Dirty South Bureau

It’s sad to think that while I was busy working and sleeping during the vast majority of films at the New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival, I easily could have missed Saturday night’s premier of Ya Heard Me?, a groundbreaking documentary on Bounce.

This movie blew my mind. It starts pretty much as one would expect— gratuitous booty dancing shots, interviews with various artists and producers. But during the course of the film, it slowly peels away the layers not only to reveal Bounce as a highly original and powerful artistic expression of a people, but also to delve into the sexual politics of Bounce— from artist Mia X’s straight-up feminist lyrics to the entire “Sissy” scene, with artists like Katey Red making Bounce that is an expression of homosexual, trans culture.

The exploration of dance in the movie also moves beyond simple booty shaking to show a highly sophisticated form of dance that looks remarkably similar to traditional African dances, expressed in a contemporary, urban context. One has to wonder if the filmmakers intentionally led the viewers from stereotyped scenes deeper in slowly, to emphasize the contradictions between mainstream (often white) perceptions of Bounce and the real thing.

But perhaps the most powerful thread to run through the movie is Bounce as music that came out of New Orleans’ public housing developments. Many of the scenes are shot in and around projects such the Magnolia (CJ Peete), Calliope (BW Cooper) and Melpomene developments (large sections of Calliope and all of Magnolia are now piles of rubble). The term “project music” is repeatedly used by musicians and producers to describe Bounce, and it is a powerful irony to see the celebration of this culture at the moment it is most threatened, which the film also explores, tracking the displacement of artists such as Cheeky Blakk.

Big shout out to Jordan Flaherty, an organizer of the New Orleans Human Rights Film Festival, for making this possible. Jordan struck a powerful chord in his introduction to the film, hinting at the importance of recognizing the range of cultural achievements of this city, particularly when they are left out by the self-appointed arbiters of New Orleans music culture such as (he did not mention them by name) WWOZ.

Incidentally, I’ve heard rumors that OZ has finally grudgingly acknowledged the cultural importance of New Orleans Hip-Hop and begun letting certain DJ’s play Hip-Hop and Bounce. I have yet to hear any of that on the station. Last thing I knew OZ had a strict no Hip-Hop policy. To quote DJ Davis “When they said community music, I didn’t realize they meant the community of white Yankees who listen to black music from forty years ago instead of the community of thirty-year old black people who actually live here and make music.”

So for the time being, Bounce, instead of having non-profit and foundation backing like Jazz and other “acceptable” forms of music, is sold out of trunks at gas stations.

Little changes. It’s important to remember that Jazz was originally as unacceptable to mainstream white culture as Hip-hop is, that white musicians were drawn to it (like Hip-hop), that in many ways it was co-opted, and that now that it is no longer considered a threat to mainstream white culture it is acceptable. I have to wonder if Hip-hop (and Bounce) will follow a similar trajectory.

Yaheardmefilm.com

Nolahumanrights.org

Looking back recently, I’ve realized that in all the rush to fight the impending demolition of public housing as we know it in New Orleans, that I and others have never really taken the time to explain the specifics of why we oppose the demolitions. Maybe it just seemed to obvious that the demolition of hundreds of units of livable housing was simply too absurd and too wrong to even bother to explain given the institutionalized displacement of over one hundred thousand residents of New Orleans and the severity of the housing crisis that we are experiencing.

But it is worth explaining, and the details are important.

First, let me be clear that I speak only on behalf of myself and that others in the movement to stop the demolitions may disagree with me on some or all of these points.

Some may be surprised to hear that both I and some other allies of public housing residents agree that mixed income developments are a better strategy for public housing than the old, Fordist warehousing of poor people. Yes, you heard me right— concentrating large numbers of poor people in massive developments may have seemed OK in the 1930’s- 1950’s, but I don’t believe it is a good idea today.

As a caveat, I don’t think concentration of poverty is at the root of the social ills that policymakers describe in their rush to destroy public housing. Policymakers are frequently confusing the problems of concentration of poverty with the problems of poverty itself. For instance, there is violence around the drug trade in low-income communities in many American cities. This is true if the poor are concentrated or spread out; in fact since the mixing up of returning New Orleanians post-storm there is generally more violence, reflected in our higher per-capita murder rate. No amount of moving people around in the shell game that we call our housing policy has changed that.

