President Bush adopted many of the recommendations within the week, although, under pressure, he was eventually forced to reinstate the labor standards. Another recommendation called for giving parents vouchers to use at private and charter schools (for-profit schools subsidized with tax dollars), a move perfectly in line with the vision held by Trump’s pick for education secretary, Betsy DeVos. Within the year, New Orleans became the most privatized school system in the United States.
And there was more. Though climate scientists have directly linked the increased intensity of hurricanes to warming ocean temperatures, that didn’t stop Pence and his committee from calling on Congress to repeal environmental regulations on the Gulf Coast, give permission for new oil refineries in the United States, and green-light “drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” It’s a kind of madness. After all, these very measures are a surefire way to drive up greenhouse gas emissions, the major human contributor to climate change, which leads to fiercer storms. Yet they were immediately championed by Pence, and later adopted by Bush, under the guise of responding to a devastating hurricane.
It’s worth pausing to tease out the implications of all of this. Hurricane Katrina turned into a catastrophe in New Orleans because of a combination of extremely heavy weather, possibly linked to climate change, and weak and neglected public infrastructure. The so-called solutions proposed by the group Pence headed at the time were the very things that would inevitably exacerbate climate change and weaken public infrastructure even further. He and his fellow “free-market” travelers were determined, it seems, to do the very things that are guaranteed to lead to more Katrinas in the future.
And now Mike Pence is in a position to bring this vision to the entire United States.
Kleptocracy Free-for-All
The oil industry wasn’t the only one to profit from Hurricane Katrina. Immediately after the storm, the whole Baghdad gang of contractors—Bechtel, Fluor, Halliburton, Blackwater, CH2M Hill, and Parsons, infamous for its sloppy Iraq work—descended on New Orleans. They had a singular vision: to prove that the kinds of privatized services they had been providing in Iraq and Afghanistan also had an ongoing domestic market—and to collect no-bid contracts totaling $3.4 billion in the process.
The controversies were legion, too many to delve into here. Relevant experience often appeared to have nothing to do with how contracts were allocated. Take, for example, the company that FEMA paid $5.2 million to perform the crucial role of building a base camp for emergency workers in St. Bernard Parish, a suburb of New Orleans. The camp construction fell behind schedule and was never completed. Under investigation, it emerged that the contractor, Lighthouse Disaster Relief, was in fact a religious group. “About the closest thing I have done to this is just organize a youth camp with my church,” confessed Lighthouse’s director, Pastor Gary Heldreth.
After all the layers of subcontractors had taken their cut, there was next to nothing left for the people doing the work. Author Mike Davis tracked the way FEMA paid Shaw $175 per square foot to install blue tarps on damaged roofs, even though the tarps themselves were provided by the government. Once all the subcontractors took their share, the workers who actually hammered in the tarps were paid as little as two dollars per square foot. “Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung,” Davis wrote, “where the actual work is carried out.” These supposed “contractors” were really—like the Trump Organization—hollow brands, sucking out profit and then slapping their name on cheap or nonexistent services.
In order to offset the tens of billions going to private companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress announced that it needed to cut $40 billion from the federal budget. Among the programs that were slashed: student loans, Medicaid, and food stamps. So, the poorest people in the United States subsidized the contractor bonanza twice: first, when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services; and second, when the few programs that directly assist the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills.
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New Orleans is the disaster capitalism blueprint—designed by the current vice president and by the Heritage Foundation, the hard-right think tank to which Trump has outsourced much of his administration’s budgeting. Ultimately, the response to Katrina sparked an approval ratings free fall for George W. Bush, a plunge that eventually lost the Republicans the presidency in 2008. Nine years later, with Republicans now in control of Congress and the White House, it’s not hard to imagine this test case for privatized disaster response being adopted on a national scale.
The presence of highly militarized police and armed private soldiers in New Orleans came as a surprise to many. Since then, the phenomenon has expanded exponentially, with local police forces across the country outfitted to the gills with military-grade gear, including tanks and drones, and private security companies frequently providing training and support. Given the array of private-military and security contractors occupying key positions in the Trump administration, we can expect all of this to expand further with each new shock.
The Katrina experience also stands as a stark warning to those who are holding out hope for Trump’s promised trillion dollars in infrastructure spending. That spending will fix some roads and bridges, and it will create jobs (though—as we’ll see in Chapter 10—far less than green infrastructure investment to transition off fossil fuels would). Crucially, Trump has indicated that he plans to do as much as possible not through the public sector but through public-private partnerships—which have a terrible track record for corruption, and may result in far lower wages than true public works projects would. Given Trump’s business record, and Pence’s role in the administration, there is every reason to fear that his big-ticket infrastructure spending could become a Katrina-like kleptocracy, a government of thieves, with the Mar-a-Lago set helping themselves to vast sums of taxpayer money.
New Orleans provides a harrowing picture of what we can expect when the next shock hits. But sadly, it is far from complete: there is much more that this administration may try to push through under cover of crisis. To become shock resistant, we need to prepare for that too.
CHAPTER NINE
THE TOXIC TO-DO LIST
WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU ARE EXPECTING A CRISIS