August 28, 2006
The Katrina dossier undoubtedly needs updating, but looking through it, it stands up well as an account of the racist, barbaric criminality of the Bush administration, the local Democratic establishment, the police and practically every relevant institution of the American state. Far from being merely incompetence or cruel indifference during a natural disaster, it was a shocking crime perpetrated on the poor. Not merely underfunding and poor planning: they had a plan, but it didn't include helping the poor. Not merely neglect, but the conscious blockading of the city, the refusal of aid, and the eventual imposition of martial law. Not merely the inability to house 'refugees', but the deliberate use of the situation to impose a plan for turning New Orleans into a Disneyland for rich yuppies.
How's it looking now? Well:
We are still finding dead bodies. Ten days ago, workers cleaning a house in New Orleans found a body of a man who died in the flood. He is the 23rd person found dead from the storm since March.
Over 200,000 people have not yet made it back to New Orleans. Vacant houses stretch mile after mile, neighborhood after neighborhood. Thousands of buildings remain marked with brown ribbons where floodwaters settled. Of the thousands of homes and businesses in eastern New Orleans, 13 percent have been re-connected to electricity.
The mass displacement of people has left New Orleans older, whiter and more affluent. African Americans, children and the poor have not made it back – primarily because of severe shortages of affordable housing.
Thousands of homes remain just as they were when the floodwaters receded – ghost-like houses with open doors, upturned furniture, and walls covered with growing mold.
Not a single dollar of federal housing repair or home reconstruction money has made it to New Orleans yet. Tens of thousands are waiting. Many wait because a full third of homeowners in the New Orleans area had no flood insurance. Others wait because the levees surrounding New Orleans are not yet as strong as they were before Katrina and fear re-building until flood protection is more likely. Fights over the federal housing money still loom because Louisiana refuses to clearly state a commitment to direct 50 percent of the billions to low and moderate income families.
Meanwhile, 70,000 families in Louisiana live in 240-square-foot FEMA trailers – three on my friend’s street. As homeowners, their trailer is in front of their own battered home. Renters are not so fortunate and are placed in gravel strewn FEMA-villes across the state. With rents skyrocketing, thousands have moved into houses without electricity.
Meanwhile, privatization of public services continues to accelerate.
Public education in New Orleans is mostly demolished and what remains is being privatized. The city is now the nation’s laboratory for charter schools – publicly funded schools run by private bodies. Before Katrina the local elected school board had control over 115 schools – they now control 4. The majority of the remaining schools are now charters.
The metro area public schools will get $213 million less next school year in state money because tens of thousands of public school students were displaced last year. At the same time, the federal government announced a special allocation of $23.9 million which can only be used for charter schools in Louisiana. The teachers union, the largest in the state, has been told there will be no collective bargaining because, as one board member stated, "I think we all realize the world has changed around us."
Public housing has been boarded up and fenced off as HUD announced plans to demolish 5,000 apartments – despite the greatest shortage of affordable housing in the region’s history. HUD plans to let private companies develop the sites. In the meantime, the 4,000 families locked out since Katrina are not allowed to return.
The broken city water system is losing about 85 million gallons of water in leaks every day. That is not a typo, 85 million gallons of water a day, at a cost of $200,000 a day, are still leaking out of the system even after over 17,000 leaks have been plugged. Michelle Krupa of the Times-Picayune reports that the city pumps 135 million gallons a day through 80 miles of pipe in order for 50 million gallons to be used. We are losing more than we are using; the repair bill is estimated to be $1 billion – money the city does not have.
Public healthcare is in crisis. Our big public hospital has remained closed, and there are no serious plans to reopen it. A neighbor with cancer who has no car was told that she has to go 68 miles away to the closest public hospital for her chemotherapy.
Mental health may be worse. In the crumbling city and in the shelters of the displaced, depression and worse reign. Despite a suicide rate triple what it was a year ago, we have lost half of our psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and other mental health care workers, the New York Times reports.
Nevertheless, some commentators in the US have noticed, resentfully, that Hezbollah is assiduously reconstructing the destroyed areas of Lebanon. Big difference? While Hezbollah is a movement rooted in poor communities, the Bush administration is a government of rich sociopaths dedicated to a massive transfer of wealth to the capitalist class, particularly that sector most allied to it. That's going quite well, by the way. I mentioned before that wages had continually failed to keep up with inflation for the last six years. Latest reports show that the median wage has declined by 2 per cent since 2003, while UBS, the investment bank, describes the current period as "the golden era of profitability". Profit rates are still well below those that obtained during the long postwar boom: it is doubtful whether the structural imbalances in the US economy will allow it to recover to those peaks, especially given the growing likelihood of another recession, but Bush is doing his best to ensure that the growing crisis is paid for by American workers and not their bosses.
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