The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Author:Naomi Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307371300
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2008-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

September 11 and the Civil Service Comeback

As Bush and his cabinet took their posts in January 2001, the need for new sources of growth for U.S. corporations took on even greater urgency. With the tech bubble now officially popped and the Dow Jones tumbling 824 points in their first two and half months in office, they found themselves staring in the face of a serious economic downturn. Keynes had argued that governments should spend their way out of recessions, providing economic stimulus with public works. Bush’s solution was for the government to deconstruct itself—hacking off great chunks of the public wealth and feeding them to corporate America, in the form of tax cuts on the one hand and lucrative contracts on the other. Bush’s budget director, the think-tank ideologue Mitch Daniels, pronounced, “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.”31 That assessment included disaster response. Joseph Allbaugh, the Republican Party operative whom Bush put in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—the body responsible for responding to disasters, including terrorist attacks—described his new place of work as “an oversized entitlement program.”32

Then came 9/11, and all of a sudden having a government whose central mission was self-immolation did not seem like a very good idea. With a frightened population wanting protection from a strong, solid government, the attacks could well have put an end to Bush’s project of hollowing out government just as it was beginning.

For a while, that even seemed to be the case. “September 11 has changed everything,” said Ed Feulner, Milton Friedman’s old friend and president of the Heritage Foundation, ten days after the attack, making him one of the first to utter the fateful phrase. Many naturally assumed that part of that change would be a re-evaluation of the radical anti-state agenda that Feulner and his ideological allies had been pushing for three decades, at home and around the world. After all, the nature of the September 11 security failures exposed the results of more than twenty years of chipping away at the public sector and outsourcing government functions to profit-driven corporations. Much as the flooding of New Orleans exposed the rotting condition of public infrastructure, the attacks pulled back the curtain on a state that had been allowed to grow dangerously weak: radio communications for the New York City police and firefighters broke down in the middle of the rescue operation, air traffic controllers didn’t notice the off-course planes in time, and the attackers had passed through airport security checkpoints staffed by contract workers, some of whom earned less than their counterparts at the food court.33

The first major victory of the Friedmanite counter-revolution in the United States had been Ronald Reagan’s attack on the air traffic controllers’ union and his deregulation of the airlines. Twenty years later, the entire air transit system had been privatized, deregulated and downsized, with the vast majority of airport security work performed by underpaid, poorly trained, non-union contractors.

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