[A-List] The real battle lines - Naomi Klein in the G&M (fwd)

[Andre Gunder Frank <franka@xxxxxxx>]

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

                    ANDRE  GUNDER  FRANK
Department of History			   Home
University of Nebraska Lincoln [UNL]       4440 North 7th Street
612 Oldfather                              Apt. 107
P.O. Box 880327				   Lincoln, NE 68521 USA
Lincoln, NE 68588-0327 			   Tel: 1-402-742 7931
Tel: 1-402-472 3251=direct 2414=Dpt        Fax: 1-402-742 7932
Fax: 1-402-472 8839
E-Mail: franka@xxxxxxx          Web Page: csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/




---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 13:47:29 PDT
From: shniad@xxxxxx
To: shniad@xxxxxx
Subject: The real battle lines - Naomi Klein in the G&M

The Globe and Mail				      October 24, 2001

The real battle lines

     What is making the U.S. most vulnerable to terrorist attacks,
especially
     bioterrorism, is not a depleted weapons arsenal but a crumbling public

     sector, says Naomi Klein

     By Naomi Klein

Only hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, Republican Representative Curt Weldon went on CNN and announced
that he didn't want to hear anyone talking about funding for schools or
hospitals. From here on, it was all about spies, bombs and other manly
things.

"The first priority of the U.S. government is not education, it is not
health care, it is the defence and protection of U.S. citizens," he said,
adding, later: "I'm a teacher married to a nurse -- none of that matters
today."

But now it turns out that those frivolous social services matter a great
deal. What is making the U.S. most vulnerable to terrorist networks is not a
depleted weapons arsenal but its starved, devalued and crumbling public
sector. The new battlefields are not just the Pentagon, but also the post
office; not just military intelligence, but also training for doctors and
nurses; not a sexy new missile defence shield, but the boring old Food and
Drug Administration.

It has become fashionable to wryly observe that the terrorists use the
West's technologies as weapons against itself: planes, e-mail, cellphones.
But as fears of bioterrorism mount, it could well turn out that their best
weapons are the rips and holes in the United States' public infrastructure.

Is this because there was no time to prepare for the attacks? Hardly. The
U.S. has openly recognized the threat of biological attacks since the
Persian Gulf war, and Bill Clinton renewed calls to protect the nation from
bioterror after the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. And yet shockingly
little has been done.

The reason is simple: Preparing for biological warfare would have required a
ceasefire in America's older, less dramatic war -- the one against the
public sphere. It didn't happen. Here are some snapshots from the front
lines.

The health system: Half the states in the U.S. don't have federal experts
trained in bioterrorism. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are
buckling under the strain of anthrax fears, their underfunded labs
scrambling to keep up with the demand for tests. Little research has been
done on how to treat children who have contracted anthrax, since Cipro --
the most popular antibiotic -- is not recommended.

Many doctors in the U.S. public health-care system have not been trained to
identify symptoms of anthrax, botulism or plague. A recent U.S. Senate panel
heard that hospitals and health departments lack basic diagnostic tools, and
information sharing is difficult since some departments don't have e-mail
access. Many health departments are closed on weekends, with no staff on
call.

If treatment is a mess, federal inoculation programs are in worse shape. The
only laboratory in the U.S. licensed to produce the anthrax vaccine has left
the country unprepared for its current crisis. Why? It's a typical
privatization debacle. The lab, in Lansing, Mich., used to be owned and
operated by the state. In 1998, it was sold to BioPort, which promised
greater efficiency. The new lab has failed several FDA inspections and, so
far, has been unable to supply a single dose of the vaccine to the U.S.
military, let alone to the general population.

As for smallpox, there are not nearly enough vaccines to cover the
population, leading the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases to experiment with diluting the existing vaccines at a ratio of 1
to 5 or even 1 to 10.

The Water System Internal documents show that the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency is years behind schedule in safeguarding the water supply
against bioterrorist attacks. According to an audit released on Oct. 4, the
EPA was supposed to have identified security vulnerabilities in municipal
water supplies by 1999, but it hasn't yet completed even this first stage.

The food supply: The FDA has proved unable to introduce measures that would
better protect the food supply from "agroterrorism" -- deadly bacteria
introduced to the food supply. With agriculture increasingly centralized and
globalized, the sector is vulnerable to the spread of disease, both inside
the U.S. and outside (as the hoof-and-mouth epidemic demonstrated most
recently). But the FDA, which inspected only 1 per cent of food imports
under its jurisdiction last year, says it is in "desperate need of more
inspectors."

Tom Hammonds, CEO of the Food Marketing Institute, an industry group
representing food sellers, says, "Should a crisis arise -- real or
manufactured as a hoax -- the deficiencies of the current system would
become glaringly obvious."

After Sept. 11, George W. Bush created the position of "homeland security,"
designed to evoke a nation steeled and prepared for any attack. And yet it
turns out that what "homeland security" really means is a mad rush to
reassemble basic public infrastructure and resurrect heath and safety
standards that have been drastically eroded. The troops at the front lines
of America's new war are embattled, indeed: the very bureaucracies that have
been cut back, privatized and vilified for two decades, not just in the U.S.
but in virtually every country in the world.

"Public health is a national security issue," U.S. Secretary of Health Tommy
Thompson observed earlier this month. No kidding. For years, critics have
argued that there are human costs to all the cost-cutting, deregulating and
privatizing -- train crashes in Britain, E. coli outbreaks in Walkerton,
food poisoning, and substandard health care. And yet until Sept. 11,
"security" was still narrowly confined to the machinery of war and policing,
a fortress built atop a crumbling foundation.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that real security cannot be
cordoned off. It is woven into our most basic social fabric, from the post
office to the emergency room, from the subway to the water reservoir, from
schools to food inspection. Infrastructure -- the boring stuff that binds us
all together -- is not irrelevant to the serious business of fighting
terrorism. It is the foundation of our future security.