http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/7/145445/9698MILITARY RECRUITMENT - 9/7 JOB FAIR IN THE ASTRODOME
NO SCAVENGING THE GULF COAST CRISIS TO BOOST THE
DEPLETED RANKS OF THE MILITARY!
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Stop the military from preying upon the vulnerable! Come educate youth dislocated from their lives and communities - facing homelessness, joblessness and often hopelessness -about the false promises of recruiters!
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Doling out food to the hungry crowds overflowing
Houston's Astrodome, the National Guard has engaged in ad hoc recruiting in recent days.
Tomorrow, September 7, 2005, the U.S. military is
conducting a Job Fair in the Astrodome in a blatant effort to exploit the despair of masses of Americans evacuated from the Gulf Coast. Once
signed up, even if purportedly to reconstruct their region, they could easily find themselves deployed to Iraq, left with medical coverage for only two for only combat-related injury and the expectations for training eviscerated. And if they sign up on the promise of temporary relief,
they could find themselves bound for extended tours of duty.
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Forwarding:
No link was provided with this. More on eminent domain at the end
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Black Water
I've spent days scrutinizing satellite photos of New Orleans, helping people check out their houses. Inevitably, if they or their neighbors
had a swimming pool, the turquoise blue of the pool visible on the pre-Katrina image is black on Digital Globe's shots from August 31st 10 AM. Also, as I said in a previous post, I was pretty
certain that certain corporate names, familiar from the mercenary industry in Iraq, were going to turn up in New Orleans. So this evening I got an email from Patrick Nielsen Hayden informing me that Blackwater's in New Orleans. Bodyguards to the coalition, they have a certain cowboy
reputation among the private "security" firms. The
style of their website tends to be a little over-the-top macho in comparison to other private military firms, whose websites tend to mimic
accounting firms, as though it was sercurities (in the plural) they were selling, rather than "security."
And, yes, those were Blackwater guys who died in
Falluja, touching off the public revelation that at Paul Bremer's instigation, Iraq was awash in mercenaries who were pulling down salaries ten
times what the American troops stationed there were making.
Blackwater. From a novelistic standpoint, it is inevitable that they would turn up in the city in which there is so much water and on the satellite photos it looks like a black stain. And really, when you hire mercenaries, a certain amount of murkiness about accountability is part of what you are paying for. I lost track: were any of the private contractors implicated in the torture documented in the Taguba report ever actually
charged with anything? What ever happened to John
Israel and Steve Stephanowitz?
Sending Blackwater into New Orleans is the
twenty-first century's sad answer to that quaint twentieth-century phrase "send in the marines."
It is the public confession that too much of our
infrastructure has been "privatized," by which we mean that services formerly provided by
government employees accountable to the American
people can now be purchased, often at much higher prices, from the private sector, opening up much larger opportunities for war (and now disaster)
profiteering. This is not to say that there aren't
talented, strong, idealistic young men working for companies like Blackwater. But rather the privatization of these areas of endeavor, in light
of the Iraq experience, is part cynical exercise in looting of the public treasuries, and part liberating the government from the burdensome
accountability that keeps public employees from
behaving like action heroes do in the movies.
Put yourself in the shoes of those frightened,
traumatized people holed up in their houses, determined to hang on because what's left of their houses is all they have left in the world. What would you do if one of these big burly Blackwater guys, with sunglasses and a sub-machine gun, showed up on your doorstep and instructed you to evacuate?
As nearly as I can tell, New Orleans is awash in rumor. Suppose you had heard that they weren't really rescuing black people, but rather were rounding them up and putting them in concentration camps, something I wish were further from the truth [link via Xeni at boingboing].
What happens if the man from Blackwater reacts badly to your response?
And how much is Blackwater being paid to prance around with guns while firefighters who came for free are used as props for political photo ops?
(Via Attytood, thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden.)
A FURTHER THOUGHT: In August of 1955, Hurricane Connie passed through the Delaware Valley, followed shortly by the remnants of Hurricane
Diane. This resulted in the Great Flood of 1955. As the late science fiction literary agent Virginia Kidd (at the time of the flood, Mrs.
James Blish) told the story, the flood waters rose up to the window sills of the main floor of the house (to a depth of about 4 ft on one side of the house, and much deeper on the other side,
as Arrowhead has a daylight basement). The waters stayed for two weeks.
Meanwhile,
Virginia and her family stayed at Judy Merrill's
house, on much higher ground, 3 doors down from the Milford stoplight (for those who've been
there). As I recall, Virginia said they spent the
whole time playing cards, waiting for the waters to recede. Much of the contents of the house had to be discarded because the flooded houses all had septic systems and the septic systems had been destroyed. But the Blish family still had their house.
But not for long. The US government took most of the houses in the flood zone by eminent domain and tore many of them down. There was a plan for a vast flood management program involving making the whole area a lake. The plan was never enacted. When I worked for Virginia in the late 1980s, we were still sweeping the Delaware River mud out of the floor boards.
Virginia was allowed to rent the family house back
from the government for the rest of her life, though if the Feds had ever decided to act on
their plan, she would have been evicted. And the house it is where she founded and ran the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency. And when she died a few years ago, the agency was allowed to continue operating in the house, and there they are still.
Why is Blackwater in New Orleans to do work that many others have volunteered to do for free? Two words: Eminent Domain.
Think about it.
What is Eminent Domain?
Eminent Domain is how the government takes your
property for a public purpose, whether you chose to sell it to them or not, at a price they
specify.
In Kelo vs. New London, the supreme court vastly expanded the powers of government to take property in situations where it was arguably for a private, not a public, purpose. The American Bar Association outlines it thusly:
The exercise of eminent domain has a central role in urban redevelopment, smart growth, water quality improvements, wild land preservation and restoration, and a host of environmental and energy infrastructure projects.
The Fifth Amendment enjoins: "nor shall private
property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
This Quick Teleconference will examine the Supreme Court's recently decided 5th Amendment cases Kelo v. New London, No. 04-108 (June 23, 2005) and Lingle v. Chevron, 125 S. Ct. 2074 (May 23, 2005). In Kelo, the Court by a 5-4 majority upheld the City of New London, Connecticut's condemnation of 15 homes in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood for the sole purpose of furthering economic redevelopment around a planned pharmaceutical research facility. The QT will discuss the extent to which the decision allows
governmental officials to condemn private property for the purpose of increasing tax
revenues and promoting development.
In Lingle, the Court held in another 5-4 opinion that the 5th Amendment does not engender inquiry into whether the regulation "substantially
advances" legitimate state interests, as it would with an issue under the Due Process Clause. Instead, how the amendment applies is a function of the extent and duration of the governmental action.
Translation: in situations like Katrina, Kelo vastly expands the opportunities for corporate looting.
