[News] There’s Nothing Natural About Puerto Rico’s Disaster

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-disaster-capitalism/ 



  There’s Nothing Natural About Puerto Rico’s Disaster

Naomi Klein - September 21, 2018
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_I’ve been digging_ into disaster capitalism for a couple of decades 
now. For those of you who are new to the term, disaster capitalism is 
about how the already rich and powerful systematically exploit the pain 
and the trauma of collective shocks — like superstorms or economic 
crisis — in order to build an even more unequal and undemocratic society.

Long before Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico was a textbook example 
<https://theintercept.com/2017/05/09/puerto-ricos-123-billion-bankruptcy-is-the-cost-of-u-s-colonialism/>. 
Before those fierce winds came, the debt — illegitimate and much of it 
illegal — was the excuse used to ram through a brutal program of 
economic suffering, what the great Argentine author Rodolfo Walsh 
<https://www.educ.ar/recursos/129063/carta-abierta-de-rodolfo-walsh-a-la-junta-militar>, 
writing about four decades earlier, famously called /miseria 
planificada/, planned misery.

This program systematically attacked the very glue that holds a society 
together: all levels of education, health care, the electricity and 
water systems, transit systems, communication networks, and more.

It was a plan so widely rejected that no elected representatives could 
be trusted to carry it out. Which is why in 2016 the U.S. Congress 
passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability 
Act, known as PROMESA. That law amounted to a financial coup d’etat that 
put Puerto Rico’s economy directly in the hands of the unelected 
Financial Oversight and Management Board. In Puerto Rico, they call it 
La Junta.

The term fits. As Greece’s former Foreign Minister Yanis Varoufakis puts 
it, governments used to be overthrown with tanks — now it’s with banks.

It was in this context — with every Puerto Rican institution already 
trembling from La Junta’s assaults — that Maria’s ferocious winds came 
roaring through. It was a storm so powerful it would have sent even the 
sturdiest society reeling. But Puerto Rico didn’t just reel. Puerto Rico 
broke.

Not the people of Puerto Rico, but all those systems that had already 
been deliberately brought to the brink: power, health, water, 
communication, food. All those systems collapsed. And let us be clear: 
It was that combination of disaster capitalism and an extraordinary 
hurricane that stole so many precious lives.

A few lives were lost to wind and water, yes, but the vast majority died 
because when you systematically starve and neglect the very bones of a 
society, rendering it dysfunctional on a good day, such a society has 
absolutely no capacity to weather a true crisis.

That is what the research tells us, those studies Donald Trump so 
casually denies: The major causes of death were people being unable to 
plug in medical equipment because the electricity grid was down for 
months; health networks so diminished they were unable to provide 
medicine for treatable diseases. People died because they were left to 
drink contaminated water because of a legacy of environmental racism. 
People died because they were abandoned and left without hope for so 
long that suicide seemed the only option.

Those deaths were not the result of an unprecedented “natural disaster” 
or even “an act of God,” as we so often hear.

Honoring the dead begins with telling the truth. And the truth is that 
there is nothing natural about this disaster. And if you believe in God, 
leave her out of this too.

God isn’t the one who laid off thousands of skilled electrical workers 
in the years before the storm, or who failed to maintain the grid with 
basic repairs. The fatal logic of economic austerity did that. God 
didn’t give vital relief and reconstruction contracts to politically 
connected firms, some of whom didn’t even pretend to do their jobs. God 
didn’t decide that Puerto Rico should import 85 percent of its food — 
this archipelago blessed with some of the most fertile soil in the 
world. God didn’t decide Puerto Rico should get 98 percent of its energy 
from imported fossil fuels — these islands bathed in sun, lashed by 
wind, and surrounded by waves, all of which could provide cheap and 
clean renewable power to spare.

These were decisions made by people working for powerful interests.

Because for 500 uninterrupted years, the role of Puerto Rico and Puerto 
Ricans in the world economy has been to make other people rich, whether 
by extracting cheap labor or cheap resources or by being a captive 
market for imported food and fuel.

A colonial economy by definition is a dependent economy. A centralized 
lopsided and distorted economy. And as we have seen, an intensely 
vulnerable economy.

And it isn’t even right to call the storm itself a “natural disaster.” 
None of these record-breaking storms are natural anymore — Irma and 
Maria, Katrina and Sandy, Haiyan and Harvey, and now Florence and 
Mangkhut, which battered parts of Asia this week.

The reason we are seeing records shattered time after time is that the 
oceans are warmer and the tides are higher. And that’s not God’s fault 
either. It’s the fault of governments protecting the interests of the 
fossil fuel companies and agribusiness giants that pay for their campaigns.

This is the deadly cocktail — not just a storm, but a storm supercharged 
by climate change slamming headlong into a society deliberately weakened 
by a decade of unrelenting austerity layered on top of centuries of 
colonial extraction, with a relief effort overseen by a government that 
makes no effort to disguise its white supremacy.

Maria just blew so hard she tore all the genteel disguises off these 
brutal systems, leaving them stark naked for the world to see. The 
hurricane and FEMA’s endless failures pushed Puerto Rico over the edge. 
But we have to talk about why Puerto Rico was teetering so precariously 
on the precipice in the first place.

We also need to stop talking about incompetence. Because if it were 
incompetence, there would be some effort to fix the underlying failures. 
To rebuild the public sphere, design a more secure food and energy 
system, and stop the carbon pollution that guarantees even more 
ferocious storms in the coming decades.

Yet we have seen the precise opposite. We have seen nothing but more 
disaster capitalism — using the trauma of the storm to push massive cuts 
to education, hundreds of school closures, wave after wave of home 
foreclosures, and the privatization of some of Puerto Rico’s most 
valuable assets.

And just as Trump denies the reality of thousands of Puerto Rican 
deaths, he also denies the reality of climate change. Which his 
administration must do in order to push dozens of toxic policies that 
makes the crisis even worse.

Such is the official  response to this modern-day catastrophe: Do 
everything possible to make sure that it will happen again and again. Do 
everything possible to bring on a future in which climate disasters 
arrive so fast and so furious that even gathering together to mourn the 
dead on painful anniversaries could, for our children, come to seem like 
an unattainable luxury. They will already be in the throes of the next 
emergency, like people in the Carolinas, Kerala, and the Philippines are 
right now.

That is why dozens of Puerto Rican organizations 
<http://juntegente.org/>, under the banner of JunteGente, are standing 
together to demand a different future. Not just a little bit better but 
radically better. Their message is a clear one: that this storm must be 
a wakeup call, a historic catalyst for a just recovery and just 
transition to the next economy. Right now.

That begins with auditing and ultimately erasing an illegal debt, and 
firing La Junta because its very existence is an affront to the most 
basic principles of self-government. Only then will there be the 
political space to redesign the food, energy, housing, and 
transportation systems that failed so many — and replace them with 
institutions that truly serve the Puerto Rican people.

This movement for a just recovery draws on local brilliance and 
protected knowledge to make the most of the richness of the soil, as 
well as the power of the sun and wind.

Today I am reminded of the words of Dalma Cartagena, one of the great 
leaders of Puerto Rico’s agro-ecology movement: “Maria hit us hard. But 
it made our convictions stronger. Made us know the correct path.”

The era of planned misery and deliberately designed dependence is over. 
It’s time to plan for joy and design for liberation. So that when the 
next storm comes — and it will — the winds will roar and the trees will 
bend, but Puerto Rico will show the world that it can never be broken.

/This is an extended version of remarks given September 20 at “One Year 
Since Maria,” a rally in Union Square Park in New York City, organized 
by UPROSE and #OurPowerPRnyc./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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