Well just bugger me with a tuning fork: I thought the B/S surrounding the “rebuilding” of the Gulf Coast in general, and New Orleans in particular, was just the Moron-In-Charge and the Corporate Capitalists’ way of having things their way down here. Sadly, I see that the Prophet, the architect of this insanity down here is Milton Friedman, the creator of the Chicago School of Capitalism.
Here’s some snippets from the Guardian UK in their extract of Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”. (Read the whole thing please.)
“One of those who saw opportunity in the floodwaters of New Orleans was the late Milton Friedman, grand guru of unfettered capitalism and credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper-mobile global economy. Ninety-three years old and in failing health, “Uncle Miltie”, as he was known to his followers, found the strength to write an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal three months after the levees broke. “Most New Orleans schools are in ruins,” Friedman observed, “as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity.”
And:
“In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as “the shock doctrine”. He observed that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the “tyranny of the status quo”. A variation on Machiavelli’s advice that “injuries” should be inflicted “all at once”, this is one of Friedman’s most lasting legacies.”
And:
“Most people who survive a disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed. “When I rebuild the city I feel like I’m rebuilding myself,” said Cassandra Andrews, a resident of New Orleans’ heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward, as she cleared away debris after the storm. But disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what once was. In Iraq, Sri Lanka and New Orleans, the process deceptively called “reconstruction” began with finishing the job of the original disaster by erasing what was left of the public sphere.”
I’ve always been a Keynesian type of spirit: a Free Market with checks and balances on certain activities that affected the whole of Society. I never saw this one coming, but thanks to Ms Klein, mine eyes have been opened to Reality. That economic forces would be so brutal to an old culture just to play out their games, to justify their philosophy. My heart hurts, and mainly it hurts because we here in New Orleans may just lose this battle and become as banal a place as almost every other locality in the country is.
“This desire for godlike powers of creation is precisely why free-market ideologues are so drawn to crises and disasters. Non-apocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to their ambitions. For 35 years, what has animated Friedman’s counter-revolution is an attraction to a kind of freedom available only in times of cataclysmic change – when people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way – moments when democracy seems a practical impossibility. Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture – a flood, a war, a terrorist attack – can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.”
Sorry you “Creators”, I don’t wish to be a part of your freakin’ experiment. I want our City back.
Fuck you Chicago School capitalism. Fuck you to the Nth degree. I don’t desire your kind of “purity”.
