L’ultime et suprême opportunité du capitalisme déchaîné: les désastres et les guerres engendrés par la crise climatique

L’acteur John Cusak, reconverti en journaliste activiste sur le site Huffington Post, s’est pris d’estime pour Noami Klein. On pourrait tomber plus mal. Les 9 octobre et 10 octobre, Cusak a mis en ligne les deux parties d’une longue interview de Klein. Le sujet est vaste et tourne bien entendu autour du thème du capitalisme radical et prédateur.

Il y est question de la privatisation générale, du monde, des nations, des armées. Il y est question de Blackwater et de ce que cette organisation représente. Il y est question des extraordinaire “opportunités”, — ces gens pensent comme ça, — que la crise climatique ménage au travers des guerres et des catastrophes naturelles. Il y est question des bornes du nihilisme apocalypitique repoussées au-delà de tout ce qu'on pouvait imaginer.

(Bien sûr, cet interview complète le texte F&C de ce jour.)

Ci-dessous, un extrait de l’interview :

«Cusack: You've written a lot about what you call “the moveable green zone”, which has extended the reach of these companies way beyond the war...

»Klein: Well the first place where we all saw this happen was in New Orleans after the flood. Within weeks, the Gulf Coast became a domestic laboratory for the same kind of government-run-by-contractors that was pioneered in Iraq. And the whole Green Zone gang was there: Halliburton, Blackwater, Parsons, Fluor, Shaw, Bechtel, CH2M Hill.

»But again, this is way more than just a story about shoddy work by contractors. These private companies were actually taking over state functions instead of rebuilding the public sphere. And in New Orleans, the supreme irony was that it was the very frail public sphere that caused the disaster in the first place when the levees broke and the public transit system couldn't handle the evacuation and FEMA was nowhere to be found.

»This is the opposite of the New Deal, when public works created good jobs and strengthened society. In today's disasters, public money floods into corporate coffers and those corporations replace the public sphere. Look at New Orleans today: public schools have been converted into charter schools, public housing remains boarded up as condo developers circle, the levee system remains inadequate, and the city's largest public hospital — Charity Hospital — is still closed. Meanwhile, contractors are driving down wages and working conditions, with African-Americans virtually locked out of reconstruction jobs, and migrant Latino workers locked in, telling horror stories of modern day indentured servitude. This is what I mean when I say that disasters are dress rehearsals for a sci-fi vision of corporate rule — it's not just that disaster response is being privatized, it's that in places like Baghdad and New Orleans, the public sphere is disappearing completely and there is no plan to bring it back. This is the warfare state you send up so brilliantly in War Inc — with the same company selling the bombs and the prosthetic limbs for the victims of those bombs. It's crazy, but we are really not that far off from your twisted imagination!

»Cusack: Some things are so vicious, you have to look at them through a different lens or you could never get out of bed. It's hard, even in absurdist satire, to stay one step ahead of this crew. Of course, the business will keep coming for these companies. Even if a momentary peace breaks out, natural disasters will ensure that the market will expand for the Disaster Capitalism Complex as a whole. They'll just diversify. A perfect flexibility built into the design.

»Klein: Put it this way: after the recent earthquake in Peru, a private U.S. company called Aramark got a contract to manage evacuee camps and they had mini-McDonald's franchises in them.

»That was a first — McRelief.

»Cusack: It fills one with pride.

»Klein: It's time to face the fact that climate change has created a major new market. And I'm not talking about a new market for sustainable energy, which would be positive, but a market to profit from the disasters caused in large part by our fossil fuel addiction. Responding to the increasing numbers of emergencies is seen as simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the non-profits — why should UNICEF rebuild schools when Bechtel can do it? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy a major international peacekeeping force to Darfur when Blackwater has been lobbying for months to go in and get the job done? Why let the CIA read our email when there are hundreds of security ''start ups'' that want the gig?

»This is a transformation of profound consequence. Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, but it was economically insignificant compared to today's disaster capitalism complex. Before 2001, wars and disasters only provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy — the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom — the medium is the message.»

Mis en ligne le 11 octobre 2007 à 09H32