美国腐败（下）| 卫报

Naomi Klein: how power profits from disaster (2)

And this is where Mike Pence enters the story. At the time Katrina hit New Orleans, Pence was chairman of the powerful and highly ideological Republican Study Committee (RSC), a caucus of conservative lawmakers. On 13 September 2005 – just 15 days after the levees were breached, and with parts of New Orleans still under water – the RSC convened a fateful meeting at the offices of the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. Under Pence’s leadership, the group came up with a list of “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices” – 32 pseudo-relief policies in all, each one straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook.

这时，迈克·彭斯登场了。飓风卡特里娜席卷新奥尔良时，彭斯担任共和党研究委员会主席，这是一个保守党议员小组，权力大，意识形态色彩浓厚。2005年9月13日，决堤仅15天后，新奥尔良部分地区仍泡在水中，共和党研究委员会在位于首都华盛顿的传统基金会办公楼召开了要命的会议，在彭斯领导下下，委员会拿出“应对卡特里娜飓风和高价天然气的自由市场主张”，囊括32项伪救援政策，条条都直接源自灾难资本主义操作手册。

What stands out is the commitment to wage all-out war on labour standards and the public sphere – which is bitterly ironic, because the failure of public infrastructure is what turned Katrina into a human catastrophe in the first place. Also notable is the determination to use any opportunity to strengthen the hand of the oil and gas industry. The list includes recommendations to suspend the obligation for federal contractors to pay a living wage; make the entire affected area a free-enterprise zone; and “repeal or waive restrictive environmental regulations … that hamper rebuilding”. In other words, a war on the kind of red tape designed to keep communities safe from harm.

引入注目的是承诺对劳工标准和公共领域全面开战，这种讽刺令人心酸，正是公共设施不堪首当其冲让卡特里娜成为人类灾难。同时需要注意的是，决心利用一切机会支撑原油和天然气业。政策包括建议暂缓联邦承包商支付基本生活工资的义务, 使整个灾区变成自由企业区，“撤销或宣布取缔……阻碍重建的环境限制性规定”。换言之，对保护社区免受危害的那些政府规范开战。

President Bush adopted many of the recommendations within the week, although, under pressure, he was eventually forced to reinstate the labour standards. Another recommendation called for giving parents vouchers to use at private and charter schools (for-profit schools subsidised with tax dollars), a move perfectly in line with the vision held by Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos. Within the year, the New Orleans school system became the most privatised in the US.

布什总统一周内就采纳了很多建议，尽管受到压力，最终被迫恢复执行劳工标准。另一个建议呼吁向父母提供代金券，让他们在私立或特许公立学校使用，这些营利学校有政府税收支持，该举措与特朗普选择教育部长贝西·德沃斯时的愿景如出一辙。当年，新奥尔良成为美国私有化程度最高的地方。

And there was more. Though climate scientists have directly linked the increased intensity of hurricanes to warming ocean temperatures, that didn’t stop Pence and his committee from calling on Congress to repeal environmental regulations on the Gulf coast, give permission for new oil refineries in the US, and green-light “drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge”.

还不止于此。尽管气候科学家认为飓风强度增加与海洋温度上升直接相关，这并未阻止彭斯和他的委员会要求国会取消对墨西哥湾海岸的环境法规，批准在美国新建炼油厂，给“在北极国家动物保护区开采石油”大开绿灯。

It’s a kind of madness. After all, these very measures are a surefire way to drive up greenhouse gas emissions, the major human contributor to climate change, which leads to fiercer storms. Yet they were immediately championed by Pence, and later adopted by Bush, under the guise of responding to a devastating hurricane.

这有点疯狂。毕竟，这些措施毫无疑问会增加温室气体排放，这一导致气候变化的重要人为因素会造成更猛烈的风暴。可彭斯立即给予支持，后来布什打着应对卡特里娜飓风的幌子采纳了这一举措。

It’s worth pausing to tease out the implications of all of this. Hurricane Katrina turned into a catastrophe in New Orleans because of a combination of extremely heavy weather – possibly linked to climate change – and weak and neglected public infrastructure. The so-called solutions proposed by the group Pence headed at the time were the very things that would inevitably exacerbate climate change and weaken public infrastructure even further. He and his fellow “free-market” travellers were determined, it seems, to do the very things that are guaranteed to lead to more Katrinas in the future.

