[Mb-civic] Who Is Killing New Orleans?

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/davis
Who Is Killing New Orleans?

by MIKE DAVIS

[from the April 10, 2006 issue]

Afew blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard 
University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of 
Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown 
skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with 
light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the 
Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to 
know when, if ever, they will be turned back on. In greater New 
Orleans about 125,000 homes 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 about 
the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 
percent of Nagin's constituents--including an estimated 80 percent of 
the 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 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 Kathleen Babineaux 
Blanco, would end local control over city finances.

Meanwhile, Bush's pledge to "get the work done quickly" and mount 
"one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen" has 
proved to be the same fool's gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild 
Iraq's 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 Representative Barney 
Frank has labeled "a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction"--the 
likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to 
return.

Lie and Stall

After his bungling initial response to Katrina, Bush impersonated FDR 
and Lyndon Johnson when he reassured the nation in his September 
15 Jackson Square speech that "we have a duty to confront [New 
Orleans's] 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 its conservative attack 
dogs in Congress offset Gulf relief with $40 billion worth of cutbacks in 
Medicaid, food stamps and student loans. Republicans also rebelled 
against aid for a state that was depicted as a venal Third World 
society, a failed state like Haiti, out of step with national values. 
"Louisiana and New Orleans," according to Idaho Senator Larry Craig, 
"are the most corrupt governments in our country and they always 
have been.... Fraud is in the culture of Iraqis. I believe that is true in the 
state of Louisiana as well."

Democrats, apart from the Congressional Black Caucus, did 
pathetically little to counter this backlash or to hold Bush's feet to the 
fire over his Jackson Square pledge. The promised national debate 
about urban poverty never took place; instead, New Orleans, like a 
great derelict ship, drifted helplessly in the treacherous 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 3,000 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 income 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 a majority of loan applications by local businesses and 
homeowners. At the same time, a bipartisan Senate bill to save small 
businesses with emergency bridge loans was sabotaged by Bush 
officials, leaving thousands to face bankruptcy and foreclosure. As a 
result, the economic foundations of the city's African-American middle 
class (public-sector jobs and small businesses) have been swept away 
by deliberate decisions made in the White House. Meanwhile, in the 
absence of federal or state initiatives to employ locals, low-income 
blacks are losing their niches in the construction and service sectors to 
more mobile outsiders.

In stark contrast to its neglect of neighborhood relief, the White House 
has made herculean efforts to reward its own base of large 
corporations and political insiders. Representative Nydia Velazquez, 
who sits on the House Small Business Committee, pointed out that the 
SBA has allowed large corporations to get $2 billion in federal 
contracts while excluding local minority contractors.

The paramount beneficiaries of Katrina relief aid have been the giant 
engineering firms KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) and the Shaw Group, 
which enjoy the services of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh (a former FEMA 
director and Bush's 2000 campaign manager). FEMA and the Army 
Corps of Engineers, 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 war-torn 
Euphrates. (Some of this largesse, of course, is guaranteed to be 
recycled as GOP campaign contributions.) FEMA, for example, has 
paid 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 by FEMA. 
Similarly, the Army Corps pays prime contractors about $20 per cubic 
yard of storm debris removed, yet some bulldozer operators receive 
only $1. 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 
Salvadoran immigrants camped out in city parks and derelict shopping 
centers--can barely make ends meet.

The Big Kiss-Off

In the fractious, take-no-prisoners world of Louisiana politics, broad 
solidarity of interest is normally as rare as a boulder in a bayou. Yet 
Katrina created an unprecedented bipartisan consensus around twin 
demands for Category 5 hurricane protection and mortgage relief for 
damaged homes. From conservative Republicans to liberal 
Democrats, there has been unanimity that the region's recovery 
depends on federal investment in new levees and coastal restoration, 
as well as financial rescue of the estimated 200,000 homeowners 
whose insurance coverage has failed to cover their actual damage. 
(There has been no equivalent consensus and little concern for the 
right of renters--who constituted 53 percent of the population before 
Katrina--and of public-housing tenants to return to their city.)

Yet by early November it was clear that saving New Orleans was no 
longer high on the Bush agenda, if it had ever been. As Congress 
headed toward its Christmas adjournment, the Louisiana delegation 
was in panic mode: A Category 5 plan had disappeared from serious 
discussion, and there were doubts about whether the damaged levees 
would be repaired before hurricane season returned. (In early March 
engineers monitoring the progress of the Army Corps's work 
complained that the use of weak, sandy soils and the lack of concrete 
"armoring" insured that the levees would again fail in a major storm.)

Congress ultimately voted to provide $29 billion for Gulf Coast relief. 
Yet as the Washington Post reported, "All but $6 billion of the measure 
merely reshuffled some of the $62 billion 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. Meanwhile, Mississippi's powerful 
Republican troika--Governor Haley Barbour and Senators Trent Lott 
and Thad Cochran--persuaded fellow Republicans to support $6.2 
billion in discretionary housing aid for Louisiana and $5.3 billion for 
Mississippi, with red-state Mississippi getting five times as much aid 
per distressed household as pink-state Louisiana.

