Disaster Profiteering

[Guest guest]

Disaster Profiteering: Purging the Poor in the New New Orleans

 

 

 

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We speak with writer and author Naomi Klein about what some are calling the real

looting of New Orleans. In this week's cover story in The Nation magazine, Klein

reports on how the city's poorest evacuees are being kept out of thousands of

perfectly livable empty homes. [includes rush transcript]

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Hurricane Rita is now just a day or so away from the US coast and more than 1.8

million people are being told to evacuate Gulf Coast communities, particularly

in Texas and Louisiana. For many, it is a horrible nightmare that has struck

twice. And as Rita bears down on the US, the devastation of Katrina remains. A

lot of attention has focused on the government's failures to protect the people

of Louisiana and the question that still looms over all of this is if New

Orleans was New England, would this have been allowed to happen? Well, as calls

increase for an independent investigation into the Bush administrations handling

of the hurricane, the wealthy elite of Louisiana, politicians and corporations

are moving ahead with what may best be termed an agenda of disaster

profiteering.

Today, we are going to take an in-depth look at what some are calling the

beginning of the real looting of New Orleans. The cover stories of this week's

Nation magazine examines what has been happening behind the scenes as wealthy

business leaders meet with politicians and government officials, plotting a path

to rebuild New Orleans their way. Meanwhile, these same forces have brought in

some of the most feared private security companies in the world to protect their

interests.

 

 

Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist and author of " Fences and Windows:

Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate " and " No Logo:

Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. "

- Read Naomi Klein's article: " Purging the Poor "

 

 

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, let's begin with you. Lay out this story, what you

have found, “Purging the Poor. "

 

NAOMI KLEIN: Thanks, Amy. I guess listening to Juan's introduction; maybe what

we're seeing is an attempt to turn New Orleans into New England. It's really an

extremely radical vision, and I think the context of this is there's something

about natural disasters that brings out a really dangerous apocalyptic side in

the national psyche or in certain people in positions of power where there's

this actual sense that these cataclysmic events are almost redemptive in their

violence.

 

And we started to hear this very early on after Katrina hit, where, not just

from evangelical Christian sides, we started to hear, " maybe this is punishment

for Mardi Gras and sodomites and we’ve cleaned the city " , but you hear it from

the mayor, Ray Nagin, " for the first time New Orleans is free of crime and

violence and we're going to keep it that way " . There's almost a sense that free

of people, the city has become this blank slate. In that context, this fantasy

can be built from scratch.

 

The buzzwords to listen for in terms of the reconstruction of New Orleans are

“smallerâ€, “saferâ€. And the idea is that in the city, wealth really buys

altitude, and so the effect of the flood was not at all democratic. The people

who were able to buy land on high ground, their neighborhoods are relatively

unscathed, and many of them never left or have been able to return. The people

who were hit hardest were the people who we saw on television, you know, in the

Superdome. These are the people who lived in the low-lying areas. So, the idea

now is, okay, maybe we won't rebuild those areas at all, and when -- on

September 15, when the mayor said that certain areas are able to be

re-inhabited, this is before Rita presented itself as the threat that it, it was

clear that the people re-populating New Orleans didn't look very much like the

people who lived there before. It was overwhelmingly white, whereas the people

still in shelters were overwhelmingly black. So, I think that the overall vision

is massive land grabs, radical gentrification, and as Jeremy's piece makes

clear, the gentrification is happening with privatized military force.

 

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, in your article, Naomi, you talk about the areas that have

begun to be repopulated, and you mention the census figures on the racial

breakdowns the French Quarter: 90% white, the Garden District: 89% white,

Audubon: 86% white. And you talk about the attempts to -- the housing that was

vacant in these neighborhoods that is not being used to settle some of those

dislocated. Could you talk about that for a minute?

 

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. I was really struck, Juan, that there's just been this

general acceptance that because of this geographical quirk of New Orleans which

is that the rich and white live on high ground, and the poor live in low-lying

areas that of course, there is going to be this massive demographic shift in the

city. There's been this acceptance that the people who were displaced to Houston

and are now being displaced again and that have been scattered across the

country will keep moving, because there's really nowhere for them to return to.

This became accepted wisdom very, very quickly. I was doing some research about

the fights over development before the hurricane, because one of the things that

I have noticed in my research is these huge, cataclysmic events are often

opportunities to exploit the dislocation that happens after a natural disaster

to ram through very unpopular policies.

 

So I started researching what the battles were in New Orleans before the

hurricane. And, of course, there were very, very fierce, an you know you’ve

covered this on your show, very fierce battles going on around housing projects,

and gentrification in the city where conflicts between people who were demanding

affordable housing and particularly the tourism sector on the French Quarter,

and over the course of the research, I saw the staggering feature, which is that

the French Quarter, which as you said is 90% white, is also almost half empty.

In the most recent census, and the market hasn't changed since then, the French

Quarter had a 37% vacancy rate, which means that 37% of the apartments and homes

in the French Quarter are sitting empty. They're sitting empty because the

people who own the buildings have decided that they would rather board up the

apartments than take reduced rent, because they're making enough off the

commercial rents, renting to restaurants and bars and so on.

