Disaster capitalism let politicians profit from Katrina’s destruction

Evidence

For years, scientists and journalists had warned that if southern Louisiana took “a direct hit from a major hurricane,” the levees could fail and the region would be flooded and destroyed, as the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported in 2002. Ignoring the warnings, it was almost as if politicians were hoping for a destructive hurricane to occur so that what Naomi Klein termed “disaster capitalism” could follow it. Politicians could award multimillion-dollar reconstruction contracts to corporations filling their campaign coffers, and New Orleans’s Black residents locked on prime real estate could be cleared away to make room for gentrification. Whether they actually hoped for something like Hurricane Katrina hardly mattered, because politicos and disaster capitalists (Vice President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, for example) capitalized on the destruction. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1199

Categorization

• XREF: Disaster-capitalism’s profit motive dovetails with Kendi’s core claim that self-interest drives racist policy — evidence that disaster is monetized via the existing racial order.
• QUESTION: The ‘even Klansmen got rich off fake donation websites’ aside is a small rabbit hole — worth checking whether that’s verified and what it looked like.