Citizen Wausau

Will Big Brother save you?

by Mike Wall on November 28th, 2008

This is a blog posting from a comrade I am volunteering with out in NY…  We work and help organize AfterShock Action: radical emergency response group – a community answer to FEMA/governmental foibles.  Check out http://aftershockaction.org/ for more info on this subject. 

I am reposting this short piece here for it sums up nicely a couple of blogs I’ve posted earlier on this site on this subject on community emergency response…

 This month twenty states and many county 7 municipal governments have let CERT (Community Emergency Response Teams) teams know they can no longer “self-activate”. CERT teams were started after September 11, 2001 to provide local and volunteer help during disasters and terrorist attacks. Over 300 cert teams have been started from Maine to Hawaii, made up of regular people taking emergency response courses and equipping themselves to provide help for their communities. CERT teams have been deployed over 50 times since they began, most recently during the California wildfires this year. The program has been declared a success by everyone including president George Bush. One of the main tenets of CERT, and also part of the official CERT training, is that trained volunteers will meet whenever there is a disaster and start to provide relief in their neighborhoods. This is called ’self activation”. The government now has decided that self-activation
> should be eliminated from CERT trainings and specifically prohibited. The reason? According to FEMA spokesperson, “we don’t want a bunch of yahoos, showing up in a dangerous situation and interfere.” It is nice that FEMA, who designed the CERT course with Department of Homeland Security, has no faith in their own training or the ability of citizens to provide help to co-workers and neighbors. FEMA admits that it is unrealistic for them to get emergency aid into most areas for at least 72 hours. This has been optimistic assessment, it took nearly 3 weeks for any relief to come to the Katrina victims in the Lower and Upper 9th ward. So if CERTs are not to deploy without getting commands from FEMA and it takes them at least 72 hours to get their shit together, than who is suppose to help? Don’t worry we now have NorthCom.
> NorthCom is a regular army brigade, who cut their teeth in Iraq. This special team made up of sniper experts, land mine operations and “social control” is said to be able to deployed within 20 hours anywhere in the US. New documents released by the St. Paul ACLU, shows that northCom was deployed during the recent anti-Republican National Convention protests, to provide technical expertise and back-up to the National Guard. So it seems clear the government is replacing civilian aid providers with trained combat troops who all have training in non-lethal weaponry but as of yet no training in such things as medical triage. Now, CERT groups are trying to figure out how to fight back against the prohibition on “self activation” but their efforts are doomed to failure. CERT was always more of a feel-good propaganda iniative than a real commitment to civil defense. CERT budgets have been savaged for the past 3 years and there has been no update or
> expansion to training since it started over 7 years ago. In fact the givernment has been strangling CERT since it began, and now it is all but dead. The government has always felt more secure trusting disaster management to the military than uncontrollable civilians (government sponsered or not). Since CERT has always been about tangible relief and not management it should come as no surprise to readers of this web-site the givernment has decided to replace CERT teams with NorthCom.