Why then, are we opposed to the demolition of public housing if it results in mixed-income redevelopments? First, because it doesn’t.

There is simply no reason to believe that any of the entities involved in the redevelopment of public housing— developers, the assorted opportunistic non-profits or HANO/HUD— have any intention of allowing the vast majority of the poor who lived in these developments pre-storm to return to the new developments. Developers like Columbia Residential, who has the contract for the St. Bernard Redevelopment, are corporations like any other and exist to turn a profit. It is simply more profitable to skew the numbers to create more “market-rate” units, and it is easier to sell, lease and rent these units for larger profits if there are fewer poor people living near by.

These sort of mixed-income developments could potentially work if there was stringent government oversight of the process to assure compliance with an income mix that allowed the majority of low-income residents to return. This approach appears to have worked in such cities as San Francisco, where the Valencia Gardens Development appears to be a successful HOPE VI redevelopment.

However, can anyone argue that known crooks like Alphonso Jackson- who resigned amid an FBI investigation, or the HANO bureaucrats— who had their office taken over in 2002 for massive mismanagement— are effective stewards of the public good?

More importantly, we watched this process go down in River Gardens, the St. Thomas Redevelopment. An excellent master’s thesis by Brod Bagert Jr., now an organizer with the Jeremiah Group, lays out much of what happened when the foxes guarded the hen house. In a nutshell, Pres Kabacoff of HRI, the developer, fudged the numbers and the New Orleans City Council, as now, looked the other way.

There is no reason to believe that homes in these mixed-income redevelopments will ever materialize for the vast majority of public housing residents.

(Side note- Kabacoff is now trying to redevelop his own image with the assistance of a white voodoo-priestess girlfriend and a new development on St. Claude in the 8th ward that includes a police substation and a food co-op housed in a “healing center”. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.)

Second, even given the laughable contention that any significant numbers of public housing residents might be allowed to return to the new developments, there is still the issue of time. It will be years before any of these redevelopments are rebuilt; some units may be opened as soon as 2009. So for every public housing resident who returns to a “mixed-income” redevelopment, there is first 4-6 years of unnecessary displacement.

Scott Keller, assistant to Alphonso Jackson, called the post-Katrina situation an “opportunity” in 2006. I again feel the need to tactfully explain to all the big wigs and suits out there that this was not an “opportunity” for the tens of thousands of men, women and children evacuated from public housing, this was a disaster. Losing your home and having to find a new one for 4-6 years in a city where rent has more than doubled is not an “opportunity”.

If there was even a shred of consideration for the residents of public housing, redevelopment would have occurred in stages, with residents moved back in to a majority of easily cleaned-out units while the redevelopment occurred one development at a time. But there wasn’t.

The situation of Charity Hospital is very similar. If LSU Health Sciences Center had any concern for the low-income residents of the city who depended on Charity, they would have allowed the crew of military and hospital personnel to re-open Charity while they work on their “dream” hospital. But they don’t. In the case of both Charity and public housing, the people of New Orleans are pawns to be swept aside in the grandiose dreams of the powerful.

Lord knows pubic housing in New Orleans needed an overhaul; most significantly some maintenance of otherwise excellent buildings. How about keeping the developments but reintroducing the street grid, as was recommended in District 4 of the Unified New Orleans Plan?. Frankly, I would support an overhaul of public housing if it was done with real involvement of the residents and a plan to bring back those who wanted to return while redevelopment occurred in stages.

What is happening right now is not an overhaul, it is wanton destruction of not only buildings but lives. It is a totally unnecessary human rights catastrophe, and makes a mockery of the concept of mixed income.

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson stepped down yesterday. If I am saddened by this news, it is only because he resigned after doing so much damage to the lives of so many men, women and children in the city of New Orleans, and that he was not stopped earlier.

It is ironic that Jackson’s resignation comes less than a week after the final accomplishment of his wantonly destructive tenure at HUD- the granting by the city of New Orleans of a demolition permit for the Lafitte Housing Development.

But not to fear; Jackson losing his job will likely not be a time of instability, like it would be if you or I lost our employment. I am sure Jackson’s friends at Columbia Residential, Jackson’s former employer and the company he awarded with a contract to oversee the redevelopment (read: destruction) of the St. Bernard Development, will not allow Jackson to see tough times. Like most former cabinet-level officials, Jackson will be free to return to the world of private industry which did him so well on his way to the top.

