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disaster capitalism
Critics Ask If Trump and Musk Are 'Intentionally Crashing the Economy'
"If you think back at the last economic crashes... the rich were able to buy up assets on the cheap and emerged even wealthier and more powerful than before," noted one progressive commentator.
Mar 05, 2025
Are U.S. President Donald Trump, top adviser Elon Musk, and allied oligarchs deliberately trying to tank the economy in order to line their own gilded pockets?
More and more observers from both sides of the political aisle are asking the question this week as the U.S. president implemented steep tariffs on some of the country's biggest trade partners, threatened a global trade war, and is taking chainsaw to government spending and programs—policies that, while inflicting economic pain upon nearly everyone else, could dramatically boost their already stratospheric wealth.
Numerous observers have likened it to the " disaster capitalism" examined in Naomi Klein's seminal 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism—politicians and plutocrats exploit the chaos of natural or human-caused crises to push through unpopular policies like privatization and deregulation that harm the masses while boosting the wealth and power of the ruling class.
Economic alarm bells were already ringing before Trump's 25% tariffs on most products from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on China—for a total of 20%—took effect on Tuesday, prompting retaliatory measures and threats of more to come.
Then, during his rambling joint address to Congress on Tuesday night, Trump threatened to impose reciprocal tariffs on every nation on Earth starting April 2 (because he "didn't want to be accused of April Fools' Day") if those countries did not lower barriers to trade with the United States.
@jamellebouie Replying to @C. Stetzer ♬ original sound - b-boy bouiebaisse
New York Times economic policy reporters Alan Rappeport and Ana Swanson called Trump's sweeping tariffs "one of the biggest gambles of his presidency," and a move "that risks undermining the United States economy."
But what if that's the whole point?
"I've been entertaining this theory a little bit more lately, because [Trump's] economic moves seem so stupid and terrible and counterproductive without thinking that he is intentionally trying to cause harm," progressive political commentator Krystal Ball—who also has a degree in economics and is a certified public accountant— said Tuesday on the social media site X.
Ball cited an X
post by Saikat Chakrabarti, a progressive Democrat running for Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) House seat who worked on Wall Street for six years and helped found the online payment processing company Stripe, in which he accused Trump of "manufacturing a recession."
"But it makes sense when you realize his goal is to create something like Russia where the economy is run by a few oligarchs loyal to him," Chakrabarti added. "Creating that state is hard in a large, dynamic, powerful economy with too many actors who can oppose him. So he's accelerating concentrating money and power into the hands of his loyalists while he crashes the rest out."
Responding to this, Ball asserted that "at this point, until proven otherwise, the primary actor in the government and the economy is actually Elon, so I think it makes sense to think of Elon's incentives here and what he may actually want to accomplish."
"If you think back at the last economic crashes—both in Covid and in the 2008 financial crash—while initially everyone suffered, including the rich, out of both, the rich were able to buy up assets on the cheap and emerged even wealthier and more powerful than before," she noted.
"So in 2008, not only did they get their own custom bailout, but they were able to buy housing stock at absurdly low prices," Ball recalled. "The rich got richer than ever, inequality skyrocketed, and the big banks got bigger than ever."
"Same deal with the Covid-era recession," she continued. "So, while again, everyone suffered initially, there was a huge bailout package which, yes, did benefit ordinary people, but if you look at who came out really on top... you could see people like Elon Musk, people like Jeff Bezos, people like Mark Zuckerberg getting far wealthier. Their net worths, which were already very high, skyrocketed beyond anyone's wildest dreams."
Indeed, as Common Dreams reported, 700 billionaires got $1.7 trillion richer during two years of pandemic. Between March 2020 and April 2022, Musk got 10 times richer, while Zuckerberg's net worth more than tripled and Bezos' grew by nearly $80 billion, according to Forbes.
"Here's the other piece that's worth thinking about as well," Ball added. "Crash and crisis leads to governments and authoritarian leaders claiming more power for themselves. They can use the crisis and the emergency as a justification for taking on extraordinary powers and for taking extraordinary measures... measures that can be custom fit to primarily benefit oligarchs like Elon Musk."
"So I don't know guys, while we're running around here going... 'can't they understand how this is going to be devastating for the economy,' maybe they do understand," she concluded, "and maybe that's kind of the point."
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Fury at Private Power Giants as Puerto Rico Suffers New Year's Eve Blackout
"People have been angry for a while now," said one San Juan resident. "This is just what we needed to end the year."
Dec 31, 2024
The latest failure of Puerto Rico's privatized power grid on Tuesday plunged much of the island into darkness on New Year's Eve, sparking fresh anger toward the system's for-profit operators and political leaders who sold off the U.S. territory's public utility company.
Tuesday's outage left over a million people without power, according to local officials. LUMA Energy, the Canadian American firm in charge of power transmission and distribution on the island, said in an update posted to social media on Tuesday afternoon that it is "working closely with Genera PR and other generators to restore power as quickly and safely as possible."
Genera PR, a subsidiary of the New York-based gas company New Fortress, received a multimillion-dollar, decade-long contract last year to operate Puerto Rico's power generators. In 2021, Puerto Rico's government—under the leadership of Gov. Pedro Pierluisi—chose LUMA to take over the island's power transmission and distribution operations in the wake of Hurricane Maria. The 15-year contract agreement, when it was announced, was loudly decried by advocacy groups as "terrible."
"In its singular pursuit of American investors, the local government has ignored political protests and demonstrations, disregarded the concerns raised by opposition political parties, and ignored studies that caution against privatizing the public power utility," Pedro Cabán, a professor in the Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies Department at the University at Albany, wrote for The American Prospect last year. "For many Puerto Ricans, the Pierluisi government seems intent on converting the archipelago into a dystopia for its people."
"LUMA has Puerto Rico in an energy stranglehold, and Puerto Ricans shouldn't have to put up with continued subpar service."
The Associated Press quoted Puerto Ricans expressing their frustration over the New Year's Eve blackout, which came months after an outage left 350,000 people without power.
"It had to be on the 31st of December!" exclaimed a man identified as Manuel, who said Tuesday was his birthday. "There is no happiness."
AP noted that the latest blackout "fanned simmering anger against Luma and Genera PR... as a growing number of people call for their ouster."
Camille Rivera, founder of La Brega Y Fuerza—a New York-based advocacy group that works to organize Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland—said in a statement Tuesday that "LUMA needs to fix the grid or get the hell out of Puerto Rico."
“Almost 25 years into the 21st century, it is ridiculous that Puerto Rico's power grid has failed its people again," said Rivera. "Puerto Ricans deserve answers and accountability from LUMA for this latest fiasco."
