Horner's Corner

Haiti Watch: Disaster Capitalism Headed to Haiti

by on Jan.18, 2010, under economics, places, politics

In her book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein explores the myth of free market democracy, explaining how neoliberalism dominates the world with America its main exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere.

As a result, wars are waged, social services cut, public ones privatized, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or in duress to object. Disaster capitalism is triumphant everywhere from post-Soviet Russia to post-apartheid South Africa, occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Honduras before and after the US-instigated coup, post-tsunami Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia, New Orleans post-Katrina, and now heading to Haiti full-throttle after its greatest ever catastrophe. The same scheme always repeats, exploiting people for profits, the prevailing neoliberal idea that “there is no alternative” so grab all you can.

More via Haiti Watch.

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3 Comments for this entry

  • Thomas Kelly
    January 18th, 2010 on 7:11 pm

    What I like the least is the idea of political recriminations being bounded around before the dead have even been buried. Act now; talk later.

  • Chris
    Chris
    January 18th, 2010 on 7:27 pm

    It’s hard to know how to answer that, briefly, as the assumption seems to be that articles of the kind that I’ve posted are mere political point scoring. Trouble is, the IMF etc are moving in now, to make a terrible situation even worse. I think tht what is truly damaging is (a) to not think politically, whewe ‘politically’ means taking into account the ways in whch people are acting to affect people’s lives long term and (b) not to think historically. It’s that sort of failure that keeps the problems alive – we don’t want to depart from our assumptions about 3rd world basket cases etc. We have aresponsibility to these people that goes beyond charity. That’s politics.

  • Luis Lazaro Tijerina
    January 19th, 2010 on 10:37 pm

    Toussaint L’ ouverture Still Here
    in Haiti after the Quake

    Toussaint L’ ouverture still lives
    in the heart of Port-au-Prince,
    where the thousands of dead now lie covered with plastic sheets or bloodied bags.
    The Black Liberator is here
    all across this beautiful island,
    at Pétionville, the National penitentiary, among shattered houses
    on Delmas road, near the Karibe Hotel where tourists
    and Haitian workers perished regardless
    of class, all of them destroyed in an outpost
    where the crossroads of commerce and insurrection meet…
    Toussaint L’ ouverture with his slave fighters
    at Hotel Villa Créole, where doctors treated
    the first wounded at the opened gates,
    Toussaint L’ ouverture has not abandoned Haiti
    even as the gentle hillsides are scraped bare of its shanty houses, even as they tumble
    down into the dark ravines,
    Toussaint L’ ouverture is among the Haitians,
    A great torch of Liberation
    among the catastrophe—schools collapsed with orphaned children,
    hospitals gone, the infirmed tossed among the broken
    telephone lines and x-ray machines, the National Palace now
    a mass of white, concrete debris…
    Toussaint L’ ouverture with his revolutionary troopsmarch like silent ghosts among the greatness and poverty that is Haiti.
    There is no calm among the enclave in the hills
    above Port-au-Prince,
    where peacekeepers lie dead near Christopher Hotel.
    There and everywhere you can see
    Toussaint L’ ouverture, his proud black face
    etched with grief.

    Luis Lázaro Tijerina
    Burlington, Vermont, 2010

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