There are more than a few similarities between Jackson and another prominent Bush appointee who resigned amid scandal, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Both have lives that read like sinister versions of the Horatio Alger myth. Both are men of color who were born into poverty in large families, to fathers who labored in humble jobs. They are amazing examples of the kind of class mobility that America has prided itself on, often exaggerated in our national mythology of who were are. But Jackson and Gonzales were the real deal; hard-working, ambitious men whose rise would be unthinkable in the pre-civil rights era.

What happened to make these men forget where they came from, and to turn them into the monsters they became? They represent a curious trend in American society. Unlike the blue-bloods who run, say, the Times-Picayune, these men knew poverty and want, rose above it, and then proceeded to mercilessly sacrifice those still trapped below them to their own massive ambitions.

The administration of Bush Jr., himself a patrician and a faux-Texan, will be remembered for promoting a large number of minorities to cabinet-level positions. They appear to have made a study of finding the most ruthless, unscrupulous and spineless African-Americans and Latinos to fill these positions. It is truly a PR feat. Rove, or whoever else has been running the Bush machine, is very clever to have used these individuals to do their dirty work while still paying homage to equal opportunity employment. In this case, it reads more like equal opportunity oppression.

Ultimately, Jackson’s resignation is too late for the homeless under the interstate, and for those in semi-permanent exile in Houston. The Magnolia (C J Peete) Development has already been flattened, and demolition is underway on both parts of B W Cooper and St. Bernard. New Orleans now has a 4% homeless rate, four times that of most major US cities. Most of them, like the overwhelming majority of the poor in New Orleans, are of course black.

Maybe Horatio Alger wouldn’t be the best person to write Jackson’s story. It’s a pity Theodore Dreiser isn’t still around.

Driving by work today I drove past the ruins of what was formerly the St. Bernard Housing Development. Block after block is now rubble; cranes smash what was formerly livable, if not particularly well maintained, housing. Rumor has it that the development will be replaced with a private golf course.

This is what “free-market” restructuring looks like on the ground: the wanton destruction of sound homes in the interests of lining the pockets of developers and politicians. Today, housing, tomorrow, golf courses.

Meanwhile, go under the I-10 on Claiborne, or go to the streets of any major city, and you will see what happens when we as a society don’t ensure the human right to housing.

Alphonso Jackson, George Bush, Mayor Ray Nagin, and every member of the New Orleans City Council will be remembered by future generations as criminals and the restructuring of Katrina which they oversaw as a human rights catastrophe. Already the UN Commission on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has condemned these actions.

Full report

But all of this is too late for the people living under the overpass. As for me, I’m just sick.

So the DSB is back after a lengthy hiatus… actually in the interests of full disclosure I got a new job working for the teachers union. And let me also say that anything that I say here on this blog is my own personal opinion and should in no way be connected to the union.

And what’s new on the horizon (drumroll please…) Alphonso Jackson send us bulldozers for Christmas! And the City Council lacks the guts to do anything about it! Maybe this is because in our electoral apathy we allowed a devout gentrificationist and a woman who epitomizes hatred of poor people to be elected?

Where to start? Alphonso Jackson’s compromising relationship with Columbia Residential?

12,000 homeless people on the streets of New Orleans?

Blatantly biased reporting from that paragon of journalism that we know as our daily paper? (Love those 64-word lead sentences with no clear connection between clauses, guys.)

All I know is that I have sent my letters to Midura and Fielkow, and I am going to be at the City Council Meeting tomorrow morning, Thursday, December 20.

My letter to Shelly Midura:

Dear Councilwoman Midura,

I live in your district in the Bayou St. John neighborhood and I am asking you to vote not to allow HUD to demolish the CJ Peete, Lafitte and St. Bernard Developments.

Though I lived in District C at the time, I was glad when you defeated Jay Batt. You seemed like a person of compassion and integrity. This vote will be a test of those qualities.

We all agree that public housing in this city needs to be improved. But HUD’s plan is privatization, not improvement. It will waste hundreds of millions of dollars in senseless destruction and will not provide enough low-income housing for New Orleanians who want to come home.

There are other plans that have been approved by the city government, including your office, such as the Unified New Orleans Plan, which provide for some demolition but also renovating and improving much of the city’s public housing instead of wantonly destroying it. This plan was arrived at in a democratic and inclusive manner and is supposed to be the official plan for rebuilding the city. I implore you to follow our city’s plan instead of arbitrary and destructive measures put forth by a federal government which has repeatedly shown a lack of care for this city and our people.

