Hurricanes,
pandemics, and
droughts are acts of
God. Private
markets in housing,
health care, and
food — and the
resulting deaths —
are not
BY MEAGAN DAY
TOWARD THE END of my rst semester in college, some older student radicals I admired announced they were driving down to New Orleans. Two and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, they were going to protest the demolition of public housing. I was elated when they agreed to let me tag along. I didn’t know much about the political context, but I trusted them.
Our caravan arrived in Louisiana from Ohio late at night, and we settled onto some friendly activists’ couches. In the morning, we reported for duty at a meeting assembled by local organizers and publichousing residents. From there, we deployed to New Orleans’ vacant projects, known as “the Bricks.”
It was only after standing in front of the buildings themselves that I understood the nature of the injustice that had brought us to New Orleans. I’d seen Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, the iconic footage of wooden structures reduced to splinters. But the Bricks didn’t look anything like that. The city, which planned to tear them down, had declared them uninhabitable — but from what I could tell, they were basically unscathed.
New Orleans planned to replace the Bricks with scaled-down, mixed-income, public-private developments, which would be supplemented by an expanded voucher system for private housing. Housing o cials and real-estate developers had discussed this vision for years, and the fact that the Bricks were now vacant — their residents scattered to the winds — provided the perfect opportunity to realize it.
Proponents of this plan said the new housing would be nicer. But, structurally speaking, New Orleans public housing — built by dedicated reformers during the New Deal — was hard to match. According to New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ourosso in 2006:
The city’s public housing projects have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States . . . Solidly built, the buildings’ detailed brickwork, tile roofs and wrought-iron balustrades represent a level of craft more likely found on an Ivy League campus than in a contemporary public housing complex.
Decades of disinvestment and neglect left the Bricks with some wear and tear, but those problems could have been xed with money and attention. The city chose austerity instead. “This is a government-sanctioned
diaspora of New Orleans’ poorest African American citizens,” said Bill Quigley, a lawyer who represented residents in their attempts to legally stop the demolition. “They are destroying perfectly habitable apartments when they are more rare than any time since the Civil War.”
The lawsuit failed. The protests failed, too. The Bricks were torn down. The new housing was erected in their place. Before the storm, the city had seven thousand units of public housing. Ten years later, it had only two thousand units. Public-housing residents were forced out of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, and their homes were razed in their absence. Only a handful of them moved into the new units.
It was all according to plan. Days after the storm, the Wall Street Journal reported that Louisiana Republican congressman Richard Baker had been overheard telling lobbyists in Washington, DC, “We nally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it. But God did.”
The Neoliberal Virus
I SAW HOW, in times of disaster, the powerful will swiftly pursue their preexisting agenda at the expense of those who’ve already lost the most. I also learned another valuable lesson that winter in New Orleans: the forces of pro t are quick to blame the forces of nature.
When the world comes crashing down, it suits the ruling class to allow the public to believe that the primary cause of the collapse was something organic and intractable — God, the weather, natural uctuations in the market, the unique savagery of a virus, the incomprehensible perversity of a foreign culture. Displacing responsibility onto abstractions allows the powerful to evade criticism for creating and maintaining such an unstable state of a airs.
The way the coronavirus pandemic in the United States has been presented is a case in point. COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus that causes fever, fatigue, and a dry cough. In severe cases, it causes respiratory distress. In some cases, it causes death. But the coronavirus can’t accurately be said to have caused the upheaval happening all around us.
A virus can make a person sick enough to need a ventilator — but it can’t create a shortage of ventilators That’s not the result of nature but of medical device companies promising to build them — even signing government contracts and taking public money — then failing to deliver, with zero consequences, leaving executives richer and the public in peril.
The coronavirus didn’t cause our understaffed and under-resourced hospitals — “lean production” in hospital management did that. It didn’t cause an unemployment rate that rivals the Great Depression — the United States’ unwillingness to protect workers’ jobs did that. The coronavirus didn’t cause millions of newly unemployed people to lose their private health insurance during a public health crisis — the United States’ stubborn refusal to implement a single-payer system did that.
What allowed each of these systems to atrophy to the point where they could be knocked over with a feather is the brazenly pro-corporate disposition of American governance, and the successful suppression of a workingclass mass movement that might reverse it.
The mainstream media has so far demonstrated little curiosity about the social and economic processes that have facilitated the virus’s spread. Likewise, the politicians of both parties are hard-pressed to acknowledge the deeper problems that led to this point, nor the protracted crises that presaged this acute one. To the extent that they acknowledge human causes, Democrats restrict blame to the aberrant and inexplicable phenomenon they call Donald Trump, while Trump himself lays it at the feet of the increasingly vili ed Chinese people.
But mostly, our leaders speak in reverential tones of the awesome power of the virus itself, and of the strength of the American spirit in the face of misfortune and calamity. Neoliberalism is the road we traveled to get here, but those who paved it would have us believe we arrived at our present destination by teleportation.
