{"id":95198,"date":"2017-07-10T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2017-07-10T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=95198"},"modified":"2017-07-09T09:17:35","modified_gmt":"2017-07-09T08:17:35","slug":"naomi-klein-how-power-profits-from-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/07\/naomi-klein-how-power-profits-from-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Naomi Klein: How Power Profits from Disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a crisis, private contractors move in and suck up funding for work done badly, if at all \u2013 then those billions get cut from government budgets. Like Grenfell Tower, Hurricane Katrina revealed a disdain for the poor. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

AP Photo\/Palm Beach Post\/Gary Coronado.<\/p><\/div>\n

6 Jul 2017 – <\/em>There have been times in my reporting from disaster zones when I have had the unsettling feeling that I was seeing not just a crisis in the here and now, but getting a glimpse of the future \u2013 a preview of where the road we are all on is headed, unless we somehow grab the wheel and swerve. When I listen to Donald Trump<\/a> speak, with his obvious relish in creating an atmosphere of chaos and destabilisation, I often think: I\u2019ve seen this before, in those strange moments when portals seemed to open up into our collective future.<\/p>\n

One of those moments arrived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina<\/a>, as I watched hordes of private military contractors descend on the flooded city to find ways to profit from the disaster, even as thousands of the city\u2019s residents, abandoned by their government, were treated like dangerous criminals just for trying to survive.<\/p>\n

I started to notice the same tactics in disaster zones around the world. I used the term \u201cshock doctrine\u201d<\/a> to describe the brutal tactic of using the public\u2019s disorientation following a collective shock \u2013 wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters \u2013 to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called \u201cshock therapy\u201d. Though Trump breaks the mould in some ways, his shock tactics do follow a script, and one that is familiar from other countries that have had rapid changes imposed under the cover of crisis.<\/p>\n

This strategy has been a silent partner to the imposition of neoliberalism for more than 40 years. Shock tactics follow a clear pattern: wait for a crisis (or even, in some instances, as in Chile or Russia, help foment one), declare a moment of what is sometimes called \u201cextraordinary politics\u201d, suspend some or all democratic norms \u2013 and then ram the corporate wishlist through as quickly as possible. The research showed that virtually any tumultuous situation, if framed with sufficient hysteria by political leaders, could serve this softening-up function. It could be an event as radical as a military coup, but the economic shock of a market or budget crisis would also do the trick. Amid hyperinflation or a banking collapse, for instance, the country\u2019s governing elites were frequently able to sell a panicked population on the necessity for attacks on social protections, or enormous bailouts to prop up the financial private sector \u2013 because the alternative, they claimed, was outright economic apocalypse.<\/p>\n

The Republicans under Donald Trump are already seizing the atmosphere of constant crisis that surrounds this presidency to push through as many unpopular, pro-corporate policies. And we know they would move much further and faster given an even bigger external shock. We know this because senior members of Trump\u2019s team have been at the heart of some of the most egregious examples of the shock doctrine in recent memory.<\/p>\n

Rex Tillerson<\/a>, the US secretary of state, has built his career in large part around taking advantage of the profitability of war and instability. ExxonMobil profited more than any oil major from the increase in the price of oil that was the result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq<\/a>. It also directly exploited the Iraq war to defy US state department advice and make an exploration deal in Iraqi Kurdistan<\/a>, a move that, because it sidelined Iraq\u2019s central government, could well have sparked a full-blown civil war, and certainly did contribute to internal conflict.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rex Tillerson, now US secretary of state, is a former CEO of ExxonMobil.
Photograph: Mike Stone\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

As CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson profited from disaster in other ways as well. As an executive at the fossil fuel giant, he spent his career working for a company that, despite its own scientists\u2019 research into the reality of human-caused climate change, decided to fund and spread misinformation and junk climate science. All the while, according to an LA Times investigation<\/a>, ExxonMobil (both before and after Exxon and Mobil merged) worked diligently to figure out how to further profit from and protect itself against the very crisis on which it was casting doubt. It did so by exploring drilling in the Arctic (which was melting, thanks to climate change), redesigning a natural gas pipeline in the North Sea to accommodate rising sea levels and supercharged storms, and doing the same for a new rig off the coast of Nova Scotia.<\/p>\n

At a public event in 2012, Tillerson acknowledged that climate change was happening \u2013 but what he said next<\/a> was revealing: \u201cas a species\u201d, humans have always adapted. \u201cSo we will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around \u2013 we\u2019ll adapt to that.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s quite right: humans do adapt when their land ceases to produce food. The way humans adapt is by moving. They leave their homes and look for places to live where they can feed themselves and their families. But, as Tillerson well knows, we do not live at a time when countries gladly open their borders to hungry and desperate people. In fact, he now works for a president who has painted refugees from Syria \u2013 a country where drought was an accelerant<\/a> of the tensions that led to civil war \u2013 as Trojan horses for terrorism. A president who introduced a travel ban that has gone a long way towards barring Syrian migrants from entering the United States.<\/p>\n

