Internal Refugees in the USA

It doesn't feel at all like a year and a half has passed since the storm. The city is half the size it was -- from a population of 485,000 to around 250,000. . . . It's no surprise that the grassroots movement that has sprung up here is calling what has happened an "ethnic cleansing." Some people's homes have been bulldozed without the consent of the residents. Other people have returned home to find their locks changed or their doors boarded up. Most of the projects, although habitable, have been surrounded by brand new barbed wire fences. In poorer parts of the city, rent and utility prices have doubled or tripled, making them prohibitive to former inhabitants.

One grassroots organization, the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, recently managed to overturn legislation that would have given the city the right to claim property through eminent domain if it had not been reclaimed by its former inhabitants one year after the storm.
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Many who would have liked to stay through the storm were forced to leave in a 'mandatory evacuation' and have been scattered across the country to FEMA trailer parks, unable to return for lack of resources. The trailer parks are an American version of refugee camps. Up to nine people share a tiny trailer in the middle of nowhere. The park is surrounded by fences and checkpoints. Security guards taunt the inhabitants. No one knows when they may be kicked out or left with nowhere to go. Many are transferred from park to park every few months, given no stability, and are too exhausted from repeated trauma to have energy for fighting the bureaucracy. FEMA will not release the list of where people are, so many still have no idea where their friends and family members have been taken. Although there are many places in Louisiana where these parks could have been set up, the people have been dispersed to many different states, making it very difficult to reunite or come back to New Orleans.

Different levels of government have collaborated to systematically dispossess whole neighbourhoods full of people, using Katrina as an excuse to simply steal their property to give to wealthy developers. It's a cumbersome process which hasn't been completed yet, but for anyone who spends any time looking, it shows a few things. The first is that even the most core principles touted by the right are basically lies to make their greed more palatable. If there is one thing any right winger will swear up and down, it is that all the inequities of the system they love are perhaps regrettable, but necessary because of the absolute sanctity of the principle of private property. Private property must be inviolable, they intone piously, and this principle transcends wealth and is the fundamental freedom; poor people may have less of it, but their right to it is equally enshrined; if they are thrifty and work hard, they too can accumulate it, and that is why everyone must resist the spectre of socialism which would deprive them of this essential right. BUT, Katrina makes it clear that this is rubbish. The sanctity of private property is a flag that is normally convenient for the right to wrap themselves in because it helps them fend off the horrors of redistribution, but if poor people manage to get their hands on any, their rights to it become irrelevant as soon as some rich people think it would be really nice if they had it instead. The law may get in the way because of its tendency to be framed in general terms, so that laws intended to protect rich people are in Katrina's case raising a number of hurdles in the way of finishing the job of dispossessing poor people. But there's certainly nobody on the right pointing out that this process violates their rights to their property. And of course this is just a magnified version of the usual "urban renewal" stuff--it's not a break from normality, just an intensification of "business as usual" that shows us how brutal "business as usual" is. In a small way, the same business is gearing up in my town of Vancouver as we approach the Olympics.

The other interesting matter is the process. Essentially, it seems as if the Americans are copying techniques for use on their own citizens from the Israeli experience in keeping the Palestinians down--e.g. checkpoints, displacement, making legalities moot with "facts on the ground", lotsa barbed wire. They in turn had to a fair degree made use of methods developed in South Africa, and I've heard it said that the South Africans drew some of their approaches from a study of Canadian methods of dividing and immiserating our First Nations. All the imperialists copy techniques from each other. This is nothing new; Americans have taught torture methods all over Latin America, and more recently in Iraq have been using Israeli procedures for dealing with Iraqi prisoners. But it's rather chilling to see the US government, near as I can make out not just at federal but state and local levels, applying such techniques to people who aren't foreigners, aren't immigrants, and indeed aren't even so much as alleged to be wrongdoers of any sort, just because it would be inconvenient for developers if they were allowed to return to their homes. Mind you, they are black. And, you know, poor. So I suppose they've committed the two worst sins you can in the States.

There are two points of hope to be drawn from this evil. First, it's kind of a graphic example of the hopes of many socialists that the capitalist system will be messed up by its internal contradictions. I mean, theoretically, a bunch of developers will make a stack of money off all this. But can the country possibly be more prosperous from the efforts required to keep tens of thousands of people stuffed in little fenced off trailer parks all over the place where they have no way to make a living, not to mention the efforts and bureaucracy needed to stop them from going home? Seems to me like the productive economy is being hosed for the sake of enabling theft, and it's becoming OK to do that on larger and larger scales. How sustainable is that? The second is that the people are fighting back despite it all.

And in smaller font but with the same bold lettering, the poster continues, "The people of New Orleans will not go quietly in the night, becoming the homeless of countless other cities while our own homes are razed to make way for your mansions, condos, and casinos. We will join together to defend our claim, and we will rebuild our home in the image of our own dreams."