There is an article in the art and design section of the New York Times which describes better than I can what a waste destroying these buildings is. Before you vote you should read it— the historical and architectural value of these projects, especially Lafitte, is immense.

But it is the people, not the buildings, who are the real issue. There is a housing crisis in this city of epic proportions, and tearing down thousands of units will make it worse. It will take at least three years to rebuild any of these developments, which will only contain a fraction of the affordable housing. Many poor people simply cannot afford to move back to this city. The failure of the federal and state government to provide for a way for these internally displaced citizens to come home is a violation of international human rights law. If you vote for demolition, you will be a party to that crime.

Please make the right choice, the humane choice, the compassionate choice. Do not allow these demolitions.

Christian Roselund

Nia Robertson was killed on Wednesday night, August 15th at a neighborhood bar in Mid-City. I had met her there maybe a week ago. She was warm, intelligent and attractive. I recall asking where she was from, and she explained that her New Orleans accent had been eroded somewhat by a few years away at college. She was 25.

People are killed every day in New Orleans. And the murders often appear senseless to many of us. But the incredible recklessness of this one stands out. A young woman in the prime of her life, her throat cut by someone she apparently didn’t know.

A number of things stand out about this murder. In the discussions of crime on the internet, in bars – anywhere where either anonymity or privacy is available, my fellow white people frequently talk about “the thugs”. It is no secret that many of those who do the killing, as well as those killed, are young black men. And whites in this city fear “the thugs” in a way that is racialized.

The Times-Picayune doesn’t print the races of those who are charged with murder – a good practice in a city where racial mob violence is a not-so-distant historical reality. However, the killer here has a Slavic last name (probably Polish or Serbian- note the cz). There are only a few Pal’s regulars who are black men, and none I’ve met are anywhere near 35.

So it appears that a white man killed a young, college-educated black woman.

Helen Hill’s death galvanized white communities in the downtown neighborhoods- the death of a promising young white woman and a mother of a young child. In a city where people die every day, the death of Helen Hill sparked outrage.

Will there be similar outrage now?

I for one want to know what could have been done to prevent this killing. There are a number of details that stand out to me. First, the killing was done quickly without any warning. This is not a murder that any number of police could have prevented unless we have police officers on every other barstool at Pal’s and every other bar. Incidentally, that would make me stop drinking. So those who suggest that an improved criminal justice system could have prevented this are either being delusional or they are thinking of a sci-fi psychic-prevention crime techniques like one in the movie Minority Report.

Second, the man claimed to be ex-military. Was this another murderer created by the US government who finally snapped? According to the Times-Picayune article the co-owner of Pal’s says that the whole process happened very rapidly. Was this a trained killer who used his abilities on an American instead of a foreigner, say an Iraqi, like he was trained to do?

This is also a man who had been fighting at work and had threatened to kill co-workers. I will note the absence of a mental health infrastructure, exacerbated by the loss of Charity Hospital, to deal with all the certifiable mentally unsound people in this city. Could this murder have been prevented by adequate mental health services in the city of New Orleans?

Finally, Nia was rushed to the hospital and died during surgery. The hospital is not mentioned in the article. Was it University? I will note the loss of the excellent level one trauma center at Charity Hospital. Incidentally, a good friend of mine who was an Emergency Room doctor at Charity just moved to Newfoundland, largely as a result of the disappearance of the hospital. Could the highly experienced ER doctors who worked at Charity have saved her life if it was open?

We will likely never know the answers to whether or not improved mental health services or an open Charity Hospital could have prevented Nia’s death. With time we may find out if this was a murderer who was created by the US Government, or if the man was idly boasting of a background that he did not possess.

Either way, a beautiful young woman is dead for no good reason.

I went out to Lafayette on Saturday for the Festival International. I got a little carried away, stayed too long, skipped out on my ride back, drank too much, spent too much money, said the wrong things and spent the next morning hung over wandering the streets of Lafayette, feeling like Johnny Cash’s Sunday Morning Coming Down. Lafayette is a pretty town, and feels affluent; everywhere I saw happy, well-fed Cajuns. Of course, every American city I’ve gone to looks affluent after New Orleans.

Made my way down to the Greyhound station and borrowing a cell phone I met two other New Orleanians, a girl going to school at Loyola and Eddie the Cake Man.

