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'm a fan of yours, and the Shock Doctrine, but you're way out of bounds on this.
- Watch residents react to the bulldozing of their homes here.
many of the protesters weren't even from New Orleans, and you should note that every single city council member approved the demolition. These projects were a failed attempt at public housing and we desperately needed to start over. I can assure you that the majority of this city, black and white, poor and wealthy...
- Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.
how do you know that? how do you know how valuable the land is where these projects stand? Can you even tell me where the real estate is located? That may be a valid argument for one of the locations, but certainly not all 4.
There's also the inconvenient fact that there are no plans to build hotels or condo's on the properties. We are building..
You were the first person to expose the privatization laboratory which our Public School system has become in Post-K...I appreciate that. But you need to do your homework before you make blanket accusations that every move this city is making falls under your paradigm.
I've been obsessing over politics and economics and government for many years. It's all fascinating.
Naomi's "shock doctrine" theory is one of the most profound tools for understanding the motives and actions of our government.
I feel like I've "graduated" in my understanding of world affairs after reading her book.
HIGHLY reccommended.
Shocking, indeed. I don't know if you've read Shadows of War, Naomi, but I highly recommend it.
Systems of governance rely on good, decent people in power and smart, informed people keeping an eye out. In a country where neither is the typical case, Naomi, you're one in a million.
Watching the news footage of the scene in New Orleans I was disgusted. These are citizens being attacked by the police for trying to participate in government. The basic civil rights of the poor have been disregarded for the moneyed with the MSN going along for the ride. These are not protesters but citizens.
Today the housing projects in NOLA, tomorrow the people that still think they are in the middle class and nothing like that can happen to them. Until those people that are deluding themselves wake up, all of what is happening in NOLA will just be written off as "those" people getting what they deserve. How tragic this all is. Keep pointing the bright light on these things, Naomi.
Most cities are razing and replacing their old-style public housing projects, because it's been found that warehousing large numbers of very poor people in dense housing units only encourages the proliferation of crime. The progressive way is to build smaller housing units scattered around the cities, so that poor people aren't segregated from the general population, and so that they can be in better school districts.
It's beyond me why these protesters, many of whom are outside agitators, want NOLA to keep to the old, ineffectual way. Seriously, the efficacy of these old-style housing units has been completely discredited.
Before Katrina, New Orleans was the most dysfunctional large city in America, with shy-high crime and poverty rates, and a terrible school system. Why not make some changes? It's stupid to just keep on doing things the same old ineffective way.
Thank you for all your excellent work, Naomi.
The Shock Doctrine that you have articulated so well is really the master plan behind the obscene transfer of wealth that has taken place in the 7 years of the Bush-Cheney administration.
They exploit tragedy and see it as "opportunity" for their private interests.
This is no longer America. At least not the America I grew up in. Slowly the military industrial complex and the corporations have taken over our government without as much as a whimper from us. No longer does the oath of protecting the Constitution from enemies foreign or domestic mean anything. The only thing that matters is how much money or power can I get.
I've been telling folks for years that administration policy has simply been about moving poor people out of New Orleans and turning their land over to Republican developers. I viewed the whole thing as simple vicious greed in action.
I've been following your writing/thinking and I find accepting the cold, evil logic of the Bushies/NeoCons you describe even worse. I wish there really was a hell for those people.
THANK YOU!
We have to make urban areas aware that this is THE plan. The use of Private Contractors during the disaster was filmed, and you know that is SOP.
This is the "Culture War." Urban areas "Terrorized" movement conservatives, so they called them un-American, and declared them the "Culture of Poverty." The have systematically defunded everything they could.
Welcome to the fall of the nation state and the rise of the Global Corporate Empire.
"RUN IT LIKE A BUSINESS."
If someone were to ask me for a difinitive illustration of modern America it would have to be the response to the 9/11 attacks. Generous heartfelt outpouring of sympathy and donations for the victims from all corners of the country. When it finally came to dividing-up the victims fund how did they do it? The richest few got the MOST, the poorest got little more than a slap across the face. Disgraceful. Disgraceful. Disgraceful.
Thank you for this update, Ms. Klein, and for your book -- easily the most important one I read this year. It snapped the whole ugly picture into focus.
It would be interesting to know if you've changed your mind about the convenient use of "ideas lying around" versus deliberate design by conscienceless profiteers, after what seems a very vivid example of the latter.
Where is the MSM,Where is the outrage? This is criminal and we all go shopping..
While this article is largely true, I feel that as a resident of the New Orleans area I must comment. First off, some of the housing projects were flooded, the St Bernard Housing Development being the one that first comes to mind. It also was in very bad condition with many abandoned units and was a hotbed of crime and drug trafficking before Katrina. I believe that the projects that were not flooded could and should be re-opened. However, there is a pervasive feeling in New Orleans that the projects have been, for a long time, areas of crime and desperation. Those who were able to escape from them did so a long time ago. Supposedly some of them will be redeveloped as mixed income developments with 20% of the units set aside for Section 8 tenants and the rest rented at "market rates". This may be an example of Right Wing "petri dish" theory, that the low income residents will learn how to live better by the example set by the market rate tenants. Who knows? I do not know how this will play out and if there will be enough units available for all those who need Section 8 assistance. My guess is, there will not be enough. I must admit, I don't know enough about the New Orleans Public Schools to comment on their conversion to charter schools.
How can we stop these neocons? They're utterly ruthless and have the military at their command.
It's so depressing.
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