by Naomi Klein
The Opposite of Decency
Most people are appalled by this kind of crisis exploitation, and with good reason. The shock doctrine is the polar opposite of the way decent people, left to their own devices, tend to respond when they see widespread trauma, which is to offer help. Think of the staggering $3 billion privately donated in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, or the millions offered in response to the 2015 quake in Nepal or the 2004 Asian tsunami. These disasters, like so many others, provoked extraordinary gestures of generosity from individuals around the world. Thousands upon thousands of regular people donated money and volunteered their labor.
As the American historian and writer Rebecca Solnit has so eloquently described, disasters have a way of bringing out the best in us. It is in such moments that we often see some of the most moving displays of mutual aid and solidarity. In Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, despite decades of interethnic civil war, Muslims saved their Hindu neighbors and Hindus saved their Buddhist neighbors. In flooded post-Katrina New Orleans, people put their own lives at great risk to rescue and care for their neighbors. After Superstorm Sandy hit New York, a remarkable network of volunteers fanned out across the city, under the banner of Occupy Sandy—it grew out of the Occupy Wall Street movement—to serve hundreds of thousands of meals, help clear out more than a thousand homes, and provide clothing, blankets, and medical care to thousands of people in need.
The shock doctrine is about overriding these deeply human impulses to help, seeking instead to capitalize on the vulnerability of others in order to maximize wealth and advantage for a select few.
There are few things more sinister than that.
The Art of the Steal
Shock doctrine logic is entirely in keeping with Trump’s view of the world. He unabashedly sees life as a battle for dominance over others—and he keeps obsessive track of who is winning. In his much-self-celebrated negotiations, the questions are always the same: What’s the most that I can get out of this deal? How do I exploit my adversary’s weakness?
In a particularly candid moment on Fox & Friends in 2011, he described a deal he made with former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi like this: “I rented him a piece of land. He paid me more for one night than the land was worth for the whole year, or for two years, and then I didn’t let him use the land. That’s what we should be doing. I don’t want to use the word screwed, but I screwed him. That’s what we should be doing.”
If Trump extracted predatory terms only from despised dictators, few tears would be shed. But this is Trump’s attitude to all negotiations. In Think Big, one of his how-to-be-like-me manuals, he describes his negotiation philosophy this way: “You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win. That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win—not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.”
This cold-blooded enthusiasm for exploiting the weakness of others has shaped Trump’s career as a real estate developer, and it is a trait he shares with many members of his administration. It’s worrying for what it tells us about not only the atmosphere of chaos his team appears to be consciously cultivating but also, far more alarmingly, how they might exploit any larger crises yet to come.
So far, Trump’s unending atmosphere of crisis has been sustained largely through his own over-the-top rhetoric—declaring cities “crime-infested” sites of “carnage” when in fact the violent-crime rate has been declining nationwide for decades; hammering away at a manufactured narrative about an immigrant crime wave; and generally insisting that Obama destroyed the country. Soon enough, however, Trump could well have some crises to exploit that are distinctly more real, since crisis is the logical conclusion of his policies on every front.
Given this, it’s well worth taking a close look at the ways in which Trump and his team have exploited moments of crisis in the past to achieve their economic and political goals. Understanding this track record will make whatever happens next a whole lot less shocking, and will ultimately help us to resist these tired tactics.
A Career Forged in Shock
In the United States, the neoliberal revolution got a head start in New York City in the mid-1970s. Up until this point, the city had been a bold, if imperfect, experiment in social democracy, featuring the most generous public services in the United States, from libraries to mass transit to hospitals. But in 1975, federal and state cutbacks, combined with a national recession, pushed New York to the brink of all-out bankruptcy, and the crisis was seized upon to dramatically remake the city. Under cover of crisis came a wave of brutal austerity, sweetheart deals to the rich, and privatizations—with the end result of turning the city so many of us love into the temple of speculative finance, luxury consumption, and nonstop gentrification that we know today.
In Fear City, a recently published book about this little-understood chapter in America’s past, historian Kim Phillips-Fein meticulously documents how the remaking of New York City in the seventies was a prelude to what would become a global tidal wave, one that has left the world sharply divided between the one percent and the rest—and nowhere more so than in the city Donald Trump calls home. It’s also a story in which Trump plays a starring, if unflattering, role.
In 1975, with no help forthcoming from President Gerald Ford, it looked so likely that the United States’ largest and most storied city would actually go bankrupt that the New York Daily News ran a banner headline that said simply: FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. At the time, Trump was just twenty-nine years old and still working in the shadow of his wealthy father, who had made his fortune building distinctly unflashy middle-class homes in New York’s outer boroughs—and who was notorious as a landlord practicing systemic discrimination against African Americans.
