If you look at the processes of remediation in the US, say public health and health care, the justice system, the maintenance and regeneration of infrastructure, the furnishing and replacement of personal properties, and etc., you see patterns which are both striking and depressingly familar. Not only do you see an acceleration of damages wrought by increasing exploitation, climate change, collapse of the social contract and state legitimacy, increasing social and political strife, and the like, but you also see growing damages carried out by the very processes of remediation marshalled to address the primary damages in the first place.
We could start with the decades-long dismantling of public services and hollowing out of the state, resulting in the increasing provision of social goods through private self-interested actors, which the US has a long history of, backed by a long-running ideology of self-reliance, but at the peak of its power the US did provide some degree of guaranteed affluence for a large portion of its population.
Various forms of private insurance, security provision, legal response to harms inflicted, provision of basic needs, and so on have - in a direct inversion of the libertarian fear - crowded out public provisions, and in so doing, have replaced the prevailing ethic of addressing a given harm or replacing a specific need, putting the onus on the economic power of the individual.
It is this mercenary ethic that is steadily transforming collective provisions and remediations into an intensifying form of exploitation itself. Insurance and public health for example are increasingly run by consolidating financial companies looking to deny their responsibilities, while all the while collecting profits on the basis of the privilege of monopolist and rentier. Not without first supplying the attendant propaganda of course.
The cities are not only becoming ever more expensive and dangerous to live in, but the issues arising out of their very political economic environments and management, the damages wrought by homelessness, crime, and pollution for example, are seized upon as additional opportunities of profit. While of course services and employment disappears in the hinterlands and industrial accidents and superfund sites crop up at a growing pace while the perpetrators fail upwards.
Listen for a giant sucking sound, as they say. Or to use another "emptying out" metaphor, taken all together this all looks like a giant, slow motion bank run, complete with the rising panic.
