Make no mistake of this, the same forces that would militarize our economy, our nation, have set their sights on using Katrina to further weaken the rights of ordinary citizens, namely, middle and working class citizens of New Orleans. As the Nation points out, the democratic party has been weak to non-existent in defending the right of our city to rebuild, and the right of our citizens to return.
If one examines the recovery of the Gulf Coast in Mississippi, I believe one would see much the same: working class communities left to fend for themselves, in a red state no less.
There’s been a debate here raging between the different activist groups, and C3/Hands off Iberville, the group that I belong to, has been much maligned in suggesting the failure of recovery has much more to do with class issues, than race. It is a debate worth having, and I am hoping it will continue.
In the meantime, I have little faith in the power of electoral politics to change much these days. It is grassroots involvement, as always, that will signal the real changes.
The Nation article makes no mention of our group, C3/Hands off Iberville. We’ve been working side by side with residents to reopen public housing since Katrina. It’s an uphill battle, given Secretary of HUD Alphonse Jackson’s hostility to public housing, and to the low income citizens of New Orleans in general.
He stated back in October that there would be fewer poor people in New Orleans post-Katrina, and he has done everything in his power to bring this about, by keeping the housing developments shut-down. The few that are being repaired are proceeding at a snail’s pace, further insuring fewer residents will return.
Local black and white politicians are using public housing residents as a convenient scapegoat and punching bag for all of the city’s ills pre-Katrina. Mayoral candidate Peggy Wilson has gone so far as to say in a TV ad that the city ought not to welcome back “welfare queens, pimps, crack heads and gang bangers” from public housing. But she has been assisted in this scapegoating by Oliver Thomas, the African American president of the New Orleans City Council, when he suggested recently that the city doesn’t need the “soap opera watchers” in public housing to return.
Like my colleague Mike Howells said, public housing in New Orleans is about as popular as Anthrax right now, but we believe it to be a key to assisting the working class African Americans in returning to the city.
The Nation article correctly points out that the same people who profited from the destruction of the St. Thomas Housing Development in New Orleans, the Canizaros and the Kabacoffs, in the late 90’s, now have unprecedented power in deciding what our city may look like in the coming years.
But the powers that be have always, and will continue to underestimate the power and will of the people. New Orleanians are fighting back, and the Nation article underscores some of those efforts.
There are national lessons to be drawn from this New Orleans struggle: the right of citizens to determine the fate of their communities is, at bottom, the heart of the issue, as well as the very purpose of government during and after natural, and manmade, calamities.
The billions going to the Pentagon, and down the black hole of Iraq, is the sub-theme.
Cindy Shehann came to our rally to reopen St. Bernard Housing Development, and underscored this struggle, in an article she co-authored with Sam Bostaph:
…Cindy was in New Orleans as people were being kicked out of their subsidized FEMA housing while hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of “FEMA trailers” sat in lots and on railroad cars waiting for a place to be parked. She listened to Richard Skinner of Homeland Security say on CNN that FEMA is spending “eight to ten million dollars” to spread gravel on a lot in Arkansas so that the 11,000 trailers that should be in the Gulf States, but are parked on that lot, won’t sink into the mud while they sit. She saw hundreds of units of low income housing in St. Bernard’s Parish that could be rehabilitated with some sheetrock and paint, but are sitting empty and useless. Hundreds of residents could return to their homes for what it would cost for 18 months use of two of those empty trailers – each of which is estimated by the Times-Picayune to cost as much as $120,000.
Cindy and Sam mistook the St. Bernard Development for the parish of the same namesake. She is on an endless world wind tour of the U.S. to raise issues and consciousness. Local grassroots efforts matter a great deal. What’s going on in your town?
From the Nation:
In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, “New Urbanists” and neo-Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances.
Meanwhile, Bush’s pledge to “get the work done quickly” and mount “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen” has proved to be the same fool’s gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq’s bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.
With each passing week of neglect–what Representative Barney Frank has labeled “a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction”–the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return.
