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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The Shock Doctrine is essential reading to fully appreciate the context of the actions in New Orleans, but the machinations around this destruction of public housing are unfortunately only a very small part of the problem. Behind the disaster capitalism tactics and the greed is the far more sinister face of racism. Those already made poor and downtrodden by systematic mistreatment and neglect are now left homeless. The public housing wasn't much, but it was all they had.
Now what? Until we care enough to answer that question, we may have to avoid the ugly truth about ourselves.
Ms. Klein, as soon as I saw what was happening I thought of your book. What astounds me is how people defend the tearing down of public housing to be replaced with housing that the original occupants could never afford.
I mean, there were victims of Katrina of every economic level. They all deserve to return to their where they live. What is happening here is the disenfranchisement of individuals who are rightfully Citizens of New Orleans.
It's wrong ... in fact, it is the moral equivalent of looting.
After the 1906 Earthquake in San Francisco, where Chinatown was razed, the City Fathers, not having a great love for the Chinese, wanted to relocate Chinatown to the southern border of the City. The Chinese got wind of it and before the City Planners had a chance to act they had rebuilt Chinatown themselves.
Is that what needs to be done now? We need to assume that in our darkest hour our City Fathers are going to disenfranchise us? Divest us of our rights to retain our homes, and, therefore, we have to rebuild our own homes before they can rip us off?
That is an absolutely pathetic state of affairs.
Mz. Klein,
thank you for keeping the light on in New Orleans. You're all over today's New Orleans News Ladder
http://nol
Any chance we could get you to come and do a special screening in New Orleans?
Naomi, you only forgot to mention the indifference of people who witness disaster capitalism and do nothing about it, justifying their apathy and heartlessness with the latest economic mumbo jumbo.
Excellent book. And much needed in our times.
I'm sorry but public housing was another one of those horrible ideas that came out of the so called war on poverty programs of the 1960's. Go to any city and you will find the remnants of a failed policy. Dirty ,crime infested monuments that are a metaphor to what we now know is a failed social experiment in socialism.
But I know the folks on this site will continue to repackage and attempt to resell socialism in its various forms till time immortal. Because someone has always tried to to hock socialism for centuries. Even though it has failed every time it has been tried.
I saw the pictures on TV of the folks protesting the demolition of the public housing buildings. I feel sorry for them. It is not totally their fault. They bought into and now have fell victim to the lure of the entitlement. They are so ensnared they have no idea how to acquire shelter on there own. This is what liberalism has wrought. You did not just give a helping hand; you created millions of people who are now essentially "wards of the state". You have literally inbred pure dependency.
Most private charity gives a helping hand for a relatively short period of time to get someone back on their feet. Government "help", however, has created a class of people that have no incentive to leave the dole. That is a shame because I would bet that many of these folks are truly capable of more success and happiness. Instead they are trapped in a lifestyle of dependency created by politicians who simply want to be reelected again and again.
The evil people are not the ones who want to tear down these monuments to failure. It is the ones who want to continue to convince these poor folks that they are not good enough to survive on their own.
What if there's not really any doctrine involved
and instead it's just a bunch of greedy people
fighting their way through a neverending bureaucratic car wreck?
The REAL disaster hit New Orleans a long, long
time ago...thes
the job of trying to clean it all up, now.
Proper Prior Planning etc. etc. etc.
I agree with the woman quoted, "They see. They aren't blind. They're evil."
So much American history is focused on New Orleans and its unique blend of people that gave it character and personality, language, music, food, literature, festivals, and all else that made New Orleans what it was just a few years ago. All gone now into the great maw of greed.
Who wants a painted plastic lady in its place?
But this is the new American corporate takeover of America's life and spirit.
Coming to your town soon.
the real culprit is capitalism and our style of capitalism will create a lot of billionaires and eliminate the middle class.
write a book on how unchecked capitalism goes against every universal law. greed self destructs but before it does a nation loses its morals and wealth.
we will become a nation of haves and have nots while voters shop till they drop.
capitalism has turned us into a nation of imperialists where might makes right.
