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NEWS & LETTERS, April - May 2008New Orleans fights backTwo and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, the struggle of Black and working-class New Orleans has intensified. Dozens were arrested in March in civil disobedience actions trying to stop the demolition of poor people's housing. More than 4,500 public housing units--many of them untouched by the storm--are to be destroyed and replaced by "mixed-income" developments with only 800 low-income units. Even if all the planned subsidized housing is built, the total units will be only one-third of what existed three years ago. CITY TO POOR: DROP DEADAll this is in a city where 40,000 affordable rental units were wiped out by the storm, rents are up 50% or even 100%, and homelessness has doubled to 12,000, that is, one in 25 people, the highest rate of any city in the U.S. The city's solution: a new ordinance allowing the arrest of people who sleep on the street. Protesters, sometimes in the hundreds, have repeatedly packed City Council meetings to demand a halt to demolitions but have been met with police force. Meanwhile, nearly 40,000 families from the Gulf Coast still live in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers. Hundreds have suffered from toxic effects of formaldehyde--from breathing difficulties to death. When scientists were writing a report on formaldehyde's health risks, FEMA told them to leave out references to cancer or other long-term dangers. Housing is only one area transformed in the wake of the flood. Charity Hospital, the main facility for the poor and home of one of the country's top two trauma units, has been closed since the hurricane. Two-fifths of public schools are closed, dozens converted into charter schools, and all 4,900 teachers were laid off. Thousands of bus drivers were laid off and the buses destroyed in the flood have not been replaced. While politically connected corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton raked in billions from Katrina reconstruction contracts, the Bush administration refused emergency funds to pay for municipal workers, so 3,000 were fired. CUTTING WORKERS, SERVICESWhile hundreds of thousands of Black workers were being displaced, hundreds of thousands of immigrants were brought in to work long hours for low pay. Many immigrants, now tossed out of these jobs, have been deported, left the city or are homeless. While many have been intimidated into keeping quiet, 100 workers from India marched in Washington, D.C., on March 31, protesting being treated as slaves by Signal International after being brought to the U.S. to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Much of the Left is echoing Naomi Klein's analysis of "Disaster Capitalism" in her book The Shock Doctrine, showing how rulers have taken advantage of disasters like Katrina to implement a far-reaching program of neoliberal restructuring. While true, this analysis overlooks how these manifestations flow from capitalism's inherent law of motion--so that the proposed solution of "mixed economy," which leaves capitalism fundamentally intact, is no solution at all. There are only two alternatives--reconstruction capitalist style, which is what the workers, poor, African Americans and immigrants are fighting, or reconstruction on a new, human basis that is implicit in these struggles. --Franklin Dmitryev |
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