New Orleans - Undone by Neoliberalism
by Adolph Reed, Jr.
The Nation magazine, September
18, 2006
In October 2005, returning from my first
trip to New Orleans since the week before the storm, I wound up
in conversation with a 40-something white doctor who lives in
Jackson, Mississippi. As a native Floridian, she had a sense of
the damage that a Category 4 or 5 storm could produce even as
far inland as Jackson; so, when Katrina was upgraded on the weekend
before landfall, she headed for the city's main storm shelter
to volunteer. She was shocked when she arrived to find that no
other doctors had volunteered. She expressed surprise and dismay
that "people just didn't step up." When I suggested
that's one reason we need a strong central government, to mobilize
responses to such crises, she immediately and animatedly dissented
that she doesn't believe in "big government." When I
asked who, then, was to have "stepped up," her response
was vague--individual doctors, unspecified voluntary groups. She
had no conception that there are some things only large public
institutions can do in a centrally organized way. When we changed
the topic to maintain civility, I learned that she was going to
visit her son, a University of Pennsylvania student. On hearing
that's where I teach, she related with glee that the previous
semester her progeny had taken a course on Tupac Shakur: "Only
at Penn, right?" That's one facet of the neoliberal mindset;
it can be broadening and culturally enriching to spend $40,000
a year for a child to learn about a dead rapper, but a counterproductive
use of resources to fund government and public services.
This brings to mind Margaret Thatcher's
infamous quip, that there is "no such thing [as society]...there
are individual men and women and there are families." In
his Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey quotes Thatcher's
succinct statement of the neoliberal ideological program: "Economics
are the method, but the object is to change the soul." The
goal of this change is acceptance, as the unquestioned natural
order of things, that private is always better than public, and
that the main functions of government are to enhance opportunities
for the investor class and suppress wages for everyone else. Hurricane
Katrina and reactions to it throw into relief how successful that
program has been.
The neoliberal worldview, which the late
Daniel Singer, among others, memorialized as TINA--There Is No
Alternative to market logic--has become the default position of
common sense. Its smug moral standard is drawn from an idealized
world in which equivalent individuals make choices in line with
an abstract market rationality. Its viciousness seeped through
even during the phase of mass-mediated compassion for the human
suffering in New Orleans. The litany of victim-blaming questions
frequently enough arose: Why didn't they evacuate? Why would they
choose to live below sea level? Why should we be expected to pay
for their choices? Those questions no doubt had a racial edge
regarding New Orleans, but it is useful to recall that Joseph
Allbaugh, Michael Brown's predecessor as FEMA director, denigrated
FEMA as a huge "entitlement program" when he took over
and promptly stonewalled rural white, heavily Republican Missourians
with the same kind of accusatory language during the severe flooding
of the Mississippi River in 2001. A critique that focuses just
on race misses how the deeper structures of neoliberal practice
and ideology underlie the travesty in New Orleans, as well as
in the other devastated areas of the Gulf Coast. (Adjacent to
the Lower Ninth Ward, St. Bernard Parish, nearly 90 percent white,
working class and reliably Republican, was virtually wiped off
the face of the earth. Most of the parish's housing was destroyed.
No hospitals or public libraries have reopened, and only 20 percent
of its schools are operating.)
The "chocolate city" quip for
which Mayor Ray Nagin became notorious nationally was an instance
of his scuffling to reassure angry black New Orleanians that he
did not endorse the widely touted models of a smaller, whiter
city that seemed to follow from his administration's utterances
and practices. And it is revealing of the depth and persistence
of many whites' racial double standards that the Mayor's affirmation
of the goal of retaining a black majority provoked a national
and local firestorm of denunciation as narrow and racist, but
the many calls for remaking New Orleans as a white-majority city,
to which he was ultimately responding, generated no such reaction.
But as it turned out, even though the most politically articulate
and militant demands stressed the rights of renters [see Chris
Kromm, page 22], Nagin's main policy concession to the protest
against the rebuilding proposals was to extend greater latitude
to "homeowners." Thus, in what was supposed to be a
victory for popular interests against developers, renters were
left out of the equation entirely and established as non-stakeholders.
