The long read
Naomi Klein: how power profits from
disaster
After a crisis, private contractors
move in and suck up funding for work done badly, if at all – then those
billions get cut from government budgets. Like Grenfell Tower, Hurricane
Katrina revealed a disdain for the poor. By Naomi Klein
Thursday 6 July 2017 06.00 BST
There have been times in my reporting from disaster zones
when I have had the unsettling feeling that I was seeing not just a crisis in
the here and now, but getting a glimpse of the future – a preview of where the
road we are all on is headed, unless we somehow grab the wheel and swerve. When
I listen to Donald Trump speak, with his obvious relish in creating an atmosphere
of chaos and destabilisation, I often think: I’ve seen this before, in those
strange moments when portals seemed to open up into our collective future.
One of those moments arrived in New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina, as I watched hordes of private military contractors descend on the
flooded city to find ways to profit from the disaster, even as thousands of the
city’s residents, abandoned by their government, were treated like dangerous
criminals just for trying to survive.
I started to notice the same tactics in disaster zones
around the world. I used the term “shock doctrine” to describe the brutal
tactic of using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock –
wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters – to push
through radical pro-corporate measures, often called “shock therapy”. Though
Trump breaks the mould in some ways, his shock tactics do follow a script, and
one that is familiar from other countries that have had rapid changes imposed
under the cover of crisis.
This strategy has been a silent partner to the imposition of
neoliberalism for more than 40 years. Shock tactics follow a clear pattern:
wait for a crisis (or even, in some instances, as in Chile or Russia, help
foment one), declare a moment of what is sometimes called “extraordinary
politics”, suspend some or all democratic norms – and then ram the corporate
wishlist through as quickly as possible. The research showed that virtually any
tumultuous situation, if framed with sufficient hysteria by political leaders,
could serve this softening-up function. It could be an event as radical as a
military coup, but the economic shock of a market or budget crisis would also
do the trick. Amid hyperinflation or a banking collapse, for instance, the
country’s governing elites were frequently able to sell a panicked population
on the necessity for attacks on social protections, or enormous bailouts to
prop up the financial private sector – because the alternative, they claimed,
was outright economic apocalypse.
The Republicans under Donald Trump are already seizing the
atmosphere of constant crisis that surrounds this presidency to push through as
many unpopular, pro-corporate policies. And we know they would move much
further and faster given an even bigger external shock. We know this because
senior members of Trump’s team have been at the heart of some of the most
egregious examples of the shock doctrine in recent memory.
Rex Tillerson, the US secretary of state, has built his
career in large part around taking advantage of the profitability of war and
instability. ExxonMobil profited more than any oil major from the increase in
the price of oil that was the result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It also
directly exploited the Iraq war to defy US state department advice and make an
exploration deal in Iraqi Kurdistan, a move that, because it sidelined Iraq’s
central government, could well have sparked a full-blown civil war, and certainly
did contribute to internal conflict.
As CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson profited from disaster in
other ways as well. As an executive at the fossil fuel giant, he spent his
career working for a company that, despite its own scientists’ research into
the reality of human-caused climate change, decided to fund and spread
misinformation and junk climate science. All the while, according to an LA
Times investigation, ExxonMobil (both before and after Exxon and Mobil merged)
worked diligently to figure out how to further profit from and protect itself
against the very crisis on which it was casting doubt. It did so by exploring
drilling in the Arctic (which was melting, thanks to climate change),
redesigning a natural gas pipeline in the North Sea to accommodate rising sea
levels and supercharged storms, and doing the same for a new rig off the coast
of Nova Scotia.
At a public event in 2012, Tillerson acknowledged that
climate change was happening – but what he said next was revealing: “as a
species”, humans have always adapted. “So we will adapt to this. Changes to
weather patterns that move crop production areas around – we’ll adapt to that.”
He’s quite right: humans do adapt when their land ceases to
produce food. The way humans adapt is by moving. They leave their homes and
look for places to live where they can feed themselves and their families. But,
as Tillerson well knows, we do not live at a time when countries gladly open
their borders to hungry and desperate people. In fact, he now works for a
president who has painted refugees from Syria – a country where drought was an
accelerant of the tensions that led to civil war – as Trojan horses for
terrorism. A president who introduced a travel ban that has gone a long way
towards barring Syrian migrants from entering the United States.
