Mike Davis on New Orleans

To: Retort


[This magnificent piece of analytic journalism - from a true tribune of the people - lost its superscripts in transmission, so the endnotes and citations are omitted for the moment.  Apologies.  And thanks to DW for his role in the ungarbling. IB]


At the Corner of New Orleans and Humanity  
Mike Davis



A few blocks from the badly flooded and still closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the surprising intersection of Humanity and New Orleans.  Night is falling and after a weirdly muggy winter day, the cool breeze from Lake Pontchartrain is welcome.  In the distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of New Orleans, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for five months now and no one seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back on again.  150,000 homes in greater New Orleans remain damaged and unoccupied; a vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the river.   Such a large portion of the Black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that 'New Orleans is back,’ pointing to the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is less than Disney World on a normal day.  Fully two-thirds of Nagin's constituents including an estimated 80 percent of African-Americans - are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home.


In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think-tanks, New Urbanists, and neo-Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government.   With the city council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority black and Democratic city.  

Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees.  Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the permanent closure of Charity Hospital formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana.  And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Blanco, would end local control over city finances. 

Meanwhile President Bush's pledge to 'get the work done quickly' and  mount ìone of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen’ has proven to be the same foolís gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraqís bombed-out infrastructure. Instead the administration has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small business loans, or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.  

With each passing week of neglect what Rep. Barney Frank has labeled 'a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction’ the likelihood increases that most Black Orleanians will never be able to return.  As the New York Times observed in early February, Katrina 'barely merited a mention’ in the president's State of the Union address, and 'New Orleans has all but dropped off the map of national priorities.’ (Mayor Nagin has become so desperate for assistance that he has begged for help from foreign countries, including France and Jordan.)


Yet, even as pundits rant about the foolishness of locals wanting to return to their below-sea-level homes, it has become clear that federal negligence, not wrathful nature, was most responsible for killing New Orleans. 



1. Dereliction of Duty 

‘Not just human error was involved.  There may have 
been malfeasance.’
Forensic engineer about levee breaches

Humanity Street was flooded on August 29 by a breach in the London Avenue Canal which - like the Orleans and 17th Street Canals further west - provides a lake outfall for storm water pumped from low-lying residential districts like Gentilly that were originally swamplands. 

After Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Orleans Parish Levee Board claimed the northern part of the city had drowned because a hurricane-drive storm surge of biblical magnitude had 'overtopped' the floodwalls that the agencies jointly build and maintain along New Orleans' canals.   ‘The intensity of this storm,’ said Corps commander Lt. Gen. Carl Strock on 2 September, 'simply exceeded the design capacity of this levee.’ Later in testimony before Congress, representatives of the two bureaucracies continued to blame a ‘category 4 or 5 surge’ despite evidence from an American Society of Civil Engineers' investigation that water levels, in fact, were ‘well below the top height of the floodwalls’ (designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane) and that the breaches were the results of design flaws, not monster waves.


Now, thanks to further research by a team of forensic engineers sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as inspired muckraking by the press, there is stunning evidence that federal authorities were well aware that the city's levee system was fatally compromised by incompetent design and shoddy construction as well as by chronic underfunding that left critical holes in the city's defenses. 

In the cases of the 17th Street and (probably) London Avenue canals, for example, flawed soil analyses, which ignored dangerously unstable layers of swamp peat, led project engineers to build walls that were too weak and poorly anchored to resist shifts in the underlying soil.  When the Army Corps' Vicksburg (Miss.) office discovered these potentially catastrophic faults in a 1990 design review, their New Orleans colleagues apparently shrugged off the warning without any attempt to reinforce the inadequate structures.


In the case of the Orleans Canal floodwall - which NSF investigators describe as having basically failed before the storm began - a large (and ultimately fatal) gap had been left to prevent water pressure from bursting the walls of an ancient pumping station.  Despite urgent appeals by both the Corps and the Levee Board, the Bush administration refused to authorize $10 million to rebuild the pumping station and complete the floodwall.  (As a Democratic stronghold controlling the balance of power in Louisiana elections, New Orleans is not a favorite charity of a Republican White House.)

Meanwhile, the funneling effect of the notorious Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) - a little-used ship channel expensively maintained by the Army Corps - amplified Katrina’s storm surge by as much as 40 per cent as it raced toward the Industrial Canal and the Lower Ninth Ward. Hurricane Pam, an inter-agency planning exercise in 2004, foresaw this scenario and accurately predicted extensive flooding throughout the city's eastern flank.  Yet the Corps, in obeisance to shipping interests, had for years rejected urgent local demands to close MRGO.

In the face of growing criticism, the Army Corps has only compounded suspicion by withholding crucial documents from the NSF team and blocking their access to levee breach sites.   Likewise Republicans in congressional hearings have tried to deflect the blame for the Katrina fiasco from the Army Corps to the Orleans Parish Levee District, which they depict as a corrupt patronage machine that cares less about flood control than about a subsidiary empire that includes a marina, amusement park, and gambling boat.  

This caricature may be largely true, but it is almost irrelevant, since the Army Corps and its top boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, bear the ultimate legal responsibility for flood protection. By tradition, the Corps is supposed to represent the gold standard in American engineering; instead it now faces the disgrace of losing New Orleans. 

2. Lie and Stall

‘The worst fears of many policymakers are being realized. 
Bureaucratic delays have caused the recovery effort to be
appallingly slow and inefficient.’	
Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)

False promises are a Bush dynasty tradition.   

In the spring of 1992, President George H. Bush toured the burnt-out rubble in southcentral L.A., reassuring residents that Washington had ‘an absolute responsibility to solve inner-city problems.’  In response to the Rodney King riots, the White House promised major initiatives to aid Los Angeles and other neglected cities.   But presidential compassion quickly turned back into indifference as Republican leaders in Congress blocked every effort to ‘reward the rioters.’

Likewise, after his bungling response to Katrina, George W. Bush impersonated FDR and Lyndon Johnson to reassure the nation in his Jackson Square speech (15 September) that ‘we have a duty to confront [New Orleans’] poverty with bold action.  We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.’

