Are Disaster Capitalists Seeking Profit from Climate Change?
Remember the scene in Apocalypse Now where Marlon Brando’s character, the crazed Colonel Kurtz, tells Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) of the shock he felt upon realizing the strength of his enemies?
“And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we.”
That same bullet struck me recently while reading Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.” Her argument: that the U.S. government and now, ever increasingly, multinational corporations not only view disasters as fortune-making opportunities but actually work to hasten the onset of such opportunities, whether through coups, economic strong-arming or willful neglect (think New Orleans).
