For months the former residents of some of the poorest districts in New Orleans have watched while local, state and federal governments and numerous business interests have proceeded with their plans to “makeover” the city into an enclave for the wealthy and upper middle class, and as an experiment in every pet conservative policy one can imagine, from the privatization of education to the the wholesale abandonment of any regulation or other legal restriction which impinges on “private enterprise” and “entrepreneurs” to seek “creative approaches” to rebuilding the city.
Well now, when the people whose homes are scheduled to be torn down to make way for this grand new vision were finally given the opportunity to express their dissent at a public hearing they were shut out of the meeting, and then pepper spray and tasers were employed against them by the New Orleans police in one of the worst examples of political oppression of free speech and dissent in recent memory:
Readers of my book The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city’s public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.
The final showdown over New Orleans public housing is playing out in dramatic fashion right now. The conflict is a classic example of the “triple shock” formula at the core of the doctrine.
– First came the shock of the original disaster: the flood and the traumatic evacuation.
– Next came the “economic shock therapy”: using the window of opportunity opened up by the first shock to push through a rapid-fire attack on the city’s public services and spaces, most notably it’s homes, schools and hospitals.
-Now we see that as residents of New Orleans try to resist these attacks, they are being met with a third shock: the shock of the police baton and the Taser gun, used on the bodies of protestors outside New Orleans City Hall yesterday.
Here’s another report of what happened on the scene at this public hearing, from which so many of the public were excluded, from Jeff Lassahn at Axis of Logic:
The local authorities and police acted in a thoroughly provocative manner Thursday. A police SWAT team was located inside the hall between council members and the audience, while barriers were set up outside manned by dozens of police.
Protesters first attempted to open the iron gates blocking their access to the meeting, alleging that the meeting was disproportionately filled with supporters of the demolition. Police responded with Tasers and large cans of mace, resulting in four hospitalizations. Videos of the event show demonstrators first being sprayed and forcibly kept from entering, and later, flushing their eyes out with water.
According to the Associated Press, “One woman was sprayed by police and dragged from the gates; emergency workers took her away on a stretcher. Another woman said she was stunned by officers, and still had what appeared to be a Taser wire hanging from her shirt. “I was just standing, trying to get into my City Council meeting,” said the dazed woman, Kim Ellis, who was taken away in an ambulance.”
The elected officials incurred the wrath of demonstrators and others by their arrogant and indifferent attitude. “City Council members—some sipping water, others leafing through file folders—looked on impassively as a man was tasered, handcuffed and dragged from the council chambers,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
Amy Goodman at Democracy Now interviewed witnesses to this rampant violation of the rights of New Orleans’ poorest citizens:
(cont.)
AMY GOODMAN: We are going first to New Orleans. The New Orleans City Council has unanimously voted to move ahead with the demolition of 4,500 units of public housing. Under the plan, the city’s four largest public housing developments will be razed and replaced with mixed-income housing.
On Thursday, hundreds of people were turned away from the City Council meeting. Some of the protesters were shot with pepper spray and tasered. Inside the City Council chambers, the scene turned chaotic when police began making arrests. […]
AMY GOODMAN: New Orleans police also tasered protesters inside the New Orleans City Council chambers. […]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined by three guests right now in New Orleans. Kali Akuno is the executive director of People’s Hurricane Relief. We are also joined by Sess4-5, a community activist. And we’re joined on the telephone as well by Howard Robertson; he is a retired major with the New Orleans Police.
We turn first to Kali of Hurricane Relief. Describe what happened yesterday and why you were outside and inside the New Orleans City Council.
KALI AKUNO: Yeah, well, Amy, I was outside, because I was barred entry to the inside. They made an arbitrary decision yesterday to cut off the inside, when there were clearly seats that were still available. I was getting minute-by-minute reports as the events were starting, as the proceedings were starting, that there were still seats available, and they just made an arbitrary decision to keep those of us—there were probably about a hundred of us still outside at that particular point in time—to close the gates and to keep us outside. And from there, events just really escalated, as they particularly—as the folks who were on the inside, from what I can see—and Sess can give you a more detailed account—as the folks on the inside started advocating for us to be able to actually enter into the building.
So, you know, they made a situation of trying to control it and basically stifle and cut off any vocal dissent or opposition to their decision. We knew when we walked in, based on their comments the past several days and based on how they had been treating this issue the past two years, that we were going to lose the vote on the basis primarily of Clarkson’s new addition to the City Council and that at the very least it was going to be a four-to-three vote along racial lines. So we knew what we were walking into. And we just clearly wanted to make sure that our point was heard, that we disagree with the plan towards demolition and that we were going to stand fast and fight this through the courts and through other means as we moved forward. So they made a decision to basically shut everything down and shut everybody else down.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Sess, what was happening inside? Obviously, it was a seven-zero vote, but could you talk a little bit about what was happening inside?
