In New Orleans after Katrina, some of the key players who now surround Trump showed to what lengths they will go to decimate the public sphere and advance the interests of real estate developers, private contractors, and oil companies. Today, they are in a position to take Katrina national.
What makes this constellation of disaster capitalists all the more worrying is the fact that, though Trump has been able to do a great deal of damage in his first few months in office, he has been repeatedly stymied by the courts and by Congress. And many of the more radical items on this administration’s wish list have yet to be attempted at all. His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, for instance, has devoted her life to pushing for a privatized education system like the one in New Orleans after Katrina. Many of the figures who surround Trump are passionate about dismantling Social Security. Several are equally fervent in their distaste for a free press, unions, and political protests. Trump himself has mused publicly about bringing in “the feds” to deal with crime in cities like Chicago, and on the campaign trail he pledged to block all Muslims from entering the US, not just the ones from the countries on his various lists. His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has been highly critical of police department “consent decrees,” an important measure that allows the Justice Department and federal courts to intervene in local and state police forces if they identify a pattern of abuse—for example, repeated shootings of unarmed Black people. Sessions claims these accountability mechanisms “can reduce morale for the police officers,” impairing their ability to fight crime (a claim unsupported by the data).
The wealthiest funders of Trump’s campaign and of the Far Right more broadly—the multibillionaire Koch Brothers and the Mercer family—have their sights set on eliminating the remaining restrictions on money in politics, while doing away with those laws that require transparency in how such private money is spent. Under the guise of battling a manufactured “voting fraud” crisis, they are also backing groups that have been pushing measures to make it even harder for low-income people and minorities to vote, such as rules requiring photo ID to cast a ballot (some form of these initiatives had already been enacted in at least thirty-two states by the time Trump was elected). If these twin goals are fully realized, progressive challengers will be so outspent by their Republican rivals, and will have so much trouble getting their supporters into voting booths, that the corporate coup Trump represents could well become permanent.
Realizing the full breadth of this antidemocratic vision is not achievable in the current circumstances. Without a crisis, the courts would keep getting in the way, as would several state governments controlled by Democrats, and on some of Trump’s more sadistic dreams—like bringing back torture—even Congress might stand up to him.
But the full agenda is still there, lying in wait. Which is why author and journalist Peter Maass, writing in the Intercept, described the Trump White House as “a pistol cocked to go off at the first touch”—or rather, the first crisis. As Milton Friedman wrote long ago, “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Survivalists stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; these guys stockpile spectacularly antidemocratic ideas.
So the questions we need to focus on are these: What disaster, or series of disasters, could play the enabling role? And what tasks on the toxic to-do list are most likely to rear their heads at these first opportunities?
It’s high time for some disaster preparedness.
During the campaign, some imagined that the more overtly racist elements of Trump’s platform were just talk designed to rile up the base, not anything he seriously intended to act on. In Trump’s first week in office, when he imposed a travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, that comforting illusion disappeared fast. And the response was immediate. In major cities across the United States, thousands upon thousands of people left their homes and flooded to the airports, demanding that the ban be revoked and that the travelers being detained be released. Taxi drivers in New York refused to take fares to or from JFK airport, local politicians and lawyers showed up in droves to help the people under detention, and a federal court judge finally intervened to block the ban. When Trump slightly modified his executive order and reissued it, another judge got in his way.
The whole episode showed the power of resistance, and of judicial courage, and there was much to celebrate. But we can’t forget that a terrorist attack in the United States would provide the administration with a pretext to try to override much of this kind of pushback. In all likelihood they would do it swiftly, by declaring protests and strikes that block roads and airports a threat to “national security,” and then using that cover to go after protest organizers—with surveillance, arrests, and imprisonment. Many of us well remember the “with us or with the terrorists” atmosphere that descended after September 11—but we don’t need to go back that far to see how these dynamics work.
In the immediate aftermath of the Westminster terror attacks in London in March 2017, when a driver plowed into a crowd of pedestrians, deliberately killing four people and injuring dozens more, the Conservative government wasted no time declaring that any expectation of privacy in digital communications was now a threat to national security. Home Secretary Amber Rudd went on the BBC and declared the end-to-end encryption provided by programs like WhatsApp to be “completely unacceptable.” And she said that they were meeting with the large tech firms “to ask them to work with us” on providing backdoor access to these platforms.
