美国腐败（上） | 卫报

Naomi Klein: how power profits from disaster (1)

There have been times in my reporting from disaster zones when I have had the unsettling feeling that I was seeing not just a crisis in the here and now, but getting a glimpse of the future – a preview of where the road we are all on is headed, unless we somehow grab the wheel and swerve. When I listen to Donald Trump speak, with his obvious relish in creating an atmosphere of chaos and destabilisation, I often think: I’ve seen this before, in those strange moments when portals seemed to open up into our collective future.

我在灾区报道时，心里经常惴惴不安，不仅我因为目睹了这一危机，还因对未来有某种预感，我看到未来我们走向何方，除非我们设法抓住轮子，彻底转向。听特朗普夸夸其谈，看他一脸唯恐天下不乱的得意神情，我常感觉这似曾相识，那是些奇怪的时刻，犹如打开传送门，送入我们共同的未来。

One of those moments arrived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, as I watched hordes of private military contractors descend on the flooded city to find ways to profit from the disaster, even as thousands of the city’s residents, abandoned by their government, were treated like dangerous criminals just for trying to survive.

卡特里娜飓风席卷新奥尔良，就是这样一个时刻，我看到成群结队的私人军事承包商空降这座被洪水淹没的城市，设法从灾难中牟利，可成千上万被政府遗弃的居民为求一线生机，竟被视作危险的暴徒。

I started to notice the same tactics in disaster zones around the world. I used the term “shock doctrine” to describe the brutal tactic of using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock – wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters – to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called “shock therapy”. Though Trump breaks the mould in some ways, his shock tactics do follow a script, and one that is familiar from other countries that have had rapid changes imposed under the cover of crisis.

我开始留意到，全球范围内的灾区都有类似把戏在上演。我曾用“冲击主义”形容诸如战争、政变、恐怖袭击、市场崩溃或自然灾害等集体性冲击后，政府野蛮地利用公众迷茫失措而大力推行激进的亲商业措施，他们美名其曰“休克疗法”。尽管特朗普在某些方面不走寻常路，可他的休克策略有章可循，同其他国家以危机为借口推动剧变的手段半斤八两。

This strategy has been a silent partner to the imposition of neoliberalism for more than 40 years. Shock tactics follow a clear pattern: wait for a crisis (or even, in some instances, as in Chile or Russia, help foment one), declare a moment of what is sometimes called “extraordinary politics”, suspend some or all democratic norms – and then ram the corporate wishlist through as quickly as possible. 

四十多年来，这一战略与强制推行新自由主义形影不离。休克策略条理清晰，待灾难降临（某些情况下，他们甚至还会煽动灾祸，例如智利或俄罗斯），政府宣布进入”非常政治“时期，叫停部分或全部民主准则，紧接着马上强推企业的愿望清单。

The research showed that virtually any tumultuous situation, if framed with sufficient hysteria by political leaders, could serve this softening-up function. It could be an event as radical as a military coup, but the economic shock of a market or budget crisis would also do the trick. Amid hyperinflation or a banking collapse, for instance, the country’s governing elites were frequently able to sell a panicked population on the necessity for attacks on social protections, or enormous bailouts to prop up the financial private sector – because the alternative, they claimed, was outright economic apocalypse.

研究表明，事实上任何动荡，只要政治领导人充分营造歇斯底里的情绪，都能攻坚克难。可以通过一场激进的军事政变，但市场或预算危机引发的经济冲击亦能达成目的。例如，恶性通胀或银行破产时，国家的统治精英总有能力向惊慌失措的群众推销，主张有必要破除各类社会保障，或实施大规模紧急救助以支撑私人金融部门。他们声称，若不如此，经济会立刻彻底完蛋。

The Republicans under Donald Trump are already seizing the atmosphere of constant crisis that surrounds this presidency to push through as many unpopular, pro-corporate policies. And we know they would move much further and faster given an even bigger external shock. We know this because senior members of Trump’s team have been at the heart of some of the most egregious examples of the shock doctrine in recent memory.

