By 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.
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.
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.
Click here for the full article.
Source: The Intercept_
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