Taken At the Flood

The waters in Texas were still rising, and thousands of people were still stranded or worse, but it's never too soon for the disaster capitalists of the plutonomy to begin licking their chops over all the potential windfall profits they can take from the thousand-year storm known as Harvey.

If New Orleans could privatize its entire public school system after Hurricane Katrina, just imagine the possibilities for the fifth largest metro area in the country. Houston, which boomed on climate-changing oil in the first place, can surely reinvent itself once the flood waters subside and all the disposable people - like the homeless, the old, the immigrant, and the unemployed - are but misty water-colored memories. 

Look on the bright side, advise the financiers and economists who dished on the future of south Texas to the New York Times. This epic flood is just a glitch in the never-ending march of progress!  Sure, there will be a temporary hiatus in Houston's economic "recovery" - dividends for the rich gained in large part from an orgy of pollution, deregulation policies not conducive to public safety, and ever-stagnating wages.

 The Houston metropolitan area, the nation’s fifth largest, accounted for 2.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product as of 2015, and that figure is almost certainly higher today. A good amount of that comes from trade: Texas accounts for about half of petroleum and gas exports, along with about a fifth of chemical exports.

But what about the billions of dollars in property damage and the fact that many of the storm's victims lack flood insurance? Not to worry. People have short memories, and pretty soon they'll be flocking back to town, escaping the cold winters and looking to buy or rent still relatively affordable homes.  An added Texas bonus: no state income tax. And Houston has no pesky zoning rules. 

But if other disasters are a guide, much of that lost potential will be diverted for now and made up later, through money spent on cleanup and rebuilding.

Moreover, factories and refineries are rarely running at full capacity, and as they come back online they can ramp up production to meet the backlogs that accrue. “Businesses have stockpiles and the ability to catch up,” said Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Beacon Economics, a consulting firm.

This is rule number one of market neoliberalism: never let a serious crisis go to waste.

 As the floodwaters drain away and Texas shifts to clean-up mode, followed by a mammoth effort to replace what was lost, the daily modes of commerce will shift but not stop. Disruptions, displacement and property damage are quickly followed by federal aid and insurance checks.

 This is rule number two of neoliberalism: whenever things go terribly, terribly wrong because policy-makers have put profits over people, always look forward and never look back. No matter what happens to the little people, it will always be the best of all possible worlds for the obscenely rich. All they care about is the deluge of money sure to come their way as they suck up billions in dollars in no-bid government contracts to, when they're not lining their own pockets, construct even more shoddy dwellings at no personal cost to themselves and at much cost to the poor people left behind.

Disasters are just so cool:

In fact, when natural disasters do show up in economic data it is usually as a small growth bump a few months after the storm, when rebuilding accelerates and insurance checks are cut.

One might think that the scale of the damage would give future home buyers some pause. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, for instance, investors and homeowners had big questions about property values in coastal New York and New Jersey.

But thanks to boosterism by the likes of unindicted BridgeGate Governor Chris Christie, and the cornering of the property market by private equity sharks, real estate prices are booming. And it's during those manufactured, periodic crises known as government shutdowns that the vultures can really swoop down. When the beaches are closed to the public because of alleged lack of public funds, the rich and the powerful can still enjoy them with impunity. That's just what Chris Christie and his clan did this past July. These people no longer even care what the public thinks of them, of course, because their approval ratings were in the toilet to begin with. 

The predatory capitalist class is just taking a tip from Shakespeare's Brutus, who cynically remarked back in the day: “There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Or, as one financial wag put it about a millennium later in Citigroup's infamous study of the New Plutonomy:  "A rising tide lifts all yachts." 

***
To my readers in Texas: all my good wishes go out to you. This feels very personal to me. I lived for an extended period in Houston and have made frequent visits to Austin and the Hill Country, where I also have family. We went through some pretty severe record flooding here in the Hudson Valley of New York in 2011, in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene. But it was not even remotely close to what Texans are experiencing. I can only imagine what you must be going through.

To everybody else: please consider making a donation to the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, or the charity of your choice.(see comments below.)