Saturday, December 10, 2005
Katrina: the crime that keeps on paying off. posted by Richard Seymour
No plan to help the poor, racism, intimidation, murder, lies, blockade, slander, mercenaries, corporate profiteering, aid withheld, more racism, military invasion...
Mike Howells, of the public housing rights group C3/Hands Off Iberville, estimates that 3,750, or about half of the city's previous number of public housing units, are either habitable or can easily made so (this does not include the projects like Lafitte with serious flooding). And yet only a few dozen units, at a senior citizens' development, have been officially reopened. This at a time when the Gulf Coast director of FEMA, Thad Allen, is telling the New York Times, "Our No. 1 priority is housing, our No. 2 priority is housing, and after that, at No. 3, we'd put housing."
At the moment, public housing residents or those with Section 8 housing vouchers who wish to return to the city are being asked to register with FEMA and wait for rental assistance, as though they were still evacuated.
...
What has housing activists in the city really upset is that national and local officials are publicly planning to repeat across the city what was done at the St. Thomas housing projects. In 2002, after a long public fight, they were demolished and replaced with River Garden. The new development, built using a federal HOPE VI grant and brokered by local businessman Pres Kabacoff, had 25 percent units rated as affordable, versus 75 percent labeled market-rate, and was anchored by the first Wal-Mart in Orleans Parish. Out of 800 families who previously lived in the projects, only about 70 were able to come back in the years before the storm.
"We're not going to build traditional public housing anymore," Jackson said at a November 3 press conference flanked by local leaders, calling St. Thomas "the model."


The lumpen city mayor, meanwhile, has a plan: bulldoze the former homes of the poor, introduce city-wide internet access and build seven new casinos. Businesses in the coastal area are getting their tax breaks, although they have been, since October 26th, obliged once more to pay minimum wage and adhere to the standards of the Davis-Bacon Act despite Bush's temporarily successful attempt at removing all such regulations.
And the victims, having had quite enough of being pushed to the bottom of every available pile and then blamed for being there, are pressing charges against the government. Some are testifying:
Alva, a 51-year-old grandmother from New Orleans East, remembers, “When we were taken to the higher ground in Jefferson Parish, what did we have to greet us? A line of military police with M-16 rifles. They watched us, caged us, laughed at us, took pictures of us with their camera-phones. I saw a young man get down on his knees and beg for water for his little baby, and I saw the child die right there on the concrete. This was murder. They wanted us dead. They just didn't think so many of us would survive."
Tammy, a black woman in her mid-30s, complains, “I was trying to evacuate with my two daughters by car, when we were stopped by police, made to get out and told, ‘Lie down on the ground, you black monkey bitch.’ I was arrested and thrown in jail with my daughters and could not get out for several weeks.”
Others are marching to demand the right to return to their homes, and one hopes they will have more luck than these guys. For the plain fact is that the authorities in New Orleans and in Washington have shown no interest in allowing the poor to return to their homes: quite the opposite. They have shown no interest in account for the missing and dead: slander is the preferred option. They would rather cut taxes for businesses, allow them to pay poverty wages while ignoring health and safety regulations, award massive contracts to their favourite corporations, and cut food stamps for the poor.
