The Disgusting State of New Orleans a year after Hurrican Katrina

I found a blog entry through a live journal community of some of the horrible things that have happened in New Orleans since the disaster:
----------------
Hurricane Katrina seems to have provided a perfect opportunity to privatize the entire city of New Orleans, starting with it's schools and housing

Schools
After Katrina, the Louisiana State government took over the New Orleans school district and fired 7,500 school employees including about 4,000 teachers. The rest were bus drivers, lunch workers, janitors, ect. According to Joe DeRose, Communications Director for the United Teachers of New Orleans:


"(These were) solid middle class employees, career professionals who had dedicated their careers to helping try to educate the children in one of the neediest cities in the country, a city with one of the highest poverty rates, as everybody saw in the days immediately following Katrina. They were treated with utter disrespect. There was no notification that they would be fired until one day in October, when the school board called a press conference, notified us about an hour before that they were going to have such a conference. Therefore, most people found out that they were being terminated on the 5:00 news. Those who didn't have TVs or weren't still living in the city found out in the newspaper the next morning or by phone calls from friends and relatives who were in touch with the media."


And now that the entire infrastructure of the school system has been anhilated, the privitization can begin. Just last week it was announced that $24 million of federal aid will be given for the development of private charter schools. None of this money is being given to public schools. Before the Hurricane there were 128 schools in New Orleans, now there are 25, and only four of them are public schools.


on a side note I thought it was interesting that Barbara Bush promised the Katrina victims that she would give to a charity to help the situation, but according to the Houston Chronicle

“Katrina funds earmarked to pay for Neil Bush’s software program. Former First Lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina fund with specific instructions that the money be spent with an educational software company owned by her son Neil. Since then, the Ignite learning program has been given to eight area schools that took in substantial numbers of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.”




Housing
In August 2005, the US Department of Housing and Urban Devlopment (HUD) reported they had 7,381 public apartments in New Orleans. Now HUD has announced it's plans to demolish the 5,000 remaining public housing units. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson said: "Any New Orleans voucher recipient or public housing resident will be welcomed home." But he didn't say how they would be welcomed; apparently with bulldozers and wrecking balls.

Much of the bulldozing comes through a federal program called Hope IV, a program that destroys low income housing in the name of creating "mixed income housing". It sounds good; like something everyone can benefit from, but such is not the case. According to Bill Quigley, law professor at Loyola University, and director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola:


New Orleans has already experienced the tragic effects of HOPE VI. The St. Thomas Housing Development in the Irish Channel area of New Orleans was home to 1600 apartments of public housing. After St. Thomas was demolished under Hope VI, the area was called River Gardens. River Gardens is a mixed income community - home now to 60 low income families, some middle income apartments, a planned high income tower, and a tax-subsidized Wal-Mart! Our tax dollars at work – destroying not only low-income housing but neighborhood small businesses as well. Worse yet, after Katrina, the 60 low-income families in River Gardens were not even allowed back into their apartments. They were told their apartments were needed for employees of the housing authority. It took the filing of a federal complaint by the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center to get the families back into their apartments."


There has been some resistance. Last weekend there was a march in an upper-income area with the argument "If you want to mix, let's do mixed income. Let’s mix income in your community!" The group held a large banner in front of a $2 million house saying "If we're going to start mixed income, let's start here.”

I will end my rant with a quote from ten-term Republican Congressmember from Baton Rouge, Richard Baker.

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it. But God did.”
----------------

these developments really bothered me because instead of helping rebuilding New Orleans and helping those who need it the, the federal and state government is exploiting the city and pushing aside low-income people (those who suffered the most because the natural disaster).

Yet unfortunately, this isn't the end of the exploitation of New Orleans and the general gulf coast area. According to a recent report by CorpWatch:

"Disaster profiteers [are] mak[ing] millions while local companies and laborers in New Orleans and the rest of the Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast region are systematically getting the short end of the stick"because of no bid contracts to companies outside of the three most effected areas (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) and " 'contracting charge pyramids' where the companies doing the actual reconstruction work often get only a tiny (and insufficient) fraction of the taxpayer money awarded for projects and widespread non-payment of local companies and laborers, including what has been alleged to be the deliberate and systematic exploitation of immigrant workers, including undocumented individuals."

Local businesses get shunned and cheap labor is exploited. The Bush Administration at its best!