








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. 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. 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. 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. ...]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.
