Re: The Yes Men strike again

wolfbat359a@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
snafu wrote:

Disaster Relief - for Profit
By Naomi Klein
The Los Angeles Times

Tuesday 29 August 2006

Will government-contracted private firms ever charge us for emergency
services?

The Red Cross has just announced a new disasterresponse partnership
with Wal-Mart. When the next hurricane hits, it will be a coproduction of
Big Aid and Big Box.

This, apparently, is the lesson learned from the government's
calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina: Businesses do disaster better.

"It's all going to be private enterprise before it's over," Billy
Wagner, emergency management chief for the Florida Keys, currently under
hurricane watch for Tropical Storm Ernesto, said in April. "They've got the
expertise. They've got the resources."

But before this new consensus goes any further, it's time to take a
look at where the privatization of disaster began, and where it will
inevitably lead.

The first step was the government's abdication of its core
responsibility to protect the population from disasters. Under the Bush
administration, whole sectors of the government, and particularly the
Department of Homeland Security, have been turned into glorified temp
agencies, with essential functions contracted out to private companies. The
idea is that entrepreneurs, driven by the profit motive, are always more
efficient than government.

We saw the results in New Orleans: Washington was weak and incompetent
in part because its emergency management experts had fled to the private
sector and its technology and infrastructure had become positively retro.
In a crisis, government looks frighteningly inept ( "doing a heckuva job")
while the private sector can seem modern and competent, at least by
comparison.

In truth, when it comes to reconstruction, contractors are hardly
wizards. "Where has all the money gone?" ask desperate people from the
Persian Gulf to the Gulf Coast. One place a great deal of it has gone is
into major capital expenditures for the private corporations. Largely under
the public radar, billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on
privatized disaster-response infrastructure: the Shaw Group's new
state-of-the-art Baton Rouge headquarters, Bechtel's battalions of
earthmoving equipment, Blackwater USA's 6,000-acre campus in North Carolina
(complete with paramilitary training camp and 6,000-foot runway).

Call it the Disaster Capitalism Complex. Whatever you might need in a
serious crunch, these contractors can provide it: generators, water tanks,
cots, port-a-potties, mobile homes, communications systems, helicopters,
medicine, men with guns.

This state within a state has been built almost exclusively with money
from public contracts, yet it is all privately owned. Taxpayers have
absolutely no control over it. So far, that reality hasn't sunk in because
when these companies are getting their bills paid by government contracts,
the Disaster Capitalism Complex provides its services to the public free of
charge.

But here's the catch: The U.S. government is going broke, in no small
part thanks to this kind of loony spending. The national debt is $8
trillion; the federal budget deficit is at least $260 billion. That means
that sooner rather than later, the contracts are going to dry up. And no
one knows this better than the companies themselves. Ralph Sheridan, chief
executive of Good Harbor Partners, one of hundreds of new counter-terrorism
companies, explains that "expenditures by governments are episodic and come
in bubbles."

When the bubbles burst, firms such as Bechtel, Fluor and Blackwater
will lose their primary revenue stream. They will still have the ability to
respond to disasters - while the government will have let that precious
skill wither away - but now they will sell back the infrastructure built at
public expense at whatever the market will bear.

If current trends continue, here's a snapshot of what could be in store
in the not too distant future: helicopter rides off of rooftops in flooded
cities ($5,000 a pop reflects typical fees for such a service, $7,000 for
families, pets included), bottled water and "meals ready to eat" ($50 per
person - steep, but that's supply and demand) and a cot in a shelter with a
portable shower (show us your biometric ID, developed on a lucrative
Homeland Security contract, and we'll track you down later with the bill).

Before you say "not in America," ask yourself this: Where else but in
America? The model is the U.S. healthcare system, in which the wealthy can
access best-in-class treatment in spa-like environments while 46 million
Americans lack health insurance. The model also fits the global AIDS
emergency, in which private-sector prowess has helped produce lifesaving
drugs that the vast majority of the world's infected cannot afford. If that
is the private sector's track record on slow-motion disasters, why should
we expect different values to govern fast-moving disasters, such as
hurricanes and even terrorist attacks?

One year ago, New Orleans' working-class and poor citizens were
stranded on their rooftops waiting for help that never came, but those who
could afford it escaped to safety. It could prompt us to reverse a fatally
wrong direction. Or it could be our first glimpse at "user pays" disasters.



A lot of the direction of Elected officals is to beleive that Health
Care is not even a Right!:



http://afcm.org/hcinar.html

excerpts:

Now our only rights, the American viewpoint continues, are the rights
to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all.
According to the Founding Fathers, we are not born with a right to a
trip to Disneyland, or a meal at Mcdonald's, or a kidney dialysis (nor
with the 18th-century equivalent of these things). We have certain
specific rights-and only these.

Why only these? Observe that all legitimate rights have one thing in
common: they are rights to action, not to rewards from other people.
The American rights impose no obligations on other people, merely the
negative obligation to leave you alone. The system guarantees you the
chance to work for what you want-not to be given it without effort by
somebody else.

The right to life, e.g., does not mean that your neighbors have to feed

and clothe you; it means you have the right to earn your food and
clothes yourself, if necessary by a hard struggle, and that no one can
forcibly stop your struggle for these things or steal them from you if
and when you have achieved them. In other words: you have the right to
act, and to keep the results of your actions, the products you make, to

keep them or to trade them with others, if you wish. But you have no
right to the actions or products of others, except on terms to which
they voluntarily agree. ...

Under the American system you have a right to health care if you can
pay for it, i.e., if you can earn it by your own action and effort. But

nobody has the right to the services of any professional individual or
group simply because he wants them and desperately needs them. The very

fact that he needs these services so desperately is the proof that he
had better respect the freedom, the integrity, and the rights of the
people who provide them.

You have a right to work, not to rob others of the fruits of their
work, not to turn others into sacrificial, rightless animals laboring
to fulfill your needs. ...

------------

But then one really has to ask - "How exactly do the rich get richer"!
Since We have privatization of such as Medical Treatment under HMO
direction - where Newtty was right on hand not only to legislated for
it but to be involved as an Investor in one of the First HMOs - Folden
Riule! So we see here the ruch use the Government to get rich and
Privatizion is one quick way to do it:

http://www.conservativenannystate.com/

The Conservative Nanny State
How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer
by Dean Baker, published May 2006

In his new book, economist Dean Baker debunks the myth that
conservatives favor the market over government intervention. In fact,
conservatives rely on a range of "nanny state" policies that ensure
the rich get richer while leaving most Americans worse off. It's time
for the rules to change. Sound economic policy should harness the
market in ways that produce desirable social outcomes - decent wages,
good jobs and affordable health care.
Praise for The Conservative Nanny State
"Here is the brutal truth, exposed systematically, methodically,
unsparingly. Forget the pork rinds and the hokey Texas twang:
Conservative government is government by and for the upper class."
- Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?
How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
"Dean Baker is one of the most insightful and original economists in
Washington. With this book, he exposes the prevailing myth of modern
conservatives. They are not for limited government, as they claim.
Rather, they are for a government that helps their own. Baker says it
is time to balance the books. Government is by all the people, for all
the people. It's that simple."
- Jeff Madrick, author of Why Economies Grow: The Forces That Shape
Prosperity and How We Can Get Them Working Again

--------

Under the logic of people be trackef down to pay for roof rescues, one
would have to assume with the government in dire straits that the
Elected officials would say that private charity would pick up the
bills - much like many elected officials assume that private charities
will help those in need with a privatized Medical Service!! But we can
assume that only those People in need, who are liked, or could
publicize their needs would get donations. One could ask
under such a system, would not much be expected of a person or family
who
gets help to pay back the one or ones who helped them such as if they
needed a Kidney or wanted a Kidney from you or your relatives to sell
on the open marke such as in India!:

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/2006/07/india_a_pound_o.html

Headline:

Rough Cut
India: A Pound of Flesh
Selling kidneys to survive

BY Samantha Grant
July 20, 2006
t

Samantha Grant is a San Francisco-based documentary filmmaker who has
reported for PBS, NPR and Current TV through her production company
Gush Productions. In 2005, Grant worked in New York as an associate
producer with director Jehane Noujaim (Control Room and Startup.com) on

a film about the 2004 presidential race. Upon her return to San
Francisco, Grant was hired as an associate producer for FRONTLINE/World

while pursuing a master's degree in Journalism at U.C. Berkeley.

When Samantha Grant headed to Chennai in southern India to explore the
kidney trade, she had no idea if she would be able to find anyone who
had sold an organ or who would be willing to talk about it on camera.
As you'll see in this week's Rough Cut, "A Pound of Flesh," getting
people to talk was no harder than getting them to sell their kidneys in

the first place. As Grant describes in her reporter's diary, before
organ commerce was outlawed, "would-be donors used to line up outside
Indian hospitals waiting for the chance to sell."

Traveling between Bangalore, India's thriving technology center, and
the slums to the south, Grant spoke to government officials, doctors,
kidney brokers and donors to try to find out why so many people are
still getting paid to give up their kidneys even though a law was
passed 12 years ago to heavily regulate the practice. When Grant
arrived in the slums of Chennai, about eight hours south by train from
Bangalore, someone offered to sell her their kidney on the spot. "I was

stunned," she says.

