Silver Lining

I was out of town for Naomi Klein at the NYPL . I'd heard her on Brian Lehrer, and read the Harper's piece on the flight out. It's a smart if popular (or should I say, and popular?) analysis and I'm glad she has written it and that it is getting so much attention. One ominous-felicitous term she uses is 'disaster apartheid'. This is what happens to communities that lose their public services to private contractors, a phenomenon that is exacerbated in crisis or catastrophic situations (the US war in Iraq, for example). The reconstruction (I use the term advisedly) of public education in post- Hurricane Katrina New Orleans demonstrates how government and the private sector exploit emergencies to transfer the social contract to market, such that the citizen goes to bed with rights and responsibilities, and wakes the next day with a bill for services rendered.