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:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Rachel's Precaution Reporter #121
"Foresight and Precaution, in the News and in the World" Wednesday, December 19, 2007.........
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here.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Featured stories in this issue...Disaster Capitalism: The New Economy of Catastrophe Have you ever wondered why precaution is so strongly opposed in
Washington and on Wall Street? An economic system that requires
constant growth while resisting almost all serious attempts at
environmental regulation generates a steady stream of disasters all on
its own, whether military, ecological, or financial. Now the economic
and political systems have learned to thrive on disasters. Under these
circumstances, precaution is the enemy.
Lloyd's of London Issues Report on Nanotechnology Risks "The precautionary principle is now accepted to apply to the
degradation of human health as well as the environment, and suggests
the use of nanotechnology should be risk assessed appropriately before
consumption by the public. This approach is being recommended within
the EU, though the US and Japan prefer a lighter regulatory touch. In
the past a vacuum of regulation has proved unhelpful to insurers. The
insurance industry should lobby for clarity in this area." --Lloyd's
The Precautionary Principle Was Ignored at Bali Both Canada and the United States signed the Framework Convention
on Climate Change, and subsequently ratified the Convention. The
Framework Convention on climate Change called for the invoking of the
precautionary principle which reads: "The Parties should take
precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimize the causes
of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. Where there are
threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific
certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such
measures...."
At Bali, International Youth Implore World Leaders: 'Please' "The precautionary principle has been completely ignored.
Negotiators are acting as though this is a political question, when it
is instead a moral imperative. What are they doing to protect my
future?"
Fear Versus Science "If civilization had embraced this principle in the 1800s, our
lives today would be almost as nasty, brutish and short as they were
200 years ago." What were we just saying about
precaution being the enemy of those who profit from disasters?
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: From: Harper's Magazine, Oct. 1, 2007
[Printer-friendly version]DISASTER CAPITALISM: THE NEW ECONOMY OF CATASTROPHEBy
Naomi Klein[An excerpt from Naomi Klein's new book,
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise
of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).]
Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When
that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas
that are lying around. -- Milton Friedman
Three years ago, when I was in Baghdad on assignment for this
magazine, I paid an early-morning visit to Khadamiya, a mostly Shiite
area. An Iraqi colleague had heard that part of the neighborhood had
flooded the night before, as it did regularly. When we arrived, the
streets were drenched in slick green-blue liquid that was bubbling up
from sewage pipes beneath exhausted asphalt. A family invited us to
see what the frequent floods had done to their once lovely home. The
walls were moldy and cracked, and every item -- books, photos, sofas
-- was caked in the algae-like scum. Out back, a walled garden was a
fetid swamp, with a child's swing dangling forlornly from a dead palm
tree. "It was a beautiful garden," Durdham Yassin, the owner, told us.
"I grew tomatoes."
For the frequent flooding, Yassin spread the blame around. There was
Saddam, who spent oil money on weapons instead of infrastructure
during the Iran-Iraq War. There was the first Gulf War, when U.S.
missiles struck a nearby electricity plant, knocking out power to the
sewage-treatment facility. Next came the years of U.N. sanctions, when
city workers could not replace crucial parts of the sewage system.
Then there was the 2003 invasion, which further fried the power grid.
And, more recently, there were companies like Bechtel and General
Electric, which were hired to fix this mess, and which failed.
Around the corner, a truck was idling with a large hose down a
manhole. "The most powerful vacuum loader in the world," it
advertised, in English, on its side. Yassin explained that the
neighbors had pooled their money to pay the company to suck away the
latest batch of sludge, a costly and temporary solution. The mosque
had helped, too. As we drove away, I noticed that there were similar
private vacuum trucks on every other block.