"LUMA has Puerto Rico in an energy stranglehold, and Puerto Ricans shouldn't have to put up with continued subpar service," Rivera added. "In 2025, it should be out with the old and in with the new—we have to fundamentally address the energy crisis facing Puerto Rico, reevaluate Luma's role as an energy provider, and build more sustainable solutions."
Conservative Gov.-elect Jenniffer González Colón, who is set to take office on Thursday, wrote on social media that "we can't keep relying on an energy system that fails our people."
AP reported that the incoming governor has "called for the creation of an 'energy czar' to review potential Luma contractual breaches while another operator is found."
Jeanette Ortiz, a resident of San Juan, told The Guardian on Tuesday that "the blackouts have been worse" since the privatization of the island's power grid.
"People have been angry for a while now," said Ortiz. "This is just what we needed to end the year."
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Progressives Demand Federal Action Against Companies 'Exploiting' Hurricanes for Profit
"This egregious price-gouging hampers evacuations and undermines recovery efforts, while putting vulnerable residents in serious jeopardy."
Oct 09, 2024
The head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a group of Florida representatives said late Tuesday that the federal government must do more to crack down on airlines, hotels, and other companies taking advantage of emergency conditions brought by Hurricanes Helene and Milton to jack up prices and pad their bottom lines.
"Instead of making it easier for people to evacuate, airlines and hotels are exploiting a horrific situation to charge astronomical fares only the rich can afford—from over $600 for a single night in a Hampton Inn to over $1,000 for flights that usually cost around $100," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the CPC, said in a joint statement with Reps. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.), Darren Soto (D-Fla.), and Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.).
"Exploiting vulnerable people fleeing a deadly storm for higher profits is a new low," said the CPC members as Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida as a monstrous Category 5 storm, fueled by record-high ocean temperatures made far more likely by the climate crisis. The hurricane is expected to make landfall in the Tampa area on Wednesday night.
The federal lawmakers' statement came amid a flood of price-gouging reports from Florida residents seeking to escape Milton's path. A spokesperson for Florida's attorney general said earlier this week that the office had received hundreds of complaints about price gouging, particularly for fuel and water.
"There were also scattered instances involving overnight accommodations, including one Airbnb listing of a 'room in Tallahassee' for nearly $6,000 a night," The Tallahassee Democrat reported Tuesday. The outlet noted that "during a storm-related state of emergency, state law prohibits price gouging for equipment, food, gasoline, hotel rooms, ice, lumber, and water needed as a direct result of the event."
The Biden Transportation Department, meanwhile, said it has "been in touch with airlines to get more information about the capacity and affordability of flights in the affected areas" amid reports of sky-high ticket prices. President Joe Biden said Tuesday that he is "calling on the airlines and other companies to provide as much service as possible to accommodate evacuations and not to engage in price gouging, to just do it on the level."
The Associated Press reported that "by midafternoon Tuesday on the East Coast, airlines had canceled more than 700 U.S. flights, compared with fewer than 200 cancellations on Monday and fewer than 100 each of the two previous days, according to the FlightAware tracking service."
Major airlines, including Delta and United, said they capped fares under the emergency circumstances, but people seeking last-minute tickets reported dramatically elevated prices. One woman trying to buy a one-way ticket to New York said prices more than tripled "in a matter of seconds" as she examined her options.
"There were prices even as high as $1,000 for one leg. So wrong! So wrong!" the woman told The Associated Press.
In their statement Tuesday, Jayapal and the Florida lawmakers noted that "in North Carolina and Georgia, while families try to recover and rebuild from the devastating impacts of Helene, there have been hundreds of similar incidents of bad actors price gouging residents on everything from groceries to gas to hotel rooms."
"This egregious price gouging hampers evacuations and undermines recovery efforts, while putting vulnerable residents in serious jeopardy," they said.
While welcoming the Transportation Department's efforts to monitor and prevent airline price gouging, the progressive lawmakers said that "we will need a whole-of-government focus" in the coming days and weeks "on protecting the people impacted by these disasters from predatory price gouging."
"Further action is still needed from the federal government to stop the corporate exploitation that impacts all areas of American life, whether at the grocery store or gas station," the lawmakers said. "We need a federal ban on price gouging, more stringent antitrust laws and enforcement, and for Congress to reassert its role and governing power in this space—something CPC is deeply committed to and actively engaged in."
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Private Equity Exposed for Profiting From Fossil Fuels and Disasters They Cause
"Firms like Blackstone should be ashamed of this sinister investment strategy that contributes to catastrophe and rebuilds after it strikes," a report author said.
Sep 07, 2023
In yet another instance of disaster capitalism, private equity companies like Blackstone have found two ways to profit from the climate emergency: first by investing in fossil fuel infrastructure and then by buying up restoration companies that clean up after increasingly extreme weather events.
That's one of the main takeaways from a report released Thursday by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) and Resilience Force titled Private Equity Profits From Disaster at the Expense of Workers, Communities, and Climate.
"Firms like Blackstone should be ashamed of this sinister investment strategy that contributes to catastrophe and rebuilds after it strikes," report co-author and PESP research coordinator Azani Creeks told Common Dreams.
"The investments Blackstone has made in both ServPro and its fossil fuel companies have long-term consequences that are borne primarily by already marginalized communities in the United States."
The report documents a shift that took place in the disaster recovery industry following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Before that historic storm, cleanup work in a given area was usually done by smaller local companies.
"After the massive efforts required post-Hurricane Katrina and the increasing frequency and magnitude of climate disasters, private equity firms saw an opportunity to consolidate the market by buying up smaller companies," Creeks wrote in the report.
And the trend continues. Private equity firms bought 72 restoration companies between January 2020 and June 2023, with the number of purchases rising each year. They acquired 13 in 2020, 20 in 2021, 25 in 2022, and 14 during just the first six months of 2023. If that pace continues through the end of the year, the 2023 total will rise to 28, more than double the yearly purchases three years ago.
The report includes a list of 14 major disaster relief companies owned by private equity firms, five of which also invest in fossil fuels. For example, Blackstone, which owns ServPro, also bought Ohio's General James Gavin Power Plant—one of the leading single sources of coal pollution in the U.S.— in 2017. In another example, Louisiana-based disaster relief company the Lemoine Company also manages Lemoine Pipeline Services. The company is owned by the private equity firm Bernhard Capital Partners.
This profit-making strategy has major environmental justice implications.
"The investments Blackstone has made in both ServPro and its fossil fuel companies have long-term consequences that are borne primarily by already marginalized communities in the United States," Creeks told Common Dreams, adding that ServPro often hires immigrants and people of color who are vulnerable to unfair and unsafe labor practices like wage theft.
