Mailbox in Flood Waters New Mexico, USA
attribution: © Royalty-Free/CORBIS
Once the storm-surge waters receded after Hurricane Katrina plowed through New Orleans, the city has since experienced another flood, one that rushed in to fill the vacuum created by tragedy in order to reap profit: Disaster capitalism.
While the impoverished struggled under the natural disaster intensifying the social disaster that had characterized their lives, the Commons were ripe for disaster capitalists to create their predatory market, notably in the person of school CEO-as-superintendent Paul Vallas. The Recovery School District accomplished the privatizers' dream of dismissing public school teachers, rendering teachers' unions impotent, and then flooding the city with "no excuses" charter schools (often Knowledge Is Power Program [KIPP] charters or KIPP-clones) staffed primarily by Teach For America (TFA) recruits.
As Sarah Carr has documented in Hope Against Hope, mostly minority families already