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The privatization of disaster

Paying to be saved: the future of disaster response

"The Red Cross has just announced a new disaster response partnership with Wal-Mart. When the next hurricane hits, it will be a co - production of the mega-charity with the mega-supermarket.



This is, apparently, the lesson learned from the tragic government response to Hurricane Katrina: the business better respond to disasters.



"In the end, everything will fall into the hands of the private sector," he said, in April, Billy Wagner, emergency management chief for the Florida Keys, currently monitoring Tropical Storm Ernesto. "They have the knowledge. They have the resources. "



But before this new consensus goes any further, it might be time to see where the privatization of disaster began, and where it will inevitably.



The first step was the government's abdication of its fundamental responsibility to protect the population from disasters. Under the Bush administration, whole sectors of government, and in particular the Department of Homeland Security, have been turned into glorified temporary work agencies, with essential functions contracted out to private companies. The theory is that entrepreneurs, driven by the profit motive, are always more efficient (please suspend hysterical laughter).



We saw the results in New Orleans: Washington was frighteningly weak and inept, in part because its emergency management experts had fled to the private sector and because its infrastructure - structures and technology were completely overcome. At least by comparison, the private seem modern and competent (a columnist for the New York Times even suggested FEMA to deliver to Wal - Mart).



But the moon - to - honey did not last long. "Where has all the money?" Ask desperate people from Baghdad to New Orleans, from Kabul to tsunami-struck Sri Lanka. A large part of it was spent on major capital spending these private contractors. Largely under the public radar, were spent billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to build an infra - structure privatized disaster response: the ultra-modern headquarters of the Shaw Group in Baton Rouge, the battalions of equipment to remove land from Bechtel, the campus of 2,400 acres of Blackwater USA in North Carolina (complete with paramilitary training camp and a foot runway). I call it the Disaster Capitalism Complex. All you need in a serious crunch, these contractors can provide it: generators, water tanks, cots, potties, mobile homes, communications systems, helicopters, medicine, men armed ...



This state within a state was built almost exclusively with money from public contracts, including the training of its staff (overwhelmingly former officials, politicians and soldiers). And yet, it's all in the hands of private individuals, taxpayers have no control or complaints about this. So far, that reality has not sunk in because while these companies are getting their bills paid by government contracts, the Disaster Capitalism Complex provides its services to the public on a free.



But therein lies the problem: the U.S. government is losing money, largely thanks to this kind of loony spending. The national debt is 8 trillion dollars, the federal budget deficit is at least 260 billion dollars. This means that sooner than later, contracts will dry up. And nobody knows this better than the companies themselves. Ralph Sheridan, chief executive of Good Harbor Partners, one of hundreds of new companies against - terrorism, explains that "expenditures by governments are sporadic and hit the bubbles." The Insiders call it - her "homeland security bubble."



When it bursts, firms such as Bechtel, Fluor and Blakwater will lose their source primary income. Still have all your equipment, high - technology - giving them the ability to respond to disasters - while the government will have missed this precious ability - but then sell the infra - structure financed by public money at the price they want.



Here's a snapshot of what may occur in the near future: helicopter rides off of rooftops in flooded cities ($ 5,000 per head, $ 7,000 per family, pets included), bottled water and "prepared foods" (50 dollars per person; expensive, but that's supply and demand) and a bed in a shelter (show us your biometric ID - created thanks to a lucrative contract from Homeland Security - and we send - him - we will then count. Do not worry, we have the means: the spying has been outsourced too).



The model is of course the U.S. healthcare system, in which the wealthy can access best treatment in spa-like environment, while 46 million Americans lack health insurance. As emergency response, the model is already working on global pandemic da SIDA: o sector privado ajudou com proeza a criar medicamentos salvadores de vidas (com substanciais subsídios públicos), depois estabeleceu preços tão altos que a maioria dos infectados do mundo não pode pagar o tratamento.



Se esse é o historial mundial do sector privado nas catástrofes em câmara lenta, porque haveríamos de esperar que valores diferentes governassem as catástrofes de actuação rápida, como os furacões e até os ataques terroristas? É bom lembrar que quando as bombas israelitas zurziram o Líbano não há muito tempo, o governo dos EUA inicialmente tentou cobrar aos seus cidadãos o custo das suas próprias evacuações.


A year ago, the poor and working class citizens of New Orleans were stranded on the roofs of their homes waiting for help that never arrived, while those who could pay his ex fled for safety. The country's political leaders claim it was all a terrible mistake, a breakdown in communication that is being fixed. Their solution is to go deeper into the catastrophic road of "private sector solutions."



Unless a radical change of course is demanded, New Orleans will prove to be a glimpse of a dystopian future, a future of disaster apartheid in which the wealthy are saved and all others are left behind. "

KLEIN, Naomi , NO LOGO , August 29, 2006.

in. Alternative Information .

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MOVING

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Add to My Profile last Sunday, "The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya

, a symbol of uncompromising opposition to the policies of President Vladimir Putin in Chechnya, was killed with four shots in the elevator of the building where he lived

(...)" Vladimir
In democracy, journalists nuisance shut up with bullets, the worst style of the former KGB-FSB-current where this germ has harvested its teachings. In tribute to Politkovskaya could only shut up with methods cowards, here I leave you this excellent article published in El Pais


today, where
JOSEP Ramoneda , outlines the current regime's claim Vladimir Putin. (I will translate it to Portuguese as time allows me to do it. Until then, I invite you to read the same in its original version, since it is undoubtedly true and enlightening demonstration of the system intaladoactualmente in Russia!).






La rusa dishonor


En La rusa dishonor, Anna Politkovskaya señalaba three razon by them that at le gustaba Putin: el racism, racism to menudo un invisible, as es del propio Century, which is spreading across the country, the antirreconciliación, ie the desire to maintain a permanent citizenship in combat against an enemy, in this case, evil Caucasian, and summary justice, "the terrorists charged in the urinal, "according to Putin's famous phrase, give the security forces and their concentric circles permanent authority to act under the principle of exemption from the law.
On Saturday Anna Politkovskaya was the victim of summary justice that she reported. Very likely, especially if the United States and Europe are hypnotized to Putin, that the official versions of the murder cases attributed to a disturbed, drunken a street robber or a personal enemy of the journalist. Anna Politkovskaya, as all critical journalist in Russia (and there are very few) had been threatened from all sorts of official agencies and paraoficiales and had been identified repeatedly as an enemy, especially by the puppet government in Chechnya, Putin installed. So there are only two plausible scenarios for murder: or has been ordered and organized directly from Russian power, either in its central version or the version Chechen through any terminal of the security services (the hypothesis probable), or has been contaminated people work and encouraged by nationalist discourse deployed the means of power, ie, almost all media that turn any dissenting traitor. "Putin's Russia, Politkovskaya had written," is morally even dirtier than that of Yeltsin. It looks like a garbage dump and covered with thorns. " The infection was "moral gangrene" Russia has its origins in the Soviet past, but its immediate roots in the war in Chechnya. "War would not have started," says the reporter if the lieutenant colonel Putin, little known to the public, would not have needed to increase their share of popularity for the presidential elections. " Putin sought in the blood of its legitimacy Chechnya and she has built a neo-authoritarian regime that is characterized by all the strings of power (executive, judicial, legislative, economic and media) converge not only in the Kremlin, but directly on the president's office, and because the Constitution-al So what happened in the Soviet Union is irrelevant, because they are political and judicial practices that impose arbitrary power only what counts. Tzvetan Todorov said

