I wrote a brief intro to this (excellent) article but it turned out quite long so im
going to paste it below the article. I can't help relating New Orleans back to
regenicide in Hackney East London, something I'm more familiar with. The
scale is different of course, but the common features striking: state-corporate
deployed emergency as tool for mass expropriation of poor (black) people;
primitive accumulation (of former public property) on an industrial scale;
(one-way) consultation at gunpoint; liquidity and displacement; and finally
a reflux of real resistance against the tidal wave of gentrification and fictitious capital.
B
http://www.blackcommentator.com/167/167_cover_fighting_no_theft_pf.html
The
Black
C om m e n t a t o r
Issue 167 - January 19, 2006
Cover Story
Fighting the Theft of New Orleans The Rhythm of
Resistance
by BC Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble
"I don't think it's right that you take our
properties. Over my dead body. I didn't die with
Katrina." - Lower 9th Ward resident Caroline Parker.
"Joe Canizaro, I don't know you, but I hate you. I'm
going to suit up like I'm going to Iraq and fight
this." -Â New Orleans East resident Harvey Bender,
referring to the author of the city commission's
"rebuilding" plan.
The overwhelmingly Black New Orleans diaspora is
returning in large numbers to resist relentless
efforts to bully and bulldoze them out of the city's
future. "Struggle on the ground has intensified
enormously. A number of groups are in motion, moving
against the mayor's commission," said Mtangulizi
Sanyika, spokesman for the African American Leadership
Project (AALP). "Increasing numbers of people are
coming back into the city. You can feel the political
rhythm."
Mayor Ray Nagin's commission has presented residents
of flood-battered, mostly African American
neighborhoods with a Catch-22, carefully crafted to
preclude New Orleans from ever again becoming the more
than two-thirds Black city it was before Hurricane
Katrina breached the levees. Authored by Nagin crony,
real estate development mogul and George Bush
fundraiser Joseph Canizaro, the plan would impose a
four-month moratorium on building in devastated
neighborhoods like the lower Ninth Ward and New
Orleans East. During that period, the neighborhoods
would be required to come up with a plan to show how
they would become "viable" by reaching an undefined
"critical mass" of residents.
But the moratorium, itself, discourages people from
rebuilding their neighborhoods - just as it is
intended to do - thus creating a fait accompli:
residents will be hard pressed to prove that a
"critical mass" of habitation can be achieved.
"It's circular reasoning," said the AALP's Sanyika.
They talk about "some level of neighborhood viability,
but no one knows what that means. What constitutes
viable plans? What kinds of neighborhoods are viable?
Everywhere you turn people are trying to rebuild, but
there is this constraint."
The commission is empowered only to make
recommendations, but with the help of corporate media,
pretends their plan is set in stone. "They keep
pushing their recommendations as though they are the
gospel truth," said Sanyika, who along with tens of
thousands of other evacuees has been dispersed to
Houston, five hours away. "There is confusion as to
all of these recommendations, issued as if they are
policy. The Times-Picayune contributes to that
confusion. None of this is a given."
Activists believe the way to play this situation is
for residents to forge ahead on their own. "Trying to
figure out the logic of that illogical proposal is a
wasted effort - all you're going to do is wind up
going in circles," said Sanyika. He emphasizes that
the commission's recommendations are not binding on
anyone - certainly not on the majority Black city
council, which claims authority in city planning
matters. They're not buying the nonsense. "The city
council has rejected it. Nagin says ‘ignore it.' I
think it's dead in the water," said Sanyika.
The city council has attempted to block Nagin's
collaboration with corporate developers - a hallmark
of his tenure - voting to give itself authority over
where to place FEMA trailers. (Only about 5,000 of a
projected 25,000 trailers arrived, say community
activists.) Nagin vetoed the bill, but the council
overrode him. The council has also endorsed equitable
development of neighborhoods, rather than shrinking
the city. "We [the African American Leadership
Project] are developing a resolution to that effect,"
said Sanyika. Odds are that it will pass - but the
question is, who wields power in post-Katrina New
Orleans, where only one-third of the city's previous
population of nearly half a million has returned?
It is in this context that one must view Mayor Nagin's
statement to a mostly Black crowd gathered at City
Hall for a Martin Luther King Day march, on Monday: "I
don't care what people will say - uptown, or wherever
they are. At the end of the day, this city will be
chocolate…. This city will be a majority African
American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You
can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be
New Orleans."
Ray Nagin is probably the most disoriented person in
the country, these days - the fruit of his own
venality, sleeziness, and opportunism. A corporate
executive, sports entrepreneur and nominal Democrat,
he contributed to the Bush campaign in 2000 (Democrats
dubbed him "Ray Reagan") and endorsed a Republican
candidate for governor in 2003 (see BC November 20,
2003). Now he doesn't have a clue as to where the
power lies or where his base is centered. "Nagin is
playing a game, trying to have it both ways," says the
AALP's Sanyika - but his options are shrinking as fast
as the city envisioned by his buddy, Joe Canizaro,
with whom he habitually worked hand in hand, but whom
he now tells Blacks to "ignore."
Who's in charge in New Orleans?
Canizaro is clearly the center of gravity on the
"mayor's" commission which, although integrated, is
essentially a corporate concoction. The commission's
slogan, "Bring New Orleans Back," is a euphemism for
bringing the city "back" to the days before Black rule
by erecting multiple barriers to the return of Black
residents. Of course, even when Black mayors hold
titular office in New Orleans, Canizaro's crowd runs
the show. His bio, posted on the commission's website,
shows Canizaro to be the major domo of the city's real
estate, development, banking, and pro-business
political machinations. Canizaro is also a Trustee and
former Chairman of the Urban Land Institute, the
planning outfit that is determined to turn Black
neighborhoods into swamp.
Since shortly after New Years, the commission has been
feverishly working to appear to be an empowered
governmental entity, tasking subcommittees to present
reports and recommendations several days a week on
Government Effectiveness, Education, Health and Social
Services, Culture, and Infrastructure. What Black New
Orleans had been waiting for was presentation of the
Urban Planning Committee Final Report, Wednesday,
January 11. An overflow crowd at the Sheraton Hotel
hissed Mayor Nagin and booed the hated Canizaro.
Others cursed and vowed that they would be exiled only
over their dead bodies.
"Four Months to Decide" read the headline of the
Times-Picayune, on the day of the official unveiling
of the commission's recommendations, a blueprint for
the displacement of hundreds of thousands. In the
packed hotel spaces, residents alternated between rage
and deep anxiety at the ultimatum. "I don't think four
or five months is close to enough time given all we
would need to do," said Robyn Braggs. "Families with
school-age children won't be able to even return to do
the work necessary until this summer."
Cities with 25,000 or more displaced New Orleans
residents include Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Memphis,
and Baton Rouge. Others are scattered to the four
winds. Their children will be enrolled in far-flung
schools until the June deadline.
Former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, currently
president of the National Urban League, called the
commission's scheme a "massive red-lining plan wrapped
around a giant land grab." With the situation so
uncertain, and time so short, homeowners will have
difficulty settling with their insurance companies in
time. Said Morial:
"It's cruel to bar people from rebuilding. Telling
people they can't rebuild for four months is
tantamount to saying they can't ever come back. It's
telling people who have lost almost everything that
we're going to take the last vestige of what they
own."
And what about renters, who made up well over half of
residents? Such people have no place in George Bush's
"ownership society" - especially if they are Black.
Bush put his smirking stamp of approval on the
corporate plan during an oblivious visit to New
Orleans, last week. "It may be hard for you to see,
but from when I first came here to today, New Orleans
is reminding me of the city I used to visit."
Apparently, the president doesn't read newspapers
because he is blind - except to the cravings of his
class. Bush's Gulf Opportunity Zone Act provides
billions in tax dodges for (big) business, while the
threatened permanent depopulation of Black New Orleans
would eliminate the possibility of return for the
nearly 8,000 (small) Black businesses that served the
neighborhoods.
Self-styled Black capitalists take note: this is the
nature of the beast. Bush fronts for a class for which
Katrina is not a catastrophe, but an opportunity. They
believe devoutly in "creative chaos" - the often
violent destruction of the old, so that new profits
can be squeezed from the rubble. Through their
Catch-22 ultimatums, they are deliberately inflicting
additional "creative chaos" on the displaced people of
New Orleans. The fact that the victims are mostly
Black, makes it all the easier. Or so they assume.
