“We finally cleaned up public housing. We couldn’t do it, but God could.” So crowed Richard Baker, the real-estate entrepreneur and former Baton Rouge Republican congressman, while bantering with lobbyists on the House floor in the days after Hurricane Katrina floodwaters busted through New Orleans’s ill-maintained federal levees and swamped the city.

But, as all good market fundamentalists know, God helps those who help themselves. Providence’s floodwaters had inflicted little actual damage on New Orleans’s sturdy brick public housing structures, so to ensure that the Lord’s will would be carried out, Republicans worked with their willing neoliberal executioners across the aisle in New Orleans and Washington DC, including the Obama administration.

As we commemorate the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Baker and company can celebrate the achievement of their neoliberal kingdom. With God’s invisible hand at the wheel, authorities have not only demolished all of the city’s remaining traditional public housing, but have also converted almost the entire public school system into charters, eliminated the teachers’ collective bargaining agreement (which the US Supreme Court has recently sanctioned by refusing to hear a court challenge), and have overseen the permanent closure — despite it receiving little flood damage — of the public hospital dedicated to serving the poor.