In France in 2015, after the coordinated attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, the government of François Hollande declared a “state of emergency” that banned political protests. I was in France a week after those horrific events and it was striking that, though the attackers had targeted a concert, a football stadium, restaurants, and other emblems of daily Parisian life, it was only outdoor political activity that was not permitted. Large concerts, Christmas markets, and sporting events—the sorts of places that were likely targets for further attacks—were all free to carry on as usual.
In the months that followed, the state-of-emergency decree was extended again and again—until it had been in place for well over a year. It is currently set to remain in effect until at least July 2017—the new normal. And this took place under a center-left government in a country with a long tradition of disruptive strikes and protests. One would have to be naive to imagine that Donald Trump and Mike Pence wouldn’t immediately seize on any attack in the USA to go much further down that same road. We should be prepared for security shocks to be exploited as excuses to increase the rounding up and incarceration of large numbers of people from the communities this administration is already targeting: Latino immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter organizers, climate activists. It’s all possible. And, in the name of freeing the hands of law enforcement officials, Sessions would have his excuse to do away with federal oversight of state and local police.
Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that, in the aftermath of an attack, judges would show the same courage in standing up to Trump as they did immediately after his inauguration. As much as they position themselves as neutral arbiters, courts are not immune to public hysteria. And there is no doubt that the President would seize on any domestic terrorist attack to blame the courts. He made this abundantly clear when he tweeted, after his first travel ban was struck down: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system.”
Trump has made no secret of his interest in torture. “Torture works,” he said on the campaign, “only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.” He also pledged to fill up Guantanamo with new “bad dudes, believe me, we’re gonna load it up.”
Legally, this won’t be easy. Ever since the George W. Bush administration found loopholes it could exploit to take a turn toward sadism, the US courts have made it harder for future administrations to follow suit, as has the Senate, which passed an amendment in 2015 clearly stating that all interrogation techniques must follow the Army Field Manual.
Still, if the country found itself in the grip of a large-enough security crisis, there is no reason to expect that a Republican-controlled House and Senate would refuse the White House the powers it demanded. And Mike Pompeo, Trump’s CIA director, has indicated an alarming openness to going backward. After originally stating unequivocally in his confirmation hearing that he would not allow torture tactics to return, he followed up with an addendum: “If experts believed current law was an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country, I would want to understand such impediments and whether any recommendations were appropriate for changing current law.” He has also called for a reversal of the limited restrictions on digital surveillance put in place after Edward Snowden’s revelations.
Even without the blessing of Congress or the CIA, an administration that is determined to violate the law can, unfortunately, find a way. The likeliest route for Trump is to outsource this dirty work to private contractors. None other than Blackwater founder Erik Prince (who happens to be the brother of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos) has been counseling Trump behind the scenes. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, who wrote an award-winning book on Blackwater, reports that Prince not only donated $100,000 to a Trump-friendly political action committee but actively advised the transition team “on matters related to intelligence and defense, including weighing in on candidates for the Defense and State departments.” And in April, the Washington Post published a report revealing that
the United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. The meeting took place around Jan. 11—nine days before Trump’s inauguration—in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said.
Prince, the Post reported, “presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump.” Through a spokesperson, Prince described the account as “a complete fabrication. The meeting had nothing to do with President Trump.”
Prince’s appearance in all this is alarming for reasons that go well beyond the revelation of yet another link between the Trump team and Russia. In the wake of a long line of lawsuits and investigations (in 2014, a US federal jury found four Blackwater employees guilty on charges including first-degree murder in a massacre in Baghdad’s Nisour Square that left seventeen people dead), Prince attempted to rename Blackwater and finally sold the company. He now has a new firm: Frontier Services Group. He is getting in on the anti-immigrant frenzy sweeping the globe, pitching the company as the most efficient way to keep migrants from successfully crossing borders. In Europe, he makes the case that by paying his company to work in Libya, countries can “secure land borders and so prevent migrants from reaching the Mediterranean.” Writing in the Financial Times in early 2017, Prince explained that if his plan were implemented, “there would be nowhere for migrant smugglers to hide: they can be detected, detained and handled using a mixture of air and ground operations”—all private, all for-profit.
Prince’s resurfacing is a reminder that there are many backdoor ways around constitutional practices. And Trump, as well as other leaders, can turn to companies like his for surveillance, interrogation, and massively ramped-up border controls.