In the event, the White House sat on its pledges all autumn, mumbling homilies about the limits of government, while allowing its ultra-conservative attack dogs - the 100-plus member Republican Study Group - to pound Congress with demands to offset Gulf relief with $50 billion worth of cutbacks in Medicaid, food stamps, and student loans.  (The 
Rottweilers won: the Administration agreed to shift the burden of hurricane relief onto the poor and the cuts were incorporated into the budget.)

Republicans also rebelled against aid for a state - Louisiana but not Mississippi - that was depicted as a venal Third World society out-of-step with national values.   ‘Louisiana and New Orleans,’ according to Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), ‘are the most corrupt governments in our country, and they have always been.  Fraud is in the culture of Iraqis.  I believe that is true in Louisiana as well.’  Democrats apart from the Black Caucus did pathetically little to counter this backlash or to hold Bush's feet in the fire over his Jackson Square pledge. The promised national debate about urban poverty, as in 1992, never took place; instead, New Orleans, like a great derelict ship, drifted helplessly in the twin currents of White House hypocrisy and conservative contempt.  

An early, deadly blow was Treasury Secretary John Snow's refusal to guarantee New Orleans municipal bonds: forcing Mayor Nagin to lay off 3000 city employees on top of the thousands of education and medical workers already jobless. The Bush administration also blocked bipartisan measures to increase Medicaid coverage for Katrina evacuees and to give the state of Louisiana - facing an estimated $8 billion in lost revenues over the next few years - a share of the revenues generated by its offshore oil and gas leases.


Even more egregious was the flagrant redlining of Black neighborhoods by the Small Business Administration (SBA) which rejected 82 per cent of loan applications by local businesses and homeowners.  An analysis by the New York Times in mid-December concluded that 'the [SBA] loans that have been approved so far appear to be flowing to wealthy neighborhoods in New Orleans but not to poor ones.’ At the same time, a bipartisan Senate bill to save Gulf-area small businesses with emergency bridge loans was sabotaged by Bush officials, leaving thousands to face bankruptcy and foreclosure.

As a result, the economic foundations (public-sector jobs and small businesses) of New Orleans' African-American middle class were swept away by deliberate decisions made in the White House and presumably overseen by the domestic-policy troika of Dick Cheney, Andrew Card and Karl Rove.   At the same time, FEMA's excruciating failure to provide temporary housing within the city prevented blue-collar Orleanians, exiled in Baton Rouge, Houston, and Atlanta, from returning to jobs in reconstruction and revived tourism.  (In six months, FEMA had installed barely one-seventh of the trailers it had promised to New Orleans - even police officers were still homeless.)


In the absence of federal or state initiatives to employ locals, low-income Blacks especially are losing their niches in the construction and service sectors to more mobile outsiders.  ‘With jobs lost, shuffled and solicited,’ Christine Hauser reported last fall, 'the workforce crisis is changing the very demography of New Orleans.  With schools still closed, for example, families have migrated to other states to look for work and stability.  Many of the newer workers here are younger and single, able to double up in apartments.  Better-off and more mobile workers, some commuting from nearby areas, have begun to replace workers who could not afford cars.’

In stark contrast to its neglect of neighborhood relief,  the White House has made Herculean efforts to reward its own political base of large corporations and political insiders.  Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-New York), who sits on the House Small Business Committee, complained that the SBA has 'allowed large corporations to get $2 billion in federal contracts under the guise of being small business’ while excluding local minority contractors.  Likewise, the so-called Gulf Opportunity Zone has primarily benefited larger companies outside the disaster area.  A typical example, according to veteran Louisiana political analyst John Magginis, are  'apartment developers in Baton Rouge and Lafayette, who were able to raise rents to meet the growing demands from displaced residents, and who now can virtually free money to build more units.’


But the paramount beneficiaries have been giant engineering firms like Halliburton and the Shaw Group (the biggest Louisiana-based company), as well as the three companies from Minnesota, California, and Tennessee who were awarded the prime contracts for debris removal.  FEMA and the Army Corps, while unable to explain to Governor Blanco last fall exactly how they were spending money in Louisiana, have tolerated levels of profiteering that would raise eyebrows even on the dismal Euphrates.   (Some of this largesse, of course, is guaranteed to be recycled as Republican campaign contributions.)

FEMA, for example, pays the Shaw Group $175 per square (100 square feet) to install tarps on storm-damaged roofs in New Orleans.  Yet the actual installers earn as little as $2 per square and the tarps are provided free by FEMA.  Times-Picayune reporters were flabbergasted to discover that ‘the cost to taxpayers to tack up a covering of blue vinyl is roughly the same, on a per square foot basis, as what a homeowner would pay to install a basic asphalt-single roof.’  Similarly the Army Corps pays prime contractors $20 per cubic yard of storm debris removed, yet many bulldozer operators receive only $1. (The clean-up, moreover, is proceeding so agonizingly slow that by February contractors had only removed 6 million of an estimated 50 million cubic yards of debris in the city.) 


Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung where the actual work is carried out.  While the Friends of Bush mine gold from the wreckage of New Orleans, many disappointed recovery workers - often Mexican or Salvadorean immigrants camped out in city parks and derelict shopping centers - can barely make ends meet.   

3.  The Big Kiss-off


‘Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words 
"pending in Congress" are a death warrant requiring no signature.’

New York Times editorial

In the fractious, take-no-prisoners world of Louisiana politics, broad solidarity of interest is normally as rare as a boulder in a bayou (southern Louisiana is all water, muck and sand).  Yet Katrina created an unprecedented bipartisan consensus around twin demands for category 5 hurricane protection and mortgage relief for damaged homes.


From conservative suburban Republicans like Rep. Richard Baker (notorious for his comment about  ‘God cleaning up’ New Orleans public-housing projects) to progressive Black Democrats like councilmember Cynthia Willard-Lewis who represents New Orleans East, there is unanimity that the region's recovery crucially depends upon federal investment in new levees and coastal restoration, as well as the financial rescue of the estimated 200,000 homeowners whose insurance coverage has failed to cover their actual damage.  (It is important to note that there has been no equivalent consensus or comparable concern about the right of renters and public-housing tenants to return to their city.)

Comprehensive, category-5 protection for the New Orleans region was actually mandated by the Johnson Administration after Hurricane Betsy flooded parts of New Orleans in 1965, but key elements of the plan, including storm gates on Lake Pontchartrain, were subsequently scuttled and others, like the Orleans Canal floodwall, left unfinished.  By the 1990s annual appropriations for hurricane protection were consistently less than the urgent requests from the Army Corps and local governments. 

