It wasn’t just the physical infrastructure that failed the city, and particularly its poorest residents, who are, as in so many US cities, overwhelmingly African American. The human systems of disaster response also failed, the second great fracturing. The arm of the federal government that is tasked with responding to moments of national crisis like this is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with state and municipal governments also playing key roles in evacuation planning and response. All levels of government failed.
It took FEMA five days to get water and food to people in New Orleans who had sought emergency shelter in the Superdome. The most harrowing images from that time were of people stranded on rooftops—of homes and hospitals—holding up signs that said HELP, watching the helicopters pass them by. People helped each other as best they could. They rescued each other in canoes and rowboats. They fed each other. They displayed that beautiful human capacity for solidarity that moments of crisis so often intensify. But at the official level, it was the complete opposite. I’ll always remember the words of Curtis Muhammad, a longtime New Orleans civil rights organizer, who said this experience “convinced us that we had no caretakers.”
The way this abandonment played out was deeply unequal, and the divisions cleaved along lines of race and class. Many people were able to leave the city on their own—they got into their cars, drove to a dry hotel, called their insurance brokers. Some people stayed because they believed the storm defenses would hold. But a great many others stayed because they had no choice—they didn’t have a car, or were too infirm to drive, or simply didn’t know what to do. Those are the people who needed a functioning system of evacuation and relief—and they were out of luck. It felt like Baghdad all over again, with some people taking shelter in their own private Green Zones while many more were left stranded in the Red Zone—where the worst was yet to come.
Abandoned in the city without food or water, those in need did what anyone would do in those circumstances: they took provisions from local stores. Fox News and other media outlets seized on this to paint New Orleans’s Black residents as dangerous “looters” who would soon be coming to invade the dry, white parts of the city and surrounding suburbs and towns. Buildings were spray-painted with messages: “Looters will be shot.” Checkpoints were set up to trap people in the flooded parts of town. On Danziger Bridge, police officers shot Black residents on sight (five of the officers involved ultimately pled guilty, and the city came to a $13.3-million settlement with the families in that case and two other similar post-Katrina cases). Meanwhile, gangs of armed white vigilantes prowled the streets looking, as one resident later put it in an exposé by investigative journalist A.C. Thompson, for “the opportunity to hunt Black people.” In the Red Zone, apparently, anything goes.
I was in New Orleans and I saw for myself how amped up the police and military were—not to mention private security guards from companies like Blackwater who were showing up fresh from Iraq. It felt very much like a war zone, with poor and Black people in the crosshairs—people whose only crime was trying to survive. By the time the National Guard arrived to organize a full evacuation of the city, it was done with a level of aggression and ruthlessness that was hard to fathom. Soldiers pointed machine guns at residents as they boarded buses, providing no information about where they were being taken. Children were often separated from their parents.
What I saw during the flooding shocked me. But what I saw in the aftermath of Katrina shocked me even more. With the city reeling, and with its residents dispersed across the country and unable to protect their own interests, a plan emerged to ram through a pro-corporate wish list with maximum velocity. Milton Friedman, then ninety-three years old, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal stating, “Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”
In a similar vein, Richard Baker, at that time a Republican congressman from Louisiana, declared, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” I was in an evacuation shelter near Baton Rouge when Baker made that statement. The people I spoke with were just floored by it. Imagine being forced to leave your home, having to sleep in a cot in some cavernous convention center, and then finding out that the people who are supposed to represent you are claiming this was some sort of divine intervention—God apparently really likes condo developments.
Baker got his “cleanup” of public housing. In the months after the storm, with New Orleans’s residents—and all their inconvenient opinions, rich culture, and deep attachments—out of the way, thousands of public housing units, many of which had sustained minimal storm damage because they were on high ground, were demolished. They were replaced with condos and town-homes priced far out of reach for most who had lived there.
And this is where Mike Pence enters the story. At the time Katrina hit New Orleans, Pence was chairman of the powerful and highly ideological Republican Study Committee (RSC), a caucus of conservative lawmakers. On September 13, 2005—just fourteen days after the levees were breached and with parts of New Orleans still under water—the RSC convened a fateful meeting at the offices of the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. Under Pence’s leadership, the group came up with a list of “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices”—thirty-two pseudo relief policies in all, each one straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook.
What stands out is the commitment to wage all-out war on labor standards and the public sphere—which is bitterly ironic, because the failure of public infrastructure is what turned Katrina into a human catastrophe in the first place. Also notable is the determination to use any opportunity to strengthen the hand of the oil and gas industry. The list includes recommendations to “automatically suspend Davis–Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas” (a reference to the law that requires federal contractors to pay a living wage); “make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone”; and “repeal or waive restrictive environmental regulations…that hamper rebuilding.”