Trump had always dreamed of making his mark in Manhattan, and with the debt crisis he saw his big chance. The opening came in 1976, when the famed Commodore Hotel, a historic midtown landmark, announced that it was losing so much money that it might have to close down. The city government was panicked at the prospect of this iconic building sitting empty, broadcasting a message of urban decay and depriving the city of tax revenue. They needed a buyer, quick, and the mood was sufficiently desperate that, as one local television broadcast put it, “beggars can’t be choosers.”
Enter Trump, proto–disaster capitalist. Partnering with the Hyatt Corporation, Trump had a plan to replace the Commodore’s classic brick facade with “a new skin” of reflective glass, and to reopen it as the Grand Hyatt Hotel (this was in the brief window before the future US president began insisting that all his developments bear his name). He extracted extraordinary terms from a city in crisis. As Phillips-Fein explains:
Trump would be allowed to purchase the property from the railroad for $9.5 million. Then he would sell it for a dollar to the Urban Development Corporation….Finally, the UDC would lease the property back to Trump and the Hyatt Corporation for ninety-nine years, allowing the developers to pay taxes far below the normal rate for four decades—a windfall worth hundreds of millions of dollars. (As of 2016, Trump’s tax break has cost New York City $360 million in uncollected taxes.)
Yes, that’s right: for $9.5 million down, Trump extracted a tax-break windfall for the property worth $360 million (and counting) from the city. The new hotel was a blight—what one architectural critic described as “an out-of-towner’s vision of city life.” In other words, it was vintage Trump, a man who would go on to sell the world on a Russian oligarch’s vision of the United States as filtered through bootleg VHS copies of the eighties soap operas Dynasty and Dallas. In Phillips-Fein’s words:
Donald Trump and the developers who exploited the city’s desperation to build their towers had little interest in the rest of New York. The fact that millions of dollars went to subsidize building projects instead of restoring public services or promoting recovery in the poor and working-class neighborhoods of the city never registered as a moral concern.
What is s
triking about this story is not simply that a young Trump seized on New York’s economic catastrophe to boost his own fortune, extracting predatory terms from a government in crisis. It’s also that this was not just any deal—it was the one that let Trump emerge from his father’s shadow and decisively turned him into a player in his own right. Trump’s career was forged in shock, shaped by the unique opportunities for profit presented by moments of crisis. Right from his breakout moment, his attitude toward the public sphere was that it was there to be pillaged, to enrich himself.
It’s an attitude that has stayed with him ever since. It’s worth remembering that on September 11, 2001, shortly after the Twin Towers came down, Trump gave an interview to a radio station during which he could not help observing that, with the Towers gone, he now had the tallest building in downtown Manhattan. Dead bodies were in the street, lower Manhattan looked like a war zone, and yet, with only a little encouragement from the radio hosts, Trump was thinking about his brand advantage.
When I asked Phillips-Fein what lessons she drew from studying Trump’s actions during New York’s debt crisis, her reply was all about fear. There was, she said, “this deep level of fear about bankruptcy, fear of the future. And it’s that kind of fear that really makes possible the cutbacks of the time, and also the sense that the city needs a savior in the first place.” Since the 2016 election, she has been thinking about this a lot. “The way that fear can make things that seem politically impossible suddenly feel as though they’re the only alternative. And so I think that is one of the things that we need to fight at this moment, and to find ways to resist that sense of overwhelming fear and chaos, and to find forms of solidarity that can counter it.”
It’s good advice. Especially since Trump has assembled around him an all-star cast of crisis opportunists.
Meet the Disaster Capitalism Cabinet
Senior members of Trump’s team have been at the heart of some of the most egregious examples of the shock doctrine in recent memory. What follows is a brief overview of their exploits (which, by nature of just how many Goldman Sachs executives Trump has appointed, is by no means exhaustive).
Profiting from Climate Change and War
Rex Tillerson, US secretary of state, has built his career in large part around taking advantage of the profitability of war and instability. ExxonMobil profited more than any oil major from the increase in the price of oil that was the result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It also directly exploited the Iraq War to defy State Department advice and make an exploration deal in Iraqi Kurdistan, a move that, because it sidelined Iraq’s central government, could well have sparked a full-blown civil war, and certainly did contribute to internal conflict.
As CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson profited from disaster in other ways as well. As we have already seen, as an executive at the fossil fuel giant, he spent his career working for a company that, despite its own scientists’ research into the reality of human-caused climate change, decided to fund and spread misinformation and junk climate science. All the while, according to an LA Times investigation, ExxonMobil (both before and after those two companies merged) worked diligently to figure out how to further profit from and protect itself against the very crisis on which it was casting doubt. It did so by exploring drilling in the Arctic (which was melting, thanks to climate change), redesigning a natural gas pipeline in the North Sea to accommodate rising sea levels and supercharged storms, and doing the same for a new rig off the coast of Nova Scotia.
At a public event in 2012, Tillerson acknowledged that climate change was happening—but what he said next was revealing: “as a species,” humans have always adapted. “So we will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that.”
He’s quite right: humans do adapt when their land ceases to produce food. The way humans adapt is by moving. They leave their homes and look for places to live where they can feed themselves and their families. But, as Tillerson well knows, we do not live at a time when countries gladly open their borders to hungry and desperate people. In fact, he now works for a president who has painted refugees from Syria—a country where drought was an accelerant of the tensions that led to civil war—as Trojan horses for terrorism. A president who introduced a travel ban that, if it had not been blocked by the courts, would have barred Syrian migrants from entering the United States. A president who has said about Syrian children seeking asylum, “I can look in their faces and say ‘You can’t come.’ ” A president who has not budged from that position even after he ordered missile strikes on Syria, supposedly moved by the horrifying impacts of a chemical weapon attack on Syrian children and “beautiful babies.” (But not moved enough to welcome them and their parents.) A president who has announced plans to turn the tracking, surveillance, incarceration, and deportation of immigrants into a defining feature of his administration.
Waiting in the wings, biding their time, are plenty of other members of the Trump team who have deep skills in profiting from all of that.
Profiting from Prisons
Between election day and the end of Trump’s first month in office, the stocks of the two largest private prison companies in the USA, CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America) and the GEO Group, doubled, soaring by 140 percent and 98 percent, respectively.
And why not? Just as Exxon learned to profit from climate change, these companies are part of the sprawling industry of private prisons, private security, and private surveillance that sees wars and migration—both very often linked to climate stresses—as exciting and expanding market opportunities. In the United States, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) incarcerates up to thirty-four thousand immigrants thought to be in the country illegally on any given day, and 73 percent of them are held in private prisons. Little wonder, then, that these companies’ stocks soared on Trump’s election. And soon they had even more reasons to celebrate: one of the first things Jeff Sessions did as Trump’s attorney general was rescind the Obama administration’s decision to move away from for-profit jails for the general prison population.
Profiting from War and Surveillance
Trump appointed as deputy defense secretary Patrick Shanahan, a top executive at Boeing who, at one point, was responsible for selling costly hardware to the US military, including Apache and Chinook helicopters. He also oversaw Boeing’s ballistic missile defense program—a part of the operation that stands to profit enormously if international tensions continue to escalate under Trump.
And this is part of a much larger trend. As Lee Fang reported in the Intercept in March 2017, “President Donald Trump has weaponized the revolving door by appointing defense contractors and lobbyists to key government positions as he seeks to rapidly expand the military budget and homeland security programs….At least 15 officials with financial ties to defense contractors have been either nominated or appointed so far.”
The revolving door is nothing new, of course. Retired military brass reliably take up jobs and contracts with weapons companies. What’s new is the number of generals with lucrative ties to military contractors whom Trump has appointed to cabinet posts with the power to allocate funds—including those stemming from his plan to increase spending on the military, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security by more than $80 billion in just one year.
The other thing that has changed is the size of the Homeland Security and surveillance industry. This sector grew exponentially after the September 11 attacks, when the Bush administration announced it was embarking on a never-ending “war on terror” and that everything that could be outsourced would be. New firms with tinted windows sprouted up like malevolent mushrooms around suburban Virginia, outside Washington, DC, and existing ones, like Booz Allen Hamilton, expanded into brand-new territories. Writing in Slate in 2005, Daniel Gross captured the mood of what many called the security bubble: “Homeland security may have just reached the stage that Internet investing hit in 1
997. Back then, all you needed to do was put an ‘e’ in front of your company name and your IPO would rocket. Now you can do the same with ‘fortress.’ ”
That means many of Trump’s appointees come from firms that specialize in functions which, not so long ago, it would have been unthinkable to outsource. His National Security Council chief of staff, for instance, is retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg. Among the many jobs Kellogg has had with security contractors since going private was one with Cubic Defense. According to the company, he led “our ground combat training business and focus on expanding the company’s worldwide customer base.” If you think “combat training” is something armies used to do all on their own, you’d be right.
One noticeable thing about Trump’s contractor appointees is how many of them come from firms that did not even exist before 9/11: L1 Identity Solutions (specializing in biometrics), the Chertoff Group (founded by Bush’s Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff), Palantir Technologies (a surveillance/big data firm cofounded by PayPal billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel), and many more. Security firms draw heavily on the military and intelligence wings of government for their staffing. Under Trump, a remarkable number of lobbyists and staffers from these firms are now migrating back to government, where they will very likely push for even more opportunities to monetize the hunt for people President Trump likes to call “bad hombres.”