Yet even as the federal commitment to southern Louisiana was waning, the storm-surge danger to New Orleans was steadily increasing as its protective delta dissolved into the Gulf of Mexico.   Catastrophic coastal erosion at the rate of one acre every 24 minutes is partly the consequence of the Army Corps’ monumental dam-building and streamlining of river flow, which reduces the delta's vital diet of sediment; but it also a byproduct of constant, promiscuous dredging and canal-cutting by the oil and gas industries.  In both cases, the ultimate safety of New Orleans and surrounding parishes has been compromised to accommodate powerful, non-local economic interests (upriver agribusiness, shipping companies, energy corporations) without any mechanism to recycle revenues into compensatory coastal restoration and urban flood control.   

In 1998, after a terrifyingly close call with Hurricane Georges, a coalition of agencies and governments including the Army Corps, EPA, and all 20 coastal parishes united around Coast 2050, a comprehensive $14 billion plan to rebuild barrier islands and restore vanishing wetlands.   In addition, category 5 protection for New Orleans would have to include the modernization and relocation of the cityís storm pumps, the construction of truly robust levees, the closure of the MRGO, and massive flood gates on the Lake. The combined cost of coastal restoration and new hurricane fortifications has been estimated at approximately $30 billion over a generation.


Before Katrina, there was never the slightest chance that a Republican White House would give consideration to spending so much money to protect the Deep South's 'bluest', most Democratic city.  Then, after the deluge, the president's Jackson Square speech seem to signal a new dispensation: Coast 2050 and category 5 levees were suddenly topics of serious discussion.  Louisiana delegations promptly rushed off to The Netherlands to see what a truly serious national commitment to coastal protection could achieve.  

Yet by early November, it was clear that saving New Orleans was no longer high on the Bush agenda, if it had ever been.  When reporters asked if the president supported category-5 levees, his spokespeople pointedly refused to give a direct answer.


Washington was rumored to be suffering from 'Katrina Fatigue’ with little congressional enthusiasm for flushing billions down the supposed 'black hole’ of bayou corruption.  When Louisiana delegates lobby for flood protection, a reporter noted, 'they often are met with skepticism, ignorance and outright hostility.’  The newly appointed Gulf recovery czar, Texas banker Donald Powell, did nothing to defend his new constituents.

To locals, of course, Washington was brazenly blaming the victim and, as the Times-Picayune complained, 'They [Congress] act as if we wore our skirts too short and invited trouble.’  One of New Orleans' few outspoken allies, the editorial page of the New York Times, pointed out that the 30-year bill for protecting New Orleans would equal  'barely one third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.’ (Louisianans added that they wouldn't need to beg if they received the same share of offshore oil and gas royalties that states like California and Texas have traditionally derived from land-based oil exploration.)

But the point was moot.   As Congress headed toward its Christmas adjournment, the Louisiana delegation was in a panic mode: not only had a category 5 plan disappeared from serious discussion, but there were suddenly doubts whether the White House would repair damaged levees before hurricane season returned.

There was equal suspense over whether the Administration would support the other key plank of the Katrina recovery consensus: Rep. Richard Bakerís bill to federally fund a Louisiana Reconstruction Corporation that would bail out mortgage holders and homeowners by buying distressed properties and packaging them in larger parcels for resale to developers.   Baker insisted that he was in regular receipt of good vibrations from the White House, but most observers simply described the administrationís attitude as ëengimatic.í

In the end, Louisiana's representatives, Democrats and Republicans alike, abased themselves before more powerful personages from Alaska and Mississippi.   In a shameless bid for a share of oil revenues, Mary Landrieu joined the doomed Senate banzai charge led by Alaska's Ted Stephens on behalf of despoiling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  With more success, Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin supplicated Governor Haley Barbour, the former head of the Republican National Committee, to let Louisiana ride Mississippi's impeccable conservative coat tails. Babour agreed and persuaded Senator Thad Cochran, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to write the legislation, which both the White House and Senate Democrats eventually approved.

Congress ultimately voted $29 billion for Gulf relief: 'all but $6 billion of the measure merely reshuffled some of the $62 billon in previously approved Hurricane Katrina aid.  The rest was funded by a 1 percent across-the-board cut of non-emergency, discretionary programs.’  The Pentagon won approval for a whopping $4.4 billion in base repairs and other professed Katrina-related needs, but Congress cut out the $250 million allocated to combat coastal erosion.  Cochran, Barbour and Trent Lott, meanwhile, persuaded fellow Republicans to support $11.5 billion in discretionary housing aid (actually, Community Development Block Grants or CDBGs): $6.2 billion for Louisiana and $5.3 billion for Mississippi. 

Louisiana Democrats blushed in gratitude to their Mississippi colleagues, but it was truly a devil's bargain, with red state Mississippi getting five times as much aid per distressed household as pink state Louisiana. (649,138 Louisianans were displaced from their homes as contrasted to 110,000 Mississippians.) 
Although the Administration took credit for doubling spending on levees to $3.1 billion, it was sheer slight of hand, since $1.4 billion in Louisiana CDBG assistance had been shifted to flood control 'all for the sake of providing ìthe Category 3 hurricane protection the New Orleans area was supposed to have before Katrina revealed structural inadequacies in the system.’ In the meantime, the Baker bill (seen as indispensable to elite schemes for shrinking New Orleans, but also broadly supported by homeowner groups) was put on hold.  Finally, on 23 January, the White House rejected the scheme and Donald Powell published a stinging attack on its sponsors in the Washington Post, arguing that $6.2 billion was more than adequate for the time being and implying that the locals couldnít be trusted to manage large sums of money by themselves. 


Rep. Baker, convinced that he enjoyed Bush's personal support, was utterly humiliated; local Republicans as well as Democrats howled in rage; and the future of southern Louisiana was again thrown into chaos.  Nor was any relief provided in the $2.77 trillion budget which Bush sent to Congress on 7 February: while the rest of the Pentagon received a huge raise, the construction budget of the Army Corps was slashed by 34 percent.  Although the Administration promised supplementary appropriations, no one in New Orleans was holding their breath. Grateful Mississippians might be moving back to rebuilt homes by the end of the spring, but the lights would still be out in Gentilly.  

