Nexilist Notebook

It used to be that when war or natural disaster hit, the stock market would go down in reaction to the news. It appears that a new day has dawned. Things began shifting as billions of dollars were being sprayed around in Iraq to companies like Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater, etc. A gold rush began to supply services for reconstruction, logistics, security etc.

Then Katrina hit and the Iraq service suppliers saw that opportunity lay in natural disaster as well as war. Today Wall Street is enamored with the stock of companies that supply services to the US government in support of the Iraq war and are also available to cater natural disasters.

This trend is troubling enough if you can trust the people involve to behave in a rational and ethical fashion. Unfortunately, that seems to be the exception rather than the rule for these companies. What if a company saw an opportunity to increase its business in a war zone or disaster zone if conditions deteriorated for some reason. Would they act to deliberately make matters worse in the name of profit. I am afraid that it seems all to plausible.

Case in point. When the US military cracked down on the city of Falluga the trigger was the gory death of four “contractors”. Now we find out that these “contractors” were four Blackwater mercenaries who had been sent out into a dangerous zone without the normal six personnel, with inadequate equipment and maps on short notice. This appears to me to be inviting disaster. And disaster is what they got. The citizens of Falluga suffered horribly, much of the city was destroyed, US troops got killed and Blackwater has made a lot of money in Iraq since because of the deteriorating security conditions in Iraq.

I wonder how this new profit enhancement methodology could be applied to natural disasters??

Naomi Klien has written a book on Disaster Capitalism called the Shock Doctrine the covers some of these topics.

Shock Doctrine