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01/21/2006:

"Privatizing New Orleans"

...Last week, the mayor’s Bring Back New Orleans commission released its recommendations on rebuilding, which are filled with the expected double talk and half promises regarding what neighborhoods can be rebuilt, pegged to vague tests and benchmarks.

But most infuriating, featured in all the coverage of the report, is the estimate given by the commission, politicians, developers, and media that only half of the city’s population is expected to come back to New Orleans in the next several years. The so-called experts advise us to be “realistic,” and accept that the city has to have a “smaller footprint” because so many people will not be returning.

Where do the reduced population statistics come from? The truth is that the “experts” are manipulating the truth for their own ends. They are creating a situation where half the city is kept from returning; then saying that we need to reduce our expectations to this reality they have created.

This week, 90% of Tulane University students came back to resume classes in uptown New Orleans. The majority did not have long-term ties to the city, but they returned because Tulane and the city wanted them back, and worked to get them back. With housing and encouragement, the majority of New Orleans would be back today. This is a completely avoidable displacement, happening in slow motion before our eyes.

It is also paternalistic, with experts brought out, one after another, to tell us – especially poor and Black New Orleanians – what is best. You can’t come to this neighborhood yet, it’s not safe for you. You can’t rebuild, we don’t know if your neighborhood will be viable. You can’t move back to New Orleans – we think you’ll be better off somewhere else, where the welfare is better.

For the city’s poor, more hurdles are being put up. Some residents who have returned are blocking the installation of FEMA trailers in their neighborhoods. Hotels are planing evictions of New Orleanians in preparation for Mardi Gras tourists. The city plans to demolish homes before people can even come back to see them.

It's perhaps a symbol of Republican dominance and Democratic cowardice that free-marketers have chosen this overwhelmingly Democratic city as a front line in their war on government institutions created for the poor. Charity Hospital is forced to remain closed. Public housing tenants are pressured to remove their belongings. The public schools remain mostly closed, while the school system becomes the landscape for social experimentation by right-wing school privatisers.

Within the first two weeks after New Orleans was flooded, the right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation released its plans to capitalize on the disaster. Near the top of the list was promotion of “school choice” and school vouchers. Pre-Katrina, New Orleans schools were among the most segregated in the nation, with some of the nations lowest spending going to public schools, which had a wide array of problems including collapsing infrastructure and so little money for elective courses that in some schools JROTC, the military recruiting program for high schools, was a mandatory class.

The proposed changes do nothing to address these issues, instead they exacerbate the problem, diverting funds from the poorest schools, and continuing a system with two tiers of schools, one for those with the privilege, and one for everyone else. As an added benefit for privatisers, the teachers union - previously the largest union in the city - faces virtual elimination under this scheme, as staff are laid off and new schools open with mandates to cut salaries and eliminate health insurance.
zmag.org