Guns being pointed at victims has happened all too often.
PRIVATIZE OR FACE DIVINE PUNISHMENT (IS THIS WHAT PAT ROBERTSON WAS THINKING ABOUT WHEN HE DEVELOPED HIS CRAZY THEORY ON HAITI MAKING A PACT WITH THE DEVIL?)
While Haiti was hit with four tropical storms or hurricanes in 2008, killer storms in 2005 and 2004, and floods in 2007, 2006, 2003 (twice), and 2002 and while the earthquake is the fifteenth disaster that has led USAID to send money and help to Haiti, history shows how major catastrophes have been exploited by corporate or private interests.
Naomi Klein wrote about the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, which had a magnitude of 9.0 at one point and produced a series of lethal tsunamis in December killing hundreds of thousands of people. The tsunamis killed people and produced significant damage in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and even had an impact in Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania.
Klein wrote a chapter on how the crisis created by the tsunami created opportunity for private interests in Sri Lanka:
"[the] significance of the event was understood immediately. The newly elected government would need billions from foreign creditors to reconstruct the homes, roads, schools, and railways destroyed in the storm--and those creditors knew well that when faced with a devastating crisis even the most committed economic nationalists suddenly become flexible."
President Chandrika Kumaratunga, according to Klein, had a kind of "religious epiphany" and believed the tsunami to possibly be "divine punishment for failing to sell off Sri Lanka's beaches and forests." She bowed to pressure from Washington lenders and created a group "made up of Sri Lanka's most powerful business executives from banking and industry" called the Task Force to Rebuild the Nation.
Instead of allowing elected leaders in government to handle reconstruction, she gave private interests a gateway they had been hoping for before the tsunami ---an opportunity to drop barriers to private land ownership, institute more "flexible" labor laws, modernize the national infrastructure, etc.
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