Quake Recovery in Haiti Versus the Quake Recovery in Italy

The Italian government official, Guido Bertolaso, who led the country's response to the L'Aquila earthquake, has condemned relief efforts in Haiti as a disorganised "vanity parade", ahead of an international conference on rebuilding the devastated country. Thank you Guido Bertolaso for helping to get the truth out: this recovery effort smells like, well, it smells like a dead body actually.

I was just thinking the other day how the Italian quake was handled so well and yet until now I failed to think of bringing that up to support statements I have already made about the Haitian governments' failings being a major problem for the recovery of Haiti. That the US military will do relatively little good in the recovery effort is so obvious to me that I have seldom mentioned that aspect. (Is there anything left that the US civil government should do that the US military and the contractors associated with it is NOT asked to do anymore?)

You either have a good government that has real capabilities, some of which become far more needed after an earthquake, or you don't. Italy has a decent government with real capabilities and Haiti does not. Haiti is far right and Italy is not. America is closer to Haiti than it is to Italy on this subject. Enough said on that topic for now.

Shame on Italy's foreign minister for indirectly knocking his own countries’ fine earthquake relief job by criticizing Guido Bertolaso's criticism of the Haiti relief.

In the old days the common narrative coming from the right was that governments are bad because they are bureaucratic, which automatically means they are less efficient than other organizations, including private corporations and non-profit organizations (cutely referred to nowadays as NGO's which stands for non government organizations). Like all the other lies about government, this one is today seen for the farce that it is.

As an important side point, it should be noted that many NGO functions and capabilities exist only because right wingers have gutted government to the point where capabilities that need to exist don't exist in government agencies anymore, so they have to be created within the NGOs.

But we see today in general and after this earthquake in particular that most if not all private corporations and many non-profit organizations, as they go into action to fill the void caused by the lack of various important capabilities within the Haitian and the American governments, have burdensome bureaucracy and needless “rules and regulations.” Everything has to be run through the corporate committees and through the corporate chain of command, you know, and this guy, that guy, and that lady over there have to review things and sign off, you know. Every "i" has to be dotted and every "t" has to be crossed.

The vast majority of people who might want to physically go to Haiti to help out are simply not allowed to do so due to one bureaucratic reason or another. If the NGO doesn't stop them, one or more of the governments involved will stoop them. Many corporations and large NGO's today act like little tyrannical governments with nasty bureaucracies.

And of course, in a world where globalism has run amok, for anything more than pocket change to be deployed either by a NGO, by a government, or by both in tandem, there has to be a big flashy meeting featuring a lot of convoluted discussions in a nice place like Montreal among elites who wouldn't know how to dig for a survivor if a shovel hit them on the rear end.

So much for the idea that only government is subject to being partially paralyzed by too much bureaucracy. The most relevant issue is always going to be whether the bureaucracy problem is under control or not, whether government agencies or NGOs are involved. Bureaucracy can be under control, or not, in government, and in non-government organizations. Roughly speaking there are four possibilities:

--NGO bureaucracy out of control
--NGO bureaucracy in control
--Government bureaucracy out of control
--Government bureaucracy in control

The best combo is the last one: a government that avoids needless bureaucratic burdens while having enough capability and reach to deal in an organized and purposeful way with the aftermath a massive catastrophe. This is apparently what Italy enjoyed after their quake.

If as in Haiti you have 1,000 or more NGO's trying to deal with the aftermath, many of them are going to be semi-paralyzed by their inner bureaucracies. Moreover, you can forget about coordinating their actions so that the country as a whole optimizes both the relief and the rebuilding. Instead, with NGOs instead of governments in charge, you can count on a lot of confusion, a lot of inconsistency, and a lot of unequal treatment of various segments of the population, including for example the little detail of some getting adequate food and water after the quake and others not getting it.

Oh, and I am so enthusiastic about Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive supposedly taking charge of things! I'm bubbling over. I'm sure given the dire circumstances that the Americans will loosen up his dog collar and allow him a greater length of chain, laugh out loud.

Then again, maybe not: since Bellerive has a European education that the Americans will not trust, they might keep him on a very short leash despite the circumstances.

And if the Haitian international debt is not cancelled, the whole recovery effort is nothing more than a joke, and in that event people should have the right to have their donations refunded. There isn't going to be any real recovery in Haiti unless the foreign debt they supposedly owe is cancelled.

The above was in response to this article.
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