A little over a year ago, the calamity in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina occured. With much of the city wrecked and destroyed by the ensuing floods, it will be a long time before things can even be remotely described as normal. Repairs, reconstruction and resettlement will have to take place on a massive scale to rebuild the city to as good a normal a condition as should be.
These articles from The Nation talk about some of the distressing and sinister aspects on the politics behind the disaster, the city and rebuilding efforts.

To start it off, here's Naomi Klein writing about the increasing privatisation of government and its duties and responsibilities such as disaster-relief. There's a large consensus among many that privatisation means more efficiency, expertise and accountability. Miss Klein tries to break this consensus/myth by examining how privatisation of disaster-response played a large part in all the neglect and tragedy in New Orleans.
Basically privatisation is the allocation of duties to private firms from the government, whether it be federal, provincial or city. Besides duties, control of national resources are also privatised such as in impoverished African countries for instance. Anyways the rationale behind privatisation is that by having private companies perform tasks and services instead of government, the tasks are done more efficiently especially since these companies are profit-driven, government is slimmed down and becomes more effective by focusing on fewer tasks in addition to saving money because of this reduction in duties.

Well many of this is erroneous and false. While private companies may do things more efficiently, they also do things for profit and it is profit not people which is their main priority.
Look at Bolivia for instance with the water riots in Cochabamba. Privatising several essential services like water, the corporation that controlled the water service started charging exorbitant rates for water usage until finally poor and other Bolivians rose up and rioted against this, in a rare successful show of people power, forcing the government to rescind its water contract and the corporation to leave.

Anyways a few extracts from the article illustrate the problems more clearly with the New Orleans calamity: "We saw the results in New Orleans one year ago: Washington was frighteningly weak and inept, in part because its emergency management experts had fled to the private sector and its technology and infrastructure had become positively retro. At least by comparison, the private sector looked modern and competent."
and "But the honeymoon doesn't last long. "Where has all the money gone?" ask desperate people from Baghdad to New Orleans, from Kabul to tsunami-struck Sri Lanka. One place a great deal of it has gone is into major capital expenditures for these private contractors."
and finally "state-within-a-state [private contractors] has been built almost exclusively with money from public contracts, including the training of its staff (overwhelmingly former civil servants, politicians and soldiers). Yet it is all privately owned; taxpayers have absolutely no control over it or claim to it."

Klein ends by forseeing a bleak future called disaster apartheid which even now is apparent in the present.