Real Devastation

I'm going to excerpt just the lead in to this Rolling Stone article, but please, please, read the whole thing. This is the real story of NOLA, post Katrina, and it is an object lesson of what the rest of us can expect following a disaster, natural or man made, in our communities. It is horrifying. This is the Abu Ghraib of the US, another Bushco production.

How to Steal a Coastline
The Gulf is still in ruins -- but Bush has opened the door for the casinos and carpetbaggers, and now there's a cutthroat race to the high ground

New Orleans, ninth ward, near the infamous levee, the last Tuesday in March. I'm in the passenger seat of a spiffy black Volkswagen, staring out my window in shock. Only one word comes to mind: Hiroshima. Houses all sideways and blown to bits, cars flipped over, ground covered with glass and wire and dismembered dolls' heads. No water, no electricity, no civilization.

Katrina might as well have hit yesterday. Almost nobody has come back. Goateed white college volunteers living in tents seem to outnumber actual residents 10-to-1. On any given street, anything moving is probably either a rat or a CUNY sophomore. The death smell still hangs everywhere.

The VW stops, and I'm staring at a nearby car, crushed under a house. Next to it is a half-crumpled shack with a message written in spray paint: "Possible child body inside."

"Holy shit," I whisper.

"You ain't seen nothing yet, dude," says the man beside me.

I last saw the Rev. Willie Walker when we went out in rescue boats together just after the storm. The affable black pastor's cell phone and BlackBerry are constantly buzzing; he's always making new contacts, trying to get something organized. The good reverend is a hustler for God. I like Willie a lot. He's sincere without being a bore. And another thing: When he's my tour guide, I always seem to end up interviewing a lot of pretty girls.

Back in September, Willie had told me while standing in his ruined church, the fatefully named Noah's Ark Baptist, that he feared what lay ahead.

"They're going to take it all," he had said. "They're going to bring in the developers, and this neighborhood is going to be gone."

Willie foresaw that some combination of post-disaster zoning, forced property condemnations, infrastructural inattention and carpetbagging real-estate vultures would turn Katrina into one giant gentrification project. "They're hoping that you take the money and move," he had told people on the street.

Now Willie is leading me on a tour of the ruined city. Willie is usually a chatty guy, but now, here in the Ninth Ward, neither of us is talking. New Orleans is not a conversation. It's an image. You have to see it in person to comprehend it. It's a Grand Canyon of continuing misery and failure.

"Jesus," I say, staring at the wreckage. "What the hell have they been doing all this time?"

Willie laughs morbidly. "Nothing, dude," he says. "Absolutely nothing."
....
Then there's the flip side. the Bush administration opened the door for big corporate developers by offering huge tax incentives. And they're jumping on it. According to residents, within a month of the storm, much of East Biloxi was papered with little pink fliers that read: IF YOU OWN LAND IN EAST BILOXI AND WOULD LIKE TO SELL YOUR LAND TO A CASINO/DEVELOPER, CALL (228) 239-XXXX

Around the time that FEMA was issuing its ABFEs for East Biloxi, Congress was passing the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, colloquially known as the GoZone Act. When President Bush signed the law on December 21st, he made it sound like a relief program for the little guy. "It's a step forward to fulfill this country's commitment to help rebuild," he said. "It's going to help small businesses, is what it's going to do."

Well, not exactly. GoZone does an important thing. It provides a first-year bonus depreciation of fifty percent for commercial real-estate investors within the designated areas, which include East Biloxi and most of the lower parts of Mississippi, Louisiana and western Alabama. What this means, essentially, is that investors who bought into large projects after August 28th, 2005, will pay a fraction of the usual taxes in the first year of the investment.

The GoZone law is just another hand job for the rich, of the sort that has become a staple of the Bush administration's post-Katrina strategy. If the strategy for keeping public money from reaching the poor is to force people to first stand upside down and sing "Come On Eileen" backward and blindfolded, the strategy for giving money to the rich is a little more subtle. First, you give them tax breaks for indulging in the same activity you told the poor was dangerous, then you issue aid packages that only find their way down to needy recipients long after the value has been torn from the package's spine by a string of rapacious subcontractors, each taking their cut, who of course never had to enter into a competitive bid for their trouble. Carrying charges, my boy, carrying charges!

"The labor starts off at twenty-seven, thirty bucks [a yard], and by the time it gets down to me, it's five or seven dollars," says Richard Rispoli, a gregarious Georgian contractor who came to East Biloxi to work after the storm. In Rispoli's case, the chain started at a local construction company and passed down through three subcontractors on the way to Rispoli, who ended up not being paid at all by the last subcontractor, who simply split with the money. (The common thief who steals the last exposed bits of the public-aid package is a recurring character in the Katrina story.) Living now in a trailer in East Biloxi while he awaits payment for his work ("If the trailer's a-rockin', don't come a knockin'!" says his girlfriend, Diane), Rispoli is now faced with the prospect of selling his equipment in order to raise money for the trip back to Georgia.

From the administration down to the subcontractors, this is nothing more than organized crime.

As Taibi says in the article, until you've seen the devestation which is the Ninth Ward, you can't really understand the depth of the damage and the suffering. My boss was down in NOLA before Christmas and he just choked up when I asked him, "How was it?" He's been in the disaster recovery business a long time, so that was an unexpected response.

These are black people who aren't Bush Pioneers so don't expect much to change.