The Resistance
Grassroots community groups, along with platoons of
non-native volunteers, are refusing to acquiesce to
the greatest attempted urban theft in American
history. At a conference organized by Mtangulizi
Sanyika's African American Leadership Project and
affiliated organizations, progressive urban planners
explored ways to make the new New Orleans a better
place for the people who live there, rather than for
ravenous corporations and new populations. The experts
included Dr. Ed Blakely, of the University of Sydney,
Australia; MIT's Dr. Phil Thompson, housing aide to
former New York Mayor David Dinkins; and Abdul
Rasheed, who helped rebuild the flood ravaged Black
town of Princeville, North Carolina after a hurricane
in the Nineties.
The coalition also held a Town Hall meeting attended
by leaders of 15 national organizations, including Dr.
Ron Daniel's Institute of the Black World, Nation of
Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and movers and shakers
from the Progressive Baptist Convention and the
National Baptist Convention USA. National co-sponsors
included the Hip Hop Caucus, Black Voices for Peace,
the Black Family Summit of the Millions More Movement,
and the National Black Environmental Justice Network
(NBEJN).
(Dr. Robert Bullard, of the NBEJN-affiliated
Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark-Atlanta
University, has published the grim but very useful
report: "A Twenty-Point Plan to Destroy Black New
Orleans.")
Neighborhood groups are mobilizing to confront the
racist/corporate onslaught. "Every other day some
major event is happening," said Sanyika. Various
groups held marches during MLK weekend, carrying signs
such as "We're Back," "Stop Displacement," and
"Rebuild With People."
On February 7th, a National Mobilization of
progressive forces will descend on the U.S. Capitol in
Washington to pressure Congress to halt the juggernaut
of expulsion and give substance to the people's Right
to Return. Although there are literally thousands of
large and small Katrina-related projects operating
throughout the nation, many of the New Orleans
organizers are handicapped by the fact of their own
displacement. A great moral and political challenge
presents itself to Black and progressive America: Will
they rise to the occasion in the face of a real,
imminent, well-defined crisis - as opposed to the
general conditions addressed by the Million Man and
Millions More rallies? February 7th will be a test of
Black political resolve and cohesion. And there will
be many more.
Meanwhile, New Orleans in some ways resembles a
poignant scene from bygone wars, when lists of the
dead were published on public walls. The "Red Danger
List" is posted in local papers, designating
properties that are "in imminent danger of collapse"
and, therefore, subject to demolition without the
consent of the owners. To date, over 5,000 buildings
have been red tagged.
The "Flood Map" is a kind of municipal schematic of a
cemetery, delineating the parts of the city that will
be caused to die. Residents on the wrong side of the
lines will be unable to get flood insurance, which
certainly means no meaningful investment can occur in
those areas. The map was last published in 1984, and
is now being updated.
You can be sure that Black folks are not in charge of
the mapping.
Katrina has shown us many things. One, is the
hollowness of the purely electoral Black strategy (and
its cousin, lobbying) that followed the shutdown of
mass movements after the death of Martin Luther King,
Jr. It is a great irony that, while we rant at FEMA's
inability (or unwillingness) to respond to the Katrina
crisis, Black America finds itself desperately
searching for the "people power" tools to effectively
counter the post-Katrina aggression.
The citizens of New Orleans are paying the cost for
the mistakes of the late Sixties and early Seventies,
when aspiring electoral and corporate officeholders
convinced Black folks that mass movements were no
longer necessary. Progress would trickle down from the
newly acquired heights. Popular political capital
could be wisely invested in the few, the upwardly
mobile.
What we got was chicken-with-his-head-cut-off Ray
Nagin and his many counterparts in plush offices
across Black America. We must invent Black Power all
over again, under changed conditions. New Orleans in
its present state is the worst possible place to start
- but that's where we're at.
BC Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble are writing a
book to be titled, Barack Obama and the Crisis in
Black Leadership.
Mtangulizi Sanyika, of the African American Leadership
Project, can be contacted at Wazuri@aol.com.