我们要停下来，梳理一下所有这些带来的后果。可能因气候变化引起的极端天气，加上破旧和被忽视的公共设施，让卡特里娜变成一场灾难。当时彭斯小组提出的所谓解决方法不可避免会加剧气候变化，并使公共设施进一步恶化。看起来，彭斯和鼓吹“自由市场”的同僚决心在未来制造更多卡特里娜式的灾难。

And now Mike Pence is in a position to bring this vision to the entire United States. The oil industry wasn’t the only one to profit from Hurricane Katrina. Immediately after the storm, the whole gang of contractors who had descended on Baghdad when war broke out – Bechtel, Fluor, Halliburton, Blackwater, CH2M Hill and Parsons, infamous for its sloppy Iraq work – now arrived in New Orleans. They had a singular vision: to prove that the kinds of privatised services they had been providing in Iraq and Afghanistan also had an ongoing domestic market – and to collect no-bid contracts totalling $3.4bn.

如今的副总统迈克·彭斯准备将这一愿景在全美推开。原油并非从卡特里娜飓风获益的唯一行业。风暴一过，伊拉克战争爆发后登陆巴格达的一干合同商就来到新奥尔良，柏克德、福陆、哈里伯顿、黑水、西图与帕森斯等，它们以在伊拉克草率行事而声名狼藉。它们目标明确，想证明当初在伊拉克和阿富汗提供的私人服务在国内也有市场，并获得总价达34亿美金的非竞标合同。

The controversies were legion. Relevant experience often appeared to have nothing to do with how contracts were allocated. Take, for example, the company that Fema paid $5.2m to perform the crucial role of building a base camp for emergency workers in St Bernard Parish, a suburb of New Orleans. The camp construction fell behind schedule and was never completed. Under investigation, it emerged that the contractor, Lighthouse Disaster Relief, was in fact a religious group. “About the closest thing I have done to this is just organise a youth camp with my church,” confessed Lighthouse’s director, Pastor Gary Heldreth.

当时争议很大，合同花落谁家与承包商的相关经验毫无关系。例如，联邦应急署用520万美金找了一家公司，在新奥尔郊区圣伯纳德区救援人员营地建设中发挥关键作用。可营地建设延期，现在还一直烂尾。调查发现，承包商灯塔救灾事实上是一宗教组织。该组织负责人牧师盖瑞·赫尔德莱斯承认，“我唯一的经验便是在教堂组织了一场青少年夏令营。”

After all the layers of subcontractors had taken their cut, there was next to nothing left for the people doing the work. Author Mike Davis tracked the way Fema paid Shaw $175 per sq ft to install blue tarps on damaged roofs, even though the tarps themselves were provided by the government. Once all the subcontractors took their share, the workers who actually in the tarps were paid as little as $2 per sq ft.

分包商层层瓜分，留给工人的所剩无几。作者迈克·戴维斯调查，联邦应急署曾以每平方英尺175美元的价格雇佣肖公司在受损屋顶上铺蓝色防水布，蓝色防水布本身由政府提供。层层分包后，到工人手上的只有每平方英尺2美元。

“Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung,” Davis wrote, “where the actual work is carried out.” These supposed “contractors” were really – like the Trump Organization – hollow brands, sucking out profit and then slapping their name on cheap or non-existent services.

“换言之，除了最底层真正干活的工人，食物链上的每层分包商都盆满钵满，这简直荒唐，”戴维斯写道。同特朗普公司一样，这些所谓“承包商”实际上都是空壳公司，他们拿走利润，然后把品牌打在廉价或压根不存在的服务上。

In order to offset the tens of billions going to private companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress announced that it needed to cut $40bn from the federal budget. Among the programmes that were slashed: student loans, Medicaid and food stamps.