"Furthermore," Creek added, "Blackstone's financing of fossil fuel assets also inflicts direct harm on these same communities, who bear the brunt of toxic emissions and climate disasters."
Even if private equity firms aren't funding fossil fuels, their acquisition of restoration companies still means they have a responsibility to workers and communities, the report argues.
As disaster restoration companies have consolidated and gone national, they have organized themselves in a series of franchises and subcontractors. Of the 72 companies acquired in the last three years, more than 80% of them were instances of larger companies buying up smaller ones. These often-opaque corporate structures can make it difficult for workers to challenge their employers over issues like wage theft or unsafe working conditions. Undocumented workers are especially vulnerable, because any complaint may be met with a threat to contact immigration authorities.
"Though issues with wage theft and worker health and safety have long existed in the construction and disaster restoration industries, with an investment from the world's largest asset manager, you would expect to see these issues less frequently as more resources can be implemented to protect workers," Creek said. "Instead, the problems at ServPro and other private equity-owned disaster restoration companies persist, with even less mechanisms for accountability and public scrutiny than before."
One worker named Joél Salazar, who is also an organizer with Resilience Force, shared his experience ServPro subcontractor Royal Services. He said the company offered to pay his way from Florida to Colorado in early 2022 to help with wildfire recovery there, and promised him 40-hour workweeks and weekly paychecks when he arrived. But the travel costs never materialized, weeks started out closer to 20 hours, and the pay ended up being every other week instead.
"The company is stealing from me."
What's more, the payment was made via a Visa card. When Salazar said he had to return to Florida, the company canceled his card despite the fact that a significant amount of his earnings were still on it.
"The company is stealing from me," he said in the report.
Salazar said he wanted private equity firms and investors to be aware of what their companies were doing.
"Investors, I'm calling to ask you to consider worker safety at the companies you invest in, especially the private equity firms you rely on for profits," he said.
Another problem is unsafe working conditions. Companies owned by private equity firms racked up a total of 194 federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration violations between January 2015 and January 2022. The most common violations were exposing workers to asbestos and failing to provide them with respiratory protection, followed by failing to communicate dangers and protect workers from falls.
Recovery workers are organizing to protect themselves through the group Resilience Force, which says it is "building a strong, stable, inclusive, million-strong workforce that will be able to perform year-round climate preparation and adaptation work, as well as rebuild after disasters."
The group's founder and director Saket Soni said in the new report, "We must ensure that these companies, and their private equity backers who profit from disaster, pay and protect the resilience workers who are essential to helping communities adapt and recover."
What's better for workers will be better for the communities they help, as well. The report found that the private equity-owned firms engage in price gouging. For example, a ServPro franchise settled with the state of North Carolina for overcharging residents following Hurricane Florence.
The report highlights the legislative efforts of U.S. Rep. Pramilla Jayapal (D-Wash.), whose Climate Resilience Workforce Act would fund jobs and training through grants and make workers less vulnerable by providing a pathway to citizenship for immigrant workers and banning employers from asking about criminal history.
"The innovative Climate Resilience Workforce Act responds to the worsening climate crisis at the scale necessary by investing in a skilled workforce that is capable of not only responding to but preparing for the destructive impacts of climate change," Jayapal said when the bill was introduced in 2022. "As we create millions of good-paying, union jobs and center the very communities who are disproportionately impacted, we are finally building back better, greener, and stronger."
The report also issues recommendations to private equity firms to better protect the workers at the companies they own, such as setting up complaint lines, minimizing the use of subcontractors, funding programs to monitor their companies, and allowing their workers to unionize.
Finally, Creeks noted that firms like Blackstone manage public pensions, and have a responsibility to these workers as well.
"Public employees, such as teachers, nurses, and firefighters, have a right to know that their pension dollars are being used to purchase fossil fuel plants that are contributing to climate disasters all over the country," Creeks told Common Dreams. "In turn, their retirement capital is also being used to buy companies that profit off of these very disasters."
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A Just Recovery for Maui Must Center Native Hawaiians
As we look forward to how we not only rebuild, but work to reduce the threat of these climate change-fueled disasters, we have to change who is leading this work.
Aug 30, 2023
In the wake of the Maui fires, Governor Josh Green moved to prevent the sale of land to outside investors in an effort to prevent disaster capitalism, a common pattern we’ve seen play out in the wake of disasters from Hurricane Katrina to the tsunami in Thailand. This is an important first step to prevent further displacement of Native Hawaiians, but it only scratches the surface of a deeper issue.
In the days after the devastating wildfires on Maui, we saw patients with burns, wounds, infections, chronic disease flare-ups, displacement and, overwhelmingly, mental health crises. Neither of us would have ever imagined experiencing such a tragic crisis as a physician or seeing the amount of devastation right here at home. Treating these patients—and hundreds of Native Hawaiians in our careers—brings to life what research shows: When Native Hawaiians’ connection to land is severed, we suffer.
This is because when the land is sick, so are we.
Centuries before European settlers arrived in Hawai‘i, Native Hawaiians developed an elaborate and highly sophisticated public health system based on socioreligious tenets to ensure equitable access, availability, and distribution of natural resources to help minimize, if not eliminate, starvation and illness across islands with finite resources.
Human-triggered climate change is the latest environmental injustice threatening Native Hawaiian health and wellness. The Maui fires make this clear. The causes of the fires are complicated, but climate change played a key part. Climate change causes stronger, more frequent storms and droughts, and we see that in Hawai‘i, which is suffering worsening drought conditions, despite being surrounded by ocean. Dry conditions and dangerous wind changes produced by Hurricane Dora fueled the fires.
In responding to this disaster and charting a path forward, we need to look to those with the greatest commitment to acting as stewards of Hawai‘i. Centuries before European settlers arrived in Hawai‘i, Native Hawaiians developed an elaborate and highly sophisticated public health system based on socioreligious tenets to ensure equitable access, availability, and distribution of natural resources to help minimize, if not eliminate, starvation and illness across islands with finite resources.
Colonization changed Hawaiʻi’s natural landscape, through deforestation for sugarcane, pineapple, and cattle. Water from mountains was redirected from natural streams and aquifers to flow instead through concrete irrigation ditches, feeding golf courses and hotels. Fire-prone invasive grass species replaced native vegetation.
As we look forward to how we not only rebuild, but work to reduce the threat of these climate change-fueled disasters, we have to change who is leading this work. An important solution is stewardship of land by Native people. Indigenous peoples maintain sustainable relationships with their environment and recognize and respond to environmental changes in creative ways, drawing on traditional knowledge and science to find solutions that can help society at large. When Native communities have sovereignty to take care of the land, it helps everyone.
