Today's Huffington Post features a discussion between John Cusack and Naomi Klein about what Klein calls "disaster capitalism" in her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it Klein discusses how "necessary" (quotation marks to indicate that many of the disasters are manufactured) services are being outsourced to private companies. Blackwater and Halliburton are just the most well known beneficiaries of the Bush administration's policy of gutting the government's capabilities to handle disasters and then handing out contracts to the private sector to step in.
It's frightening to hear about Blackwater's buildup of arms and personnel:
They're planning for the future, building infrastructure -- in Blackwater's case, paramilitary infrastructure. Founded in 1996, the company has used the steady stream of contracts during the Bush years to build up a private army of twenty thousand on-call mercenary soldiers and a massive military base in North Carolina worth between $40 and $50 million. They have armored vehicles, helicopter gunships, manmade lakes, a Boeing 767, a Zeppelin.
Klein says this is the inevitable outcome of a government run by people who don't believe in a strong state. And she's not talking only about Iraq, which is halfway around the world:
Cusack: You've written a lot about what you call "the moveable green zone", which has extended the reach of these companies way beyond the war...
Klein: Well the first place where we all saw this happen was in New Orleans after the flood. Within weeks, the Gulf Coast became a domestic laboratory for the same kind of government-run-by-contractors that was pioneered in Iraq. And the whole Green Zone gang was there: Halliburton, Blackwater, Parsons, Fluor, Shaw, Bechtel, CH2M Hill.
And in what Cusack calls the "mother of all con jobs," the Bush administration is selling all this (no-bid contracts to their buddies) as the free market in action! Klein outlines how the disaster capitalism industry has been built almost entirely with public money, yet taxpayers have no stake in or control of these companies.
What will such companies do after the war? Cusack's take on it is chilling:
Blackwater is a symptom of a larger problem which is also more terrifying: basically what the Bush administration has done is use its time in office to fund and create a dangerous counter-power to the very government it is leading.
This discussion is a must-read. Klein argues that Iraq and New Orleans show us what a future under the current policies would look like. I just hope it's not too late to change course.