Fences and Windows (13 page)

This is the type of track record that has turned the World Bank and the IMF into international pariahs, drawing thousands to the streets of Ottawa last weekend, with a “solidarity protest” in Johannesburg.
The Washington Post
recently told the heartbreaking story of one Soweto resident, Agnes Mohapi. The reporter observed, “For all its wretchedness, apartheid never did this: It did not lay her off from her job, jack up her utility bill, then disconnect her
service when she inevitably could not pay. ‘Privatization did that,’ she said.”

In the face of this system of “economic apartheid,” a new resistance movement is inevitable. There was a three-day general strike against privatization in August. (Workers held up signs that read, “ANC We Love You But Not Privatizations.”) In Soweto, unemployed workers reconnect their neighbours’ cut-off water, and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee has illegally reconnected power in thousands of homes. Why don’t the police arrest them? “Because,” Ngwane says, “when the police officers’ electricity is disconnected, we reconnect them too.”

It looks as if the corporate executives, so eager to have their pictures taken with Nelson Mandela last weekend, have a second chance to fight apartheid—this time while it’s still going on. They can do it not only through good-hearted charity, but by questioning the economic logic that is failing so many around the world. Which side will they be on this time?

June 2000

Just after noon tomorrow, a few hundred protesters, many of them homeless, will arrive on the steps of the Ontario Legislature with a very simple request. They want to speak to the Tory government about the effects its policies are having on the poor. If history has anything to teach us, Premier Mike Harris will make a get-tough speech about how Ontario’s voters have made their voices heard and he won’t be bullied—right before he calls in the cops for a smash-up. The question is, How will the rest of us react?

I ask this because since the E. coli outbreak in the town of Walkerton, in which more than two thousand residents fell ill from drinking the municipal water, voters across Ontario have been searching their souls about the effects of Tory deregulation on real people and their daily lives. There has been widespread horror at the possibility that government cuts to the Ministry of the Environment, and downloading to municipalities, may have put the people of Walkerton at great risk.

Public outrage is a powerful, transformative force, even in Mike Harris’s seemingly impenetrable political enclave. This outrage has led directly to the convening of four inquiries into the causes of the water crisis, to political commitments to fix the problems identified, as well as an offer
of millions of dollars in compensation. The tragedy deserves this swift attention and more. But why did we need the deaths in Walkerton to make us see that abstract policies take their toll on real people’s lives?

Seven people, possibly more, died from drinking E. coli-infected water, and tomorrow the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty is marching on Queen’s Park because twenty-two homeless people died on the streets of Toronto in the past seven months. The connections between those deaths and government cutbacks and deregulation are just as compelling in Toronto as they are in Walkerton. Perhaps even more so, because in Toronto we don’t need four inquiries to establish the connections—they are virtually taken as a given.

Before the Tories were elected, some winters passed with absolutely no homeless deaths on the streets of Toronto. The death toll began to mount in 1995, the same year the Tories cut welfare by 21.6 percent and the same year they nixed plans for new social housing. Just after that, the economic recovery that the Tories love to take credit for began to drive rental rates way up, while the Tory Tenant Protection Act has made it much easier for landlords to throw out their renters. Roughly sixteen hundred renters now face eviction each month in Toronto.

The result is a staggering number of people on the streets and not enough beds for them in shelters. Last year, there were five thousand emergency hostel beds available in the city, but many social workers say there is demand for twice that many. As the hostels and streets become more crowded,
street culture becomes more degraded and violent. And it is here that the Tories step in with their Safe Streets Act, a new measure that allows the police to treat homeless people like criminals, prime content-providers for Ontario’s coming private super-jail.

Just as there are clear remedies available to prevent future Walkertons, there are plenty of obvious policy solutions to prevent future street deaths. More housing, better tenant protection and less harassment are all good places to start. Anti-poverty groups have put forward the “1 percent solution”: a call to double the amount of money available for affordable housing by getting all levels of government to contribute an additional 1 percent of their total budgets.

In comparing the E. coli deaths in Walkerton to the homeless crisis in Toronto, I am not trying to pit one tragedy against another in some kind of misery sweepstakes, only pointing out that the debate about homelessness has two ingredients missing: noisy public outrage and the political will to prevent future tragedies.

This is Mike Harris’s Ontario in action. The first lesson of the Tories’ Common Sense Revolution [the campaign slogan on which they came to power] was that there are two clear classes of people in the province: those who are inside the system, and those who belong outside it. Those who are inside have been rewarded with tax cuts; those on the outside have been pushed farther out still.

The people of Walkerton were supposed to be on the inside: hard working, tax paying, healthy, Tory voting. The dead on
the streets of Toronto were exiled from Day 1 of the Common Sense Revolution: unemployed, poor, mentally ill.

