 |
Add to My Group
The Iraqi Book of the Dead
By Jane Stillwater (about the author) Page 2 of 3 page(s)
Around the corner, a truck was idling with a large hose down a manhole. "The most powerful vacuum loader in the world," it advertised, in English, on its side. Yassin explained that neighbors had pooled their money to pay the company to suck away the latest batch of sludge, a costly but temporary solution. The mosque had helped, too. As we drove away, I noticed that there were similar private vacuum trucks on every other block. Later that day I stopped by Baghdad 's world-famous Green Zone. There, the challenge of living without functioning public infrastructure are also addressed by private actors. The difference is that in the Green Zone, the solutions actually work.
The enclave has its own electrical grid, its own phone and sanitation systems, its own oil supply, and its own state-of-the-art hospital with pristine operating theaters -- all protected by walls five meters thick. It felt, oddly, like a giant fortified Carnival Cruise ship parked in the middle of a sea of violence and despair, the boiling Red Zone that is Iraq . If you could get on board, there were poolside drinks, bad Hollywood movies, and Nautilius machines. If you were not among the chosen, you could get shot just for standing too close to the wall.
Everywhere in Iraq, the wildly divergent values assigned to different categories of people are on crude display, Westerners and their Iraqi colleagues have checkpoints at the entrances to their streets, blast walls in front of their houses, body armor, and private security guards on call at all hours. They travel the country in menacing armored convoys, with mercenaries pointing guns out the windows as they follow their prime directive to "protect the principal." With every move they broadcast the same unapologetic message: We are the Chosen , our lives are infinitely more precious than yours. Middle class Iraqis, meanwhile, cling to the next rung of the ladder: they can afford to buy protection from local militias, they are able to ransom a family member held by kidnappers, they may ultimately escape to a life of poverty in Jordan .
But the vast majority of Iraqis have no protection at all. They walk the streets exposed to any possible ravaging, with nothing between them and the next car bomb but a thin layer of fabric. In Iraq , the lucky get Kevlar, while the rest get prayer beads. Like most people, I saw the divide between Baghdad 's Green and Red zones as a simple byproduct of the war: this is what happens when the richest country in the world sets up camp in the poorest. But now, after years spent visiting other disaster zones, from posttsunami Sri Lanka to postKatrina New Orleans , I've come to think of these Green Zone/Red Zone worlds as something else: fast-forward versions of what "free market" forces are doing to our societies even in the absence of war.
In Iraq the phones, pipes, and roads had been destroyed by weapons and trade embargoes. In many other parts of the world, including the United States , they have been demolished by ideology, the war on "big government," the religion of tax cuts for the rich, the fetish for "privatization." When that crumbling infrastructure is blasted with increasingly intense weather, the effects can be as devastating as war.
Last February, for instance, Jakarta suffered one of these predictable disasters. The rains had come, as they always do, but this time the water didn't drain out of Jakarta 's famously putrid sewers, and half the city filled up like a swimming pool. There were mass evacuations, and at least fiftyseven people were killed. No bombs or trade sanctions were needed for Jakarta 's infrastructure to fail -- in fact, the steady erosion of the country's public sphere had taken place under the banner of "Free Trade." For decades, Washington-backed structural-adjustme nt programs had pampered investors and starved public services, leading to such cliches of lopsided development as glittering shopping malls with indoor skating rinks surrounded by moats of open sewers. Now those sewers had failed completely. In wealthier countries, where public infrastructure was far more robust before the decline began, it has been possible to delay think kind of reckoning. Politicians have been free to cut taxes and railed l against big government even as their constituents drove on, studied in, and drank from the huge public-works projects of the 1930s and 1940s.
But after a few decades, that trick stops working. The American Society of Civil Engineers has warned that the United States has fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and a half dollars to bring it back up to standard. This past summer those statistics came to life: collapsing bridges, flooding subways, exploding steam pipes, and the still-unfolding tragedy that began when New Orleans levee broke.
After each new disaster, it's tempting to imagine that the loss of life and productivity will finally serve as a wakeup call, provoking the political class to launch some kind "new New Deal." In fact, the opposite is taking place: disasters have become preferred moments for advancing a vision of a ruthlessly divided world, one in which the very idea of a public sphere has no place at all. Call it disaster capitalism. Every time a new crisis hits -- even when the crisis itself is the direct result of free-market ideology -- the fear and disorientation that follows are harnessed for radical social and economic re-engineering. Each new shock is midwife to a new course of economic shock therapy. The end result is the same kind of unapologetic partition between the included and the excluded, the protected and the damned, that is on display in Baghdad . Consider the instant reactions to last summer's infrastructure disasters. Four days after the Minneapolis bridge collapsed, a Wall Street Journal editorial had the solution: "tapping private investors to build and operate public roads and bridges," with the cost made up from ever-escalating tolls....
