New Orleans: "Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators."

WSJ: White rich elude Orleans chaos, don't want poor blacks back

John Byrne

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/WSJ_White_rich_escape_New_Orleans_chaos_dont_want_blacks_poor__0908.html

He continues: "The mostly African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there have scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white and more affluent areas, streets are dry and passable. Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators. Yesterday, officials reiterated that all residents must leave New Orleans, but it's still unclear how far they will go to enforce the order."

"The green expanse of Audubon Park, in the city's Uptown area, has doubled in recent days as a heliport for the city's rich -- and a terminus for the small armies of private security guards who have been dispatched to keep the homes there safe and habitable. Mr. O'Dwyer has cellphone service and ice cubes to cool off his highballs in the evening. By yesterday, the city water service even sprang to life, making the daily trips to his neighbor's pool unnecessary. A pair of oil-company engineers, dispatched by his son-in-law, delivered four cases of water, a box of delicacies including herring with mustard sauce and 15 gallons of generator gasoline."

How do they want the city rebuilt? "The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters. "The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

Not every white business leader agrees, Cooper notes. "Some black leaders and their allies in New Orleans fear that it boils down to preventing large numbers of blacks from returning to the city and eliminating the African-American voting majority. Rep. William Jefferson, a sharecropper's son who was educated at Harvard and is currently serving his eighth term in Congress, says, "This is an example of poor people forced to make choices because they don't have the money to do otherwise," Mr. Jefferson says.

God, I hate these people. They make their money off the blood, sweat and tears of the poor but they don't want them visible. I'm afraid with bushes recent executive order, it can't be helped but to create another poor population. Paying sub-standard wages, what will they do ship the hispanics in in the morning and ship them out at night?

He went on vacation...a resort in Aruba or somewhere like that.

All of the African-American staff that manned the resort was brought in by boat in the morning and shipped off at night, every day. From sundown to sunup it was the whitest resort in the world, and apparently that's what the N.O. "elite" are seeking too.

:grr:

Translated, it reads "poor whites, poor blacks? Don't bother coming back."

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

I really hate having to take up for "rich white people" but this is a bogeyman.

People come from all over the economic spectrum, it's a fact of life. Yes, poor people suffered vastly more than people who had means, WHATEVER THEIR SKIN COLOR (and I had to say this on DU!), but that too is a fact of life.

If you want to ameliorate those facts, then you have to have an infrastructure UP FRONT that would have mitigated this disaster more effectively.

Are we looking for someone to hate? That's childish. What do you propose the solution is? Drag the RICH WHITE PEOPLE through the streets to the guillotines and behead them?

We need to look for solutions, not for more people to victimize.

and that is done, by having fair labor laws and pay living wages to our fellow humans (I know it's easier to think of them as not being human and to have no sympathy for their plight).

I've never been able to understand the greed, just how much do the rich need. When they have absolutely everything they could possibly need or want and more money than they'll ever spend. Just what is the purpose? No one is going to be able to take it with them and no one gets out of this world alive!

You appear to have a kinship with these type of people.. so please, please tell me when do you finally have enough?

but I'm not claiming kin with any "class" of income.

We are all Americans. The rich, the poor, and everything in between. Redistribution of wealth implies many things, most notably that you have fewer rights than the collective at all times. That is communism, and while I understand the goals of communism are to alleviate misery, I am not a communist by any form of kinship or agreement. I know that, barring utopia, in the end no matter who promises what, I am ultimately and finally responsible for making the decisions that keep me alive, regardless of my resources. In reality, I also know that cooperation trumps competition, and while lifting a loaf of mouldy bread might be good enough to let my family survive a couple of days, sharing it means more hands available to rebuild and more eyes available to look after the kids.

What is "enough"? That doesn't have an absolute answer. Trying to establish a lowest common denominator answer implies many things that we would consider patently un American and patently disincentives to struggle to succeed, to "better" ourselves. I personally believe that people of means have a social and personal moral obligation to do good with what they have and to look out for their fellow humans, but merely dispensing that "more than enough" into the crowd is only going to feed them for a day, and leave you with no resources to do more tomorrow.