Only now the neat lines of the Tories’ hierarchy of humanity are blurring. “The Harris agenda goes beyond destroying the social structure and has started to erode the very physical structure everyone relies upon,” says John Clarke, spokesperson for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, the group organizing tomorrow’s demonstration. “In the end, it becomes obvious that everyone is under attack.”

October 2001

Only hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Republican Congressman Curt Weldon went on CNN and announced that he didn’t want to hear anyone talking about funding for schools or hospitals. From here on, it was all about spies, bombs and other manly things. “The first priority of the U.S. government is not education, it is not health care, it is the defence and protection of U.S. citizens,” he said, adding, later, “I’m a teacher married to a nurse—none of that matters today.”

But now it turns out that those frivolous social services matter a great deal. What is making the U.S. most vulnerable to terrorist networks is not a depleted weapons arsenal but its starved, devalued and crumbling public sector. The new battlefields are not just the Pentagon but also the post office; not just military intelligence but also training for doctors and nurses; not a sexy new missile defence shield but the boring old Food and Drug Administration.

It has become fashionable to wryly observe that the terrorists use the West’s technologies as weapons against itself: planes, e-mail, cellphones. But as fears of bioterrorism mount, it could well turn out that their best weapons are the rips and holes in the United States’ public infrastructure.

Is this because there was no time to prepare for the
attacks? Hardly. The U.S. has openly recognized the threat of biological attacks since the Persian Gulf war, and Bill Clinton renewed calls to protect the nation from bioterror after the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. And yet shockingly little has been done.

The reason is simple: preparing for biological warfare would have required a ceasefire in America’s older, less dramatic war—the one against the public sphere. It didn’t happen. Here are some snapshots from the front lines.

Half the states in the U.S. don’t have federal experts trained in bioterrorism. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are buckling under the strain of anthrax fears, their underfunded labs scrambling to keep up with the demand for tests. Little research has been done on how to treat children who have contracted anthrax, since Cipro— the most popular antibiotic—is not recommended for them.

Many doctors in the U.S. public health care system have not been trained to identify symptoms of anthrax, botulism or plague. A recent U.S. Senate panel heard that hospitals and health departments lack basic diagnostic tools, and information sharing is difficult since some departments don’t have e-mail access. Many health departments are closed on weekends, with no staff on call.

If treatment is a mess, federal inoculation programs are in worse shape. The only laboratory in the U.S. licensed to produce the anthrax vaccine has left the country unprepared for its current crisis. Why? It’s a typical privatization debacle. The lab, in Lansing, Michigan, used to be owned and operated by the state. In 1998, it was sold to BioPort, which promised
greater efficiency. The new lab has failed several FDA inspections and, so far, has been unable to supply a single dose of the vaccine to the U.S. military, let alone to the general population.

As for smallpox, there are not nearly enough vaccines to cover the population, leading the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to experiment with diluting the existing vaccines at a ratio of 1 to 5 or even 1 to 10.

Internal documents show that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is years behind schedule in safeguarding the water supply against bioterrorist attacks. According to an audit released on October 4, the EPA was supposed to have identified security vulnerabilities in municipal water supplies by 1999, but it hasn’t yet completed even this first stage.

The FDA has proven unable to introduce measures that would better protect the food supply from “agroterrorism”— deadly bacteria introduced into the food supply. With agriculture increasingly centralized and globalized, the sector is vulnerable to the spread of disease. But the FDA, which inspected only 1 percent of food imports under its jurisdiction last year, says it is in “desperate need of more inspectors.”

Tom Hammonds, CEO of the Food Marketing Institute, an industry group representing food sellers, says, “Should a crisis arise—real or manufactured as a hoax—the deficiencies of the current system would become glaringly obvious.”

After September 11, George W. Bush created the office of “homeland security,” designed to evoke a nation steeled and prepared for any attack. And yet it turns out that what
“homeland security” really means is a mad rush to reassemble basic public infrastructure and resurrect health and safety standards that have been drastically eroded. The troops at the front lines of America’s new war are embattled indeed: they are the very bureaucracies that have been cut back, privatized and vilified for two decades, not just in the U.S. but in virtually every country in the world.

“Public health is a national security issue,” U.S. Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson observed earlier this month. No kidding. For years, critics have argued that there are human costs to all the cost-cutting, deregulating and privatizing— train crashes in Britain, E. coli outbreaks in Walkerton, food poisoning, street deaths and substandard health care. And yet until September 11, “security” was still narrowly confined to the machinery of war and policing, a fortress built atop a crumbling foundation.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that real security cannot be cordoned off. It is woven into our most basic social fabric, from the post office to the emergency room, from the subway to the water reservoir, from schools to food inspection. Infrastructure—the boring stuff that binds us all together—is not irrelevant to the serious business of fighting terrorism. It is the foundation of our future security.

 

III
FENCING IN THE MOVEMENT: CRIMINALIZING DISSENT

In which copious quantities of gas are inhaled, friends are thrown into vans by cops dressed as anarchists, and a boy dies in Genoa