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.
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I read on one of the links to Naomi Klein's page that prevailing wage laws for construction were suspended. So not only were the construction workers down there washed out of their homes and jobs, the jobs they could get were at lower wages. New Orleans is one of the lower-wage areas of the country anyway, did they really need to do that to those people? That and some Repub asshat saying that God cleaned out the public housing projects. Repubs claim to be so religious, what kind of Christian says those things?
"The People's Army will never be used to attack the people."..
If this happened in China and not New Orleans, in say Tienamen Square instead of Perdido Street, it would be denounce all over the world.
“If you try to bulldoze our homes, we’re going to fight. There’s going to be a war in New Orleans.“— Sharon Jasper
"Don't Taze me Bro" ...Andrew Meyer
I know I wasn't the only one, but I predicted this in August of '06: http://www
"The once blue state of Louisiana will be remade as a red state, simply by making it economically improbable, if not impossible, for a significant portion of the once predominantly Democratic population to ever return to their lives in New Orleans - redistricting that Tom DeLay could only fantasize about.
All the same players, (including Blackwater mercenaries), who brought Bush-style Reconstruction to Iraq were brought into New Orleans faster than Katrina breeched the levees. They had years to hone their highly profitable, misery-inducing, corrupt, self-serving skills in Iraq and they were handsomely paid to bring that expertise to New Orleans.
The Big Sleazy comes to the Big Easy.
Now, instead of a rebuilt New Orleans, we have Baghdad on the Bayou; a ruined city, rife with corruption and misery.
Bush Republicans are...frig
It doesn't take a Bourbon Street psychic to see the future of New Orleans. She will rise again. She will exist as a testament to the Machiavellian use of leveraging disaster for political and financial gain, visible evidence of the real moral code of today's Bush Republicans.
New Orleans will see the widespread use of politically and racially motivated eminent domain in place of genuine reconstruction. African Americans who have lived for generations in New Orleans will find insurmountable obstacles impeding their efforts to reclaim or inherit their own property. They will face a burden of proof beyond the capabilities of many of them. And many of those who can prove their right to their property will find eminent domain used to deny them their inheritance anyway.
Big-time Republican donors and corporate interests will then divvy up New Orleans amongst themselves like the Romans under the cross throwing lots for Christ's meager possessions.
Naomi:
Do you think the economy could get so bad next year that the Democrats can practice a little shock doctrine themselves in early 2009?
I'm thinking it might be easier to pass health care reform, a real energy package, and middle income tax relief if the country is still under the thumb of another Bush recession.
Any thoughts?
Never before has a President and Vice President deserved to be impeached more than these.
Yet our Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is working behind the scenes with House Democrats, not to build a consensus for impeachment, but to do just the opposite: to keep others from succeeding in their effort to hold this president accountable by means of impeachment.
With the FISA bill still looming in the Senate, and a new war funding bill passed with no structure in place to Bring our Troops Home, we have to show the leaders of the House and Senate that this is still our country.
Please read the petition to replace Pelosi with a Democratic Representative who will bring impeachment proceedings to the floor. A Question of Privilege under House Rules IX can declare the Speaker seat vacant.
It can be done, it must be done. We have waited long enough.
http://www
The job of government is to protect our freedom. Dr. Ron Paul is the only candidate who is 100% committed to the rights of individuals, not the corporate elite.
Vote Paul08.
End the shock doctrine as our social program.
What is shocking is that this "doctrine" is being pawned off as legitimate sociology. It comes off as nothing more than an attempt to sound authoritative, while stringing together barelyy related events and phenomenon. Its very Rush Limbaugh-esque. If we must speak of "Shock Doctrine" there can be no better example of the full forced attempt by the government to impose socialism during the great depression.
the democrats have to find a new meme. simply being good governors is not enough in a culture where the conservative media can push its catch phrases to a public that is too ignorant and apathetic to know how empty they are.
republicans under Reagan tapped into the American psyche by telling us that taxing the rich and providing for the poor were bad things. there was a tiny element of truth in both of these and simultaneously it touched on something vitally American: hard work pays off. work hard enough and you'll have a piece of the American pie, which is how god ordained it. they were able to do this because liberalism had failed under Jimmy Carter.
of course it turns out that these ideas were not reality based. human nature is not as simple as that. but the republicans exploited these with great success.
now, it's the democrats' turn. conservatism has failed to a shocking degree under this administration. what is our meme? what sexy catch phrases can we come up with that will touch at the American psyche and sway the people to stand with us?