Eddie lived in the seventh ward before the storm, in an apartment building on Claiborne next to the freeway painted purple and yellow. When I met him he had a small bag at his feet with his rolling skates; he was headed fifty miles away to Baton Rouge to go skating and would come back tonight on the Grey Dog. Ed is fifty-seven and a veteran. He is soft-spoken, and gentle, and looks you straight in the eye when he talks.

Eddie’s story came spilling out of him like an open bag of rice falling over.

Ed’s mother died during evacuation in Michigan. He showed us pictures of his mother on his camera phone; kind of like a digital version of the photos of my ex-girlfriend and little sister that I have in my wallet. He had several pictures of her in there, and scrolled through them for us. Another Katrina casualty; an eighty-year old woman in poor health who had to take a road trip that lasted more than twelve hours. He says her house was almost fixed up when she passed in Michigan.

Ed’s father died a year before, and his sister a year before that. A friend of Eddie’s and his whole family died in their house in the rapid flooding in the lower 9th. Eddie tried to move back to New Orleans and live in a FEMA trailer, but the formaldehyde off-gassing made him sick (like most people he didn’t know that you are supposed to run the air conditioning all the time to help deal with the toxic gas chamber that FEMA trailers are). He says the city was just too much of a mess, so he came out to Lafayette to live with his daughter.

Eddie got a job with a baker here, he says he just called him up and he hired him. His specialty is cake decorating, he says he can do everything including comic book figures for kid’s cakes. Never went to school just taught himself. He says his website is on the way.

Eddie says that the Prozac helps, that before he started taking it he would just ball of on the sofa. He can’t afford individual therapy but is going to group therapy. He speaks slowly and with no shame. The thing that really helps him, though, is skating; before the storm he would go to the lanes on Terry Parkway in the West Bank. And now he waits for the Greyhound to go to Baton Rouge.

Someday he says he wants to move back to New Orleans but he doesn’t know when.

I wonder how many people there waiting at Greyhound stations like Ed. And it matters, because it’s more significant when two people suffer than one. On the other hand the mathematics of suffering can be misleading; the other people aren’t Ed and they aren’t standing in front of me with their soft voices, steady brown eyes and roller skate bags. There is aggregate of human misery, the numbers and statistics, and then there is Ed the Cake Man.

Ed tells us that a doctor he saw in Lafayette told him that the Hurricane was two years ago and that he should get over it.

“What a bunch of bullshit”, I respond.

“Thank you”, he says quietly. And he goes on to explain the thing that everyone down here knows and that for some reason people in the rest of the country seem to have a hard time grasping. The hurricane is not over for Ed the Cake Man. And it won’t be any time soon.

By Sean Benjamin

In addition to flooding 80% of the city, Hurricane Katrina destroyed over 50,000 rental apartment units. A small portion of these have since been refurbished, but the vast majority are still unlivable and the city still faces an acute shortage of affordable housing 19 months after the storm. Rents have skyrocketed since the storm; landlords have taken the opportunity to jack up the rents on the apartments that are still livable. Apartments that used to rent for as little as $400-500 before the storm now regularly rent for between $800 and $1200. In many cases, rents have more than doubled as the pressures of a drastically-reduced housing stock and the lack of price regulation allow landlords to gouge their tenants. The folks who still haven’t returned home since the storm regularly cite a lack of affordable rental housing as one of the main reasons they are unable to come home to New Orleans.

For the first six months after the storm, I was working with a group called NOHEAT (New Orleans Emergency Housing Action Team) to fight rent increases and evictions. NOHEAT doesn’t exist any more, but high rents are still a huge problem. Since NOHEAT disbanded last year, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) Tenants Rights Working Group has been doing the bulk of the organizing around issues of fighting high rents. This week they managed to get a hearing before the City Council to demand rent control and the creation of a board of New Orleans renters mandated to defend the rights of tenants and to have a voice for tenants in the rebuilding process. I haven’t been very involved in the housing struggle lately, but when the PHRF called for a large turnout of renters to this City Council meeting, I figured I’d better attend.

