Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina
240
Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina
240eBook
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Overview
Filled with the often desperate voices of residents who returned to New Orleans, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith describes the human toll of disaster capitalism and the affect economy it has produced. While for-profit companies delayed delivery of federal resources to returning residents, faith-based and nonprofit groups stepped in to rebuild, compelled by the moral pull of charity and the emotional rewards of volunteer labor. Adams traces the success of charity efforts, even while noting an irony of neoliberalism, which encourages the very same for-profit companies to exploit these charities as another market opportunity. In so doing, the companies profit not once but twice on disaster.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822379195 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 859,260 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Vincanne Adams is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She has written and edited numerous books in medical anthropology, including Sex and Development: Science, Sexuality and Morality in Global Perspective (coedited with Stacy Leigh Pigg) also published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
MARKETS OF SORROW, LABORS OF FAITH
New Orleans in the Wake of KatrinaBy VINCANNE ADAMS
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5449-9
Chapter One
IT'S NOT ABOUT KATRINA
Why should [we] continue to carry the full burden of this recovery on [our] backs? ... We are in a dead standstill, as there is no money for building materials. We were devastated both physically and emotionally. Our mental health is in crisis. The depression has shifted from the storm to the hopelessness and stress of the Road Home. Yes, it is that bad.... A little girl came to volunteer with her mom from Boston. She was nine years old. And she asked her mother on the third day of working in [our community], "Mom, when are we going back to America?" You know ... that really ... [crying]. Sorry. I said I wasn't going to do this. But it's overwhelming.... [taking a deep breath].... So I think I'm here to ask you all.... We are Americans. We are homeowners and we pay taxes and we are citizens. My question to you is: when can we rejoin the country?—CAROLINE REEVES, community organizer, testimony for the U.S. Senate, May 2007
This book is not about Hurricane Katrina. It is about Americans who have managed to survive a second-order disaster that was precipitated by the success of profit-driven solutions to a crisis of need at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is about the disaster of stalled and prolonged recovery, not the disaster that preceded it. It is about the price that is paid in human terms for the success of processes set in motion long before Hurricane Katrina, 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. It is also about the other face of privatization: the grass-roots, community, and faith-based responses that rose up in the wake of these failures and the new economy that has emerged in the wake of such responses. This economy is based on the circulation of an affective surplus—the emotional responsiveness and ethical inducement to action generated by a recognition of ongoing need among Americans—and the unpaid labor force it mobilizes. Finally, this book is about the infringements of market logic that impinge on even the charity sector in ways that promise, once again, profits gained from the spoils of a disaster and its victims. New Orleanians are in a good position to tell us this story, and perhaps none are better qualified to do so than the Bradlieus.
The Bradlieus
In August 2005, Henry and Gladys Bradlieu lived comfortably in retirement in one of the oldest properties in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. Henry had served in Vietnam, had been shot several times, and was a three-time Purple Heart recipient. He then became a civil servant for the U.S. Postal Service; after he retired he spent his free time golfing at the public course. Gladys had worked different clerical and assistant jobs her whole life and had last been a data entry clerk at City Hall. They owned their two-bedroom home on a corner lot in what was, in 2005, a densely packed mixed-race neighborhood. They were a success story of middle-class comfort that surpassed many of their relatives who lived across town in Mid-City and the Upper Ninth Ward. The Bradlieus had no idea how quickly everything they had lived and saved for in order to retire in modest comfort could be taken away from them.
On August 27, 2005, the Bradlieus evacuated to Texas and watched the storm on television; they didn't know yet that their home would survive the hurricane but would be swallowed up by the floods resulting from the collapse of the levee system thereafter. Their home filled with ten feet of water, and it sat like that for three weeks. When they finally came back to the city a few months later, Gladys recalled it was so quiet. "No birds, no trees, no color. Nothing. Just gray, everywhere gray." Furniture was covered in layers of lifeless mud. Silverware that had floated off of kitchen counters was strewn about in layers of smelly, gooey sludge. Family photographs were blackened and moldy. Clothing, linens, books, and shoes were indistinguishable from the walls, which had wallpaper peeling away in sheets from the stained brown-gray sheetrock beneath. Worst of all, Gladys said, were the trees. Most of the trees had been uprooted, and the rest were covered in brownish-gray mud. They were as lifeless as the neighborhood around them.
Like a lot of returning residents, Henry and Gladys didn't really know where to begin. They had received a check for $2,400 and a trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The church folks in Texas who helped the Bradlieus while they were displaced sent them home with some $500 taken up in collection from parishioners, a few items of clothing, some dishware, glasses, and linens. In December 2005, they moved into their three-hundred-square-foot trailer parked lengthwise on what was once their front lawn. As African Americans who had lived through the years prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act, they were used to pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, or at least with nothing if not the Lord's help. Henry said, "We'll rebuild."
Five years later, in January 2011, at the age of seventy, Henry Bradlieu died, having spent most of the last three years of his life in his cramped bed at one end of a FEMA trailer, paralyzed by a stroke that he suffered in 2008 on the day he learned that he would be denied, for the second time, federal assistance for rebuilding from the Louisiana Recovery Authority's Road Home Program. Gladys recalled her husband's anger on that day in 2008. "He was beside himself," she said. His two-and-a-half-year struggle to prove to Road Home that he owned his home, including getting an affidavit from the previous owner, months and months of lost paperwork, repeat visits to agency offices, being treated like a criminal, and the sheer discomfort of living in his little FEMA trailer, was too much. Gladys had tried to reason with people at the office of the Road Home Program, providing the paperwork and the bond-for-deed sale records showing that they owned their home. Bond-for-deed sales were common among those who had been denied opportunities for mortgages through conventional banks. Despite the fact that Gladys had retrieved documentation from City Hall that showed such transactions were legal and conferred ownership, she was unable to convince them. She was resigned, but "Henry was different," she said.
He wanted to cuss them out. One time we had one meeting and we went all the way to [Governor] Blanco's office and he cussed them out and they had to get people to escort him out of there.... He was so mad.... They were trying to say that we hadn't flooded in our home. Can you imagine? Henry said, "I fought for my country. Look what my country did for me? They kicked me in the head."
By 2008, Henry and Gladys's savings were gone. Their pensions were not enough to afford even the building materials for repairing their home. He was out of time, out of money, out of patience. In the same year that Henry was denied his request for a mere $50,000 to rebuild, the executives at ICF International who ran the Road Home Program under a no-bid federal subcontract awarded themselves $2 million in bonuses and posted record earnings for their stockholders. When Henry got the letter that denied him funds for a second time, he couldn't believe it. That afternoon, he told Gladys he was going in to take a nap; within minutes of lying down in his tiny trailer bed, he suffered a massive stroke that left him nearly totally paralyzed.
Gladys took care of Henry after that. She fed him, cleaned him, tended his bed sores, got his medications, and, in her spare time, tried to figure out what to do with her gutted, empty home that sat some fifteen feet from her trailer door. Even the tasks of keeping the weeds down and the rats out were challenges. When the Bradlieus finally moved back into their rebuilt home two years later in July 2010, it was only because a neighborhood volunteer group had championed their cause. It took two years, eight hundred volunteers, and a steady stream of donations from ordinary people—people who, upon hearing Henry's story, would say things like "Screw the government! We'll rebuild it ourselves!"
The wait was too long for Henry. Only six months after moving in, he died. Gladys said she believed Henry had waited to die until she was settled back in their home. "You know," she said, "it wasn't Hurricane Katrina that killed him. It was the recovery that killed him." Remembering the day of his stroke, she said, "Look what they did for him. "Look what they did to him."
Delayed Recovery and Market-Driven Governance
There are specific reasons it took so long for people to recover in New Orleans. These reasons are largely tied to forces that were far beyond the control of any returning resident or any local official. They were mobilized in and through political and economic arrangements that allowed them. These arrangements turned disaster recovery into a for-profit endeavor that enabled private companies to obtain government relief funds while offering little accountability to the people for whom these funds were intended. They allowed banks to offer loans that drove up debt among victims while generating interest-based returns for lenders. They allowed insurance companies to evade culpability when they refused to pay for damages but extract further insurance payments from people whose homes could no longer be inhabited. Finally, they ensured that real recovery would be left up to local volunteers, churches, and nonprofit charities. Recovery that should have taken a few years was turned into what locals called a "funeral that would not end." For people like Henry Bradlieu, the funeral became all too real. Henry Bradlieu's experience was not exceptional; it was exemplary.
The testimonies and analyses of New Orleanians' experiences of trying to rebuild and recover offer a glimpse of the inevitable outcome of what is often called neoliberal capitalism. In New Orleans, we can see in bold relief the contours of our political and social predicament created by neoliberal policies of governing, or what Margaret Somers has more descriptively called market-driven governance. Emerging out of a half-century commitment to neoliberal policies that favor and advance market-based solutions for our most pressing economic and social problems, we see now a steady transformation of public-sector institutions into market-based consortia wherein fiscal, for-profit transactions become the means by which access to federal resources, even for things like disaster relief, is determined. George Soros has called attention to the dangers of this trend—a form of market fundamentalism—in which popular support prevails for ending "big government" alongside policies that allow the free market to determine how we allocate our national resources in order to solve not only our fiscal problems but also our social problems. What New Orleanians' stories offer is a glimpse into how the trend toward letting the for-profit market serve as the engine that drives public-sector work is both much more complex and more pervasive than we have seen in the past, and also how it fails.
Despite calls for ending big government, New Orleans offers evidence of an ongoing dependence upon big government to fund the work of things like disaster recovery in ways that help markets and companies but hurt people. To be sure, market-driven governance has in no way ended government involvement in socioeconomic affairs. Market-driven governance simply offers new ways to bring the market and its rationalities of profit into governance. Somers notes that these trends have been successful at converting popular legislative agendas, which historically favored and protected an ethos of "shared fate, equal risk, and social justice" into a situation in which exclusions on the benefits of citizenship are determined by contractual opportunities governed by the market. Market-driven governance is what happens, she writes, when "disproportionate market power disrupts the carefully constructed balance [of power among state, market, and citizens, adjudicated in the public sphere], as risks and costs of managing human frailties under capitalism once shouldered by government and corporations get displaced onto individual workers and vulnerable families."
The conscription of the profit sector to do the work that the public needs has in no way resulted in more efficient or effective recovery for those trying to return and rebuild after a disaster. New Orleans offers an example of how this happens. The costs of shouldering responsibility for recovery were shifted to families and individuals, while profits were generated for corporations that were given responsibility for managing what many people still think of as civil and social welfare needs. Companies that were hired to help New Orleanians rebuild developed high-profile IPO offerings and upward trends in stock values, while homeowners were forced to go into debt, arbitration, and lawsuits to recover funds they were promised. The delayed recovery produced a second-order disaster that had its own logic and rationales that were nearly as deadly as those that produced the floods in the first place.
The disaster of market-driven governance emerges today as an entrenched set of institutional arrangements in which government continues to play a key role in protecting the interests of market-oriented businesses that, in turn, are increasingly authorized to make money not only on key government activities like defense contracting and infrastructure but also on key commitments to social welfare, including assistance for disaster and recovery aid—that is, on the business of social suffering. These arrangements define the contours and also the predicament of our current political economy; accounts from New Orleans in the five-year aftermath of Katrina offer us insights about the uneven success of such policies when it comes to the social contract, demonstrating how well this arrangement is working for some and how poorly it works for others. In the chapters herein, we will see how market-oriented policies deployed to effect and augment recovery instead enabled and encouraged private-sector investment in public-sector problems in ways that prioritized corporate financial rewards and fiscal growth over other measures of success that have, at different historical moments in the United States, held sway because they were protected by a strong public sector.
The Inefficiencies of Profit
When government funds allocated for relief are funneled through private for-profit companies on their way to being distributed to victims of disaster, something happens to the money. The interference of competing demands of the market can impede operations, pulling resources in other directions than downward to the recipients who are in need. What we will see herein is an example of a privately organized, publicly funded bureaucratic failure. The market, which many believe provides an impartial engine for sustainable infrastructure and social welfare, actually got in the way of hoped-for outcomes. The assumption that government bureaucracy was to blame for the disaster of delayed recovery was voiced, but it concealed a more pivotal truth: such delays were actually a result of the inefficiencies of profit.
Commitment to neoliberal arrangements on the part of policymakers, planners, and citizens alike in the United States has been growing for more than fifty years even though it has never been universally supported. Today, the market penetrates more and more domains of the public sector, where one finds large-scale commitment to the idea that profit motivation will create an equitable and efficient trickling down of resources to those in need who deserve it. This trickledown is believed to occur in two ways: first by the growth of businesses that find ways to solve problems of need while also making profits and, second, by the recognition on the part of large profit owners that charity will work better than public-sector institutions to take care of those in need. Both of these processes are seen in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Businesses organized to help with relief arose at the intersection between government and citizen and seized opportunities to show that the private sector could succeed where government would fail. Subcontracted to the government to carry out redistribution activities, these businesses were nevertheless allowed to work with little regulatory oversight. In the end, they were able to profit from human tragedy, turning sorrows into opportunities for capital investment in what Naomi Klein calls a form of disaster capitalism. In New Orleans, one can trace this dynamic in the actions of private-sector businesses like Halliburton, the Shaw Group, and Blackwater, who were called in for rescue-and-relief operations, all the way to the recovery subcontractors like ICF International and the banks who obtained Small Business Administration loan support and insurance companies who denied payments to their clients.
Even more surprising, and frightening, is how the trail of profit making can also be followed all the way to the nonprofit sector, with creeping market penetration into the charities and faith-based groups that stepped up in response to the failure of the for-profit sector. Organizations like HandsOn and Points of Light Institute have emerged as part of a new national-level corporate assemblage that makes use of federal funds in new ways, bringing charity into the mix of market-oriented opportunities to take care of a needy public. As this assemblage grows, so, too, does the degree to which our economy turns need and the affective responses it generates into a new source of profit. Questions about how best to provide for people in need (and which of these people qualify for help) after a disaster are vividly brought to the forefront as the recovery industry becomes a new sector for market opportunism and growth.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MARKETS OF SORROW, LABORS OF FAITH by VINCANNE ADAMS Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
1. It's Not about Katrina 12. The Making of a Disaster 22
3. "If This Could Happen to Us, It Could Happen to Anyone" 55
4. Navigating the Road Home 74
5. Getting to the Breaking Point 99
6. Faith in a Volunteer Recovery 126
7. Charity, Philanthrocapitalism, and the Affect Economy 153
8. Katrina as the Future 176
Acknowledgments 191
Notes 193
Bibliography 213
Index 225