[R-G] Bush's hollow state

[Anthony Fenton]

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
All Rights Reserved
Los Angeles Times

October 20, 2007 Saturday
Home Edition

SECTION: MAIN NEWS; Editorial pages Desk; Part A; Pg. 19

LENGTH: 973 words

HEADLINE: Bush's hollow state;
 From border fences to Iraq security, the government has outsourced  
core services.

BYLINE: Naomi Klein, Naomi Klein is the author, most recently, of  
"The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism."

BODY:


'We didn't want to get stuck with a lemon." That's what Homeland  
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said to a House committee last  
month. He was referring to the "virtual fence" planned for the U.S.  
borders with Mexico and Canada. If the entire project goes as badly  
as the 28-mile prototype, it could turn out to be one of the most  
expensive lemons in history, projected to cost $8 billion by 2011.

Boeing, the company that landed the contract -- the largest ever  
awarded by the Department of Homeland Security -- announced this week  
that it will finally test the fence after months of delay due to  
computer problems. Heavy rains have confused its remote-controlled  
cameras and radar, and the sensors can't tell the difference between  
moving people, grazing cows or rustling bushes.

But this debacle points to more than faulty technology. It exposes  
the faulty logic of the Bush administration's vision of a hollowed- 
out government run everywhere possible by private contractors.

According to this radical vision, contractors treat the state as an  
ATM, withdrawing massive contracts to perform core functions like  
securing borders and interrogating prisoners, and making deposits in  
the form of campaign contributions. As President Bush's former budget  
director, Mitch Daniels, put it: "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."

The flip side of the Daniels directive is that the public sector is  
rapidly losing the ability to fulfill its most basic responsibilities  
-- and nowhere more so than in the Department of Homeland Security,  
which, as a Bush creation, has followed the ATM model since its  
inception.

For instance, when the controversial border project was launched, the  
department admitted that it had no idea how to secure the borders  
and, furthermore, didn't think it was its job to figure it out.  
Homeland Security's deputy secretary told a group of contractors that  
"this is an unusual invitation. ... We're asking you to come back and  
tell us how to do our business."

Private companies would not only perform the work, they would  
identify what work needed to be done, write their own work orders,  
implement them and oversee them. All the department had to do was  
sign the checks.

And as one former top Homeland Security official put it: "If it  
doesn't come from industry, we are not going to be able to get it."

Put simply, if any given job can't be outsourced, it can't be done.

This philosophy, so central to the Bush years, explains statistics  
like this one: In 2003, the U.S. government handed out 3,512  
contracts to companies to perform domestic security functions, from  
bomb detection to data mining. In the 22-month period ending in  
August 2006, the Homeland Security Department had issued more than  
115,000 security-related contracts.

If government is now an ATM, perhaps the war on terror is best  
understood not as a war but as a sprawling new economy, one based on  
continued disaster and instability. In this economy, the Bush team  
doesn't run the venture exactly; rather, it plays the role of deep- 
pocketed venture capitalist, always on the lookout for new security  
start-ups (overwhelmingly headed by former employees of the Pentagon  
and Homeland Security). Roger Novak, whose firm invests in homeland  
security companies, explains it like this: "Every fund is seeing how  
big the [government] trough is and asking, how do I get a piece of  
that action?"

The Boeing border contract is just one piece of that action. Another,  
of course, is the security contractor boom in Iraq, currently  
starring Blackwater USA.

Last month, when the Iraqi government accused Blackwater guards of  
massacring civilians in Baghdad, it became clear that the U.S.  
Embassy had no intention of severing ties with Blackwater because it  
could not function without it.

Perhaps that's why that same bureau rushed to respond to the Iraqi  
government's allegations in the September shooting with a "spot  
report" of its own: that Blackwater guards had come under attack and  
had responded accordingly. Days later, it emerged that an embassy  
contractor wrote the report -- a contractor who worked for  
Blackwater. The administration then sent in the FBI to investigate  
the shootings. Yet it quickly emerged that the FBI investigators  
could well be guarded by Blackwater. The FBI announced that other  
arrangements would be made -- but this was an exception.

And remember Hurricane Katrina, when contractors -- including  
Blackwater -- descended on New Orleans? FEMA was already so hollowed- 
out by then that it had to hire a contractor to help manage all the  
contractors. And with all the controversies, the Army recently  
decided it needed to update its manual for dealing with contractors  
-- giving the job of drafting the new policy to one of its major  
contractors.

It still looks like a government -- with impressive buildings,  
presidential news briefings, policy battles. But pull back the  
curtain and there is nobody home.

The Blackwater scandal could have provided an opportunity to question  
the wisdom of turning state security into a for-profit activity --  
but not in today's Washington. Instead, rather than replacing its  
cowboy contractors with troops, the State Department says it will put  
video cameras on the vehicles they guard.

Video surveillance is one of the most lucrative sectors of the war-on- 
terror economy. This could even turn out to be great news for the top  
executives at Blackwater, who have launched a new private  
intelligence company billed as a "one-stop service able to meet all  
the intelligence, operational and security needs." If the past is any  
indication, there is no reason why the men from Blackwater cannot be  
contracted to spy on Blackwater. Indeed, it would be the perfect  
expression of the hollow state that Bush built.