Malcolm Suber from the PHRF led a team of presenters to outline the urgency of the housing crisis in front of City Council. He didn’t rant about ‘ethnic cleansing’ or chew the scenery the way that some of the city’s self-proclaimed housing advocates are in the habit of doing; his approach was calm, considered, and was amply backed up with statistics and with testimony from renters and displaced New Orleans residents. He explained that affordable rents were necessary so that the low-wage workers central to the city’s economy could return, and that the lack of affordable housing was a major obstacle to the return of displaced residents and to the city’s reconstruction efforts. The PHRF proposal called for the creation of a city-wide tenants’ council to represent the interests of tenants in all decisions made regarding the reconstruction of the city. He also pointed out that it’s the City Council’s responsibility to protect its citizens by regulating exorbitant rents and demanded the enactment of an anti-price-gouging and rent control ordinance using August 2005 rents as a retroactive benchmark and allowing for modest annual increases to account for increased costs of property insurance after the storm. The PHRF delegation also submitted a 10,000-signature petition in support of these demands.

I doubt Malcolm Suber or the PHRF is under the illusion that the City Council has any real interest in counter-acting the landlords’ price gouging. He’s a solid socialist with decades of community organizing experience, and he’s well aware of the class interests of the Council and the purpose it serves within the city’s economic power structure. But publicly coming before the Council and demanding that it take a strong stand for the citizens it ostensibly serves was the right approach to take. The councillors, for their part, knew they had to appear sympathetic so that when the meeting was covered on the evening news they’d look like they have the interests of tenants at heart. The Council referred the proposal to the housing sub-committee, and most of them made appropriate noises about the urgency of the problem and the need to find ways for displaced New Orleans residents to return. Most of them, that is, except for Stacy Head.

Stacy Head made no attempt to hide her disrespect for the presentation and her disagreement with the need for protection of tenants’ rights. She spent the entire length of the PHRF presentation sighing, scowling, rolling her eyes, and whispering indignantly to James Carter and Shelly Midura, the two councillors sitting beside her. She interrupted Malcolm Suber a number of times to angrily insist that landlords faced insurmountable hardships in insurance costs and that they were the real victims needing protection. (Never mind that the PHRF proposal took into account the fact that small landlords needed to deal with increased insurance and repair costs; they recommended a combination of amortization and pressure on the state legislature to enact controls on insurance companies.)

Later, a former resident of the Lower Ninth Ward got up to testify that he’d been the owner of a small local hip-hop record label before the storm, but he couldn’t come home to contribute to the economy because of high rents and he was still stuck in Baton Rouge while commuting to the city every day. Stacy Head showed him even more contempt. She refused to believe he couldn’t find affordable housing in the city. “You’re a young man,” (I’d guess he was in his 30s) she said with that mixture of disdain and patronizing sweetness that only a yuppie can muster. “You’re probably looking for – what – a one-bedroom?” No, he said, he was actually a family man with two kids to support. “Well, there’s a website you might try looking at; it’s called Craigslist, and it’s got all sorts of listings for apartments available. I’m sure you can find something there.” This in the same cloying, falsely-helpful tones as before, as if it had never occurred to a man trying for months to get his family home and re-start his business that there might actually be apartments listed on *gasp!* the Internet! The audience murmured angrily at her patronizing suggestions, but she kept going with her lecture on Apartment-Hunting 101, completely unaware of how offensive her assumptions were.

So apparently to the Stacy Heads of the city, the housing problem is not due to high rents, lack of livable apartment units, or shuttered public housing; it’s just that these complainers just aren’t resourceful enough to find apartments for themselves. They just need to look harder. The same goes for jobs, I presume. It’s not that unemployment is a built-in side-effect of contemporary capitalism, or that New Orleans’s economy is dominated by low-wage tourism and service-industry jobs through any consequence of the way the city has been run for the last fifty years. No, it’s that people just don’t have the dedication or stick-to-it-iveness to create opportunities for themselves. It’s their own fault, really…….

Stacy Head isn’t the only opponent of affordable housing on New Orleans City Council by any means. The two Cynthias (Cynthia Hedge-Morrell and Cynthia Willard-Lewis) are also allied with developers’ interests and just as opposed to affordable housing. But they manage to talk a good talk, making populist appeals to bringing New Orleanians home while at the same time opposing the construction of affordable housing complexes in their districts. In the time-honored tradition of two-faced New Orleans politicians, they manage to fool a lot of people into thinking they represent the interests of regular folks. But Stacy Head doesn’t even try to seem sympathetic to the needs of tenants. She’s an open unabashed representative of real-estate developers, yuppie gentrifiers, and landlords. During her election campaign last year, one of her most-trumpeted qualifications for elected office was that she had bought a number of run-down rental properties, renovated them, and resold them for a tidy profit. She’s a landlord and gentrifier, plain and simple.

