BY CEDRIC JOHNSON (The Neoliberal Deluge and Revolutionaries to Race Leaders) AND THOMAS JESSEN ADAMS
Excerpt from article published in Jacobin:
The rains over Corpus Christi and Houston have finally stopped, and floodwaters are beginning to recede. Some residents are still stranded, while others — tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands — won’t be able to return to their homes for weeks and months.
Meanwhile, the race to capitalize on the disaster, to redistribute wealth upward, and to transform the region has already begun.
While rain was still falling over much of southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana, Patrick Gleason took to the editorial section of Forbes to propose the now-expected Republican (and increasingly Democratic) response to natural disasters: suspend the Davis-Bacon Act and cut wages in order to spur reconstruction efforts.
For many who survived the Katrina crisis twelve years ago, Gleason’s words will sound disturbingly familiar. He advances the same flawed recovery approach that the Bush White House and local politicians took in Louisiana. They rolled back labor and environmental protections, guaranteeing wide profit margins for corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel while creating a deeply uneven and unjust recovery process.
New Orleans has seen an entrepreneurship boon since Katrina, with individual start-ups outpacing the national average by 68 percent in 2013. And yet the city’s child poverty rate still sits higher than the dismal numbers for the state of Louisiana overall, not to mention the nation. Three out of five renters spend more than 30 percent of their monthly income on housing.
American liberals find themselves in uncharted waters with a social disaster on the scale and complexity of the south Texas floods. As the popular outrage over Charlottesville showed, liberal antiracism retains powerful currency in many corners, but, when confronted with ruling-class power and less social-media friendly subjects — like wages, collective bargaining, workplace safety, and other issues that have direct material effects on the lives of millions of working people— many of those same voices fall silent.
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Read the full article at Jacobin.
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Cedric Johnson is associate professor of African American studies and political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is editor of The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans. See more on the blog by Cedric: Hurricane Katrine, ten years later: When the investor class goes marching in.