The irony is that blacks were disproportionately renters, and
renters were disproportionately black. And roughly 90 percent
of rental units destroyed were low-income affordable. Many, no
doubt a preponderance, of black homeowners are not affluent, and
securing greater civic voice for homeowners democratized the process,
if only by slowing down the development juggernaut a bit. Nevertheless,
the concession at the same time inscribed property ownership as
the condition for entry into the arena of interest groups with
effective civic voice.
Treating property ownership as the sine
qua non for policy consideration didn't raise any eyebrows locally
or nationally, except among the ranks of those who were left out.
Neither the black Mayor nor the majority-black City Council has
shown initiative in taking into account, much less defending,
the interests of poor New Orleanians. The city's evacuation plans
notoriously failed to anticipate adequately poor people's circumstances
and needs. Landlords began evicting tenants without a hint of
due process as soon as water receded and rumors spread of possibilities
for extracting exorbitant rents from construction workers. The
state officially prohibited evictions before October 25, but that
prohibition was academic for the tens of thousands of people dispersed
in shelters around the region and nation. And even that minimal
right was flagrantly ignored with impunity. New Orleans City Council
president Oliver Thomas complained in February that government
programs and agencies had "pampered" poor people and
proclaimed that they should not be encouraged to return. As he
put it, "We don't need soap opera watchers right now."
At least one other black councilmember expressed support of his
view, as did the New Orleans Housing Authority receiver.
This all attests to the triumph of neoliberalism
as both ideology and policy regime, and that triumph is seamlessly
compatible with the discourse of racial politics. Black property
owners, after all, are stakeholders as well as whites. Demonizing
government to cut public spending and regulation, plundering the
public treasury through privatization and rationalizing both through
the myth of magical market efficiency all underlie what happened
to New Orleans. The storm exposed the consequences of neoliberalism's
lies and mystifications, in a single locale and all at once. The
levees on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals, it turns out,
failed because they were inadequately constructed. In the words
of the Independent Levee Investigation Team, "safety was
exchanged for efficiency and reduced costs." This was largely
the result of federal underfunding, partly the result of the Army
Corps of Engineers' skimping, partly state and local officials'
temporizing and lack of government oversight or, in neoliberal
parlance, cutting government red tape. The breach of the Industrial
Canal, and much of the flooding of St. Bernard Parish, resulted
from storm surge that pushed up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet,
a boondoggle channel dug four decades ago as corporate welfare
that was obsolete almost from its opening.
It's certainly understandable that Mayor
Nagin found himself overwhelmed and that he occasionally lost
composure in the first days of a sui generis disaster, and the
negative comparisons of him to New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's
handling of 9/11 are absurd, if not racist twaddle. I took the
subway with no problem to my office, not much more than a mile
up Fifth Avenue from the World Trade Center, and then walked to
my apartment in Alphabet City, on Manhattan's Lower East Side,
on 9/12. Nearly all New Orleans's infrastructure was destroyed,
overwhelmed or inaccessible after the levees failed; not even
most of Manhattan below 14th Street was in that condition after
the World Trade Center collapse. Nagin's finest moments were his
no-nonsense denunciations of the Bush Administration's dereliction
and his passionate demands for federal assistance.
Nevertheless, at every point the Mayor
has been hamstrung and undone by his commitment to a neoliberal
approach to government. Less than two months before Katrina, the
Nagin administration determined that it couldn't afford to provide
transportation to evacuate. So the city produced DVDs to distribute
in poor neighborhoods, alerting residents that they would be on
their own in the event of a major storm. Since then, Nagin and
other local officials have governed unwaveringly in line with
neoliberal presumptions, even as doing so may have stifled repopulation
and reconstruction. First, while the city was still submerged,
Nagin fired some 3,000 municipal employees, many, if not most,
of whom had lost their homes or been displaced. Later, the Orleans
Parish School Board laid off 7,500 teachers and other employees.
No serious consideration was given to the possibility that maintaining
a public workforce could help people return sooner by giving them
income, providing services and augmenting the cleanup and reconstruction
efforts.