Meanwhile in New Orleans , schools were getting ready to reopen for fall. More than half the city's students would be attending newly minted charter schools, where they would enjoy small classes, well-trained teachers, and refurbished libraries, thanks to special state and foundation funding pouring into what the New York times has described as "the nation's pre-eminent laboratory for the widespread use of charter schools." But charters are only for the students who are admitted to the system - an educational Green Zone. The rest of New Orleans public-school students -- many of them with special emotional and physical needs, almost all of them African American -- are dumped into the pre-Katrina system : no extra money, overcrowded classrooms, more guards than teachers. An educational Red Zone. Other institutions that had attempted to bridge the gap between super-rich and ultra-poor were also under attack: thousands of units of subsidized housing were slotted for demolition, and Charity Hospital , the city's largest public-health facility, remained shuttered.
.... "Our re-building work in Iraq is slowing down, and this has made some people available to respond to our work in Louisiana ," a company representative explained. Joe Albaugh, whose company, New Bridge Strategies, had promised to bring Wal-Mart and 7-Eleven to Iraq, was the lobbyist in the middle of many of the deals. The feeling that the Iraq war had somehow just been franchised were so striking that that some of the mercenary soldiers, fresh from Iraq , had a hard time adjusting.
When David Enders, a reporter, asked an armed guard outside a New Orleans hotel if there had been much action, he replied, "Nope. It's pretty Green Zone here." Since then, privatized disaster response has become one of the hottest industries in the South. Just one year after Hurricane Katrina, a slew of new corporations had entered the market, promising safety and security should the next Big One hit. One of the more ambitious ventures was launched by a charter air service in West Palm Beach, Florida Help Jet bills itself as "the world's first hurricane escape plan that turns a hurricane evacuation into a jet-setter vacation." When a storm is coming, the charter company books holidays for its members at five-star golf resorts, spas, or Disneyland. With the reservations made, the evacuee is then whisked out of the hurricane zone on a luxury jet. "No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first class experience that turns a problem into a vacation. Enjoy the feeling of avoiding the usual hurricane evacuation nightmare." For the people left behind, there is a different kind of privatized solution.
During the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006, the U.S. government initially tried to charge American citizens for the cost of their own evacuation, though it was eventually forced to back off. If we continue in this direction, the images of people stranded on New Orleans rooftops will not only have been a glimpse of America's unresolved past of racial inequality but will have also foreshadowed a collective future of disaster apartheid, in which survival is determined primarily by one's ability to pay. Perhaps part of the reason so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it. This may also partially explain why so many Bush supporters are Christian end-timers.
It's not just that they need to believe there is an escape hatch from the world they are systematically destroying. It's that the Rapture is a parable for what they are building down here on Earth -- a system that invites destruction and disaster, then swoops in with private helicopters and airlifts them and their friends to divine safety. As con-tractors rush to develop alternative stable sources of revenue, one avenue of business is in disaster-proofing other corporations. This was J. Paul Bremer's line of work before he became Bush's proconsul in Iraq: turning multi-nationals into security bubbles able to function smoothly even if the states in which they are doing business crumbles around them. The early results can be seen in the lobbies of many office buildings in New York or London -- airport-syle check-ins complete with photo-ID requirements and X-ray machines -- but the industry has far greater ambitions, including privatized global communications networks, emergency health and electricity services, and the ability to locate and provide trans-portation for a global workforce in the midst of a major disaster.
....In addition to reaping the short-term benefits of high prices linked to uncertainty in key oil-producing regions, the oil industry has consistently managed to turn disasters to its long term advantage, whether by ensuring that a large portion of the reconstruction funds in Afghanistan went into the expensive road infrastructure for a new pipeline - while most other major construction projects stalled -- or by pushing for a new investor-friendly oil law in Iraq while the country burned, or by piggy-backing on Hurricane Katrina to plan the first new refineries in the United States since the Seventies.
The oil and gas industry is so intimately entwined with the economy of disaster -- both as root cause behind many disasters and as a beneficiary of them -- that it deserves to be treated as an adjunct of the disaster-capitalism complex. The recent spate of disasters has translated into such spectacular profits that many people around the world have come to the same conclusion: the rich and powerful must be deliberately causing the catastrophes so that they can exploit them.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
 Contact Author |
Contact Editor |
 View Authors' Articles |
by Christopher Cooper
$16.00
Lowest New Price $2.00
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
$69.95
Lowest New Price $38.99
Number of pages: 340
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
$45.00
Lowest New Price $34.70
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
by Michael Eric Dyson
$14.95
Lowest New Price $6.72
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Basic Civitas Books
| No comments |
Want to post your own comment on this Article? 
|
||||
|
||||||||||||||
Must Read (0) 
Well Said (0) 
News (0) 
Touching (0) 
Funny (0) 
Supported (0) 
Interesting (0) 
Inspiring (0) 
Valuable (0) Tell a Friend:
|
Copyright © 2002-2009, OpEdNews |
