Sonia Shah: Think Exotic Animals Are to Blame for the Coronavirus? Think Again // Naomi Klein: Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for Disaster Capitalism
It’s going to be exploited to bail out industries that are at the heart of most extreme crises we face like the climate crisis: airlines, the gas and oil industry, the cruise industry..
Scientists have fingered bats and pangolins as potential sources of the
virus, but the real blame lies with human assaults on the
environment It could have been a pangolin.
Or a bat.
Or, as one now-debunked theory that made the rounds suggested, a snake.
The race to finger the animal source of COVID-19, the coronavirus currently
ensnaring more than 150 million people in quarantines and cordons
sanitaires in China and elsewhere, is on. The virus’s animal origin is
a critical mystery to solve. But speculation about which wild creature
originally harbored the virus obscures a more fundamental source of our growing
vulnerability to pandemics: the accelerating pace of habitat loss.
Since 1940, hundreds
of microbial pathogens have either emerged or reemerged into new territory
where they’ve never been seen before. They include HIV, Ebola in West Africa,
Zika in the Americas, and a bevy of novel coronaviruses. The majority of them -
60 percent - originate in the bodies of animals. Some come from pets and
livestock. Most of them - more than two-thirds - originate in wildlife. But that’s not the
fault of wild animals. Although stories illustrated with pictures of wild
animals as “the
source” of deadly outbreaks might suggest otherwise, wild animals are not
especially infested with deadly pathogens, poised to infect us. In fact, most
of these microbes live harmlessly in these animals’ bodies.
The problem is the way
that cutting down forests and expanding towns, cities, and industrial
activities creates pathways for animal microbes to adapt to the human body. Habitat destruction
threatens vast
numbers of wild species with extinction, including the medicinal plants and
animals we’ve historically depended upon for our pharmacopeia. It also forces
those wild species that hang on to cram into smaller fragments of remaining
habitat, increasing the likelihood that they’ll come into repeated, intimate
contact with the human settlements expanding into their newly fragmented
habitats. It’s this kind of repeated, intimate contact that allows the microbes
that live in their bodies to cross over into ours, transforming benign animal
microbes into deadly human pathogens...
Naomi Klein: Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for Disaster Capitalism
The coronavirus is officially a global pandemic that has so far infected 10 times more people than SARS did. Schools, university systems, museums, and theaters across the U.S. are shutting down, and soon, entire cities may be too. Experts warn that some people who suspect they may be sick with the virus, also known as COVID-19, are going about their daily routines, either because their jobs do not provide paid time off because of systemic failures in our privatized health care system.
Most of us aren’t exactly sure what to do or who to listen to. President Donald Trump has contradicted recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and these mixed messages have narrowed our window of time to mitigate harm from the highly contagious virus. These are the perfect conditions for governments and the global elite to implement political agendas that would otherwise be met with great opposition if we weren’t all so disoriented. This chain of events isn’t unique to the crisis sparked by the coronavirus; it’s the blueprint politicians and governments have been following for decades known as the “shock doctrine,” a term coined by activist and author Naomi Klein in a 2007 book of the same name.
History is a chronicle
of “shocks” - the shocks of wars, natural disasters, and economic crises - and
their aftermath. This aftermath is characterized by “disaster capitalism,” calculated, free-market “solutions”
to crises that exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities. Klein says we’re
already seeing disaster capitalism play out on the national stage: In response
to the coronavirus, Trump has proposed a $700 billion stimulus package that would include cuts to payroll taxes (which would devastate Social
Security) and provide assistance to industries that will lose business as a
result of the pandemic. They’re not doing
this because they think it’s the most effective way to alleviate suffering
during a pandemic—they have these ideas lying around that they now see an
opportunity to implement,” Klein said.
VICE spoke to Klein
about how the “shock” of coronavirus is giving way to the chain of events she
outlined more than a decade ago in The Shock Doctrine.
Let’s start with
the basics. What is disaster capitalism? What is its relationship to the “shock
doctrine”? The way I define
disaster capitalism is really straightforward: It describes the way private
industries spring up to directly profit from large-scale crises. Disaster
profiteering and war profiteering isn’t a new concept, but it really deepened
under the Bush administration after 9/11, when the administration declared this
sort of never-ending security crisis, and simultaneously privatized it and
outsourced it—this included the domestic, privatized security state, as well as
the [privatized] invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The “shock doctrine”
is the political strategy of using large-scale crises to push through policies
that systematically deepen inequality, enrich elites, and undercut everyone else.
In moments of crisis, people tend to focus on the daily emergencies of
surviving that crisis, whatever it is, and tend to put too much trust in those
in power. We take our eyes off the ball a little bit in moments of crisis.
Where does that
political strategy come from? How do you trace its history in American
politics? The shock-doctrine
strategy was as a response to the original New Deal under FDR. [Economist]
Milton Friedman believes everything went wrong in America under the
New Deal: As a response to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, a much more
activist government emerged in the country, which made it its mission to
directly solve the economic crisis of the day by creating government employment
and offering direct relief.
If you’re a hard-core
free-market economist, you understand that when markets fail it lends itself to
progressive change much more organically than it does the kind of deregulatory
policies that favor large corporations. So the shock doctrine was developed as
a way to prevent crises from giving way to organic moments where progressive
policies emerge. Political and economic elites understand that moments of
crisis is their chance to push through their wish list of unpopular policies
that further polarize wealth in this country and around the world.
Right now we have
multiple crises happening: a pandemic, a lack of infrastructure to manage it,
and the crashing stock market. Can you outline how each of these components fit
into the schema you outline in The Shock Doctrine ? The shock really is
the virus itself. And it has been managed in a way that is maximizing confusion
and minimizing protection. I don’t think that’s a conspiracy, that’s just the
way the U.S. government and Trump have utterly mismanaged this crisis. Trump
has so far treated this not as a public health crisis but as a crisis of perception, and a potential problem for his
reelection.
It’s the worst-case
scenario, especially combined with the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have a
national health care program and its protections for workers are abysmal. This
combination of forces has delivered a maximum shock. It’s going to be exploited
to bail out industries that are at the heart of most extreme crises that we
face, like the climate crisis: the airline industry, the gas and oil industry, the cruise industry—they want to prop all of this up.... read more:
