The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer

by John C. Mutter

  Armored vehicles carrying soldiers with powerful weapons at the ready and patrolling city streets belong in countries at war. We see them, too, in places where large crowds have gathered to protest the actions of authoritarian governments, as in the Ukraine and Venezuela, hoping to dislodge the government and change the regime. But the soldiers who roamed the suburban streets of Ferguson and New Orleans were indistinguishable from those deployed in conflict settings. This is due to a disturbing and increasing militarization of policing in the United States. Who would even have guessed that a small-town police force in Ferguson, Missouri, would even have such equipment? Apparently, it is widely available and widely used. In his 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, Radley Balko, a Washington Post reporter, describes this trend.2 He also details its very negative consequences for civilian law enforcement, including mission creep among SWAT teams, where more and more force is used for fairly minor infractions. The normally strong separation between military activities and civilian police work is made vague and porous if the police themselves obtain military equipment and take actions indistinguishable from military ones.

  Police departments across the United States have become paramilitary units.3 And this assertion is especially true in places like Ferguson and New Orleans, where a majority black and poor population is policed by a majority white police force that does not come from the community it serves and sees its work as containing the “problem people.”

  This mind-set—that a “problem people” majority must be contained for the sake of the privileged minority who live among them—is all too common around the world. From it we can discern a narrative common to most natural disasters almost regardless of where they happen and how citizens are governed. First, a terrible event happens. Nature has a tantrum, everything seems terribly wrong, outside the norm. A massive fire erupts on an oil rig. A riot breaks out. The ground shakes violently where no one could remember it ever having shaken before. A massive storm arrives out of nowhere. This is analogous to stage 1 in Susan Sontag’s4 brilliantly satirical description of science fiction movies of the 1950s—it’s the arrival of the Thing. In the movies Sontag discusses, the Thing almost always arrives in the United States or Japan, often from outer space but sometimes from deep inside Earth. The terrible event of a disaster can arrive anywhere.

  The authorities are the most surprised, or act as if they are, even though they should be the least surprised. The class, race, or ethnic group of those who form the authorities, whether a military junta, a major company, or an elected governor, does not reflect that of the majority of the people most affected by the event. The authorities consist of a small, perhaps tiny elite that holds almost all the wealth and political power. They don’t care very much about those most affected by the event. They have to say they care and sometimes they do initially, but that soon fades. The Thing doesn’t care about any humans, either.

  Scientists say they are not surprised. They say “I told you so,” and then are not heard from again. Sometimes a smug scientist is interviewed on television. When the Thing emerges, the press is initially delighted. They describe it in apocalyptic terms and rush to see it for themselves and report back from the field, breathless and harried. Scientists do the same.

  The authorities downplay the scale of the event, wanting us to think it’s not as bad as reporters and scientists are saying. You can’t believe those reports, the authorities tell us. We all know how they exaggerate. Don’t worry; everything is under control. You can trust those in authority. New Orleans is over 80 percent submerged—no problem, we’ve got it, we’ll send KBR, the private security firm that was made infamous when a group of Blackwater guards was involved in the killing of seventeen Iraqi civilians.5 A no-bid contract to KBR would get things moving along the fastest.

  An attempt is made to deal with the event that is in proportion to its advertised, downscaled magnitude. In Sontag’s science fiction movies, for example, police are sent in to deal with the Thing and are slaughtered. The head of Homeland Security pays no attention to Katrina and trusts Michael Brown to deal with the problem. At least in science fiction, or figuratively, Brown will be slaughtered soon enough. In Myanmar, the generals ask, Cyclone? What cyclone are you talking about? Everyone in the elite stands flat-footed for days, hoping that the Thing will go away. Incompetent people in government who are political appointees with little to no experience make pathetic efforts to deal with it. People in the affected area try to help each other because no help has arrived. Lying and finger-pointing begin. All attempts to kill the Thing are failing badly.

  The elite start to panic while regular people don’t, although the media says they do. But soon the regular people start to realize they do not have the capacity to gain control of the situation and no one has come to their assistance. People who have been bravely helping each other realize that food and water are running out. They can’t produce either out of thin air. Because no one has come to help, the people take what they need from stores. The media sometimes call these actions provisioning (if performed by members of the elite’s racial group) and sometimes call it looting (if performed by those outside the elite’s group).

  Frustration mounts among the affected population. They are angry but not panicked and are starting to feel hostile. Members of the elite class in the affected area are long gone, having left at the first news of the Thing. If they made the mistake of staying, they are rescued by the first of the rescuers to arrive on the scene and are treated for any injuries they might have sustained.

  Looting, whether real or imagined, extensive or trivial, begins in earnest and is a game changer. Looting is a godsend for the elite. It’s a way out, a way to deflect attention from their incompetence. Looting is a godsend for the media, too, and where earlier the elite wanted everyone to ignore the media, now they want everyone to believe the media. No more downplaying. The media are showing things as they really are, they tell us. By this time, the Thing that arrived to start all the trouble is gone, and it’s hard to keep the public’s attention. The story has moved back a few pages in the newspapers and is no longer the first item discussed on the nightly news. Then, luckily, looting “breaks out,” and there is something to exaggerate and moralize about, a way to frame a story that the public will accept—a framing adapted from movies mixed with racial and class bias. The event is back on the front page again. When there are no reports of looting—as in Japan after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami—media focus remains on government incompetence and inconsistent reporting from authorities.

  The elite who supposedly struggled to quell the Thing are able to say that the very people they were trying to save from the monster are actually monsters themselves. They are problem people behaving badly, rejecting the elite’s valiant, not to mention expensive, efforts to help them. They are criminals, bad people, not only stealing luxury goods from stores owned by good people but raping and killing each other, even children. It doesn’t matter that few if any of the stories of rape and murder are substantiated; it’s just what you would expect these non-elites to do. What next? Soon they will start killing and raping members of the elite. They must be suppressed at all costs. We need curfews, martial law, the military, and shoot-to-kill orders. That’s the only hope.

  By this time in the disaster event, the Thing re-emerges; it had not gone away at all. But it has changed. It is no longer an act of Nature; it’s a group of people. The military is brought in. In some countries, the military is already there. Looting and crime, real or manufactured by the media, become the reason to wage war on the people.

  The elite win. How can they not? They command the military. “Peace” is restored.

  Scientists give advice. Sontag’s young hero scientist, having built a device to kill the Thing in his lab, stands cheek to cheek with his beautiful girlfriend, looks into the sky, and asks, “But will they return?”

 
Today’s scientists say the Thing will return, and it will be bigger and more aggressive than ever. They recommend abandoning places where the Thing might appear next and creating massive fortifications against it everywhere that matters to them. Members of the elite consider protecting themselves but hardly anyone else. Plans are being considered for a storm barrier to protect lower Manhattan, for example, but not much can be done about the Rockaways. That’s too bad, but what were those people doing there in the first place? What were people doing in the Lower Ninth Ward? Didn’t those problem people know it was dangerous?

  Now the second opportunity opens wide: The winners can plunder the vanquished. It’s their turn to loot, but they would never call it that. Money is needed and needed quickly. No time for lengthy bidding processes, review, and oversight. “Dangerous” lands must be taken and used for better purposes. Scientists agree. In rich countries, that means gentrification or “urban renewal”—euphemisms for property development that benefits the elite and enriches them. In poorer countries, it means land grabs under bizarre laws made by the elite that typically ensure that regular people either do not own land or can be easily displaced from areas they have been farming and living on for generations. Or rebuilding in a damaged area becomes so expensive and so regulation-restricted that those who lived there earlier (in the Lower Ninth of New Orleans, for instance) can’t possibly afford to return. The losers also lose what capital assets they might have had, and the winners gain them. Capital is key to gaining wealth. If winners already had private capital assets, and they usually do, those assets become more valuable. The winners can control who gets the lucrative contracts for reconstruction of public infrastructure and ensure that they go to members of the elite.

  The rich win; the poor lose.

  It’s completely expected in a world of great inequality that the outcome of a natural disaster will also be unequal. Disasters may well affect everybody, rich or poor, in some way, and they are never pleasant for anyone. We want to believe that a disaster is a moment when everyone pulls together—but it is not. It is a moment of pulling apart because the effect on each group is so different, and the way each group can cope is vastly different. The way each group can capitalize on a disaster is incomparably different—the rich can, the poor can’t. Schumpeter’s gale puts wind in the sails of the rich’s yachts but sinks the fragile craft of the poor. The rich can move further up; the poor can only stay in their poverty trap or slide down the slope back into the trap—descending from having land and a meager income to no land and no income, for example.

  Thomas Piketty, the French economist who recently rose to international stardom with his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century,6 has argued that the only time inequality decreases is in times of catastrophe, after which inequality inexorably rises again as returns on capital outpace the overall economy (r > g). Piketty is referring to financial crises; the opposite is true for natural disaster crises, where owners of capital see the value of that capital actually increase rapidly in the immediate postdisaster period. Disasters make the owners of capital even more wealthy; those lacking capital are made poorer, and inequality becomes greater.

  What is there to be done? Disaster risk reduction (DRR) is extraordinarily important. That hardly needs to be said. But DRR might better be called DLR—disaster loss reduction—because it focuses mostly on the initial loss from whatever has happened, be it storm or quake or flood. It is important to help ensure that the poor don’t suffer and can be helped back to as good a condition as possible, as quickly as possible. The less the loss, the quicker the recovery: this appears to be the logic. But we know this isn’t the case except in the extremely unlikely situation where all losses have been reduced to zero.

  But it is what happens before and after that tormented moment of loss that is the most important. One death occurred in Ferguson, Missouri. What happened after that death is, one could say, out of proportion to the death itself. There may be more deaths in Ferguson. But the turmoil that followed has no scaling relationship to the number of lives lost. It is the result of inequality. Ferguson is not a disaster because of the number of deaths. The shooting of a 15-year-old Haitian girl, the abandonment of people in the Irrawaddy Delta, the crushing of schoolchildren in China, and the events in Ferguson are all social disasters, and all should have been avoidable.

  Ferguson was fairly prosperous and mostly white in 2000 and has changed rapidly to become mostly black, with areas of intense concentrated poverty. The source of the strife in Ferguson is that all forms of the city’s governance have remained overwhelmingly white, though recent elections have tripled the number of African Americans on the city council.7 Nonetheless, governance in general has not changed, even though the city’s demographics and economic prospects have changed. It is as out of touch with those it governs as the generals in Myanmar were out of touch with the average citizens there or the elite in Pétionville, Haiti were with the majority of Haitians. People in the Ferguson city government don’t like the way their town has changed, and they are afraid of the people who are now the majority. Why else would the police in a small town in Missouri have armored vehicles, riot gear, and assault weapons? In a moral sense, their fortifications are no different from the high walls and barbed wire enclosing the elite of Haiti; no different from the suppression of ethnic minorities in Myanmar or the isolation of the poor in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. To have acquired such equipment, they must have believed they would come under assault at some time, by someone, and the “someone” could only be the black community. Were they anticipating an attack or spoiling for a fight, like the white vigilantes in New Orleans?

  It’s not fatalistic to say that we will never stop natural disasters from happening. It may be somewhat fatalistic to suggest they are going to increase. What is very likely to happen is that the true injustices of disasters will increase. As the gap between the wealthy elite and the 99 percent grows and grows, it will become easier and easier for the elite to control the outcomes of the disasters amid the chaos. And that is no accident. It is not only because of existing inequalities—that’s an excuse; it is because inequalities can be made greater still by the actions of those who have power. The disaster itself provides a cover, a sort of shield to hide behind, a distraction. Most people will believe that what is going on really is natural, but the natural part of the drama of disaster is over fairly quickly.

  Many natural scientists believe that burgeoning climate change will increase the frequency of extreme weather disasters, including prolonged droughts, intense rainfall, and strong storms. Even if that does not occur per se, climate change will progressively increase the area of our planet on which we cannot successfully grow food crops. A smaller and smaller habitable planet will be asked to serve the needs of a much larger number of people. As the years pass and change continues slowly but inexorably, the elite will grab more and more habitable land for themselves, leaving the majority in the badlands. If there is anything certain about climate change, it is that it will send us further apart than we already are. Natural disasters teach us how it will be done.

  Most important of all is to recognize that disasters are economic and political in nature as much as, perhaps more than, they are natural events. They are briefly natural, in the horrifying minutes and hours of the first attack of Nature. In that moment, Nature is in charge. Before and after that, however, disasters are pure social phenomena. Returning to some form of normality after a disaster requires economic stimulus, good planning and discipline, and other actions similar to what was needed following the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. The two kinds of events are different, but we can learn from the errors and the successes of the financial crisis to help us think about the road to recovery for all of those who endure Nature’s wrath. We have to be very hard on any form of profiteering, not just because it might bring a quick gain for some at the expense of others but also because it can do permanent damage by enhancin
g existing inequalities.

  In planning for disaster risk reduction, the focus is on the prelude (phase 1) and the event itself (phase 2). Governments think about preparations, strengthening, protecting. After the event, a build-back-better approach is invoked to repair the physical damage as a way of being better prepared for the next disaster. But planning must include realistic approaches to post-disaster social risk reduction. Militarization is not the answer. Allowing the elites to control the post-disaster period is not the answer, either, and will do little more than allow the elites to profit and exclude. Reconstruction must be an inclusive process. Rather than sending in the military for disasters that occur in states and countries known to be poorly governed and corrupt, we should send in neutral parties to help ensure that relief money is spent to restore and improve society. That means more than treating people for posttraumatic stress or helping them with the grieving process. It means understanding the social dynamics before disasters happen so that societies don’t become disordered after.

  Rather than turn our attention elsewhere when phase 2 has ended, phrase 3 of the disaster must be carefully scrutinized. The New Orleans Index provides a model for how this might be done. Recovery can’t be properly measured by the number of buildings restored; it should be measured by the number of lives restored. Every disaster presents an example of how we cannot work from only one side of the Feynman line or the other.