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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-disaster-capitalism/">https://theintercept.com/2018/09/21/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-disaster-capitalism/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">There’s Nothing Natural About Puerto
Rico’s Disaster</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Naomi Klein - September 21,
2018</div>
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<p><u>I’ve been digging</u> 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.</p>
<p>Long before Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico was a <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2017/05/09/puerto-ricos-123-billion-bankruptcy-is-the-cost-of-u-s-colonialism/">textbook
example</a>. 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 <a
href="https://www.educ.ar/recursos/129063/carta-abierta-de-rodolfo-walsh-a-la-junta-militar">Rodolfo
Walsh</a>, writing about four decades earlier,
famously called <em>miseria planificada</em>, planned
misery.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Those deaths were not the result of an unprecedented
“natural disaster” or even “an act of God,” as we so
often hear.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>These were decisions made by people working for
powerful interests.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A colonial economy by definition is a dependent
economy. A centralized lopsided and distorted economy.
And as we have seen, an intensely vulnerable economy.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>That is why dozens of Puerto Rican <a
href="http://juntegente.org/">organizations</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>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.</em></p>
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