 |
Saint Paul Irregulars
The Saint Paul Irregulars War Gaming Forums
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
twhitley
Pilot
Joined: 15 May 2006
Posts: 185
Location: Varies
|
 Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 2:49 pm Post subject: Conversation on privatization of core government functions |
 |
|
John Cusack apparently is a blogger on The Huffington Post.
Part 1: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack/the-real-blackwater-scand_b_67741.html
Part 2: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack/the-real-blackwater-scand_b_67796.html
This quote alone does not summarize the wide range of the discussion, but it inspired me to post this topic:
| Quote: | | Here's what I'm thinking. If these people want to create their own privatized countries, they should practice what they preach, and "take their chances on the open market." Secede from the union and stop bankrolling the whole thing with our tax dollars. I'd love to hear someone make a legal argument that the constitution allows for corporations to build private armies at taxpayer expense. I mean, publicly funded mercenaries are totally outside the boundaries of any conceivably acceptable legal version of the constitutional checks and balances we all learned in civics class. But Blackwater is a symptom of a larger problem which is also more terrifying: basically what the Bush administration has done is use its time in office to fund and create a dangerous counter-power to the very government it is leading. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
urmomshawt
Pilot
Joined: 12 May 2006
Posts: 108
Location: Check with yo mammie
|
| Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 9:58 am Post subject: |
|
|
I'm not sure spending money on security companies is a bad thing, however those companies need to be held to the same or higher expectations and behaviours of our countries military. Somehow these guys working for blackwater got it in their heads that since they're a private army, they can do what they want when they want without the concern the regular army has. I'm not sure if that stems from neglect from our own government or laws that they've found loopholes in to support bad behaviour.
We run a volunteer army so I imagine that sometimes, for instance now, we can't quite fill out the numbers we need in order for it to run efficiently, so why not supplement it with security companies like blackwater, as long as their held to the same rules.
Part of the grey area for me is how involved politicians are in things like this, from Oil to private mercenary companies, it seems like a conflict of interest in my mind, to have a guy who has a vested interest in industry - and works at the top of our government.
_________________
waxing your moms @ss since 1979 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
twhitley
Pilot
Joined: 15 May 2006
Posts: 185
Location: Varies
|
| Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 4:34 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Here's another great quote, unrelated to what you said:
| Quote: | | ...when countries are rebuilt by people who don't believe in government, the states they build are invariably weak, creating a market for alternative security forces, whether Hezbollah, Blackwater, the Mahdi Army or the gang down the street in New Orleans. |
-=-=-=
Related to what you said, yes, I don't think that privatizing government functions ('spending money on security companies') is necessarily bad in its own right, but the examples we've had in the last few years are certainly dicey. That is, it may be a great idea, but so far we've only seen bad examples.
However, the author of the book in the John Cusack interview (Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism) seems to think that we can only expect bad results when we privatize in the fashion of the Bush Administration in Iraq: lots of money, but no oversight. That's what sets up the gold rush/wild west conditions that we're suffering from now.
It sounds like a cool book. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
urmomshawt
Pilot
Joined: 12 May 2006
Posts: 108
Location: Check with yo mammie
|
| Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 4:38 pm Post subject: |
|
|
| Quote: | | lots of money, but no oversight. |
I definitely think that is the source of the problems we're seeing at the moment.
_________________
waxing your moms @ss since 1979 |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
twhitley
Pilot
Joined: 15 May 2006
Posts: 185
Location: Varies
|
| Posted: Thu Nov 20, 2008 11:32 am Post subject: |
|
|
Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a good book. I highly recommend it.
Amazon's listing contains some good reviews:
http://tinyurl.com/6x49ea
Here's a good one
| Quote: | 5.0 out of 5 stars
A Stunning and Well-Researched Indictment of Friedmanian Neoliberalism,
September 25, 2007
By Steve Koss (New York, NY United States)
This review is from: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Hardcover)
Naomi Klein's THE SHOCK DOCTRINE is a stunning indictment of American corporatism and institutionalized globalization, on a par with such groundbreaking works as Harrington's THE OTHER AMERICA and Chomsky's HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL. Comprehensive in its breadth and remarkable for its well-researched depth, Klein's book is a highly readable but disturbing look at how the neoliberal economic tenets of Milton Friedman have been implemented across the world over the last thirty-plus years.
The author's thesis is simply stated: that neoliberal economic programs have repeatedly been implemented without the consent of the governed by creating and/or taking advantage of various forms of national shock therapy. Ms. Klein asserts that in country after country, Friedman and his Chicago School followers have foisted their tripartite economic prescription - privatization, deregulation, and cutbacks in social welfare spending - on an unsuspecting populace through decidedly non-democratic means. In the early years, the primary vehicle was dictatorial military force and accompanying fear of arrest, torture, disappearance, or death. Over time, new organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank were employed instead, using or creating impossible debt burdens to force governments to accept privatization of state-owned industries and services, complete removal of trade barriers and tariffs, forced acceptance of private foreign investment, and widespread layoffs. In more recent years, terrroism and its response as well as natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis have wiped clean enough of the slate to impose these Friedmanite policies on people too shocked and focused on recovering to realize what was happening until it was too late.
According to Ms. Klein's thesis, these revolutionary economic programs were the "medicine" deemed necessary by neoliberal, anti-Keynesian economists to bring underdeveloped countries into the global trading community. Ms. Klein argues her case in convincing detail a long chronological line of historical cases. Each chapter in her book surveys one such situation, from Chile under Pinochet and Argentina under military junta through Nicaragua and Honduras, Bolivia under Goni, post-apartheid South Africa, post-Solidarity Poland, Russia under Yeltsin, China since Tiananmen, reconstruction of Iraq after the U.S. invasion, Sri Lanka after the tsunami, Israel after 9/11, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Along the way, she lets various neoliberal economists and Chicago School practitioners speak for themselves - we hear their "shock therapy" views in their own words. As just one example, this arrogant and self-righteous proclamation from the late Professor Friedman: "Only a crisis - actual or perceived - producs real change...our basic function, to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."
What the author makes inescapably clear is that the world economic order has been largely remade in Milton Friedman's image in the last few decades by adopting programs that would never have been democratically accepted by the common people. Military coups, violence and force, wars, induced hyperinflation, terrorism, preemptive war, climate disasters - these have been the disruptive vehicles that allowed such drastic economic packages to be imposed. Nearly always, they are developed in secrecy and implemented too rapidly for citizens to respond. The end results, as Ms.Klein again makes clear, are massive (and too often, continuing) unemployment, large price increases for essential goods, closing of factories, enormous increases in people living in poverty, explosive concentration of wealth among a small elite, and extraordinary opportunity for rapacious capitalism from American and European corporations.
Ms. Klein argues that from its humble beginnings as an economic philosophy, the neoliberal program has evolved (or perhaps devolved) into a form of corporatism. Particularly in America, government under mostly Republican adminstrations has hollowed itself out, using private sector contractors for nearly every conceivable task. Companies ranging from Lockheed and Halliburton to ChoicePoint, Blackwater, CH2M Hill, and DynCorp exist almost entirely to secure lucrative government contracts to perform work formerly done by government. They now operate in a world the author describes as "disaster capitalism," waiting and salivating over the profits to be made in the next slate-wiping war or disaster, regardless of the human cost. In an ominous closing discussion, Ms. Klein describes the privatization of government in wealthy Atlanta suburbs, a further step in self-serving and preemptive corporatism guaranteed to hollow out whatever is left of major American cities if it becomes a widespread practice.
THE SHOCK DOCTRINE is truly a head-shaking read. One can only marvel at the imperiousness of past (mostly) American governmental behavior, the grievous callousness of it all, the massive human despair and suffering created for no other reason than economic imperialism, and the nauseating greed of (mostly Republican) politicians, former political operatives, and corporate executives who prey like pack wolves on people's powerlessness and insecurity. Reading this book, one can no longer ask the question, "Why do they hate us?" The answer is obvious, and no amount of hyperventilation from Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, or Fox News can erase the facts and consequences of behavior that we as a country have implicitly or explicitly endorsed.
THE SHOCK DOCTRINE proves itself as shaming of modern American governmental policy as Dee Brown's epic of 19th Century America, BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE. It is an essential read for intelligent citizens who want to understand the roots of globalization and its blowback effects on our lives. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