Later that day I stopped by Baghdad's world-famous Green Zone. There,
the challenges of living without functioning public infrastructure are
also addressed by private actors. The difference is that in the Green
Zone, the solutions actually work. The enclave has its own electrical
grid, its own phone and sanitation systems, its own oil supply, its
own state-of-the-art hospital with pristine operating theaters -- all
protected by walls five meters thick. It felt, oddly, like a giant
fortified Carnival Cruise ship parked in the middle of a sea of
violence and despair, the boiling Red Zone that is Iraq. If you could
get on board there were poolside drinks, bad Hollywood movies, and
Nautilus machines. If you were not among the chosen, you could get
shot just for standing too close to the wall.
Everywhere in Iraq, the wildly divergent values assigned to different
categories of people are on crude display. Westerners and their Iraqi
colleagues have checkpoints at the entrances to their streets, blast
walls in front of their houses, body armor, and private security
guards on call at all hours. They travel the country in menacing
armored convoys, with mercenaries pointing guns out the windows as
they follow their prime directive to "protect the principal." With
every move they broadcast the same unapologetic message: We are the
chosen, our lives are infinitely more precious than yours. Middle-
class Iraqis, meanwhile, cling to the next rung down the ladder: they
can afford to buy protection from local militias, they are able to
ransom a family member held by kidnappers, they may ultimately escape
to a life of poverty in Jordan. But the vast majority of Iraqis have
no protection at all. They walk the streets exposed to any possible
ravaging, with nothing between them and the next car bomb but a thin
layer of fabric. In Iraq, the lucky get Kevlar; the rest get prayer
beads.
Like most people, I saw the divide between Baghdad's Green and Red
zones as a simple by-product of the war: This is what happens when the
richest country in the world sets up camp in one of the poorest. But
now, after years spent visiting other disaster zones, from post-
tsunami Sri Lanka to post-Katrina New Orleans, I've come to think of
these Green Zone/Red Zone worlds as something else: fast-forward
versions of what "free market" forces are doing to our societies even
in the absence of war. In Iraq the phones, pipes, and roads had been
destroyed by weapons and trade embargoes. In many other parts of the
world, including the United Stares, they have been demolished by
ideology, the war on "big government," the religion of tax cuts, the
fetish for privatization. When that crumbling infrastructure is
blasted with increasingly intense weather, the effects can be as
devastating as war.
Last February, for instance, Jakarta suffered one of these predictable
disasters. The rains had come, as they always do, but this time the
water didn't drain our of Jakarta's famously putrid sewers, and half
the city filled up like a swimming pool. There were mass evacuations,
and at least fifty-seven people were killed. No bombs or trade
sanctions were needed for Jakarta's infrastructure to fail in fact,
the steady erosion of the country's public sphere had taken place
under the banner of "free trade." For decades, Washington-backed
structural-adjustment programs had pampered investors and starved
public services, leading to such cliches of lopsided development as
glittering shopping malls with indoor skating rinks surrounded by
moats of open sewers. Now those sewers had failed completely.
In wealthier countries, where public infrastructure was far more
robust before the decline began, it has been possible to delay this
kind of reckoning. Politicians have been free to cut taxes and rail
against big government even as their constituents drove on, studied
in, and drank from the huge public-works projects of the 1930s and
1940s. But after a few decades, that trick stops working. The American
Society of Civil Engineers has warned that the United States has
fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure --
roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a
trillion and a half dollars over five years to bring it back up to
standard. This past summer those statistics came to life: collapsing
bridges, flooding subways, exploding steam pipes, and the still-
unfolding tragedy that began when New Orleans's levees broke.
After each new disaster, it's tempting to imagine that the loss of
life and productivity will finally serve as a wake-up call, provoking
the political class to launch some kind of "new New Deal." In fact,
the opposite is taking place: disasters have become the preferred
moments for advancing a vision of a ruthlessly divided world, one in
which the very idea of a public sphere has no place at all. Call it
disaster capitalism. Every time a new crisis hits -- even when the
crisis itself is the direct by-product of free-market ideology -- the
fear and disorientation that follow are harnessed for radical social
and economic re-engineering. Each new shock is midwife to a new course
of economic shock therapy. The end result is the same kind of
unapologetic partition between the included and the excluded, the
protected and the damned, that is on display in Baghdad.