The Black Book of Capitalism
I FIRST WATCHED something like this play out in New Orleans in 2007, where the waters were blamed for the deeds of the wealthy. But it’s much older than that.
In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis recounts the late-nineteenth-century famines that killed tens of millions across the colonized world. Two waves of starvation, from 1876–9 and 1896–1902, left anywhere
between 20 and 50 million people dead in India and China. Given their scale, it’s astonishing how seldom these famines are acknowledged. Their obscurity no doubt owes partly to the notion that famines are inevitable, since they are usually the result of natural events beyond human control — a tragic footnote with no villains and no lessons.
But in countries like India, the origins of the famine at the end of the nineteenth century were directly attributable to British imperial policy. Of course, natural disturbances came first: an El Niño event brought about a monsoon failure. But the unavoidable causes stop there.
Humans had been practicing agriculture in India for more than ten thousand years and had developed systems for responding to variable rainfall. These methods weren’t perfect, but they were important safeguards. They were violently disrupted by the British Empire’s integration of India into the global capitalist order, when, as Davis writes, “the reluctant peasantry was forcibly married to the world market.”
Where previous generations had built irrigation infrastructure to conserve water, the British let it fall
into disrepair. Where grain had previously been grown for consumption, cotton and indigo were now grown for export. Grain itself was then increasingly grown for sale and exported, too, largely to England, depleting India’s grain stores — reserves that had historically been relied on to tide people over in times of crop failure.
When the British began building railroads in India, they bragged that famines would become a thing of the past — grain could simply be imported via rail. But when the starvation began, that’s not what happened. In fact, the railroads were used to take grain out of droughtstricken regions. Grain was now a commodity, subject to hoarding and speculation, and ultimately for sale to the highest bidder. Often, the highest bidder was in a less-famished region of India, or all the way over in London.
Among themselves, British administrators acknowledged that “the famine was one of high prices rather than of scarcity of food,” Davis writes. But this understanding did not prompt them to intervene in grain speculation and export. On the contrary, they were averse to the idea of price controls and other economic interventions. They were devotees of the free market, apostles of Adam Smith, who had written in The Wealth of Nations that “famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth.”
For a time, British authorities did nothing whatsoever as people dropped like ies and wild dogs tore at the corpses of children in the streets. Indeed, so strong was their opposition to price controls or regulation, so steadfast their faith that the market would correct itself in due time, and so enduring their belief that interference would only make matters worse, that the colonial government disciplined those in its ranks who orchestrated relief.
One official did the unthinkable and imported grain, directly providing sustenance. He was accused of “extravagance,” “Fourierism” — as in Charles Fourier, the founder of utopian socialism — and, worst of all, encouraging Indians to believe “it is the duty of the Government to keep them alive.”
So shamed was this o cial that, in order to rehabilitate his reputation, he built labor camps where starving Indians were meant to work in exchange for food, partly in the image of Dickensian English workhouses. But people whose bodies are undergoing a process called “skeletonization” cannot perform physical labor. The relief camps inevitably became extermination camps.
All of this, writes Davis, was a British sacri ce “to their savage god, the Invisible Hand.” They were murdered “by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith” and the other prophets of freemarket capitalism.
Guilty
POWERFUL CAPITALISTS, the free-market ideologues who applaud their dominance, and the political opportunists who cater to their preferences will always join forces to exploit emergencies. From the moment the term “crisis” enters the conversation, they will attempt to muscle through their dream agenda, rationalizing it by pointing to circumstances out of anyone’s control. It only took a few weeks after the United States understood the severity of the coronavirus pandemic for Congress to pass a multitrillion-dollar, no-strings-attached bailout of business, the largest ever in American history.
And the predation doesn’t stop when the crisis is over. Then begins a period of so-called recovery in which in uential actors — usually the same ones responsible for creating the crisis and for pro teering as it unfolded — endeavor to bend society further to their will in the name of reconstruction. Politicians will clear the red tape for their friends in business and call it a public-private partnership to restore society to its former (exaggerated) glory. But as Naomi Klein observed in The Shock Doctrine, “disaster capitalists have no interest in repairing what was,” only in “ nishing the job of the original disaster.” That’s what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and, absent serious opposition, it’s precisely what will happen after this pandemic passes.
The ruling class’s capacity to exploit the aftermath of disaster depends in part on the public’s continued willingness to tolerate their hold on power. Even if the public loses con dence or its patience wears thin, deposing the existing political and economic elite will remain a formidable task. But nothing of the sort can be attempted if people continue to believe that their leaders are trying in good faith to shepherd society through the aftermath of an unavoidable tragedy for which the ruling class itself bears no responsibility.
A virus can infect a human body and cause it to die, as this particular virus has proved in abundance. But it can’t cause the degree of social chaos we’re witnessing today. Systematic collapse of this magnitude is a judgment on that system’s viability. And in the end, no matter how convincingly they plead innocence, it’s also an indictment of those who diligently maintain it. ■
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN O’NEIL
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