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.

Comments

[clumberfeet]

I am shocked by their 'Let them eat cake' explanation.
'The people who lost their $400. a month rental property will now be able to move back to their old neighborhood and buy a $350,000. home.'

[Galvestonians for Dr. Ron Paul]

We know whats coming to Galveston if we dont change the way things are getting done. The federal Government is feeding our corrupt politicaians here and they are making us more and more reliant on Federal funding. Ron Paul says no, but this is local politics and he doesnt have much say.

I worry for us all, I think there has been a shift though. I feel much more comfortable about the state of our country in the last few weeks. People are waking up.
Naomi knows, there is a revolution going on that would address her written concerns and Many other concern we Americans share as well!
I hope others will join us and help us to fight these neoconservatives.
Ron has beat them EVERY time down here in our district.
How American to allow one of their own to take them down..

This good man will do it!
Using our power bestowed upon him....

He deems this power ABSOLUTE and we must use him, and each other to get our way of life back.

[bluesky49876]

Naomi, you are a hero of mine...and what you are doing, exposing the crimes of this administration against the people, is a real public service of the highest order.

[doctorj2u]

Outsiders that don't have a clue to the situation in NOLA might believe this post. This is the real story.
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=3637767n
Housing IS available. Let us make a better New Orleans by tearing down these awful projects.

[DrPaulProteus]

As Michael Franti once said "Its a crime to be broke in America".

(And while you're at it, don't get sick, either.)

[hopeless277]

Wait until Blackwater show up. Then you'll see some SHOCK!!! Blackwater, you might recall, is not bound by the pesky 'laws'. Get ready NO, they're on their way.

[freespeach]

"No, they're not blind, they're evil. They see just fine."

The mother with two kids said it best.

The CNN coverage of this yesterday was especially disgusting.
At first they (Kyra Phillips) covered the most violent sensationalist aspect of the story....pepper spray, batons, and downed protesters­.....inste­ad of the stuff that Naomi writes about. But even that changed as they began to justify or cover for the police with weasel words and spin.
CNN is an enemy of the US people, and is one very good tool in the fascist tool-box.

Thanks for trying to keep this story front and center Naomi.
It would be nice if huffpo gave this more coverage too.

[DickTater]

This was all predicted. No media is squeaking out unless it is on a blog. This has been a long time coming, and it was only a matter of time before the international capitalists were able to start targeting US soil. Most of this stuff has (in the past) been done to poor brown folks in far-off lands.

Every single thing predicted in 2000 that would happen if the oil/corporatists got ahold of our government...has come to pass. In spades. You think martial law, haliburton­/blackwate­r detention camps here in the US is a chicken little conspiracy theory? The mask is off. These corporatists aren't even pretending anymore

In N.O., they kept out all the people affected, let only the monied interests to the table. Then, of course, they say the disenfranchised will have their say during rebuilding. They just keep kicking the can a little further down the road because each delay and renegged promise redounds to their bottom line and disenfranchises the non-corporate.

[wagonjak]

Thank you Naomi, for the best run-down on the "housing crisis" in NOLA. We on the left realize this is no example of incompetence, but a well-thought out part of the assault on the middle-class and poor in this country on the part of the rich an powerful...

As this country decends into Facism and Anarchy.

[lastams]

Interesting conclusion.
It would certainly explain a great deal regarding the attitude of the SBA in underwriting rebuilding loans.
Over two years since the disaster, my wife and I are still fighting tooth and nail to squeeze from the government funds that were approved over a year ago.
As with everyone we know in the process, the SBA has consistently “lost” papers, changed the rules to prevent the actual completion of loans, and just when something is about to progress , the file is shifted to another caseworker who needs to start from the beginning.
Recent Congressional hearings found that in hundreds of cases the SBA put pressure on caseworkers to intentionally drop mortgagees without notice or cause. The SBA denied wrongdoing, the committee made some noise, and as usual, no action was taken.
Anyone involved in rebuilding in New Orleans knows that the government is the enemy, and that you will have to fight them if you wish to rebuild.
In the meantime rents and utilities have skyrocketed and available housing has disappeared, not only for the poor, but for the middle class as well.
Whatever the “grand plan” of this administration is in regards to the Big Easy, it does not involve rebuilding a viable city with a low-income population.