Disaster Capitalism

April 23, 2019

            “This is going to get real ugly real fast,” Marty Bahamonde of FEMA wrote in a text message to his bosses two days before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.[1] It appeared to Bahamonde that no one was really listening to him. His assumption was correct. Hurricane Katrina was a disaster, but FEMA’s response was catastrophic. “This is going to get real ugly real fast,” sums up a lot about the state of affairs around the globe. Will we listen to those who sound the alarm? This essay considers four books published within the last dozen or so years which explain how capitalists profit from disastrous conditions at home and abroad. The Canadian journalist Naomi Klein and the Australian journalist Anthony Loewenstein analyze global affairs, and scholars of education Kristen Buras and Megan Erickson discuss how austerity measures have affected schoolchildren and their communities in New Orleans and New York, respectively. The stories told by these authors reveal that, yes, things have gotten “real ugly real fast,” but there is tremendous potential for change and hope in grassroots organizing. Klein and Loewenstein’s stories of disaster profiteering are terribly depressing, but the socially conscious activism Buras and Erickson describe centered around public education, “the great equalizer,” might just help us see more clearly what needs to be addressed and how.

            Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) follows the paths of the neoliberal set, largely educated or influenced by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, intent on profiting from disasters man-made or natural. Friedman peddled a strategy to violent strongmen and/or opportunists the world over that might be best summed up by this progression: Have a neoliberal plan preparedWait for the disaster/window of opportunity Privatize formerly public assetsReap ProfitsRinse and Repeat. The fallout from such a strategy is what causes Klein to sound the alarm. Klein writes about “the intersection between superprofits and megadisasters” in locales far-flung and near to home.[2] Regardless of whether Klein writes about war in the Middle East or how Hurricane Katrina affected New Orleans, she relates the story of a disturbing, decades-long pattern of behavior she terms “disaster capitalism,” defined by “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities.”[3] Klein’s focus is not limited to large-scale disasters; she also writes of torture as practiced by autocrats, police states, or military leaders around the world. Klein’s novel, if not unproblematic, approach is to begin The Shock Doctrine with a description of the origins of electroshock therapy and then use “torture as metaphor” throughout the book to obliquely equate torture with the “disaster capitalism complex.”[4] I am impressed by Klein’s notion of “disaster capitalism,” but I remain unconvinced that she had to interleave electroshock therapy with Friedman-brand economic shock therapy. Klein’s theory of disaster capitalism should have been allowed to stand on its own.

            It is ironic that though Klein coined “disaster capitalism,” she did not choose it for the title of her book. Nearly a decade after The Shock Doctrine appeared, Anthony Loewenstein chose Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe (2015) for his book title. A deep-reader of Klein, Loewenstein “expanded Klein’s thesis to focus not just on environmental catastrophe, war, and the hidden costs of foreign aid, but also on what happens when the resources sector and detention centers are privatized.”[5] Loewenstein blends Klein’s observations, a variety of academics’ research, journalistic accounts, and his own firsthand experiences in an absorbing tale of the dangers of privatization. Lowenstein’s chapter on mass incarceration in the United States is greatly influenced by Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), but unlike Alexander, Loewenstein discusses immigration detention centers. Better to surveil and jail than let be and let live, seems to be the operating principle for advocates of mass incarceration and private prisons. Private prisons and detention centers, in particular, are representative of a “nice form of subsidized socialism,” Loewenstein writes, despite firms’ avowedly free market talking points.

            Klein and Loewenstein relate how private contractors (and sub- and subsub- contractors) profess neoliberal ideology despite socializing risk and privatizing return. This is a textbook private equity maneuver. It might not be immoral for a private equity firm to acquire an underperforming factory and then choose to strip it of its assets or reinvigorate it, but there is something terribly awry when corporate executives look to state prisons and consider how more efficiently they could be managed if, say, they were privatized, the guard staff were reduced by a quarter, and less food were offered to prisoners. But such is the story that Klein and Loewenstein relate. As Klein writes, “For decades, the market had been feeding off the appendages of the state; now it would devour the core.”[6]

            Name the taxpayer funded asset—Social Security, the VA, prisons, the military, Medicare and Medicaid, etc.—and look to see how privatizers have flocked to feed off them. “These corporations,” Loewenstein writes, “ are like vultures feeding on the body of a weakened government that must increasingly rely on the private sector to provide public services.”[7] But nothing is so sad a sight as deliberately underfunded public education and childcare. This is the central theme of Megan Erickson’s Class War: The Privatization of Childhood (2015) and Kristen Buras’s Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance (2015), which reckon with how inequality affects children’s education and wellbeing. Stories of disaster capitalism’s effect on children can be glimpsed in Klein and Loewenstein’s work, but neither truly illuminates the topic. Klein began The Shock Doctrine by referencing Hurricane Katrina’s impact on Greater New Orleans, including Milton Friedman’s remarks that, “This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system,” but then hopscotches to other subjects related to this “blank slate.”[8] Buras and Erickson, on the other hand, provide sustained attention to how privatization efforts in the States—Buras focuses on New Orleans; Erickson on New York—affect children.

