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 prevailing wage rates and fringe benefits for corresponding classes of labourers and mechanics employed on similar projects in the area.” The 1965 Executive Order 11246 is an affirmative action provision that “prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors…from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin.” The temporary annulment of these two laws – described as necessary to speed up the recovery process – allowed for contractors to reap enormous profits within this vacuum of deregulation. The ability to focus strictly on profit maximization led to numerous cases of prejudicial contracting, discriminatory employment practices, and the abuse of health and safety standards. It was not until affected groups were able to mobilize, coupled with the public censuring by civil rights alliances, that these regulations were reinstated (Bennett 2006; Olam and Stamper 2006; Button and Oliver-Smith 2008; Schuller 2008).

Whereas disaster capitalism theory provides an authentic outlook of the manipulation of Hurricane Katrina by self-interested individuals, government officials and big corporations to make money, it is not without