4.  Ancient Calumnies 

‘I hate the way they portray us in the media.  If you see a black
family, it says theyíre looting.  See a white family, it says they're
looking for food.’
Rap star Kanye West

The Republican hostility to New Orleans, of course, runs deeper and nastier than mere concern with civic probity (America’s most corrupt city, after all, is located on the Potomac, not the Mississippi).  Underlying all the circumlocutions are the same
antediluvian prejudices and stereotypes that were used to justify the violent overthrow of Reconstruction almost 130 years ago.  

Let us return, for a moment, to the symbol-laden corner of New Orleans and Humanity.   Humanity Street and the adjacent 610 Freeway constitute a local social divide: to the south are older working-class neighborhoods largely composed of weary bungalows and 'shotgun' duplexes, with occasional apartment buildings and public-housing projects.  North of Humanity, however, are attractive subdivisions of brick-facade homes: part of a sprawling Black middle-class universe that includes Pontchartrain Park with its golf course and country club as well as the generic Home-Depot-and-Days-Inn suburbia of New Orleans East, across the Industrial Canal.  

Usually it is the poor who are invisible in the aftermath of urban disasters, but in the case of New Orleans, it has been the African-American professional middle class and skilled working class.   In the confusion and suffering of Katrina - a Rorschach test of the American racial unconscious - most white politicians and media pundits have chosen to see only the demons of their prejudices.   The city’s complex history and social geography have been reduced to a cartoon of a vast slum inhabited by an alternately criminal or helpless underclass, whose salvation is the kindness of strangers in other, whiter cities.   Inconvenient realities like Gentilly's red brick normalcy - or, for that matter, the pride of homeownership and the exuberance of civic activism in the blue-collar Lower Ninth Ward  - have not been allowed to interfere with the belief, embraced by New Democrats as well as old Republicans, that black urban culture is inherently pathological. 

Thus the national media shamelessly and uncritically purveyed the spectacle of a flooded city under the terrorist rule of thugs, rapists and zombies - a hallucination, to be fair, that originated in the hysteria of Mayor Nagin and police officials.  Lurid images of a rampaging underclass, in turn, 'changed troop deployments, delayed medical evacuations, drove police officers to quit, grounded helicopters’ and left a toxic legacy in public opinion.   Terrified members of New Orleans oligarchy, like regional transit head James Reiss, helicoptered in machine-gun-toting Israeli security guards to protect their Audubon Place mansions.  Yet the mayhem was largely urban myth: in late September New Orleans police superintendant Eddie Compass confessed to the New York Times that “we have no official reports to document any murder. Not one official report of rape or sexual assault.”



But the truth will never slacken the thirst of conservative fundamentalists like the Cato Institute's David Boaz intent on blaming the Katrina catastrophe on a welfare state that ‘so destroyed wealth and self-reliance in the people of New Orleans that they were unable to fend for themselves in a crisis.’   Nor will it stop Joel Kotkin, writing in American Enterprise Magazine, from libeling 'isolated, immobile African-American remnants mired in urban poverty', or prevent David Brooks from claiming with self-righteous certainty that  ‘if we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as rundown and dysfunctional as before.’

Such calumnies reproduce the ancient caricatures of Blacks running amok, incapable of honest self-government  - that were evoked by the murderous White League when it plotted against Reconstruction in New Orleans in the 1870s.  (The League’s platform declared that ‘where the white race rules, the negro is peaceful and happy; where the black rules, the negro is starved and oppressed.’  It promised to restore ‘that just and legitimate superiority in the administration of our State affairs to which we are entitled by superior responsibility, superior numbers and superior intelligence.’)


Indeed, some civil-rights veterans fear that the 1874 Battle of Canal Street (a bloody League-organized insurrection against a Republican administration elected by Black suffrage) is being refought - perhaps without pikes and guns, but with the same fundamental aim of dispossessing Black New Orleans of economic and political power.   Certainly, a sweeping transformation of the racial balance-of-power within the city has been on some people's agendas for a long time.

5. The Krewe of Canizaro

‘As I wish, thus I command.’
Motto of Comus

Power and status in New Orleans have always been defined by membership in secretive Mardis Gras 'krewes' and social clubs, with the Krewe of Comus and the Boston and Louisiana clubs at the apex.   'Perhaps more than any other city in America,’ historian John Barry has written, 'New Orleans was run by a cabal of insiders...Looking on as if from behind a two-way mirror, these insiders watched and judged and decided.’

Then in the early 1990s, civil-rights activists led by feisty councilmember Dorothy Mae Taylor forced the token desegregation of the Mardis Gras and some of the clubs reluctantly admitted a few African-American millionaires.  Despite a few old-guard holdouts (like Comus, which preferred to stop parading rather than integrate), Uptown seemed to be adjusting, however grudgingly, to the reality of Black political clout.  

But, as post-Katrina events have brutally clarified, if the oligarchy is dead, then long live the oligarchy.   While elected Black officials protest impotently from the sidelines, a largely white elite with overriding common interests  - especially prime real estate and  Tulane University - has wrested control over the debate about how to rebuild the city.   This de facto ruling krewe includes Jim Amoss, the publisher of the Times-Picayune; Pres Kabacoff, developer-gentrifier and local patron of the 'New Urbanism'; Donald Bollinger, shipyard owner and prominent Bushite; James Reiss, real-estate investor and chair of the Regional Transit Authority (i.e. he was responsible for the buses that didn't evacuate people); Alden McDonald Jr., CEO of the largest African-American-owned bank; Janet Howard of the Bureau of Government Research (originally set-up by Uptown elites to oppose the populism of Huey Long); and Scott Cowen, the aggressively ambitious president of Tulane University.   

But the dominating figure and literal kingpin is Joseph Canizaro, a wealthy property developer with friends in high places.  First and most importantly, Canizaro is a leading Bush supporter with close personal ties to Karl Rove and the White House inner circle.  Secondly, he is the power behind the throne of Mayor Ray Nagin, a nominal Democrat (he supported Bush in 2000) who was elected in 2002 with 80 percent of the white vote.  And, thirdly, as the former president of the Urban Land Institute, he mobilizes the support of some of the nation's most powerful developers and prestigious master-planners. 