A president who has said about Syrian children seeking asylum, \u201cI can look in their faces and say: \u2018You can\u2019t come.\u2019\u201d A president who has not budged from that position even after he ordered missile strikes on Syria, supposedly moved by the horrifying impacts of a chemical weapon attack on Syrian children and \u201cbeautiful babies\u201d. (But not moved enough to welcome them and their parents.) A president who has announced plans to turn the tracking, surveillance, incarceration and deportation of immigrants<\/a> into a defining feature of his administration.<\/p>\n

Waiting in the wings, biding their time, are plenty of other members of the Trump team who have deep skills in profiting from all of that.<\/p>\n

**********************<\/p>\n

Between election day and the end of Trump\u2019s first month in office, the stocks of the two largest private prison companies in the US, CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America) and the Geo Group, doubled, soaring by 140% and 98%, respectively. And why not? Just as Exxon learned to profit from climate change, these companies are part of the sprawling industry of private prisons, private security and private surveillance that sees wars and migration \u2013 both very often linked to climate stresses \u2013 as exciting and expanding market opportunities. In the US, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) incarcerates up to 34,000 immigrants thought to be in the country illegally on any given day, and 73% of them are held in private prisons. Little wonder, then, that these companies\u2019 stocks soared on Trump\u2019s election. And soon they had even more reasons to celebrate: one of the first things<\/a> Trump\u2019s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, did was rescind the Obama administration\u2019s decision to move away from for-profit jails for the general prison population.<\/p>\n

Trump appointed as deputy defence secretary Patrick Shanahan, a top executive at Boeing who, at one point, was responsible for selling costly hardware to the US military, including Apache and Chinook helicopters. He also oversaw Boeing\u2019s ballistic missile defence programme \u2013 a part of the operation that stands to profit enormously if international tensions continue to escalate under Trump.<\/p>\n

And this is part of a much larger trend. As Lee Fang reported in the Intercept<\/a> in March 2017, \u201cPresident Donald Trump has weaponised the revolving door by appointing defence contractors and lobbyists to key government positions as he seeks to rapidly expand the military budget and homeland security programmes \u2026 At least 15 officials with financial ties to defence contractors have been either nominated or appointed so far.\u201d<\/p>\n

The revolving door is nothing new, of course. Retired military brass reliably take up jobs and contracts with weapons companies. What\u2019s new is the number of generals with lucrative ties to military contractors whom Trump has appointed to cabinet posts with the power to allocate funds \u2013 including those stemming from his plan to increase spending on the military, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security by more than $80bn in just one year.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Contractors for the US-based Blackwater private security firm in Iraq in 2005.
Photograph: Marwan Naamani\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

The other thing that has changed is the size of the Homeland Security and surveillance industry. This sector grew exponentially after the September 11 attacks, when the Bush administration announced it was embarking on a never-ending \u201cwar on terror\u201d, and that everything that could be outsourced would be. New firms with tinted windows sprouted up like malevolent mushrooms around suburban Virginia, outside Washington DC, and existing ones, such as Booz Allen Hamilton, expanded into brand new territories. Writing in Slate in 2005<\/a>, Daniel Gross captured the mood of what many called the security bubble: \u201cHomeland security may have just reached the stage that internet investing hit in 1997. Back then, all you needed to do was put an \u2018e\u2019 in front of your company name and your IPO would rocket. Now you can do the same with \u2018fortress\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

That means many of Trump\u2019s appointees come from firms that specialise in functions that, not so long ago, it would have been unthinkable to outsource. His National Security Council chief of staff, for instance, is retired Lt Gen Keith Kellogg. Among the many jobs Kellogg has had with security contractors since going private was one with Cubic Defense.<\/p>\n

According to the company, he led \u201cour ground combat training business and focus[ed] on expanding the company\u2019s worldwide customer base\u201d. If you think \u201ccombat training\u201d is something armies used to do all on their own, you\u2019d be right.<\/p>\n

One noticeable thing about Trump\u2019s contractor appointees is how many of them come from firms that did not even exist before 9\/11: L-1 Identity Solutions (specialising in biometrics), the Chertoff Group (founded by George W Bush\u2019s homeland security director Michael Chertoff), Palantir Technologies<\/a> (a surveillance\/big data firm cofounded by PayPal billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel<\/a>), and many more. Security firms draw heavily on the military and intelligence wings of government for their staffing.<\/p>\n