Some have warned that Trump has so much to gain from an atmosphere of heightened fear and confusion, and such a blatant disregard for the truth, that we should expect this administration to cook up its own crises. While it would be unwise to put anything past this constellation of characters, the fact is that nefarious conspiracies may well be unnecessary. After all, Trump’s reckless and incompetent approach to governance is nothing short of a disaster-creation machine.
Take the administration’s incendiary public statements and policies relating to Muslims and “radical Islamic terrorism.” A decade and a half into the so-called war on terror, it’s not controversial to state the obvious: these kinds of actions and rhetoric make violent responses distinctly more likely. These days, the people warning about this danger most forcefully are not antiracism or antiwar activists, but leading figures in the military and intelligence communities and the foreign policy establishment. They argue that any perception that the United States is at war with Islam as a faith and Muslims as a group is a gift to extremists looking to rationalize bloody attacks on American soldiers and civilians. Daniel L. Bynam, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served on the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, puts it this way: “Trump’s actions and rhetoric add credibility to the jihadists’ narrative of civilizational war.”
Already, ISIS reportedly described Trump’s first anti-Muslim-travel executive order as a “blessed ban” that will help to recruit fighters. Iran’s foreign minister warned the ban was “a gift to extremists.” Even Trump’s own national security adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, has described Trump’s repeated use of the term “radical Islamic terrorism” as unhelpful because, he says, the terrorists are “un-Islamic.” Yet nothing has changed. Trump seems determined to do everything possible to reinforce the holy war message.
The idea that Trump doesn’t realize how provocative he’s being rings about as hollow as his claims of being unaware that his racist rhetoric has generated a climate ripe for hate crimes.
The most lethal way that governments overreact to terrorist attacks is by exploiting the atmosphere of fear to embark on a full-blown foreign war. It doesn’t necessarily matter if the target has no connection to the original terror attacks. Iraq wasn’t responsible for 9/11, and it was invaded anyway.
Trump’s likeliest targets are mostly in the Middle East, and they include (but are by no means limited to) the following: Syria; Yemen, where Trump has already increased the number of drone strikes; Iraq, where deadly strikes with high civilian casualties are also on the rise; and, most perilously, Iran. And then, of course, there’s North Korea. Already, after visiting the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea, Secretary of State Tillerson declared “all options are on the table,” pointedly refusing to rule out a preemptive military strike in response to the North Korean regime’s missile testing. This was followed by Trump’s muscle-flexing announcement of the immediate deployment of a US Navy strike group, including two destroyers, a guided-missile cruiser, and a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, to the Korean Peninsula (embarrassingly for the administration, the carrier was photographed thousands of miles away, heading in the opposite direction for joint exercises with the Australian Navy). And it was all underlined by a testosterone-fueled tweet from Trump about how, if China doesn’t step in, “we will solve the problem without them! U.S.A.” North Korean state media, meanwhile, issued a hair-raising declaration that the country was prepared to launch a nuclear attack “in the US mainland.”
Trump has openly called for a new nuclear “arms race”—a call we have not heard since the 1980s. He has reportedly asked his foreign policy advisers repeatedly why the United States can’t just use nuclear weapons, seemingly not grasping the principle of retaliation. And one of Trump’s biggest financial backers, Sheldon Adelson, has talked about needing to threaten Iran with a nuclear strike in the “middle of the desert that doesn’t hurt a soul…maybe a couple of rattlesnakes…. Then you say, ‘See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business.’ ” Adelson donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, the largest donation of its kind ever.
I am not saying a nuclear war is likely. But in Trump’s very short time in office, there has already been a level of military escalation that is both chilling and bizarrely haphazard. As indicated by his early deployment of the most powerful conventional weapon in the US arsenal—the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB—Trump is drunk on the allure of showing the world he’s top dog. Which is why Mikhail Gorbachev, who worked toward disarmament when he was Soviet leader, wrote in Time magazine that today “the nuclear threat once again seems real. Relations between the great powers have been going from bad to worse for several years now. The advocates for arms build-up and the military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands.” (And that was before Trump upped the ante with North Korea.)