Consider the instant reactions to last summer's various infrastructure
disasters. Four days after the Minneapolis bridge collapsed, a Wall
Street Journal editorial had the solution: "tapping private investors
to build and operate public roads and bridges," with the cost made up
from ever-escalating tolls. After heavy rain caused the shutdown of
New York City's subway lines, the New York Sun ran an editorial under
the headline "Sell the Subways." It called for individual train lines
to compete against one another, luring customers with the safest,
driest service and "charging higher fares when the competing lines,
stingier on their investments, were shut down with tracks under
water."' It's not hard to imagine what this free market in subways
would look like: high-speed lines ferrying commuters from the Upper
West Side to Wall Street, while the trains serving the South Bronx
wouldn't just continue their long decay, they would simply drown.
The same week as the bridge collapse, hysteria erupted over canceled
flights and delays at London's Heathrow airport, prompting The
Economist to demand "radical reform" of the "grubby, cramped"
facility. London's airports are already privatized, but now, according
to the magazine, they should be deregulated, allowing terminals to
compete against one another: "different firms could provide different
forms of security checks, some faster and dearer than others."
Meanwhile, in New Orleans, schools were getting ready to reopen for
fall. More than half the city's students would be attending newly
minted charter schools, where they would enjoy small classes, well-
trained teachers, and refurbished libraries, thanks to special state
and foundation funding pouring into what the New York Times has
described as "the nation's pre-eminent laboratory for the widespread
use of charter schools." But charters are only for the students who
are admitted to the system -- an educational Green Zone. The rest of
New Orleans's public-school students -- many of them with special
emotional and physical needs, almost all of them African American --
are dumped into the pre-Katrina system: no extra money, overcrowded
classrooms, more guards than teachers. An educational Red Zone.
Other institutions that had attempted to bridge the gap between New
Orleans's super-rich and ultra-poor were also under attack: thousands
of units of subsidized housing were slotted for demolition, and
Charity Hospital, the city's largest public-health facility, remained
shuttered. The original disaster was created and deepened by public
infrastructure that was on its last legs; in the years since, the
disaster itself has been used as an excuse to finish the job.
There will be more Katrinas. The bones of our states -- so frail and
aging -- will keep getting buffeted by storms both climatic and
political. And as key pieces of the infrastructure are knocked out,
there is no guarantee that they will be repaired or rebuilt, at least
not as they were before. More likely, they will be left to rot, with
the well-off withdrawing into gated communities, their needs met by
private suppliers.
Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare
moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled
together. Today they are moments when we are hurled further apart,
when we lurch into a radically segregated future where some of us will
fall off the map and others ascend to a parallel privatized state, one
equipped with well-paved highways and skyways, safe bridges, boutique
charter schools, fast-lane airport terminals, and deluxe subways.
As Iraq and New Orleans both reveal, the markets opened up by crises
aren't only the roads, schools, and oil wells; the disasters
themselves are major new markets. The military-industrial complex that
Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against in 1961 has expanded and morphed
into what is best understood as a disaster-capitalism complex, in
which all conflict- and disaster-related functions (waging war,
securing borders, spying on citizens, re-building cities, treating
traumatized soldiers) can be performed by corporations at a profit.
And this complex is not satisfied merely to feed off the state, the
way traditional military contractors do; it aims, ultimately, to
replace core functions of government with its own profitable
enterprises, as it did in Baghdad's Green Zone.
It happened in New Orleans. Within weeks of Hurricane Katrina, the
Gulf Coast became a domestic laboratory for the same kind of
government run by contractors that was pioneered in Iraq. The
companies that snatched up the biggest contracts were the familiar
Baghdad gang: Halliburton's KBR unit received a $60 million contract
to reconstruct military bases along the coast. Blackwater was hired to
protect FEMA operations, with the company billing an average of $950 a
day per guard. Parsons, infamous for its sloppy work in Iraq, was
brought in for a major bridge-construction project in Mississippi.