特朗普领导下的共和党人已开始利用本届总统任期内危机四伏的气氛，推行民众反对的亲公司政策。外部冲击越大，他们走得更远，行动更快。我们明白这一点，因为近来，在某些冲击主义最臭名昭彰的案例中，特朗普团队高官堪称罪魁祸首。

Rex Tillerson, the US secretary of state, has built his career in large part around taking advantage of the profitability of war and instability. ExxonMobil profited more than any oil major from the increase in the price of oil that was the result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It also directly exploited the Iraq war to defy US state department advice and make an exploration deal in Iraqi Kurdistan, a move that, because it sidelined Iraq’s central government, could well have sparked a full-blown civil war, and certainly did contribute to internal conflict.

美国国务卿雷克斯·蒂勒森，主要靠战争和动荡大展宏图。2003年侵略伊拉克导致原油价格上涨，埃克森美孚获利超过任何一家石油大鳄。公司还直接从伊拉克战争牟利，甚至不顾美国国务院忠告，同伊拉克库尔德斯坦签订开采协议，此举抛开伊拉克中央政府，很可能导致内战全面爆发，也无疑确实成为该国国内冲突的原因。

As CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson profited from disaster in other ways as well. As an executive at the fossil fuel giant, he spent his career working for a company that, despite its own scientists’ research into the reality of human-caused climate change, decided to fund and spread misinformation and junk climate science. All the while, according to an LA Times investigation, ExxonMobil (both before and after Exxon and Mobil merged) worked diligently to figure out how to further profit from and protect itself against the very crisis on which it was casting doubt. It did so by exploring drilling in the Arctic (which was melting, thanks to climate change), redesigning a natural gas pipeline in the North Sea to accommodate rising sea levels and supercharged storms, and doing the same for a new rig off the coast of Nova Scotia.

作为埃克森-美孚首席执行官，蒂勒森还通过其他方法从灾难中牟利。身为化石能源行业巨头的总裁，蒂勒森一生效力的企业决定资助并散布虚假消息，诋毁气候科学，尽管他们自己的科学家研究发现人类导致气候变化实属事实。《洛杉矶时报》调查显示，埃克森-美孚，不论合并前或合并后，都在趋利避害，想方设法从危机中获取更多利润，使自己免受影响，尽管它怀疑危机的真实性。埃克森-美孚在因气候变化而融化的北极地区开采石油；在北海重新设计了天然气管道，应对上升的海平面和来势汹汹的风暴；在加拿大新斯科舍近海也是如此。

At a public event in 2012, Tillerson acknowledged that climate change was happening – but what he said next was revealing: “as a species”, humans have always adapted. “So we will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around – we’ll adapt to that.”

2012年一场公开活动中，蒂勒森承认气候变化正在发生，但他接下来说的话道出实情，他表示，“作为一个物种”，人类总能适应变化。“因此我们能够适应，依气候模式做出改变，转移农作物产区，我们将加以适应。”

He’s quite right: humans do adapt when their land ceases to produce food. The way humans adapt is by moving. They leave their homes and look for places to live where they can feed themselves and their families. But, as Tillerson well knows, we do not live at a time when countries gladly open their borders to hungry and desperate people. In fact, he now works for a president who has painted refugees from Syria – a country where drought was an accelerant of the tensions that led to civil war – as Trojan horses for terrorism. A president who introduced a travel ban that has gone a long way towards barring Syrian migrants from entering the United States.

他说得很对：土地不产粮食时，人们的确可以适应。人们会背井离乡，另寻能够养活自己和家人的地方定居。可蒂勒森深知，当前各国都不愿意欣然打开边境，迎接饥饿和绝望的人。事实上，他效力的总统将叙利亚难民说成暗藏恐怖主义的特洛伊木马，而在叙利亚，正是干旱加剧了导致内战的紧张局势。这位颁布入境禁令的总统在限制叙利亚移民进入美国方面大有作为。

A president who has said about Syrian children seeking asylum, “I can look in their faces and say: ‘You can’t come.’” A president who has not budged from that position even after he ordered missile strikes on Syria, supposedly moved by the horrifying impacts of a chemical weapon attack on Syrian children and “beautiful babies”. (But not moved enough to welcome them and their parents.) A president who has announced plans to turn the tracking, surveillance, incarceration and deportation of immigrants into a defining feature of his administration. Waiting in the wings, biding their time, are plenty of other members of the Trump team who have deep skills in profiting from all of that.