--
Some comments
this is an excellent article and seems to capture all the moments of
contemporary regenicide as played out on the grandest/ most abject scale
in New Orleans, right down to the 'creative' use of chaos and emergency
to produce capitalist 'opportunity' ie mega-theft. (will Newer Orleans be
twinned with Lagos? what will Koolhaas learn from the organised
resistance of decanted blacks against forced deshantification?)
on the other hand, great developments in 'bringing the (gulf) war home'
are documented here, with those whom the war has been brought home to
electing in turn to bring it home to those that homed in on their homes.
the ground rent scam this fightback opposes shows just how much Katrina
and after is turning into the paradigmatic exercise in death by (liquid)
'regeneration'. corporate servant ray nagin places a 'moratorium' on
rebuilding (as elsewhere states allow working class homes to rot unless
they are transferred into private ownership) in order to force the 'correct' -
most corporate-friendly - choice when the popular consultation
('only 4 months to decide!') takes place. while the people wait to
return to and/or rebuild their homes, the speculators que up to suck in the tax
breaks/flow of subsidy for buildings which are primarily concretised
speculative abstractions not homes or necessary infrastructure.
it's obviously a bit dubious to overstretch the resemblances, but i
can't help feeling it's all uncannily like a macro-version of the logic of ye
old hackney siege/sell-offs/caff occupation (cf Mute articles: Run Eli Run! -
Notes on the Hackney Siege, Fear Death by Water, The Re-Occupation) -
not to mention the thames gateway floodplain swelling on the horizon:
there is not only a zone of (economic) exception (tax breaks for developers
and a moratorium on development for black businesses), but the aim is the same as it was
regarding poor eli and other more legit black small businessmen of
Hackney (eg Spirit...) - permanent displacement, reposession of property, etc.
Whereas classically capital squeezed workers out of the process of
production in the pursuit of expanded accumulation by deployment of more
efficient technology, now it squeezes them out of their homes to free up
more property for (ultimately unproductive, fictitious) capitalisation.
the cannibalistic rapine of redevelopment has never been so blatant with
the inhabitants forcibly restrained from restoring the use-values of
their
homes. they are simply a surplus population in the US's post-industrial
economy and are being asked to vote themselves out to make way for a
massive new city of debt-backed consumption and financial services. with
the US housing bubble showing all signs of deflating (softly or sharply,
depending which analysts you read), the liquidity-activated turbines of
this 'economic motor' (ie apartments, stadiums for keeping refugees in,
etc) may not even perform the usual task of expanding claims on
unvalorisable, over-valued, value.
unlike the hackney siege, in this case, however, the collective eli is
organised and may be more effective in resisting the onrush of
liquidity:
'I'm going to suit up like I'm going to Iraq and fight this.' It sounds
like the pro and anti-multiculturalist forces are converging around the
concrete demand for return to their homes and against demolition. this
is
an odd or unpromising coalition but according to the article at least is
being stretched into more attractive forms by the sudden urgent need for
self-organisation - 'people power' > electoralism and faith in trickle
down from new black elites etc. this article seems to suggest that the
current 'representatives'/ points of aggregation of the black community
-
baptist and muslim, black nationalist, million men marchers etc - could
have their game raised by the situation, though the could equally be
said
to be smothering the germs of a wider revolt? clearly the authors of the
piece want to intervene to burst the illusions of the post-black power
period and make the petrified conditions dance by playing them old soul
music.
The conclusion seems especially helpful in spelling out the possibility
that the present time represents not just the crisis and re-iteration of
multiculturalism but the moment at which all its ugly assumptions and
preconditions are becoming intolerably clear - hence a new opportunity
for
moving beyond the sclerosis of the post-60s cooptation of black
radicalism
into a buppy version of american dream:
"The citizens of New Orleans are paying the cost for
the mistakes of the late Sixties and early Seventies,
when aspiring electoral and corporate officeholders
convinced Black folks that mass movements were no
longer necessary. Progress would trickle down from the
newly acquired heights. Popular political capital
could be wisely invested in the few, the upwardly
mobile.
"What we got was chicken-with-his-head-cut-off Ray
Nagin and his many counterparts in plush offices
across Black America. We must invent Black Power all
over again, under changed conditions. New Orleans in
its present state is the worst possible place to start
- but that's where we're at."
