Posts Tagged ‘Disaster Capitalism’

There’s Nothing Natural About Puerto Rico’s Disaster

2018-09-22

(The Intercept) – Naomi Klein:

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. 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, writing about four decades earlier, famously called miseria planificada, planned misery. …

theintercept 2018/09/21 disaster-capitalism

Devastation in Puerto Rico