Neoliberalism in New Orleans

Review of Vincanne Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith:  New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina. Durham: Duke UP, 2013.

“This book is not about Katrina.  It is about Americans who have managed to survive a second-order disaster … about the effects of privatizing our most public social services, and about the failure of these services to respond to Americans in need because they are tied to market forces guided by profit” (1).  So begins Vincanne Adams’s study of neoliberal policies enacted in the wake of Katrina, policies put into play by the U.S. government’s market-driven response to social welfare programs in general and to disaster recovery in particular.  But it is the very particular recovery from Katrina that consumes Adams in this book.  She amasses abundant materials that show the inter-workings of government contracts, banking practices, recovery and rescue programs, faith-based initiatives, and charity-for-profit in Katrina’s wake, and she surrounds this data with narratives gained through extensive interviews with citizens of New Orleans who became ensnared in the distinctly entrepreneurial recovery of their city.  In some sense, the rebuilding of parts of New Orleans has breathed new life into the city, making for an impressive glossy portrait of its post-Katrina fate.  But what Adams sketches out here is not a pretty picture, and it is a picture that shows the fault lines on which profit-driven disaster recovery is likely to proceed anywhere in our increasingly disaster-prone times.
 
The “markets of sorrow” that made booty of human suffering in this particular disaster all stem from market-driven governance policies and their quick implementation in the post-Katrina recovery.  These include government dispensation of money and contracts, typically via FEMA and Homeland Security operations, to the likes of Blackwater, Halliburton, and Bechtel for initial rescue and temporary housing (notably the infamous and toxic FEMA Trailers); government subcontracting of the huge federally-funded state-run initiative known as the Road Home Program to the private-sector corporation ICF International; and implementation of the Small Business Administration loan program which forced victims not only to pay for their own long-term recovery, but to pay interest on that self-sustaining venture.  In a careful and precise analysis of the workings of these markets, Adams shows how they failed, again and again, to help the people most in need to come even close to rebuilding their homes or renting affordable housing, while they proved remarkably successful as profit-making ventures for the corporations and agencies that used public money for generating private profit.  The SBA program alone produced what Adams calls “disaster-induced debt” of the same kind that keeps poor nations perpetually in debt to richer ones, bringing global neoliberal capitalism home to a devastated American city.
 
But there is more.  These “markets of sorrow” were variously supported by what Adams calls “labors of faith”—notably the volunteer labor of faith-based groups who descended on the city by the hundreds of thousands, whose good works replaced direct government-funded rebuilding assistance and transformed New Orleans into a veritable missionary outpost.  In addition, the more general operations of numerous charity initiatives unfolded through the market’s penetration of humanitarian assistance.  This vast “charity economy” continues to extend from the labor of house-gutting and rebuilding by volunteers to the entrepreneurial initiatives of both government and corporations that basically conscript volunteers and the poor into the service of private-sector firms managed by what Adams identifies as “intermediary” organizations—such as the HandsOn Network and Points of Light Institute.  Charity is not so much given, but administered—relying on free-market strategies, and blurring any effective distinction between “for profit” and “nonprofit” initiatives.  In the case of disasters like Katrina, a particular kind of emotional response that should rightly fuel volunteer action and philanthropic contributions gets channeled through an “affect economy” in which a surplus of emotion serves market agendas.  ICF, which made a mess of the Road Home Program, resurfaces as a major investor in faith-based programs, offering its services (for pay) to help such groups organize themselves according to successful market strategies.  The problem is not only that affect gets translated into volunteer labor for profit-driven initiatives, or that homeless and devastated people are forced to borrow money and told to pick up their bootstraps and become successful entrepreneurs, but that all such markets and labors proceed with virtually no governmental regulation or oversight.
 
For people in New Orleans, this is a story that really hits home.  The ethnographic component of this book, compiled by Adams and her team of interviewers, offers stories told by people from all across the racial, class, and geographic divides within the city.  These testimonies come not only from the devastated Lower Ninth Ward, but equally devastated areas of St. Bernard Parish situated even lower on the geographic map.  Some of the most riveting accounts come from the Gentilly neighborhood, a mixed-racial section of the city, and others come from comparatively wealthy individuals who were better positioned to recover yet still lost much of what they once possessed and nearly all of their savings for the future.  One couple, who lost their daughter to the floodwaters and struggled to rebuild their home amid horrific devastation, described their situation as “‘the opposite of recovery’” (113). With over 80% of the city flooded, Katrina was a great leveler but was utterly devastating to those who had little to begin with.  Many books, from memoirs to oral histories and ethnographic interviews, have delivered these first-hand accounts to a wide readership, at least before, as Adams points out, “Katrina fatigue” set in (178).  What is unique in Adams’s account of post-Katrina policy is that these stories are supported by precise data that explains the economics that drove their fate in market-driven recovery programs.  As she explains, the story of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina is “not a story of the decline of the welfare state or the rise of crony capitalism,” but “a story about how the two have become intertwined in new ways:  crony capitalism now makes money on the welfare state” (13).  This new partnership of market economies and social welfare policy operates in especially insidious ways at sites of disaster, and the narratives of people in New Orleans who have experienced that “second-order disaster” are the ones best positioned to describe its effects.
 
I have read Vincanne Adams’s book both as a scholar devoted to New Orleans culture and literature, and as a native of the city who lost a home to the floodwaters of Katrina.  Her arguments, her insights, her interviews all ring true in the long echo of post-Katrina memory, and explain crisply what happened, and why.  Who were in fact the “first responders” to this national disaster?  Not the U.S. government, as we all now know, but as Adams shows, contract workers of the likes of those employed by Blackwater—the private-sector paramilitary group that now goes under(cover) by the name Xe Services, and whose quick arrival in the post-Katrina city resulted from our national investment in private firms that now perform the paid labor of disaster relief.  How is it that post-New Orleans was immediately transformed into the likes of a missionary outpost?  The emotional response to the disaster and its victims, as Adams documents, was overwhelming, and yet this volunteer labor ignited by affect not only quickly replaced direct government assistance, but was also quickly consumed in the directives of profit-driven charity.  Why were fresh new banks sprouting up all over the devastated landscape of the city just a few months after the flood?  Adams’s sharp analysis of the workings of the SBA loan program makes it crystal clear who was reaping profits from these eager lenders, and who was paying back the debt, at interest.
 
For scholars familiar with critiques of neoliberal politics and policies, this book may seem to offer yet another example of the same story of capitalism run amuck in disaster zones.  And in some conspicuous ways, New Orleans has already occupied a place in those stories—in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007), for example, the charter school system in New Orleans serves as an example of what happens when private enterprise rushes in to replace ailing public school systems.  But there is a difference between using select business enterprise sites in post-Katrina New Orleans as an example of disaster capitalism and using the entire disaster of Katrina and post-Katrina recovery to understand what Adams calls the “apogee” of market-driven public programs.  Katrina, after all, stands as the most singular, major disaster to strike a US city for the past century or more—certainly the most destructive in our distinctly modern moment where climate change joins with breaches in the social contract to breed catastrophe.  Post-Katrina recovery, taken as a whole—from initial rescue operations on through the machinations of small business loans and philanthrocapitalism—shows how neoliberal policy has come to fruition at the site of a catastrophe where over 80% of a major US city flooded.  In this sense, it is not precisely some new claim about neoliberal theory that Adams advances here, though her engagement with this theory is careful and nuanced.  Instead, what she contributes is a pivotal long-term study of neoliberal policies that reach a high-water mark both on the flooded homes in New Orleans and on the theoretical landscape surrounding disaster capitalism.  As Adams herself puts it, New Orleans after Katrina is not just another post-disaster story:  “It is the story of the effects of market-driven public policies that have reached their apogee” (16). And it is hardly over yet.
 
In a brief final chapter entitled “Katrina as the Future,” Adams describes the legacy of Katrina as the “restructuring of America’s political economy” and thus “a foreshadowing of a future that could belong to anyone, a catastrophic revelation of vulnerability not just of a few Americans but of an American way of life” (181).  Life has indeed changed in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, and in many ways, the city is booming—even as some of its neighborhoods have been left to rot.  Simply put, the success of market-driven recovery typically obscures the people and places that the market left behind, including those who gained some traction on landscapes where both well-intentioned volunteers and unrestrained developers have rushed to build on increasingly vulnerable terrain.  Charity initiatives in the famous “Make it Right” program in the Lower Ninth Ward offer at once an example of the power of charitable giving but also what happens when it proceeds without governmental regulation, or without assurance that the Army Corps of Engineers can come through with their latest levee designs, or that funding for such projects will emerge in timely fashion, or at all.  New “green” houses barely obscure the fact that much of this area remains in blight and that many of its residents have permanently evacuated—not to mention that its future remains precarious when a category four or five hurricane next comes knocking on the door.  As I was writing this review in the fall of 2013, I just received the latest press release from the Office of the Mayor on the progress of recovery in New Orleans.  One can’t help but feel a lift when reading some of the good news—such as the reopening of the Saenger Theatre after years of decline and shutdown even before Katrina, and the path of such recovery initiatives around the historic Tremé area and especially its performance venues that trace their legacy back to Congo Square.  This $52 million dollar renovation was the result of a public-private partnership between the city and the Canal Street Development Corporation, whose profits from this contractual enterprise remain unreported.  Next, we hear news that on another side of town, in the devastated neighborhood of Gentilly, a new Walmart is opening, and that still another Walmart super center is slated for development in the even more devastated area of New Orleans East.  Three hundred new jobs are promised at the Gentilly Walmart, as if manna from heaven were being sprinkled on this blighted area.  Meanwhile, back next to the Mercedes Superdome, they are celebrating the $200 million South Market District development, combining  over 200 luxury apartments with shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues—the project of Domain Companies, whose website boasts their reputation as one of the nation’s preeminent real estate and investment firms.  The profit that Domain is reaping on this project, again, is left unnoted.  And the people who move into these luxury apartments are decidedly not those who are still rebuilding their homes in blighted areas and ecologically vulnerable neighborhoods.  Instead, these people are made to be grateful that Walmart has at last arrived.
 
Adams’s claim that the profit-driven recovery of post-Katrina New Orleans is an ominous “foreshadowing of the future” also finds support in this latest good news report from the city (181). New Orleans has recently been designated as a “pilot city” for a newly created resilience dashboard for cities rebounding from “natural disasters” (Office of the Mayor).  The effort is funded by a $100 million commitment from the Rockefeller Foundation and will be implemented by the software company Palantir, a company specializing in U.S. government customers and receiving heavy investments from the CIA.  For people who recognize that Katrina was no “natural disaster” to begin with,  but the product of a long history of bad contracts between government and business that paved the path for risky development, oil drilling and dredging, and faulty levees, the investments of Domain and Palatir appear as plastic Mardi Gras beads thrown from the gods of profit.  If such auspicious gifts chart the future of disaster recovery, then Adams’s book stands as both a scary account of what actually happened in Katrina’s wake, and an ominous projection of a future run by corporations whose profits are driven by disaster and whose operations are concealed under the wing of what was once the humanitarian work of government.

Ruth Salvaggio, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the author of several books, most recently Hearing Sappho in New Orleans: The Call of Poetry from Congo Square to the Ninth Ward (LSU Press, 2012), and essays on environmental disaster, poetics, and imagination.