2 - The Flood: Political Economy and Disaster

Summary

The consequence of our free market is the failure to provide for the collective good, leaving the poor, the hungry, unhoused, and the untreated ill in the grasp of a metaphorical flood. Some manage to keep their heads above water, some drown in the flood. This chapter discusses how urban disaster plans, like the one in place before Hurricane Katrina, and the American pattern of healing: outrage, faith, hope, charity, and return to business as usual, reinforces existing distributions of wealth, power, and safety. When natural disaster comes, this second flood slams into structural inequality. Those who suffer are disproportionately those already disadvantaged by race, class, disability, or immigration status. The chapter asks the reader to organize a tide of citizen justice-seekers who will become the new flood, transforming the invisible and under-cared-for majority into a force of change. The chapter concludes that calamitous responses to disaster are less stupid mistakes than choices to let some die while others shelter safely.