A president who has said about Syrian children seeking
asylum, “I can look in their faces and say: ‘You can’t come.’” A president who
has not budged from that position even after he ordered missile strikes on
Syria, supposedly moved by the horrifying impacts of a chemical weapon attack
on Syrian children and “beautiful babies”. (But not moved enough to welcome them
and their parents.) A president who has announced plans to turn the tracking,
surveillance, incarceration and deportation of immigrants into a defining
feature of his administration.
Waiting in the wings, biding their time, are plenty of other
members of the Trump team who have deep skills in profiting from all of that.
Between election day and the end of Trump’s first month in
office, the stocks of the two largest private prison companies in the US,
CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America) and the Geo Group,
doubled, soaring by 140% and 98%, respectively. And why not? Just as Exxon
learned to profit from climate change, these companies are part of the
sprawling industry of private prisons, private security and private
surveillance that sees wars and migration – both very often linked to climate
stresses – as exciting and expanding market opportunities. In the US, the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) incarcerates up to 34,000
immigrants thought to be in the country illegally on any given day, and 73% of
them are held in private prisons. Little wonder, then, that these companies’
stocks soared on Trump’s election. And soon they had even more reasons to
celebrate: one of the first things Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions,
did was rescind the Obama administration’s decision to move away from
for-profit jails for the general prison population.
Trump appointed as deputy defence secretary Patrick
Shanahan, a top executive at Boeing who, at one point, was responsible for
selling costly hardware to the US military, including Apache and Chinook
helicopters. He also oversaw Boeing’s ballistic missile defence programme – a
part of the operation that stands to profit enormously if international
tensions continue to escalate under Trump.
And this is part of a much larger trend. As Lee Fang
reported in the Intercept in March 2017, “President Donald Trump has weaponised
the revolving door by appointing defence contractors and lobbyists to key
government positions as he seeks to rapidly expand the military budget and
homeland security programmes … At least 15 officials with financial ties to
defence contractors have been either nominated or appointed so far.”
The revolving door is nothing new, of course. Retired
military brass reliably take up jobs and contracts with weapons companies.
What’s new is the number of generals with lucrative ties to military
contractors whom Trump has appointed to cabinet posts with the power to
allocate funds – including those stemming from his plan to increase spending on
the military, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security by more than
$80bn in just one year.
The other thing that has changed is the size of the Homeland
Security and surveillance industry. This sector grew exponentially after the
September 11 attacks, when the Bush administration announced it was embarking
on a never-ending “war on terror”, and that everything that could be outsourced
would be. New firms with tinted windows sprouted up like malevolent mushrooms
around suburban Virginia, outside Washington DC, and existing ones, such as
Booz Allen Hamilton, expanded into brand new territories. Writing in Slate in
2005, Daniel Gross captured the mood of what many called the security bubble:
“Homeland security may have just reached the stage that internet investing hit
in 1997. Back then, all you needed to do was put an ‘e’ in front of your
company name and your IPO would rocket. Now you can do the same with
‘fortress’.”
That means many of Trump’s appointees come from firms that
specialise in functions that, not so long ago, it would have been unthinkable
to outsource. His National Security Council chief of staff, for instance, is
retired Lt Gen Keith Kellogg. Among the many jobs Kellogg has had with security
contractors since going private was one with Cubic Defense.
According to the company, he led “our ground combat training
business and focus[ed] on expanding the company’s worldwide customer base”. If
you think “combat training” is something armies used to do all on their own,
you’d be right.
One noticeable thing about Trump’s contractor appointees is
how many of them come from firms that did not even exist before 9/11: L-1
Identity Solutions (specialising in biometrics), the Chertoff Group (founded by
George W Bush’s homeland security director Michael Chertoff), Palantir
Technologies (a surveillance/big data firm cofounded by PayPal billionaire and
Trump backer Peter Thiel), and many more. Security firms draw heavily on the
military and intelligence wings of government for their staffing.
Under Trump, lobbyists and staffers from these firms are now
migrating back to government, where they will very likely push for even more
opportunities to monetise the hunt for people Trump likes to call “bad
hombres”.
