Meet the Disaster Capitalists Behind Alligator Alcatraz -- The American Prospect

[erronis]

https://prospect.org/power/2025-07-17-meet-disaster-capitalists-alligator-alcatraz/
Maureen Tkacik

Incompetent and militarized ‘emergency response’ is on track to be a trillion-dollar industry by the end of Trump’s second term.

One company just forced the state of Illinois to fork over $1.3 million for a detention center it never built, and boasts an armored car subsidiary that “lost track of” tens of millions of dollars in cash belonging to banks, businesses, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Another recently won a $70 million contract from the state of Oregon to remove dead trees to mitigate wildfire risk—then ordered contractors to indiscriminately chop down tens of thousands of healthy trees because it had fired the only professional arborist on its payroll. A third has been sued in Florida for allegedly orchestrating a sprawling insurance fraud ring that ended up screwing over hundreds of Hurricane Ida victims, stiffing the claim adjustors they hired, then suing its conspirator law firm for failing to make good on the 582 percent annualized return its partners had allegedly promised.

Still a fourth built a $22 million COVID-19 field hospital in New York that never ended up treating any patients because Andrew Cuomo thought nursing home residents could use some company and sent all the COVID patients to long-term care facilities—though, to be fair, a lot of stuff like that happened during the pandemic.

I speak of course of the bastions of free enterprise that converged upon a wildlife preserve south of Miami last month to build, in the miraculous space of eight days, a 3,000-bed nylon and barbed wire concentration camp for abusing and humiliating random people dragged from strip mall parking lots and park benches and tow yards. The air conditioners shut off chronically, but the interrogation lights never do; the floor is flooded with human waste from overflowing toilets; and the price tag now exceeding $600 million means there’s room for all the grifters to get a piece.

“It’s monumental, the wealth creation that’s being done,” Stephan Crétier, the billionaire founder and CEO of the Canadian security and surveillance conglomerate GardaWorld, gushed to Bloomberg from his home base in Dubai. Crétier wasn’t referencing the Alligator Alcatraz prison camp, which was likely just a footnote in Stephen Miller’s fascist run of show when he gave the interview back in November. But then again maybe he was; his company is staffing the camp now, after all. Like the journalist and critic Naomi Klein, Crétier and GardaWorld were born in Montreal, and reading about the company’s ascent into the world’s largest private security firm can give one the queasy suspicion he read Klein’s 2007 odyssey The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism as a “get rich quick” guide.

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[Kid Berwyn]

1. GardaWorld

World Police State their destination.

[leftstreet]

2. DURec