Naomi Klein on Disaster Capitalism

From Democracy Now!

NAOMI KLEIN: ...The last frontier for the privatization of the state is the privatization of those core state functions. You know, the only thing left that hasn’t already been privatized and outsourced is -- and this is pre-Bush administration -- is the army, is the police, are the fire departments. And these core state functions are really seen as the last great privatization free-for-all. It’s already entered healthcare. It’s already entered water. It’s already entered electricity, the media. So this is the last frontier.

And what we saw during the California wildfires was something really extraordinary. People have gone back to their neighborhoods now, and they see neighborhoods which have just been destroyed by the fires, but a few houses standing, and are asking questions about why some of those houses were saved. And in some cases, you can’t explain it, you know, it’s mysterious. But in some cases, it’s not mysterious. The reason why some houses were saved and others were not is because the people who lived in those saved houses pay insurance to the company AIG, and AIG offers privatized fire response. So --

AMY GOODMAN: American Insurance Group.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, exactly. And they have a special service, a sort of VIP concierge service, where they spray the homes of the wealthy in certain select zip codes -- these are people who pay around $19,000 a year in insurance premiums. And as part of this special service, they get men in fire trucks, with the red hats and the bright red fire trucks -- they look, for all intents and purposes, like real firefighters -- spraying down their homes with fire retardant. But during the California wildfires, they actually did more than that. They actually put out fires and bragged to the press that they saved houses, while the house next to it went up like a candle...

When you see these privatized disaster responses, privatized firefighting -- you have Blackwater in the midst of this, pitching themselves as privatized humanitarian response and building tent cities and saying, you know, “We can do this better than the state” -- then, you know, I think we really need to question this basic premise that we are all in this together, and that maybe this explains the slowness and the unwillingness to take real action on the most pressing issue of our time, which is climate change...

All of these new companies work on what some of them are calling a “country club model.” You pay an annual fee, or you pay a one-time lump membership payment. So there’s another company called Sovereign Deed that is even bigger than HelpJet and is offering comprehensive VIP disaster rescue. You pay $50,000 a year.

But back to HelpJet, you pay as if you're joining a country club, and then if a hurricane is coming to your part of Florida, you get an early alert and a concierge calls you, or you call the HelpJet concierge, and you tell them if you want to go to Disneyland, if you want to book in some five- star resort, and they bill it as an escape from the failures that we witnessed during Hurricane Katrina. It says, you know, escape the madness, the lines, the chaos; just have “a first-class experience.”...

...There’s a company called Sovereign Deed. It’s one of the key -- it’s connected to the mercenary firm Triple Canopy, and also a retired brigadier general back from Iraq named Richard Mills is one of the key executives in this company. And they have just announced plans to set up a kind of a privatized FEMA in Pellston, Michigan, northern Michigan, a rural part of Michigan, that happens to have a very modern regional airport. And the idea is that they’re going to be turning Pellston, Michigan into their national disaster response center -- once again, only for their members...

I think, more than that, you know, as I’ve been talking about this with people, what we’re going to hear more of is sort of blaming the victims of these natural disasters who don’t pay the higher premiums to get this special service. You're starting to hear the language of personal responsibility, much like the sort of welfare debates of, you know, “It’s up to you to protect you and your family. You can’t look to the government.” It’s very similar, actually, to the way in which people discuss healthcare, that it’s your personal responsibility. Now, it’s your personal responsibility to protect your family from terrorist attacks, from climate change...

In Peru this summer, there was an earthquake, and there was another one of these breakthroughs in disaster capitalism, where after the earthquake an American company, an American service company called Aramark, got the contract to build evacuation camps, which is something that’s traditionally done by the UN, traditionally done by NGOs. Now it’s a private contractor, a for-profit company that actually provides food for prisons, going in there and seeing disaster response as -- internationally -- as an emerging market. And these are the first evacuation camps in the world, that I know of, that come with many McDonald's outlets...

I think we need to understand this -- disasters are seen by a growing sector of the economy as an exciting new market opportunity. And so, we’re in a situation where these companies are going to be putting, or are already putting, a counter-pressure on the government, where, you know, the citizens, the people of the world, are saying, “We want action on climate change,” but these companies have a vested interest in just staying on the same disastrous course. But the two-tiering of disaster response, I think we really need to think of very urgently, because this is moving really fast...

...the fact is that we know that Blackwater doesn’t just -- isn’t a humanitarian organization. They have the mission: protect the principal, protect whoever paid them. And this is what permeates all of this privatized disaster response. It’s not “protect everyone”; it’s “protect the principal.” So if we believe in other principles, besides that you should pay to be saved, the time has come to “protect the principle.”