Disaster Capitalists and what the future looks like because of them

[Fire Walk With Me]

Remember the 1980s, when capitalists bought up failing companies and sold off the assets for profit, instead of saving them and retooling, as their employees may have hoped would happen?

It's 2000+. Why wait for opportunity to find you? The rich know to create start-ups wherever disaster strikes, and to suck up the government contracts and funding alloted to it. This includes hurricane and tsunami relief and other disaster. Large, politically-connected companies are offered no-bid contracts. This is certainly the case regarding Iraq.

Most recently, Hurricane Katrina offered a good view of Disaster Capitalism at work. Two sources remark upon no-bid contracts taken by only a few, well-known names such as Halliburton and KBR, for hundreds of millions of dollars. We all know what a great job they did in cleaning up and aiding New Orleans...

1. "Come Hell or High Water", Michael Eric Dyson, chapter 8.

2. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism", Naomi Klein, The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050502/klein

The Dyson book is telling, and chapter 8 is worth the price of the book alone.

"More than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts awarded by FEMA were no-bid or limited-competition agreements."

Google "bush failed businesses" and note that he makes money by destroying things. Do not be suprised if he and his friends have turned this focus upon the United States itself. Remember his close ties with Enron, who "Planned schemes in advance".

http://forum.fearbush.com/lofiversion/index.php/t6650.html

It is easy to consider that the future will hold more and more examples of this gross opportunism and rampant greed at the cost of others lives and security. Bush and his "base" are not politicians. They are businessmen. War with Iran would allow for massive spending upon weaponry, weapons contracts, support logistics (Halliburton were caught charging $100.00 per bag of laundry in Iraq; source: "Come Hell or High Water")... They aren't effected by war as the rest of us are. When the people in charge of all of the "guns and ships" also profit from war, worry.

And unfortunately, "the Luciferic opens the door for the Satanic", as stories and pics of abuse in Iraq have eloquently detailed. Opportunists in other nations are likely champing at the bit for enough chaos to make their own social, geographic, and resource grabs.

[mainegreen]

1. No-bid capitalism does make much sense, does it?

[Fire Walk With Me]

2. A bit more

"Traveling around the country (Honduras), we found many ways that Lousiana State University could help, but we also found out, then and subsequently, that the 'Beltway Bandits' with the good connections to the US Agency for International Development were going to get all the work. Once again, a lot of American aid would mainly help certain corporations get on their feet, rather than help sort out some of the real issues in Honduras, where the poorest people of necessity live in the most flood-prone areas."

-"The Storm", Ivor van Heerden on Katrina, page 5.


"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. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them."

-From the Klein article in The Nation, if you have't read it yet.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050502/klein