Liberal Street Fighter

What else are we going to “privatize” in this country?

Storm-Wracked Parish Considers Hired Guns

ST. BERNARD PARISH, La. — Maj. Pete Tufaro scanned the fenced lot packed with hundreds of stark white trailers soon to be inhabited by Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Shaking his head, he predicted the cramped quarters would ignite fights, hide criminals and become an incubator for crime, posing another test for his cash-strapped sheriff’s department, which furloughed 206 of its 390 officers after the storm.

Tufaro thinks the parish has the solution: DynCorp International LLC, the Texas company that provided personal security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq. If the Federal Emergency Management Agency approves the sheriff’s department’s proposal, which would cost $70 million over three years, up to 100 DynCorp employees would be deputized to be make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Department khaki and black uniforms.

So, after starving public institutions for decades, the plan is to replace underpaid, laid off civil servants with … more expensive mercenaries. Can there be any other reason to pursue this wrong-headed course of action than to ramp up militarism while hiding uniformed “security” behind a veil of corporate limited liability? It’s certainly NOT to save money:

But while the plan is for the DynCorp employees to eat and live with the other deputies in the same trailer camp, the hired guns would earn “significantly more” than the $18,000 annual salary of an entry-level deputy and the $30,000-a-year salary of a seasoned officer.

After all, there has already been widespread use of mercenary forces in the Gulf region, so why not just go ahead and use them for permanent policing?

We are returning to a world where the wealthy, the connected, the landowners make their own law, and enforce it with their own law enforcement. And, as it was with medieval Lords, one can see that it is the Keep, the Lord’s personal assets that will get the most security, while the peons are left to fend for themselves, when they aren’t fending off the Lord’s goons. We can already see this in the gated communities and upper floors of corporate campuses, where the layers of security tighten and the goons get more confrontational toward “outsiders”, all while factories and vital infrastructure go unsecured in order to cut costs. YOU and your coworkers are protected by some flimsy locks, maybe a magnetic keycard … the bosses have Praetorian guards, layered locked entryways and extensive video surveillance.

THIS is where the real danger was in the UAE ports deal – a feudal monarchy, known for it’s brutal treatment of labor, being given the keys to so many entry points vital to this country’s security and trade. As more and more falls under the all-but untouchable control of closely held corporations, up to and including the security of your streets, accountabilty and civil liberties will be ripe for the dustbin of history. Our emirs envy the Emir, and there is increasing pressure to bring us back to a that future.

It is increasingly clear that the hurricane zone is where the new militarism will be field tested. Slowly ramping of the use of professional soldiers in the place of peace officers, getting Americans used to seeing armed goons patrolling the “homeland”:

For DynCorp and other private security companies, the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, like Iraq, is a land of opportunity. Hired shortly after the storm to protect several New Orleans hospitals, its first domestic security job, the Texas firm has earned about $14 million from work in the Gulf Coast since Katrina, not all of which has involved security.

Blackwater USA, which protected the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and lost four employees in a brutal ambush in Fallujah in 2004, earned about $42 million through the end of December on a contract with Federal Protective Service, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, to provide security to FEMA sites. Most of the 330 contract guards now working in Louisiana are employed by the company.

The Homeland Security Department’s Inspector General said the company’s costs in its FEMA contract — it earns $950 a day for each employee — were “clearly very high,” and it expressed hope that competition would lower them. But costs are not the only concerns raised by critics of the companies.

“Katrina broke all of the rules. It was the first time you had the deployment of armed private security contractors in the U.S.,” said Peter W. Singer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry.”

What will you do if some disaster strikes the community where you live, and you find yourself confronted by faux-cops demanding your papers, with no badge number in site, only a weapon and some official patch deputizing them as “homeland security”? In many communities, badges are already used as an excuse for the abuse of power … how much worse can it get when you can’t get a name, when it’s not a guy who lives in your community, but a soldier who’s company can rotate him out if there is some kind of problem? Where will you turn if some over-hyped thug takes his newfound power too far?

Wearing black polo shirts and khaki pants and carrying pistols, more than a dozen Blackwater employees now patrol FEMA’s disaster-assistance center in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Their strict style — “no, sir,” for example, instead of “How you boys doing?” — has come to irritate St. Bernard Homeland Security Director Larry Ingargiola. “They’re a little sterner, more military-type” than people from Louisiana, said Ingargiola, recounting how he has been denied entry to several FEMA sites.[…]

The proposal to work with DynCorp would be a more permanent solution, lasting up to three years. Under the plan, DynCorp employees working for the sheriff’s department would take over security at several FEMA trailer sites and establish three highway checkpoints. The DynCorp guards would report directly to a sheriff’s deputy, who would be on site to supervise them, said Tufaro.

The department did not hold a competition before recommending DynCorp for the work but would consider other contactors if FEMA recommended it, said Tufaro. The department thinks DynCorp is the cheapest alternative, noting that it would charge less than $700 per day, compared with the $950 a day charged by Blackwater, he said.

We continue down a very dangerous road, a road that is bankrupting this country financially, morally and socially. Militarism is embraced in the name of security, yet with fewer and fewer protections left in place to protect the citizenry from the hired guns of our increasingly isolated ruling classes. It’s happening now in the communities devastated already by Hurricane Katrina and Republicrat neglect. Don’t be suprised if it comes to your community next.