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

By Naomi Klein - December 21st, 2007

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.

School reform? yeah, right!

SUN MAR 20, 2011 AT 05:00 PM EDT

School 'reform': Educational salvation or burning the village in order to save it?

bySteve SingiserforDaily Kos

Last week, in the course of discussing the flurry of anti-teacher initiatives across the nation, I made the conscious decision to focus only on the apparent shift in political calculations that factored into the current mini-revolution.

What last week's piece did not address was the proposals themselves. That, as it turned out, is the topic of this week's essay.

Now, it would be tempting to dismiss all the pending legislation rolling through GOP-led legislatures on the simple procedural grounds that they are, in fact, emanating from Republican-led legislatures.

However, it is worth noting that any number of these initiatives have vocal backers on the Democratic side, up to and including folks who hang out in the White House. So dismissing them purely on partisan motive is probably not productive.

That said, those presuming that there will be criticism here of the "reform" measures currently making their way through the halls of state legislatures will feel vindication as they keep reading, no doubt.

As someone who has spent his entire adult life in education, I will concede that I have few qualms with the exploratory nature of reform. Even if things are going well (and I would submit that things are better than often mourned in the public conversation), there is nothing wrong with seeking to be better.

But that's not what is going on here. In addition to the existence of legitimate questions about the effectiveness of proposed reforms, the haste with which they are being orchestrated raises real questions about motive. Indeed, it is the "ready, fire, aim" nature of the current wave of legislation that I find the most dangerous aspect of this wave of educational "reform."

Case in point: when I wrote a critical analysis of value-added teacher assessment this past June, I noted that one of the pioneering institutions in this arena (the University of Wisconsin's Value Added Research Center) had this to say about their craft:

Much basic research remains to be done to build high-quality value-added models and indicators that can legitimately support district and state accountability and high-stakes applications such as pay for performance.

One must conclude that they did all of this basic research in the past nine months. Because the notion of "value-added" teacher evaluation is a cornerstone of Florida's new "Merit Pay" proposal.

The reliance on testing is the most oft-cited criticism of the bulk of these educational "reform" measures. Not only is it found in the Florida proposal, but it is also part of the "seniority" reform being kicked around in Michael Bloomberg's New York schools.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the fact that many in the educational community have serious qualms about using high-stakes testing to make so many of these critical decisions, there is an additional concern that too many in the "reform" community seem eager to ignore.

Basing teacher retention decisions on test scores is a policy that is tailor-made for the worst kinds of exploitation by school districts being forced to try to do more with less.

Those advocating the end of seniority-based retention practices in favor of "performance" based on student test scores have to concede that districts, which must stretch dollars these days like never before, will be tempted to staff their classes in such a way to protect their younger (and, it must be noted, markedly cheaper) staff members.

I will never forget in my third year on the job drawing a Freshman Geography class that felt, on bad days, like a training session for America's Most Wanted. When I half-jokingly teased a counselor about how I managed to draw every wild-eyed boy in the freshman class, she smiled and told me, "But, Steve, we all know how good you are with difficult students."

At the time, I took it for the backhanded compliment that it was. In this brave new world being promoted by the GOP (and an alarming number of Democrats), it would be my ticket to lower pay. Worse yet, it could be my ticket out of the profession.

Other reforms seem to be surging forward, despite conflicting evidence as to their effectiveness, as well. Efforts to increase class size are driven by dismissive claims that such increases "don't matter." Yet there is at least one study that says there is a legitimate return on investment for reduced class sizes, one that is substantially higher in urban schools.

Merit pay proposals have been kicked around for years, and they are currently moving their way through multiple state legislatures. Aside from a bit of intellectual disconnect (if teachers were solely motivated by the cash, wouldn't they be doing something a bit more lucrative?), there is question as to how effective they have been in the places where they have been piloted.

Of course, the "reform" at the top of the agenda for these GOP-fueled state efforts is dramatic restructuring of the rights and powers of labor unions representing teachers. Most dramatically displayed in Wisconsin, it is also at the core of legislative efforts in states like Idaho and Indiana, as well. Will this save our schools? Given that the performance of those states hostile to teachers unions has hardly impressed, one would think not. Especially on the heels of a new international study which shows that...wait for it..."in many cases, countries with the highest student performance also had strong teacher unions."

And it is on this final point that the intentions of the "reformers" become a lot more naked. For Republicans at the state level, teachers unions have proven to be their most dogged and effective nemesis for years. The strategy for the GOP here is cynical, but possibly effective: 

Step #1: Decry the current state of education, even raising it to crisis level. This makes sense--people are more willing to accept dramatic solutions, if they feel the crisis merits it. If you have to exaggerate, do it (consider the fact that Florida, site of the most aggressive reform, actually ranked 5th among the states in education, according to an Education Week survey.) 

Step #2: Offer a variety of solutions, and structure them in a way to guarantee howls from teachers in protest.

Step #3: When the protests inevitably come, lament that teachers are not interested in "fixing the problems" in education, and have become a barrier to progress. Then work on stripping them of the ability to negotiate matters of working conditions, curriculum, etc. 

Step #4: With your toughest opponent weakened and muffled, enjoy the budgetary savings that come with "belt tightening" in education. Those, of course, can pay for oodles and oodles of tax cuts!   

Whether this works politically remains to be seen. Whether this works to improve education for America's kids, however, seems to be a very suspect proposition.