Today's Huffington Post features a discussion between John Cusack and Naomi Klein about what Klein calls "disaster capitalism" in her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it Klein discusses how "necessary" (quotation marks to indicate that many of the disasters are manufactured) services are being outsourced to private companies. Blackwater and Halliburton are just the most well known beneficiaries of the Bush administration's policy of gutting the government's capabilities to handle disasters and then handing out contracts to the private sector to step in.
It's frightening to hear about Blackwater's buildup of arms and personnel: