CH2M Hill Implicated in "Disaster Profiteering" by Naomi Klein- Theresa Loar (VP Global Strategies CH2M Hill) and Board Member Tahirih Justice Center
maybe...@gmail.com
and author, Naomi Klein, CH2M Hill is identified (alongside
Halliburton and Blackwater) as being at the front line of what Klein
calls "disaster profiteering" (paragraphs 3 and 4 of excerpt below).
They are also identified as having been a major contractor in Iraq,
"performing quasi government functions in the disaster zone".
You can view a sample of these contracts here:
Just to remind everyone, Theresa Loar is Vice President of Global
Strategies at CH2M Hill, and sits on the Board of Advisors at the
Tahirih Justice Centre. I wonder what kind of advice she's giving?
CHM2 Hill Beijing also employs Maurice Strong as Chairman of its
International Advisory Board.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0710/S00252.htm
(excerpt from full article)
Naomi:
"The parallels were very striking. There were the same contractors --
Blackwater-Halliburton-Bechtel. The point of this is that disaster
zones are laboratories. They're testing grounds. In the chaos of this
moment, you have these leaps forward for the privatization agenda.
What was Blackwater doing there? They claim that they had just seen
the disaster on television and wanted to help, right? But this was an
extraordinary incursion into what we think of as a core state
function. Why wasn't the National Guard there? Where were the local
authorities?
In the name of crisis response, Blackwater leaps into the gap. Then
their presence becomes normalized. The model that emerges in the chaos
of these disasters is highly privatized disaster response experiments.
And I would include Iraq -- that whole Green Zone -- as the ultimate
expression of that. New Orleans, another. Then it becomes normalized,
and it's a new model for corporate government.
The best example of that, I would say, is the emergence of these
contract cities in the suburbs of Atlanta. There has been a mini-
explosion of wealthier suburbs deciding to incorporate as cities. The
first one to do this was Sandy Springs. Because they had to build an
entire city from scratch, an entire city infrastructure, they were
approached by CH2M HILL OMI, which was one of the prime contractors in
Iraq, performing quasi-governmental functions in that disaster zone.
Its job was to oversee other contractors. It also was the leading U.S.
contractor in Sri Lanka after the tsunami, building bridges and
overseeing other contractors. In New Orleans, it was one of the
companies that got the contract to build these trailer parks.
CH2M Hill was and is really at the vanguard of this privatized
disaster response, and they have already parlayed that into a non-
disaster model of public government. They approach the citizens of
Sandy Springs, and they say, okay, you need to build a new city from
scratch. Let us do it for you. It encompasses everything from writing
the tax code to collecting the garbage. The entire city infrastructure
doesn't work for the city government, but works for CH2M Hill."
Regarding Klein's credentials:
(excerpt from full article)
"Klein (a Canadian, born of American parents) is a serious writer. She
is more interested in getting it right than being a celebrity. In
fact, her exhaustively researched body of work on the havoc caused by
"disaster capitalism" is roundly ignored by the American mainstream
press -- and generally used for target practice by the corporate
Canadian media.
If there is a serious author who poses a threat to "disaster
capitalism," it is Naomi Klein. In her latest book, The Shock
Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein makes a cogent
argument that the Milton Friedman school of economics (which has
characterized American and European global economic policy for years)
thrives on national economies that are in a melt down or in the midst
of crises, many of the latter created as a result of IMF and World
Bank policies.
Klein is actually not personally or politically an extremist by any
means. She believes in a mixed economy, but one that allows people to
choose the economic destiny of their nations, not have one imposed on
them by essentially the neo-colonial powers of the U.S. and the
developed Western nations who run the IMF and World Bank (think Paul
Wolfowitz here)."
maybe...@gmail.com
maybeiam...@gmail.com wrote:
> In the following article, written by respected journalist, activist
> and author, Naomi Klein, CH2M Hill is identified
should be:
"In the following article, FEATURING respected journalist, activist
and author, Naomi Klein, CH2M Hill is identified......."
In this article and interview, Klein presents and references material
from her latest book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism".