LoD
Cecile Robin tosses a wreath in the water during a memorial for victims of
Hurricane Katrina
at Shell Beach, Louisiana. (Getty Images/AFP: Chris Graythen)
Disaster Capitalism, Philanthropy & Democracy -- Realities
President Bush was blamed by many for his market response to Hurricane Katrina in early autumn 2005, but only in an advanced market society already privileging private philanthropy and market voucher programs would his preference for religious philanthropy and housing voucher approaches have any legitimacy at all in responding to a public disaster on this scale. The market had already played a role in weakening New Orleans's defenses against category five hurricanes: wetlands that once protected the city had been carved up and overdeveloped, safety standards for levees had been pushed aside as too expensive or circumvented by corruption, and the city itself had followed a path of urban development in which the safest land had been secured for commercial development while the lowest-lying, least protected districts (like the Ninth Ward) had been left to the poor (those least likely to be able to flee a hurricane).
Philanthropy is a form of private capital aimed at achieving public outcomes, but it cannot substitute for public resources and public will in confronting public calamities. In the admirable private efforts of superwealthy American stars such as Oprah and Bill Gates to render assistance to the poor in New Orleans, there is also something dismaying. First a privatizing ideology rationalizes restricting public goods and public assets pf the kind that might allow the public as a whole to rescue them from their distress their fellow citizens who are in jeopardy; then the same privatizing ideology celebrates the wealthy philanthropists made possible by the market's inequities who earnestly step in to spend some fragment of their market fortunes to do what the public can no longer do for itself. Better philanthropy than nothing, but far better than philanthropy is a democratic public capable of taking care of itself with its own pooled resources and its own prudent planning. The private philanthropist does for others in the larger public what they have not been able to do for themselves as a public; democracy on the other hand empowers the public to take care of itself.
Benjamin R. Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole 151 (2007).
One should also consider at this time that the unique examples of incompetence or cronyism of the Bushites, mentioned here, are not the driving forces that lead to those monstrous outcomes that we have seen in New Orleans. As compellingly described by Naomi Klein in her widely acclaimed book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism 19 (September 2007), "Bush exploits merely represent the monstrously violent and creative culmination of a fifty-year campaign for total corporate liberation." Examples of incompetence or cronyism of the Bushites, are not adequate explanations of themselves, Disaster Capitalism is designed for corporate liberation, according to the account offered by Ms. Klein, through deliberate shock and disintegration of the global civilization, and through the malevolent destruction of democracy. Wherever the opportunities present themselves to enlist social disintegration as a tool to remake society for corporate liberation -- there you will find Disaster Capitalism doing its work.
Democrats may also learn that the logic of Disaster Capitalism also works in reverse. Wherever the disintegration of decadent capitalist structures appears such as those on the horizon -- the mortgage meltdown, the foreign debt meltdown, the next stock market meltdown, etc,. -- there one may discover spectacular new opportunities to put capitalist organizations in their proper place as servants of the people, while constructing essential support for democratic institutions, and their necessary norms and networks that can lead to genuine betterment of the whole field of caapital resources that we can call OmniCapital.