SESS4-5: Well, I’ll definitely start with just the process of entering the City Council chambers. They changed the whole process for this particular vote. And, you know, upon entering the building, you know, they just made it hard for all the Africans who was coming in the gate, who was clearly identified as, you know, not supportive of demolition. And so, they took other measures of, you know, just searching people and putting you through metal detectors and just winding different people. And so, we just had problems just entering the building. You know, they closed the building—they locked the gates at 10:30, so that the proceedings started at 10:00.
AMY GOODMAN: Sess4-5, were you tasered inside?
SESS4-5: Yes, I was tasered. But just get inside the building before the proceedings started, you know, we just noticed they had a lot of seats available, and the number of Africans in there just were very few. And they just closed it off right after we entered the building. So we was asking, before they started the proceedings, to let more people in, because they had a number of seats that was identified inside of the council chambers, and clearly there are more—if you can see from the video, you know, it was—they had run all inside, all on the walls.
And so, when Reverend Sanders, you know, made a plea, after Arnie Fielkow tried to start the proceedings, he made a plea to let the people in. And that’s when everything really started, by Arnie Fielkow trying to start the meeting without properly letting all the people supporting us, you know, opposing, inside of the chambers. […]
KALI AKUNO: . . . The woman who was tasered and who went into a seizure never made it inside. She was outside. And she was tasered in the back, unaware. She was one of the hundreds of people who were trying to get inside at that particular point and was omitted from coming. It had nothing to do with seats being available or anything of that nature. They made that decision to cut that off.
Now, in terms of myself being there, my interest is basically trying to—you know, for lack of a better term, Amy—stop this neoliberal destruction that we see taking place in New Orleans and the complete privatization of all of the different services within the city, housing being, I think, the most critical of them, public housing being kind of the cornerstone of that. But there’s an affordable housing crisis in New Orleans, of which the public housing is just one particular element of it. […]
Public hospitals are also being shut down and set to be demolished and destroyed in New Orleans. And they’ve systematically dismantled the public education system and beginning demolition on many of the schools in New Orleans—that’s on the agenda right now—and trying to totally—excuse me, totally turn that system over to a charter and a voucher system, to privatize and just kind of really go forward with a major experiment, which was initially laid out by the Heritage Foundation and other neoconservative think tanks shortly after the storm. So this is just really the fulfillment of this program.
For the first time in recent memory the entire New Orleans City Council is all white, and they voted 7-0 to allow the demolition of 4,500 units of public housing to make way for the proposed “redevelopment” plan which would drastically reduce the number of available public housing facilities in the city. After redevelopment under the plan approved by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the city council, only 900 housing units will be available for <a href="http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_25686.shtml"low income residents, a substantial drop. Thousands of former New Orleans’ residents will have no affordable housing, no place to live in the city they called home. People whom one of their own publicly elected officials described thusly:
Councilmember Shelley Midura described some of the protesters as “demagogues and terrorists.”
I think Council member Shelley Midura was projecting just a little bit, don’t you. The only people I see being terrorized in these videos are the people protesting the decision to destroy their homes in order to advance the interests of wealthy businessmen and women:
By the way, the public housing to be demolished was little effected by Hurricane Katrina, so the need to tear down these brick buildings is not a matter of public safety, so much as it is a political decision to eliminate poor residents from the city:
The hearing was, in many ways, political theater. Protesters, who complained that many residents had been locked out of the packed public meeting, fought with police almost immediately.
City Council members — some sipping water, others leafing through file folders — looked on impassively as a man was tasered, handcuffed and dragged from the council chambers. […]
Activists and preservationists have sharply criticized the government’s proposal to raze the city’s biggest public housing complexes when low-income housing is in short supply.
With rents up 45% and more than 3,000 former public housing residents scattered across the country, they say officials should quickly renovate and reopen the sturdy, mostly 1940s-era brick buildings, some of which were barely damaged by Katrina. Many talk of a conspiracy to purge the city of its poorest residents, pointing out the government will not replace all of the 4,500 public housing units it plans to demolish.
“The question remains: Who’s in the mix?” said Torin Sanders, pastor of the Sixth Baptist Church, near the old St. Thomas housing project, which was razed before Katrina to make way for a mixed-use project. “I saw church members with bags packed walking around the city for somewhere to live.”
Better hope your city isn’t destroyed by a natural catastrophe. New Orleans is just the test case. I’m sure the next time this happens they will be far more ruthlessly efficient at kicking the poor out and putting disaster capitalism in.
