Naomi Klein: how power profits from disaster
There have been times
in my reporting from disaster zones when I have had the unsettling feeling that
I was seeing not just a crisis in the here and now, but getting a glimpse of
the future – a preview of where the road we are all on is headed, unless we
somehow grab the wheel and swerve. When I listen to Donald Trump speak,
with his obvious relish in creating an atmosphere of chaos and destabilisation,
I often think: I’ve seen this before, in those strange moments when portals
seemed to open up into our collective future.
Ignorance is Strength-Freedom is Slavery-War is Peace (George Orwell, 1984)
One of those moments
arrived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,
as I watched hordes of private military contractors descend on the flooded city
to find ways to profit from the disaster, even as thousands of the city’s
residents, abandoned by their government, were treated like dangerous criminals
just for trying to survive. I started to notice
the same tactics in disaster zones around the world. I used the term
“shock doctrine” to describe the brutal tactic of using the public’s
disorientation following a collective shock – wars, coups, terrorist attacks,
market crashes or natural disasters – to push through radical pro-corporate
measures, often called “shock therapy”. Though Trump breaks the mould in some
ways, his shock tactics do follow a script, and one that is familiar from other
countries that have had rapid changes imposed under the cover of crisis.
This strategy has been
a silent partner to the imposition of neoliberalism for more than 40 years.
Shock tactics follow a clear pattern: wait for a crisis (or even, in some
instances, as in Chile or Russia, help foment one), declare a moment of what is
sometimes called “extraordinary politics”, suspend some or all democratic norms
– and then ram the corporate wishlist through as quickly as possible. The
research showed that virtually any tumultuous situation, if framed with
sufficient hysteria by political leaders, could serve this softening-up
function. It could be an event as radical as a military coup, but the economic
shock of a market or budget crisis would also do the trick. Amid hyperinflation
or a banking collapse, for instance, the country’s governing elites were
frequently able to sell a panicked population on the necessity for attacks on
social protections, or enormous bailouts to prop up the financial private
sector – because the alternative, they claimed, was outright economic
apocalypse.
The Republicans under
Donald Trump are already seizing the atmosphere of constant crisis that
surrounds this presidency to push through as many unpopular, pro-corporate
policies. And we know they would move much further and faster given an even
bigger external shock. We know this because senior members of Trump’s team have
been at the heart of some of the most egregious examples of the shock doctrine
in recent memory.
Rex Tillerson, the
US secretary of state, has built his career in large part around taking advantage
of the profitability of war and instability. ExxonMobil profited more than any
oil major from the increase in the price of oil that was the result of the 2003 invasion
of Iraq. It also directly exploited the Iraq war to defy US state
department advice and make an
exploration deal in Iraqi Kurdistan, a move that, because it sidelined
Iraq’s central government, could well have sparked a full-blown civil war, and
certainly did contribute to internal conflict… read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/06/naomi-klein-how-power-profits-from-disaster
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