25 questions on the murder of New Orleans
asked by Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenat in The Nation:
23. Why isn’t FEMA scrambling to create a central registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the city?
24. As politicians talk about “disaster czars” and elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed “new urbanism” in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive participation of the city’s ordinary citizens in their own future?
Mike Davis has long been interested in the politics of disaster, e.g. comparing the responses to bush fires in rich neighbourhoods and tenement fires in not so rich neighbourhoods of Los Angeles in Ecology of Fear. Even with “ordinary” disasters politics always play a role, let alone now, when the federal government from top to bottom is filled with crooks and grifters.
New Orleans is the second Iraq, another trog for Bush’s rich friends to feed upon.