总统在谈到要求避难的叙利亚儿童时表示：“我会当着他们的面说：你们不能来。”总统甚至在下令导弹袭击叙利亚后也不作出让步，尽管据说叙利亚儿童及“漂亮宝宝们”受化武袭击的可怕景象让他动了恻隐之心，但还不足以让他接纳叙利亚儿童和他们的父母。总统宣布跟踪、监控、监禁及遣返移民是其政府的主要职能。特朗普团队的其他成员在白宫两翼候着，等待机会，他们技巧高超，可以从中渔利。

Between election day and the end of Trump’s first month in office, the stocks of the two largest private prison companies in the US, CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America) and the Geo Group, doubled, soaring by 140% and 98%, respectively. And why not? Just as Exxon learned to profit from climate change, these companies are part of the sprawling industry of private prisons, private security and private surveillance that sees wars and migration – both very often linked to climate stresses – as exciting and expanding market opportunities. In the US, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) incarcerates up to 34,000 immigrants thought to be in the country illegally on any given day, and 73% of them are held in private prisons. Little wonder, then, that these companies’ stocks soared on Trump’s election. And soon they had even more reasons to celebrate: one of the first things Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, did was rescind the Obama administration’s decision to move away from for-profit jails for the general prison population.

从大选日到特朗普入主白宫第一个月末，美国两家最大的私人监狱运营商CoreCivic（前美国矫正公司）和GEO惩教集团的股价翻番，分别增长140%和98%。不出所料，正如埃克森学到从气候变化中攫利一样，两家公司同私人监狱、私人安保及私人监控公司等鱼龙混杂的产业同行一道，将战争和移民潮视为拓展市场的绝佳机会，战争和移民常常与气候变化导致的紧张态势有关。美国移民与海关执法局每天拘留着三万四千名在美国被视为非法的移民，其中73%关押在私人监狱。难怪特朗普当选使它们的股票暴涨。很快，它们有更多庆祝的理由，特朗普新任命的司法部长杰夫·塞申斯上任第一件事就是废除奥巴马总统的决定，该决定将一般犯人移出营利性监狱。

Trump appointed as deputy defence secretary Patrick Shanahan, a top executive at Boeing who, at one point, was responsible for selling costly hardware to the US military, including Apache and Chinook helicopters. He also oversaw Boeing’s ballistic missile defence programme – a part of the operation that stands to profit enormously if international tensions continue to escalate under Trump.

特朗普任命的国防部次长帕特里克·沙纳罕是波音公司高层，他曾负责向美军方销售昂贵的军备，包括阿帕奇和支奴干直升机。他曾负责波音公司的弹道导弹防御项目，如果特朗普任下国际紧张局势持续升温，该项目将大发其财。

And this is part of a much larger trend. As Lee Fang reported in the Intercept in March 2017, “President Donald Trump has weaponised the revolving door by appointing defence contractors and lobbyists to key government positions as he seeks to rapidly expand the military budget and homeland security programmes … At least 15 officials with financial ties to defence contractors have been either nominated or appointed so far.”

这是大势所趋。2017年3月李方曾在《拦截》杂志中报道，“特朗普总统试图扩张军事预算，扩大国土安全项目，因此大开旋转门，让防务承包商和说客们身居要职。截至目前，至少15名与国防承包商有金钱联系的官员获提名或任命。”

The revolving door is nothing new, of course. Retired military brass reliably take up jobs and contracts with weapons companies. What’s new is the number of generals with lucrative ties to military contractors whom Trump has appointed to cabinet posts with the power to allocate funds – including those stemming from his plan to increase spending on the military, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security by more than $80bn in just one year.

