Power to the victims of New Orleans

[Briar]

(I hope this hasn't already been posted. I couldn't find it, at least not under this name.)

Power to the victims of New Orleans

With the poor gone, developers are planning to gentrify the city

Naomi Klein


On September 4, six days after Katrina hit, I saw the first glimmer of hope. "The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funnelled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants. We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans."

...

Except relief and reconstruction never seem to work like that. When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimising them all over again. A council of the country's most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to tourist developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies for food and water. They called reconstruction "the second tsunami".

There are already signs that New Orleans evacuees could face a similarly brutal second storm. Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told Newsweek that he has been brainstorming about how "to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic".

The council's wish list is well-known: low wages, low taxes, more luxury condos and hotels. Before the flood, this highly profitable vision was already displacing thousands of poor African-Americans: while their music and culture was for sale in an increasingly corporatised French Quarter (where only 4.3% of residents are black), their housing developments were being torn down. "For white tourists and businesspeople, New Orleans's reputation means a great place to have a vacation, but don't leave the French Quarter or you'll get shot," Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans-based labour organiser told me the day after he left the city by boat. "Now the
developers have their big chance to disperse the obstacle to
gentrification - poor people."

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1565939,00.html

[VespertineIconoclast]

1. I like the message of this commentary --

empowerment to the previously powerless.

One of the most salient points in the article to me is: “the disaster's starkest lesson is that African-Americans cannot count on any level of government to protect them.” The saddest thing is that this catastrophe on the part of the Bush Administration hammered this truth home to blacks not only in NOLA and other gulf coast cities, but blacks ALL over the US. I hope that people can better understand why blacks are so distrustful of authority figures now…

I’m glad that you posted this article and I hope that the victims of this failure in the government can somehow come out on top, instead of pushed into the fringes and forgotten with time. But, I would love to see organizations like the NAACP and others come in to inform the people (after all their basic needs are met) about the possibilities they have to control their own destinies in the future.

-VI

[Jack Rabbit]

2. This is the best idea I've heard in a long time

But what will Vice President Halliburton say?