Fluor, Shaw, Bechtel, CH2M Hill -- all top contractors in Iraq -- were
handed contracts on the Gulf Coast to provide mobile homes to evacuees
just ten days after the levees broke. Their contracts ended up
totaling $3.4 billion, no open bidding required. To spearhead its
Katrina operation, Shaw hired the former head of the U.S. Army's Iraq
reconstruction office. Fluor sent its senior project manager from Iraq
to the flood zone. "Our rebuilding work in Iraq is slowing down, and
this has made some people available to respond to our work in
Louisiana," a company representative explained. Joe Allbaugh, whose
company, New Bridge Strategies, had promised to bring Wal-Mart and 7-
Eleven to Iraq, was the lobbyist in the middle of many of the deals.
The feeling that the Iraq war had somehow just been franchised was so
striking that some of the mercenary soldiers, fresh from Baghdad, were
having trouble adjusting. When David Enders, a reporter, asked an
armed guard outside a New Orleans hotel if there had been much action,
he replied, "Nope. It's pretty Green Zone here."
Since then, privatized disaster response has become one of the hottest
industries in the South. Just one year after Hurricane Katrina, a slew
of new corporations had entered the market, promising safety and
security should the next Big One hit. One of the more ambitious
ventures was launched by a charter air service in West Palm Beach,
Florida. Help Jet bills itself as "the world's first hurricane escape
plan that turns a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation."
When a storm is coming, the charter company books holidays for its
members at five-star golf resorts, spas, or Disneyland. With the
reservations made, the evacuees are then whisked out of the hurricane
zone on a luxury jet. "No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds,
just a first class experience that turns a problem into a vacation....
Enjoy the feeling of avoiding the usual hurricane evacuation
nightmare." For the people left behind, there is a different kind of
privatized solution. In 2006, the Red Cross signed a new disaster-
response partnership with Wal-Mart. "It's all going to be private
enterprise before it's over," said Billy Wagner, chief of emergency
management for the Florida Keys. "They've got the expertise. They've
got the resources." He was speaking at the National Hurricane
Conference in Orlando, Florida, a fast-growing annual trade show for
the companies selling everything that might come in handy during the
next disaster. Dave Blandford, an exhibitor showing off his "self-
heating meals" at the conference, observed: "Some folks here said,
'Man, this is huge business this is my new business. I'm not in the
landscaping business anymore; I'm going to be a hurricane-debris
contractor.'"
Much of the parallel disaster economy has been built with taxpayers'
money, thanks to the boom in privatized war-zone reconstruction. The
giant contractors that have served as "the primes" in Iraq and
Afghanistan have spent large portions of their income from government
contracts on their own corporate overhead -- between 20 and 55
percent, according to a 2006 audit of Iraq contractors. Much of those
funds has, quite legally, gone into huge investments in corporate
equipment, such as Bechtel's battalions of earth movers, Halliburton's
fleets of planes and trucks, and the surveillance architecture built
by L-3, CACI, and Booz Allen. Most dramatic has been Blackwater's
investment in its paramilitary infrastructure. Founded in 1996, the
company has used its steady stream of contracts to build up a private
army of 20,000 on-call mercenary soldiers and a military base in North
Carolina worth between $40 million and $50 million. It reportedly has
the ability to field massive humanitarian operations faster than the
Red Cross, and boasts a fleet of aircraft ranging from helicopter
gunships to a Boeing 767.[2] Blackwater has been called "al Qaeda for
the good guys" by its right-wing admirers. It's a striking analogy.
Wherever the disaster-capitalism complex has landed, it has produced a
proliferation of armed groups that operate outside the state. That is
hardly a surprise: when countries are rebuilt by people who don't
believe in governments, the states they build are invariably weak,
creating a market for alternative security forces, whether Hezbollah,
Blackwater, the Mahdi Army, or the gang down the street in New
Orleans.
