Words&Dirt

“Public pronouncements and photo ops aside, Bush and his inner circle had no intention of converting to Keynesianism.  Far from shaking their determination to weaken the public sphere, the security failures of 9/11 reaffirmed their deepest ideological (and self-interested) beliefs––that only private firms possessed the intelligence and innovation to meet the new security challenge.  Although it was true that the White House was on the verge of spending huge amounts of taxpayer money to stimulate the economy, it most certainly was not going to be on the model of FDR.  Rather, Bush’s New Deal would be exclusively with corporate America, a straight-up transfer of hundreds of billions of public dollars a year into private hands.  It would take the form of contracts, many offered secretively, with no competition and scarcely any oversight, to a sprawling network of industries: technology, media, communications, incarceration, engineering, education, health care.

What happened in the period of mass disorientation after the attacks was, in retrospect, a domestic form of economic shock therapy.  The Bush team, Friedmanite to the core, quickly moved to exploit the shock that gripped the nation to push through its radical vision of a hollow government in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture.

It was a bold evolution of shock therapy.  Rather than the nineties approach of selling off existing public companies, the Bush team created a whole new framework for its actions––the War on Terror––built to be private from the start.  This feat required two stages.  First, the White House used the omnipresent sense of peril in the aftermath of 9/11 to dramatically increase the policing, surveillance, detention and war-waging powers of the executive branch––a power grab that the military historian Andrew Bacevich has termed ‘a rolling coup.’  Then those newly enhanced and richly funded functions of security, invasion, occupation and reconstruction were immediately outsourced, handed over to the private sector to perform at a profit.

Although the stated goal was fighting terrorism, the effect was the creation of the disaster capitalism complex––a full-fledged new economy in homeland security, privatized war and disaster reconstruction tasked with nothing less than building and running a privatized security state, both at home and abroad.  The economic stimulus of this sweeping initiative proved enough to pick up the slack where globalization and the dot-com booms had left off.  Just as the Internet had launched the dot-com bubble, 9/11 launched the disaster capitalism bubble.  ‘When the IT industry shut down, post-bubble, guess who had all the money?  The government,’ said Roger Novak of Novak Biddle Venture Partners, a venture capitalism firm that invests in homeland security companies.  Now, he says, ‘every fund is seeing how big the trough is and asking, How do I get a piece of that action?’

It was the pinnacle of the counterrevolution launched by Friedman.  For decades, the market had been feeding off the appendages of the state; now it would devour the core.

Bizarrely, the most effective ideological tool in this process was the claim that economic ideology was no longer a primary motivator of U.S. foreign or domestic policy.  The mantra ‘September 11 changed everything’ neatly disguised the fact that for free-market ideologues and the corporations whose interest they serve, the only thing that changed was the ease with which they could pursue their ambitious agenda.  Now, rather than subjecting new policies to fractious public debate in Congress or bitter conflict with public sector unions, the Bush White House could use the patriotic alignment behind the president and the free pass handed out by the press to stop talking and starting doing.  As The New York Times observed in February 2007, ‘Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government.'”

––The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, pg. 376-8

“Keep us going, their eyes said.  Make it so my kids live as long as me.  Don’t let it unravel, not just yet.

Jahns lived under the weight of this pressure, a burden brutal on more than knees.  She kept quiet as they made their way to the central stairwell.  A handful called for her to make a speech, but the lone voices did not gain traction.  No chant formed, much to her relief.  What would she say?  That she didn’t know why it all held together?  That she didn’t even understand her own knitting, how if you made knots, and if you did it right, things just worked out?  Would she tell them it took only one snip for it to unravel?  One cut, and you could pull and pull and turn that garment into a pile.  Did they really expect her to understand, when all she did was follow the rules, and somehow it kept working out, year after year after year?

Because she didn’t understand what held it together.  And she didn’t understand their mood, this celebration.  Were they drinking and shouting because they were safe?  Because they’d been spared by fate, passed over for cleaning?  Her people cheered while a good man, her friend, her partner in keeping them alive and well, lay dead on a hill next to his wife.  If she gave a speech, if it weren’t full of the forbidden, it would be this: that no two better people had ever gone to cleaning of their own free will, and what did that say about the lot of them who remained?

Now was not the time for speeches.  Or for drinking.  Or for being merry.  Now was the hour of quiet contemplation, which was one of the reasons Jahns knew she needed to get away.  Things had changed.  Not just by the day, but by the long years.  She knew better than most.  Maybe old lady McNeil down in Supply knew, could see it coming.  One had to live a long time to be sure, but now she was.  And as time marched on, carrying her world faster than her feet could catch up, Mayor Jahns knew that it would soon leave her completely behind.  And her great fear, unspoken but daily felt, was that this world of theirs probably wouldn’t stagger very far along without her.”

––Wool (Omnibus Edition), by Hugh Howey, loc. 650-66