Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Naomi Klein and her clarity of vision




In the following article Naomi Klein documents how the the disastrous hurricane and ensuing floods in New Orleans were used to close down public housing and shut down many of the schools.  Readers might wonder why I posted this 4 yr old article today. I posted it today because it is blueprint for events today. While conservatives used a flooded city to take over and deconstruct a city's environment (in the case of New Orleans) in many of America's city's (and states) currently, you will see the same plan in action. The plan is to create a crisis. In this case a financial crisis. First a state or city government may spend a city into crisis or a projected crisis (easily done with tax breaks, right?). Then the crisis must be addressed which is easily handled with tightening the belt: fiscal austerity. In Colorado both the city and state are required to balance the budget which may seem like a fiscally sound way to run a state but when the mayor and the governor refuse year after year to address the need to raise taxes or to do away with tax shelters (as is the case this year when the state republicans gave corporations even more tax shelters which meant the budget would run in deeper deficits) it becomes almost ludicrous to believe the budget can be met. So here we are, naturally we have our fiscal crisis, and it's time to cut the budget. Next we get to breaks unions and slash at worker pensions, their benefits and rights to negotiate. The other great things we get to do it privatize the schools (at least some of them!) Slashing at city, state and federal worker's rights. And the best thing is? Slashing public workers wages makes it even less likely that private sector will get benefits or higher wages because the stats have shown that as the unions and public sector goes so goes the private sector...

 Well, read on if you want to know how it worked in New Orleans...  

 

The Shock Doctrine in Action in New Orleans

Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city's public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.

The final showdown over New Orleans public housing is playing out in dramatic fashion right now. The conflict is a classic example of the "triple shock" formula at the core of the doctrine.

- First came the shock of the original disaster: the flood and the traumatic evacuation.

- Next came the "economic shock therapy": using the window of opportunity opened up by the first shock to push through a rapid-fire attack on the city's public services and spaces, most notably it's homes, schools and hospitals.

-Now we see that as residents of New Orleans try to resist these attacks, they are being met with a third shock: the shock of the police baton and the Taser gun, used on the bodies of protestors outside New Orleans City Hall yesterday.

Democracy Now! has been covering this fight all week, with amazing reports from filmmakers Jacquie Soohen and Rick Rowley (Rick was arrested in the crackdown). Watch residents react to the bulldozing of their homes here.

And footage from yesterday's police crackdown and Tasering of protestors inside and outside city hall here.

That last segment contains a terrific interview with Kali Akuno, executive director of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund. Akuno puts the demolitions in the big picture, telling Amy Goodman: 

"This is just one particular piece of this whole program. Public hospitals are also being shut down and set to be demolished and destroyed in New Orleans. And they've systematically dismantled the public education system and beginning demolition on many of the schools in New Orleans--that's on the agenda right now--and trying to totally turn that system over to a charter and a voucher system, to privatize and just really go forward with a major experiment, which was initially laid out by the Heritage Foundation and other neoconservative think tanks shortly after the storm. So this is just really the fulfillment of this program."

Akuno is referring to the Heritage Foundation's infamous post-Katrina meeting with the Republican Study Group in which participants laid out their plans to turn New Orleans into a Petri dish for every policy they can't ram through without a disaster. Read the minutes on my website:

For more context, here are couple of related excerpts from The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism:

The news racing around the shelter [in Baton Rouge] that day was that Richard Baker, a prominent Republican Congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans' wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities." All that week the Louisiana State Legislature in Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a "smaller, safer city"--which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects and replace them with condos. Hearing all the talk of "fresh starts" and "clean sheets," you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway. 

Over at the shelter, Jamar Perry, a young resident of New Orleans, could think of nothing else. "I really don't see it as cleaning up the city. What I see is that a lot of people got killed uptown. People who shouldn't have died."

He was speaking quietly, but an older man in line in front of us in the food line overheard and whipped around. "What is wrong with these people in Baton Rouge? This isn't an opportunity. It's a goddamned tragedy. Are they blind?"

A mother with two kids chimed in. "No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine."

...

At first I thought the Green Zone phenomenon was unique to the war in Iraq. Now, after years spent in other disaster zones, I realize that the Green Zone emerges everywhere that the disaster capitalism complex descends, with the same stark partitions between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned.

It happened in New Orleans. After the flood, an already divided city turned into a battleground between gated green zones and raging red zones--the result not of water damage but of the "free-market solutions" embraced by the president. The Bush administration refused to allow emergency funds to pay public sector salaries, and the City of New Orleans, which lost its tax base, had to fire three thousand workers in the months after Katrina. Among them were sixteen of the city's planning staff--with shades of "de Baathification," laid off at the precise moment when New Orleans was in desperate need of planners. Instead, millions of public dollars went to outside consultants, many of whom were powerful real estate developers. And of course thousands of teachers were also fired, paving the way for the conversion of dozens of public schools into charter schools, just as Friedman had called for.

Almost two years after the storm, Charity Hospital was still closed. The court system was barely functioning, and the privatized electricity company, Entergy, had failed to get the whole city back online. After threatening to raise rates dramatically, the company managed to extract a controversial $200 million bailout from the federal government. The public transit system was gutted and lost almost half its workers. The vast majority of publicly owned housing projects stood boarded up and empty, with five thousand units slotted for demolition by the federal housing authority. Much as the tourism lobby in Asia had longed to be rid of the beachfront fishing villages, New Orleans' powerful tourism lobby had been eyeing the housing projects, several of them on prime land close to the French Quarter, the city's tourism magnet.

Endesha Juakali helped set up a protest camp outside one of the boarded-up projects, St. Bernard Public Housing, explaining that "they've had an agenda for St. Bernard a long time, but as long as people lived here, they couldn't do it. So they used the disaster as a way of cleansing the neighbourhood when the neighbourhood is weakest. ... This is a great location for bigger houses and condos. The only problem is you got all these poor black people sitting on it!"

Amid the schools, the homes, the hospitals, the transit system and the lack of clean water in many parts of town, New Orleans' public sphere was not being rebuilt, it was being erased, with the storm used as the excuse. At an earlier stage of capitalist "creative destruction," large swaths of the United States lost their manufacturing bases and degenerated into rust belts of shuttered factories and neglected neighbourhoods. Post-Katrina New Orleans may be providing the first Western-world image of a new kind of wasted urban landscape: the mould belt, destroyed by the deadly combination of weathered public infrastructure and extreme weather.


Since the publication of The Shock Doctrine, my research team has been putting dozens of original source documents online for readers to explore subjects in greater depth. The resource page on New Orleans has some real gems.

This story was first posted on The Huffington Post.

2 comments:

Conchscooter said...

That's how it goes. I've heard people in Key west say, during the boom years, that a strong hurricane would blow away enough people to allow poor people a chance to buy homes. I always said rich people don't see disasters as the rest of us do, to them they are an opportunity. Here's more evidence.

Danette said...

Yes, but you see where we're going now too, yes? With the politicians claiming we have financial crisis but not really doing anything real to cut the budget. They never cut the budget in a real way, they just this as an excuse to slash as social spending which is what they have longed to do for decades! And they have wanted to get rid of the unions for longer than that! So two birds with one stone! Thanks for the comment! Cheers!