This work of respecting Native Hawaiian leadership is already happening. We are both kiaʻi (stewards) of sacred places, like Loko Iʻa Pāʻaiau, a 400-year-old royal fishpond at Pearl Harbor that was contaminated with fuel from military operations. Restoration of Pāʻaiau is one example of how allowing Hawaiians to practice aloha ʻāina—to honor and advocate for land so it will sustain all inhabitants—leads to increased community well-being and resilience, as demonstrated by the return of healthy native plants, animals, human descendants, and relationships in the area. Restoration remains incomplete until the flow of freshwater from the mountains is restored, but stewardship efforts persist forward, through a collaborative community-based partnership with the U.S. Navy, Native Hawaiians, and the larger community, centered around a practice of aloha.
There is a lot of blame going around right now; we do need to look at how the Maui fires happened, but we must focus on moving forward. That can only happen when Native Hawaiians are central to the decision making surrounding how our land is treated.
Tradition teaches that Hawaiians descend from nature gods; thus, to heal Native Hawaiians, we must heal the 'āina that sustains us. Like our connections with those who love and nurture us, our relationship with ʻāina dramatically influences overall health and wellness. If we are able to progress with centering land practices around Indigenous knowledge and rights, Hawai‘i can model how to recover from climate-related disasters in ways that build safer, healthier futures for our children and future generations.
Preventing outsiders from buying land in Lāhainā is important, but only preserves a troubled status quo. We need to build a better future, one that is informed by Native Hawaiians’ shared history, knowledge, and connections with the land. We need Native Hawaiians on the land, and at the table.
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Fears of 'Plantation Disaster Capitalism' Mount in Wake of Maui Fires
"Justice is returning control of public resources like land and water to the people," wrote one activist. "For too long the strings of Maui and thousands of communities like it have been pulled by forces indifferent to their soul."
Aug 23, 2023
As Maui County faces a daunting recovery from the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century—with at least 115 confirmed deaths as of Tuesday, around 1,000 people still unaccounted for, and a rebuild expected to cost billions of dollars—fears and fights over land and water are highlighting the long history of colonialism and exploitation in the Hawaiian Islands.
"It's disaster capitalism at its finest," Hokuao Pellegrino, a seventh-generation Native Hawaiian farmer, educator, and president of the nonprofit Hui o Nā Wai 'Ehā, told CNN in a Monday segment about Maui's current water battles.
Disaster capitalism, as journalist Naomi Klein explained in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, is "orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities."
Fire spread by hurricane winds earlier this month leveled Lahaina, a Maui tourist destination that was previously the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, before an 1893 coup led by American expatriates and sugar planters. The United States formally annexed the islands in 1898. Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1900 and the 50th state in 1959.
"Disaster capitalism has taken many forms in different contexts," Klein wrote last week in a Guardian column with Kapua'ala Sproat, a University of Hawaii at Manoa law professor and director of the Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law.
"It's always a little different, which is why some Native Hawaiians have taken to calling their unique version by a slightly different term: plantation disaster capitalism," the pair continued. "It's a name that speaks to contemporary forms of neocolonialism and climate profiteering, like the real estate agents who have been cold-calling Lahaina residents who have lost everything to the fire and prodding them to sell their ancestral lands rather than wait for compensation. But it also places these moves inside the long and ongoing history of settler colonial resource theft and trickery, making clear that while disaster capitalism might have some modern disguises, it's a very old tactic. A tactic that Native Hawaiians have a great deal of experience resisting."
As Klein and Sproat detailed:
For over a century, water across Maui Komohana, the western region of the island, has been extracted to benefit outside interests: first large sugar plantations and, more recently, their corporate successors. The companies—including West Maui Land Co. (WML) and its subsidiaries, as well as Kaanapali Land Management and Maui Land & Pineapple Inc.—have devoured the island's natural resources to develop McMansions, colonial-style subdivisions, luxury resorts, and golf courses where cane and pineapple once grew.
This historical and modern plantation economy has taken a tremendous toll on water in particular, draining Indigenous ecologies of their natural moisture. Lahaina, once known as the Venice of the Pacific, has been transformed into a parched desert, which is part of what has made it so vulnerable to fire.
A few days after flames tore through Lahaina, Hawaiian state Attorney General Anne Lopez announced a probe into the formal response. Her sweeping investigation includes a five-hour delay in the state Commission on Water Resource Management (CWRM)—which is responsible for how much water flows through streams—approving WML's request to fill its private reservoirs that are not connected to local hydrants but the company was willing to make available to firefighters.
The delay was reportedly the result of unsuccessful attempts to reach a farmer of taro—or kalo, a root vegetable sacred to Native Hawaiians—affected by the diversion. Activists and officials have pointed out that wind would have prevented helicopter crews from reaching the WML reservoirs for firefighting. According to the Honolulu Civil Beat, "The company suffered no significant property damage in the fires."
A water official involved with the delay, Kaleo Manuel, was then reassigned to another Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources division—though the DLNR said in a statement last week that the shift was part of an effort "to focus on the necessary work to assist the people of Maui recover from the devastation of wildfires" and "does not suggest that First Deputy Manuel did anything wrong."
In a lawsuit filed Monday, Maui residents Kekai Keahi and Jennifer Kamaho'i Mather argue that the redeployment was illegal, and ask a Hawaii court to void the decision and affirm that any such move must be made in an open meeting to allow public testimony.
Hawaii Public Radio reported Tuesday that while decision has also "prompted serious concerns" from CWRM members, the state attorney general's office claims the case is "wholly without merit" and plans to file a motion to dismiss it.
"One thing that people need to understand especially those from far away is that there's been a great deal of water conflict on Maui for many years," Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said during a press briefing last week. "It's important that we're honest about this. People have been fighting against the release of water to fight fires. I'll leave that to you to explore."
The Democratic governor has faced criticism for the comments and for suspending the "state water code, to the extent necessary to respond to the emergency," through his recent proclamations relating to wildfires.
As the Civil Beat reported:
"No one's trying to oppose the use of water to fight fires," said Isaac Moriwake, an attorney with Earthjustice. "That was unfair for the governor to go there."
The real issue, Moriwake said, is that West Maui Land Co. is trying to use the fire as an excuse to gain control over the region's water supply.
Moriwake points out that Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources Chair Dawn Chang has agreed to amend—temporarily—several water regulations, at West Maui Land Co.'s request, pursuant to an emergency declaration related to the fire issued by Green. That included a provision allowing companies like West Maui Land to fill its reservoirs when fire was reported in the area.