There are many reasons why people around Trump, particularly the many who came straight from the defense sector, might decide that further military escalation is in order. As we saw, Trump’s April 2017 missile strike on Syria—ordered without congressional approval and therefore illegal according to some experts—won him the most positive news coverage of his presidency, with liberal hawks fawning over him as enthusiastically as his superfans on Fox. His inner circle, meanwhile, immediately pointed to the attacks as proof that there was nothing untoward going on between the White House and Russia. “If there was anything that Syria did, it was to validate the fact that there is no Russia tie,” Trump’s 33-year-old son Eric told the Daily Telegraph (perhaps inadvertently revealing that there might have been more than sympathy for “beautiful babies” behind the decision to stage such a dramatic strike).
There is another reason why this administration might rush to exploit a security crisis to start a new war or escalate an ongoing conflict: there is no faster or more effective way to drive up the price of oil, especially if the violence interferes with oil supplies making it to the world market.
Particularly worrying on this front is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s relationship with ExxonMobil, one of the oil giants that would benefit most directly from a price spike. Yes, Tillerson agreed to divest from the company, and to recuse himself from decisions that specifically relate to ExxonMobil for one year. But his ties to the company remain deep. Not only was Tillerson at Exxon for forty-one years, his entire working life, but ExxonMobil has agreed to pay him a retirement package worth a staggering $180 million, a sum so large (especially given how far the company’s fortunes fell under his leadership) that it may well inspire some feelings of gratitude in the secretary of state. (How would you feel about a corporation that provided you with a $180-million exit package?) As Tom Sanzillo, director of finance at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, puts it, “You can take the boy out of Exxon but you cannot take the Exxon out of the boy.”
Moreover, while Tillerson may be excluded from decisions relating to infrastructure in which ExxonMobil has a clear interest (such as approval of the Keystone XL pipeline), he cannot recuse himself from the many foreign policy decisions that could impact oil prices—decisions potentially worth billions to the company. That, after all, would mean recusing himself from any discussion of military conflict in oil-rich regions, or direct discussion with the leaders of petrostates. We have already seen that Tillerson is doing no such thing.
The link between war and oil prices is not hypothetical. When oil prices go down, instability increases in oil-dependent countries such as Venezuela and Russia. Conversely, when conflict breaks out in countries with considerable oil assets—whether Nigeria or Kuwait—the price of oil shoots up as markets anticipate a contraction in supply. (The price of oil even got a small bump when Trump ordered the April missile strike on Syria.) “There is a close correlation between oil prices and conflict,” explains Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College. Exhibit A of this phenomenon was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which helped send the price of oil soaring from around $30 a barrel at the start of the invasion to above $100 by 2008. That, in turn, is what triggered the boom in tar sands investment and the rush to the Arctic. And this dynamic could be repeated. A war that takes large state-owned oil reserves offline, or which significantly weakens the power of OPEC, would be a boon for the oil majors. ExxonMobil, loaded with tar sands reserves and with megaprojects pending in the Russian Arctic, would have a huge amount to gain.
Perhaps the only person who would have more to gain from this kind of instability is Vladimir Putin, head of a vast petro-state that has been in economic crisis since the price of oil collapsed. Russia is the world’s leading exporter of natural gas, and its second-largest exporter of oil (after Saudi Arabia). When the price was high, this was great news for Putin: prior to 2014, fully 50 percent of Russia’s budget revenues came from oil and gas. But when prices plummeted, the government was suddenly short hundreds of billions of dollars, an economic catastrophe that has had tremendous human costs. According to the World Bank, in 2015 real wages fell in Russia by nearly 10 percent; Russia’s currency, the ruble, depreciated by close to 40 percent; and the population of people classified as poor increased from 3 million to over 19 million. Putin plays the strongman, but this economic crisis makes him vulnerable at home.
Which is why many have speculated that Russia’s high-risk military involvement in Syria is partly driven by a desire to get oil prices back up. This theory has been floated most prominently by Alexander Temerko, a right-wing, Ukrainian-born British businessman who works in the oil industry. In 2015, Temerko wrote in the Guardian:
Prolonged war in the Middle East would serve Putin’s interests perfectly. The deeper and more widespread the conflict, the more world oil and gas prices are likely to rise, helping him stage an economic recovery at home and render the sanctions useless.
Ushering in better times at home is therefore Putin’s ultimate aim as he seeks to prop up a system that takes advantage of people’s patriotism and public spirit. The grand plan is for his vital oil and gas revenues to recover so he can buy the loyalty of Russia’s 140 million-strong population.