Louisiana received another blow on January 23, when Bush rejected 
GOP Representative Richard Baker's plan calling for a federally 
guaranteed Louisiana Reconstruction Corporation, which would bail 
out homeowners by buying distressed properties and packaging them 
in larger parcels for resale to developers. Local Republicans as well as 
Democrats howled in rage, and the future of southern Louisiana was 
again thrown into chaos. Although the Administration eventually 
promised an additional $4.2 billion in housing aid, the appropriation 
continues to be fought over by Texas and other jealous states.

The Republican hostility to New Orleans, of course, runs deeper and is 
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 130 years ago. 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.

Such calumnies reproduce ancient caricatures--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. 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 
agenda for a long time.

The Krewe of Canizaro

Power and status in New Orleans have always been defined by 
membership in secretive Mardi Gras "krewes" and social clubs. In the 
early 1990s civil rights activists, led by feisty Councilmember Dorothy 
Mae Taylor, forced the token desegregation of Mardi Gras, and some 
of the clubs reluctantly admitted a few African-American millionaires. 
Despite some old-guard holdouts, 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 has wrested control 
over the debate about how to rebuild the city. This de facto ruling 
krewe includes Jim Amoss, editor of the New Orleans 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., the man responsible for the buses that didn't 
evacuate people); Alden McDonald Jr., CEO of one of the largest 
black-owned banks; Janet Howard of the Bureau of Government 
Research (originally established 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 kingpin is Joseph Canizaro, a wealthy 
property developer who is a leading Bush supporter with close 
personal ties to the White House inner circle. He is also the power 
behind the throne of Mayor Nagin, a nominal Democrat (he supported 
Bush in 2000) who was elected in 2002 with 85 percent of the white 
vote. Finally, as the former president of the Urban Land Institute, 
Canizaro 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's 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 Corporation and 
endlessly repeated by Nagin and Canizaro--that in three years the city 
would recover only half of its August 2005 population. Many Orleanians 
cynically wonder whether such projections aren't actually goals. For 
years Reiss, Kabacoff and others have complained that New Orleans 
has too many poor people. Faced with the dire fiscal consequences of 
white flight to the suburbs, as well as three decades of 
deindustrialization (which has given New Orleans an economic profile 
closer to Newark than to 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.

Kabacoff's 2003 redevelopment of the St. Thomas public housing 
project as River Garden, a largely market-rate faux Creole subdivision, 
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 committee) proposes to build. 
BNOB is perhaps the most important elite initiative in New Orleans 
since the famous "Cold Water Committee" (which included Kabacoff's 
father) mobilized in 1946 to overthrow the "Old Regulars" and elect 
reformer deLesseps Morrison as mayor. BNOB grew out of a notorious 
meeting between Mayor Nagin and New Orleans business leaders 
(dubbed by some "the forty thieves") that Reiss organized in Dallas 
twelve days after Katrina devastated the city. The summit excluded 
most of New Orleans's elected black representatives and, according to 
Reiss as characterized in the Wall Street Journal, focused on the 
opportunity to rebuild the city "with better services and fewer poor 
people."

Fears that a municipal coup d'etat was in progress were scarcely 
mollified when at the end of September the mayor charged BNOB with 
preparing a master plan to rebuild the city. Although the seventeen-
member commission was racially balanced and included City Council 
president Oliver Thomas as well as jazz musician Wynton Marsalis 
(telecommuting from Manhattan), the real clout was exercised by 
committee chairs, especially Canizaro (urban planning), Cowen 
(education) and Howard (finance), who lunched privately with the 
mayor before the group's weekly meeting. This inner sanctum was 
reportedly necessary because the full-panel meetings did not allow a 
frank discussion of "tough issues of race and class."

BNOB might have quickly imploded but for a shrewd outflanking 
movement by Canizaro, who persuaded Nagin to invite the Urban Land 
Institute to work with the commission. Although the ULI is the self-
interested national voice of corporate land developers, Nagin and 
Canizaro welcomed the delegation of developers, architects and ex-
mayors as a heroic cavalry of expertise riding to the city's rescue. In a 
nutshell, the ULI's recommendations reframed the historic elite desire 
to shrink the city's socioeconomic 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.

Upon these suspect premises, 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, in which low-lying neighborhoods would be targeted for 
mass buyouts and future conversion into a greenbelt to protect New 
Orleans from flooding. As a visiting developer told BNOB: "Your 
housing is now a public resource. You can't think of it as private 
property anymore."

Keenly aware of inevitable popular resistance, the ULI also proposed a 
Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation, armed with eminent domain, 
that would bypass the City Council, as well as an oversight board with 
power 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 disenfranchisement pure and simple, a return to the 
paternalism of plantation days.

