Disaster Capitalism
Our friend Naomi Klein has an excellent piece in the latest Nation magazine, about the administration's little-noticed move to create an Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization. As Klein reports:
But what of all the stories of incompetence and corruption in the "reconstruction" business? That's hardly the point:
Its mandate is to draw up elaborate "post-conflict" plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries "at the same time," each lasting "five to seven years."And "reconstruction" is a booming business. There are the infrastructure needs, serviced by crisis corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton ($10 billion in contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq and counting). There are also "governance" needs; Klein notes that "democracy is a $2 billion industry" for contractors like the Research Triangle Institute. "Post-conflict" countries now receive 20-25 percent of the World Bank's total lending, up from 16 percent in 1998. The goal in most instances is to transform the "target" countries to market economies hospitable to the U.S.
Fittingly, a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction.
But what of all the stories of incompetence and corruption in the "reconstruction" business? That's hardly the point:
But if the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its primary purpose. According to Guttal, "It's not reconstruction at all--it's about reshaping everything." If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering.Is this what Condoleeza Rice meant when she said the Asian tsunami was a "wonderful opportunity?"
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