I read your book. I enjoyed the information a great deal. The only flaw I saw was that when you criticized Uncle Miltie's "Chicago school" doctrine of free markets, you barely discussed those points in conflict with your point of view.
After reading your book, I went back and read Friedman's tome "Capitalism and Freedom". There are points in that tome that need to be attempted. With the limited space to post here and from the top of my head, the book discusses the power of the AMA (described as a trade union) and the monopolizing influence that organization has on health care in the US. What if we significantly reduce the AMA power of influence on accreditation of various schools and hospitals? What if new group care facilities were attempted without the approval of the AMA? This is only one example.
In the conclusion to Friedman's book, originally written in anticipation of a day when government might be lessened after the "evil men at the Kremlin" were overcome, Friedman writes, "Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it". Not untrue.
And, in keeping with what may be skewed examples of privatization, consider the validity of the following as well. "The importance of government as a buyer of so much of our output, and as the sole buyer of the output of many firms and indistries, already concentrates a dangerous amount of economic power in the hands of political authorities, changes the environment in which business operates and the criteria relevant for business success, and in these and other ways endangers a free market."
See Part II
Sure, we can warehouse people in public housing where, inevitably, crime and filth thrive. Public housing, no matter how noble the intention, is another case of liberal ideology that can't work because it doesn't understand human nature.
Handouts simply haven't helped people climb the economic ladder. If anything, it keeps them on the lower rungs where they find themselves. Cling to this discredited policy if it helps you feel better about yourself, but it doesn't help people in need.
We are A Democracy first and foremost. We have a free market. We are not Capitolists in the same demonic sense that Communism & socialism were bastardized into. Nor should we support or claim Multi national corps that's operating policies are in direct conflict with the wishes of the citizens of this Democracy.
the Constitution, Bil of Right etc etc were written to lead a Democracy- not a multi national corp. We could be a democracy that has communist ideology - we provide for the citizens equally, and everyone has a voice. why do we not only separate church and state, but also the Free Market.
It's as obvious that the politicians are the lobbists as though a Arch Bishop was elected, then went back to work at the Vatican afterwards. Or the Temple or the Mosque?
Their goals have nothing to do with Demcracy and everything to do with their increase power & influence.
I don't want a Religious zealot, not a Corp lawyer (or CEO,CFO..) in Public office- conflicts of interest.E
Unbelievable. NO is the shinning example of what you get when you have complete and total control by Liberal Democrats. Everyone on the dole, crime rampant and dirt everywhere and no one willing to get off their big butts and work for anything.
Now the author is for recreating those slums and bringing back the crime and the filth. O they will be pretty and clean in the beginning, but since the people are the same people that were there before the place will be a sewer again in a short while.
Now if the it was required you go through re-education and required you to have a job to get a place then I might support it. The reeducation would include things like, you have to keep the premises clean, you have to go to work in a full time job (sorry the I can not get a job does not work, anyone can get a job if they want one). No drugs allowed, if fail to keep the place clean and you don't get a job you get evicted. Also, food stamps and Welfare will be limited and not eternal.
Liberals never learn they just keep making the same mistakes over and over and over.
The game plan in New Orleans is to turn it into a sanitized environment ready made to accommodate the economically advantaged ... the rich! This is a fine example of the Nazification of America. At one point folks, all good Americans will have to stand-up to the Nazi tactics and policies so representative of the neo-con version of America being pushed by Democratic and Republican party Nazis.
Every Western style country on Earth, except the United States, has adopted socialised medicine and education. The United States is the only Western country to have given up on popular democracy and adopted corporate welfare in its place. The citizens are increasingly disenfranchised, and decisions are made for and by right wing think tanks and corporate CEOs. It's a terrible way to run a country.
I hope and pray it will end when Republicans get voted out of power next year.
Did I miss something? The protesters did not appear to be the people that were displaced by housing. They almost had a look of professional protesters looking to be arrested as a badge of courage. If the units were not replaced is anybody worried about the mold? Was their lead or asbestos present? Would these units be a lawyer's dream? Has Bush replaced the city council and the Louisiana governor with political appointees? Has Louisiana become a territory of the U.S. as opposed to a state? Should New Orleans be rebuilt under sea level? Why has Mississippi rebounded but New Orleans is standing still? Why have none of the people running for President addressed this situation. Is Iowa and New Hampshire so important that no media coverage is available in New Orleans?
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