Privatizing disaster

I suspected there must be something afoot when talk at the Tea table began about killing FEMA. I'm more than suspicious now. It seems our former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who according to The Maritime Executive, is announcing a 'strategic partnership' with O’Brien’s Response Management, a wholly owned subsidiary of SEACOR Holdings Inc. Bush's company, Old Rhodes Holdings now looks forward to

"helping a broader array of organizations and communities become more resilient through preparation, response, communication and recovery”

says Bush, whom Floridians will remember was the governor through the disastrous hurricanes of 2004 and 2005. How they will remember him is hard to tell and probably depends on whose house and car and boat and livelihood was demolished and how long it was before he got any significant help. As I recall, my neighbors and I felt pretty much on our own, despite Bush's alleged leadership, although FEMA certainly was here with food, water and some generators.

I played a small part in delivering food to those who had no means of getting to a FEMA distribution center -- and there are many such people here -- and also used my amateur radio license to good effect, facilitating communications between Red Cross shelters and government agencies until commercial communications and electric power were restored. The interface between need and help was public and public spirited. It was not corporate, it was neighbor to neighbor working through non profit organizations. It was restaurants sending food to police and firefighters, carpenters and roofers and others helping those who needed it.

The only time we heard from Governor Jeb and his brother, the Commander Guy was when they showed up at Red Cross headquarters for a photo op, disrupting operations for half a day, and when they posed for the cameras handing out a bag of ice for a few minutes before escaping into an air conditioned limo and the Presidential helicopter to fly off to a party in Miami Beach while we sweltered in the dark for weeks and weeks.

"Governor Bush has unparalleled experience in crisis management, as he helped guide Florida through some of the most significant natural disasters in its history"

said Charles Fabrikant, executive chairman of SEACOR Holdings. Unparalleled, of course isn't quite the same as unequaled.

Jeb is a Bush, however and the "strategic partnership" may be about a further strategy than to provide "emergency planning, disaster response, preparedness consulting, crisis communications and regulatory compliance services to corporations and governments" which is what O’Brien’s Response Management, the SEACOR subsidiary in question does. O'Brien's has been picking up people like former Coast Guard Captain Ed Stanton, who was the Incident Commander during hurricane Katrina and the recent BP oil spill. It's funny how oil and the Bush family float to the top. O'Brien Oil Pollution Service being part of the O'Brien family.

So do we have the same people who were so heavily criticized for mishandling that Gulf oil spill soon to be handling more disasters for profit while FEMA goes the way of Social Security and Medicare and the FAA and all those agencies being overwhelmed by the tidal wave of tea?

I don't mean to say that FEMA has always been what it should be or done as well as it should have done, but FEMA sits at the end of a chain of responsibility that leads to the
American public while SEACOR is ultimately responsible to its owners -- and like the former Blackwater owners, they're quite able to ignore questions as to what they did and how much they made by doing it by saying "sorry, we're a private corporation."

I do mean to be suspicious however and I'm aware that evidence of collusion and corruption and various acts of grift, graft and flim-flam are too easily dismissed as "conspiracy theories." Our history is basically a series of conspiracies conveniently mislabeled and when I hear the words, oil, Bush, and disaster used in close conjunction, and when I hear about efforts to privatize yet another not-for-profit health and safety organization, I'm more than suspicious.

People like me, who belong to well organized volunteer groups like ARES, American Red Cross, SATERN and many, many others are used to working with government agencies, not that there isn't some friction on occasion, but the prospect of mercenaries who take orders from corporate CEO's who profit from disaster aid and are motivated to control and monopolize the process, rationing help to maximize private gain, isn't a welcome one. In fact it's infuriating to think about being told what to say and do, where we can go and where we can't go by black uniformed privateers protecting turf and profit and it would tempt me to ignore them and work around them if possible the next time a storm rages ashore and Florida goes dark.

Montezuma’s Revenge (Hint: Human Sacrifice is Good for You)

By Octopus

I have often wondered where John F. Kennedy cribbed the phrase, “ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.”

