Reconstruction blues
By Bill Quigley
For the NNPA
NEW ORLEANS – Bernice Mosely is 82 and lives alone in New Orleans in a shotgun double. One year ago, Mosely was on the second floor of her neighborhood church when Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Days later, she was helicoptered out. She was so dehydrated she spent eight days in a hospital. Her next door neighbor, 89 years old, stayed behind to care for his dog. He drowned.
Mosely now lives in her half-gutted house. She has no stove, no refrigerator, and no air-conditioning. The bottom half of her walls have been stripped of sheetrock and are bare wooden slats from the floor halfway up the wall.
Mosely worked in a New Orleans factory for more than 30 years sewing uniforms. When she retired she was making less than $4 an hour.
”Retirement benefits?” she laughed. She lives off Social Security. Because of her tight budget, Mosely did not have flood insurance.
Thousands of people like Mosely are back in their houses on the Gulf Coast. They are living in houses that most people would consider uninhabitable. Other institutions – water, electricity, health care, schools, criminal justice – are in just as bad shape.
New Orleans continues to lose more water than it uses. The local water system has to pump over 130 million gallons a day so that 50 million gallons will come out. The rest runs away in thousands of leaks in broken water lines, costing the water system $2 million a day. In the lower 9th Ward, the water has still not been certified as safe to drink.
Only half the homes in New Orleans have electricity. Power outages are common as hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs have not been made because Entergy New Orleans is in bankruptcy. Entergy is asking for a 25 percent increase in rates to help it become solvent. Yet Entergy New Orleans’ parent company, Entergy Corporation reported earnings of $282 million last year on revenue of $2.6 billion.
Before Katrina, 56,000 students were enrolled in over 100 public schools in New Orleans. At the end of the school year there were only 12,500. Right after the storm, the local school board gave many of the best public schools to charter groups. The state took over almost all the rest. By the end of the school year, four schools were operated by the pre-Katrina school board, three by the state and 18 were new charter schools.
After 32 years of collective bargaining, the union contract with the New Orleans public school teachers elapsed and was not renewed, and 7,500 employees were terminated.
Half the hospitals open before Katrina are still closed. The state’s biggest public healthcare provider, Charity Hospital, remains closed and there are no plans to reopen it. Blue Cross Blue Shield officials reported, “About three-quarters of the physicians who had been practicing in New Orleans are no longer submitting claims.”
There is no hospital at all in the city for psychiatric patients. While the metropolitan area had about 450 psychiatric beds before the storm, 80 are now available. The police are the first to encounter those with mental illness. One recent Friday afternoon, police dealt with two mental patients – one was throwing bricks through a bar window, the other was found wandering naked on the interstate.
Crime is increasingly a problem. In July, New Orleans lost almost as many people to murder as in July of 2005, with only 40 percent of the population back. State and local officials called in the National Guard to patrol lightly populated areas so local police could concentrate on high-crime, low-income neighborhoods.
The criminal justice system is nearly paralyzed by a backlog of over 6,000 cases. There are serious evidence problems because of resigned police officers, displaced witnesses and flooded evidence rooms. The public defender system was down to 4 trial attorneys for months.
In the suburbs across the lake, Sheriff Jack Strain said he was going to protect his jurisdiction from ”thugs” and ”trash” migrating from closed public housing projects in New Orleans. He promised that every person who wore ”dreadlocks or che-wee hairstyles” could expect to be stopped by law enforcement.
A grand jury has started looking into actions by other suburban police officers who blocked a group of people, mostly black, from escaping the floodwaters of New Orleans by walking across the Mississippi River bridge. The suburban police forced the crowd to flee back across the two-mile bridge by firing weapons into the air.
One year after Katrina, the City of New Orleans still does not have a comprehensive rebuilding plan. The first plan by advisors to the mayor was shelved before the election. A City Council plan was then started, and the state and federal government mandated yet another process that may or may not include some of the recommendations of the prior two processes.
Where did the money go?
Congress reportedly appropriated over $100 billion to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Over $50 billion was allocated to temporary and long-term housing. Just under $30 billion was for emergency response and Department of Defense spending. Over $18 billion was for state and local response and the rebuilding of infrastructure. Another $3.6 billion was for health, social services and job training and $3.2 for non-housing cash assistance. And $1.9 billion was allocated for education and $1.2 billion for agriculture.
One hour in New Orleans shows the check must still be in the mail.
Not a single dollar in federal housing rehab money has made it into a hand in Louisiana. Though Congress has allocated nearly $10 billion in Community Development Block Grants, the State of Louisiana is still testing the program and has not yet distributed dollar number one.
“Many of the same ‘disaster profiteers’ and government agencies that mishandled the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq are responsible for the failure of ‘reconstruction’ of the Gulf Coast region,” Corpwatch said in a recent report.
“The Army Corps, Bechtel and Halliburton are using the very same ‘contract vehicles’ in the Gulf Coast as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are ‘indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity’ open-ended ‘contingency’ contracts that are being abused by the contractors on the Gulf Coast to squeeze out local companies. These are also ‘cost-plus’ contracts that allow them to collect a profit on everything they spend, which is an incentive to overspend.”
Billions of dollars in no-bid FEMA contracts went to Bechtel Corporation, the Shaw Group, CH2M Hill and Fluor immediately after Katrina hit. Riley Bechtel, CEO of Bechtel Corporation, served on President Bush’s Export Council during 2003-2004. A lobbyist for the Shaw Group, Joe Allbaugh, is a former FEMA Director and friend of President Bush. The President and Group Chief Executive of the International Group at CH2MHill is Robert Card, appointed by President Bush as undersecretary to the US Department of Energy until 2004. Card also worked at CH2M Hill before signing up with Bush.
Fluor, whose work in Iraq was slowing down, is one of the big winners of FEMA work and its stock is up 65 percent since it started on the job.
No wonder there is a National Hurricane Conference for private companies to show off their wares – from RVs to portable cell phone towers to port-a-potties.
One long time provider was quoted by the Miami Herald at the conference that there are all kinds of new people in the field. “Some folks here said, ‘Man, this is huge business; this is my new business. I’m not in the landscaping business anymore. I’m going to be a hurricane debris contractor.’”