All-American Shock Doctrine

(Photo by Marco Bicca on Unsplash)

While the story of power failure in Texas and the massive failings of the unweathered and deregulated power grid have been and will put the state of Texas on trial, it helps to perhaps remember that, quite obviously, this isn’t the first major disaster of climate change to affect Americans in recent memory. It is important that we tie the disaster of Hurricane Katrina in the last twenty years and the ongoing coronavirus epidemic to highlight how on both on a federal and state level, the United States is not only seeing a failure of infrastructure, and the harbingers of global warming, but also the consequences of capitalism and its marked effects on the wellbeing of us all.

Naomi Klein as part of her book Shock Doctrine highlights the ways in which over the last forty years free marketeers in general and United States capitalists in particular, have worked to enforce their vision of crippling austerity, defunding of state governments, and the overthrow of democracy as part and parcel of a project to “liberalize” the markets of poorer nations. In her own work, Klein remarks about what she sees as the start of that vision coming home to roost in America as she notes how with the disaster of Katrina, the city of New Orleans had nearly every single school in the greater NOLA area converted to charter schools in a stroke that then aging Milton Friedman remarked as an opportunity for market forces to reign free and provide more “choice” to the consumer. Here, Klein specifies, is the means by which capitalists use disasters of the market to, rather than build back social safety nets and reinforce them, use the opportunity of people divided and broken to make more money for auspicious entrepreneurs.

Not only can we look to natural crises to find catastrophic failures of government and capitalism, but we can also examine the crisis of coronavirus in the United States over the last year. Today, as seen with the scandal of Andrew Cuomo and the anti-mask protests in the South, the actions of capitalists and corrupt politicians have also worked to undermine the well-being of Americans to the benefit of the one percent. By failing to take swift action in the early stages of the crisis, failing to mandate mask usage, reducing corporate liability, failing to develop statewide plans for contact tracing, et cetera, states have continuously failed their people. Not only that, but as a consequence, we have seen as a result of these failures a lengthened crisis that has allowed larger companies to profit from the destruction of smaller businesses who in the face of economic contraction were not able to survive the consequential extended reduction in real demand for goods and services. As a result, the entire nation has reeled into itself while abroad China, who was able to make good use of the state to effectively curb the virus, was able to largely recover and now will possibly leapfrog over the US’s dynamo of economic power for having been, for whatever criticisms may be completely deserved of the CCP, far better at managing a crisis than the federal and state governments of the United States.

To conclude, we are seeing in Texas today is something akin to the heritage of Shock Doctrine over the last half-century; the consequences of a Texas government governed by people who do not believe in government as rightly pointed out on the podcast Deconstructed by The Intercept is creating externalities that one could only have anticipated occurring from such a remarkable failure of preparation for the benefit of profiteers. Having taken the reins of government power, the Texas GOP used their overwhelming control of the hands of the state to circumvent national guidelines, fail to insulate their power grid from inclimate weather, and set the state on a pathway that lead directly to what happened last week. Much as the governments brought to power by the US in Latin America worked to put the services of their states on sale, so too did the State of Texas with remarkably unflattering results. We see again in Texas and throughout the United States the failings of the market and the state to promote the general welfare of the American people.