Cedric Johnson has gathered a coherent set of essays that explore the political economy of New Orleans as revealed and intensified by Hurricane Katrina. The core insight of the book is that New Orleans offers an example of neoliberalism expressed as ideology and a set of policies used to enrich and improve the lives of some while excluding and oppressing others. According to Johnson, the ideology of neoliberalism infuses all social interactions with market relations, “a form of state regulation that best facilitates the global movement and profit of capital” (as cited, p. xxi). The policies implied by this ideology include a paradoxical reorganization, not shrinking, of the state to expand profits through public subsidy; increased exploitation of poor people; and increased access to natural resources, including land. The correlates of using state power to enhance profits are efforts to control excluded populations, through “more extensive policing and increasingly invasive forms of surveillance and social control” (p. xxii). Racial, ethnic, gender, and immigration-status cues identify populations for differential treatment of facilitation or control.

The following paragraphs explore the chapters as they analyze this ideological, political, and socioeconomic project. In addition, I consider one of the questions that political science ought to address, which is why a neoliberal project appears to have won out against alternatives. This victory seems surprising, as Katrina induced national introspection on race and class inequities, and for a brief moment led to impressive mobilization of popular and solidarity movements.

To frame the contradictions of neoliberal governance, Johnson notes that “neoliberal efforts to marketize politics and privatize information, life, and space threaten the possibility of social equality and meaningful democracy” (p. xxii). In a sweeping chapter combining political economy, geographic, and architectural observation, Paul A. Passavant observes the central role of state action in creating current patterns, in which “a post-Fordist landscape was produced, significantly, through state practices” and “neoliberal development … created or intensified zoned, segregated spaces that are containable and defensible” (p. 88). An industrialized, financial, and shipping center has been turned into a tourist playland, where whitewashed “entertainment zones” offer visiting middle-class tourists a dose of fantasy, while architectural instruments geographically compartmentalize local populations into either “prisons” or “gated communities” separated by “highways” and kept in place by “privatized security” (pp. 106–17).

Johnson and coauthor Geoffrey Whitehall consider the nature of citizenship and sovereignty under neoliberalism, rooted in the logic of the market and in “individualizing responsibility” (p. 63). They have particular critiques of both the do-good capitalists, who offer market solutions to social problems, and the benevolent neoliberals, who indicate “an ethical commitment to those in need but simultaneously promote market-centric approaches … and seek to manage inequality through the inculcation of neoliberal technologies” (p. 71). Instead of collective action, solidarity, and class consciousness, such efforts highlight self-reliance, entrepreneurial culture, and individual action.

This preference is mimicked in the media, as Linda Robertson observes, in the rapidity with which a traditional neoliberal framing dominated. While Katrina temporarily freed media critics to “begin a serious examination of a national issue: race and class” (p. 278), they returned almost immediately to frame disaster as a combination of uncontrollable natural events, bureaucratic and state ineptitude, and self-reliant individuals. The backdrop to this renewed neoliberalism was conveniently white and nonurban, and the 2008 Midwest floods, characterized as “violent nature vs. private property defended by stout-hearted individuals” (p. 285), helped turn Katrina and New Orleans into a forgotten foil.

A chapter by Chris Russill and Chad Lavin explains how neoliberal ideas alter the concept and practice of governance. By focusing on Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown's invocation of the “tipping point” concept, Russill and Lavin emphasize the neoliberal distortion that denies real security, relief, or reconstruction and is instead obsessed with managing crises in public relations terms. The main objective is to restore the confidence that markets need in order to get on with business, mostly by hiding or putting a “band-aid” on real problems (p. 10). Others refer to this disaster response as “governing by public relations,” or more ominously, “murder by public policy”; neoliberal “government has privatized the delivery of services, and state legitimacy is secured through media coverage and public opinion” (p. 24).

Two chapters evaluate in detail the application of neoliberal ideas to public services, with Adrienne Dixson evaluating education and John Arena housing. Dixson observes that New Orleans has become a laboratory for charters, which now operate over 70% of the city's public schools. She argues that individual choice introduced by charters produced a “three-tiered system that may exacerbate racialized educational inequity” (p. 131). In addition to dubious impacts on students, one of the most interesting observations concerns the impact on the public sector, one of the few opportunities for African American women to obtain decent employment. Before Katrina, teachers could expect a reasonable amount of job security and pay secured through collective bargaining, and a majority of teachers had more than 10 years of experience. After the city took advantage of Katrina to fire all 4,000 public school teachers and effectively break the teachers' union, a majority of the workforce in 2007 had fewer than three years of experience and 36% had one year or less, a result produced at least in part by the influx of well-meaning, mostly white, inexperienced Teach for America volunteers (p. 133).

Arena focuses on the politics of public housing, noting that the decade prior to Katrina saw public housing cut in half, from 14,000 to 7,000 units, and replaced by privatized mixed-income developments with far fewer subsidized units. Arena considers this a war on working-class residents, and he understands occasional victories by public housing defenders to be the result of a political and ideological strategy that combined “uncompromising defense of public housing, interracial class unity, direct action, and democracy” (p. 157). In one of the book's few attempts to explain the defeat of alternatives to neoliberalism, he lays the blame on the doorstep of “identity politics,” which “played a central role in undermining and sapping the strength” of the public housing movement (p. 177).

