extreme makeover (related article2)
Posted by David Bollier on Fri, 09/02/2005 - 11:08amToolsThe heart-rending breakdown of civilization that we are witnessing in New Orleans is not a natural disaster." It is the logical outcome of a laissez-faire approach to governance that the Bush administration has aggressively pursued from Day One. While Category 4 hurricanes inevitably cause death and destruction, there is lots that government can do to manage the foreseeable problems after a catastrophic storm: rescue people; provide food, water, shelter and medical care; maintain order; fix damaged infrastructure. This is what government, especially the federal government, is for.But when you don't really believe in government except as a means to subsidize business and privatize wealth, the unfolding debacle in New Orleans should come as no surprise. After all, the rallying cry of conservative ideologues for years has been starve the beast." The best way to curb the size and power of government, they realize, is to slash spending on social services and discredit government leadership. Unleash the market! Privatize government!Now we know what a starved beast looks like. Chaos. Suffering. The breakdown of civil order. Now we can see what happens when essential government services are privatized.when important public works projects (like flood control and emergency planning) are under-funded. when the one-third of the National Guard is diverted to fight an unnecessary war in Iraq. and when the most basic human needs of the urban poor have no standing in our political culture.What could be more shameful than the deaths, suffering and lawlessness at the New Orleans Convention Center: several thousand refugees, mostly black and poor people, that FEMA didn't even know were there! For four days, no one had food or water. Dead bodies lay about. A young girl was reportedly raped. No one was in charge.It will take months to understand the political and policy choices that contributed to this disaster in emergency planning. But a major article by John Elliston in Independent Weekly (Disaster in the Making," September 22, 2004)goes a long way towards explaining how the Bush administration's privatization philosophy played out at FEMA (cited by Hunter at the DailyKos.)Elliston describes how Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh his chief of staff in Texas and the manager of his presidential campaign in 2000 to head FEMA in 2001. Allbaugh that year told a Senate appropriations subcommittee about his intentions for FEMA: "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management. Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level."Ellston writes:Some FEMA veterans complained that Allbaugh had little experience in managing disasters, and the new administration's early initiatives did little to settle their concerns. The White House quickly launched a government-wide effort to privatize public services, including key elements of disaster management. Bush's first budget director, Mitch Daniels, spelled out the philosophy in remarks at an April 2001 conference: "The general idea -- that the business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided -- seems self-evident to me," he said.As a result, says a disaster program administrator who insists on anonymity, "We have to compete for our jobs--we have to prove that we can do it cheaper than a contractor." And when it comes to handling disasters, the FEMA employee stresses, cheaper is not necessarily better, and the new outsourcing requirements sometimes slow the agency's operations.William Waugh, a disaster expert at Georgia State University who has written training programs for FEMA, warns that the rise of a "consultant culture" has not served emergency programs well. "It's part of a widespread problem of government contracting out capabilities," he says. "Pretty soon governments can't do things because they've given up those capabilities to the private sector. And private corporations don't necessarily maintain those capabilities."The shameful events in New Orleans are only the most lurid manifestation of the starve-the-beast ideology of governance. The Republican obsession with outsourcing and privatization (which many centrist Democrats have happily emulated) is now pervasive despite the demonstrable human costs and social inequities. We see it in public health, public education, social services, environmental protection, healthy and safety regulation, and more.It is difficult to predict whether the searing stories coming out of Louisiana will sufficiently discredit this pernicious political theology. Probably not, because fundamentalism, as exemplified by George W. Bush personally, is proudly indifferent to facts. On the other hand, Americans are a pragmatic people. They realize that "shoot to kill" orders to curb looting is no substitute for thoughtful government leadership and planning. Let's hope they realize that ramming through a permanent repeal of the estate tax in coming weeks -- as the Bush administration hopes to do -- would be supremely tasteless and anti-social.If there is one bright spot in the current morass of suffering, shame and despair, it is the clarity of the challenge facing us to reclaim government as an instrument of the common good.