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Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe, by Antony Loewenstein
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Crisis? What crisis? How powerful corporations make a killing out of disaster
Award-winning journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across the US, Britain, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea and Australia to witness the reality of Disaster Capitalism—the hidden world of privatized detention centers and militarized private security, formed to protect corporations as they profit from war zones. He visits Britain’s immigration detention centers, tours the prison system in the United States, and digs into the underbelly of the companies making a fortune from them. Loewenstein reveals the dark history of how large multinational corporations have become more powerful than governments, supported by media and political elites.
- Sales Rank: #900817 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-15
- Released on: 2015-09-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.43" w x 6.39" l, 1.55 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 384 pages
Review
“The forces of disaster capitalism are increasingly on the defensive, but their attacks on the global commons have expanded in the years since I wrote The Shock Doctrine. I am very grateful that Antony Loewenstein has brought his meticulous reporting to this subject, and the result is a keenly observed and timely investigation into rampant resource plunder, privatized detention centers, and an array of other forms of corporate rapacity on four continents. This book will serve as a potent weapon for shock resistors around the world.”
—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine
“Chilling study, based on careful and courageous reporting, and illuminated with perceptive analysis, helps us understand all too well the saying that man is a wolf to man.”
—Noam Chomsky
“A journey into a world of mutated economics and corrupt politics that we ignore at our peril.”
—John Pilger
“A devastating, incisive follow-up to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.”
—Jeremy Scahill
“Our economic system now depends upon transforming emergency relief, incarceration and the processing of asylum seekers into profits … [an] unnerving and convincing book.”
—Owen Hatherley, Guardian
“Antony Loewenstein offers us a superb description of the diminishing power of national governments and international organisations to exercise power in the modern world.”
—Robert J. Burrowes, Lahore Times
About the Author
Antony Loewenstein is an independent Australian journalist, documentary maker and blogger who has written for the BBC, the Nation and the Washington Post. He’s a weekly Guardian columnist and the author of three best-selling books, My Israel Question, The Blogging Revolution and Profits of Doom: How Vulture Capitalism is Swallowing the World. He is co-editor of After Zionism and Left Turn and co-writer of For God’s Sake. His books have been translated, and his journalism has been a finalist in many global awards. He’s currently working on a documentary about disaster capitalism.
Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Disaster capitalism
By Clare O'Beara
This book written by a travelling journalist sheds light on some of the highly profitable involvements of big business with disasters, wars and prisons.
First the Australian author explains that Disaster Capitalism is a term coined by Canadian journalist Naomi Klein. He tells us that the wealthiest one percent of the world's population owns 46% of the world's assets. I've checked with Oxfam International and their report, Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More, clearly states that a tiny global elite is cornering the world's money and resources. Oxfam adds that by 2016 they expect the balance to be tipped in favour of the elite ownership by just 85 billionaires.
We see in Afghanistan, on the author's visits, that massive private security firms provide escorts for visitors, hiring a mix of former soldiers and locals. Fine, except that clearly, continued turbulence is in their interests. Mineral rights are being bought up by outside countries for when the area is stable.
Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake in 2010 - the author visited in 2012 and 2014 and says rubble, abandoned buildings, broken sewers and more are still visible. He claims that in keeping with a wry telegram from the US Ambassador released by Wikileaks, 'the gold rush is on', outside firms were swift to arrive and sell their services, soaking up almost all of the outside aid money. Cheap garment factories in an almost unoccupied industrial estate are, says Loewenstein, there to exploit cheap labour, not to make the island self-sufficient.
We also see Greece, creaking under the strain of arriving migrants from Africa and Asia, while having been forced to sell off public assets to meet its debts. The endemic corruption which meant that some people made merry on EU funding for years had also meant that huge firms were not paying much tax. The author meets a paunchy, splendidly housed leader of a rising party with Fascist sympathies. He also meets householders unable to feed families and doctors with no medical supplies to dispense.
The second part of the book deals mainly with the prison systems in Australia, the UK and the US. Some prisons are privatised and the companies can profit from the labour of the prisoners, sewing Kevlar jackets and so on. Loewenstein claims that it is not in the interests of the prisons to release offenders or to rehabilitate them and this has contributed in the US, to a racial tilt in favour of jailing minority offenders for life. In general, after two serious crimes and prison sentences there, a third crime of any sort means life in jail. He claims that people have thus been imprisoned for life for stealing a chocolate bar. Still, if people have not learned their lesson after two jail terms society feels safer by locking them away from ordinary people.
I like that we also get an interview with a resident of a town next to a large prison, who did not find that prospects were good for employment. I've heard that elsewhere it has been hard to get businesses to invest in a town with a big prison, and it's not a touristic option. While the economic situations regarding bank collapses and disasters are well presented, as always the ordinary reader learns a lot from personal interviews such as those Loewenstein salts through the book.
This is largely good journalism, maybe a little biased towards one view, but showing a wide picture. Other journalists are cited, such as Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and John Pilger. I was critical of the way the 'gold rush' cable above was portrayed - as though the ambassador was seen capering and rubbing his hands. We have no knowledge of this and the diplomat may have been using a wry phrase in a weary, ironic tone. In general I would recommend DISASTER CAPITALISM to help understand our globalised world. At the end we are reminded that people power, through votes, candidates, purchases and social media, may bring about positive change. Let's do it.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Corporations Preying on Some of the World's Most Vulnerable
By Chris
This book is by Anthony Lowenstein, an Australian blogger and journalist. In it, he explores examples of the privatization of government services, primarily in the area of disaster relief and undocumented immigrants (or asylum seekers as they are called in Europe and Australia). The examples take place in Afghanistan, Australia, Greece, Papua New Guinea, Great Britain and the United States.
