10-04-05, 8:55 am
In recent years, a new and deeply disturbing economic trend has become apparent in the United States, the birth of what Naomi Klein calls 'disaster capitalism.' Disaster capitalism is basically an industry that has arisen which generates revenue by finding ways to capitalize off of human tragedies such as medical pandemics, war, and natural catastrophes. Whether it is Halliburton receiving no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq after the United States military had demolished the country’s infrastructure, or American pharmaceutical corporations making billions of dollars on medical pandemics, some of the most powerful corporations in the world are those which profit at the expense of the victims of catastrophes.
The rise of disaster capitalism is extremely disturbing for a simple reason: if a private company makes its income by selling services to the victims of tragedies, it will have an economic interest in the increase in frequency of tragic occurrences, and may use its exorbitant political and economic power to promote policies which will make disaster more likely. So, for instance, the companies that produce the medicine that can combat the world’s most horrible diseases and save millions of lives actually have an economic interest in perpetuating the existence of these very same diseases! If scientists were to discover a cure for a major global disease—AIDS for example—the pharmaceutical industry would suffer losses of billions upon billions of dollars, as they would no longer be able to force to world’s poor to pay monopoly prices for life-saving medicine. This may be part of the reason that developed countries devote such a small portion of their budget to disease research: it is actually against the interest of the wealthy class for major diseases which primarily affect the poor to be cured!
Similarly, the ominous rise of disaster capitalism will affect the foreign policy of corporate-dominated first-world governments such as that of the United States. While first world governments may have been neutral in the past towards some cases of genocide, civil war, and instability in economically insignificant parts of the undeveloped world, these governments may begin to take proactive stances in favor of unrest and violence as corporations in the disaster industry become more powerful. Violence—even violence in economically and strategically insignificant parts of the world—is extremely profitable for certain powerful industries—particularly the armaments industry, which ranks alongside the oil industry as the most politically and economically powerful in the world—but also increasingly for the reconstruction industry, which earns billions of dollars at the expense international organizations and national governments rebuilding war-torn countries. This is compounded with the fact that in general, all capitalist industries and the imperialist governments that they control have a stake in the perpetuation of instability in undeveloped countries, as stability tends to lead to democratization, and democratization will inevitably lead to an increased challenge to foreign domination of the domestic economy and domestic resources. If first-world governments are apathetic towards atrocities in places of economic insignificance today, it is frightening to image what sort of policies they might adopt if the disaster-relief industry grows economically and politically stronger.
Disaster capitalists may also use their political force to change the way domestic natural catastrophes are dealt with, and indeed, if government reaction to Hurricane Katrina is any indication, they may have already started. Rather than effectively prepare to defend New Orleans against the inevitable devastation that a powerful hurricane would wreck, the United States government cut $71.2 million dollars from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers and spent the money on the invasion of Iraq instead. After the hurricane did come, and after it had destroyed much of the city and thousands of its poorer residents who had been abandoned by the state, Halliburton, Bechtel, and other disaster capitalists descended on the city to fulfill no-bid reconstruction contracts—in effect, forcing America’s poor to subsidize the richest. This is the nature of disaster capitalism: instead of taking practical steps to prevent the deaths of thousands of people, disaster capitalists seeks profit and only profit.
We have to stop corporations from profiting off of our tragedies—now—lest we reach a point where corporations can literally force tragedies upon us and then charge us for the service of providing relief to the survivors of the catastrophe. All forms of disaster relief should be taken out of the private sector and placed back into the public sector. Conceivably, a non-profit, democratic global institution—perhaps even a democratized body of the United Nations—could be responsible for providing all relief goods and services to all disaster zones world wide. Such an institution would be far more effective than the private sector in dealing with medical pandemics and natural disasters, as it would not be more concerned with making a profit than with saving and improving the lives of disaster victims. It is time that we act to put a stop to this new malignant form of capitalism.
