Keywording

    Hello my name is Jeremy Soto and I will be discussing New York's response to Hurricane Sandy. I feel the way that New York City responded to Hurricane Sandy was very adequate because they kept many big corporations out of the rebuilding process.  In a chapter called "Blanking the Beach" from Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" she speaks about how private companies try to purchase different areas of disaster affected places, and potentially use them to turn a profit when she writes " At the time, many of the key privatization schemes had not yet gone through, including water and electricity"(Klein 74).  In that quote Klein is explaining how private companies were not able to get their hands on the electricity or water contracts in Sri Lanka to fulfill their plans to privatize that sector, thus giving us the idea of privatization schemes.  In terms of New York City's response to Sandy and how this idea of privatization schemes comes into play, I feel NYC avoided a lot of potential privatization schemes by not handing over our subway system and bridges to private companies in order to get quick, fast, and low to no cost relief after the storm.  If they would have signed contracts to these private companies there's no telling what we might have witness.  Potentially, we could have seen toll booths left in place as the relief efforts were done and the companies would at that point dictate how much it cost to cross that bridge and turn a profit off of it.  Perhaps even taking our subway system and repaired it while severely raising fares and putting people out of jobs because they want to make money and cut cost.  Some would argue that if the MTA was privately owned we would pay less in taxes since it would no longer be funded by the city,  but the potential damage that can cause to millions of peoples everyday lives would be dramatic.  Thankfully NYC took the relief into their own hands and avoided any privatization schemes that might have been out there waiting for it's chance to launch.