Keeping Black People from Coming Back

New Orleans Update

(Letter)

13 February 2006

To the Editor,

Thanks for printing my letter from New Orleans in November [WV No. 858, 11 November 2005]. Here’s an update: incredibly, not much has changed.

Fully 5 months post-Katrina, three-quarters of the city is still without power, phones and mail. While some businesses and streetlights are restored to power, the residences are not, and remain mostly unpopulated. The populated part is still the “Sliver by the River” from the Uptown colleges and St. Charles Avenue mansions to the CBD [Central Business District], French Quarter and precious little beyond.

Many people were stunned when Bush Junior visited the (wealthy, unflooded) Garden District in January and declared New Orleans to be “a heck of a place to bring the family”...but they missed the rest of the comment. He went on to say that it was a good thing “the infrastructure was back on its feet.” Bubble Boy beyond belief!

If the infrastructure is back, that would be news to the hundreds of thousands of residents living in exile, unable to return for lack of housing, public utilities, schools and jobs.

The loss of housing stock is key. A trickle of FEMA trailers has finally begun to arrive here (like the blue tarp roof program, trailers were distributed to the less flooded areas like the white-flight Jefferson Parish first). There were 1,700 trailers by last count in N.O., versus 32,000 in Mississippi where far fewer residences were lost.

However most of the New Orleans trailers sit empty for lack of electricity, water and sewage hook-ups. 900 more trailers were delivered to the University of New Orleans in time for classes beginning last week...only no power is expected to be supplied for another month, leaving UNO to scramble for housing and make a public appeal for space for faculty, staff and students in private homes.

But the private homes are already packed with friends, relatives and co-workers who were flooded out. Air mattresses on floors are as ubiquitous as blue tarps on roofs. Traffic and population are incredibly dense in those areas with electricity.

Some visiting Congressmen recently expressed surprise when they toured the miles of devastation. They wanted to know where was the money that they allocated for New Orleans. Local hospital officials testifying at a sub-committee meeting asked where was the $400 million in emergency aid allocated to the hospitals. Seems the feds gave it to FEMA to distribute. Oh.

But there is more afoot than the staggering incompetence of FEMA and the feds. There is a deliberate plan at all levels, city, state and federal, to seize the opportunity of an evacuated city, to keep the black and poor people from coming back. The current euphemism is to “shrink” the city to a “smaller footprint.”

While black Democratic Mayor Ray Nagin got national publicity and is still the butt of jokes for speaking of a “Chocolate City” at an MLK Day event, the fact is Nagin and all the other politicians seek a Vanilla City: a smaller, whiter, wealthier New Orleans.

One Brown University study has estimated that 50% of the white population has not returned while 80% of the black population has not returned. Capitalist politicians are doing the math. Eight white politicians have jumped into the fray for the Mayor’s race in the April city elections, including the head zookeeper, considered a serious contender.

The elections had to be postponed from November when there were no polling machines or polling places to be had. But officials poured on the steam to have elections re-scheduled ASAP...quick, before the black people return! Incredibly, the bourgeois press spoke openly of this rationale.

The powers-that-be are pretty sure the black absentee ballot will not be a problem because it is a 4 step process that will never happen. The dispersed voters must first RECEIVE a “request for absentee ballot” by mail, then mail it in, then receive the actual ballot in the mail, then send that in by mail. This from a city where you cannot receive BILLS in time to pay them IN TOWN. Half a million changes of address were filed with the Post Office since the storm, and mail is generally not being forwarded in town or out of town, or not reliably. This is more effective in disenfranchising blacks than the old poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests put together.

Nagin’s “Rebuild New Orleans Committee” and the Governor’s “Louisiana Recovery Authority” both back a Moratorium on residential rebuilding for the next 4 months while they decide which areas they will “allow” to be repopulated. If that is a Moratorium, what have the last 5 months been?

At this point residents, disproportionately black residents are being kept away by economic means. The only people who can afford to come back must have all of the following: an unflooded home or be able to buy one, a high-paying job, ability to send their kids to private schools or create a charter school, have an emergency reserve fund, and navigate a difficult world post-Katrina by paying extra for everything.

All the significant material resources like home insurance claim payouts, flood insurance money and FEMA trailers go to homeowners. Renters got a few months rent money in exile, that’s it. Rents have doubled here. Businesses can’t hire staff or extend their hours due to difficulty hiring staff. Burger King offers $2,000 sign-on bonuses. Hotels have doubled the extremely low pay to maids and clerks and doormen, still not enough to pay the rent. Hibernia Bank just moved 350 loan processor jobs to Dallas citing difficulty of their (low-paid) employees finding housing.

Hospital beds are down 58% in New Orleans and the surrounding parishes. Emergency Rooms are bursting at the seams. Since the closing of Charity Hospital, the nearest Level One Trauma Center is 8 hours away in Shreveport. There used to be 4,486 doctors in the 3 parishes; now there are 1,200. 18 of 117 Orleans Parish public schools are open. Parents are having to hire lawyers and file suit in court to try to force the opening of public schools.

Speaking of the courts: 3,500 prisoners in the Orleans Parish Jail have fallen into a worse hellhole of oblivion than ever before. These include people who were arrested but not charged, or charged but not convicted, for anything from peeing on the sidewalk or soliciting to prostitution or anything at all back in August. They are now simply lost to the so-called Justice system. The local courthouse and jail were flooded, some prisoners drowned in their cells, the rest were evacuated and dispersed to jails all over the state and outside the state. Nobody knows where they are. All computerized records of criminal court cases were lost, and the entire Evidence Room was flooded. The Innocence Project found this a bitter end to some cases where prisoners were in line to be freed on saved DNA evidence.

Here is a quote from open court from the Times Picayune 1/21/06. “Kevin Crawford is in jail,” a deputy announced, naming a 21-year-old charged in July with being a felon with a firearm. “Where he is, I have no idea.” (Judge) Hunter set a new court date for late March and moved on. “OK, Kevin Crawford is somewhere out there in limbo-land,” Hunter said for the record, “the Twilight Zone.” In the case of a man charged with soliciting crime against nature… (the deputy said) “He might have drowned, Judge, in the chaos.” A federal judge has just pronounced the city’s indigent defense program to be non-existent. The local City Business newspaper, of all sources, has run a two-part exposé on this travesty.

New Orleans cannot pull itself up by its bootstraps from this man-made disaster. Massive outside aid is needed, but the White House is...disinclined. Local columnists have cited the Marshall Plan and the level of aid supplied to New York after 9/11 as the scale of help that is needed. Liberal commentators cite money that is being spent on the Iraq war as a rightful source of aid for New Orleans. During the hurricane, many countries from Cuba to Sweden offered medical and other aid which Bush ignored, not by accident. It’s not that Bush hasn’t thought of where the money could come from: he represents a ruling class with other priorities, namely maintaining the rule of the propertied class. It will take a socialist revolution to sweep him and his class out of power.

Ruth
New Orleans