$700 Billion Bailout: The Halliburton-ization of the Treasury
<http://www.rollingstone .com/issue1065> Don’t miss Naomi’s Rolling Stone feature article, “The Bailout Profiteers.” Naomi examines how the Bush administration’s $700 billion plan for Wall Street is starting to mirror Iraq’s Green Zone, with private contractors running the show and conflicts of interest run rampant. On newsstands this Friday.
In the meantime, those looking for analysis of the bailout and the financial crisis can listen to Naomi on The Brian Lehrer Show <http://www.w nyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2008/10/22> . She lays out how the US Treasury bailout is vastly inferior to the deal struck in the UK 97and listen up for her recommendation for the next U.S. Treasury Secretary.
You can also watch Naomi’s recent appearance at the Commonwealth Club <htt p://fora.tv/2008/10/16/Naomi_Klein_Disaster_Capitalism> in San Francisco. In this onstage conversation with author Stephen Elliot, Naomi discussed how the financial crisis will impact the next U.S. president, and what people can do now to get ready for the next dose of the shock doctrine. After next Tuesday, Naomi says, “what 92s going to happen is we are going to be asked to sacrifice the dreams of actually moving to a sustainable ecological model on the altar of this crisis.”
Sandy Springs: You Read About It, Now See It!
<http://www.youtu be.com/watch?v=dOI9yrKGAV4> Readers of
The Shock Doctrine know the name Sandy Springs. It is the city in Georgia, discussed at the end of the book, that has outsourced its government to military contractor CH2M Hill 97the cutting edge of total privatization. Recently, Naomi’s husband Avi Lewis went to Sandy Springs and reported about the way this experiment is pitting rich against poor in the suburbs of Atlanta. It aired on the show he hosts on Al Jazeera English, Inside USA
<http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/insideusa/2 008/10/20081020131956718877.html> . Watch the segment
<http://www.youtu be.com/watch?v=dOI9yrKGAV4>
And to refresh your memories, here is what Naomi wrote about Sandy Springs in Harper 92s magazine last year:
“Another glimpse of a disaster-apartheid future can be found in a wealthy Republican suburb outside Atlanta. Its residents decided that they were tired of watching their property taxes subsidize schools and police in the county’s low-income African-American neighborhoods. They voted to incorporate as their own city, Sandy Springs, which could spend most of its taxes on services for its 100,000 citizens and minimize the revenue that would be redistributed throughout Fulton County. The only difficulty was that Sandy Springs had no government structures and needed to build them from scratch 97everything from tax collection to zoning to parks and recreation. In September 2005, the same month that New Orleans flooded, the residents of Sandy Springs were approached by the construction and consulting giant CH2M Hill with a unique pitch: Let us do it for you. For the starting price of $27 million a year, the contractor pledged to build a complete city from the ground up.
A few months later, Sandy Springs became the first “contract city.” Only four people worked directly for the new municipality 97everyone else was a contractor. Rick Hirsekorn, heading up the project for CH2M Hill, described Sandy Springs as “a clean sheet of paper with no governmental processes in place.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that “when Sandy Springs hired corporate workers to run the new city, it was considered a bold experiment.” Within a year, however, contract-city mania was tearing through Atlanta’s wealthy suburbs, and it had become “standard procedure in north Fulton.” Neighboring communities took their cue from Sandy Springs and also voted to become stand-alone cities and contract out their government. One new city, Milton, immediately hired CH2M Hill for the job 97after all, it had the experience. Soon, a campaign began for the new corporate cities to join together to form their own county. The plan has encountered fierce opposition outside the proposed enclave, where politicians say that without those tax dollars, they will no longer be able to afford their large public hospital and public transit system; that partitioning the county would create a failed state on the one hand and a hyperserviced one on the other. What they were describing sounded a lot like New Orleans and a little like Baghdad.
In these wealthy Atlanta suburbs, the long crusade to strip-mine the state is nearing completion, and it is particularly fitting that the new ground was broken by CH2M Hill. The corporation was a multimillion-dollar contractor in Iraq, paid to perform the core government function of overseeing other contractors. In Sri Lanka after the tsunami, it not only had built ports and bridges but was, according to the U.S. State Department, “responsible for the overall management of the infrastructure program.” In post-Katrina New Orleans, CH2M Hill was awarded $500 million to build FEMA-villes and was put on standby for the next disaster. A master of privatizing the core functions of the state during extraordinary circumstances, the company was now doing the same under ordinary ones. lf disasters had served as laboratories of extreme privatization, the testing phase was clearly over.
Watch the segment <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOI9yrKGAV4>
Naomi on Tour Next Week
Naomi will speak at the University of Madison, Wisconsin on Friday, November 7 at 7:30pm. This event is free and open to the public. See more details here
<http://www.themadisoninsti tute.org>
Naomi will also present at the Chicago Humanities Festival on Sunday, November 9 at 5:30pm. More details are available here <http://www.chfestival.org/index.cfm?fa fallfest.progdtl&am p;pid 2869> .
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Naomi Klein