当然，旋转门并非新鲜事物，退休的军队要员确实可以老将出马，与武器公司签合同。新鲜的是，特朗普任命的内阁成员中，与军事承包商有密切利益关系将军数量太多了，他们有权分配资金，部分来自特朗普给军队、国防部和国土安全部增加的支出，仅一年超过八百亿美元。

The other thing that has changed is the size of the Homeland Security and surveillance industry. This sector grew exponentially after the September 11 attacks, when the Bush administration announced it was embarking on a never-ending “war on terror”, and that everything that could be outsourced would be. New firms with tinted windows sprouted up like malevolent mushrooms around suburban Virginia, outside Washington DC, and existing ones, such as Booz Allen Hamilton, expanded into brand new territories. Writing in Slate in 2005, Daniel Gross captured the mood of what many called the security bubble: “Homeland security may have just reached the stage that internet investing hit in 1997. Back then, all you needed to do was put an ‘e’ in front of your company name and your IPO would rocket. Now you can do the same with ‘fortress’.”

国土安全与监控业也发生了变化。911恐袭后，布什政府宣布将“反恐战”进行到底，且一切可以外包的都外包出去，于是这一产业大幅增长。在华盛顿特区城外、弗吉尼亚州郊区，装着有色玻璃的新公司如毒蘑菇般冒了出来，博思艾伦-汉密尔顿咨询公司等老公司向新领域拓展。丹尼尔·格罗斯2005年在《石板》杂志撰文，充分体现了当时被称为“安全泡”的心情：“国土安全业或许同1997年网络投资热差不多，那时，你只需在公司名前加上字母e，首次公开募股就会资金滚滚。现在你只需加上“堡垒”二字。

That means many of Trump’s appointees come from firms that specialise in functions that, not so long ago, it would have been unthinkable to outsource. His National Security Council chief of staff, for instance, is retired Lt Gen Keith Kellogg. Among the many jobs Kellogg has had with security contractors since going private was one with Cubic Defense.

这意味着特朗普任命的诸多官员来自从事政府外包服务的公司，不久前，外包这些职能还令人难以想象。例如，特朗普的国家安全委员会幕僚长是退休中将基斯·凯罗格。凯罗格退伍后在多家国防承包商任职，其中包括“立方防务”。

According to the company, he led “our ground combat training business and focus[ed] on expanding the company’s worldwide customer base”. If you think “combat training” is something armies used to do all on their own, you’d be right.

该公司表示，他领导“地面战训练业务，主要负责拓展公司在全世界的客户群”。如果你认为军队过去完全依靠自己进行“战斗训练”，你没想错。

One noticeable thing about Trump’s contractor appointees is how many of them come from firms that did not even exist before 9/11: L-1 Identity Solutions (specialising in biometrics), the Chertoff Group (founded by George W Bush’s homeland security director Michael Chertoff), Palantir Technologies (a surveillance/big data firm cofounded by PayPal billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel), and many more. Security firms draw heavily on the military and intelligence wings of government for their staffing.

值得注意的是，特朗普任命的承包商官员有多少来自那些911前还不存在的公司，如L-1身份解决方案（主要从事生物测定）、切尔托夫集团（由布什政府国土安全部部长迈克·切尔托夫创立）、帕兰提尔技术公司（这是由贝宝亿万富翁与特朗普拥护者彼得·蒂尔共同创立的监控/大数据公司）等不一而足。安保公司招贤纳士时格外青睐政府军事及情报部门官员。

Under Trump, lobbyists and staffers from these firms are now migrating back to government, where they will very likely push for even more opportunities to monetise the hunt for people Trump likes to call “bad hombres”.