            Buras spent ten years researching Charter Schools. She writes that the history of African Americans in New Orleans is a history of exploitation. Buras writes that in post-Katrina New Orleans, “the public schools attended by African Americans have been commodified by white entrepreneurs (and black allies), who care less about improving the life chances of black youth than about capitalizing on schools, obtaining contracts, and lining their pockets with public and private monies.”[9] Her carefully laid out evidence makes it clear that Hurricane Katrina, as Friedman thought, provided the window of opportunity to replace what had been a strong, black teachers’ union with nonunion charter schools. The result was displacement, dispossession, and disaster. One of the main points in both Klein and Loewenstein’s works is that though locals in “disaster zones” better understand what their communities need than do outsiders, they are rarely listened to. Buras’s careful attention to the words of local education leaders and community organizers is grounded in the work of critical race theorists who espouse that “to adequately appraise social conditions, it is imperative to consider the experiential knowledge of those most intimately involved in navigating them.”[10] Hence, Buras draws “heavily on narrative testimony to provide thick description of how education reforms have been experienced by those actually navigating the newly chartered landscape.”[11] Time and again Buras’s interviewees attest to the need to divest from charter schools and reinvest in public education. Disaster capitalism, which masquerades as “socially conscious capitalism” in New Orleans, has failed students and enriched the already well-off.

            Erickson, an education professional in New York City, also uses interviews with parents, teachers, and students to elucidate how neoliberal “lessons” from the hypercompetitive American economy have trickled down to our schools. “The problem of a hypercompetitive society organized around the free market is that people don’t just work to be social and to ensure the basic needs of all are met fairly and equally,” Erickson writes. Instead, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer; “This is what must be dismantled, not public education.”[12] Erickson’s book, while occasionally repetitive, makes several important contributions related to the fallout from punitive austerity measures (Klein’s “economic shock therapy”) and how philanthropists (Buras’s “socially conscious capitalists”) expect returns on their investments in charter schools. Erickson’s greatest intervention is the series of questions peppered throughout her work. Here is a random sample: “What must people know, and how should they learn it? How should children spend their days? How should their parents and teachers?”[13]

            Erickson’s “radical set of questions,” which appear throughout Class War, is the kind of thinking that will help to awaken us.[14] But so long as business leaders continue to value test scores or the bottom line over the greater good, the radical sets of questions will be drowned out by calls for Friedman’s free market delusion. There is a kind of latent pseudo-colonialism at play whenever “free market” ideology is bandied about, as if public entities can be rebranded as terra nullius, virgin territory, to be seized by capitalists. This type of corporatist thinking tends to exacerbate situations that are already getting “real ugly real fast,” in the words of FEMA’s Marty Bahamod, As Erickson and Buras’s research demonstrates, there is no such thing as a “blank slate” from which capitalists can work their profit-driven magic. There is always a community, whether it is a teachers’ union in New Orleans or a museum professional in Baghdad, who knows what is best for their local resources. It’s time to listen.

Bibliography

Buras, Kristen. Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots    Resistance. New York: Routledge. 2015.

Erickson, Megan. Class War: The Privatization of Childhood. New York: Verso. 2015.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt.       2007.

Lowenstein, Anthony. Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe. New York:      Verso. 2015.

Rivlin, Gary. Katrina: After the Flood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

 Notes

[1] Gary Rivlin, Katrina: After the Flood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), p. 40.

[2] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), p. 9.

[3] Ibid., p. 6.

[4] Ibid., p. 12

[5] Anthony Loewenstein, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe (New York: Verso, 2015), p. 6.

[6] Klein, p. 299.

[7] Loewenstein, p. 7.

[8] Klein, p. 9.

[9] Kirsten Buras, Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 60.

[10] Buras, p. 162.

[11] Ibid., p. 163

[12] Megan Erickson, Class War: The Privatization of Childhood (New York: Verso, 2015), Kindle Locations 245-248.

[13] Ibid., Kindle Locations 1247-1248.

[14] Ibid.