The flood next time -- disaster relief for profit
THE RED CROSS has just announced a new disasterresponse partnership with Wal-Mart. When the next hurricane hits, it will be a coproduction of Big Aid and Big Box.
This, apparently, is the lesson learned from the government's calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina: Businesses do disaster better.
"It's all going to be private enterprise before it's over," Billy Wagner, emergency management chief for the Florida Keys, currently under hurricane watch for Tropical Storm Ernesto, said in April. "They've got the expertise. They've got the resources."
But before this new consensus goes any further, it's time to take a look at where the privatization of disaster began, and where it will inevitably lead.
The first step was the government's abdication of its core responsibility to protect the population from disasters. Under the Bush administration, whole sectors of the government, and particularly the Department of Homeland Security, have been turned into glorified temp agencies, with essential functions contracted out to private companies. The idea is that entrepreneurs, driven by the profit motive, are always more efficient than government.
We saw the results in New Orleans: Washington was weak and incompetent in part because its emergency management experts had fled to the private sector and its technology and infrastructure had become positively retro. In a crisis, government looks frighteningly inept ( "doing a heckuva job") while the private sector can seem modern and competent, at least by comparison.
In truth, when it comes to reconstruction, contractors are hardly wizards. "Where has all the money gone?" ask desperate people from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf Coast. One place a great deal of it has gone is into major capital expenditures for the private corporations. Largely under the public radar, billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on privatized disaster-response infrastructure: the Shaw Group's new state-of-the-art Baton Rouge headquarters, Bechtel's battalions of earthmoving equipment, Blackwater USA's 6,000-acre campus in North Carolina (complete with paramilitary training camp and 6,000-foot runway).
Call it the Disaster Capitalism Complex. Whatever you might need in a serious crunch, these contractors can provide it: generators, water tanks, cots, port-a-potties, mobile homes, communications systems, helicopters, medicine, men with guns.