In a city where old money is often as reclusive as Anne Rice's vampires, Canizaro poses as a brave civic leader unafraid to speak bitter but necessary truths.  As he told the Associated Press about the Katrina diaspora last October: ‘As a practical matter, these poor folks don't have the resources to go back to our city just like they didn't have the resources to get out of our city.  So we won't get all those folks back.  That ís just a fact.’

Indeed, it is a 'fact' that Canizaro has helped shape into reigning dogma.   The number of displaced residents returning to the city is obviously a highly variable function of the resources and opportunities provided for them, yet the rebuilding debate has been premised on suspicious projections - provided by the Rand Institute and endlessly repeated by Nagin and Canizaro - that the city would eventually recover only half of its August 2005 population.

Many New Orleanians cynically wonder whether such projections aren't actually goals, since the likes of Canizaro, Reiss,  and Kabacoff have complained for years about the city's ‘teeming underclass and attendant high crime rate,’  the percentage of residents in public-housing projects, and the proliferation of derelict and abandoned homes.


Faced with the dire fiscal consequences of white flight to the suburbs, as well as three decades of deindustrialization (which gives New Orleans a economic profile closer to Newark than Houston or Atlanta), they argue that the city has become a soul-destroying warehouse for underemployed and poorly-educated African-Americans, whose real interests - it is claimed - might be better served by a Greyhound ticket to another town.   As Kabacoff explained in 2003, ‘If a city is going to be healthy, you need to disperse your poor and concentrate your wealth.  In New Orleans, we concentrate our poor and disperse our wealth.’

Katrina, from this perspective, offers an almost utopian opportunity to resurrect New Orleans freed of its burden of poverty and crime.  As one real-estate magnate chortled to a European reporter:  ‘the hurricane drove poor people and criminals out of the city, and we hope they don't come back.  The party's finally over for these people, and now they’re going to have to find someplace else to live.’  Although Canizaro and Kabacoff would never express themselves so crudely, both have long crusaded for replacing older, centrally-situated public-housing projects like St. Thomas (Lower Garden District) and Iberville (across from the French Quarter) with New-Urbanist-inspired mixed-income neighborhoods.   

Indeed Kabacoff’s 2003 redevelopment of St. Thomas as River Garden -  a market-rate subdivision of faux Creole townhouses adjoining a Wal-Mart Supercenter  - has become the prototype for the smaller, wealthier, whiter city that Mayor Nagin’s Bring New Orleans Back commission (with Canizaro as head of the crucial urban planning subcommittee) proposes to build.  ‘Mayor Ray Nagin suggested, in one of his often impulsive public addresses,’ the Times-Picayune reported in November, ‘that the River Garden brand of New Urbanism should be the model for rebuilding the presumably soon-to-be-bulldozed portions of the Big Easy.  His assertions were soon echoed by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson, who vowed that River Garden would be the rebuilding model when other flooded public housing developments are razed.’

St. Thomas was razed in 2000 and 1700 tenants were relocated elsewhere.  River Garden, which was built with federal 'HOPE VI' program funds, symbolizes the Clinton-era approach to breaking up intractable concentrations of Black poverty by bulldozing public housing and using housing vouchers to 'empower' residents to move elsewhere in the city (often to even poorer neighborhoods and more miserable housing).  HOPE VI was originally envisioned as one-for-one replacement of public-housing but quickly became a stealth strategy of gentrification that has given developers like Kabacoff access to sites with extraordinary redevelopment potential.  In the case of River Garden only a handful of original project tenants have met the criteria for remaining in subsidized units, but land values in the adjacent parts of the Lower Garden District have soared.  

Underlying the New Urbanism of River Garden is a dogmatic belief that low-income Black neighborhoods, trapped in multigenerational  'cultures of poverty', are incapable of self-improvement, waste scarce public investment, and don't generate significant social capital.  Although a 10 percent to 30 percent quota of low-income residents may sound revolutionary when applied to Beverly Hills, ‘mixed-income’ in the context of New Orleans’ housing projects means mass eviction, tempered only by new homes for a minority of ‘deserving poor’.   Kabacoff fervently argues that a low ratio of poor tenants is the key to the viability of rebuilt neighborhoods: ‘with 30 percent affordable (mothers and children), you are pushing the envelope.’


6. Planned Shrinkage 

‘A massive red-lining plan wrapped around a giant land grab.’
Former Mayor Mark Morial


The awkwardly acronymized BNOB - Bring New Orleans Back - is perhaps the most important elite initiative in New Orleans since the famous Cold Water Committee (which included Kobacoff's father) mobilized in 1946 to overthrow the Old Regulars and elect reformer deLesseps Morrison as mayor.   BNOP grew out of a notorious meeting between Mayor Nagin and New Orleans business leaders (dubbed by some ‘the forty thieves’) that James Reiss organized in Dallas, twelve days after Katrina devastated the city.   The summit excluded most of New Orleans’ elected Black representatives and, according to the Wall Street Journal, focused on the opportunity to rebuild the city  ‘with a new demographic of fewer poor people.’ The arrogance of the conclave was brazen: Nagin was obviously receiving marching orders from his rich Uptown backers, and Black legislators blasted Reiss and others for conspiring to exclude ordinary African-Americans and their representatives from the debate on recovery.

Nagin responded that the meeting was entirely unofficial,  ‘so don’t worry about this city being hijacked by a small group of people who are trying to take us backward.’   But fears that a municipal coup d'etat was in progress were scarcely mollified when at the end of September, the mayor appointed BNOB and charged it with preparing a master-plan for rebuilding the city.   Although the 17-member commission was racially balanced and included city council president Oliver Thomas as well as a 'virtual' Wynton Marselis (he videocommuted from Manhattan), the real clout was exercised by committee chairs: especially, Canizaro (urban planning), Cowen (education), and Howard (finance). (Kobacoff declined the chair of the housing sub-committee, but remained an influential ghost.)

The New York Times soon reported that Thomas and others believe that 'they have been granted secondary status among the membership, saying they are a kind of B-team whom the others do not invite to the private luncheon that precedes the group's weekly meeting.’   This inner-sanctum - Nagin, Canizaro, and a few others lunching over oysters Rockefeller - was reportedly necessary because the full panel meetings did not allow a frank discussion of 'tough issues of race and class.’   In a pointed allusion to Thomas and his neighborhood electorate, Tulane President Cowen counter-attacked that ‘members of the commission are starting to use the meetings to cater to certain constituencies and stakeholder groups they know are watching.’