"They should stop trying to use this tragedy for cheap advantage," Moriwake said.
Kamanamaikalani Beamer, a former member of the CWRM, also challenged Green's claims about community members fighting against the release of water for firefighting, telling The Washington Post that "in my eight years on the water commission, I never heard, in a single hearing, that testimony from anyone in the community."
Lahaina's Native Hawaiian community "has fought for literally generations to seek justice and balance for the streams and the community and other usages," added Beamer, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Center for Hawaiian Studies.
According to The New York Times:
Wayne Tanaka, director of the Sierra Club of Hawaii, said conservationists had supported the use of water for fire reserves. But he said he worried that water companies and large landowners use fire protection as an excuse to hoard water for commercial purposes.
"No one has opposed the need to reserve water for firefighting, but we want to know how much they actually use for that purpose," Mr. Tanaka said.
Sproat made similar remarks in an appearance on
Democracy Now! last week after her column with Klein was published.
"Plantation disaster capitalism, I think, is, unfortunately, the perfect term for what's going on in Maui Komohana, or in West Maui, right now," Sproat said. "The plantations, the large landed interests that have had control over not just the land, but really much of Hawaii's and Maui Komohana's resources for the last several centuries, are using this opportunity, are using this time of tremendous trauma for the people of Maui, to swoop in and to get past the law, basically."
"They're using the emergency proclamation that the governor put into place the day after the fires to, you know, ravage Lahaina, and they're using this as an opportunity to try to get their way, especially with respect to water resources, something they could not achieve when the law and Hawaii's water code, in particular, were in place," she explained.
During a Thursday interview with the Civil Beat, Green "defended his position that government, developers, and environmental and cultural activists need to work together to resolve issues," but also insisted that Lahaina's rebuild "will be done with direct input from fire survivors, the island, and its mayor," and "new construction will be primarily to house locals and not to favor large developers."
A coalition of community members gathered at Maui's Wahikuli Beach Park for a Friday press conference about rebuilding. Keahi—one of the residents behind the suit over Manuel's redeployment—said that "we don't want to hear the governor's office saying that we have a plan for Lahaina because none of us ever got to speak to the governor."
Reporting from the event, Hawaii Public Radio explained that Nā 'Ohana O Lele—or the Families of Lele, in honor of Lahaina's ancient name—has three demands for Green: "One is to allow the community time to heal before rebuilding. Two is to let Lahaina lead the planning process. And three is to amend the emergency proclamation to ensure Hawaii's open meeting regulation or 'Sunshine Law' remains in full force."
Noting the group's demands, Kaniela Ing, a seventh-generation Native Hawaiian and national director of Green New Deal Network, wrote Monday for The Nation, "The vision is clear: The restoration of Lahaina should be by the community, for the community."
President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden traveled to Maui on Monday to tour the destruction and meet first responders and survivors. In a pair of speeches, the president claimed that "we're going to rebuild the way the people of Maui want to build."
"It's time to rebuild this community the way you want it built—the way you want it—so it's still a community, not a group of beautiful homes, but a community," Biden declared at the Lahaina Civic Center, provoking applause from residents impacted by fires.
Still, Hawaiians stress that such words from government officials are not enough—action is also required. Ing wrote Monday that "political and legislative fights lie ahead to ensure that rebuilding efforts steer clear of the pitfalls of external influences, and that resources are channeled to foster local resilience and empowerment."
"True justice doesn't lie merely in acknowledging the climate crisis," he argued. "Justice is returning control of public resources like land and water to the people. It's about recognizing that for too long the strings of Maui and thousands of communities like it have been pulled by forces indifferent to their soul. It's acknowledging that survivors aren't just figures in a news report but the heartbeats of a resilient community that demands its rightful place in shaping its future."
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Empire and Capital Set Maui Ablaze
The struggle now is the one that punctuates all moments of crisis: the forces of disaster capitalism versus the people attempting to build a paradise out of hell.
Aug 16, 2023
Over 100 people (likely many more) were burned alive and an estimated 1,300 are still missing on Maui, in one of the most deadly and destructive wildfires in history. The dire crisis continues as hospitals are overwhelmed with burn patients, residents inhale highly
toxic air, the community reals with trauma, and basic necessities fail to get to those most in need. Countless Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) and workers—including many undocumented and unprotected immigrants—lost everything and may never be able to reestablish their lives in the Lāhainā area. With only 25% of the devastated area searched by rescue teams, developers and realtors are already swooping in to try to buy land from displaced locals—a callous incarnation of our current social order.
The human-caused roots of the Maui atrocity—and the already-in-motion fight for what happens next—have everything to do with empire, capitalism, elite power, and their ravaging of the planet and people. But what has emerged from the bottom-up in response to the disaster—ordinary people collectively and creatively organizing to generously and selflessly care for one another—shows us the alternative to the world that imperial capital has compelled. It is also the world that the vast majority of us long for so deeply.
Multiple wildfires across typically wet, tropical islands are a chilling reminder that climate catastrophe is upon us. The “absolutely unprecedented” is our new norm. Our planet is ablaze; the impacts of climate change are hitting harder and faster than scientists predicted even less than a decade ago. Tipping points and cascades are already occurring at around 1.2°C of warming. On our current trajectory, we are facing a cataclysmic 2.7-4.4°C of warming by the end of this century.
Parallel to climate change, “tinderbox” conditions were created by appalling land and water management for benefit of the elite.
In Hawai‘i, we are increasingly accustomed to floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, even sea level rise. But wildfires of this nature came as an absolute shock to most of us, despite scientists’ warnings to government and large landowners for years. Heat and severe drought turned parts of Hawai‘i into a “tinderbox,” before a high pressure system in the north and a hurricane passing to the south lowered humidity and caused forceful winds to blow up multiple fires. All of these effects of climate change are going to get worse. Hawai‘i is already getting 90% less rainfall than it did a century ago, with the severity of drought being particularly acute in the past 15 years.
Parallel to climate change, “tinderbox” conditions were created by appalling land and water management for benefit of the elite. Major water diversions—first for plantation agriculture and then for tourism and gentlemen estates—have radically altered ecosystems. Landowners and water diverters like the old sugar barons Alexander & Baldwin may bear some direct culpability for the death and destruction on Maui. The company has a long history of ferociously and corruptly fighting Kānaka Maoli and environmentalists over restoring diverted water to its natural watersheds.
