This book is a must read for any truther IMO. Noami Klein is not a truther, but one of the major points in the book is the PTB using disaster(s)/catastrophe to ram through unpopular initiatives. This excerpt is from the late 280s (page numbers):
Not surprisingly, the generals who were used to holding sway in the Pen
tagon were pretty sure that "things" and "mass" still mattered when it came
to fighting wars. They soon became deeply hostile to Rumsfeld's vision of a
hollow military. After a little more than seven months in office, the secretary
had already stepped on so many powerful toes that it was rumored his days
were numbered.
It was at this moment that Rumsfeld called a rare "town hall meeting"
for Pentagon staff. The speculation began immediately: Was he going to
announce his resignation? Was he going to try his hand at a pep talk? Was he
belatedly trying to sell the old guard on transformation? As hundreds of Pen
tagon senior staff filed into the auditorium that Monday morning, "the mood
was definitely one of curiosity," one staffer told me. "The feeling was, How
are you going to convince us? Because there was already a huge amount of
animosity toward him."
When Rumsfeld made his entrance, "we politely stood up and sat down."
It rapidly became clear that this was not a resignation, and it most certainly
was not a pep talk. It may have been the most extraordinary speech ever
given by a U.S. secretary of defense. It began like this:
The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to
the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of
the world's last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating
five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its de
mands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With bru
tal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It
disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men
and women in uniform at risk.
Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but
that enemy is gone: our foes are more subtle and implacable today.. . .
The adversary's closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy.
As Rumsfeld's rhetorical gimmick revealed itself, the faces in the audience
went stony. Most of the people listening had devoted their careers to fighting
the Soviet Union and didn't appreciate being compared to Commies at this
stage in the game. Rumsfeld wasn't finished. "We know the adversary. We
know the threat. And with the same firmness of purpose that any effort
against a determined adversary demands, we must get at it and stay at it. . .
today we declare war on bureaucracy."
He'd done it: the defense secretary had not only described the Pentagon
as a grave threat to America but declared war against the institution where he
worked. The audience was stunned. "He was saying we were the enemy, that
the enemy was us. And here we were thinking we were doing the nation's
business," the staffer told me.
It wasn't that Rumsfeld wanted to save taxpayer dollars—he had just asked
Congress for an 11 percent budget increase. But following the corporatist
principles of the counterrevolution, in which Big Government joins forces
with Big Business to redistribute funds upward, he wanted less spent on staff
and far more public money transferred directly into the coffers of private
companies. And with that, Rumsfeld launched his "war." Every department
needed to slash its staff by 15 percent, including "every base headquarters
building in the world. It's not just the law, it's a good idea, and we're going to
get it done."
He had already directed his senior staff to "scour the Department [of De
fense] for functions that could be performed better and more cheaply through
commercial outsourcing." He wanted to know, "Why is D o D one of the last or
ganizations around that still cuts its own checks? When an entire industry ex
ists to run warehouses efficiently, why do we own and operate so many of our
own? At bases around the world, why do we pick up our own garbage and mop
our own floors, rather than contracting services out, as many businesses do?
And surely we can outsource more computer systems support."
He even went after the sacred cow of the military establishment: health
care for soldiers. Why were there so many doctors? Rumsfeld wanted to
know. "Some of those needs, especially where they may involve general
practice or specialties unrelated to combat, might be more efficiently de
livered by the private sector." And how about the houses for soldiers and
their families —surely these could be done through "public-private part
nerships."
The Defense Department should focus on its core competency:
"warfighting . . . But in all other cases, we should seek suppliers who can
provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively."
After the speech, plenty of Pentagon staffers griped that the only thing
standing in the way of Rumsfeld's bold vision of outsourcing the army was
the small matter of the U.S. Constitution, which clearly defined national se
curity as the duty of government, not private companies. "I thought the
speech was going to cost Rumsfeld his job," my source told me.
It didn't, and the coverage of his declaration of war on the Pentagon was
sparse. That's because the date of his contentious address was September
10, 2001.
It is a strange historical footnote that CNN Evening News on September
10 carried a short story under the headline "Defense Secretary Declares War
on the Pentagon's Bureaucracy" and that, the next morning, the network
would report on an attack on that institution of a distinctly less metaphorical
kind, one that killed 125 Pentagon employees and seriously wounded an
other 110 of the people whom Rumsfeld had portrayed as enemies of the
state less than twenty-four hours earlier.
Cheney and Rumsfeld: Proto-Disaster Capitalists
The idea at the heart of Rumsfeld's forgotten speech is nothing less than the
central tenet of the Bush regime: that the job of government is not to govern
but to subcontract the task to the more efficient and generally superior pri
vate sector. As Rumsfeld made clear, this task was about nothing as prosaic
as trimming the budget, but was, for its advocates, a world-changing crusade
on a par with defeating Communism.
By the time the Bush team took office, the privatization mania of the
eighties and nineties (fully embraced by the Clinton administration, as well
as state and local governments) had successfully sold off or outsourced the
large, publicly owned companies in several sectors, from water and electric
ity to highway management and garbage collection. After these limbs of the
state had been lopped off, what was left was "the core"—those functions so
intrinsic to the concept of governing that the idea of handing them to private
corporations challenged what it meant to be a nation-state: the military, po
lice, fire departments, prisons, border control, covert intelligence, disease
control, the public school system and the administering of government bu
reaucracies. The earlier stages of the privatization wave had been so prof
itable, however, that many of the companies that had devoured the
appendages of the state were greedily eyeing these essential functions as the
next source of instant riches.
