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EpistemologyTheir impacts are a product of disaster-manufacturing---be skeptical because of the widespread reach of the privatized war on drugsSchack 11 – Professor @ Ithaca College, Ph.D., Media Studies, University of Colorado, 2006, M.A., Communication, Colorado State University, 1996 (Todd, “Twenty-first-century drug warriors: the press, privateers and the for-profit waging of the war on drugs,” Media,War & Conflict 4(2), 10.1177/1750635211406013)//BB The national media doesn’t really care about the border. They hit it like a piñata and take off. (Melissa Del Bosque, in Arana, 2009)¶ Academics have long established how the history of the media’s reporting of the drug war since the 1970s has been one of over-hyped, sensationalized coverage that falls into¶ easily categorizable stereotypes and myths that fail to address the far more complicated issues beneath the ‘drug problem’ such as poverty, social and political marginalization, and race (Gitlin, 1989; Marez, 2004; Reeves and Campbell, 1994; Reinarman and Levine, 1989; Viano, 2002).¶ What scholars have repeatedly shown regarding this type of media involvement is that, for the media, sensationalism in the drug war translates into pure profit: ‘War is, of course, the health of the networks, and of their promotion departments. Scenes from the battlefront play especially well. The drug war provides ... the most vivid pictures’ (Gitlin, 1989: 17). Further, over-sensationalized ‘battlefront’ coverage and a focus solely on issues of violence are very useful for the overall justification of the milita- rized response, in the very traditional manner of using fear to mobilize support for pre-determined policy. This is nothing new, as the sociological notion of moral panic theory has established for quite some time (Becker, 1963; Cohen, 2002[1972]; Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994; Hall et al., 1978; Jenkins, 1992; Thompson, 1998). In his semi- nal work on the subject, Cohen (2002[1972]) defined moral panic as:¶ A condition, episode, person or group of persons [that] emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to. (p. 1)¶ As such, drug scares have played this role far before the prototypical decade of drug panic (the 1960s), and the efficacy of these moral panics has long been used for both financial gain by the media industries and political gain by politicians using the ‘tough on crime’ campaign platform. Perhaps the best academic investigation of a media- fomented, drug-related moral panic in the US is Reeves and Campbell’s Cracked Coverage (1994), which details the ‘epidemic’ in crack cocaine use during the 1980s. Typical of this type of moral panic, and to borrow from Stuart Hall, is the notion of con- vergence, where the perceived threat (crack cocaine) is coupled with a racialized or class-based ‘Other’ (black urban males), and once this link is established in the media, the moral panic gains momentum until demands are made to bring an end to this threat – typically with a militarized or penal solution. Hall (Hall et al., 1978: 223) writes about an earlier moral panic (student hooliganism) and explains that:¶ Convergence occurs when two or more activities are linked in the process of signification as to implicitly or explicitly draw parallels between them. Thus the image of ‘student hooliganism’ links student protest to the separate problem of hooliganism – whose stereotypical characteristics are already part of socially available knowledge ... In both cases, the net effect is amplification, not in the real events being described but in their threat potential for society.¶ It is in creating this ‘amplification’, or as Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994: 36) have termed it, the ‘disproportionality’ of the perceived threat, where the media play a significant role, as we shall see with regard to the drug war in Mexico.¶ In this way, drug panics have been linked to racialized ‘Others’, dating as far back as opium smoking and the Chinese (1880s), marijuana and Mexicans (1920–1940s), heroin and black ‘jazz’ culture (1930–1950s). In more modern times, drug scares have followed similar patterns, with either race or class-based convergences: crack cocaine and black urban society in the US; heroin and (especially) Scottish urban society in the UK during the 1980s; Ecstasy (which was a decidedly white, middle-class panic) in both the US and UK in the 1990s; Methamphetamine (typically a white, lower-class panic) in both societies since 2000.¶ It must be noted here, however, that especially for Stuart Hall, the significance of the moral panic rested not only in the convergence of ideologically pregnant moral threats, and in the media amplification, but also in the utility these played in relation to strength- ening state authority and control. Kenneth Thompson (1998: 16) writes that Hall and his colleagues, ‘portrayed moral panics mainly in terms of a crisis of capitalism and a con- sequent increase in state authoritarianism’. What is interesting about this current moral panic is that, instead of the state consolidating police, surveillance, and penal control, the state is now outsourcing that control to private security contractors.¶ When it comes to reporting on the Mérida Initiative, and the use of private contractors both within Mexico and domestically in the US, we find a similar pattern of convergence and amplification, one that is especially dominated by at least two media memes: first, that Mexico is at best a ‘narco-state’, and at worst is on the verge of being a ‘failed-state’; and second, that the drug-related violence that has arisen in Mexico in recent years is threatening to ‘spill-over’ into the US. That is, the threat of drugs converges with the threat of (1) Latin American drug lords running an entire country, and (2) violence that is somehow ‘other’ than that which already exists in the US.3¶ A recent San Francisco Chronicle article provides a clear example of the ‘failed-state’ meme:¶ The U.S. Joint Forces Command called Mexico and Pakistan the world’s two most critical states in danger of failing. While cautioning that Mexico has not reached Pakistan’s level of instability, it reported that Mexico’s ‘government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels’. (Lochhead, 2009)¶ It is a quantifiable fact that there has been a rise in drug-related violence in Mexico since the Calderon government took power, and this point should not be dismissed. Lest this argument be misinterpreted as callous, permit me to make absolutely clear that I am not dismissing what is a seriously high number of deaths. While the exact number of ‘drug- related’ deaths is difficult to figure precisely – and who is counted as a drug-related death even further complicates the matter – it can be concluded that the violence is pervasive on the Mexican side of the border, especially in Tijuana and Ciudad-Juarez. I am not disputing this here, nor do I wish to underestimate the seriousness of the situation in Mexico. As stated, exact numbers are difficult to quantify, but what is not in dispute is that, since Calderon took office in 2006, each year has seen a rise in drug-related vio- lence: according to a Council on Foreign Relations report, in 2007, there were more than 2500 deaths; in 2008, more than 4000 (Hansen, 2008). The Mexican paper El Universal¶ places the 2008 figure at 5612 (Bricker, 2008). More recently, according to an internal Mexican Government report that was leaked to the press, in 2009 it is estimated that there were 9635 deaths, and in the early months of 2010 it is claimed that at least 3365 deaths have occurred (Ellingwood, 2010).¶ However, some investigation into these reports is warranted, especially since they are being used to justify the militarization of the border, which includes the use of private contractors. Journalist Shamus Cooke (2009) writes that:¶ Interestingly, Mexico has lately been compared to Pakistan as a country ‘on the verge’ of becoming a ‘failed state,’ with the Mexican drug cartels accused of playing the same ‘destabilizing’ role as the Taliban/terrorists in Pakistan. Calling such a comparison a stretch would be a gross understatement, of course.¶ Why exactly is this more than ‘a stretch’ to compare Mexico with Pakistan? First, drug cartels are not motivated by political aims, as are the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Second, these reports completely ignore the people in Mexico themselves, both private citizens and public government officials. Do they consider their country to be in danger of becoming a ‘failed state’ and, if not, why are their voices not being heard?¶ This process of only allowing certain voices to be heard is consistent with moral panic theory – the voice of the ‘folk devil’ (Cohen, 2002[1972]) is never allowed to speak for itself. While it is not reported in most media, those in Mexico are objecting to such a classification, and President Calderon himself dismissed outright the US Joint Forces Command report that linked Mexico and Pakistan:¶ ‘To say that Mexico is a failed state is absolutely false,’ and added the nearly heretical accusation that the genesis of the problems is, in fact, in the U.S.: ‘I’m fighting corruption among Mexican authorities and risking everything to clean house, but I think a good cleaning is in order on the other side of the border.’ (Carl, 2009)¶ Echoing this sentiment, and directly contradicting the Joint Forces Command report that cautioned that Mexico was in danger of becoming a ‘failed state’ is Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who told Fox News: ‘I think that the chances of the Mexican government losing control of some part of their country or becoming a failed state are very low’ (Agence France Presse, 2009). Another interesting opinion written on the subject by the well-known conservative website Human Events stated:¶ It may be a knee-jerk conservative response to dub Mexico ‘failed’... But Mexico is not a failed state ... ‘Failed’ describes a state that has lost its ability to exercise the powers of a sovereignty ... calling it a ‘failed state’ is, so far, a stretch. It would be the equivalent of saying that the U.S. was a ‘failed state’ during Prohibition, when gangs organized a lucrative – and illegal – alcohol trade. (Molin, 2009)¶ Even when some articles do make an effort to quote native counter-claims that Mexico is not in danger of failing, those claims are quickly followed by outsider observations¶ that even if it is not completely ‘failing’, at least it has become a ‘narco-state’. This was evident in the San Francisco Chronicle article, where Lochhead (2009) first quoted Professor George Grayson at Mexico’s College of William and Mary, saying:¶ I’m in the heart of Mexico City as we speak, and the buses are full of people, the metros are running, the shops are open and people are walking freely ... I don’t see anything that looks like a failed state.¶ Then, in the next paragraph she writes:¶ Others contend that Mexico is in danger of becoming a ‘narco state’ where drug cartels control large parts of the country and the government cannot perform its most important task, ensuring the safety of its citizens.