Some of the very same players diverting water, like Alexander & Baldwin, left broad swaths of land covered in highly flammable invasive grasses, despite abundant warning that they were creating a potentially catastrophic fire hazard. Fire-prone vegetation like guinea grass, brought to Hawai‘i by sugar oligarchs to feed livestock, has been left to cover over a quarter of Hawai‘i’s land in the transition from monocrop plantations to tourism development.
Climate change and water-deprived land covered in combustible non-native vegetation have led to other serious fires in recent years, a phenomenon Hawai‘i is highly unprepared for. Multiple studies and articles have warned that Hawai‘i is “primed” for wildfires. In 2018 and 2021, fires burned thousands of acres and destroyed hundreds of homes. The growing threat was largely ignored because it was inconvenient and expensive to the powerful.
When last week’s fires broke out, the occupying U.S. state—which ideologically justifies its presence through appeals to “protection”—failed in its emergency response. Not a single alarm siren was activated during the fires. Power lines stayed on despite fire hazard warnings from the National Weather Service. Firefighters and disaster response teams were radically under-resourced to save people, and remain “overwhelmed” in the days after. A week later, despite the immense resources held by the U.S. military and settler elites in Maui—Bezos, Oprah, Jimmy Buffet, Jensen Huang, just to name a few—ordinary people are still without food, fuel, and water. Mutual aid efforts led by Kānaka Maoli have proven far more effective at delivering disaster relief.
The proximate causes of the horrific Maui tragedy—a rapidly warming climate, land “primed to burn,” and lack of preparedness—share the same underlying roots. Capital and empire, or more specifically, a social system violently forced upon most of the world, that is premised upon unending extraction and exploitation of people and environment for accumulation of private wealth. In Hawai‘i, imperial capitalism has dispossessed most of the Native population, consolidated power and resource control to a remarkable degree, created a society of lavish wealth alongside extreme poverty, ravaged the ‘āina (“that which feeds,” or land), commodified Hawai‘i and Hawaiian culture, and increasingly delivered huge chunks of “paradise” into the vacation home portfolio of the elite. These are the conditions that created water diversions, denuded land, and neglect of potential disaster that always hits hardest at the bottom of social hierarchies. As Kaniela Ing succinctly put it, “colonial greed is burning down our home.”
These histories, and the monstrous repercussions, are relatively recent ones in the long span of human history in the islands. Knowing the recent history of imperialism and capitalism in Hawai‘i—and their ongoing contestation—denaturalizes the current social order. It reminds us that much different kinds of social orders have existed in our human past, survive in our present, and are possible in our future.
For over a millennium, Hawai‘i’s peoples lived in steady balance with the rest of the web of life, sustaining dense populations through sophisticated agroecological production. Structured by relationships of reciprocity, Indigenous Hawaiian production was organized cooperatively around ‘ohana, or extended family units. People freely accessed land, water, sea, and forests. While evolving Indigenous Hawaiian society was not free from class hierarchy, it was defined by beliefs and structures of collectivity, human freedom, reciprocity, and redistribution. Systems of production and distribution were designed to ensure that all had enough and that careful stewardship and reverence for the Earth were maintained. It was a society in which the logics of capitalism—of unabated exploitation of land and people for personal gain, extreme individualism, absolute private ownership, accumulation of wealth for wealth’s sake, and the deprivation of many alongside excess riches for very few—would have been structurally impossible and culturally unintelligible.
The social relations that have existed since time immemorial in Indigenous Hawai‘i remind all of us that a world beyond the prisons of capital and empire are possible.
Kānaka Maoli power in and over the islands remained strong in the first decades of increasing contact with Euro-American capitalists and imperialists, even as they navigated widespread death from introduced disease. The 19th century was one of competitive Euro-American imperialism throughout the Pacific, and militarily imposed agreements for repayment of accused debt-ensnared Hawai‘i in the imperial-commercial economy even before it was recognized by colonial powers as a sovereign nation. While the Hawaiian Kingdom worked to maintain sovereign Indigenous governance for almost all of the 19th century, capitalism and its violent backers steadily engulfed the islands.
As the interests of sugar capitalists increasingly collided with the Hawaiian Kingdom, white oligarchs secured the backing of the U.S. military in overthrowing the Indigenous government. By the early 1900s five sugar corporations—descended from four missionary families—controlled virtually the entirety of the economy and the government that served it. Sugar production thrived for decades because an antidemocratic, illegally occupying state secured the industry’s elite minority interests, maintained extreme class and ethnic inequalities, and delivered the land, water, and laborers that it demanded.
Sugar production in the mid- and late-20th century moved to cheaper locations of exploit, largely in response to militant interracial worker organizing. However, the legacies of the plantation persist. Today, Hawai‘i is entirely dependent on a vertically integrated corporate tourism economy. It provides cheap labor, natural resources, infrastructure, and other government support in exchange for low-wage jobs and an inflated cost of living—a change in form but not in function from plantation days of past.
Lāhainā embodies these colonial and capitalist assaults, as well as their resistance. Pre-colonial Lāhainā—with older names like Malu‘ulu o Lele, “land of the flying breadfruit”—was a place of wetlands and extensive food tree forests. It has long been seen by Kānaka Maoli as a highly sacred place. Ali‘i (problematically translated to “chiefs” by colonists) would gather in Lāhainā for governance, and it was the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom for 50 years.
Lāhainā became one of the first commercial centers of the islands with the entrance of whaling, which gave rise to a growing population of foreign traders looking to “grow rich rapidly” in the islands. Thick groves of breadfruit and fishponds were destroyed to make way for export-oriented sugar production. In the 1960s sugar capitalists started cashing in for land development, which continued to require water diversions and further “denuding” of the land. West Maui is now choked with hotels and tourism infrastructure that services 2 million people who visit every year.
Amidst the ongoing systematic extraction of wealth and resources from Lāhainā, it remains the home of many Kānaka Maoli, their sacred sites, burials, and cultural centers like Na ‘Aikane o Maui. Invaluable cultural artifacts, documents, and art were turned to ash in the flames that burnt Lāhainā to the ground. It’s a chilling symbol of the rapaciousness of capital and empire.
Others at the bottom of Hawai‘i’s social hierarchies are also hardest hit by the fires. Housing is excessively unaffordable and difficult to find in Maui, and the thousands of working-class people rendered homeless will not simply be able to find new places to live. Those already living on the edges—which are the majority in Hawai‘i—will be further pushed into lives of precarity under the existing social order. A large portion of Lāhainā’s population was immigrants; many will lack access to federal relief. As the ash settles, inequalities will be further cemented.
