during the early days of the occupation of Iraq. I reported from Baghdad on Washington's failed attempts to follow "shock and awe" with shock therapy - mass privatisation, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government. Afterwards I travelled to Sri Lanka, several months after the devastating 2004 tsunami, and witnessed another version of the same manoeuvre: foreign investors and international lenders had teamed up to use the atmosphere of panic to hand the entire beautiful coastline over to entrepreneurs who quickly built large resorts, blocking hundreds of thousands of fishing people from rebuilding their villages. By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it was clear that this was now the preferred method of advancing corporate goals: using moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.

Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. "When I rebuild the city I feel like I'm rebuilding myself," said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans' heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called "reconstruction" began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.

We haven't been using Klein's terminology, but disaster capitalism should be a familiar concept to readers of Dollars & Sense. In "Fisherfolk Out, Tourists In" (July/August 2005), for example, Vasuki Nesiah wrote:

From Thailand to Sri Lanka, the tourist industry saw the tsunami through dollar signs. The governments concerned were on board from the outset, quickly planning massive subsidies for the tourism industry in ways that suggest the most adverse distributive impact. Infrastructure development will be even further skewed to cater to the industry rather than to the needs of local communities. Within weeks of the tsunami, the Alliance for the Protection of National Resources and Human Rights, a Sri Lankan advocacy group, expressed concern that "the developing situation is disastrous, more disastrous than the tsunami itself, if it is possible for anything to be worse than that." ...

Proposals announced by TAFREN [Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation] and by various government officials call for the building of multi-lane highways and the wholesale displacement of entire villages from the coast. Coastal lands are to be sliced up into designated buffer zones and tourism zones. The government is preventing those fishing families who wish to do so from rebuilding their homes on the coast, ostensibly because of the risk of future natural disasters; at the same time, it's encouraging the opening of both new and rebuilt beachfront tourist hotels.

The plans are essentially roadmaps for multinational hotel chains, telecom companies, and the like to cater to the tourism industry. Small-scale fishing operations by individual proprietors will become more difficult to sustain as access to the beach becomes increasingly privatized and fishing conglomerates move in. The environmental deregulation proposed in the PRSP will open the door to even more untrammeled exploitation of natural resources. None of the reconstruction planning is being channeled through decision-making processes that are accountable or participatory. Ultimately, it looks like reconstruction will be determined by the deadly combination of a rapacious private sector and government graft: human tragedy becomes a commercial opportunity, tsunami aid a business venture.

Not unpredictably, even the subsidies planned for the tourism industry in the wake of the tsunami are going to the hotel owners and big tour operators, not to the porters and cleaning women who were casual employees in hotels. Many of the local residents who were proprietors or workers in smaller tourism-related businesses, now unemployed, are not classified as tsunami-affected, so they are denied even the meager compensation they should be entitled to. The situation is much worse for the vast informal sector of sex workers, souvenir sellers, and others whose livelihood depended on the tourism industry. If the tsunami highlighted the acute vulnerability that accompanies financial dependence on the industry, the tsunami reconstruction plans look set to exacerbate this vulnerability even further.

And I heard similar analysis from local African American activists along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, following Hurricane Katrina. When I interviewed Derrick Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives (March/April 2006), he said:

[W]hat you'll find is that the unresolved problems pertaining to any one of those issues can be overlain on a map: that the lowest-lying land is typically where black folks, generations ago, would have acquired their land; where they would have settled and developed their communities, which would have been the least disturbed by 20th-century infrastructure; and that now, in the wake of a "Mississippi miracle"--the economic revitalization of the coast, for example, the advent of dockside casinos--would be the most ripe or prime for redevelopment.

Today, you've got casino- and tourism-driven feudalism, coupled with militarism, constituting much of the local economy. Katrina has probably raised the cachet of the casinos and the military bases even more as the two main mules that are gonna pull us out of this mud. Government contracts for shipbuilding; bigger, wider roads and highways for trucking. Deeper, wider, dredged out shipping lanes for shipping; free trade agreements. Bigger and better casinos with more bells and whistles. More of the same is the economic forecast, because they can't imagine anything else.

David Bacon, writing in this year's Annual Labor Issue, sees similar forces at play in Iraq.

President Bush says he wants democracy, yet he will not accept the one political demand that unites Iraqis above all others. They want the country's oil (and its electrical power stations, ports, and other key facilities) to remain in public hands.

The fact that Iraqi unions are the strongest voice demanding this makes them anathema. Selling the oil off to large corporations is far more important to the Bush administration than a paper commitment to the democratic process....

The occupation has always had an economic agenda. In 2003 and 2004 occupation czar Paul Bremer published lists in Baghdad newspapers of the public enterprises he intended to auction off. Arab labor leader Hacene Djemam bitterly observed, "War makes privatization easy: first you destroy society; then you let the corporations rebuild it."

The Bush administration won't leave Iraq in part because the economic agenda is still insecure.

Perhaps the quickest way to understand how shock plays into all of this is to watch the short film based on Klein's book.



One Firedoglake commenter asked Klein,

Isn’t shock a funciton of any visionary change, regardless of whether it is left or right? Mao & Pol Pot come to mind. Why, then, is it disaster capitalism rather than disaster transformationalism?

Klein replied:

I wrote this book because the far left has been held accountable for the crimes and abuses required to impose its utopian, year-zero fantasies. The far right has not. And when criminals are not held accountable for their crimes, they re-offend. It’s worth remembering that Paul Bremer was Kissinger’s right hand man during the coup in Chile in 1973.

In today's discussion, Klein emphasized nonetheless that market forces are not all powerful and that, in fact, we are at an important turning point.

The so-called “free market” is in crisis today - we see it with sub-prime, a s well as with the massive disillusionment with the Bush Administration. Even Greenspan warns in his book that people are losing faith in market fundamentalism.

This is a moment for the left/progressives to propose our vision with real confidence and without apologies. We shouldn’t be afraid to be angry at grotesque injustice, and we need to stop being apologetic about believing in universal human rights and universal health care.

Labels: Books, Disaster Capitalism, firedoglake, Gulf Coast, Iraq, katrina, mississippi, Naomi Klein, oil, sri lanka, tsunami, unions

 

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11/18/2007 08:10:00 PM