The recipe is so simple as to be artless: gut the infrastructure and replace it with crony capitalism
++++
What also bears mentioning is the "bleaching" of New Orleans.
Vast numbers of the original residents (people of color) having been shipped out as exiles to other states, are not being allowed to come home, while those that remain have their homes bulldozed to make room for a gentrified lighter skinned community.
It's racist, it's fascist, and it has NO place in a real democracy.
But then, we stopped being a real democracy some time ago.
Among the ideas that have been abandoned by the Democratic party is a belief that we, as a rational and compassionate country, can come up with creative ideas to make a better life and community for our people.
Instead, the brief flurry of citizen involvement and creativity in the 1960s and 1970s was smashed by the Reagan machine, and has been replaced by a belief that corporations should control everything. They should decide every major issue in this country, and the regular people should have no voice.
This is a shame. This is a shame that needs to be placed at the feet of those who call themselves Democrats. Why do we have no leadership, no vision, no nothing from the top Democrats? Can anyone really say that Schumer, Feinstein, Clinton, and Dirty Harry Reid have ever once come up with an idea about how to better our country? Nothing. They have completely sold out to the Republican idea that corporations should run everything.
I don't see any reason to move people back into these crime-ridden cesspools that were called "public housing" in New Orleans. There's got to be a better way. New Orleans was one of the biggest failures of all cities in this country with poor wages, failed schools, corrupt cops and government. The demand should be to make it better, not just put it back the way it used to be.
Brad Pitt has some ideas and is working on them, unfortunately in the private sector. For progressives to demand that poor black people be shoved into delapidated slum housing with more guns than people, drug dealers and gangs terrorizing the residents, is truly absurd. Why not demand something of value, like jobs for the residents? Why not attack the Bush law authorizing contractors not to pay decent wages? Why not demand new affordable housing?
This is like people "demanding" that their failing schools be reopend so their kids can continue to be shuffled through and not educated. It's a lack of vision or leadership that leads to this embarrassing failure to demand something much better.
I read the hufpo every day and one trend I hate seeing is the way this site joins the frenzy in beating up this Dem canidate A so that canidate B looks better. We need to focus our energy on who the real foe of the American people, mainly the GOP. This story should have been on the front page
http://www
instead of who said what about who. The story tells about the DOJ protecting the gop so they could block calls of dems during 06 elections.
As a New Orleanian I am an enthusiastic supporter of the demolition of our Big 4 projects, also know hereabouts as crime factories. Their loss will be a big gain for our complacent, crime-ridden city. We have needed these post-Katrina shocks, I think.
Denizens of the project near the Vieux Carre are the ones who prey on unwary tourists in the upper Quarter and on a particularly depressing stretch of Canal Street. Crime has stalled repair and restoration in the neighborhood. It's an ugly, dangerous place and has been for years, as are our other projects and surrounding neighborhoods, which are hidden from the tourists.
These housing deveopments, offspring of the New Deal, were intended to be a short-term aid for individuals or families who had hit a rough patch. They were not intentended to be the mutigenerational crash pads that they have become.
New Orleans is a small city dominated by a large undereducated underclass, which is a drain on a city that cannot afford it, and some of our housing developments are vast. Considering these factors I think it's no accident that New Orleans is a national leader in violent crime.
Many housing development residents, such as the disabled and elderly, legitimately need housing support. But many others do not. These are the jobless, bored parasites who hang, deal drugs, prey on other residents or the neighborhood and otherwise create mayhem. For these residents the projects are a right and a 'lifestyle choice'. I think it is time we stopped enabling them.
Would that the energy expended Thursday in support of the enervating status quo instead had been spent on finding solutions, with a focus on education and employment. New Orleans deserves a safer, prosperous future.
Whether you call it shock doctrine, free market, or aggressive capitalism it's known by a different name in my field----that of Social Darwinism. Under pure or aggressive Capitalism, Social Darwinism is survival of the richest supported by government policies resulting in a oligarchical administra
It is obvious that a free market capitalist society cannot work for long. On the other hand, it has been shown that a pure socialist society cannot work efficientl
here's something to ponder:
why do some disaster capitalists lose big and others make out like bandits? see Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
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