For those of you who don’t know me, I spent several months in Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina, working for FEMA in Biloxi and the surrounding communities. I have tried to follow the rebuilding efforts in the South because of that experience. Actually, I should say, the lack of rebuilding. Government programs, as you might suspect if you are as cynical about government as I am, have been slow to pay out funds, and the insurance companies have been far worse. But as I heard in this presentation from the MIT website, there may be other factors involved, not just government red tape. 

Comments made at MIT on 21 September 2006 by Philip Thompson, PhD.

Author of “Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities and the Struggle for Deep Democracy”

(these comments are paraphrased)

 

[After a decade of working in the public housing programs of New York City, he went to New Orleans last winter. He went to the Lower Ninth Ward and was told there were still bodies under the rubble. He had been in NYC in 2001 and remembers distinctly that a big effort was put into recovering human remains following the WTC collapse, indeed not even just every body, but every fragment of a body. It was seen as a point of national honor and pride, that we couldn’t leave any trace of a human being. (My note: since he gave this talk, it has come to light that there are still remains in the underground tunnels under the WTC site. The recovery operation wasn’t as thorough as we had been led to believe.)

But in New Orleans many months after the storm, he is told the Fire Dept has to go in, and that means overtime pay, and  they need equipment to lift the debris, and they couldn’t get FEMA to release the money.]

 

It’s just infuriating. What did the people of New Orleans do wrong? Is the problem that you can’t spin NEW ORLEANS the way you can spin terrorism politically? Therefore it’s not on the agenda at the White House? Therefore peoples’ family members stay under rubble? They can’t have peace? This is wrong, it’s just wrong. You can’t help but wonder…if these people were richer, or politically influential, this wouldn’t have happened. What is it, about people in New Orleans that could allow this? We have to put the situation in New Orleans in a broader political context: that is, government has been under assault in this country for 25 years. The very idea of government, much less planning, and much of the hostility towards government has racial undertones, of wasting money on urban populations, poor people, people of color who don’t deserve it, who don’t do anything for themselves and in addition, not only southern states, you have white suburban voting populations who buy into this philosophy of legislators who cut programs to city governments and you end up with cities that are very vulnerable. A big part of the explanation of why rebuilding is so difficult and why we saw what we saw on television has to do with the underfunding of cities. It’s amazing, embarrassing, and outrageous that after the largest natural disaster in 100 years in a city, we’re talking about a 3.5 million dollar grant from the Rockefeller foundation, from a private foundation, as critical to pulling together planning for a major city. That’s less than a current Democratic candidate for governor is spending on his summer house in the Berkshires.

 

 

There’s more….if you are interested, here’s the link to the talk: (he comes on at about the 34 minute mark):

http://mfile.akamai.com/12800/rm/mitworld.download.akamai.com/12800/mitw-dusp-planning-katrina-21sep2006-32k.ram