[StBernard] Who Is Killing New Orleans? Mike Davis

[Westley Annis]

Who Is Killing New Orleans? Mike Davis
Thu Mar 23, 3:10 PM ET
 


The Nation -- A few 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 (news,
bio, voting record) 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 (news, bio, voting
record), 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 (news, bio, voting record)'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?