Under Trump, lobbyists and staffers from these firms are now migrating back to government, where they will very likely push for even more opportunities to monetise the hunt for people Trump likes to call \u201cbad hombres\u201d.<\/p>\n

This creates a disastrous cocktail. Take a group of people who directly profit from ongoing war and then put those same people at the heart of government. Who\u2019s going to make the case for peace? Indeed, the idea that a war could ever definitively end seems a quaint relic of what during the Bush years was dismissed as \u201cpre\u2013September 11 thinking\u201d.<\/p>\n

**************************<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s vice-president Mike Pence<\/a>, seen by many as the grownup in Trump\u2019s messy room. Yet it is Pence, the former governor of Indiana, who actually has the most disturbing track record when it comes to bloody-minded exploitation of human suffering.<\/p>\n

When Mike Pence was announced as Donald Trump\u2019s running mate, I thought to myself: I know that name, I\u2019ve seen it somewhere. And then I remembered. He was at the heart of one of the most shocking stories I\u2019ve ever covered: the disaster capitalism free-for-all that followed Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans<\/a>. Mike Pence\u2019s doings as a profiteer from human suffering are so appalling that they are worth exploring in a little more depth, since they tell us a great deal about what we can expect from this administration during times of heightened crisis.<\/p>\n

Before we delve into Pence\u2019s role, what\u2019s important to remember about Hurricane Katrina is that, though it is usually described as a \u201cnatural disaster\u201d, there was nothing natural about the way it affected the city of New Orleans. When Katrina hit the coast of Mississippi in August 2005, it had been downgraded from a category 5 to a still-devastating category 3 hurricane. But by the time it made its way to New Orleans, it had lost most of its strength and been downgraded again, to a \u201ctropical storm\u201d.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s relevant, because a tropical storm should never have broken through New Orleans\u2019s flood defence. Katrina did break through, however, because the levees that protect the city did not hold. Why? We now know that despite repeated warnings about the risk, the army corps of engineers had allowed the levees to fall into a state of disrepair. That failure was the result of two main factors.<\/p>\n

One was a specific disregard for the lives of poor black people, whose homes in the Lower Ninth Ward<\/a> were left most vulnerable by the failure to fix the levees. This was part of a wider neglect of public infrastructure, which is the direct result of decades of neoliberal policy. Because when you systematically wage war on the very idea of the public sphere and the public good, of course the publicly owned bones of society \u2013 roads, bridges, levees, water systems \u2013 are going to slip into a state of such disrepair that it takes little to push them beyond the breaking point. When you massively cut taxes so that you don\u2019t have money to spend on much of anything besides the police and the military, this is what happens.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Vice-president Mike Pence with Donald Trump.
Photograph: Evan Vucci\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

It wasn\u2019t just the physical infrastructure that failed the city, and particularly its poorest residents, who are, as in so many US cities, overwhelmingly African American. The human systems of disaster response also failed \u2013 the second great fracturing. The arm of the federal government that is tasked with responding to moments of national crisis such as this is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), with state and municipal governments also playing key roles in evacuation planning and response. All levels of government failed.<\/p>\n

It took Fema five days to get water and food to people in New Orleans who had sought emergency shelter in the Superdome. The most harrowing images from that time were of people stranded on rooftops<\/a> \u2013 of homes and hospitals \u2013 holding up signs that said \u201cHELP\u201d, watching the helicopters pass them by. People helped each other as best they could. They rescued each other in canoes and rowboats. They fed each other. They displayed that beautiful human capacity for solidarity that moments of crisis so often intensify. But at the official level, it was the complete opposite. I\u2019ll always remember the words of Curtis Muhammad, a longtime New Orleans civil rights organiser, who said this experience \u201cconvinced us that we had no caretakers\u201d.<\/p>\n

The way this abandonment played out was deeply unequal, and the divisions cleaved along lines of race and class. Many people were able to leave the city on their own \u2013 they got into their cars, drove to a dry hotel, called their insurance brokers. Some people stayed because they believed the storm defences would hold. But a great many others stayed because they had no choice \u2013 they didn\u2019t have a car, or were too infirm to drive, or simply didn\u2019t know what to do. Those are the people who needed a functioning system of evacuation and relief \u2013 and they were out of luck.<\/p>\n