This creates a disastrous cocktail. Take a group of people
who directly profit from ongoing war and then put those same people at the
heart of government. Who’s going to make the case for peace? Indeed, the idea
that a war could ever definitively end seems a quaint relic of what during the
Bush years was dismissed as “pre–September 11 thinking”.
And then there’s vice-president Mike Pence, seen by many as
the grownup in Trump’s messy room. Yet it is Pence, the former governor of
Indiana, who actually has the most disturbing track record when it comes to
bloody-minded exploitation of human suffering.
When Mike Pence was announced as Donald Trump’s running
mate, I thought to myself: I know that name, I’ve seen it somewhere. And then I
remembered. He was at the heart of one of the most shocking stories I’ve ever
covered: the disaster capitalism free-for-all that followed Katrina and the
drowning of New Orleans. Mike Pence’s doings as a profiteer from human
suffering are so appalling that they are worth exploring in a little more
depth, since they tell us a great deal about what we can expect from this
administration during times of heightened crisis.
Before we delve into Pence’s role, what’s important to
remember about Hurricane Katrina is that, though it is usually described as a “natural
disaster”, there was nothing natural about the way it affected the city of New
Orleans. When Katrina hit the coast of Mississippi in August 2005, it had been
downgraded from a category 5 to a still-devastating category 3 hurricane. But
by the time it made its way to New Orleans, it had lost most of its strength
and been downgraded again, to a “tropical storm”.
That’s relevant, because a tropical storm should never have
broken through New Orleans’s flood defence. Katrina did break through, however,
because the levees that protect the city did not hold. Why? We now know that
despite repeated warnings about the risk, the army corps of engineers had
allowed the levees to fall into a state of disrepair. That failure was the
result of two main factors.
One was a specific disregard for the lives of poor black
people, whose homes in the Lower Ninth Ward were left most vulnerable by the
failure to fix the levees. This was part of a wider neglect of public
infrastructure, which is the direct result of decades of neoliberal policy.
Because when you systematically wage war on the very idea of the public sphere
and the public good, of course the publicly owned bones of society – roads,
bridges, levees, water systems – are going to slip into a state of such disrepair
that it takes little to push them beyond the breaking point. When you massively
cut taxes so that you don’t have money to spend on much of anything besides the
police and the military, this is what happens.
It wasn’t just the physical infrastructure that failed the
city, and particularly its poorest residents, who are, as in so many US cities,
overwhelmingly African American. The human systems of disaster response also
failed – the second great fracturing. The arm of the federal government that is
tasked with responding to moments of national crisis such as this is the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), with state and municipal
governments also playing key roles in evacuation planning and response. All
levels of government failed.
It took Fema five days to get water and food to people in
New Orleans who had sought emergency shelter in the Superdome. The most
harrowing images from that time were of people stranded on rooftops – of homes
and hospitals – holding up signs that said “HELP”, watching the helicopters
pass them by. People helped each other as best they could. They rescued each
other in canoes and rowboats. They fed each other. They displayed that
beautiful human capacity for solidarity that moments of crisis so often
intensify. But at the official level, it was the complete opposite. I’ll always
remember the words of Curtis Muhammad, a longtime New Orleans civil rights organiser,
who said this experience “convinced us that we had no caretakers”.
The way this abandonment played out was deeply unequal, and
the divisions cleaved along lines of race and class. Many people were able to
leave the city on their own – they got into their cars, drove to a dry hotel,
called their insurance brokers. Some people stayed because they believed the
storm defences would hold. But a great many others stayed because they had no
choice – they didn’t have a car, or were too infirm to drive, or simply didn’t
know what to do. Those are the people who needed a functioning system of
evacuation and relief – and they were out of luck.
Abandoned in the city without food or water, those in need
did what anyone would do in those circumstances: they took provisions from
local stores. Fox News and other media outlets seized on this to paint New
Orleans’s black residents as dangerous “looters” who would soon be coming to
invade the dry, white parts of the city and surrounding suburbs and towns.
Buildings were spray-painted with messages: “Looters will be shot.”
Checkpoints were set up to trap people in the flooded parts
of town. On Danziger Bridge, police officers shot black residents on sight
(five of the officers involved ultimately pleaded guilty, and the city came to
a $13.3m settlement with the families in that case and two other similar
post-Katrina cases). Meanwhile, gangs of armed white vigilantes prowled the
streets looking, as one resident later put it in an exposé by investigative
journalist AC Thompson, for “the opportunity to hunt black people”.
I was in New Orleans during the flooding and I saw for
myself how amped up the police and military were – not to mention private
security guards from companies such as Blackwater who were showing up fresh
from Iraq. It felt very much like a war zone, with poor and black people in the
crosshairs – people whose only crime was trying to survive. By the time the
National Guard arrived to organise a full evacuation of the city, it was done
with a level of aggression and ruthlessness that was hard to fathom. Soldiers
pointed machine guns at residents as they boarded buses, providing no
information about where they were being taken. Children were often separated
from their parents.
What I saw during the flooding shocked me. But what I saw in
the aftermath of Katrina shocked me even more. With the city reeling, and with
its residents dispersed across the country and unable to protect their own
interests, a plan emerged to ram through a pro-corporate wishlist with maximum
velocity. The famed free-market economist Milton Friedman, then 93 years old,
wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal stating, “Most New Orleans schools
are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The
children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also
an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”
In a similar vein, Richard Baker, at that time a Republican
congressman from Louisiana, declared, “We finally cleaned up public housing in
New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” I was in an evacuation shelter
near Baton Rouge when Baker made that statement. The people I spoke with were
just floored by it. Imagine being forced to leave your home, having to sleep in
a camping bed in some cavernous convention centre, and then finding out that
the people who are supposed to represent you are claiming this was some sort of
divine intervention – God apparently really likes condo developments.
Baker got his “cleanup” of public housing. In the months
after the storm, with New Orleans’s residents – and all their inconvenient
opinions, rich culture and deep attachments – out of the way, thousands of
public housing units, many of which had sustained minimal storm damage because
they were on high ground, were demolished. They were replaced with condos and
town houses priced far out of reach for most who had lived there.
And this is where Mike Pence enters the story. At the time
Katrina hit New Orleans, Pence was chairman of the powerful and highly
ideological Republican Study Committee (RSC), a caucus of conservative
lawmakers. On 13 September 2005 – just 15 days after the levees were breached,
and with parts of New Orleans still under water – the RSC convened a fateful
meeting at the offices of the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. Under
Pence’s leadership, the group came up with a list of “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for
Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices” – 32 pseudo-relief
policies in all, each one straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook.
What stands out is the commitment to wage all-out war on
labour standards and the public sphere – which is bitterly ironic, because the
failure of public infrastructure is what turned Katrina into a human
catastrophe in the first place. Also notable is the determination to use any
opportunity to strengthen the hand of the oil and gas industry. The list
includes recommendations to suspend the obligation for federal contractors to
pay a living wage; make the entire affected area a free-enterprise zone; and
“repeal or waive restrictive environmental regulations … that hamper
rebuilding”. In other words, a war on the kind of red tape designed to keep
communities safe from harm.
President Bush adopted many of the recommendations within
the week, although, under pressure, he was eventually forced to reinstate the
labour standards. Another recommendation called for giving parents vouchers to
use at private and charter schools (for-profit schools subsidised with tax
dollars), a move perfectly in line with the vision held by Trump’s pick for education
secretary, Betsy DeVos. Within the year, the New Orleans school system became
the most privatised in the US.
And there was more. Though climate scientists have directly
linked the increased intensity of hurricanes to warming ocean temperatures,
that didn’t stop Pence and his committee from calling on Congress to repeal
environmental regulations on the Gulf coast, give permission for new oil
refineries in the US, and green-light “drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge”.
It’s a kind of madness. After all, these very measures are a
surefire way to drive up greenhouse gas emissions, the major human contributor
to climate change, which leads to fiercer storms. Yet they were immediately
championed by Pence, and later adopted by Bush, under the guise of responding
to a devastating hurricane.
It’s worth pausing to tease out the implications of all of
this. Hurricane Katrina turned into a catastrophe in New Orleans because of a
combination of extremely heavy weather – possibly linked to climate change –
and weak and neglected public infrastructure. The so-called solutions proposed
by the group Pence headed at the time were the very things that would
inevitably exacerbate climate change and weaken public infrastructure even
further. He and his fellow “free-market” travellers were determined, it seems,
to do the very things that are guaranteed to lead to more Katrinas in the
future.
And now Mike Pence is in a position to bring this vision to
the entire United States.
The oil industry wasn’t the only one to profit from
Hurricane Katrina. Immediately after the storm, the whole gang of contractors
who had descended on Baghdad when war broke out – Bechtel, Fluor, Halliburton,
Blackwater, CH2M Hill and Parsons, infamous for its sloppy Iraq work – now
arrived in New Orleans. They had a singular vision: to prove that the kinds of
privatised services they had been providing in Iraq and Afghanistan also had an
ongoing domestic market – and to collect no-bid contracts totalling $3.4bn.
The controversies were legion. Relevant experience often
appeared to have nothing to do with how contracts were allocated. Take, for
example, the company that Fema paid $5.2m to perform the crucial role of
building a base camp for emergency workers in St Bernard Parish, a suburb of
New Orleans. The camp construction fell behind schedule and was never
completed. Under investigation, it emerged that the contractor, Lighthouse
Disaster Relief, was in fact a religious group. “About the closest thing I have
done to this is just organise a youth camp with my church,” confessed
Lighthouse’s director, Pastor Gary Heldreth.
After all the layers of subcontractors had taken their cut,
there was next to nothing left for the people doing the work. Author Mike Davis
tracked the way Fema paid Shaw $175 per sq ft to install blue tarps on damaged
roofs, even though the tarps themselves were provided by the government. Once
all the subcontractors took their share, the workers who actually hammered in the
tarps were paid as little as $2 per sq ft.
“Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words,
is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung,” Davis wrote, “where the actual
work is carried out.” These supposed “contractors” were really – like the Trump
Organization – hollow brands, sucking out profit and then slapping their name
on cheap or non-existent services.
In order to offset the tens of billions going to private
companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled
Congress announced that it needed to cut $40bn from the federal budget. Among
the programmes that were slashed: student loans, Medicaid and food stamps.
So, the poorest people in the US subsidised the contractor
bonanza twice: first, when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate
handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services; and
second, when the few programmes that assist the unemployed and working poor
nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills.
New Orleans is the disaster capitalism blueprint – designed
by the current vice-president and by the Heritage Foundation, the hard-right
think tank to which Trump has outsourced much of his administration’s
budgeting. Ultimately, the response to Katrina sparked an approval ratings
freefall for George W Bush, a plunge that eventually lost the Republicans the
presidency in 2008. Nine years later, with Republicans now in control of
Congress and the White House, it’s not hard to imagine this test case for
privatised disaster response being adopted on a national scale.
The presence of highly militarised police and armed private
soldiers in New Orleans came as a surprise to many. Since then, the phenomenon
has expanded exponentially, with local police forces across the country
outfitted to the gills with military-grade gear, including tanks and drones,
and private security companies frequently providing training and support. Given
the array of private military and security contractors occupying key positions
in the Trump administration, we can expect all of this to expand further with
each new shock.
The Katrina experience also stands as a stark warning to
those who are holding out hope for Trump’s promised $1tn in infrastructure
spending. That spending will fix some roads and bridges, and it will create
jobs. Crucially, Trump has indicated that he plans to do as much as possible
not through the public sector but through public-private partnerships – which
have a terrible track record for corruption, and may result in far lower wages
than true public-works projects would. Given Trump’s business record, and
Pence’s role in the administration, there is every reason to fear that his
big-ticket infrastructure spending could become a Katrina-like kleptocracy, a
government of thieves, with the Mar-a-Lago set helping themselves to vast sums
of taxpayer money.
New Orleans provides a harrowing picture of what we can
expect when the next shock hits. But sadly, it is far from complete: there is
much more that this administration might try to push through under cover of
crisis. To become shock-resistant, we need to prepare for that, too.
Main photograph: AP Photo/Palm Beach Post/Gary Coronado.
This is an edited extract from No Is Not Enough: Defeating
the New Shock Politics by Naomi Klein, published by Allen Lane at £12.99. To
order a copy for £11.04, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of
£1.99.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário