I watched the Frontline about Katrina response and it appears pretty damning. Not only is the corporate takeover fatally flawed, but the corporate partisans are inept.
I’ve long thought that due to the delay between social movements and the appearance of adherents in the political system that we have entered the time when the yuppies and corporate raiders have taken office. It’s the morally bankrupt hostile cocaine culture that is now in power. The frame of government as corporation is showing itself to be a deadly filter. I’m not entirely comfortable with the assessment by Jane Jacobs of what happens when commerce and politics are mixed in her work Systems of Survival but that certainly comes to mind.
The current administration hates government that they do not benefit from. Frankly, I think they think they hate all government, but they love using the government for their own purposes. This creates a situation where policy is antithetical to the political goals of those in power. For example, nonspecific funds distributed under the label of homeland security becomes a massive corporate welfare check to industry involved in security technology. These security technology companies are vastly entangled with the military-industrial complex that has sought out a diversification during the cold war and in advance of what they feared most: the peace dividend. If government wasn’t spending on military, then they would lose their favourite teat.
A thought that occurs to me is that the reason that the corporate raiders are so hostile to FEMA as a functioning professional organization is that by gutting it and moving under homeland security FEMA becomes more militarized. They’ve been moving everything under the overall umbrella of the military-industrial-oil complex.