Friday, September 22, 2023

What Is Disaster Capitalism? A Cycle of Crisis, Exploitation, and Privatization

 From Teen Vogue [please don't judge me] September 2, 2021:

During the near-paralyzing heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest earlier this summer, about 175 new record-high temperatures were set. Some climate analysts say the record temperatures would have been “virtually impossible” without the human impact of the climate crisis. Additionally, the number of seasonal floods in West and Central Africa nearly doubled between 2015–2020, leaving the Central African Republic to deal with its worst flooding in two decades. Even Siberia, a Russian providence infamous for its frozen tundra, is fighting fires that threaten to become the largest on record. And according to a UNICEF report, six-times more children were displaced by climate change-driven storms and flooding in the Caribbean between 2014–2018 than in the five years prior, from 2009–2013. 

Today’s climate crisis means that no region is exempt from the weather extremes that shatter records around the world, but global resource and wealth inequality mean that not all geographic regions are affected the same way. Economically vulnerable countries are especially primed for exploitation, and in the wake of disasters, that vulnerability becomes even more evident when private industries intervene in reconstruction efforts. Naomi Klein, a professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia and author of Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, recognized this pattern decades ago and named the practice “disaster capitalism.”

What is disaster capitalism?
In the aftermath of the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that swept 100-foot waves across South Asia and took 230,000 lives, Klein noticed something peculiar amid the supposed reconstruction efforts. Many local farmers and residents had been forced to evacuate their homes because of the tsunami, but developers were seizing land to build resorts and other ventures.

“When I first started looking at disaster capitalism, it was in the context of warfare and counter-terrorism and how that was sort of an extension of the military industrial complex. But after the tsunami, what we started to see was that it was happening in the aftermath of natural disasters,” Klein tells Teen Vogue. “And then [Hurricane] Katrina happened in 2005, and many of the same defense contractors that had been in Iraq [during the war on terror] showed up in New Orleans, seeing it as another opportunity for free government money.” 

Disaster capitalism, according to Klein, occurs when private interests descend on a particular region in the wake of major destabilizing events, such as war, government upheaval, and natural disaster. “It's really an extension of the military industrial complex, but it isn't just warfare; it's responses to disasters,” Klein explains. “It's the reconstruction afterwards." 

Joaquin Villanueva, an associate professor of geography at Gustavus Adolphus College, widens the framing around disaster capitalism, arguing that we have to go further back in history to understand why certain countries are especially vulnerable to this kind of privatized exploitation in the first place. Villanueva sees the impact of the 2010 and 2021 earthquakes in Haiti and 2017's Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico as examples.

“[Haiti] has been a sovereign nation before most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, but it's a nation that has been sort of forced to depend on the U.S. and other imperial forces for its survival and has been rendered very vulnerable to these natural hazards,” Villanueva tells Teen Vogue. “This has nothing to do with any cultural trait of Haitians or anything ignorant to Haitians themselves, but rather to a more complex history of colonialism and imperialism.”

Similarly, Villanueva explains, the devastation in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and the struggle to recover needs to be contextualized by its history of colonization and current status as a U.S. territory. “By the time Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico was in the midst of a massive debt crisis," says Villanueva, "because Puerto Rico's economy, which is what I call a ‘colonial economy,’ has depended almost exclusively on investments by U.S. capitalism [from] the time that the United States has been in Puerto Rico [since] 1898. So when Hurricane Maria hit, Puerto Rico was at one of the most vulnerable points in their history.”

How crises can be turned into opportunities for profit
In the midst of a major crisis, regular people are understandably focused on the everyday challenges of surviving such traumatic events. They’re busy assessing damage, recovering whatever items they can, making arrangements if they can afford to, and figuring out how to manage their personal losses. Klein points out that people in these circumstances rarely have the capacity to also worry about private industries pushing local policy proposals that might negatively impact their lives.

“What we have is a lot of people who have jobs at think tanks and institutions that exist in a state of acute disaster preparedness,” says Klein. “They didn't know Katrina was coming, but they were ready and waiting with plans to privatize the New Orleans school system [and] to roll back labor laws. After Katrina, the school system in New Orleans became the most privatized school system in the United States. The public schools were shut down and reopened as charter schools, unionized teachers were [laid off] en masse — and there was a big push to do the same in Puerto Rico after Maria."

Disaster capitalism is all about privatization efforts like this, says Klein, and the exploitative practice also includes moving to deregulate the financial sphere, implementing austerity measures that often result in cuts to social spending, and increased policing....

....MUCH MORE

Possibly related at the Associated Press, September 18, 2023:
Clinton Global Initiative will launch network to provide new humanitarian aid to Ukrainians

Definitely related:

And many, many more. 

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