Sovereign Deed

“If a company comes to you and says, ‘I want to build a plant here but I don’t want you to tell anyone. If you don’t agree to that, I’m going to go somewhere else,’ what are you going to do?” Johnson said. “If you say no, haven’t you hurt the public interest more?”

The Michigan Land Use Institute has posted a story about a nefarious organization called Sovereign Deed, whose purpose seems to be to provide private sector emergency protection to the rich, seeing as FEMA is only for poor chumps with no connections to power, and nobody expects it to work any more. It’s another Blackwater type scenario – fear-based entrepreneur with checkered past sees opportunity to make money for self and fellow patriots at the expense of taxpayers. From the article:

Meanwhile, others are questioning the background of the company’s founder, Barrett Moore. Mr. Moore, an Illinois businessman, previously formed Triple Canopy, a multi-million-dollar company that provides armed security in Iraq. The Michigan Messenger Web siteand Northern Express, the region’s weekly alternative newspaper, reported that Triple Canopy eventually fired Mr. Moore and sued him for “raiding the company’s financial accounts to enrich himself and pay his personal expenses…”

Moore, meanwhile sees it differently:

“Even while the company works to provide its clients ground-breaking life-critical services in the face of disaster, an anti-establishment group seeks to disrupt these objectives by trying to undermine Sovereign Deed’s effort to construct a National Response facility in the State of Michigan. They use unscrupulous and defamatory tactics to promote their agendas. Their bias is evident.”

So, I ask you, how did it come to this, that a privately owned company would secretly use “Pellston’s airport, a publicly owned facility, as a private national emergency response headquarters.” In times of emergency, who do you think would get preferential treatment – Sovereign Deed subscribers, or the great unwashed masses who merely pay taxes?

Yes … I can feel the “superior protection” trickling down now, even as I write.

For more info see the excellent Northern Express article on Sovereign Deed, from which comes this quote:

Analysis: Membership Has Its Privileges
By Anne Stanton

Imagine putting out wildfires in California, but only helping the people who paid $19,000 in annual premiums to insurance giant American International Group.
California clients who lived in a select zip code area were offered the option of extra fire protection. Their homes were sprayed with a special fire retardant, and further protected by a red fire truck that zoomed around to extinguish the fires.
….
Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist, has been almost prescient in privatized mega-disaster rescue. Her book Shock Doctrine just arrived on bookstore shelves, in which she makes the case that the cronies of President George Bush are profiting on the misery, violence, and incompetence of this administration.

Read it, and pass the word!