Disaster Capitalism

Disaster capitalism

This is the term given to the philosophy and practice of neoconservatives (neocons) to capitalise on natural disasters, and other “shocks”, in order to implement what they see as desirable social initiatives. For examples of this see “The shock Doctrine – the rise of Disaster Capitalism” by Naomi Klein, publisher Metropolitan Books (2007).

For example, amongst many other cases, the book documents the following: after hurricane Katrina’s visit to New Orleans, one of New Orleans’ wealthiest developers said “… I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities.” In practice the opportunities, in part, meant that the Louisiana State Legislature in Baton Rouge had locked in plans to level the public housing projects and replace them with condos.

The book also documents the fact that, within nineteen months of the hurricane, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools. Before the hurricane, the school board had run 123 public schools; now it ran just 4. Before the storm, there had been 7 charter schools in the city; now there were 31. New Orleans teachers used to be represented by a strong union; now the union’s contract had been shredded, and its forty-seven hundred members had all been fired. Some of the younger teachers had been rehired by the charters, at reduced salaries; most were not.

I’m fairly sure that with New Zealand’s population distribution and administrative systems, such major changes would be unlikely to occur in any major centre, let alone on a national level, but I do have concerns that a local initiative, such as the privatisation of the water supply in Wellington, could be slipped through following the likely confusion resulting from a major earthquake in that city.

I believe that some form of local process needs to be implemented to ensure that initiatives such as the above, which would clearly over-turn well established local, and democratically established, preferences, could be engineered.

NOTE: Keep an eye out for a new movement that will be launched soon in the Wellington Region called "Civil Resilience".

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