Abandoned in the city without food or water, those in need did what anyone would do in those circumstances: they took provisions from local stores. Fox News and other media outlets seized on this to paint New Orleans\u2019s black residents as dangerous \u201clooters\u201d who would soon be coming to invade the dry, white parts of the city and surrounding suburbs and towns. Buildings were spray-painted with messages: \u201cLooters will be shot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Checkpoints were set up to trap people in the flooded parts of town. On Danziger Bridge, police officers shot black residents<\/a> on sight (five of the officers involved ultimately pleaded guilty, and the city came to a $13.3m settlement with the families in that case and two other similar post-Katrina cases). Meanwhile, gangs of armed white vigilantes prowled the streets looking, as one resident later put it in an expos\u00e9 by investigative journalist AC Thompson<\/a>, for \u201cthe opportunity to hunt black people\u201d.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I was in New Orleans during the flooding and I saw for myself how amped up the police and military were \u2013 not to mention private security guards from companies such as Blackwater who were showing up fresh from Iraq. It felt very much like a war zone, with poor and black people in the crosshairs \u2013 people whose only crime was trying to survive. By the time the National Guard arrived to organise a full evacuation of the city, it was done with a level of aggression and ruthlessness that was hard to fathom. Soldiers pointed machine guns at residents as they boarded buses, providing no information about where they were being taken. Children were often separated from their parents.<\/p>\n

What I saw during the flooding shocked me. But what I saw in the aftermath of Katrina shocked me even more. With the city reeling, and with its residents dispersed across the country and unable to protect their own interests, a plan emerged to ram through a pro-corporate wishlist with maximum velocity. The famed free-market economist Milton Friedman, then 93 years old, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal stating, \u201cMost New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a similar vein, Richard Baker, at that time a Republican congressman from Louisiana, declared, \u201cWe finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn\u2019t do it, but God did.\u201d I was in an evacuation shelter near Baton Rouge when Baker made that statement. The people I spoke with were just floored by it. Imagine being forced to leave your home, having to sleep in a camping bed in some cavernous convention centre, and then finding out that the people who are supposed to represent you are claiming this was some sort of divine intervention \u2013 God apparently really likes condo developments.<\/p>\n

Baker got his \u201ccleanup\u201d of public housing. In the months after the storm, with New Orleans\u2019s residents \u2013 and all their inconvenient opinions, rich culture and deep attachments \u2013 out of the way, thousands of public housing units, many of which had sustained minimal storm damage because they were on high ground, were demolished. They were replaced with condos and town houses priced far out of reach for most who had lived there.<\/p>\n

And this is where Mike Pence enters the story. At the time Katrina hit New Orleans, Pence was chairman of the powerful and highly ideological Republican Study Committee (RSC), a caucus of conservative lawmakers. On 13 September 2005 \u2013 just 15 days after the levees were breached, and with parts of New Orleans still under water \u2013 the RSC convened a fateful meeting at the offices of the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. Under Pence\u2019s leadership, the group came up with a list of \u201cPro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices<\/a>\u201d \u2013 32 pseudo-relief policies in all, each one straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

New Orleans residents wait on a rooftop to be rescued after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Photograph: Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

What stands out is the commitment to wage all-out war on labour standards and the public sphere \u2013 which is bitterly ironic, because the failure of public infrastructure is what turned Katrina into a human catastrophe in the first place. Also notable is the determination to use any opportunity to strengthen the hand of the oil and gas industry. The list includes recommendations to suspend the obligation for federal contractors to pay a living wage; make the entire affected area a free-enterprise zone; and \u201crepeal or waive restrictive environmental regulations \u2026 that hamper rebuilding\u201d. In other words, a war on the kind of red tape designed to keep communities safe from harm.<\/p>\n

President Bush adopted many of the recommendations within the week, although, under pressure, he was eventually forced to reinstate the labour standards. Another recommendation called for giving parents vouchers to use at private and charter schools (for-profit schools subsidised with tax dollars), a move perfectly in line with the vision held by Trump\u2019s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos<\/a>. Within the year, the New Orleans school system became the most privatised in the US.<\/p>\n

And there was more. Though climate scientists have directly linked the increased intensity of hurricanes to warming ocean temperatures, that didn\u2019t stop Pence and his committee from calling on Congress to repeal environmental regulations on the Gulf coast, give permission for new oil refineries in the US, and green-light \u201cdrilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a kind of madness. After all, these very measures are a surefire way to drive up greenhouse gas emissions, the major human contributor to climate change, which leads to fiercer storms. Yet they were immediately championed by Pence, and later adopted by Bush, under the guise of responding to a devastating hurricane.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth pausing to tease out the implications of all of this. Hurricane Katrina turned into a catastrophe in New Orleans because of a combination of extremely heavy weather \u2013 possibly linked to climate change \u2013 and weak and neglected public infrastructure. The so-called solutions proposed by the group Pence headed at the time were the very things that would inevitably exacerbate climate change and weaken public infrastructure even further. He and his fellow \u201cfree-market\u201d travellers were determined, it seems, to do the very things that are guaranteed to lead to more Katrinas in the future.<\/p>\n