Stacy Head is the Jackie Clarkson for a new generation. Jackie Clarkson was also unabashedly in bed with big money real estate and developer interests, but she was also a caricature of herself: showy, flamboyant, New Orleans old money. Even if you knew she was on the opposing side in most issues, she was just too silly to take seriously. Stacy Head’s got an updated image: young, educated, professional, eloquent, with just enough of a veneer of good-government reform credentials to make her look progressive in some circles. It’s been less than a year since she was elected, and a lot of people were happy to see her defeat Renee Gill Pratt in last year’s election. Pratt was an old-style New Orleans politician of the worst kind: incompetent, openly corrupt, and solidly connected to one of the city’s most powerful political machines. She needed to go. But her replacement is one of the most dangerous politicians operating in New Orleans today.

A couple of the characters responsible for the dissolution of NOHEAT are still around, attaching themselves to the campaign to re-open New Orleans’s shuttered public housing developments. They’ve already singled out Stacy Head as an opponent of affordable housing and as a representative of landlords’ and real estate developers’ interests, and they’ve been picketing her Uptown house for the past couple of weekends. These folks are very problematic. They’re textbook examples of how not to do community organizing; they’ve got a strident, pompous, abrasive vanguardist approach which turns most people off. In any genuinely revolutionary situation, they’d probably be more likely to be strung up as ‘enemies of the people’ than be accepted in the kind of leadership role they aspire to. In fact, their outsized presence in New Orleans housing campaigns is a big reason why I’m not very involved anymore. But once in a while these guys just might have the right idea, and I’m starting to think that their targeting of Stacy Head as a major enemy in the housing struggle is a good choice.

I’ve always liked the idea of using home demos as a way to personalize a struggle and give faces and names to our opponents. Anarchists in Montreal used to organize “proletarian field trips” to the wealthy suburb of Westmount, and one of the best New Orleans demos I’ve been to took place outside a George W. Bush fundraiser at a country club amid the mansions of Old Metairie. The ruling class doesn’t like it when we come into their neighborhoods to raise a ruckus, and it’s also a good way to promote class warfare. In any case, a stepped-up campaign against Stacy Head at her home (and her law firm, for that matter) is a step forward in the fight for affordable housing.

Photos from the Council meeting: http://www.peopleshurricane.org/display/ShowGallery?moduleId=895693&galleryId=52565

Link to the text of the PHRF council presentation: http://www.peopleshurricane.org/storage/documents/council_presentation.doc

Stacy Head’s website: http://www.stacyhead.com/

On February 28th the US House of Representatives Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing on the insurance crisis in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina.

My mother once pointed out to me that insurance companies make their money on collecting premiums, not on paying claims. That, and investing the money that they get from us. Upon this logic they seem to be cutting their losses in the Gulf Coast quite effectively.

The Hearing was presided over by rep. Melvin Watt (D-NC). It featured testimony by reps Bobby Jindal (R-La), Gene Taylor (D-Miss) and William Jefferson (D-La), David Maurstad, Federal Insurance Administrator for FEMA, Jim Hood, Attorney General for the State of Mississippi and Dr. Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, who was revealed at the end of the hearing to be representing Allstate Insurance as well, which was hardly shocking given his defense of the insurance industry.

Selected audio from the hearing follows, starting with the testimony by rep. Jindal. audio

Testimony by William Jefferson. audio

Testimony by Rep. Gene Taylor. audio

The hearing got good when Maxine Waters came on board to blast insurance company shill Hartwig. audio

But perhaps the best was rep. Taylor of Mississippi tearing into Marstaud for the incompetence of FEMA. audio

My apologies to my readers about the lateness of this audio, and thanks to FSRN reporter Mayaba Liebenthal for her willingness to share this.

Following is audio from the January 29th hearing in New Orleans called by United States Senators Mary Landrieu, Barack Obama and Joseph Lieberman. Please note that due to a technical failure at the site (go feds!) the audio is not of as high of quality as we might have hoped.