¶ Further, some articles cite un-sourced claims, such as the one picked up in numerous papers in the US, that ‘70% of Mexicans are afraid to go outside for fear of crime’, to which Laura Carlsen (2009: 2), who lives in Mexico City writes: ‘This statistic has been cited without a source. It’s ridiculous. In a recent poll Mexicans nationwide named the economic situation over crime as the biggest problem in the country by a margin of two to one.’ In a classic case of amplification, the (US) media breathlessly report on the narco- or failed-state meme and fail to report the fact that both citizens and government alike in Mexico are bristling at these characterizations.¶ The same sorts of hype, spurious claims and statistics are being used in the ‘spill- over’ meme. This myth, however, carries even more political utility for PSCs as it can and has been used to fast-track legislation allowing private companies to profit from what is characterized as a crisis. This is entirely consistent with Klein’s concept of disas- ter capitalism, as well as moral panic theory. Summarizing most mainstream media cov- erage, Gabriel Arana (2009) writes that:¶ Television segments narrated like war documentaries broadcast dramatic footage of Border Patrol Humvees kicking up dust in the Southwest, Minutemen with binoculars overlooking the border and piles of confiscated drugs. In the national media, it’s become a foregone conclusion that Mexican drug violence has penetrated the United States.¶ In one crystallizing media moment, CNN’s Anderson Cooper went to El Paso, and, dressed in military fatigues, reported on the spill-over of violence, as guest Fred Burton, a ‘security expert’ claimed on air that: ‘It’s just a matter of time before it really spills over into the United States unless we shore up the border as best we can’ (Del Bosque, 2009). Taking issue with the sensational reporting on these related media memes, Del Bosque writes that:¶ All too often the nightly news portrays Juarez and El Paso as one and the same, with the U.S. city symbolizing the perils of that new buzzword: spillover. Night after night, TV spin-meisters, retired generals, terror analysts and politicians rage on about spillover violence. They call Mexico a ‘failed state’ and argue for militarizing the border. No wonder Americans are scared. Their quips are a product of battlefront headlines---be skeptical because they are shielded from reasonable public debateSchack 11 – Professor @ Ithaca College, Ph.D., Media Studies, University of Colorado, 2006, M.A., Communication, Colorado State University, 1996 (Todd, “Twenty-first-century drug warriors: the press, privateers and the for-profit waging of the war on drugs,” Media,War & Conflict 4(2), 10.1177/1750635211406013)//BB The political economy of this concept has best been outlined by Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007), and I will be maintaining that the increased outsourcing of wag- ing the drug war to PSCs represents a clear case of what she has termed the ‘disaster capitalism complex’. Similar to Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, yet with ‘much further reaching tentacles’, the disaster capitalism complex is a ‘global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the unending mandate of protecting the United States homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all ‘evil’ abroad’ (p. 14).¶ The key notion as it relates to the war on drugs is the fact that the drug war provides just the sort of perpetual ‘evil’ that fuels the complex. As such, it is an exciting area of opportunity – or in business parlance, an emerging market – for the PSC industry. Other such emerging markets include the ‘homeland security’ industry, which includes inter- rogating prisoners, covert intelligence gathering, surveillance and data mining, and ‘peace-keeping’ missions, not to mention the overall waging of the war on terror, which has become the best example to date of a nearly fully-privatized war as private contrac- tors outnumber soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan (Avant, 2007; Klein, 2007; Pelton, 2007; Scahill, 2007b; Singer, 2003). Further areas of opportunity are crisis and environ- mental disaster response, privatized prisons, fire and police departments. All this has grown to the extent that: ‘Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom – the medium is the message’ (Klein, 2007: 16).¶ The issue at stake here is not whether this is occurring – that has long since been established, and one merely has to look into the enormous growth of PSCs as an industry over the last decade, as well as the rise in government contract expenditures, to under- stand the economic extent of the growth in this industry (Avant, 2007; Klein, 2007; Pelton, 2007; Singer, 2003; Wedel, 2009). Rather, with regard to the war on drugs, at the very moment that the militarized response to the ‘drug problem’ is being deemed a fail- ure by both governmental and independent bodies worldwide (Government Accountability Office: GAO, the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy),1 a new pri- vate industry is being contracted to continue that same militarized policy, an industry that is financially self-interested in perpetuating the problem rather than solving it, and fur- ther, one that operates with near total impunity and unaccountability. As such, the drug war has become a for-profit endeavor, something to invest in, to seek expansion of both markets and ‘solutions’, and to realize returns for shareholders on those investments.