Monthly Archive

I would be remiss not to devote at least a few words to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.  She argues that since the 1970s, the world has been witnessing the slow emergence of “disaster capitalism.”  Generally speaking, instability and catastrophe have traditionally had an adverse effect on proft-making.  Not anymore.  Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics theorists argue that disasters such as war, tsunamis and hurricanes are, in fact, golden opportunities for making a quick buck.  Make that billions of bucks.

Let’s consider that Cheney’s company, Halliburton, received hundreds of billions of dollars in untendered contracts to rebuild Iraq.  That Donald Rumsfeld’s company, Tamiflu, made billions by selling the vaccine for avian flu to the very same government that employed him.  That property developers jumped on the opportunity afforded by the tsunami that ravaged Sri Lanka, Thailand and other countries, turfing thousands of subsistence fishers and their families from the beaches and erecting hotels for rich tourists in their place.

I am currently reading the chapter about Israel.  Some people in that country are currently enjoying a surge in prosperity thanks to the lucratic trade in counter-terrorism technologies.  Israel is seen as being on the cutting edge of military, surveillance, intelligence technologies.  Some people are getting very rich — not in spite of the conflict with Palestine — but because of the conflict with Palestine.

The right-wing rhetoric that market capitalism brings peace and prosperity never rang true with me.  Klein’s powerful book makes a powerful case why this is so.  Capitalism is not inherently good.  As Klein argues, it can be turned to ends that are very, very bad.  The fortunes of Cheney and Rumsfeld have depended on massive doses of death, torture and suffering among some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. 

After Hurricane Katrina, private capital made its strongest foray yet into the previously public domains of American civil life: education and housing.  Because the Bush administration refused to use any reconstruction money to pay public salaries, New Orleans lost 3,000 government employees almost overnight, including almost all its public planners.  Almost every single public school in New Orleans folded, to be replaced with charter schools.  Thousands of poor black families were turfed from their homes so that the property could be reveloped as condominiums for the affluent.

The stories Klein tells are so tragic and unjust that they provoke almost an overwhelming sense of sorrow and despair. 

It still amazes me that America did not witness some kind of revolution after Hurricane Katrina.  September 11 is invoked by all manner of politicans to justify all manner of things, but what about Katrina?  It was an event that laid bare the appalling inequities of America for the whole world to see.  And yet the American elite responded not with compassion but instead with more get-rich-quick schemes for the already rich.  And this isn’t an election issue?  Has any presidential candidate mentioned Katrina even once? 

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More revisions to my book are pending.  When it comes to a finished draft, there really is no such thing as writing, only re-writing.