Friday, August 29, 2025, marks the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, a weather event that rapidly became a significant social and political catastrophe killing close to two thousand people, most of whom were poor and Black, and displacing and rendering homeless thousands more, forecasting the spectre of human-made disaster precipitated by climate change.

Now, twenty years on, Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles, and Spike Lee have directed and produced a three-episode Netflix documentary entitled “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water,” which was released today. The documentary comprises interviews with survivors, local journalists, and politicians, as well as abundant news footage and commentary on the devastation to the communities of New Orleans, especially the Black residents of the 9th Ward, whose lives were most impacted. Watch the trailer for the documentary here: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/videos/katrina-come-hell-and-high-water-trailer

In her landmark book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein connects the effects of Hurricane Katrina to elements of neoliberalism. I drew upon Klein’s analysis in “Disastrous Ableism,” a section of my chapter in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability. There, I wrote:

In The Shock Doctrine, Klein sets out to show how capitalism variously produces and exploits disasters and crises in order to drastically change economies and governments. Klein’s goal is to demonstrate that the detrimental impact on disenfranchised and other subordinated social groups of these economic and political swings is both foreseeable and disregarded, if not their desideratum. For Klein, the wizard of this social movement was Chicago-school economist Milton Friedman. It was Friedman who wrote the instruction manual for the contemporary global capitalist economy whose mobility steadily outstrips geopolitical borders through policies of deregulation and a race to the bottom with respect to workers’ wages and other benefits.

For example, as Klein explains, Friedman used Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans in 2005 to facilitate privatization of the city’s public education system, a far-reaching policy change that was among the disastrous consequences of Hurricane Katrina that disproportionately affected the city’s Black residents. As Harsha Walia has stated, Hurricane Katrina laid bare “the workings of anti-Black warfare through mass displacement and carceral immobility”: “Black homes were most vulnerable to the storm, Black people were criminalized during the storm, and Black neighborhoods were abandoned by recovery efforts after the storm” (Walia 2021: 32). Seventy three percent of the 800,000 people dislocated due to Hurricane Katrina, Walia notes, were Black residents, whose neighborhoods became policed and in turn privatized, leaving most of these people permanently displaced.

Three months after the levees broke, Friedman published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that hailed these consequences of Hurricane Katrina as an occasion to usher in public policy that would further the interests of free-market capitalism (Klein 2007: 5). As Friedman put it at the time: “Most New Orleans schools are in ruins . . . as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” (Friedman, in Klein 2007: 5).

Friedman’s “radical” idea (which received financial backing from the George W. Bush administration) was that the American government should distribute vouchers to families that they could in turn spend at state-subsidized, private institutions—“charter schools,” as they are called—most of which are run for profit. As Klein points out, many African Americans, especially in New Orleans, regard these charter schools as means to reverse the gains with respect to education that the US civil rights movement made. Yet Friedman emphasized that this elemental change in the way that education in the United States is financed should be regarded as a “permanent reform” rather than merely a temporary, stop-gap measure. For Friedman, Klein explains, the idea that the state would run the school system “reeked of socialism” (Klein 2007: 5). In Friedman’s right-libertarian view, the sole functions of the state were, in his words, “to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce contracts, to foster competitive markets” (Friedman, in Klein 2007: 5). A minimalist government, Friedman had instructed, should guide recovery efforts that followed the storm.

Less than two years after the levees were breached, privately run charter schools had almost entirely replaced the New Orleans public school system, the contract with the New Orleans teacher’s union had effectively been torn to pieces, and the union’s 4,700 members had been fired. For Klein, this dismantling of the New Orleans public school system post-Katrina exemplifies “disaster capitalism,” which she defines as “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” (Klein 2007: 6). In this regard, Klein points to Friedman’s influential essay in which he articulated the core tenet of disaster capitalism thus: “only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable” (Friedman, in Klein 2007: 5).

This “shock doctrine,” as Klein refers to Friedman’s dictum, has been instrumental to the expansion of free-market capitalism globally and the neoliberal shakedown of elected socialist governments throughout Central and South America; union busting in the United States; betrayal of Solidarity in Poland; ideological pillaging of the African National Congress in South Africa; and installation, the world over, of autocracies and other fascist regimes sympathetic to unfettered capitalism. It is especially pertinent to my argument that Klein eloquently shows how disaster capitalism exploits disasters and crises to mold social values, norms, expectations, and explanations in ways that promote neoliberal social and political agendas among academics, the media, NGOs, and populations at large, in addition to
how it exploits these events to profoundly change governments and economies themselves.

I contend that all levels of government in so-called Canada, as well as various academics, journalists, think tanks, corporations, and foundations, have seized upon the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportune occasion to engage in (what I call) “disaster ableism,” that is, have exploited the pandemic and the circumstances that surround it to cultivate norms, values, and beliefs that promote ableist agendas and eugenic goals, further constraining and containing disabled people in Canada. In particular, the Trudeau Liberal government and the bioethicists to whom Canadian politicians regularly defer and appeal have employed disaster ableism to usher into law legislation—namely, Bill C-7—that both significantly expands and more deeply embeds eugenics in Canadian society.

In the midst of a global pandemic, when the residents of Canada were losing their loved ones, their dwellings, and their incomes due to COVID-19; were living in situations of fear, misinformation, and confusion; and were distracted and isolated, the Canadian federal government bypassed adequate public consultation, usurped international treaties, ignored the objections of Indigenous leaders, manipulated parliamentary procedure, and made a mockery of disabled experts invited to participate in its legislative proceedings, in order to ensure passage of Bill C-7, legislation that would make sweeping changes to existing Canadian laws on medically assisted suicide. In short, the same (neo)liberal government which, throughout the pandemic, has consistently failed to provide financial and other social supports to disabled people—allowing thousands of them to die from COVID-19 and neglect in nursing homes and other carceral institutions in which disabled people are confined—adopted a pernicious way to (in the words of Friedman) “permanently reform” distribution to disabled people, namely, by providing them with easier access to premature death rather than by providing them with the means to live their lives (Tremain 2021).