The City Council, supported by a surprising number of white 
homeowners and their representatives, angrily rejected the ULI plan. 
Mayor Nagin--truly a cat on a hot tin roof--danced anxiously back and 
forth between the two camps, disavowing abandonment of any area 
while at the same time warning that the city could not 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 BNOB recommendations presented by Canizaro in January 
faithfully hewed to the ULI framework: They included 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 people's neighborhoods 
into white people's parks," someone commented) or to assemble "in-
fill" tracts for mixed-income development a la River Garden. Other 
committees recommended a radical diminution of the power of elected 
government.

On the crucial question of how to decide which neighborhoods would 
be allowed to rebuild and which would be bulldozed, BNOB endorsed 
the concept of forced buyouts but equivocated over process. Instead of 
the ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research wanted, 
Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube Goldberg-like 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 had 
made a committment to return would be considered serious 
candidates for Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) and 
other financial aid.

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a public audience on 
January 11. The mayor said, "I like the plan," and he complimented the 
commissioners for "a job well done." But most locals found little charm 
in the Canizaro report. "I will sit in my front door with my shotgun," one 
resident warned at a jammed meeting in the Council chambers on 
January 14, 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?" Predictably, Nagin panicked and eventually disavowed the 
building moratorium. Soon afterward the White House torpedoed the 
Baker plan and left BNOB with only the state-controlled CDBG 
appropriation to finance its ambitious vision of New Orleans regrouped 
around a dozen new River Gardens linked by a high-speed light-rail 
line.

But Canizaro doesn't seem unduly worried. He has reassured 
supporters that the ULI/BNOB plan can go forward with CDBGs alone 
if necessary; in addition, he knows that independent of the local 
political weather, there are powerful external forces--lack of insurance 
coverage, new FEMA flood maps, refusal of lenders to refinance 
mortgages and so on--that can make permanent the 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 ol' boys (and girls) in Baton Rouge have their say.

Power Shift

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," said Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation, is "living in the 
Astrodome in Houston." Thanks to the Army Corps's defective levees, 
the Republicans stand to gain another Senate seat, two Congressional 
seats and probably the 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 the city's distress.

New Orleans has always vied with Detroit when it comes to the violent 
antipathy of white-flight suburbs toward its black central city, so it is not 
surprising that representatives from Jefferson Parish (which elected 
Klan leader David Duke to the state legislature in 1989) and St. 
Tammany 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.

For her part, Governor Blanco, a Democrat, 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 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.

Poor people have no voice inside the Louisiana Recovery Authority, 
whose gaggle of university presidents and corporate types appointed 
by Blanco is even less beholden to black New Orleans voters and their 
representatives than the Canizaro krewe. The twenty-nine-member 
LRA board, dominated by representatives of big business, has only 
one trade unionist and not a single grassroots black representative. 
Moreover, in contrast to Nagin's commission, the LRA has the power 
to decide, not merely advise: It controls the allocation of the FEMA 
funds and CDBGs that Congress has provided for reconstruction.

According to interviews in the Times-Picayune, leading members of 
the LRA believe that the sheer force of economic disincentives will 
shrink the city around the contours proposed by the Urban Land 
Institute. The authority has thus 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. At a special 
session of the legislature Governor Blanco emphasized that the state, 
not local government or neighborhood planning committees, will retain 
control over where grants and loans go.

But Blanco and the elites may have overlooked the Fats Domino 
factor.

'No Bulldozing!'

Like hundreds of other flood-damaged but structurally sound homes, 
Fats Domino's house wears a defiant sign: Save Our Neighborhood: 
No Bulldozing! The r&b icon, who has always stayed close to his roots 
in working-class Holy Cross, knows his riverside neighborhood and the 
rest of the Lower Ninth Ward are prime targets of the city-shrinkers. 
Indeed, on Christmas Day the Times-Picayune--declaring that "before 
a community can rebuild, it must dream"--published a vision of what a 
smaller-but-better New Orleans might look like: "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 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. 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 in 
the Central Business District.

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 that counts more than 9,000 New 
Orleans member-families, mostly in triage-threatened black 
neighborhoods. ACORN's 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 right-wing state 
Supreme Court). Since Katrina, ACORN has emerged as the major 
opponent of the ULI/BNOB plan for shrinking the city. Its members find 
themselves again fighting many of the same elite figures who were 
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 people's 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 1,000 member-families in 
some of the most threatened areas. The strategy is to confront the 
city-shrinkers with the incontestable fact of reoccupied, viable 
neighborhood cores.

ACORN has 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 Davis-Bacon 
[federal prevailing wage law], then the state takeover of the schools 
and the destruction of the teachers' 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?"

ACORN also went to court to insure that New Orleans's displaced, 
largely black population would have access to out-of-state polling 
places, especially in Atlanta and Houston, for the scheduled April 22 
city elections. When a federal judge rejected the demand, ACORN 
organizer Stephen Bradberry said it's "so obvious that there's a 
concerted plan to make this a whiter city." The NAACP agrees, but the 
Justice Department denied its request to block an election that is likely 
to transfer power to the artificial white majority created by Katrina.

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. Will our feeble 
response to Hurricane Katrina now lead to the rollback of the second?

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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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