strophe for financial gain, in one of the most blatant instances of disaster capitalism in recent years. In the aftermath of the disaster, the administration sought to remove tax breaks for small business, lodge suggestions that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) forgo environmental statutes such as the Clean Air Act, waive preconditions of affirmative action for contractors, and lift the cap on the number of work hours for truck drivers (Dreier 2006). Bush’s government, buoyed by Republican congressmen also pursued $50 billion in cuts of public expenditure on social services for the poor such as Medicaid, child care, food stamps and Supplemental Security Income (Dreier 2006). It rescinded rules capping the number of hours truckers can work. Firms and corporations with linkages to the government were added no-bid contracts for the rebuilding and reconstruction work. Firms and large corporations with political connections reaped big. Halliburton earned $ 124.9 million from contracts with the Department of Defence, FEMA, the US Navy and Army Corps of Engineers (Halliburton Watch 2005; Adams, Hattum and English 2009: 629). This was despite the fact that Halliburton botched its performance in Iraq and underwent 20 investigations for purported crimes such as bribery, vote rigging, overcharging (Adams, Hattum and English 2009: 629). However, the firm’s close relationship with the Bush administration played strongly to their advantage. The U.S construction industry furnished the Republican Party presidential and congressional candidates with over half of their $71 million pledges during the 2004 election cycle. Hurricane Katrina was their opportune moment to push their agendas through Bush’s Republican administration. According to the Los Angeles Times, lobbyists representing energy, transportation and other corporate sectors dominated the task forces created by Louisiana Senators David Vitter (a Republican) and Mary Landrieu (a Democrat) to advise them in drafting the Louisiana Katrina Reconstruction Act. The legislation included “billions of dollars’ worth of business for clients of those lobbyists.”

In this case, crisis was exploited on behalf of what Klein would call the “disaster-capitalism complex” or the privatization and contracting out of disaster response. While the scope of the disaster necessitated the use of private contracting, some of the largest no-bid contracts went to firm that were used by the government in Iraq: Halliburton’s KBR (military base construction), Blackwater (provided security for FEMA, the frenzy of firms pouring into Louisiana and Mississippi to secure largely no bid contracts was encouraged by the relaxation of longstanding labour protections. Shortly after the failure of Louisiana’s levy system, the federal government overturned The Davis-Bacon Act and Executive Order 11246. The 1931 Davis-Bacon Act called for federal contractors “to pay their labourers and mechanics not less than the pre