特朗普任下，游说者和这些公司的职员回流政府，可能获得更多机会把抓捕特朗普口中的“坏包”这件事货币化。

This creates a disastrous cocktail. Take a group of people who directly profit from ongoing war and then put those same people at the heart of government. Who’s going to make the case for peace? Indeed, the idea that a war could ever definitively end seems a quaint relic of what during the Bush years was dismissed as “pre–September 11 thinking”.

这制造了灾难性的大杂烩。招一帮从旷日持久的战争中直接获利的人，让他们在政府中居要职。可谁来捍卫和平呢？事实上，战争会永远完结这一想法看起来是小布什岁月中被斥为“前911思维”的古怪残念。

And then there’s vice-president Mike Pence, seen by many as the grownup in Trump’s messy room. Yet it is Pence, the former governor of Indiana, who actually has the most disturbing track record when it comes to bloody-minded exploitation of human suffering.

还有副总统迈克·彭斯，许多人认为他是特朗普混乱团队中成熟稳重的一个。然而，正是印第安纳州州长彭斯，他对人类苦难进行了血腥剥削，其所作所为最是令人震惊。

When Mike Pence was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, I thought to myself: I know that name, I’ve seen it somewhere. And then I remembered. He was at the heart of one of the most shocking stories I’ve ever covered: the disaster capitalism free-for-all that followed Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans. Mike Pence’s doings as a profiteer from human suffering are so appalling that they are worth exploring in a little more depth, since they tell us a great deal about what we can expect from this administration during times of heightened crisis.

当特朗普宣布迈克·彭斯为竞选搭档时，我暗自思忖，我认识这个人，在哪里见过他的名字。后来我记起来了，我曾报道过一篇最骇人听闻的故事，卡特里娜飓风和新奥尔良被淹后灾难资本主义的混战中，他是其中核心人物。彭斯从人类苦难中大发其财，行径令人发指，值得深挖。这也充分说明，危难之际，本届政府在多大程度上靠得住。

Before we delve into Pence’s role, what’s important to remember about Hurricane Katrina is that, though it is usually described as a “natural disaster”, there was nothing natural about the way it affected the city of New Orleans. When Katrina hit the coast of Mississippi in August 2005, it had been downgraded from a category 5 to a still-devastating category 3 hurricane. But by the time it made its way to New Orleans, it had lost most of its strength and been downgraded again, to a “tropical storm”. 

探讨彭斯的角色前，别忘了，虽说卡特里娜飓风被视作“自然灾害”，它对新奥尔良造成的破坏却绝非自然。2005年8月卡特里娜抵达密西西比海岸时，已从五级降至三级，仍然具有毁灭性。可卡特里娜抵达新奥尔良时，威力大幅减弱，降级为“热带风暴”。

That’s relevant, because a tropical storm should never have broken through New Orleans’s flood defence. Katrina did break through, however, because the levees that protect the city did not hold. Why? We now know that despite repeated warnings about the risk, the army corps of engineers had allowed the levees to fall into a state of disrepair. That failure was the result of two main factors.

这并非无关紧要，因为一场热带风暴压根不会冲破新奥尔良的防洪坝，可保卫城市的堤岸没能扛住卡特里娜。这究竟为何？现在我们知道，尽管反复预警，陆军工程团任由堤坝残破不堪。失修要归咎于两大因素。

One was a specific disregard for the lives of poor black people, whose homes in the Lower Ninth Ward were left most vulnerable by the failure to fix the levees. This was part of a wider neglect of public infrastructure, which is the direct result of decades of neoliberal policy. Because when you systematically wage war on the very idea of the public sphere and the public good, of course the publicly owned bones of society – roads, bridges, levees, water systems – are going to slip into a state of such disrepair that it takes little to push them beyond the breaking point. When you massively cut taxes so that you don’t have money to spend on much of anything besides the police and the military, this is what happens.

