…they will suck mother earth’s teats dry, then kill her for the meat. This is the modus operandi of the neofeudalists running our country.
Two natural disasters and a war of choice, mere “business opportunities” for the rapacious cabal running the entire federal government as a conduit for the hyper wealthy and the corporations to take from the poor and give to themselves.
Purging the Poor
by Naomi KleinAn hour earlier I had interviewed New Orleans’ top corporate lobbyist, Mark Drennen. As president and CEO of Greater New Orleans Inc., Drennen was in an expansive mood, pumped up by signs from Washington that the corporations he represents–everything from Chevron to Liberty Bank to Coca-Cola–were about to receive a package of tax breaks, subsidies and relaxed regulations so generous it would make the job of a lobbyist virtually obsolete.
Listening to Drennen enthuse about the opportunities opened up by the storm, I was struck by his reference to African-Americans in New Orleans as “the minority community.” At 67 percent of the population, they are in fact the clear majority, while whites like Drennen make up just 27 percent. It was no doubt a simple verbal slip, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was also a glimpse into the desired demographics of the new-and-improved city being imagined by its white elite, one that won’t have much room for Nyler or her neighbors who know how to fix houses. “I honestly don’t know and I don’t think anyone knows how they are going to fit in,” Drennen said of the city’s unemployed.
There is no room for justice, dignity or decency where there is profit to be made, where there is land to grab, where there is a happy false uniform subdivision to be built on the sodden corpse of a fallen community. They will tell us all that they are doing all of this to make the world better, that this is all in the name of saving the poor, of building a new community, but somehow it never works out that way.
New Orleans is already displaying signs of a demographic shift so dramatic that some evacuees describe it as “ethnic cleansing.” Before Mayor Ray Nagin called for a second evacuation, the people streaming back into dry areas were mostly white, while those with no homes to return to are overwhelmingly black. This, we are assured, is not a conspiracy; it’s simple geography–a reflection of the fact that wealth in New Orleans buys altitude. That means that the driest areas are the whitest (the French Quarter is 90 percent white; the Garden District, 89 percent; Audubon, 86 percent; neighboring Jefferson Parish, where people were also allowed to return, 65 percent). Some dry areas, like Algiers, did have large low-income African-American populations before the storm, but in all the billions for reconstruction, there is no budget for transportation back from the far-flung shelters where those residents ended up. So even when resettlement is permitted, many may not be able to return.
As for the hundreds of thousands of residents whose low-lying homes and housing projects were destroyed by the flood, Drennen points out that many of those neighborhoods were dysfunctional to begin with. He says the city now has an opportunity for “twenty-first-century thinking”: Rather than rebuild ghettos, New Orleans should be resettled with “mixed income” housing, with rich and poor, black and white living side by side.
Yet as anybody who’s lived in an urban center knows, there is often large amounts of unused or underused housing available, housing that is kept fallow in order to maximize profit for the few.
Roughly 70,000 of New Orleans’ poorest homeless evacuees could move back to the city alongside returning white homeowners, without a single new structure being built. Take the Lower Garden District, where Drennen himself lives. It has a surprisingly high vacancy rate–17.4 percent, according to the 2000 Census. At that time 702 housing units stood vacant, and since the market hasn’t improved and the district was barely flooded, they are presumably still there and still vacant. It’s much the same in the other dry areas: With landlords preferring to board up apartments rather than lower rents, the French Quarter has been half-empty for years, with a vacancy rate of 37 percent.
The citywide numbers are staggering: In the areas that sustained only minor damage and are on the mayor’s repopulation list, there are at least 11,600 empty apartments and houses. If Jefferson Parish is included, that number soars to 23,270. With three people in each unit, that means homes could be found for roughly 70,000 evacuees. With the number of permanently homeless city residents estimated at 200,000, that’s a significant dent in the housing crisis. And it’s doable. Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, whose Houston district includes some 150,000 Katrina evacuees, says there are ways to convert vacant apartments into affordable or free housing. After passing an ordinance, cities could issue Section 8 certificates, covering rent until evacuees find jobs. Jackson Lee says she plans to introduce legislation that will call for federal funds to be spent on precisely such rental vouchers. “If opportunity exists to create viable housing options,” she says, “they should be explored.”
This situation is a direct result of the tax and spending polticies of our government, of both parties who serve the needs of the wealthy before the people.
The deafening – and dangerous – silence on taxes
– David SirotaOur country spent the ’90s building up a projected $5 trillion surplus as a rainy-day fund. But when it came time to prepare for the rainiest day of them all, the money we had socked away was, instead, used to pay for trillions of dollars of tax cuts — tax cuts that Americans have never wanted to supercede other pressing priorities. Here are the facts.
In 2001, Republicans passed a $1.3 trillion tax cut at the same time they pushed massive cuts to America’s flood and hurricane protection programs. In 2003, President Bush pushed a $125 billion plan to eliminate taxes on stock dividends while cutting funds that his own Army Corps of Engineers said were needed to maintain flood-control infrastructure in southeast Louisiana. The next year, the White House pushed a $1 trillion plan to make the president’s previous tax cuts permanent — the same year the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that “for the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area’s east bank hurricane levees.” Even this year, as the White House pushed to repeal the estate tax on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, it proposed a budget that would provide almost $300 million less than the Army Corps of Engineers said was needed to complete critical infrastructure improvements in and around New Orleans.
Remember, these tax and budget decisions happened while experts such as Bush’s own Army Corps chief warned that leaving these infrastructure priorities unaddressed could lead to a disaster. Had most Americans heard these warnings, they most certainly would have supported rolling back Bush’s tax cuts to make sure such urgent needs were addressed. Since 2001, polls have consistently shown Americans support reducing tax cuts in order to reduce the deficit and pay for critical priorities. Yet, knowing all of this, nobody today is talking taxes.
No political leaders are proposing rolling back tax cuts to pay Katrina’s $51 billion clean-up bill, and perhaps worse, no one is even making the case that the disaster along the Gulf Coast was aided and abetted by tax-cut zealotry. Should we be surprised?
The only sacrifices that will be asked for will be from those who will never get their humble homes back in New Orleans, left to fend mainly for themselves in FEMA trailer ghettos. The only sacrifices that will be asked for will be working people paying more and more for the stuff of life, for fuel, for their healthcare, while their wages continue to drop from year to year. The only sacrifices that will be asked for are the families left to bury their sons and daughters dead in a war of choice in the service of greed.
A plague, the rightwing and their masters, the hyperwealthy and the corporations, but they are able to continue their reign of terror because they appeal to the greed and hope of far too many of us. The poor and their communties make us sad, angry, guilty, so far too many of us buy into bullshit like “enterprise zones” and tax credits. Is it too late for us to wake up, to say no more?
There are large antiwar marches today, which are of course being all-but ignored by the mainstream media. So much injustice is being screamed from the stages, yet it never penetrates. How can we move past this? How can we tie all of this together into a cohesive answer to the rightwing? Are we too fractured, unable to see the interconnections of all of our pet causes?
I don’t know how it will all turn out, but the beat goes on. The ranks of the homeless and the poor grow. Mother Earth has reached the point where her black milk, the lifefluid that runs western society, is about to run dry. Perhaps all that is left is cutting up the corpse, and the rich and connected own all of the knives.
editorial comics:
Tony Auth
Scott Stantis