Disaster Capitalism and the Environment

This is a quick and dirty version of a talk I am giving tomorrow.

What is missing from these news report quotes?

• “Action on climate change is cheaper than inaction”
• “Despite knowing about biodiversity’s importance for a long time, human activity has been causing massive extinctions”
• “… notion of “climate justice” … typically ignored by many rich nations and their mainstream media…”

CLASS ANALYSIS IS WHAT’S MISSING!!!!

These are typical liberal statements about environmental politics that ignore or downplay the role of social class inequality and structured power in creating our environmental disaster.

Global environmental disaster sounds biblical, but it’s not mythic, it’s real.

Fossil-fuel driven capitalism has already enormously compounded extinction, death, disease, and other suffering all over the earth.

Major 2009 Global Humanitarian Forum report: estimated that climate change accounted for over 300,000 deaths throughout the world each year

Major 2017 report by mainstream authoritative health journal: health of millions across world already significantly harmed by climate change

• number of undernourished in 30 most undernourished countries increased from 398 million in 1990 to 422 million in 2016 at least in part driven by climate on change of yields of staple crops

Having trouble breathing? Here is a prescient writer for you:

• “In Victorian times… [for] fashionable health resorts, some cynical entrepreneurs produced bottled air with the name of the health Spa… to be released in the bedrooms of the credulous wealthy… Today, if capital could corner the planet’s atmosphere and thus deprive the individuals of… breathing, it would certainly devise a global bottling plant and ration the produce… with total authoritarianism, thereby prolonging its own lifespan indefinitely” (Meszaros 1995:174).

What does disaster capitalism have to do with the environmental problem? Here are a couple of fun quotes:

• “Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement. We want… to be able to exploit the environment for private gain absolutely”

— Ron Arnold, founder of Wise Use, an anti-regulatory group, a member of which was George W. Bush’s Dept. of Interior head.

• “For us, the fear and disorder offered real promise.”

— The thirty-four-year-old ex-CIA operative Mike Battles talking about how chaos in post-invasion Iraq had helped his private security firm, Custer Battles, to get roughly $100 million in contracts from U.S. government

Disaster capitalism =

• Orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events
• Treatment of disasters (war, hurricanes, earthquakes…) as exciting market opportunities
• Some of the most infamous human rights violations of last 4 decades, sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes, were committed to terrorize the public or to introduce radical free-market “reforms.”

Disaster capitalism examples

• Argentina

— Junta’s “disappearance” of thirty thousand people, most of them leftist activists, was integral to the imposition of privatization and more inequality

• Hurricane Katrina

— Instead of spending reconstruction money on rebuilding and improving New Orleans public school system, the government should subsidize private schools, many run at a profit.

• Iraq

— 2007 law adopted by Iraq’s cabinet: no limits on profits foreign companies can take from the country, excluded Iraq’s parliament from any say in the terms for future oil contracts…

Disaster capitalists kill for their cause

I worked in 1980 at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-leaning progressive think tank. Four years prior, a hero fighter for truth was killed while working with IPS:

• 1976 Washington, D.C.: Orlando Letelier published article arguing that Milton Friedman, “the intellectual architect… for… economists… running… Chilean economy,” shared responsibility for Pinochet’s crimes
• September 21, was driving to work in downtown Washington, D.C. Remote-controlled bomb planted under driver’s seat exploded, sending the car flying and blowing off both his legs.
• FBI investigation: Bomb planted by Michael Townley, senior member of Pinochet’s secret police. The assassins were admitted to the country on false passports with CIA knowledge.

In conclusion: What is to be done?

“… without a radical restructuring of every single domain and dimension of the established reproductive order… the new kinds of perverse necessities created by the alienated needs of [capital]… cannot be overcome” (Meszaros 1995:184).

We need to do this fight private power to get to eco-justice through democratic socialism.

‘nuf said.

References

Anon. 2009. “Climate Change Killing 300,000 People a Year.” Climate & Capitalism. Retrieved November 7, 2017 (http://climateandcapitalism.com/2009/05/29/climate-change-killing-300000-people-a-year/).

Anon. 2017. “Lancet Report: Health Impact of Climate Change Impact Is ‘the Major Threat of 21st Century.’” Climate & Capitalism. Retrieved November 7, 2017 (http://climateandcapitalism.com/2017/10/31/lancet-report-health-impact-of-climate-change-impact-is-the-major-threat-of-21st-century/).

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books.

Meszaros, Istvan. 1995. Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition. New York: Monthly Review Press.