The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer

by John C. Mutter

  3.Sarah Burd-Sharps, Kristen Lewis, and Eduardo B. Martins, A Portrait of Louisiana. Louisiana Human Development Report 2009, American Human Development Project of the Social Science Research Council, 2009, http://ssrc-static.s3.amazonaws.com/moa/A_Portrait_of_Louisiana.pdf.

  4.Ibid.

  5.Alan Berube and Bruce Katz, “Katrina’s Window: Confronting Concentrated Poverty Across America” Brookings, October 2005, http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2005/10/poverty-berube.

  6.Kris Macomber, Sarah E. Rusche, and Delmar Wright, “After the Levees Broke: Reaction of College Students to the Aftermeth of Hurricane Katrina,” in David L. Brunsma, David Overfelt, and J. Stephen Picou, The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 166.

  7.Edward L. Glaeser and Raven E. Saks, “Corruption in America,” Journal of Public Economics 90 (2006): 1053–72.

  8.“Ex-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin Gets 10 Years in Prison,” CNN, July 9, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/09/justice/ray-nagin-sentencing/.

  9.Arianna Huffington, “The Flyover Presidency of George W. Bush,” Huffington Post, May 25, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-flyover-presidency-of_b_6566.html.

  10.Stephen C. Webster, “Bush’s Disgraced FEMA Director Stunned at Sandy Response: ‘Why Was This So Quick?’” Raw Story, October 30, 2012, http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/10/bushs-disgraced-fema-director-stunned-at-sandy-response-why-was-this-so-quick/.

  11.Michael D. Brown and Ted Schwarz, Deadly Indifference: The Perfect (Political) Storm: Hurricane Katrina, the Bush White House, and Beyond (Plymouth, MA: Taylor Trade, 2011).

  12.Richard D. Knabb, Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown, “Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Hurricane Center, 2005, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCR-AL122005_Katrina.pdf.

  13.Eric S. Blake, Todd B. Kimberlain, Robert J. Berg, John P. Cangialosi, and John L. Beven II, “Tropical Cyclone Report Hurricane Sandy (AL182012) 22–29 October 2012,” NOAA National Hurricane Center, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL182012_Sandy.pdf.

  14.Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (New York: Crown, 2000).

  15.David L. Johnson, “Service Assessment: Hurricane Katrina August 23–31, 2005,” NOAA, National Weather Service, 2006, http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/assessments/pdfs/Katrina.pdf.

  16.Isaac M. Cline, “Special Report on the Galveston Hurricane of September 8, 1900,” NOAA History, February 4, 2004, http://www.history.noaa.gov/stories_tales/cline2.html.

  17.Julian Gavaghan, “On This Day: Hurricane Betsy Kills 76 in New Orleans in Deadliest Storm Before Katrina,” September 24, 2013, https://uk.news.yahoo.com/on-this-day—hurricane-betsy-kills-76-in-new-orleans-in-deadliest-storm-before-katrina-152855522.html.

  18.Elliot Aronson, “Fear, Denial, and Sensible Action in the Face of Disasters,” Social Research 75, no. 3 (2008): 855–72.

  19.Eric Lipton, “White House Knew of Levee’s Failure on Night of Storm,” New York Times, February 10, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10katrina.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

  20.Keren Fraiman, Austin Long, and Caitlin Talmadge, “Why the Iraqi Army Collapsed (and What Can Be Done about It),” Washington Post, June 13, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/06/13/why-the-iraqi-army-collapsed-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/.

  21.Brown and Schwarz, Deadly Indifference.

  22.Kevin Drum, “Bush and Katrina,” Political Animal (blog), Washington Monthly, September 1, 2005, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007023.php.

  23.Ken Silverstein, “Top FEMA Jobs: No Experience Required,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2005, http://articles.latimes.com/2005/sep/09/nation/na-fema9.

  24.Scott Price, “The Coast Guard’s Katrina Documentation Project,” The U.S. Coast Guard & Hurricane Katrina, November 17, 2014, http://www.uscg.mil/history/katrina/docs/karthistory.asp. Originally published in The Federalist: Newsletter for the Society for History in the Federal Government, 2nd series, no. 12 (Winter 2006-2007): 1, 3-5.

  25.Kathleen B. Blanco, “Taskforce Pelican,” September 30, 2005, http://www.blancogovernor.com/index.cfm?md=newsroom&tmp=detail&catID=1&articleID=532&navID=3&printer=1.

  26.Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007); Jed Horne, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City (New York: Random House, 2006).

  27.Thomas E. Nelson, Zoe M. Oxley, and Rosalee A. Clawson, “Toward a Psychology of Framing Effects,” Political Behavior 19, no. 3 (1997): 221–246.

  28.Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary (October 1965), https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-imagination-of-disaster/; see also https://americanfuturesiup.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/sontag-the-imagination-of-disaster.pdf.

  29.E. L. Quarantelli, “Conventional Beliefs and Counterintuitive Realities,” Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences 75, no. 3 (2008): 873–904, http://dspace.udel.edu/bitstream/handle/19716/4242/Article%20450%20for%20DSpace.pdf?sequence=1.

  30.Ibid.

  31.Kathleen Tierney, Christine Bevc, and Erica Kuligowski, “Metaphors Matter: Disaster Myths, Media Frames, and Their Consequences in Hurricane Katrina,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604, no. 1 (2006): 57–81.

  32.Guy Gugliotta and Peter Whoriskey, “Floods Ravage New Orleans; Two Levees Give Way,” Washington Post, August 31, 2005, http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/56907:floods-ravage-new-orleans.

  33.Kevin McGill, “Officials Throw Up Hands as Looters Ransack City,” San Diego Union-Tribune, August 31, 2005, http://legacy.utsandiego.com/news/nation/20050831-0839-katrina-looting.html.

  34.Robert McFadden and Ralph Blumenthal, “Higher Death Toll Seen; Police Ordered to Stop Looters,” New York Times, September 1, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/national/nationalspecial/01storm.html?pagewanted=print&_r=0.

  35.Sam Coates and Dan Eggen, “In New Orleans, a Desperate Exodus,” Washington Post, September 1, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/31/AR2005083101804.html.

  36.Joseph B. Treaster and Deborah Sontag, “Local Officials Criticize Federal Government over Response,” New York Times, September 2, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/national/nationalspecial/02storm.html?pagewanted=all.

  37.Maureen Dowd, “United States of Shame,” New York Times, September 3, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/03dowd.html.

  38.Anderson Cooper et al., “New Orleans Shelters to Be Evacuated. Floodwaters Rising, Devastation Widespread in Katrina’s Wake,” CNN, August 31, 2005, http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/30/katrina/index.html?PHPSESSID=80205969dd4db592b10a3c325fb0e01c.

  39.Lisa G. Sun, “Disaster Mythology and the Law,” Cornell Law Review 96, no. 5 (2011): 1132.

  40.The stadium had been used twice before—in 1998 and 2004—as a “refuge of last resort” so that people who had been flooded out of their homes knew to seek shelter in the stadium, where they expected food and drink to be supplied as in the past.

  41.Jim Dwyver and Christopher Drew, “Fear Exceeded Crime’s Reality in New Orleans,” New York Times, September 29, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/national/nationalspecial/29crime.html?adxnnl=1&fta=y&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1406477443-FbnkdjkU0QyYWci0LqBcpA; Astra Taylor, “Rebecca Solnit by Astra Taylor,” BOMB (Fall 2009), http://bombmagazine.org/article/3327/rebecca-solnit.

  42.Brian Thevenot, “Reports of Anarchy at Superdome Overstated,” Seattle Times, September 26, 2005, http://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/reports-of-anarchy-at-superdome-
overstated/.

  43.Lee Clarke and Caron Chess, “Elites and Panic: More to Fear Than Fear Itself,” Social Forces 87, no. 2 (2008): 993–1014.

  44.Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). Taylor, “Rebecca Solnit by Astra Taylor.”

  45.Michael E. Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (New York: Basic Civitas, 2005).

  46.Van Jones, “Black People ‘Loot’ Food . . . White People ‘Find’ Food,” Huffington Post, May 25, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/van-jones/black-people-loot-food-wh_b_6614.html.

  47.Webster Commission, The City in Crisis: A Report by the Special Advisor to the Board of Police Commissioners on the Civil Disorder in Los Angeles, UCLA, Institute for Government and Public Affairs, 1992.

  48.Federal Emergency Management Agency, Report of the Joint Fire/Police Task Force on Civil Unrest, February 1994, http://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/fa-142.pdf.

  49.“New Orleans Rocked by Huge Blasts,” BBC, September 2, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4207202.stm.

  50.Philip L. Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

  51.A. C. Thompson, “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,” The Nation, December 17, 2008, http://www.thenation.com/article/katrinas-hidden-race-war.

  52.Mai Denawa, “Behind the Accounts of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923,” Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship, 2005, http://library.brown.edu/cds/kanto/denewa.html

  53.Robert Neff, “The Great Kanto Earthquake Massacre,” Ohmy News, September 29, 2006, http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=363496.

  Chapter 7. Rebuilding as Social Engineering

  1.Mai Denawa, “Behind the Accounts of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923,” Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship, 2005, http://library.brown.edu/cds/kanto/denewa.html; Joshua Hammer, “The Great Japan Earthquake of 1923,” Smithsonian Magazine (May 2011), http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-japan-earthquake-of-1923-1764539/?no-ist; US Geological Survey, “Earthquakes with 1,000 or More Deaths 1900–2014,” USGS Earthquakes Hazard Program, February 19, 2015, http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/world_deaths.php.

  2.C. D. James, “The 1923 Tokyo Earthquake and Fire,” 2002, http://nisee.berkeley.edu/kanto/tokyo1923.pdf.

  3.J. Charles Schencking, The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Chimera of National Reconstruction in Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

  4.Kevin Rozario, The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

  5.John R. Logan, “The Impact of Katrina: Race and Class in Storm-Damaged Neighborhoods,” Brown University, 2006, http://www.s4.brown.edu/katrina/report.pdf.

  6.Gary Rivlin, “A Mogul Who Would Rebuild New Orleans,” New York Times, September 29, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/business/29mogul.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

  7.John Harwood, “Louisiana Lawmakers Aim to Cope with Political Fallout,” Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2005, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB112622923108136137.

  8.Charles Babington, “Some GOP Legislators Hit Jarring Notes in Addressing Katrina,” Washington Post, September 10, 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090901930.html.

  9.Mike Davis, “Gentrifying Disaster,” Mother Jones, October 25, 2005, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/10/gentrifying-disaster.

  10.Lori Rodriguez and Zeke Minaya, “HUD Chief Doubts New Orleans Will Be As Black,” Houston Chronicle, September 29, 2005, http://www.chron.com/news/hurricanes/article/HUD-chief-doubts-New-Orleans-will-be-as-black-1919882.php.

  11.Babington, “Some GOP Legislators Hit Jarring Notes in Addressing Katrina.”

  12.Cathy Young, “Everything You Knew about Hurricane Katrina Was Wrong,” Y-Files (blog), January 6, 2006, http://cathyyoung.blogspot.com/2006/01/everything-you-knew-about-hurricane.html.

  13.Patrick Sharkey, “Survival and Death in New Orleans: An Empirical Look at the Human Impact of Katrina,” Journal of Black Studies 37, no. 4 (2007): 482–501, http://jbs.sagepub.com/content/37/4/482. See also Patrick Sharkey, Were Whites Really More Likely to Die in Katrina? A Re-analysis of Data on Race and the Casualties of Katrina (Cambridge, MA: New Vision, 2006).

  14.Gary Rivlin, “Anger Meets New Orleans Renewal Plan,” New York Times, January 12, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/national/nationalspecial/12plan.html.

  15.Davis, “Gentrifying Disaster.”

  16.Ben Margot, “Plans to Rebuild New Orleans Spark Controversy,” USA Today, January 11, 2006, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-11-neworleansrebuilding_x.htm.

  17.“Geology of National Parks, 3D and Photographic Tours: Breezy Point (Gateway National Recreation Area),” US Geological Survey, January 20, 2015, http://3dparks.wr.usgs.gov/nyc/parks/loc69.htm.

  18.Narayan Sastry and Jesse Gregory, Spatial Dislocation and Return Migration Among New Orleans Residents After Hurricane Katrina (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, 2009), http://paa2010.princeton.edu/papers/101643.

  19.Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).

  20.Peter T. Leeson, and Russell S. Sobel, “Weathering Corruption,” Journal of Law and Economics 51 (2008): 667–81.

  21.Allison Plyer, Elaine Ortiz, Ben Horwitz, and George Hobor, The New Orleans Index at Eight: Measuring Greater New Orleans’ Progress toward Prosperity (New Orleans: Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, 2013).

  22.Haeyoun Park and Archie Tse, “Mapping the Recovery of New Orleans,” New York Times, August 27, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/27/us/20100827-katrina-resettlement.html?_r=0.

  23.Plyer et al., New Orleans Index at Eight.

  24.Logan, “Impact of Katrina.”

  25.Michelle Krupa, “New Orleans’ Official 2010 Census Population Is 343,829, Agency Reports,” Times Picayune, February 3, 2011, http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/02/new_orleans_officials_2010_pop.html.

  26.Elizabeth Fussell, Katherine J. Curtis, and Jack DeWaard, “Recovery Migration to the City of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: A Migration Systems Approach,” Population and Environment 35, no. 3 (2014): 305–22.

  27.Logan, “Impact of Katrina.”

  28.Lyndsey Layton, “In New Orleans, Major School District Closes Traditional Public Schools for Good,” Washington Post, May 28, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/in-new-orleans-traditional-public-schools-close-for-good/2014/05/28/ae4f5724-e5de-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html.

  29.Danielle Dreilinger, “John White: New Orleans Charter Civil Rights Complaint ‘a Joke,’” Times Picayune, May 15, 2014, http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2014/05/john_white_new_orleans_charter.html.

  30.Plyer et al., New Orleans Index at Eight.

  31.Ibid.

  32.Ibid.

  33.Richard Campanella, “Gentrification and Its Discontents: Notes from New Orleans,” NewGeography, 2013, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003526-gentrification-and-its-discontents-notes-new-orleans.

  34.Alberto Amore, “Regeneration from the Rubble. Culture and Creative Urban Renewal in Post-Earthquake Christchurch, New Zealand,” n.d., Academia.edu, http://www.academia.edu/9057248/Regeneration_from_the_rubble._Culture_and_creative_urban_renewal_in_post-earthquake_Christchurch_New_Zealand.

  35.Michelle W. Anderson, “The New Minimal Cities,” Yale Law Journal 123, no. 5 (2014): 1118–1227.

  36.Ben Austen, “The Post-Post-Apocalyptic Detroit,�
�� New York Times, July 11, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/magazine/the-post-post-apocalyptic-detroit.html.

  37.Monica Davey, “A Private Boom amid Detroit’s Public Blight,” New York Times, March 14, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/us/a-private-boom-amid-detroits-public-blight.html.

  38.T. S. Bernard, “Rebuilding After Sandy, but with Costly New Rules,” New York Times, May 10, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/your-money/after-hurricane-sandy-rebuilding-under-higher-flood-insurance.html.

  39.Definition from Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/profit.

  Chapter 8. Disasters as Casus Belli

  1.Aaron Morrison, “Ferguson Police Racism Report: Full Text of Justice Department Probe after Michael Brown’s Death,” International Business Times, March 4, 2015, http://www.ibtimes.com/ferguson-police-racism-report-full-text-justice-department-probe-after-michael-browns-1835944.

  2.Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York: Public Affairs, 2013). See also “Radley Balko on the Militarization of America’s Police Force,” Vice, http://www.vice.com/video/radley-balko-on-the-militarization-of-americas-police-force. This equipment has comes from two sources: one is money in large amounts provided to local municipalities in the wake of 9/11, to be used to strengthen their ability to fight terrorism; the second is from the Obama administration, direct supply of equipment to the military.

  3.Matt Apuzo, “War Gear Flows To Police Departments,” New York Times, June 8, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-police-departments.html?_r=1.

  4.Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary Magazine, August 1965, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-imagination-of-disaster/; see also https://americanfuturesiup.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/sontag-the-imagination-of-disaster.pdf.