A tale of two disasters

It's hardly a novel observation to point out that the U.S. government response to Hurricane Katrina was feeble, uncoordinated, wasteful, and racist. We can start with George Bush's own web site, whitehouse.gov, which posted an analysis of the failures. "[F]our critical flaws in our national preparedness became evident: Our processes for unified management of the national response; command and control structures within the Federal government; knowledge of our preparedness plans; and regional planning and coordination," according to The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned.

"The disastrous response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Katrina exposed the weakness of existing emergency management and response policies on all political levels - local, state, and federal," concluded William L. Waugh, professor of public administration at Georgia State, in Shelter from the Storm: Repairing the National Emergency Management System after Hurricane Katrina.

"[A] hastily improvised $10 billion effort by the federal government has produced vast sums of waste and misspent funds, an array of government audits and outside analysts have concluded," wrote Spencer Hsu in The Washington Post in April 2006.

In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein argues that none of this is accidental. The ineffectual government response, coupled with enablement of unfettered capitalist power grabs, in New Orleans is of a piece with capitalist grabs after the Chile coup, the Sri Lankan tsunami, and the Iraq invasion, among other examples.

Recently, Scott Tong of "Marketplace" on American Public Media illustrated a very different kind of governmental response to a natural disaster - the earthquake in Sichuan, China, last month, which left 11 million people homeless. In its response to the earthquake, China reminded us that it retains some characteristics of a socialist economy.

Chen Juxiang, plant manager of Yangfan, which usually makes tents for outdoor equipment companies like Eureka, got a call the day after the quake. " '[G]overnment officials called us and asked us to send everything we had, so we worked until 2 in the morning to airlift more than a thousand tents.' Yangfan put its U.S. and European clients on hold and it shifted hundreds of workers from other product lines over to tentmaking," reported Tong.

" 'They moved so many people and so much assets right away. They commandeered every airplane to make this happen. It's something to kind of stand back and admire, kind of be in awe of, how fast they were able to go from zero to 60' ", summarized Richard Brubaker, a logistics coordinator who runs a charity doing earthquake relief.

Tong's conclusion: "It's the benefit of an economy that still retains its central planning roots -- in this case, cranking up the world's workshop for disaster relief."

Katrina and Sichuan, disaster capitalism and central planning. Which system would you like to see take charge of the next relief operation?