While Arena offers an ideational understanding of the victory of neoliberalism, the tools of political science might usefully be applied to the determinants of political struggle. One specialty of political science is the structural and institutional analysis of political conflict, following E. E. Schattschneider's dictum that “organization is itself a mobilization of bias.”Footnote ¹ When we consider how authority is exercised in New Orleans, closer observation reveals a bevy of quasi-governmental decision-making institutions that by accident or design evade democratic oversight and hand power to entities led by unelected appointees. Such entities can be called satellites because they are related to, but are not entirely of, city government, and their decisions occur with limited democratic and especially lower-class input. Many satellites predated Katrina, and not all of them were explicitly tailored for elite capture, but their fragmentation of authority deserves at least some of the blame for the weakness of the local state in the face of Katrina. As Johnson notes, “a balkanized system of levee boards [that] functioned as a form of petty patronage for successive administrations in the city and neighboring parishes … failed to enforce basic laws that were crucial to maintaining the integrity of the system” (p. xxx).

Colleagues and I are currently mapping the satellite entities in New Orleans through an interactive, searchable, sortable database of quasi-governmental entities made available through a website.Footnote ² We have counted more than 200 such satellites to date, and for the current discussion of neoliberalism, two patterns bear mention: privatization and “ring-fencing.” Some of the satellites appear created to privatize public assets, hidden under the oversight of an unelected board, commission, or public benefit corporation. Somewhat out of public sight, such satellites interact with private-sector allies to facilitate efforts to secure monopoly rents from what had previously been public. To evade the few sunshine laws that exist, these entities can be accompanied by additional institutional innovations to take decisions and profits further from public control.

In a prototypical case, the late 1800s Audubon Commission was established to manage a plantation obtained by the city that now includes parts of Tulane University, Audubon Park, a golf course, and the city zoo. For its first century, the commission chronically underinvested and allowed its assets to deteriorate, but a coalition of business leaders gave it a new incarnation in the 1970s, altering commission rules and establishing private-sector affiliates, the Audubon Nature Institute and the Audubon Foundation. The institute manages the day-to-day operation and draws on capital raised in publicly backed debt or grants and donations mobilized by the foundation, and they have together expanded their assets into a zoo, aquarium, and insectarium, offering pay scales outside public-sector limits and acting as a lobby to push the city further towards tourism. More recent entities that fit into this same category of privatizing a public asset include the newly created New Orleans Recreational District Commission and the post-Katrina explosion of charter schools. The most striking similarity about each is the political pattern by which they are established. First, a public asset is grossly underfunded and driven into disrepute; second, it is placed under the control of an unelected satellite entity; third, private-sector interests spin off additional entities to absorb public subsidies, mobilize resources from private donors, pay non–civil service salaries, and accumulate wealth with limited or no official oversight or return to the public.

A second satellite behavior, ring-fencing, also bears mention, as it serves to demonstrate the exclusion and enforcement meted out to lower classes and minorities under neoliberalism. Perhaps the best examples are the crime prevention and security districts, made possible by legislation at the state level, which began appearing in 1998. These districts enable neighbors to levy a fee, or sometimes a tax, to finance additional policing resources from private security firms. The neighborhoods that have adopted such districts are mostly middle or upper class and white, and the revenues they collected in 2009 ranged from $60,000 to $830,000 in the wealthiest neighborhoods. In his chapter, Passavant observes that private security provision probably increases safety, but also increases harassment and brutality toward those who enter spaces where they are not wanted (p. 102). Meanwhile, the city has been unable or unwilling to raise taxes to protect other areas, perhaps because the wealthiest citizens have already protected themselves. This leaves an underfunded and overworked police to deal with the highest murder rate in the country, even as senior police officers establish security firms and distribute detail assignments to off-duty subordinates—what the US attorney general called the “aorta of corruption” in the police.Footnote ³ In a political dynamic that would appear to characterize many similar ring-fenced satellites, the police and their neighborhood allies have become vocal advocates for crime prevention and security districts, making it unlikely that they can be rolled back. Other satellites that might fall into the same category of ring-fencing include development districts, neighborhood improvement associations, and business and entertainment districts.

The authors in The Neoliberal Deluge describe the ideology and policies that have dominated most areas of New Orleans public life in the years before and after Katrina. They lament the victory of an upper-class attempt to renew a highly unequal model of capitalism, while dispensing coercive social control to excluded populations, who are portrayed in the pages of this book as heroic, if occasionally weak and fragmented, defenders of alternative frameworks. The book will serve as a useful tool for those interested in New Orleans and will remind all of us that our anger at the racial and class injustice exposed by Katrina was not misplaced. In fact, we should be angrier than ever, as much post-Katrina political struggle produced deepened opportunities for accumulation by the few while intensifying social control on others.