At a public event in 2012, Tillerson acknowledged that climate change was happening—but what he said next was revealing: “as a species,” humans have always adapted. “So we will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around—we’ll adapt to that.”
He’s quite right: humans do adapt when their land ceases to produce food. The way humans adapt is by moving. They leave their homes and look for places to live where they can feed themselves and their families. But, as Tillerson well knows, we do not live at a time when countries gladly open their borders to hungry and desperate people. In fact, he now works for a president who has painted refugees from Syria—a country where drought was an accelerant of the tensions that led to civil war—as Trojan horses for terrorism. A president who introduced a travel ban that, if it had not been blocked by the courts, would have barred Syrian migrants from entering the United States. A president who has said about Syrian children seeking asylum, “I can look in their faces and say ‘You can’t come.’?” A president who has not budged from that position even after he ordered missile strikes on Syria, supposedly moved by the horrifying impacts of a chemical weapon attack on Syrian children and “beautiful babies.” (But not moved enough to welcome them and their parents.) A president who has announced plans to turn the tracking, surveillance, incarceration, and deportation of immigrants into a defining feature of his administration.
Waiting in the wings, biding their time, are plenty of other members of the Trump team who have deep skills in profiting from all of that.
Profiting from Prisons
Between election day and the end of Trump’s first month in office, the stocks of the two largest private prison companies in the USA, CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America) and the GEO Group, doubled, soaring by 140 percent and 98 percent, respectively.
And why not? Just as Exxon learned to profit from climate change, these companies are part of the sprawling industry of private prisons, private security, and private surveillance that sees wars and migration—both very often linked to climate stresses—as exciting and expanding market opportunities. In the United States, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) incarcerates up to thirty-four thousand immigrants thought to be in the country illegally on any given day, and 73 percent of them are held in private prisons. Little wonder, then, that these companies’ stocks soared on Trump’s election. And soon they had even more reasons to celebrate: one of the first things Jeff Sessions did as Trump’s attorney general was rescind the Obama administration’s decision to move away from for-profit jails for the general prison population.
Profiting from War and Surveillance
Trump appointed as deputy defense secretary Patrick Shanahan, a top executive at Boeing who, at one point, was responsible for selling costly hardware to the US military, including Apache and Chinook helicopters. He also oversaw Boeing’s ballistic missile defense program—a part of the operation that stands to profit enormously if international tensions continue to escalate under Trump.
And this is part of a much larger trend. As Lee Fang reported in the Intercept in March 2017, “President Donald Trump has weaponized the revolving door by appointing defense contractors and lobbyists to key government positions as he seeks to rapidly expand the military budget and homeland security programs….At least 15 officials with financial ties to defense contractors have been either nominated or appointed so far.”
The revolving door is nothing new, of course. Retired military brass reliably take up jobs and contracts with weapons companies. What’s new is the number of generals with lucrative ties to military contractors whom Trump has appointed to cabinet posts with the power to allocate funds—including those stemming from his plan to increase spending on the military, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security by more than $80 billion in just one year.
The other thing that has changed is the size of the Homeland Security and surveillance industry. This sector grew exponentially after the September 11 attacks, when the Bush administration announced it was embarking on a never-ending “war on terror” and that everything that could be outsourced would be. New firms with tinted windows sprouted up like malevolent mushrooms around suburban Virginia, outside Washington, DC, and existing ones, like Booz Allen Hamilton, expanded into brand-new territories. Writing in Slate in 2005, Daniel Gross captured the mood of what many called the security bubble: “Homeland security may have just reached the stage that Internet investing hit in 1997. Back then, all you needed to do was put an ‘e’ in front of your company name and your IPO would rocket. Now you can do the same with ‘fortress.’?”
That means many of Trump’s appointees come from firms that specialize in functions which, not so long ago, it would have been unthinkable to outsource. His National Security Council chief of staff, for instance, is retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg. Among the many jobs Kellogg has had with security contractors since going private was one with Cubic Defense. According to the company, he led “our ground combat training business and focus on expanding the company’s worldwide customer base.” If you think “combat training” is something armies used to do all on their own, you’d be right.
One noticeable thing about Trump’s contractor appointees is how many of them come from firms that did not even exist before 9/11: L1 Identity Solutions (specializing in biometrics), the Chertoff Group (founded by Bush’s Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff), Palantir Technologies (a surveillance/big data firm cofounded by PayPal billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel), and many more. Security firms draw heavily on the military and intelligence wings of government for their staffing. Under Trump, a remarkable number of lobbyists and staffers from these firms are now migrating back to government, where they will very likely push for even more opportunities to monetize the hunt for people President Trump likes to call “bad hombres.”
This creates a disastrous cocktail. Take a group of people who directly profit from ongoing war and then put those same people at the heart of government. Who’s going to make the case for peace? Indeed, the idea that a war could ever definitively end seems a quaint relic of what during the Bush years was dismissed as “pre–September 11 thinking.”
Profiting from Economic Crisis