I was in London on Sept. 10 of this year when pictures of American firefighters at the World Trade Center published in The Guardian caught my eye. They were illustrating an excerpt of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, an award-winning investigative journalist from Canada.
The excerpt begins with President Bush and his cabinet taking office in January 2001, and between the burst of the “tech bubble” and a Dow Jones slide, this new government needs new growth for U.S. corporations. According to the excerpt, Bush’s solution was “for the government to deconstruct itself — hacking off great chunks of the public wealth and feeding them to corporate America, in the form of tax cuts on one hand and lucrative contracts on the other.” It even mentions then-FEMA Director Joe Albaugh describing his new place of work as an oversized entitlement program. That was before Sept. 11, 2001.
The article states that on Sept. 10, 2001, long flights were cheap and plentiful. Two days later, a $6-per-hour airport security guard was seen as a bad idea and things began to change.
Disasters and how to anticipate them has become big business in America. That certainly was seen in the publishing industry. A plethora of disaster management magazines popped up like dandelions, but who was their readership? Some magazines were a bit too premature for the new crop of disaster consultants and specialists that would be born, and others tried to be everything to everyone on disasters.
Six years later, the fire department still is the go-to agency when something goes wrong and the police department still is the official gun-carrying law enforcer. EMS departments, on the other hand, are growing exponentially because of a worsening health care industry, aging baby boomers and fast-tracking within an emergency department. And there is a new layer of “protection” that includes security services and emergency management.
The excerpt also describes how the Department of Homeland Security was developed by the Bush administration and “… is the clearest expression of this wholly outsourced mode of government.” Through 2006, DHS handed out $130 billion to contractors.
There have been changes in fire departments in the past six years, but not to all of them. There’s still more need and more grants applied for than can be distributed. I don’t question the security efforts — especially while flying back this Sept. 11 from London — but I sometimes wonder if the fire service ever will be funded adequately.
The excerpt from The Shock Doctrine was interesting, but I’m not sure I’m ready to buy the book, despite it raising some good questions about the government and disaster preparedness. I’ve just gotten over my last bout of paranoia from reading about plagues.
September 28th, 2007 @ 2:01 pm
Naomi Klein’s new book does indeed raise some interesting and troubling questions about the privitization of public safety. By focusing attention on the the policies of the Bush Administration and its neocon allies, I’m concerned that it avoids much bigger questions and shifts focus away from more constructive responses. The effects of 9/11 and the neocons’ approach to contractualism (the Fourth Branch of Government) has encouraged many to ask anew what constitutes the public service ethos and where has it gone?
Arguably, the fire service has yet to be truly co-opted by the neocons’ privatization agenda, but that does not mean we haven’t been corrupted by a way of looking at questions of public good that assumes our activities and interests are the same as those of the people we serve. Our behavior certainly does not indicate that such beliefs are the core motivation for our actions, especially in matters of money and power.
The funding of the fire service has created an atmosphere of entitlement that has encouraged begging for an increasing federal commitment to funding local public goods without regard to the principle of subsidiarity or the requirement for a clear federal nexus. Consequently, most of the funding for these programs supports unsustainable investments, disproportionate number of which involve expenditures for people and equipment that clearly benefit private firms and individuals in the name of vagues or poorly defined notions of the public good. How much better off are communities who have added staff or equipment than they were before? How much better off are they than their peers?
Building a better future for the fire service should require us to reconsider some of our key assumptions. What difference do we really make in our communities? How do we know we are responsible for making that difference? We could start by critically evaluating the fire service contribution to the declining fire incidence and fire death rate in the U.S. Are these direct consequences of our efforts or salutary side-effects of broader socio-economic and demographic trends?