Hurricane Sandy and the Shock Doctrine: template

This post is a response to an in-class assignment for my ENG 101 class at LaGuardia Community College about New York City's response to Hurricane Sandy. I argue that despite the city's timely reconstruction of the subway system, the city failed to protect many ordinary New Yorker's from the storm's harmful aftereffects. The city's failure to provide shelter for the most vulnerable, in particular, is a troubling legacy from the storm - and not necessarily a unique failure of New York. In fact, that failure may have been intentional, as many municipal and state governments have leveraged natural disasters to promote privitization and profit-driven schemes that Noami Klein calls "disaster capitalism." In "Blanking the Beach," Klein writes about the privatization of Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunam and writes that the housing problems affecting displaced persons after the tsunami were "structural and deliberate" (79). In other words, governments put commercial interests or private companies ahead of providing land and resources to poor communities. Working off of Klein's idea, I call this concept intentional failure. Intentional failures occur when governments fail on purpose in order to create situations that benefit private interests. In the case of Sandy, governments failed to provide adequate housing to displaced people. They could have put people up in hotels indefinitely, for example, but they didn't - in part because they probably claimed to not have the revenue, and in part because the hotels couldn't subsidize the rooms. Yet raising taxes on rich New Yorkers and wealthy businesses could have produced the needed revenue to keep people in the housing, or the city could have passed a law requiring hotels to continue subsidizing people until they found fair priced, replacement housing. We can see these issues in article such as THIS and THIS and THIS (these are the first sites appearing on Google for the search phrase: "kicked out of hotels in new york after hurricane sandy homeless shelter."