The BNOP might have imploded in the first month but for a shrewd out-flanking movement by Canizaro, who persuaded the mayor to invite the Urban Land Institute (ULI) to New Orleans in November to work with the commission.  Years earlier in 1993, Canizaro had brought in the ULI to help convince St. Thomas residents to seek the HOPE VI funding that eventually resulted in Kabacoff's River Garden and the displacement of most tenants.   Although the ULI is the self-interested national voice of corporate land developers, Nagin and Canizaro welcomed the 50-member delegation of developers, architects, and ex-mayors as a heroic cavalry of expertise riding to New Orleans rescue.  After an intense week of workshops and charettes, the ULI presented the BNOP with a set of provisional recommendations (finalized in December) that immediately hegemonized the debate on reconstruction.

In a nutshell, the ULI reframed the historic elite desire to shrink New Orleans' socio-economic footprint of Black poverty (and Black political power) as a crusade to reduce its physical footprint to contours commensurate with public safety and a fiscally viable urban infrastructure.  Once again, the Rand Corporation's population guesstimates were fetishized as scientific facts, and cause and effect were grotesquely inverted so that the population decline appeared to mandate a shrinkage of residential area, rather than (the actual case) a stalled recovery deterring residents from moving back. Upon these suspect premisses,  the outside ‘experts’ (including representatives of some of the country’s largest property firms and corporate architects) proposed an unprecedented triage of an American city: with short-term rebuilding focused on high ground like Uptown and the CBD, leaving a periphery for future individual rehabilitation or River Garden-type large-scale renewal.   Meanwhile, a third zone of low-lying neighborhoods - including African-American heartlands like Gentilly, most of New Orleans East, Broadmoor, Mid-City, Hollygove and most of the Lower Ninth Ward  -would be targeted for mass buyouts and future conversion into a greenbelt to protect the city from flooding.   As a visiting developer told BNOB: ‘Your housing is now a public resource.  You can't think of it as private property any more.’

Based on the St. Thomas precedent, however, many Orleanians - white as well as Black - wondered whether the ULI wasn't actually lobbying for a mechanism that would transform ordinary peoples’ equities into developers’ windfall profits.  Keenly aware of fierce popular resistance to a color-coded triage of neighborhoods, the ULI also proposed a Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation armed with eminent domain that would bypass the New Orleans city council, as well as an oversight board (modeled on New York City's Municipal Assistance Corporation) to take over the city’s finances.  With control of New Orleans’ schools already usurped by the state, the ULI’s proposed dictatorship of experts and elite appointees would effectively overthrow representative democracy and annul the right of local people to make decisions about their lives.   For veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement, especially, it reeked of disfranchisement pure and simple, a return to the paternalism of plantation days.

Oliver Thomas and the Council, supported by a surprising number of white homeowners and their representatives, angrily rejected the concept of neighborhood triage.   Amongst Blacks, only Alden McDonald and a handful of others supported the ULI, while Mayor Nagin - truly a cat on a hot tin roof - danced anxiously back and forth between both camps, disavowing the abandonment of any area while at the same time warning that the city could no longer afford to service every neighborhood. 


But state and national officials, including HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, applauded the ULI scheme, as did the editorial page of the Times-Picayune and the influential Bureau of Government Research (the traditional voice of Uptown 'good government' types).   Additional support came from Beltway carpetbaggers like James Glassman of the American Enterprise Institute ('Those areas should return to marshland’), Ron Utt of Heritage (‘Should we think about a New Orleans that shrinks back to its original and more viable core?’), and Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute (‘I would submit that the entire structure of the elected school board should be dismantled...’).  New Orleans was treated like a failed state, a domestic Haiti.  

Faced with such a formidable coalition of plutocrats, newspaper editors, policy wonks, even environmentalists in favor of downsizing New Orleans, and with their grassroots memberships scattered in exile across the Southern tier, the ULI's opponents (including local unions, churches and activist groups like ACORN) had enormous difficulty making their voices heard.   The Times-Picayune, as well as the major national dailies, relentlessly sermonized that New Orleans was faced with the choice between the anarchy of its irresponsible elected Council or the wisdom of Canizaro and the ULI elders.  Yet throughout December, as the committees worked on their final reports, there was considerable nervousness amongst its original instigators that the BNOB might bow to popular opinion and pull its punch. 

Just before Christmas, the Bureau of Government Research issued a position paper (Wanted: A Realistic Development Strategy) which warned that the city faced further disaster if it allowed politics, rather than ‘physical and demographic realities’ to determine ‘exactly which parts of the city can be rebuilt and when.’  ‘Unless the city’s plan addresses the mismatch between the cityís footprint and its population by initially directing development into more compact areas, the outcome will be random, scattered development in a sea of blight.’

In the event, the BNOP recommendations that were presented by Canizaro in January faithfully hewed to the ULI framework: proposing an appointed redevelopment corporation outside the control of the city council that would act as a land bank to buy out heavily-damaged homes and neighborhoods with federal funds - wielding eminent domain as needed to retire low-lying areas to greenbelt ('Black peoples' neighborhoods into white peoples' parks,’ someone commented) or to assemble 'in-fill’ tracts for mixed-income development along the lines of River Garden.


Other committees recommended a radical dimunition of the power of elected government: for example, eliminating the City Councilís ability to override decisions by the Planning Commission, consolidating seven elected assessors' offices into a single appointed office, and transferring financial control to a banker-dominated oversight board like Felix Rohatyn's MAC which ruled New York in the 1970s.    

On the crucial question of how to decide which neighborhoods would be allowed to rebuild and which would be bulldozed, the BNOB endorsed the concept of forced buy-outs but equivocated over process.  Instead of the ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research wanted, Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube-Goldberg-like procedure of a temporary building moratorium in tandem with neighborhood planning meetings that would poll homeowners about their intentions   Only those neighborhoods where at least half of the pre-Katrina residents committed to return would be considered as serious candidates for CDBGs and other financial aid.  

