Disaster Capitalism and Privatization of the Military. From Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein p361 ... following the corporatist principles of the counterrevolution, in which Big Government joins forces with Big Business to redistribute funds upward, [Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld] wanted less spent on staff and far more public money transferred directly into the coffers of private companies. And with that, Rumsfeld launched his war. ... He even went after the sacred cow of the military establishment: health care for soldiers. Why were there so many doctors? Rumsfeld wanted to know. Some of those needs, especially where they may involve general practice or specialties unrelated to combat, might be more efficiently delivered by the private sector. And how about the houses for soldiers and their families-surely these could be done through public-private partnerships. The Defense Department should focus on its core competency: warfighting ... But in all other cases, we should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively. ... the central tenet of the Bush regime: that the job of government is not to govern but to subcontract the task to the more efficient and generally superior private sector. As Rumsfeld made clear, this task was about nothing as prosaic as trimming the budget, but was, for its advocates, a world-changing crusade on a par with defeating Communism. By the time the Bush team took office, the privatization mania of the eighties and nineties (fully embraced by the Clinton administration, as well as state and local governments) had successfully sold off or outsourced the large, publicly owned companies in several sectors, from water and electricity to highway management and garbage collection. After these limbs of the state had been lopped off, what was left was the core-those functions so intrinsic to the concept of governing that the idea of handing them to private corporations challenged what it meant to be a nation-state: the military, police, fire departments, prisons, border control, covert intelligence, disease control, the public school system and the administering of government bureaucracies. The earlier stages of the privatization wave had been so profitable, however, that many of the companies that had devoured the appendages of the state were greedily eyeing these essential functions as the next source of instant riches. p364 At the vanguard of the push to create what can only be described as a privatized police state were the most powerful figures in the future Bush administration: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush himself. For Rumsfeld, the idea of applying market logic to the U.S. military was a project that dated back four decades. It began in the early sixties, when he used to attend seminars at the University of Chicagos Economics Department. ... As CEO of the international drug and chemical company Searle Pharmaceuticals, he used his political connections to secure the controversial and extraordinarily lucrative Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for aspartame (marketed as NutraSweet); and when Rumsfeld brokered the deal to sell Searle to Monsanto, he personally earned an estimated $12 million. Thanks to: William Bloom Third World Traveler
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 20:48:39 +0000
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