Researching the Internet yesterday for a clue, I finally located a source: Huitzilopochtli (plus a curious codicil from House Republicans, Eric Cantor and Ron Paul).

If you want to serve your country and heed the call of Cantor and Paul - which means pull the plug on FEMA, emancipate seniors from Social Security slavery, cast out MediScare, and gut food safety regulations - please note: Human sacrifice is pleasing to Huitzilopochtli.

No money for disaster relief?  No problem!  Let hurricanes drown all deadbeats on the Federal dole.  Distribute emergency food to the hungry?  Let them eat brioche!  Only 28,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths from tainted food each year?  Save money with salmonella!

With fewer folks making demands on the gubbermint, more supplies will surely trickle down to the rest of us. After all, human sacrifice is pleasing to Huitzilopochtli.

How many sacrificial human beings will it take to balance the budget?  To reach a savings of $2.7 trillion, a mere 100 sacrificial billionaires will suffice - compared to 163,279,483 middle-class Amerikaners.  But everyone knows billionaires have no hearts worthy of sacrifice, which is not pleasing to Huitzilopochtli.

Huitzilopochtli will be counting on us to do our civic duty.  So ask not what House Republicans can do for you - ask what you can do for House Republicans.

Tropical Storm Irene and the Meteoric Rise of Ron Paul's Descent

Perhaps it won't be amiss to post this little piece alongside Capt. Fogg's now since we've gotten onto the subject of cynicism, snark, Irene and Ron Paul.  So here goes....

It was bound to happen, you know. While Ron Paul is by no means what you'd call an extremist – at least not, that is, if you go by a sufficiently rigorous definition of the term that involves forcing people to accept your beliefs and being willing to kill or imprison them if they don't – at a certain point the out-thereness of the man's philosophy, the almost infinite impracticability of it in the real world, couldn't hide under all the copies of Atlas Shrugged in the world piled up in one blessed spot.

I believe we have reached that point in the current presidential campaign. If you weren't too busy battening down your own hatches against H/TS Irene today or worrying about how poor old Uncle Harry and Aunt Matilda are doing over there on the East Coast, you may have noticed Rep. Paul popping up on your tv screen (here's an MSNBC clip, for example) explaining with patient passion that FEMA really shouldn't be involved in this whole operation since there's "no magic" about that outfit whatsoever. It's unnecessary, you see, because as we all know, helping people is a task best relegated to the various states and local government entities. That apparently remains true even when the help may need to be provided to millions across a huge swath of the country swamped and blasted by a storm itself the size of Texas or California.

When Ron Paul makes such a statement, he might as well have just admitted that he likes to cuddle up every night with a big stuffed bear named "Aynie the Pooh." The effect on anyone's ability to take him seriously is approximately the same. The word for the day is "Galveston," where a huge hurricane took thousands of Texans' lives back in 1900 – a period back to which Mr. Paul evidently looks nostalgically: "We ought to be like 1900…."

Perhaps his recent pronouncements are admirably consistent of Rep. Paul, but they're also apt to be taken rather badly by the 99.99999999% of the American public who don't insist on their libertarian ideologism in the middle of a monster storm that's pelting them with uprooted trees and flooding their homes. The healthy core of libertarianism has always been that its proponents genuinely favor civil liberty -- government shouldn't be snooping on you in your bedroom and meddling in your private life generally. But if the bed that was in your bedroom yesterday happens just now to be bobbing wildly in debris-strewn storm surge with you hanging on for dear life atop it (and the bedroom itself is you've no idea where), I think you really WANT some nosy government types on the lookout for you – as many as possible, to be precise. Even if there's nothing "magic" about them.

When libertarian philosophy meets the real world, the former almost invariably comes off looking mighty foolish and ineffectual, the helpless victim of massive forces like hurricane-force winds and corporate monopoly that it simply cannot process, not even in its dreams, if it has any. This is the proper stuff of college kids hashing out pure ideas in their dorm rooms, not something that belongs in the company of serious political deliberation for the benefit of anyone with a fair amount of life experience.