Memorial evil temptation of the good that "since (in the Soviet Union) party power replaced the authority of the State, has revealed a drop in the disappearance of the other. no state is worse than the presence of a state unfair because it leaves the field open to the pure brute-force confrontation, and an impressive rise in crime. "Years later, on these brute forces, Putin has built his personal state in which seeks to any media not to accept the Kremlin's game, it destroys businesses that are not part of the circle of friends, is submitted to the legislature, making any opponent in invisible applies to summary justice those who meddle, and exercised, according to Russian tradition of state-a nihilism that no one forget that the human material is, for power, flesh of trash. Politkovskaya was investigating una de las más abrumadoras demostraciones de esta creencia de que matar es un fin en sí mismo: la matanza de la Escuela de Beslán, en que Putin demostró que para él los niños no eran más que figurantes de su orgía nihilista.
Esta es la Rusia que Putin está construyendo con el petróleo como arma estratégica para hacerse respetar, ante la complicidad de los líderes occidentales, que le blanquean todos sus crímenes a cambio del suministro energético y de un control, sin reparar en medios, de su inmenso país. La economía rusa se aguanta con el dinero del petróleo, la arbitrariedad de un Estado de derecho sometido al capricho del poder dificulta enormemente las inversiones extranjeras y da como resultado una economía mafiosa, fundada en el amiguismo y las simpatías cambiantes del poder político. Dice Javier Solana que un día le dijo a Putin: "No se ha visto nunca un solo producto made in Rusia en las tiendas de Europa. Y eso sí debería preocuparte". Así es de artificial la economía rusa.

Y, sin embargo, Bush trata a Putin como un socio privilegiado y fiable; Schroeder, que siempre miró a Moscú, no tiene ningún reparo, al dejar el poder, en irse a ganar dinero en una terminal del complejo energético ruso; Aznar le apoyaba incondicionalmente contra los chechenos, porque todos los terrorismos son iguales; Chirac y Zapatero le ven como un aliado útilen sus desencuentros with the Americans. And so on. "After the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, still the same? I'm afraid that yes, things do not go far beyond diplomatic protests ritual expressions of confidence in the Russian justice. Pure sarcasm.

Why this fear of Putin? The reason allegedly being given to me in private conversations some political leaders of both the right and the European left is the fear of Russia. The Soviet Union was a bomb explosion which could have delayed blown up the world. Putin has been able to bring order and chaos has been avoided. Our Democratic leaders are not averse to authoritarian leaders when trying to resolve conflicts in foreign territory.

The reasoning, however, conceal past mistakes and shortsightedness of a manifest. Mask past mistakes: Putin's authoritarian regime has been possible largely because of U.S. pressure forced an abrupt change from socialism to capitalism, not pre-create the legal conditions, without seeking the appropriate rhythms to make the process acceptable by society. The result was that a section of the same nomenclature metamorphosed into Soviet economic and political power at a time. And so were prevented from building a peaceful democracy. Shortness of states, what is more dangerous for the West, chaos say that Putin has avoided or the authoritarian regime that this man has built, which as everyone knows has oil and weapons of mass destruction?

I do not believe in fatalism of the people. But it is possible that, as Anna Politkovskaya wrote, "Slavery is our downfall. But our fetish. We love being slaves," everyone has the habit of "aligned with the Tsar, our father." On these habits of submission and the timeless appeal to nationalist discourse, Putin has built his system. Here are the results: The summary execution of people uncomfortable about the health of the Tsar and the fatherland. Showing nationalism each day a little more face fierce and violent in the streets of Moscow. There are Western governments, leaving them in their plight to the Russian democrats, and underpinning, each day a little more, the Putin regime. Will the death of Politkovskaya so that they begin to look at Russia differently? Or does it allow the Caucasus remains the territory in which Putin turns on the flame of the new authoritarian Russian nationalism?

When indifference and fear are imposed, when all was justified by the fight against the enemy, when politics, justice and money are combined in one person, languishes democracy, power is concentrated and rampant thugs . And when playing, as happens now in the world, with the doctrines of ethnic homogeneity and the advocacy of communitarianism no one is safe from this error. Politkovskaya reminded us a thousand times and no one listened. She's dead. And Russia profoundly sick. "



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