A year after the storm, municipal services
remain barely existent. Fewer than half the schools in Orleans
Parish are open. Most of those are operating as charter schools,
as privatizers have seized the moment. Just about half of the
bus routes and fewer than a third of the buses in New Orleans
are in service. My family and countless others attest to the hassle
of trying to deal with the irrationality of privatized utilities
companies. Still, both Mayor and Council can imagine only scenarios
in which the "private sector" will be stimulated to
come to the rescue and lead a renaissance. This means they can
imagine only policies aimed at boosting investor confidence--cutting
spending precisely when they should be increasing it--or drawing
on corporate "expertise."
And this isn't just a New Orleans thing.
St. Bernard Parish, practically without revenue, has outsourced
much of its police service, bringing in DynCorp, a private military-services
firm--what used to be called mercenaries. It's difficult to understand
how paying them at least three to four times more (some estimates
run as high as $950 per man, per day) than the local deputies
with whom they'll be grouped will save money. In the days after
the storm Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco hired Blackwater
USA, another such firm, to provide "security" in New
Orleans, during the period when subsequently disproven rumors
of chaos and widespread violence titillated the nation and fueled
the right's pornographic racism. The state even outsourced identification
of bodies after the hurricane, in some cases, apparently, to firms
with histories of fraud and misfeasance.
It's at the federal level, where the responsibility
should be heaviest in times of such great disaster, that the practical
realization of neoliberal vision is most striking. The Bush Administration's
refusal, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the danger, to
fund the New Orleans levee project is well-known and criminal.
Michael Brown's incompetence and lack of engagement at FEMA became
breathtakingly clear to the public shortly after Katrina's landfall.
His e-mail records show just how cynical his appointment was.
As Katrina steamed through the Gulf, he hesitated to declare a
disaster area in its Florida wake, expressing concern that some
might file fraudulent claims. Presumably for the same reason he
temporized until the storm had come ashore on the Gulf Coast.
On August 29, hours after the storm hit Louisiana, he issued a
press statement urging us all to contribute to a list of sixteen
recommended private charities to support relief efforts. That
was a strange enough abdication of his responsibility as director
of the federal agency charged with managing emergencies, but the
Red Cross was one of just two secular agencies on the list. On
the 31st, responding to a memo alerting him to critical conditions
at the Superdome and Convention Center, he wrote, "Thanks
for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?"
A few hours later he replied to a frustrated staffer in the field,
"I'm working on an organization chart and staffing plan now."
During those days he found time to respond to e-mails from random
citizens either praising or criticizing his efforts and forward
them, along with self-pitying comments, to his staff.
Brown was in over his head. But the larger
point is that he and his bosses--Secretary of the Department of
Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and President Bush--have so
little regard for government that they couldn't conceive of the
agency's functions, even to go through the motions. They could
connect only to do public relations damage control, punish enemies
and outsource plunder to cronies. When the chief executive officers
of the parishes hardest hit by Katrina and then Rita participated
in a discussion on local public television in late October 2005,
each of them was trenchantly critical of FEMA's shoddy performance
(and the Red Cross's, by the way). They also complained bitterly
about Halliburton and the other private contractors hired to do
cleanup. The main charge was that the firms refused to coordinate
with others and demanded additional pay for every action. Such
is the practical truth of "market efficiency."
There are groups and individuals struggling
mightily to provide services and advocate for the interests of
poor and displaced New Orleanians, renters and others likely to
be simply cast aside by the market imperative. But they lack resources
to be effective in the current political environment. On the national
scale neither the labor movement (in either institutional variety),
nor women's, civil rights or environmentalist groups, nor, least
of all, the Democratic Party seems prepared to advance and fight
for a clear alternative vision.
As time goes on, fewer and fewer Americans
will recall that government can do anything but make war and suppress
dissent. Unless current patterns change, the struggle for New
Orleans's future may be a more extreme, condensed version of the
future of many, many more people as the bipartisan neoliberal
consensus reduces government to a tool of corporations and the
investor class alone.
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