Naomi Klein Might Say "I told You So"

Just two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans Naomi Klein already had a sense of what the future would likely hold...she also knew how things could have been different, much different.

"It's a radical concept: the $10.5bn released by Congress and the $500m raised by private charities doesn't actually belong to the relief agencies or the government - it belongs to the victims. The agencies entrusted with the money should be accountable to them. Put another way, the people Barbara Bush tactfully described as "underprivileged anyway" just got very rich.

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".

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

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."

Here's a better idea: New Orleans could be reconstructed by and for the very people most victimised by the flood. Schools and hospitals that were falling apart before could finally have adequate resources; the rebuilding could create thousands of local jobs and provide massive skills training in decent paying industries. Rather than handing over the reconstruction to the same corrupt elite that failed the city so spectacularly, the effort could be led by groups like Douglass Community Coalition. Before the hurricane, this remarkable assembly of parents, teachers, students and artists was trying to reconstruct the city from the ravages of poverty by transforming Frederick Douglass senior high school into a model of community learning. They have already done the painstaking work of building consensus around education reform. Now that the funds are flowing, shouldn't they have the tools to rebuild every ailing public school in the city?

For a people's reconstruction process to become a reality (and to keep more contracts from going to Halliburton), the evacuees must be at the centre of all decision-making. According to Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United, the disaster's starkest lesson is that African-Americans cannot count on any level of government to protect them. From an article in The Guardian September 2005, by Naomi Klein the author of No Logo.

Here is a fund that Tuffy P let me know about....Common Ground my concern is...what about that $500 million?

Common Ground needs your support immediately to continue critical relief and recovery work in New Orleans and the city's surrounding areas.

The City of New Orleans has initiated a “Good Neighbor” Program. Thousands of residents—many of whom are elderly and disabled--are now facing the possibility of having their homes repossessed by the City, if their properties are not gutted, mold abated, and boarded up. Instead of providing the needed resources to those who need assistance, the local government is referring residents to non-profit organizations like Common Ground.

I support the idea of residents who were able to stay the storm getting needed support to keep their houses. I believe there should be an organization that gives displaced residents from New Orleans an opportunity to move back. Many have been given new houses in new cities...which is beautiful and I think important...but what about the option of moving back to their home city?

Ironically the French Quarter is no longer a commercialized tourist spot only but has returned to a sort of roots of the city...and the former residential areas are likely being turned into a "new kind of neighbourhood" of gated or cookie cutter streets.