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a public audience in the Sheraton Hotel ballroom on 11 January.   The mayor said 'I like the plan' and complimented the commissioners for ‘a job well done.’  The Times-Picayune predictably homilized that 'the death of neighborhoods is an uncomfortable idea for many people, and understandably so, but it may be unavoidable in the aftermath of Katrina.’  But that 'doesnít have to mean,’ the editors added, 'that New Orleans becomes a lesser version of itself.  The city can be rebuilt with the same charm.’

But most locals found little charm in the Canizaro report.   ‘I will sit in my front door with a shotgun,’ one resident warned at a jammed meeting in the council chambers on 14 January, while another demanded:  ‘Are we going to allow some developers, some hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab our homes, to make this a Disney World version of our homes, our lives?’ Even old antagonists like Cynthia Willard-Lewis and Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson (the white council member for Algiers and the French Quarter) closed ranks to denounce the plan.  Predictably, Mayor Nagin panicked and eventually disavowed the building moratorium.


Soon afterwards the White House torpedoed the Baker bill and left BNOB with only the state-controlled CDGB appropriation to finance its ambitious vision of New Orleans regrouped around a dozen new River Gardens linked by a highspeed light-rail line.  But Canizaro - who has gamely weathered the insults screamed in his face at public presentations of his report – doesn’t seem unduly worried.   He has reassured supporters that the JLI/BNOB plan can go forward with CDGBs alone if necessary; in addition, he knows that independent of the local political weather, there are irresistible external forces - lack of insurance coverage, new FEMA flood maps, refusal of lenders to refinance mortages, and so on - that can compel an exodus from redlined neighborhoods.   Moreover, as anyone versed in the realpolitik of modern Louisiana knows, nothing is finally decided in New Orleans until some good ole boys (and girls) in Baton Rouge have their say.  


7.  Power Shift 

‘We are concerned that there are both a land grab and
a power grab going on.’
NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund

Even before the last bloated body had been fished out of the fetid waters, conservative political analysts were writing gleeful obituaries for Black Democratic power in Louisiana.   'The Democrats' margin of victory,’ boasted Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation, '[is] living in the Astrodome in Houston.’   Others pointed excitedly to the new math: subtract the Ninth Ward of New Orleans and Senator Mary Landrieu and numerous other Democrats, big and small, would be unemployed.


Thanks to the Army Corps’ defective levees, the Republicans stand to gain another Senate seat, two congressional seats, and possibly a governorship.  The Democrats would also find it impossible to reproduce Bill Clinton's 1992 feat, when he carried Louisiana by almost exactly his margin of victory in New Orleans.  With a ruthless psephologist like Karl Rove in the White House, it is inconceivable that such considerations haven't influenced the shameless Bush response to New Orleans’ distress.

But there have been Machiavellian celebrations in Baton Rouge as well.  As Rep. Charlie DeWitt, a conservative Democrat from rural Lecompte, gleefully told a reporter from California: ‘This state has totally changed politically.  I think it's going to be probably one of the most conservative states in the South.’  A political analyst from Shreveport added: 'Even good people are quietly sitting back, not lending their support to the rebuilding of New Orleans.  What you’re seeing is a lot of people snickering and winking and nodding.’

Presumably some of this ‘snickering and winking’ has been happening just across the parish border.  New Orleans has always vied with Detroit when it comes to the violent antipathy of its white-flight suburbs toward its Black central city, so it is not surprising that the representatives from Jefferson Parish (which elected neo-Nazi David Duke to the legislature in 1989) and St. Tammany's Parish have particularly relished the post-Katrina shift in metropolitan population and electoral power.  Both parishes are in the midst of housing booms that may consolidate the hollowing out and decline of New Orleans.  

In December, for example, giant KB Home of California (formerly Kauffman and Broad) announced a partnership with the Shaw Group to quickly start phase-one construction of 20,000 homes on the West Bank of Jefferson Parish: a move clearly designed to preempt the rebuilding of flood-damaged white-collar neighborhoods in New Orleans across the river.  Similarly across Lake Pontchartrain, there has been a ‘feeding frenzy’ in St. Tammany's ‘desperation [real estate] market’ where the population is predicted to surge 30 per cent in the next few years.  Likewise, zero-vacancy Baton Rouge is rushing to build enough subdivisions, apartments and offices to accommodate tens of thousands of expatriates from the south. 


For her part, Governor Kathleen Blanco has expressed little concern about this fundamental reconfiguration of Louisiana's major metropolitan area.  Indeed, her immediate, Bush-like responses to Katrina were to help engineer a state takeover of New Orleans schools, and then, to slash $500 million in state spending while sponsoring tax breaks (in the name of economic recovery) for oil companies awash in profits.  The legislative Black Caucus was outraged at Blanco's ‘complete lack of vision and leadership’ and went to court to challenge her right to make cuts without consulting lawmakers.   But Blanco, supported by rural conservatives and corporate lobbyists, remained intransigent, even openly hostile to Black Democrats whose support she had previously courted.


Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-New Orleans), the chair of the Black Caucus, interpreted the confrontation as evidence of a post-Katrina political realignment.  'It would appear that the administration is moving to the right.' He promised, however, that the Caucus would 'continue to speak for the people whose voice is ignored, and that's poor people - not just African-Americans, but poor people across the state.’

But poor people have no voice inside the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) that controls the allocation of $7.7 billion in FEMA funds and Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) that Congress has voted for the reconstruction of southern Louisiana.  The LRA ís a gaggle of university presidents and big business types appointed by Governor Blanco is a mirror image of the Canizaro krewe, but even less beholden to Black New Orleans voters and their representatives. 'Team Blanco' one-sidedly includes 28 representatives of big business, but only 2 trade-unionists and not a single grassroots' Black representative.  In contrast to Nagin’s commission, moreover, the LRA has the power to decide, not merely advise.


According to interviews in the Times-Picayune, leading members of the  LRA believe that the sheer force of economic disincentives - including insurance premiums, building codes changes, new FEMA flood maps, and the like - will shrink the city around the contours proposed by the Urban Land Institute.  Accordingly, the Authority has refused to disburse any of its hazard mitigation funds to areas considered unsafe, and presumably will be equally hardheaded in the allocation of CDBG spending through a proposed Housing and Land Trust.  At a special session of the Legislature in New Orleansí Convention Center, Governor Blanco emphasized that the state, not local government or neighborhood planning committees, will retain control over where grants and loans go. 


