October 14, 2007 at 09:53:36

The Iraqi Book of the Dead

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By Jane Stillwater (about the author) Page 3 of 3 page(s)

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In July, 2006, a national poll of U.S. residents found that more than a third of respondents believe that the government had a hand in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop them. "Because they wanted war in the Middle East." Similar suspicions dog most catastrophes of recent years. In Louisiana in the aftermath of Katrina, the shelters were alive with rumors that the levees hadn't broken but had been covertly blown up in order to keep the rich areas dry while cleansing the city of poor people. In Sri Lanka , I often heard that the tsunami had been caused by underwater explosions detonated by the United States so it could send troops into Southeast Asia and take full control of the region's economies.

The truth is at once less sinister but more dangerous. An economic system that requires constant growth while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological, or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis, the dot-com collapse, and the subprime-mortgage crisis demonstrate.

Our common addiction to dirty, non-renewable energy sources keep other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters up 560% since 1975 and wars waged for control over scarce resources, which in turn spawn terrorist blowback -- a 2007 study calculated the number of terrorist attacks has increased seven-fold since the start of the Iraq war. Given the boiling temperatures, both climatic and political, future disasters need not be cooked up in dark conspiracies. All indications are that if we simply stay the current course, they will keep coming with ever more ferocious intensity. Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market's invisible hand. This is one area in which it actually delivers.

The disaster-capitalism complex may not deliberately scheme to create the cataclysms upon which it feeds -- though Iraq may be a notable exception -- but there is plenty of evidence that its component industries work very hard indeed to make sure that current disastrous trends continue unchallenged. Large oil companies have bankrolled the climate-change denial movement for years. Exxon-Mobil alone has spent an estimated $19 million on the crusade over the past decade.

....The creeping expansion of the disaster-capitalism complex into the media may prove to be a new kind of corporate synergy, one building in the vertical integration that became so popular in the nineties.

It certainly makes sound business sense. The more panicked our societies become, convinced that there are terrorists lurking behind every mosque, the higher the news ratings soar, the more biometric Ids and liquid-explosive detection devices the complex sells, and the more high-tech fences it builds. If the dream of the open, border-less "small planet" was the ticket to profits during the Clinton years, the nightmare of the menacing, fortressed Western continents, under siege from jihadists and illegal immigrants, plays the same role in the new millenium. There is only one cloud that looms over the thriving disaster economy -- from weapons to oil to engineering to surveillance to patented drugs. It is the threatening but unlikely scenario that this latest boom could somehow be interrupted by an outbreak of climatic stability and geopolitical peace.

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Stillwater is a freelance writer who hates injustice and corruption in any form but especially injustice and corruption paid for by American taxpayers. She has recently published a book entitled, "Bring Your Own Flak Jacket: Helpful Tips For Touring (more...)

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