The reach of the disaster industry extends far beyond policing. When
the contractor infrastructure built up during the Bush years is looked
at as a whole, what we see is a fully articulated state-within-a-state
that is as muscular and capable as the actual state is frail and
feeble. This corporate shadow-state has been built almost exclusively
with public resources, including the training of its staff: 90 percent
of Blackwater's revenues come from state contracts, and the majority
of its employees are former politicians, soldiers, and civil servants.
Yet the vast infrastructure is all privately owned and controlled. The
citizens who funded it have absolutely no claim to this parallel
economy or its resources.
The actual state, meanwhile, has lost the ability to perform its core
functions without the help of contractors. Its own equipment is out of
date, and the best experts have fled to the private sector. When
Katrina hit, FEMA had to hire a contractor to award contracts to
contractors. Similarly, when it came time to update the Army manual on
the rules for dealing with contractors, the Army outsourced the job to
one of its major contractors, MPRI, because it no longer had the in-
house expertise. The CIA has lost so many staffers to the privatized
spy sector that it has had to bar contractors from recruiting in the
agency dining room. "One recently retired case officer said he had
been approached twice while in line for coffee," reported the Los
Angeles Times. And when the Department of Homeland Security decided it
needed to build "virtual fences" on the U.S. borders with Mexico and
Canada, Michael P. Jackson, deputy secretary of the department, told
contractors, "This is an unusual invitation.... We're asking you to
come back and tell us how to do our business." The department's
inspector general explained that Homeland Security "does not have the
capacity needed to effectively plan, oversee, and execute the [Secure
Border Initiative] program."
Under George W. Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a
government -- the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings,
policy battles -- but it no more does the actual work of governing
than the employees at Nike's Beaverton, Oregon, campus stitch running
shoes.
The implications of the decision by the current crop of politicians to
systematically outsource their elected responsibilities will reach far
beyond a single administration. Once a market has been created, it
needs to be protected. The companies at the heart of the disaster-
capitalism complex increasingly regard both the state and nonprofits
as competitors; from the corporate perspective, whenever governments
or charities fulfill their traditional roles, they are denying
contractors work that could be performed at a profit.
"Neglected Defense: Mobilizing the Private Sector to Support Home-land
Security," a 2006 report whose advisory committee included some of the
largest corporations in the sector, warned that "the compassionate
federal impulse to provide emergency assistance to the victims of
disasters affects the market's approach to managing its exposure to
risk." Published by the Council on Foreign Relations, the report
argued that if people know the government will come to the rescue,
they have no incentive to pay for protection. In a similar vein, a
year after Katrina, CEOs from thirty of the largest corporations in
the United States joined together under the umbrella of the Business
Roundtable, which includes in its membership Fluor, Bechtel, and
Chevron. The group, calling itself Partnership for Disaster Response,
complained of "mission creep" by the nonprofit sector in the aftermath
of disasters. The mercenary firms, meanwhile, have been loudly
claiming that they are better equipped than the U.N. to engage in
peacekeeping in Darfur.
Much of this new aggressiveness flows from suspicion that the golden
era of bottomless federal contracts might not last much longer. The
U.S. government is barreling toward an economic crisis, thanks in no
small part to the deficit spending that has bankrolled the privatized
disaster economy. Sooner rather than later, the contracts are likely
to dip significantly. In late 2006 defense analysts began predicting
that the Pentagon's acquisitions budget could shrink by as much as 25
percent in the coming decade.
When the disaster bubble bursts, firms such as Bechtel, Fluor, and
Blackwater will lose much of their primary revenue streams. They will
still have all the high-tech equipment bought at taxpayer expense, but
they will need to find a new business model, a new way to cover their
high costs. The next phase of the disaster-capitalism complex is all
too clear: with emergencies on the rise, government no longer able to
foot the bill, and citizens stranded by their hollow state, the
parallel corporate state will rent back its disaster infrastructure to
whoever can afford it, at whatever price the market will bear. For
sale will be everything from helicopter rides off rooftops to drinking
water to beds in shelters.