Blanco has announced that she wants to set aside $4.4 billion of the CDBGs to help homeowners throughout the state, with another $1 billion for affordable housing: far too little  to rebuild New Orleans, much less to heal the wounds of a dozen coastal parishes.  In the absence of further federal aid, the threat of a triage controlled by rural and suburban legislators hangs ominously over the city.  As advertising executive Sean Reilly, an LRA appointee from Baton Rouge, told the New York Times, 'Someone has to be tough, to stand up and to tell the truth.  Every neighborhood in New Orleans will not be able to come back safe.’


But the elites may have overlooked the Fats Domino factor. 


8.  ‘No Bulldozing!’

‘The battle for New Orleans has now become a guerrilla struggle fought
block by block and house by house.’
ACORN organizer Wade Rathke

Like hundreds of other flood-damaged, but structurally sound homes, Fats Domino’s house wears a defiant sign: ‘Save Our Neighborhood: No Bulldozing.’  The rhythm-and-blues icon, who has always stayed close to his roots in working-class Holy Cross, knows that his riverside neighborhood and the rest of the Lower Ninth Ward are prime targets of the city-shrinkers.

Indeed, on Christmas Day 2005, the Times-Picayune - declaring that 'before a community can rebuilt, it must dream’ - published a vision of what a smaller-but-better New Orleans might look like: 'Meanwhile, tourists and schoolchildren tour a living museum that includes the former home of Fats Domino and Holy Cross High School, a multiblock memorial to Katrina that spans the devastated neighborhood.’  

'Living museum' (or 'holocaust museum' as a Black friend bitterly observed) sounds like a bad joke, but it is the elite in-a-nutshell view of what African-American New Orleans should become.  In the brave New-Urbanist world of Canizaro and Kabacoff, Blacks (along with that other colorful minority group, Cajuns) will reign only as entertainers and self-caricatures.   All the high-voltage energy that once rocked juke joints, housing projects, and second-line parades will now be safely embalmed for tourists in a proposed Louisiana Music Experience district in the CBD.  

But this minstrel-show version of the future must first defeat a remarkable local history of grassroots organization.  The Crescent City's best-kept secret - in the mainstream press, at least - has been the resurgence of trade-union and community organizing since the mid-1990s.  Indeed New Orleans (the only Southern city in which labor was ever powerful enough to call a general strike) has become an important crucible of new social movements.  

In particular, it has become the home base of ACORN, a national organization of working-class homeowners and tenants (founded in Arkansas in 1970) that counts more than 9000 New Orleans member families (including Fats Domino), mostly in triage-threatened Black neighborhoods.  ACORN’s dynamic membership has been the engine behind the tumultuous, decade-long struggle to unionize downtown hotels as well as the successful 2002 referendum to legislate the nation' s first municipal minimum wage (later overthrown by a rightwing Louisiana Supreme Court).  Since Katrina,  ACORN has emerged as the major opponent of the ULI/BNOB plan for shrinking the city.  They find themselves again fighting many of the same elite figures who were also opponents of hotel unionization and a living wage. 

ACORN founder Wade Rathke scoffs at the Rand Corporation projections that portray most Blacks abandoning the city.  ‘Don’t believe those phony figures,’ he told me over beignets at Cafe du Monde in January, ‘we have polled our displaced members in Houston and Atlanta.  Folks overwhelmingly want to return.  But they realize that this is a tough struggle since we have to fight simultaneously on two fronts: to restore peoples’ homes and to bring back their jobs.   It is also a race against time.  The challenge is: you make it, you take it.  So our members are voting with their feet.’

Not waiting for CDBGs, FEMA flood maps or permission from Canizaro,  ACORN crews and volunteers from across the country are working night-and-day to repair the homes of 1000 member-families in four of the most threatened areas: Gentilly, New Orleans East, Hollygrove and the Lower Ninth Ward.  The strategy is to confront the city-shrinkers with the incontestable fact of reoccupied, viable neighborhood cores.  While other homeowners might be deterred by the daunting challenges of insurance costs and possible eminent domain, ACORN relies on the political consciousness of its members and their fierce loyalties to extended families, churches and neighborhoods.   

ACORN has also allied with the AFL-CIO, and the NAACP to defend worker rights and press for the hiring of locals in the recovery effort.   Rathke points out that Katrina has become the pretext for the most vicious government-supported attack on unions since President Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers in 1981.  'First suspension of Bacon-Davis [federal prevailing wage law], then the state take-over of the schools and the destruction of the teachersí union, and now this.’  He points to a beat-up, green garbage truck rattling by Jackson Square. ‘Trash collection in the French Quarter used to be a unionized city job, SEIU members.  Now FEMA has contracted the work to a scab company from out-of-state.  Is this what Bring New Orleans Back means?’

While ACORN is trying to bring its members home, a coalition of smaller groups, including the Peoples’ Hurricane Relief Fund (with a genealogy that goes back to SNCC and the Black Panthers), the Common Ground collective, and the New Orleans Green Party, as well as progressive law students from across the country, have been battling proposed demolitions in the Lower Ninth Ward.   After Christmas, the city stealthily attempted to bulldoze more than 100  ‘public hazard’ homes without any effort to locate or notify their owners.   Local activists and volunteer workers rushed to put their bodies in the way, winning time for veteran civil-rights lawyer Bill Quigley to file suit against the city for its blatant violation of due process.   As both sides were keenly aware, it was just the first skirmish in the coming struggle against mass demolitions and neighborhood triage.

It would be inspiring to see in this latest battle of New Orleans the birth pangs of a new or renewed civil rights movement, but gritty local activism has yet to be echoed in meaningful solidarity by the labor movement, so-called progressive Democrats, or even the Congressional Black Caucus    Pledges, press statements, and occasional delegations, yes; but not the unfaltering national outrage and sense of urgency that should attend the attempted murder of New Orleans on the fortieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.   In 1874, as historian Ted Tunnell has pointed out, the failure of Northern Radicals to launch a militant, armed riposte to the white insurrection in New Orleans helped to doom the first Reconstruction.  (‘A harsh verdict can scarcely be avoided: Reconstruction failed on the lower Mississippi mainly because Louisiana whites believed more devoutly in white supremacy than the Radicals believed in the rights of man.’)


Will our feeble response to Katrina now lead to the rollback of the Second?