Letters to the Editor
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Huh?
Serious request: can someone please explain to me what she is saying? So many of her responses seem to start out with "It's very interesting" but then what she subsequently says doesn't seem to reveal anything about disasters and capitalism.
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Its a great article
Just read it in Harpers - wow. Its great stuff.
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for Pedestrian0
"Disaster capitalism": making a profit by exploiting disaster. Naomi Klein's examples are diverse and disparate, but there is a common theme. When people are disoriented or disrupted after a shock, their defenses are down and they don't put up much of a resistance. This offers an opportunity for governments or corporations that want to implement unpopular policies to go ahead and do so with little opposition. In some cases, the shock may have been deliberately applied to enable the policy change. In most cases, the shock is the result of a natural disaster or an external disruption, and the policy change is opportunistic. It could be argued that this is the natural way, the survival of the fittest by tooth and nail. The problem is that so often it is governments acting against their own citizens, corporations acting against their own customers, exploiting a temporary extreme power imbalance to further disrupt the lives of millions.
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Why is it capitalist societies generally do a better job of treating their people than all the others
Don't take my word for it. Ask the French, Germans, Israelis, Argentines, South Koreans, Japanese, the Dutch, the Singaporeans and stack them up against Syria, Cuba, the other Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Angola, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Cuba, Turkmenistan, Mali.
In Iran a few years ago, an 8.0 earthquake killed more than 50,000 people. The reasons were: no building codes, no disaster recovery, no real interest in helping, poor roads, no reserve capacity limited medical care. California has experienced two earthquakes that large in the last 30 years over an area not only more populated but littered with buildings and people extremely densely. Total deaths, <60. In fact the worst natural disasters in the capitalist world typically represent 1% of the fatalities of those in the non capitalist world. 250k dead in the 2004 tsunami, 1 million dead in the 1970 Bangladesh typhoon, 350-500 Chinese miners killed this year alone. And so on.
So where's the disconnect?
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Errors about New Orleans
I live in New Orleans and am attuned to whenever my city is mentioned in the national press. Both of the two times Klein mentions New Orleans is this interview are wrong (at least to my knowledge).
1) She says public housing is being turned into condos. Really? Just today in the front page of the Times-Picayune, there was a story about HUD opening 40 units of the Lafitte projects due to public pressure. At the same time, a few hundred livable units in the city remain unoccupied. Why that is, I'm not quite sure. In any case, I've never heard anything about projects being converted to condos. And that would be big news locally.
2) She criticizes the charter school movement as being a private takeover of public education. The overall sentiment in the city though is that charter schools are giving progressive energy to a failed educational system. I personally think they're a bright spot in the city these days, and they're not after profits from what I can tell. The entrenched system pre-Katrina was corrupt and simply did a horrendous job of educating children. With the charter schools' energy and a new superintendent, there is now hope for schooling in New Orleans.
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Interesting..
The nexus between group psychology and economics is a fascinating topic.
Makes me think of something that Greenspan said in a recent interview.
Something about how he has gotten no better at predicting markets in 20 years of service, and how he believed if he better understood human psychology, he *could* predict better.
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US District Court, Southern NY, Unseals 9/11 Inside Job Case
Dr Morgan Reynolds, the former Chief Economist of the US Dept of Labor, is suing private contractors alleging they defrauded the government by supplying bogus analyses for the official 9/11 NIST Report of an aluminum airplane with a plastic nosecone gliding into a steel/concrete building.
Dr Reynolds is represented by attorney Jerry Leaphart, and is demanding a Trial By Jury.
The US District Court, Southern New York, recently unsealed the case and Mr Leaphart is now notifying the Defendants.
See Dr Reynolds site for info and the Court Document PDF:
http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911&subpage1=federal_case
Dr Judy Wood, a former Professor of Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University, recently filed an appeal with the government for their refusal to retract their report on the World Trade Center destruction. Dr Wood (and Dr Reynolds) have compiled much evidence demonstrating that the WTC was destroyed with directed energy weapons. She has been in contact with government officials and is getting results. See Dr Wood's site for evidence of directed energy weapons and PDFs of official Request for Corrections filed with the government:
http://drjudywood.com
Dr Wood is also represented by Jerry Leaphart.
It's every American's duty to remove corrupt elements in the government.
Please help by distributing the above material to your local media.
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Suing the Corporations for Fraud?
Ok...I have no problem with this...as long as the individuals who were given government prepaid credit cards to survive on are forced to reimburse the government if they defrauded the government as well. As I understand it, some of those people used the cards to go to strip joints, buy booze, buy cigarettes, etc. That was NOT what this money was intended for!
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"defrauded the government"
"as long as the individuals who were given government prepaid credit cards to survive on are forced to reimburse the government if they defrauded the government as well."
We've heard a lot about this over and over again, but we've been presented very little evidence aside from a couple of anecdotes.
And frankly, the idea of giving people who have lost everything cash, and then being surprised when they spend it in ways you find unsuitable, is ridiculous. Man, if I'd lost my home and/or members of my family, you'd better believe I'd want a drink or several.
No one doubts that some of the money given was spent badly (though is it really "fraud" if you get relief money after a disaster and buy a pack of cigarettes?) but this is a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket compared to the billions that have looted by companies working on disasters. Billions of dollars that were given to Halliburton and KBR to fix up NOLA and there's almost no evidence that they actually accomplished anything at all.