为了弥补通过合同和减税流入私人公司的数百亿美元，2005年11月，共和党控制的国会宣布削减400亿美元联邦预算，被砍项目包括学生贷款、医疗补助计划和食品救济券。

So, the poorest people in the US subsidised the contractor bonanza twice: first, when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services; and second, when the few programmes that assist the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills. 

于是，美国最贫穷的人两次帮着承包商们大发横财。首先，卡特里娜救援计划沦为不受监管的企业大奉送，既没给灾民提供像样的就业机会，也没有提供行之有效的公共服务。其二，本就为数不多的旨在扶助失业或贫困人口的项目也被掏空，用来支付膨胀的账单。

New Orleans is the disaster capitalism blueprint – designed by the current vice-president and by the Heritage Foundation, the hard-right think tank to which Trump has outsourced much of his administration’s budgeting. Ultimately, the response to Katrina sparked an approval ratings freefall for George W Bush, a plunge that eventually lost the Republicans the presidency in 2008. Nine years later, with Republicans now in control of Congress and the White House, it’s not hard to imagine this test case for privatised disaster response being adopted on a national scale.

新奥尔良是灾难资本主义的蓝图，由现任副总统和传统基金会亲手打造，传统基金会是鹰派右翼智库，承包了特朗普政府很多财政预算编制工作。最后，政府应对卡特里娜的表现让布什政府的支持率直线下降，共和党人最终输掉2008年总统选举。九年后，共和党人再次控制了国会和白宫，不难想象，将应对灾难私有化的尝试将在全国范围推开。

The presence of highly militarised police and armed private soldiers in New Orleans came as a surprise to many. Since then, the phenomenon has expanded exponentially, with local police forces across the country outfitted to the gills with military-grade gear, including tanks and drones, and private security companies frequently providing training and support. Given the array of private military and security contractors occupying key positions in the Trump administration, we can expect all of this to expand further with each new shock.

新奥尔良出现荷枪实弹的警察及武装雇佣军，这让很多人吃惊。此后，这一现象迅速蔓延，全国各地方警察彻头彻尾有了军事级装备，配备坦克和无人机；私人安保公司经常提供训练与支持。考虑到私人军队和安全承包商在特朗普政府身居要职，可以预见未来每场灾难都会使这些进一步加剧。

The Katrina experience also stands as a stark warning to those who are holding out hope for Trump’s promised $1tn in infrastructure spending. That spending will fix some roads and bridges, and it will create jobs. Crucially, Trump has indicated that he plans to do as much as possible not through the public sector but through public-private partnerships – which have a terrible track record for corruption, and may result in far lower wages than true public-works projects would. 

卡特里娜事件也提醒那些对特朗普承诺投资一万亿美元进行基础设施建设抱有希望的人。支出将用来修缮某些道路与桥梁，创造就业。关键在于，特朗普已经表明，他要尽可能不通过公共部门而通过公私合伙的方式，后者以滋生腐败著称，与真正的公共事业工程相比，工资将会更低。

Given Trump’s business record, and Pence’s role in the administration, there is every reason to fear that his big-ticket infrastructure spending could become a Katrina-like kleptocracy, a government of thieves, with the Mar-a-Lago set helping themselves to vast sums of taxpayer money. New Orleans provides a harrowing picture of what we can expect when the next shock hits. But sadly, it is far from complete: there is much more that this administration might try to push through under cover of crisis. To become shock-resistant, we need to prepare for that, too.

鉴于特朗普的从商纪录和彭斯在政府中扮演的角色，有充分的理由担心大型基础设施支出会成为卡特里娜式的盗贼政治，满政府都是贼，在海湖庄园聚首，觊觎纳税人的大笔血汗钱。下一场灾难来袭，我们只需想想新奥尔良的惨状。可更悲惨的远不止如此：借危机之名，本届政府可能会得寸进尺。为提高抵御冲击的能力，我们也要做好准备。

This is an edited extract from No Is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics by Naomi Klein, published by Allen Lane at £12.99.

译者 张小平

观世界，学英文

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