(This is something of an oversimplification: Putin has other reasons for being in Syria as well, including a desire to access the country’s ports and potentially its oil and gas fields—and war, as ever, is a great distraction from the misery at home.)
We’ve also heard a lot about how ExxonMobil made a massive deal with the Russian state oil company Rosneft to drill for oil in the Arctic, which Putin bragged was worth half a trillion dollars. That deal was derailed by US sanctions against Russia imposed under the Obama administration. It is still eminently possible, despite the posturing on both sides over Syria, that Trump could lift those sanctions and clear the way for that deal to go ahead, which would quickly boost ExxonMobil’s flagging fortunes. (Months after Trump took office, the company requested a waiver from the US sanctions, and was denied.)
But even if the sanctions are lifted, there is another factor standing in the way of the project moving forward: the depressed price of oil. Tillerson made the deal with Rosneft in 2011, when the price of oil was soaring at around $110 a barrel. Their first commitment was to explore for oil in the sea north of Siberia, under tough-to-extract, icy conditions. Since the oil price collapse, other oil majors, including Shell and France’s Total, have backed away from Arctic drilling, in part because frozen conditions drive up costs so much. (The break-even price for Arctic drilling is estimated to be around $100 a barrel, if not more.) So even if sanctions are lifted under Trump, it won’t make sense for Exxon and Rosneft to move ahead with their project unless oil prices are high enough. In other words, both parties have significant and multi-layered reasons for wanting the price of oil to shoot back up.
Which is why we need to be very clear that a state of instability and uncertainty is not something that is feared by core figures in and around the Trump administration; on the contrary, many will embrace it. Trump has surrounded himself with masters of chaos—from Tillerson to Mnuchin. And chaos has a long track record of sending the price of oil up. If it rises to $80 or more a barrel, then the scramble to dig up and burn the dirtiest fossil fuels, including those under melting ice, will be back on. A price rebound would unleash a global frenzy in new high-risk, high-carbon fossil fuel extraction, from the Arctic to the tar sands. If that is allowed to happen, it really would rob us of our last chance of averting catastrophic climate change.
So, in a very real sense, preventing war and averting climate chaos are one and the same fight.
Just as Trump could not be unaware that his anti-Muslim actions and rhetoric make terror attacks more likely, I suspect that many in the Trump administration are fully cognizant of the fact that their frenzy of financial deregulation makes other kinds of shocks and disasters more likely as well. Trump has announced plans to dismantle Dodd–Frank, the most substantive piece of legislation introduced after the 2008 banking collapse. Dodd–Frank wasn’t tough enough, but its absence will liberate Wall Street to go wild blowing new bubbles, which will inevitably burst, creating new economic shocks.
Trump’s team are not unaware of this, they are simply unconcerned—the profits from those market bubbles are too tantalizing. Besides, they know that since the banks were never broken up, they are still too big to fail, which means that if it all comes crashing down, they will be bailed out again, just like in 2008. (In fact, Trump issued an executive order calling for a review of the specific part of Dodd–Frank designed to prevent taxpayers from being stuck with the bill for another such bailout—an ominous sign, especially with so many former Goldman executives making White House policy.)
Some members of the administration surely also see a few coveted policy options opening up in the wake of a good market shock or two. During the campaign, Trump courted voters by promising not to touch Social Security or Medicare. But that may well be untenable, given the deep tax cuts on the way. An economic crisis would give Trump a handy excuse for abandoning those promises. In the midst of a moment being sold to the public as economic Armageddon, Betsy DeVos might even have a shot at realizing her dream of replacing public schools with a system based on vouchers and charters.
Trump’s gang has a long wish list of policies that do not lend themselves to normal times. In the early days of the new administration, for instance, Mike Pence met with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to hear how the governor had managed to strip public sector unions of their right to collective bargaining in 2011. (Hint: he used the cover of the state’s fiscal crisis, prompting New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to declare that in Wisconsin “the shock doctrine is on full display.”)
The picture is clear. We will very likely not see this administration’s full economic barbarism in the first year. That will only reveal itself later, after the inevitable budget crises and market shocks kick in. Then, in the name of rescuing the government and perhaps the entire economy, the White House will start checking off the more challenging items on the corporate wish list.
