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Comment by truth on September 6, 2015 at 4:47pm

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The following is an excerpt from the new book Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and... by John C. Mutter (St. Martin's Press, 2015):

Disaster seen as an opportunity for engineering social change is not a new idea. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 occurred simultaneously with a typhoon, the only occurrence of such a double disaster on record. The earthquake, and more so the subsequent fires, destroyed 45 percent of Tokyo and 90 percent of Yokohama, killing well over 100,000 people. (As always, estimates vary.) The fires no doubt killed more people than the quake itself as the quake occurred around midday, when many people were cooking outdoors on open fires. Descriptions of the conflagration sound like scenes from a fiery hell. Some 38,000 people were incinerated together when they sought refuge in a huge former army clothing warehouse; it was instantly engulfed in the inferno of a massive fire tornado created by the typhoon winds and the roaring fires.

A certain elite saw the earthquake as an opportunity to rebuild the city in a more modern and efficient way, similar to Georges- Eugene Haussmann's renewal of Paris, with wide boulevards and grand architecture, at the behest of Napoleon III in the 1850s. (Tellingly, Haussmann's plans have been criticized for creating an overly grandiose city meant for tourists, the wealthy, and the bourgeoisie, with working-class people effectively ignored and marginalized to the periphery of the city.) In its layout and architecture, the new Tokyo was meant to somehow reflect new moral values as well. Haussmann used military cannons to demolish Paris, but for Tokyo, there was no need for cannons: Nature had razed the city.

In fact, the grand plan for heroic and moral reconstruction of Tokyo never came to fruition.

http://www.sott.net/article/301164-How-the-elites-cash-in-on-natura...