{"id":1125,"date":"2008-10-31T05:53:40","date_gmt":"2008-10-31T13:53:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bbrace.laughingsquid.net\/wordpress\/?p=1123"},"modified":"2008-10-31T05:53:40","modified_gmt":"2008-10-31T13:53:40","slug":"sandy-springs-in-congo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/?p=1125","title":{"rendered":"Sandy Springs in Congo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another glimpse of a disaster-apartheid future<\/em> can be found
\nin a wealthy Republican suburb outside Atlanta. Its
\nresidents decided that they were tired of watching their
\nproperty taxes subsidize schools and police in the county’s
\nlow-income African-American neighborhoods. They voted to
\nincorporate as their own city, Sandy Springs, which could
\nspend most of its taxes on services for its 100,000 citizens
\nand minimize the revenue that would be redistributed
\nthroughout Fulton County. The only difficulty was that Sandy
\nSprings had no government structures and needed to build
\nthem from scratch-everything from tax collection to zoning
\nto parks and recreation. In September 2005, the same month
\nthat New Orleans flooded, the residents of Sandy Springs
\nwere approached by the construction and consulting giant
\nCH2M Hill with a unique pitch: Let us do it for you. For the
\nstarting price of $27 million a year, the contractor pledged
\nto build a complete city from the ground up.<\/p>\n

A few months later, Sandy Springs became the first “contract
\ncity.” Only four people worked directly for the new
\nmunicipality-everyone else was a contractor. Rick Hirsekorn,
\nheading up the project for CH2M Hill, described Sandy
\nSprings as “a clean sheet of paper with no governmental
\nprocesses in place.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
\nreported that “when Sandy Springs hired corporate workers to
\nrun the new city, it was considered a bold experiment.”
\nWithin a year, however, contract-city mania was tearing
\nthrough Atlanta’s wealthy suburbs, and it had become
\n“standard procedure in north Fulton.” Neighboring
\ncommunities took their cue from Sandy Springs and also voted
\nto become stand-alone cities and contract out their
\ngovernment. One new city, Milton, immediately hired CH2M
\nHill for the job-after all, it had the experience. Soon, a
\ncampaign began for the new corporate cities to join together
\nto form their own county. The plan has encountered fierce
\nopposition outside the proposed enclave, where politicians
\nsay that without those tax dollars, they will no longer be
\nable to afford their large public hospital and public
\ntransit system; that partitioning the county would create a
\nfailed state on the one hand and a hyperserviced one on the
\nother. What they were describing sounded a lot like New
\nOrleans and a little like Baghdad.<\/p>\n

In these wealthy Atlanta suburbs, the long crusade to
\nstrip-mine the state is nearing completion, and it is
\nparticularly fitting that the new ground was broken by CH2M
\nHill. The corporation was a multimillion-dollar contractor
\nin Iraq, paid to perform the core government function of
\noverseeing other contractors. In Sri Lanka after the
\ntsunami, it not only had built ports and bridges but was,
\naccording to the U.S. State Department, “responsible for the
\noverall management of the infrastructure program.” In
\npost-Katrina New Orleans, CH2M Hill was awarded $500 million
\nto build FEMA-villes and was put on standby for the next
\ndisaster. A master of privatizing the core functions of the
\nstate during extraordinary circumstances, the company was
\nnow doing the same under ordinary ones. lf disasters had
\nserved as laboratories of extreme privatization, the testing
\nphase was clearly over.<\/p>\n

When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4 million
\ndead, the clich\u00e9s of Africa-reporting tumble out: this is a
\n“tribal conflict” in “the Heart of Darkness”. It isn’t. The
\nUnited Nations investigation found it was a war led by
\n“armies of business” to seize the metals that make our
\n21st-century society zing and bling.<\/p>\n

At the moment, Rwandan business interests make a fortune
\nfrom the Congolese mines they illegally seized during the
\nwar. Congo is the richest country in the world for gold,
\ndiamonds, coltan, cassiterite, and more. Everybody wanted a
\nslice — so six other countries invaded.<\/p>\n

These resources were not being stolen to for use in Africa.
\nThey were seized so they could be sold on to the West. The
\nmore we bought, the more the invaders stole — and
\nslaughtered. The rise of mobile phones caused a surge in
\ndeaths, because the coltan they contain is found primarily
\nin Congo. The UN named the international corporations it
\nbelieved were involved: Anglo-America, Standard Chartered
\nBank, De Beers and more than 100 others. (They all deny the
\ncharges.)<\/p>\n

The debate about Congo in the West — when it exists at all
\n— focuses on our inability to provide a decent bandage,
\nwithout mentioning that we are causing the wound. The 17,000
\nUN forces in the country are abysmally failing to protect
\nthe civilian population. But it is even more important to
\nstop fuelling the war in the first place by buying
\nblood-soaked natural resources. Rwandan-backed militias only
\nhave enough guns and grenades to take on the Congolese army
\nand the UN because we buy the loot. We need to prosecute the
\ncorporations buying them for abetting crimes against
\nhumanity, and introduce a global coltan-tax to pay for a
\nsubstantial peacekeeping force. To get there, we need to
\nbuild an international system that values the lives of black
\npeople more than it values profit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another glimpse of a disaster-apartheid future can be found in a wealthy Republican suburb outside Atlanta. Its residents decided that they were tired of watching their property taxes subsidize schools and police in the county’s low-income African-American neighborhoods. They voted to incorporate as their own city, Sandy Springs, which could spend most of its taxes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","spay_email":""},"categories":[5,57,14,23,33,37,42],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbrace.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}