Just as Trump’s national security and economic policies are sure to generate and deepen crises, the administration’s moves to ramp up fossil fuel production, dismantle large parts of the country’s environmental laws, and trash the Paris climate accord all pave the way for more large-scale industrial accidents—not to mention future climate disasters. There is a lag time of about a decade between the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the full resulting warming, so the very worst climatic effects of the administration’s policies won’t likely be felt until they’re out of office.
That said, we’ve already locked in so much warming that no president can complete a term without facing major weather-related disasters. In fact, Trump wasn’t even two months in before he was dealing with overwhelming wildfires on the Great Plains, which led to so many cattle deaths that one rancher described the event as “our Hurricane Katrina.”
Trump showed no great interest in the fires, not even sparing them a tweet. But when the first superstorm hits a coast, we should expect a very different reaction from a president who knows the value of oceanfront property, and has only ever been interested in building for the one percent. The worry, of course, is a repeat of Katrina’s rip-offs and Iraq’s “missing billions,” since contracts handed out in a hurry are ripe for corruption, and it is evacuees and workers who pay the price.
The biggest Trump-era escalation, however, will most likely be in disaster response services marketed specifically toward the wealthy—what a New Yorker headline recently dubbed “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.” When I was writing The Shock Doctrine, this industry was still in its infancy, and several early companies didn’t make it. I wrote, for instance, about a short-lived airline called Help Jet, based in Trump’s beloved West Palm Beach. While it lasted, Help Jet offered an array of gold-plated rescue services in exchange for a membership fee.
When a hurricane was on its way, Help Jet dispatched limousines to pick up members, booked them into five-star golf resorts and spas somewhere safe, then whisked them away on private jets. “No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first-class experience that turns a problem into a vacation,” read the company’s marketing materials. “Enjoy the feeling of avoiding the usual hurricane evacuation nightmare.” With the benefit of hindsight, it seems Help Jet, far from misjudging the market for these services, was simply ahead of its time. These days, luxury real estate developments in New York have begun marketing exclusive private disaster amenities to would-be residents—everything from emergency lighting to private water pumps and generators to thirteen-foot floodgates. One Manhattan condominium boasts of its watertight utility rooms sealed “submarine-style,” in case another Superstorm Sandy hits the coast. Trump’s golf courses are trying to prepare too. In Ireland, Trump International Golf Links and Hotel applied to build a two-mile-long, thirteen-foot wall to protect the coastal property from rising seas and increasingly dangerous storms.
Evan Osnos recently reported in the New Yorker that, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists are hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers in Kansas (protected by heavily armed mercenaries) and building escape homes on high ground in New Zealand. It goes without saying that you need your own private jet to get there—the ultimate Green Zone.
At the ultra-extreme end of this trend is PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, a major Trump donor and member of his transition team. Thiel underwrote an initiative called the Seasteading Institute, cofounded by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) in 2008. The goal of Seasteading is for wealthy people to eventually secede into fully independent nation-states, floating in the open ocean—protected from sea-level rise and fully self-sufficient. Anybody who doesn’t like being taxed or regulated will simply be able to, as the movement’s manifesto states, “vote with your boat.” Thiel recently has appeared to lose interest in the project, saying that the logistics of building floating nation-states were “not quite feasible,” but it continues.
What is worrying about the entire top-of-the-line survivalist phenomenon (apart from its general weirdness) is that, as the wealthy create their own luxury escape hatches, there is diminishing incentive to maintain any kind of disaster response infrastructure that exists to help everyone, regardless of income—precisely the dynamic that led to enormous and unnecessary suffering in New Orleans during Katrina. (The survivalists refer to FEMA as “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid”—a joke that is only funny if you have the means to pay cash for your own escape.)
This two-tiered disaster infrastructure is galloping ahead at alarming speed. In fire-prone states such as California and Colorado, insurance companies provide a “concierge” service to their exclusive clients: when wildfires threaten their mansions, the companies dispatch teams of private firefighters to coat them in fire-retardant. The public sphere, meanwhile, is left to further decay.
California provides a glimpse of where this is all headed. For its firefighting, the state relies on upwards of 4,500 prison inmates, who are paid a dollar an hour when they’re on the fire line, putting their lives at risk battling wildfires, and about two bucks a day when they’re back at camp. By some estimates, California saves about a billion dollars a year through this program—a snapshot of what happens when you mix austerity politics with mass incarceration and climate change.
The uptick in high-end disaster prep also means there is less reason for the big winners in our economy to embrace the demanding policy changes required to prevent an even warmer and more disaster-prone future. Which might help explain the Trump administration’s determination to do everything possible to accelerate the climate crisis.
So far, much of the discussion around Trump’s environmental rollbacks has focused on supposed schisms between the members of his inner circle who actively deny climate science, including EPA head Scott Pruitt and Trump himself, and those who concede that humans are indeed contributing to planetary warming, such as Rex Tillerson and Ivanka Trump. But this misses the point: what everyone who surrounds Trump shares is a confidence that they, their children, and indeed their class will be just fine, that their wealth and connections will protect them from the worst of the shocks to come. They will lose some beachfront property, sure, but nothing that can’t be replaced with a new mansion in the mountains.
What matters isn’t their stated views on the science of climate change. What matters is that not one of them appears to be worried about climate change. The early catastrophic events are playing out mostly in poor parts of the world, where the people are not white. And when disasters do strike wealthy Western nations, there are growing numbers of ways for the wealthy to buy their relative safety. Early in Trump’s term, Republican congressman Steve King caused a controversy by tweeting, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” It was a revealing comment on many fronts. Climate change is not a concern for the Republican Party because a great many people in positions of power clearly think it’ll be “somebody else’s babies” who will shoulder the risks, babies who don’t count as much as their own. They may not all be climate deniers, but almost every one of them is catastrophically unconcerned.
This insouciance is representative of an extremely disturbing trend. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, a significant cohort of our elites are walling themselves off not just physically but also psychologically, mentally detaching themselves from the collective fate of the rest of humanity. This secessionism from the human species (if only in their minds) liberates them not only to shrug off the urgent need for climate action but also to devise ever more predatory ways to profit from current and future disasters and instability.
What we are hurtling toward is the future I glimpsed in New Orleans and Baghdad all those years ago. A world demarcated into Green Zones and Red Zones and black sites for whoever doesn’t cooperate. And it’s headed toward a Blackwater-style economy in which private players profit from building the walls, from putting the population under surveillance, from private security and privatized checkpoints.
This is the way our world is being carved up at an alarming rate. Europe, Australia, and North America are erecting increasingly elaborate (and privatized) border fortresses to seal themselves off from people fleeing for their lives. Fleeing, quite often, as a direct result of forces unleashed primarily by those fortressed continents, whether predatory trade deals, wars, or ecological disasters intensified by climate change.
Hands are wrung about the “migrant crisis”—but not nearly so much about the crises driving the migrations. Since 2014, an estimated thirteen thousand people have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach European shores. For those who make it, safety is far from assured. The massive migrant camp in Calais, France, was nicknamed “the jungle”—an echo of the way Katrina’s abandoned people were categorized as “animals.” In late 2016, just before Trump was elected, the Calais camp was bulldozed.
But it’s the Australian government that has gone the furthest in treating human desperation as a contagion. For five consecutive years since 2012 migrant boats headed for Australia’s coastline have been systematically intercepted at sea and their occupants flown to remote detention camps on the islands of Nauru and Manus. Numerous reports have described the conditions in the camps as tantamount to torture. But the government shrugs. After all, they don’t run the camps—private, for-profit contractors do (of course).
Conditions are so degraded on Nauru that in one week in 2016, two refugees set themselves on fire in an attempt to awaken the world to their plight. It hasn’t worked. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull continues to refuse demands coming from many Australians to welcome the refugees into their vast country. “We cannot be misty-eyed about this,” he says, asserting that Australians “have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose.”
Nauru, incidentally, is one of the Pacific islands vulnerable to sea-level rise. Its residents, after seeing their home turned into a prison for people fleeing war in places such as Somalia and Afghanistan, will quite possibly be forced to become migrants themselves. It’s another glimpse into an already-here future: tomorrow’s climate refugees recruited into service as today’s prison guards.
The irony is particularly acute because many of the conflicts driving migration today have already been exacerbated by climate change. For instance, before civil war broke out in Syria, the country faced its deepest drought on record—roughly 1.5 million people were internally displaced as a result. A great many displaced farmers moved to the border city of Daraa, which happens to be where the Syrian uprising broke out in 2011. Drought was not the only factor in bringing tensions to a head, but many analysts, including former secretary of state John Kerry, are convinced it was a key contributor.
In fact, if we chart the locations of the most intense conflict spots in the world right now—from the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq—what becomes clear is that these also happen to be some of the hottest and driest places on earth. The Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has mapped the targets of Western drone strikes and found an “astounding coincidence.” The strikes are intensely concentrated in regions with an average of just 200 millimeters (7.8 inches) of rainfall per year—so little that even slight climate disruption can push them into drought. In other words, we are bombing the driest places on the planet, which also happen to be the most destabilized.
A frank explanation for this was provided in a US military report published by the Center for Naval Analyses a decade ago: “The Middle East has always been associated with two natural resources, oil (because of its abundance) and water (because of its scarcity).” When it comes to oil, water, and war in the Middle East, certain patterns have become clear over time. First, Western fighter jets follow that abundance of oil in the region, setting off spirals of violence and destabilization. Next come the Western drones, closely tracking water scarcity as drought and conflict mix together. And just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought—so, now, boats follow both. Boats filled with refugees fleeing homes ravaged by war and drought in the driest parts of the planet.
And the same capacity to discount the humanity of the “other,” which justifies civilian deaths and casualties from bombs and drones, is now being trained on the people in the boats (or arriving on buses or on foot)—casting their need for security as a threat, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army.
The dramatic rise in right-wing nationalism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and straight-up white supremacy over the past decade cannot be pried apart from this maelstrom—from the jets and the drones, the boats and walls. The only way to justify such untenable levels of inequality is to double down on theories of racial hierarchy that tell a story about how the people being locked out of the global Green Zone deserve their fate, whether it’s Trump casting Mexicans as rapists and “bad hombres,” and Syrian refugees as closet terrorists, or prominent Conservative Canadian politician Kellie Leitch proposing that immigrants be screened for “Canadian values,” or successive Australian prime ministers justifying sinister island detention camps as a “humanitarian” alternative to death at sea.
This is what global destabilization looks like in societies that have never redressed their foundational crimes—countries that have insisted slavery and Indigenous land theft were just glitches in otherwise proud histories. After all, there is little more Green Zone/Red Zone than the economy of the slave plantation—of cotillions in the master’s house steps away from torture in the fields, all of it taking place on the violently stolen Indigenous land on which North America’s wealth was built.
What is becoming clear is that the same theories of racial hierarchy that justified those violent thefts in the name of building the industrial age are visibly resurfacing as the system of wealth and comfort they constructed starts to unravel on multiple fronts simultaneously.
Trump is just one early and vicious manifestation of that unraveling. He is not alone. He won’t be the last.
Searching for a word to describe the huge discrepancies in privileges and safety between those in Iraq’s Green and Red zones, journalists often landed on “sci-fi.” And of course, it was. The walled city where the wealthy few live in relative luxury while the masses outside war with one another for survival is pretty much the default premise of every dystopian sci-fi movie that gets made these days, from The Hunger Games, with the decadent Capitol versus the desperate colonies, to Elysium, with its spa-like elite space station hovering above a sprawling and lethal favela. It’s a vision deeply enmeshed with the dominant Western religions, with their grand narratives of great floods washing the world clean, with only a chosen few selected to begin again. It’s the story of the great fires that sweep in, burning up the unbelievers and taking the righteous to a gated city in the sky. We have collectively imagined this extreme winners-and-losers ending for our species so many times that one of our most pressing tasks is learning to imagine other possible ends to the human story, ones in which we come together in crisis rather than split apart, take down borders rather than erect more of them.
Because we all pretty much know where the road we are on is leading. It leads to a world of Katrinas, a world that confirms our most catastrophic nightmares. Though there is a thriving subculture of utopian sci-fi, the current crops of mainstream dystopian books and films imagine and reimagine that same Green Zone/Red Zone future over and over again. But the point of dystopian art is not to act as a temporal GPS, showing us where we are inevitably headed. The point is to warn us, to wake us—so that, seeing where this perilous road leads, we can decide to swerve.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” So said Thomas Paine many years ago, neatly summarizing the dream of escaping the past that is at the heart of both the colonial project and the American Dream. The truth, however, is that we do not have this godlike power of reinvention, nor did we ever. We must live with the messes and mistakes we have made, as well as within the limits of what our planet can sustain.
But we do have it in our power to change ourselves, to attempt to right past wrongs, and to repair our relationships with one another and with the planet we share. It’s this work that is the bedrock of shock resistance.