Months before a one-two punch of September storms slammed Puerto Rico, a financial manager living on the island quipped: “The only thing we need now is a hurricane.” With the US territory mired in a debt crisis, the manager told an interviewer that she had redirected her clients’ assets from public debt to stocks. She recommended investing in Home Depot, as devastation from a hurricane would surely bring federal aid, much of which would flow to the construction industry.

While quite absurd, this anecdote demonstrates an increasingly predictable phenomenon, one popularized by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: disasters are good for business.

Conservatives are well aware of this, and they’ve often got more in mind than just boosting the construction industry. In the midst of Hurricane Harvey’s historic flooding, the conservative American Enterprise Institute pleaded with Texas and Louisiana officials to allow price gouging of fuel and water to “let the market work”.

The time to advocate against zoning laws in Houston that left the city more prone to flooding during Harvey is now

The director of state affairs at the right-leaning Americans for Tax Reform urged President Trump to not only suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage requirements, but also seek their permanent repeal.



And, as California’s wine country burned earlier this month, Steven Greenhut of the conservative R Street Institute argued that the state ought to use the disaster to bring “pension and compensation systems under control”.

The impacts of such reckless, pro-corporate and anti-worker policy changes are all too familiar to us now. As Klein has chronicled, post-Katrina New Orleans became fertile ground for the conservative recovery response. Within weeks of the devastation, Republican leaders, including the then congressman Mike Pence, compiled a phalanx of policy solutions literally called: “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices”.



In Congress, the fruit of their labor was the Gasoline for America’s Security Act to “expedite the construction of new refining capacity”, a massive giveaway to the booming oil industry. In New Orleans, their efforts reaped dividends too: the city’s public housing was privatized, its public schools turned into charters, and its public university brought to its knees.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A protest for Puerto Rico in Washington DC following Hurricane Maria. Photograph: WG Dunlop/AFP/Getty Images

It’s clear that the Trump administration’s capitalism on steroids will, almost certainly, encourage more environmental disasters. And in the immediate aftermath of such events, the most dominant narratives and policy ideas will be used to rebuild and reshape institutions and governments for decades to come.



While progressives have stepped up to provide material support – a number of unions were quick to join on-the-ground efforts in Puerto Rico, for example – it is conservatives who have understood that moments of collective trauma present unique opportunities to, as Klein describes it, “engage in radical social and economic engineering”.

In these moments, progressives must be prepared to deploy our own blueprint for tangible policy ideas which will enable us to expand democratic power and build more sustainable, resilient public institutions. We must stop yielding space to conservatives to publicly advocate for their positions and privately legislate for their ideas.

As calls grow to privatize Puerto Rico’s publicly owned power utility, known as Prepa, progressives ought to both educate the public on the dangers of privatization, and aim to pass legislation where possible to avoid reckless and shortsighted privatization in the future.



Massachusetts’ Taxpayer Protection Act, considered the gold standard for ensuring government contracts result in cost-savings that don’t simply rely on slashing wages and benefits for workers, should be the rule nationwide, not the exception.

It's a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly | Michael E Mann Read more

Such protection, alongside standards for contracting transparency, might have prevented Prepa’s recent $300m contract with a small, inexperienced Montana corporation to help restore power to millions of residents, which raised eyebrows in the Puerto Rican government and the US House of Representatives.

The time to advocate against zoning laws in Houston that left the city more prone to flooding during Hurricane Harvey is now. Instead of using the next flood – or forest fire, or hurricane – only as a means to initiate conversation around climate change, progressives should be ready to deploy climate resiliency policy at the state and local levels.

In the wake of disasters, progressives have responded with a combination of mourning, material support, and debate about the structural inadequacies that led to crisis. Each of these is vitally important in its own way. But, along with the constant churn of building democratic power in our communities, we must add a rapid deployment of clearly defined state and local policy ideas to our disaster response arsenal.

Conservatives haven’t shied away from politics in the wake disasters. Progressives should do the same – our communities depend on it.