And now Mike Pence<\/a> is in a position to bring this vision to the entire United States.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The oil industry wasn\u2019t the only one to profit from Hurricane Katrina. Immediately after the storm, the whole gang of contractors who had descended on Baghdad when war broke out \u2013 Bechtel, Fluor, Halliburton, Blackwater, CH2M Hill and Parsons, infamous for its sloppy Iraq work<\/a> \u2013 now arrived in New Orleans. They had a singular vision: to prove that the kinds of privatised services they had been providing in Iraq and Afghanistan also had an ongoing domestic market \u2013 and to collect no-bid contracts totalling $3.4bn.<\/p>\n

The controversies were legion. Relevant experience often appeared to have nothing to do with how contracts were allocated. Take, for example, the company that Fema paid $5.2m to perform the crucial role of building a base camp for emergency workers in St Bernard Parish, a suburb of New Orleans. The camp construction fell behind schedule and was never completed. Under investigation, it emerged that the contractor, Lighthouse Disaster Relief, was in fact a religious group. \u201cAbout the closest thing I have done to this is just organise a youth camp with my church,\u201d confessed Lighthouse\u2019s director, Pastor Gary Heldreth.<\/p>\n

After all the layers of subcontractors had taken their cut, there was next to nothing left for the people doing the work. Author Mike Davis tracked the way Fema paid Shaw $175 per sq ft to install blue tarps on damaged roofs, even though the tarps themselves were provided by the government. Once all the subcontractors took their share, the workers who actually hammered in the tarps were paid as little as $2 per sq ft.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung,\u201d Davis wrote, \u201cwhere the actual work is carried out.\u201d These supposed \u201ccontractors\u201d were really \u2013 like the Trump Organization \u2013 hollow brands, sucking out profit and then slapping their name on cheap or non-existent services.<\/p>\n

In order to offset the tens of billions going to private companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress announced that it needed to cut $40bn from the federal budget. Among the programmes that were slashed: student loans, Medicaid and food stamps.<\/p>\n

So, the poorest people in the US subsidised the contractor bonanza twice: first, when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services; and second, when the few programmes that assist the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills.<\/p>\n

New Orleans is the disaster capitalism blueprint \u2013 designed by the current vice-president and by the Heritage Foundation, the hard-right think tank to which Trump has outsourced much of his administration\u2019s budgeting. Ultimately, the response to Katrina sparked an approval ratings freefall for George W Bush, a plunge that eventually lost the Republicans the presidency in 2008. Nine years later, with Republicans now in control of Congress and the White House, it\u2019s not hard to imagine this test case for privatised disaster response being adopted on a national scale.<\/p>\n

The presence of highly militarised police and armed private soldiers in New Orleans came as a surprise to many. Since then, the phenomenon has expanded exponentially, with local police forces across the country outfitted to the gills with military-grade gear, including tanks and drones, and private security companies frequently providing training and support. Given the array of private military and security contractors occupying key positions in the Trump administration, we can expect all of this to expand further with each new shock.<\/p>\n

The Katrina experience also stands as a stark warning to those who are holding out hope for Trump\u2019s promised $1tn in infrastructure spending. That spending will fix some roads and bridges, and it will create jobs. Crucially, Trump has indicated that he plans to do as much as possible not through the public sector but through public-private partnerships \u2013 which have a terrible track record for corruption, and may result in far lower wages than true public-works projects would. Given Trump\u2019s business record, and Pence\u2019s role in the administration, there is every reason to fear that his big-ticket infrastructure spending could become a Katrina-like kleptocracy, a government of thieves, with the Mar-a-Lago set helping themselves to vast sums of taxpayer money<\/a>.<\/p>\n

New Orleans provides a harrowing picture of what we can expect when the next shock hits. But sadly, it is far from complete: there is much more that this administration might try to push through under cover of crisis. To become shock-resistant, we need to prepare for that, too.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Naomi Klein is the award-winning author of the international bestseller, <\/em>No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, translated into 28 languages. She writes an internationally syndicated column for <\/em>The Nation magazine and the <\/em>Guardian newspaper. She is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia. Her book <\/em>The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism was published worldwide in 2007.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theguardian.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Take a group of people who directly profit from ongoing war and then put those same people at the heart of government. Who’s going to make the case for peace? After a crisis, private contractors move in and suck up funding for work done badly, if at all \u2013 then those billions get cut from government budgets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}