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The audio begins with presentations by Joe Lieberman, Barack Obama and Donald Powell, Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding.

audio

Presentation by Donald Powell audio

Senator Mary Landrieu confronting Donald Powell on the disparities in CBDG funding audio

Senator Lieberman confronting Powell on the CBDG disparities audio

I personally think the best piece of audio is the last one, which is Lieberman asking Walter Leger of the LRA what the hell is going on with the delivery of federal monies. Walter Leger squirms a bit, blaming things first on Katrina and then on federal red tape.

Is this a partial explanation or merely the latest in disingenuous excuses from Baton Rouge? I’m guessing both.

audio

For those of you who don’t already know, the St. Bernard Housing Development was re-opened by its residents on Martin Luther King day. A group calling itself Mayday New Orleans (apparently a spin-off of Mayday DC) is currently occupying the units full-time so that residents can come back and clean them out.

Full story on New Orleans Indymedia

See also the blog Note from the Book

First off, I want to send out my deepest condolences to those who have lost loved ones in the violence here in New Orleans. To the family of Helen Hill and Dinerral Shavers, but also to the families of the six other people murdered since the first of the year whose names have not been in headlines, and to the families of the 161 people who were killed last year.

As some of you know, I did not attend the march on Thursday. I understand that many felt the need to march, but I personally do not go on marches where there is not a clear statement or demand being made. I do not want my presence used by policy-makers to justify something that I do not support.

From the meeting at Sound Cafe on Sunday, which I did attend, one thing was abundantly clear: that there was no consensus on what the demands of this march would be. Some in the crowd wanted more police on the street, one woman who says that she spends a lot of time on nola.com forums even proposed a state of emergency. While many other viewpoints were expressed, those are the ones that I fear will be heard from all of this.

So let’s have a real conversation about what will reduce violent crime in New Orleans.

Let’s talk first about what we have tried.

We already have 1,400 police on the street- 609 police per every 100,000 residents of New Orleans. Before the storm we had 1,668 police- 359 police per every 100,000 residents (figures courtesy of Michelle Krupa, Times-Picayune, Sunday 7th.)

The most recent data that I have found online (year 2000) indicates that we now have the highest per-capita number of police in any large or medium sized city except Washington D.C- more than New York, Chicago, or even Detroit or Baltimore, and more than twice the year 2000 per-capita numbers of Los Angeles and Houston. This number does not include the state police or national guard who are here indefinitely. (figures courtesy of the Department of Justice)

Our jails were full as well. Before the storm, we had 1.5% of the city locked up in OPP, giving us the highest incarceration rate of any large city, and the state incarceration rate was the highest in the nation. And the US incarceration rate is the highest in the world.

Despite the numbers of police and jails, we continue to have one of the highest per-capita murder rates in the nation. Incidentally, Washington DC, with all their cops, also has one of the highest per-capita murder rates.

So let’s talk about other related factors:

We had one of the highest rates of functional illiteracy in the country- around 40% according to the literacy alliance of greater New Orleans. Study after study shows that those who cannot read and write well are more likely to end up in prison (Literacy Behind Prison Walls, National Center for Education Statistics)

We continue to have some of the worst public schools in the country- some of which, like John McDonogh, have gotten worse since the state takeover.

Around 40% of children under the age of five in New Orleans were growing up in poverty before the storm- and the poor are more likely to end up in jail as well.

For decades we have had a surfeit of low-paying service industry jobs in this city, and little else. And from years working as a carpenter I can testify that racial discrimination in the construction trades- one of the few places where a person with limited education can make a decent living here- is rampant.

It is scant consolation to those who have lost loved ones, but what needs to be done to make this city safe will take time. We have to create a decent society where everyone has access to quality education, living wage jobs, and health care, including mental health care, a huge need post-Katrina.

The so-called “thugs”- or whatever other racially coded language you prefer- committing these crimes are largely young men. Many, like the seventeen year old who killed Dinerral Shavers, are teenagers. Perhaps you can remember what it was like to be a teenager- and the lack of caution that you had. These children are not afraid of death or jail, and it isn’t stopping them from picking up guns. You can put them in jail, you can even kill them, but more are on their way. As Ralph Ellison said, the most dangerous thing that a society can produce is a man who has nothing to lose. I would modify that to say that the most dangerous thing we can produce is children who have nothing to lose.

It will not be quick and it will not be easy. But if you want to stop the killings here you have to change society. The short-term solutions will not work. They haven’t yet.

See also the G-Bitch Spot