其一，政府罔顾穷苦黑人的生命安全。他们住在第九区低地，堤岸修缮计划搁浅让他们身处险境。从更大角度说，这是对基础设施建设的忽视，正是几十年来推行新自由政策的恶果。当你系统性地对公共领域和公共利益思想开战，道路、桥梁、堤岸、水利系统等社会共有的设施当然会年久失修，轻而易举就崩溃了。当你大幅减税，连警察和军队都没钱可花，灾难自然就发生了。

It wasn’t just the physical infrastructure that failed the city, and particularly its poorest residents, who are, as in so many US cities, overwhelmingly African American. The human systems of disaster response also failed – the second great fracturing. The arm of the federal government that is tasked with responding to moments of national crisis such as this is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), with state and municipal governments also playing key roles in evacuation planning and response. All levels of government failed.

城市被毁，尤其是最贫苦的居民，同美国其他城市一样，绝大多数都是非裔美国人，其原因不仅是硬件设施。灾难响应机制也未发挥作用，这是第二个大破裂。联邦应急署是联邦政府中负责响应全国危机的机构，州政府和市政府在撤离计划及响应中也扮演关键角色。当时，各级政府都失灵了。

It took Fema five days to get water and food to people in New Orleans who had sought emergency shelter in the Superdome. The most harrowing images from that time were of people stranded on rooftops – of homes and hospitals – holding up signs that said “HELP”, watching the helicopters pass them by. People helped each other as best they could. They rescued each other in canoes and rowboats. They fed each other. They displayed that beautiful human capacity for solidarity that moments of crisis so often intensify. But at the official level, it was the complete opposite. I’ll always remember the words of Curtis Muhammad, a longtime New Orleans civil rights organiser, who said this experience “convinced us that we had no caretakers”.

联邦应急署花了五天时间才把水和食物送到在新奥尔良超级穹顶体育场避难的群众手中，当时最令人心碎的场景是人们被困在自家或医院屋顶上，高举“呼救”标语，却眼睁睁看着直升机呼啸而过。人们尽力互帮互助，靠独木舟和手划艇互救，分享食物，患难时刻更显出人类团结的光辉，可政府却截然相反。我会永远铭记新奥尔良长期民权运动者柯蒂斯·穆罕默德的话，他认为这种经历“使人相信，我们没有守护者”。

The way this abandonment played out was deeply unequal, and the divisions cleaved along lines of race and class. Many people were able to leave the city on their own – they got into their cars, drove to a dry hotel, called their insurance brokers. Some people stayed because they believed the storm defences would hold. But a great many others stayed because they had no choice – they didn’t have a car, or were too infirm to drive, or simply didn’t know what to do. Those are the people who needed a functioning system of evacuation and relief – and they were out of luck.

人民被遗弃的方式极不平等，沿种族和阶级分裂。许多人可以自行撤离，他们跳上车，开车到干爽的酒店里去，给保险中介打电话。有人也会留下来，因为他们以为风暴堤扛得住。可大多数人滞留，因为他们别无选择。他们没有车，或年老体弱无法驾车，或惊慌失措。这些人恰恰需要切实可行的撤离和救助体系，他们却没那么好命。

Abandoned in the city without food or water, those in need did what anyone would do in those circumstances: they took provisions from local stores. Fox News and other media outlets seized on this to paint New Orleans’s black residents as dangerous “looters” who would soon be coming to invade the dry, white parts of the city and surrounding suburbs and towns. Buildings were spray-painted with messages: “Looters will be shot.”

被困在没有水和食物的城里，灾民行为可以理解：他们从当地商店获取补给。福克斯新闻和其他媒体大做文章，把新奥尔良的黑人写成危险的“掠夺者”，很快就将侵入未受洪水影响、以白人为主的城区及周围的郊区和镇子。建筑外墙上喷着 “强盗将被击毙”。

Checkpoints were set up to trap people in the flooded parts of town. On Danziger Bridge, police officers shot black residents on sight (five of the officers involved ultimately pleaded guilty, and the city came to a $13.3m settlement with the families in that case and two other similar post-Katrina cases). Meanwhile, gangs of armed white vigilantes prowled the streets looking, as one resident later put it in an exposé by investigative journalist AC Thompson, for “the opportunity to hunt black people”.