The struggle now is the one that punctuates all moments of crisis: the forces of disaster capitalism versus the people attempting to build a paradise out of hell. Capitalism compels a grotesque search for profit wherever it is to be made—even in desperate times, the system knows no morality. As capital and empire turn Maui and the planet into a burning nightmare, power could consolidate in increasingly violent and extractive ways. The people that are and will be hit the hardest are those who have already been most brutalized by the past centuries of imperialism-capitalism-racism-patriarchy that delivered us to this apex.
But even at this apex, the future is not a foregone conclusion. The social relations that have existed since time immemorial in Indigenous Hawai‘i remind all of us that a world beyond the prisons of capital and empire are possible. The ways people are mobilizing to care for one another in the wake of Maui’s disaster illuminate our deepest human selves—generosity, compassion, cooperation, interdependence. Both show us the alternative to systems premised on hierarchy, exploitation, and greed. They show us that humans are absolutely capable of constructing far more utopic futures that are structured to incentivize, inspire, and cultivate the best of our human capacities rather than the worst.
Our different potential future trajectories couldn’t be more stark. Maui is a powerful reminder that we all need to fight like hell to get out of hell.
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As 93 Confirmed Dead, Locals Fear Lahaina Rebuild Dominated by Rich Outsiders
"Disaster capitalism will happen yet again unless they act proactively."
Aug 13, 2023
Formerly the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Lahaina on island of Maui was ravaged by a wildfire that has killed 93 people as of Sunday, and locals now fear wealthy outsiders will dominate and further serve themselves with the multibillion-dollar rebuild from the recent devastation in the 50th U.S. state.
"Lahaina residents worry that rebuilt homes in their Maui town could slip into the hands of affluent outsiders seeking a tropical haven rather than homegrown residents who give the Hawaiian island its spirit and identity," The Associated Press wrote on social media Sunday, sharing new reporting from Hawaii.
Naomi Klein—author of several books including The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism—responded with one word: "Again."
After American expatriates and sugar planters backed by U.S. troops led the 1893 coup that deposed the Hawaiian Kingdom's Queen Lili'uokalani, the United States formally annexed the islands in 1898. Hawaii became a state in 1959.
"As that recovery unfolds, we want to make sure that the people, the communities, are actually empowered to rebuild themselves, that we don't open the door for disaster capitalists."
Even before Tuesday's fire—which was enabled by climate-wrecking fossil fuel companies and land management decisions that have diverted water away from the area—"a chronic housing shortage and an influx of second-home buyers and wealthy transplants have been displacing residents," the AP noted.
Richy Palalay, who had "Lahaina Grown" tattooed on his forearms when he was 16, told the outlet at a shelter on Saturday that "I'm more concerned of big land developers coming in and seeing this charred land as an opportunity to rebuild."
Condos and hotels "that we can't afford, that we can't afford to live in—that's what we're afraid of," said Palalay, who didn't yet know whether the house where he rents a room for $1,000 survived the fire, which destroyed the restaurant where he works.
The Pacific Disaster Center and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimate that 86% of the 2,719 structures in Maui County exposed to fire—the deadliest in the U.S. in over a century—were residential, 4,500 people may be in need of shelter, and rebuilding could cost $5.52 billion.
The AP's reporting on Sunday sparked warnings from Kanaka Maoli—a term Native Hawaiians use to refer to themselves—as well as campaigners and experts beyond the islands.
"Reports suggest 93 people are dead, 1,000 people missing still, and 2,700 structures destroyed," said Uahikea Maile, a Kanaka Maoli activist and scholar and assistant professor of Indigenous politics at the University of Toronto, St. George. "The colonial speculation of disaster capitalism is happening right now in Lahaina."
Former National Women's Soccer League player Mana Shim, who is also Kanaka Maoli, wrote on social media: "This is a major concern that needs our immediate attention. It's awful to have to discuss this before we know how many have lost their lives, but anyone who knows disaster capitalism knows the urgency of protecting our 'āina from developers and greedy malihini."
Malihini means a foreigner, newcomer, or stranger, while 'āina is a Hawaiian term for land or Earth.
Klein, who coined the term disaster capitalism, has said, "The way I define disaster capitalism is really straightforward: It describes the way private industries spring up to directly profit from large-scale crises."
Some users of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, pointed to past examples of such exploitation:
Institute for Policy Studies fellow Sanho Tree said Sunday that "disaster capitalism will happen yet again unless they act proactively."
In an interview earlier this week with Heatmap, Kaniela Ing, a seventh-generation Native Hawaiian from Maui and national director of the Green New Deal Network, took aim at the fossil fuel companies that have heated the planet as well as mismanagement of land and water tied to "corporations that stem from the original Big Five oligarchy in Hawaii—which is the first five missionary families who control our government, rich, white, right-wing families."
"We want to make sure that as we recover, once the direct relief efforts are done, the cameras have left—we understand that recovery will take years. And as that recovery unfolds, we want to make sure that the people, the communities, are actually empowered to rebuild themselves, that we don't open the door for disaster capitalists," Ing said.
"Unfortunately, the institutions best poised to distribute direct aid are also the most likely to enable disaster capitalists to exploit this tragedy," he continued. "They're actively raising millions and once the spotlight moves from our island, what's to come of those monies, and who's really going to benefit? Those are questions that I think we need to be really proactive about answering on our own as community organizers."
"And maybe in this opportunity—like, we all understand that we're going to have to be lobbying for additional FEMA funds, federal funds, state and local funds," he added. "We want to make sure that the people, the forces that contributed to this problem in the first place, are pushed out of power for a more community, ground-up sort of infrastructure. So there's a lot of mutual aid and power building that needs to happen immediately."
This post has been updated to correct the name of Uahikea Maile.
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'Drought Profiteers' Under Fire as Wall Street Targets Colorado River Water
"Vultures," said one critic, are "looking to make a lot of money off this public resource."
Jan 31, 2023
Financial speculators are buying and selling rights to the Colorado River's dwindling water resources in a bid to profit as historic drought conditions intensified by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis lead to worsening scarcity.
Wall Street investment firms "have identified the drought as an opportunity to make money," Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, told CBS News on Tuesday. "I view these drought profiteers as vultures. They're looking to make a lot of money off this public resource."
Matthew Diserio, the co-founder and president of a Manhattan-based hedge fund called Water Asset Management (WAM), makes no secret of his intentions, having described water in the United States as "the biggest emerging market on Earth" and "a trillion-dollar market opportunity." The company's website declares that "scarce clean water is the resource defining this century, much like plentiful oil defined the last."
A newly published joint investigation by CBS News and The Weather Channel found that WAM has purchased at least $20 million worth of land in Western Colorado over the past five years, making it one of the biggest landowners in a farming and ranching region known as the Grand Valley.