 

So when I saw this massive dislocation happening, and all of these people

saying, “well, there's nowhere for them to return toâ€, I looked at the

census again, and looked at all of these other areas that the mayor has said are

dry and inhabitable and found that there were comparably high vacancy rates in

other areas, like the Garden District and Central Business District. What we

found was that in fact there are 12,000 empty apartments and houses in the dry

areas. Which means that those -- those could be affordable houses for people.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Yet, they argue that the authorities -- the authorities argued

there's no infrastructure to support them: no water, no electricity, or the

water is worse than that -- there's water but it's polluted.

 

NAOMI KLEIN: I'm not -- you know, I don't think it could happen at this point

tomorrow, but the mayor has said -- and obviously, because it's possible that

the city could flood again, but the context that we're talking about is that the

mayor said these areas are ready to be re-inhabited by the people who lived

there previously. If they're ready to be re-inhabited by the people who lived

there previously, then those apartments could clearly be opened up and it could

be part of the reconstruction process rather than just scattering people.

 

And we have heard this demand from community groups like Community Labor United,

demanding the right to return to the city. This is a huge political issue

related to this radical militarized gentrification agenda. Because people

can’t fight for their economic and social rights saying you know, we want

schools and hospitals to rebuild. We want affordable housing. They can’t make

those demands. They can’t fight for their social interests, economic interests

if they're not in the city. If they're scattered, living in shelters.

 

So, I think that there can be a fairly short term plan to get people into those

houses. I have talked to some legislators who say it's a pretty simple process

of the city passing an ordinance, and then federal monies being used to issue

Section 8 vouchers to pay landlords 100% of the rent. All that's lacking, Amy,

is really just political will to do it, because this doesn't fit the Bush Agenda

for the so-called “reconstruction of New Orleansâ€, because that agenda is

really treating the city as a laboratory for their so-called " Ownership

Society " . So, rather than subsidizing rents, what they're interested in is this

bizarre Urban Homesteading Act, which would auction off federal land or lottery

off federal land and people would build homes on that land.

 

JUAN GONZALEZ: Also, Naomi, your article talks about a document that you got a

hold of that deal deals with some meetings that have occurred to discuss how to

buy, I think it was the Heritage Foundation was involved, to begin to discuss

how to implement some of the conservative movement's programs under the guise of

dealing with the crisis of Katrina?

 

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. There are two key documents that people should really take a

look at. We're going to have them up on The Nation website and I'm sure we can

have them up on Democracy Now! as well. There's two documents. They come from

the same people, and they're connected. The first one comes from the Republican

Study Group, which is the caucus of Republican lawmakers in Congress, headed by

Mike Pence. It is called the “Pro Free Market Ideas for Responding to

Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices.†It comes out of a meeting that took

place at the Heritage Foundation on September 15th, where people from the

Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks got together with the

Republican Study Group members, and they brainstormed thirty-two policy demands

to package in as hurricane relief. And we have already seen several-- this is

why I think it should be taken extremely seriously, is that the first of the

demands is automatically suspending Davis-Beacon prevailing wage laws in

disaster areas.

 

So it's pretty clear that the people making this list have a direct line to

President Bush. Because that's already been adopted by presidential decree. The

second is to make the entire affected area “flat tax-free enterprise zoneâ€.

This is Bush's “Gulf Opportunity Zone†idea, making the whole region a sort

of “Club Med†for corporations to have every tax break they have ever

dreamed of. But it goes on. This is where we, I think, need to get ready.

 

They use the excuse of Katrina to talk about everything from opening up drilling

in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to subsidizing -- this is an incredible,

incredible one of their demands -- they want to subsidize oil exploration,

saying that the corporations won't fund this themselves. And then there's things

that we have heard about like they don't want money to be going directly to

public schools for displaced children who are affected by the hurricane. They

want it to go into school vouchers. This is already happening.

 

So it’s a transfer of wealth from the public realm, a huge transfer of wealth

from the public realm into private hands. So you have this on the one hand. They

issued this on September 13. It's already being adopted into law on several

levels. And then they come up with another document that actually just came out

yesterday, which is the Republican Study Committee's ideas of how to pay for all

of these corporate subsidies that they have demanded.

 

They say, “look, we cannot do this -- we cannot pay for so-called “hurricane

relief,†and it has very little or nothing to do with the families that were

affected by the hurricane; in fact, it's going to hurt those families.) They

say, “the only way we can afford this is if we make some radical cuts to the

budget.†They issue another document, the “RSC Budget Options for 2005â€,

which says “here's where we are going to make the cutsâ€. Once again, you

have the radical re-victimization of the very people who the money was intended

for.

 

Their demands are things like: suspend Medicaid's prescription drug coverage.

But more than that, you know, I mentioned the thing that got me was -- I

mentioned the fact that they're demanding subsidization for Big Oil for

exploration that they won't pay for. In this other document where they talk

about how they're going to find the money for all of this corporate welfare,

they say that they should cut all programs, all federal research programs, into

sustainable energy sources. So, here you have the issue that's really at the

core of this disaster, which is global warming and fossil fuels. They're

subsidizing big oil and cutting funding to any alternative energy source

research.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist, author of

the piece in this Nation magazine called, " Purging the Poor. "

 

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I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can still do

something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the

something that I can do.