检查站建起来了，只为把人们困在洪泛区。在丹奇格桥，警察一看到黑人公民就立即开枪，其中五名最终认罪，该市用1330万美元与涉案家庭和发生在卡特里娜飓风后类似案件的两个家庭达成和解。同时，白人治安团武装起来，在街头巡逻，正如调查记者AC·汤普森后来的披露报道中一位市民所言，他们“寻找机会，猎捕黑人”。

I was in New Orleans during the flooding and I saw for myself how amped up the police and military were – not to mention private security guards from companies such as Blackwater who were showing up fresh from Iraq. It felt very much like a war zone, with poor and black people in the crosshairs – people whose only crime was trying to survive. By the time the National Guard arrived to organise a full evacuation of the city, it was done with a level of aggression and ruthlessness that was hard to fathom. Soldiers pointed machine guns at residents as they boarded buses, providing no information about where they were being taken. Children were often separated from their parents.

洪水发生时，我在新奥尔良，我亲眼见识过亢奋的的警察与军人，更别提诸如黑水等安保公司的私人保镖，这些公司在伊拉克战争后出现。新奥尔良很像一个战区，贫穷的黑人都是攻击对象，唯一的罪行是试图求生。国民警卫队前来组织全面撤离，其暴力与残酷难以尽述。灾民上大巴时，被士兵们用机关枪指着，也不告诉他们要到哪里去。父母和孩子常被分开安置。

What I saw during the flooding shocked me. But what I saw in the aftermath of Katrina shocked me even more. With the city reeling, and with its residents dispersed across the country and unable to protect their own interests, a plan emerged to ram through a pro-corporate wishlist with maximum velocity. The famed free-market economist Milton Friedman, then 93 years old, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal stating, “Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”

洪泛时期所见令人震惊，但卡特里娜灾后更令人胆寒。城市一片狼藉，灾民们流散各地，无从保护自己的利益，此时，一个大力推动有利于公司愿望的计划却以迅雷不及掩耳之势出现。著名的自由市场经济学家米尔顿·弗里德曼当时九十三高龄，他为《华尔街日报》撰文称，“新奥尔良大多数学校一片瓦砾，与此同时，失学孩子的家也断壁残垣。孩子们散落各地，这固然是一场悲剧，可也是根本改革教育体制的一个机会。

In a similar vein, Richard Baker, at that time a Republican congressman from Louisiana, declared, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” I was in an evacuation shelter near Baton Rouge when Baker made that statement. The people I spoke with were just floored by it. Imagine being forced to leave your home, having to sleep in a camping bed in some cavernous convention centre, and then finding out that the people who are supposed to represent you are claiming this was some sort of divine intervention – God apparently really likes condo developments.

同米尔顿思路相仿，时任路易斯安那州议员的理查德·贝克称：“我们终于扫清了新奥尔良的公共住房。我们做不了的事，上帝做得了。”贝克发表声明时，我在巴吞鲁日附近一所收容所，我采访的人们都吃惊得不知所措。想想看，你只能背井离乡，睡在会议中心大堂里的行军床上，却发现本应为他们做主的人在鼓吹神明果断出手， 上帝还真是喜欢公寓楼啊。

Baker got his “cleanup” of public housing. In the months after the storm, with New Orleans’s residents – and all their inconvenient opinions, rich culture and deep attachments – out of the way, thousands of public housing units, many of which had sustained minimal storm damage because they were on high ground, were demolished. They were replaced with condos and town houses priced far out of reach for most who had lived there.

贝克的确“清理”了公共住房。风暴后数月，新奥尔良的居民不碍事了，他们不合时宜的意见、丰富的文化和对故乡的深深依恋之情无关紧要了，成千上万所公共住房被拆除，尽管大多数建筑建在高地，受飓风影响很小。取而代之的是公寓楼和联排住宅，价格之高，让大多数曾经的居民望尘莫及。

This is an edited extract from No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics by Naomi Klein, published by Allen Lane at £12.99.

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