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.

This state within a state has been built almost exclusively with money from public contracts, yet it is all privately owned. Taxpayers have absolutely no control over it. So far, that reality hasn't sunk in because when these companies are getting their bills paid by government contracts, the Disaster Capitalism Complex provides its services to the public free of charge.

But here's the catch: The U.S. government is going broke, in no small part thanks to this kind of loony spending. The national debt is $8 trillion; the federal budget deficit is at least $260 billion. That means that sooner rather than later, the contracts are going to dry up. And no one knows this better than the companies themselves. Ralph Sheridan, chief executive of Good Harbor Partners, one of hundreds of new counter-terrorism companies, explains that "expenditures by governments are episodic and come in bubbles."

Disaster Relief -- for Profit
Will government-contracted private firms ever charge us for emergency services?
By Naomi Klein
NAOMI KLEIN's book on disaster capitalism will be published in spring 2007.
August 29, 2006

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.

In fact, after the Katrina experience, I venture to say the percentage of Black folks willing to defy those evacuation orders is considerably less than 25%

1 in 4 surveyed would defy evacuation orders
By Mike Stobbe, Associated Press  |  July 21, 2006

ATLANTA -- One in 4 people in Southern coastal states said they would ignore government hurricane evacuation orders, according to a Harvard University survey conducted earlier this month.

The most common reasons respondents gave for not evacuating were confidence that their houses are well built, belief that roads would be too crowded, and concern that evacuating would be dangerous.

That's the sound of the men workin' on the chain...

National prison experts say that only Louisiana allows citizens to use inmate labor on such a widespread scale, under the supervision of local sheriffs. The state has the nation's highest incarceration rate, and East Carroll Parish, a forlorn jurisdiction of 8,700 people along the Mississippi River in the remote northeastern corner of Louisiana, has one of the highest rates in the state.

As a result, it is here that the nation's culture of incarceration achieves a kind of ultimate synthesis with the local economy. The prison system converts a substantial segment of the population into a commodity that is in desperately short supply — cheap labor — and local-jail inmates are integrated into every aspect of economic and social life.

The practice is both an odd vestige of the abusive convict-lease system that began in the South around Reconstruction, and an outgrowth of Louisiana's penchant for stuffing state inmates into parish jails — far more than in any other state. Nowhere else would sheriffs have so many inmates readily at hand, creating a potent political tool come election time, and one that keeps them popular in between. 

gaaaang...

With Jobs to Do, Louisiana Parish Turns to Inmates
By ADAM NOSSITER

LAKE PROVIDENCE, La. — At barbecues, ballgames and funerals, cotton gins, service stations, the First Baptist Church, the pepper-sauce factory and the local private school — the men in orange are everywhere.

Many people here in East Carroll Parish, as Louisiana counties are known, say they could not get by without their inmates, who make up more than 10 percent of its population and most of its labor force. They are dirt-cheap, sometimes free, always compliant, ever-ready and disposable.

Justyn Green, 12, and his brother Jaleel, 8, spent six days at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans with their mother and father -- hot, hungry, thirsty, dirty and frightened. They heard gunfire and saw dead people. They got out at one point, only to be forced to return when police in a nearby town turned away thousands of evacuees at gunpoint. When they finally boarded a bus to leave -- after enduring a line so long they could barely stand -- they thought the horror was over, but it wasn't. The bus flipped over near Opelousas, and their father was killed.

The boys "didn't say a word" at the Superdome, said their mother, Joy Green. "They looked so lost and scared. There was no security at all. You were on your own."

The boys still don't talk much.

For Many of Katrina's Young Victims, The Scars Are More Than Skin Deep
By Julia Cass
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, June 13, 2006; A01

FEMA now requiring doctor's note for free generators
Freebie generators after hurricanes are now a thing of the past. You'll need proof that a generator is a necessity in order to get FEMA reimbursement.
BY AMY SHERMAN
[email protected]

Only people who can prove a medical need will qualify for free generators after a power-cutting hurricane, according to a new federal policy.

Last year, Florida residents -- rich or poor -- who suffered through major power outages could buy generators for up to $836 and then be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The bill was huge: about $118 million in 2005.

But a taxpayer watchdog group decried the policy as a waste of money.