¶ As for the press, they have a role to play as well: drug wars have long proved profit- able to both print and broadcast media, as scholars have shown for quite some time Gitlin, 1989; Marez, 2004; Reeves and Campbell, 1994). The media also stand to gain¶ from this new complex:¶ The creeping expansion of the disaster capitalism complex into media may prove to be a new kind of corporate synergy, one building on the vertical integration so popular in the nineties. It certainly makes sound business sense. The more panicked our societies become, convinced that there are terrorists lurking in every mosque, the higher the news ratings soar. (Klein, 2007: 541)¶ In place of ‘terrorists’ one can easily substitute ‘drug cartels’ and the point is the same. In fact, this is invoking classic moral panic theory, which plays a critical role in the media’s framing of the issue, and is discussed in section IV. Overall, I am interested in investigating four main issues: the extent of drug war privatization; the structural limita- tions of media investigations into PSCs; the complicity of the press with drug war narra- tives; and finally the implications of re-conceptualizing the drug war as a for-profit endeavor.¶ II The extent of drug war privatization¶ In order to outline the extent to which private contractors are capitalizing on the war on drugs, some background facts need to be established.2 First, the overall market for the use of PSCs has been growing exponentially since the Clinton administration, and was estimated to be worth a total of $200 billion by the end of 2010 (Yeoman, 2003). Most of the money being spent on private contracts was for the support of US military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, where:¶ There are now 630 companies ... on contract for the US government, with personnel from more than 100 countries ... Their 180,000 employees now outnumber America’s 160,000 official troops. The precise number of mercenaries is unclear, but last year, a US government report identified 48,000 employees of private military/security firms. (Scahill, 2007a)¶ The privatization of the drug war represents only a small slice of this estimated $200 billion and employs only a fraction of the total numbers of personnel that are currently under contract in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, in 2007 the Department of Defense offered private contractors the chance to bid for various aspects of a drug war contract worth $15 billion in total. According to the Army Times:¶ The vendors will compete for a series of task orders covering a wide range of products and services. These could include anti-drug technologies and equipment, special vehicles and aircraft, communications, security training, pilot training, geographic information systems, and in-field support. (Richfield, 2007)¶ It must be understood here that when such contracts are reported in the media, the focus is always on the use and delivery of technology – a key aspect of the contract, but also an uncontroversial one, especially compared to the much more dangerous, yet innocuous- sounding, ‘in-field support’. Similarly, in another article:¶ In response to specific task orders issued under the indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract, companies will develop and deploy new surveillance technologies, train and equip foreign security forces and provide key administrative, logistical and operational support to Defense and other agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration. (McIntire-Peters, 2007)¶ Again, the bureaucratic phrase ‘operational support’ euphemistically covers the proposi- tion of having armed contractors – mercenaries – on the ground in combat situations.¶ Further, the most controversial aspect of the entire $15 billion contract went nearly without notice: the fact that almost a quarter of the contract would be carried out domes- tically. That is, the Pentagon and other agencies including the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), are outsourcing the domestic war on drugs to the winning bidder. This contract- ing out of what used to be a core state function (e.g. domestic drug interdiction, including policing, surveillance and penal responses) is precisely the type of opportunity into which the disaster capitalism complex expands – as an emerging market.¶ One of the companies competing for the contract is the Maryland-based ARINC, whose spokesperson Linda Hartwig told the Army Times that: ‘We don’t have a lot of details yet, but we do know that this is an expansion of what [the U.S] is already doing to fight drug trafficking, and that 80 percent of the work will be overseas’ (Richfield, 2007). This is a figure that is an estimation based on ‘a work statement provided to the bidders’ (McIntire-Peters, 2007), and which leaves unspoken the fact that 20 percent of the ‘work’ is to be carried out domestically. This fact was not reported beyond the phrase ‘the vast majority of the drive will be conducted overseas’. Further, neither corporate nor alternative media reported the consequences of this decision, precluding public sphere debate. This lack of discussion is nothing new, however, as contractors have been used in the waging of the war on drugs far before this 2007 DoD (Department of Defense) con- tract, mostly under the counter-narcotics program known as ‘Plan Colombia’. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.1 Mb. Share with your friends:
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