The third chapter is on the so-called reconstruction effort in post-earthquake Haiti. Lowenstein shows how a number of American businesses renowned for overcharging US taxpayers and performing shoddy work were given reconstruction contracts by the US government in spite of their reputation. One such business was the non-profit Clinton foundation, which, according to Lowenstein’s reading of a Nation Magazine investigation, provided makeshift trailers for shelter and classrooms that were of shoddy construction and contained high levels of formaldehyde. The company making these trailers was sued by the US government for providing poor quality trailers after Hurricane Katrina.
While cases of corruption and shady business probates are abundant in post-earthquake Haiti (Wyclef Jean’s charity being a prominent example), the deeper point from Lowenstein’s account is that the reconstruction effort has reinforced the economic exploitation and political powerlessness of ordinary Haitians. The US has always helped to reinforce the misery of Haitians, for example supporting the Duvaliers and undermining Jean Bertrand Aristide’s very modest reforms efforts. Lowenstein refers to the fact that in return for allowing Aristide to resume Haiti’s presidency in 1994, Bill Clinton secured from Aristide the ending of restrictions on the entry of heavily government subsidized US rice into the Haiti. This act devastated Haiti’s domestic rice farmers and the country became a net importer of rice for the first time in its history. Currently Haiti’s president is Michel Martelly, whose regime, writes Lowenstein, has been “mired in scandal, with many of his closest advisors accused of drug running, kidnapping and murder.”
Though after his appointment as Haiti’s reconstruction czar Bill Clinton professed to be very sorry about his actions vis a vis Haiti’s rice farmers, the reconstruction aid effort has done little to build up Haiti’s indigenous economy. US government funds have flowed into contractors whose actions have reinforced Haiti’s impoverishment. USAID has heavily touted the Carocol industrial park which, in 2012, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton claimed would produce 130,000 jobs. It has produced jobs though far less than that predicted by Clinton. According to Lowenstein, sweatshop workers at the park are paid $4 per day, less than Haiti’s official $5 per day minimum wage.
Lowenstein writes that various corporate predators, long experienced in destroying ecosystems and abusing workers throughout the third world, are lustily eying abundant untapped mineral deposits in Haiti.
Lowenstein devotes a chapter to the Bougainville region of Papua New Guinea (PNG). The secessionist movement in Bougainville in the 1980’s centered on opposition to the presence of Rio Tinto’s Paguna mine, which severely toxified the surrounding eco-system. The insurgency against PNG’s central government of the late 80’s and 90’s managed to close the mine down but economic activity in the region is relatively scare and there is severe poverty all around. Bougainville is supposed to have a referendum on independence within the next few years and it has been argued that the mine should be reopened because the region needs the revenue from it were it to become an independent country. Many locals are hostile, remembering the toxic sickness and ruined landscape the mine’s previous run left in its wake. Others seemed to have warmed to the idea.
The book’s last chapters concentrate on the terrible conditions faced by undocumented immigrants in Great Britain, the US and Australia who are incarcerated in detention facilities run by private contractors. Lowenstein’s chapters on the US and UK also contain a little about private prisons. From Lowenstein’s account, it appears there is no shortage of cases of private prison contractors defrauding the government, allowing its employees to sexually abuse detainees, physically abuse and utter racist invective at them, compel them to live in harsh conditions without access to adequate medical care and so on. Prison and detention center privatization may not save taxpayers money and in notable cases may be much costlier but it lines the pockets of the campaign contributors of politicians, including the state legislators who pushed the Arizona immigration law of 2010. According to Lowenstein, the Corrections Corporation of America helped draft that law. Private US contractors operating detention centers have also had their pockets lined by a little known 2007 congressional law which requires the nation’s immigration authorities to fill 34,000 beds at detention facilities every night. According to Lowenstein, many innocent legal immigrants as well as undocumented immigrants guilty of very minor infractions have been caught up in the quest to fill the nightly 34,000 quota. Lowenstein quotes a 2014 New York Times report about Obama’s record-breaking immigrant deportations, something about which, of course, his right wing critics will never give the President credit for. According to The Times, Two thirds of those deported were guilty of minor infractions like traffic tickets “or no crime at all."
Prisons and immigrant detention centers, of course, are not the only areas targeted for privatization. All public services are being eyed. In the UK, where poverty has substantially deepened since the Thatcher years, David Cameron’s government has been particularly interested in furthering private contractor involvement in the National Health Service (NHS). Lowenstein notes that in 2015, the government was forced to fire the contractor that ran the country’s one fully private NHS hospital on the ground that it had problems like poor hygiene.
A great merit of the book is the author’s prose style. It is crisp and describes vividly the persons he interviews and the physical and human landscape of the countries he visits.
A look at the author’s endnotes shows that he relies on mainstream news sources in all the countries he profiles, with some non-mainstream sources like Commondreams.org thrown in. He also conducts many interviews, not just with victims but with persons on the other side of the issue.
One interesting source he uses is Paige Miller of the Australian newspaper. As Lowenstein notes in an endnote, the Australian newspaper is a Rupert Murdoch publication and has reflected the widespread hysteria in Australia about undocumented immigrants. the paper’s editors have allowed Miller to provide a viewpoint contrary to that hysteria.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By JR
A very sobering read.
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