A New York Times Magazine article recently asked the question, "Why not

let people sell their organs?" From an economic point of view, the
article explains, demand for kidneys is far outrunning supply around
the world. If people could legally sell, economists argue, more people
with kidney disease might be saved, and the poor people willing to sell

would have a chance to get badly needed funds.

As Grant reveals, the problem is especially acute in India, where
demand for kidney transplants is increasing along with the country's
growing numbers of diabetics, a health problem that has been directly
linked to India's recent prosperity and rise in obesity. Those who can
afford medical care are much more likely to receive a new organ, often
because inside India's impoverished slums, many are desperate enough to

sell a kidney for as little as a few hundred dollars. ... (cont)
------

Or indeed since the only Morality under the new privatized system is
what is for
sale, a person may demand your young daughter to molest to help save
the life of another family member!

------------

And since your top morality is making money and minimizing the
Government, we have the case of State Farm insurance Company cheating
the people of Katrina! A totally capitalistic Company sells policies
and then decides it will define what those policies mean under any
condition! The people had a choice to buy from the company! So, under

the privatization agenda, Buyer Beware would be the top policy!

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=21844

headline:

BC's "20/20" claims State Farm cheated Katrina victims

(Crain's) - State Farm Insurance has been accused of cheating
policyholders out of claims filed for damages sustained by Hurricane
Katrina.

Two sisters who worked as independent adjusters for the
Bloomington-based insurance company told ABC News that they witnessed
State Farm supervisors altering claims to avoid payouts to
policyholders in Mississippi, according to ABC's Web site.

The network is scheduled to air its report on Friday night's
"20/20" program.

Kerry and Cori Rigsby, both whom have worked for State Farm for eight
years, told ABC reporters that State Farm employees in Biloxi, Miss.,
and Gulfport, Miss., pushed for reports to conclude that
Katrina-related damages were caused by water and not wind. Water damage

is not covered by State Farm policies.

Insurance companies including State Farm and Allstate have come under
fire recently by Mississippi and Louisiana state authorities who have
accused the industry of underpaying or denying damage claims from
Hurricane Katrina.

*** Luedke, a spokesman for State Farm, said the company was unable to

comment on a report that it has not seen, however, a lawyer for the
insurer was interviewed for the piece.

The Rigsbys said they have provided the Federal Bureau of
Investigations and Mississippi state authorities with internal company
documents supporting their claims.

---------

And how would this conform to a view of a world run 'by the free
market'

From C-Span:

February 4, 2001
The Informant: A True Story
by Kurt Eichenwald (from the Program!:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

------
BRIAN LAMB, host: Kurt Eichenwald, what is the brief synopsis of "The
Informant"?

Mr. KURT EICHENWALD (Author, "The Informant: A True Story"): "The
Informant" is about the highest-ranking corporate executive who ever
worked as a cooperating witness with the FBI, who was producing
evidence of an international price-fixing conspiracy at a company
called Archer Daniels Midland, on one level.

On the second level, it's the story of how that individual, during the
entire time he was working with the government and working as a senior
officer at the company, was simultaneously losing his mind. And,
ultimately, that sends the case spinning out of control in ways that,
even while I was going through it, even while I was living through it
as a reporter, were pretty hard to believe....

excerpt:

LAMB: Isn't there a famous quote you've got in here that the--about
the competitors and the consumers?

Mr. EICHENWALD: That--that--this is, yeah, the ADM quote; that,
`The--the--the competitors are our friends, and the customers are our
enemies.'

LAMB: And that's what they would say among themselves?

Mr. EICHENWALD: Yes. On tape.

LAMB: Inside the company?

Mr. EICHENWALD: Yes.

LAMB: On tape, `The competitor is our friend. The consumer is our
enemy.'

Mr. EICHENWALD: Well, ca--because the competitor wants higher
prices, and the consumer wants lower prices. Well, if a co--you're a
company, you want higher prices. So if you just sit down and make a
deal with your competitors, you'll get higher prices. And the
customer, no matter how much he does, you know, value shopping, will
still have to pay the same price. Now that's why that's illegal
because, ultimately, it undermines the system of capitalism, it
undermines consumer confidence, and it creates a system where only the
powerful can survive. You know, if--if you come in with--with the
ability to do it better, you'll get crushed by the rest of the
industry.

-------------

The real Book!:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0767903277/102-3045715-9000969?v=gla...


-----

So, different companies consprie to fix prices - High - and declare
that the consumer is the enemy - not the compeitor Companies - With the
Government folding for private corporations to do the service - There
would be no check against the Corporations!!

is that fixed or cathode-biased?
.