Wednesday, June 27, 2007

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".


Article continues....

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.

5 comments:

mister anchovy said...

It will be very interesting to see what's happening there first hand in the fall.

felix said...

The Frontline PBS show last night was on the aftermath of the tsunami in Indonesia, eight months before Katerina.

The video of the affected areas is amazingly in contrast to NO outside of the Quarter and other tourist areas. Buildings restored or new construction, life going on.

Damn shame. A weak phrase, but all I can summon at this hour.

Gardenia said...

Good research. An IT guy I met on the plane during one trip back to the South told me that those who were unable to come back and clean up their property in N.O. were losing the property to the government who was then handing it over to developers. This was only one year after the storm. NO ONE can really "see" what happened until you are in ground zero on these.

Our coast too is now a developer haven. The charm, the enchantment of this part of the coast is gone as we knew it.

Many parts of the Gulf Coast are still devastated.

I think the majority of the help that was given successfully was from the grass roots efforts. The sheer mass of the devasatation demanded more. But the grass roots efforts were better than nothing. At least the victims knew SOMEONE cared.

Property Tax burdens were not lifted from people who lost everything but their property. No, the governments were going to be part of the process that pushed the edge to loss of property as well.

Even Red Cross cannot properly account for all donated monies. And we know the government never will. What happened to all the FEMA trailers? We still have homeless begging on our corners.

Even government help with cleanup came to a halt here. People are STILL trying to pull out molded walls, etc., and some have no money to hire the hauling away of debris. It piles up by the streets.

Haliburton? Don't get me started.

And, I think African-Americans AND THE POOR both can't count on the government for help. Or even middle class America - what would happen to any of us if our home was suddenly devastated with everything in it? The insurance companies refuse to pay in many cases. Many I know did not have success applying for FEMA loans - yeh, what happened to the donated money that belonged to the victims?

We had several thousand dollars worth of damage - the insurance company would not pay. Our current insurance policy is a joke. We applied for a FEMA loan (not a gift) and were turned down. Yet, how could we complain when others had NOTHING.

Candy, if more posts like yours went up on the internet, maybe the people would hold the government more accountable during elections. Maybe.

I can remember my anger when a politician in Wyoming mouthed "They were too lazy to walk out." Obviously he had never seen New Orleans - and was too stupid to know you can't walk fast enough to beat a storm that size, if you are 80 or crippled, in ill health or carrying babies and a few clothes, I would have liked to see him walk out. I was so enraged all I could do was ask him if he was there, and spin around and walk out. Enough, this is supposed to only be a comment.

FOUR DINNERS said...

poor people are always getting in the way of governments. very inconsiderate of them...

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