Wealth already provides an escape hatch from most disasters -- it buys
early-warning systems for tsunami-prone regions and stockpiles of
Tamiflu for the next outbreak. It buys bottled water, generators,
satellite phones, and renta-cops. During the Israeli attack on Lebanon
in 2006, the U.S. government initially tried to charge American
citizens for the cost of their own evacuation, though it was
eventually forced to back down. If we continue in this direction, the
images of people stranded on New Orleans rooftops will not only have
been a glimpse of America's unresolved past of racial inequality but
will also have foreshadowed a collective future of disaster apartheid,
in which survival is determined primarily by one's ability to pay.
Perhaps part of the reason so many of our elites, both political and
corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are
confident they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it.
This may also partially explain why so many Bush supporters are
Christian end-timers. It's not just that they need to believe there is
an escape hatch from the world they are creating. It's that the
Rapture is a parable for what they are building down here on Earth --
a system that invites destruction and disaster, then swoops in with
private helicopters and airlifts them and their friends to divine
safety.
As contractors rush to develop alternative stable sources of revenue,
one avenue of business is in disaster-proofing other corporations.
This was Paul Bremer's line of work before he became Bush's proconsul
in Iraq: turning multinationals into security bubbles able to function
smoothly even if the states in which they are doing business crumble
around them. The early results can be seen in the lobbies of many
office buildings in New York or London -- airport-style check-ins
complete with photo-ID requirements and X-ray machines -- but the
industry' has far greater ambitions, including privatized global
communications networks, emergency health and electricity services,
and the ability to locate and provide transportation for a global
workforce in the midst of a major disaster. Another potential growth
area identified by the disaster-capitalism complex is municipal
government: the contracting out of police and fire departments to
private security companies. "What they do for the military in downtown
Fallujah, they can do for the police in downtown Reno," a spokesperson
for Lockheed Martin said in November 2004.
The contracting industry predicts that these new markets will expand
dramatically over the next decade. A frank vision of where these
trends are leading is provided by John Robb, a former covert-action
mission commander with Delta Force turned management consultant. In a
widely circulated manifesto for Fast Company magazine, he describes
the "end result" of the war on terror as "a new, more resilient
approach to national security, one built not around the state but
around private citizens and companies.... Security will become a
function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care
is allocated already."
Robb writes, "Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will
be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to
hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy,
to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective
perimeter around daily life. Parallel transportation networks --
evolving out of the time-share aircraft companies such as Warren
Buffett's NetJets -- will cater to this group, leapfrogging its
members from one secure, well-appointed lily pad to the next." That
elite world is already largely in place, but Robb predicts that the
middle class will soon follow suit, "forming suburban collectives to
share the costs of security." These "'armored suburbs' will deploy and
maintain backup generators and communications links" and be patrolled
by private militias "that have received corporate training and boast
their own state-of-the-art emergency response systems."
In other words, a world of suburban Green Zones. As for those outside
the secured perimeter, "they will have to make do with the remains of
the national system. They will gravitate to America's cities, where
they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance and marginal or
nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no other refuge."
The future Robb describes sounds very much like the present in New
Orleans, where two very different kinds of gated communities emerged
from the rubble. On the one hand were the so-called FEMA-villes:
desolate, out-of-the-way trailer camps for low-income evacuees, built
by Bechtel or Fluor subcontractors and administered by private
security companies that patrolled the gravel lots, restricted
visitors, kept journalists out, and treated survivors like criminals.
On the other hand were the gated communities built in the wealthy
areas of the city like Audubon and the Garden District, bubbles of
functionality that seemed to have seceded from the state altogether.
Within weeks of the storm, residents there had water and powerful
emergency generators. Their sick were treated in private hospitals,
and their children went to private or charter schools. And they had no
need for public transit. In St. Bernard Parish, a New Orleans suburb,
DynCorp had taken over much of the policing; other