According to Mueller, WAM has bought more than 2,500 acres of farmland in the area. But "it's the water"—not the land—that investors are really interested in, he said, observing that the farmland comes with water rights.
"There are real fears that this crucial water supply for the West is on the brink of disaster."
Notably, WAM has "hired Colorado's former top water official as one of its lawyers," CBS News reported. Diserio previously stated that "one of his firm's strategies is to profit from water in part by making the farms it buys more efficient and then selling parts of its water rights to other farmers and cities increasingly desperate for the natural resource."
Mueller is tasked with protecting Colorado's share of the Colorado River—a sprawling 1,450-mile waterway that traverses seven states and is a key water source for 40 million people in the western U.S. and northern Mexico, including those in the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, and Salt Lake City.
Clean water is becoming increasingly scarce in the region for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.
"The Colorado River relies mostly on snowpack in the Rocky Mountains that feeds into the river as it melts in the spring and summer," Weather Channel storm specialist Greg Postel explained. "But climate change is making the West hotter and drier. For every degree the temperature has gone up, the flow of the river has dropped by about 5%—a nearly 20% reduction over the past century."
The volume of water being withdrawn from the Colorado River has fallen since 2000 despite more people moving to the region. But with less water flowing into the river amid the West's ongoing 23-year megadrought—more severe than anything seen in the preceding 1,200 years—recent decreases in per capita water consumption are insufficient.
"It's taken a major toll on the nation's largest reservoirs," Postel said of climate change-amplified drought. "Lake Powell in Arizona and Lake Mead in Nevada—they are at historic lows. They're at just 25% of their full, combined capacity. There are real fears that this crucial water supply for the West is on the brink of disaster."
As the long-brewing crisis surrounding the Colorado River grows more acute, the federal government has taken steps to compel state-level policymakers to improve how they manage water resources in the increasingly arid region.
For instance, "Congress recently allocated $4 billion in drought funding that can be used to pay farmers to fallow their land and not use their water," CBS News reported. "Some Western states, including Colorado, are also considering paying some farmers to keep their lands fallow." Agriculture accounts for 70% of withdrawals from the Colorado River.
Last August, after the Colorado River Basin states failed to meet a federal deadline to approve a plan for achieving a 15% to 30% reduction in water use, the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) announced—based on projected water levels for 2023—that Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico would be forced to draw less from the river this year.
On Tuesday, for the second time in six months, the seven states that depend on the Colorado River failed to reach a water conservation pact by the DOI's deadline, increasing the likelihood the agency will impose cuts later this year. Six states—Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—agreed to slash water use. But California, the largest water consumer of the bunch, refused, setting the stage for what CNN described as a "high-stakes legal battle."
In August, Food & Water Watch research director Amanda Starbuck implored policymakers to "eliminate rampant corporate water abuse before it's too late," decrying the "massive water use of Big Ag and Big Oil."
"By switching to renewable energy sources like solar and wind, California could save 98% of the water currently needed for its fossil fuel production," said Starbuck. "And by transitioning away from industrial megadairies, thirsty crops like almonds and pistachios, and engaging in regenerative farming, California will gain enormous water savings that could serve small farmers and domestic households."
Regarding WAM and other hedge funds looking to profit from looming water shortages, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) unveiled legislation last March that would prevent Wall Street from speculating on life-sustaining water resources.
The Future of Water Act, as the congressional Democrats' bicameral legislation is titled, would amend the Commodity Exchange Act to affirm that water is a human right to be managed for public benefit—not a commodity to be bought and sold by investment firms. The bill would also prohibit the trading of water rights on futures markets—a recently invented financial ploy widely condemned as "dystopian."
Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said at the time of the bill's introduction that "with the climate crisis delivering historically devastating droughts across the West, it is clearer than ever that water should be treated as a scarce, essential resource, not a commodity for Wall Street and financial speculators."
"This groundbreaking legislation would put a lid on dangerous water futures trading before it creates a crisis," said Hauter, "and it reinforces the fact that water must be managed as a public resource, not a corporate profit center."
Mueller, for his part, said Tuesday that "water in Colorado, water in the West, is your future."
"Without water," he added, "you have no future."
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BlackRock Accused of 'Trying to Cash In On the Disaster' With Ukraine Reconstruction Deal
"This is going to make the neoliberalism and privatization the U.S. inflicted on post-Soviet Russia look like child's play," one critic predicted.
Dec 29, 2022
Investment behemoth BlackRock was accused Thursday of what author Naomi Klein termed "disaster capitalism" after war-ravaged Ukraine's president announced he would work with the firm to coordinate foreign investment in the country's reconstruction.
"The BlackRock team has been working for several months on a project to advise the Ukrainian government on how to structure the country's reconstruction funds," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office said Wednesday following the president's video conference with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
Zelenskyy's office said that the two men "agreed to focus in the near term on coordinating the efforts of all potential investors and participants in the reconstruction of our country, channeling investment into the most relevant and impactful sectors of the Ukrainian economy."
In language evocative of Klein'sThe Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the peace group CodePink, tweeted that BlackRock is "already trying to cash in on the disaster in Ukraine."
Investigative journalist and Status Coup CEO Jordan Chariton predicted that "this is going to make the neoliberalism and privatization the U.S. inflicted on post-Soviet Russia look like child's play."
New York-based BlackRock—the planet's largest asset manager—handles about $8 trillion in client assets and has around 70 offices in 30 countries. The firm has faced intense criticism for actions including being the world's top investor in fossil fuels and deforestation, war profiteering, and doing business with human rights violators.
Zelenskyy had a message for foreign investors as he virtually opened the September 6 trading session at the New York Stock Exchange: "We are free. We are strong. We are open for business."
"Ukraine is the story of a future victory and a chance for you to invest now in projects worth hundreds of billions of dollars to share the victory with us," he added.
On that day Zelenskyy also launched the Advantage Ukraine initiative in a bid to draw $400 billion in foreign investment in a land of "superior growth opportunities."
The program focuses on 10 key sectors of the Ukrainian economy, including the military-industrial complex, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, power, natural resources, and industrial manufacturing.
"It is necessary to invest in Ukraine now, and not wait for the end of the war," Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said in a statement touting the initiative.
In July, top officials from some of the world's leading economic powers met in Lugano, Switzerland for the most recent Ukraine Recovery Conference. Last year's conference agenda included core "shock doctrine" policies of "decentralization, privatization, reform of state-owned enterprises, land reform, state administration reform," as well as "Euro-Atlantic integration."
The Russian onslaught against Ukraine has devastated its infrastructure and economy. According to the World Bank, it will cost at least half a trillion dollars to rebuild Ukraine once the war ends.
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