Having said that, life is full of choices, and people make bad choices all the time. As a society it is our responsibility to raise our children to have those values of cooperation from the beginning; the hope that they might some day have it "easier", and at the same time that they can pay it back and pay it forward. Some people inherit wealth, some people earn wealth, some people stumble on to it by blind luck. But the same can be said of poverty, or even ordinary middle class middle of the line "enough".

Some people are greedy selfish bastards, and you don't have to be rich or white to earn that distinction. What is enough? Ask P. Diddy to strip one of those 100,000 bling rings off and sell it. Ask our fat cat oil executive administration to do more than just "give at the office". Just remember, that the government already has some ideas about what "enough" is when they set unemployment caps and welfare caps and medicaid and medicare caps and disability income caps. I don't trust them to set the line for what "enough" is any more than I trust someone with more noble social agendas to set a fair standard for "enough".

We do not have the means to cure poverty in our lifetime, or at least not without creating all kinds of other social problems. All we can do is our best to make sure that people have a fair chance to strive for success, and to not have to struggle to stay alive every time a tropical storm blows in from August to November every year.

but I don't agree that rich or poor, it is all a result of the choices we make as individuals. I do think it is a choice that we make collectively though.

I came from poor, I remember being ashamed of going to the grocery store with my mother because she had to pay in food stamps. I remember having a mouth full of rotten and missing teeth because the only time we saw a dentist is when we were in so much pain that extraction was the only remedy. I guess these are choices she made. She made the choice to marry a man that beat her(even though the beatings didn't start till after she married). She chose to leave him with the 3 children she had with him and he chose to run (not walk) away from all his responsibilities and I guess it was my choice too, for deciding to be born to these two people?

I went to school, I educated myself and I worked. I saved and invested my money and for what? For the corporation I was employed by for 28 years to scam and cheat me out of my savings? To have my job offshored after 28 years? I worked my way out of poverty and I have been thrown back into it by the rich greedy monsters that are afraid that if they pay a decent wage and treat their employees decently, they won't make enough money. There's no doubt in my mind that if I resided in LA, I'd be considered one of those shiftless, too lazy to save myself sub humans too. And I'm going to be told it's because of the choices I made?

The rich in this country has collectively prevented the elimination of poverty in this country. They do it because of their greed. Look at the current administration, every decision they make benefits their corporate greed monsters who isolate themselves from the uglyness of poverty all the while creating more of it every day. I'm afraid dear person, it's not the poor who are the real parasites in this country.. it's the rich.

that we are where we are as a result of our choices alone, but our choices do have some influence some of the time. I have never said or even remotely thought of the poor or anyone as "parasites". I think rich and poor at the edges between middle income and its borders can go either way. Not every poor person votes the democratic ticket after they have made their way. Not every person of means votes red, but many people who think they might some day have more vote red, regardless of where they are in life.

I completely agree that corporations, particularly public corporations in this country are basically evil. Many look at human resources as a revenue drain, and if they could get people to work for free they would. They view their bottom line as the only important thing, and they view people as an expensive but annoying necessity to delivering the bottom line.

I think that real living people should have more rights than corporations, and that corporate reform has to start with how we treat the rights of corporations as greater than the rights of individuals. That's a whole novel for another day - but the problem is not "the rich". The problem is how the government ignores "the poor" and deprioritizes addressing poverty in a meaningful way.

Turning the rich into toothpaste and dogfood is not the solution. Limiting and regulating growth of the investment vehicles at the expense of individuals and labor is what results in some people becoming rich or richer. If you can't offshore your jobs, more local people will be employed. The cost of your goods will be higher and you will have lower profits, but you will find other ways to increase your margin and compete than grabbing at low hanging fruit such as your own American employees.

I think that our government is utterly evil not to treat failed public pension plans and public corporation retirement plans as anything less than a national disaster, much less allow companies to raid pension plans and then run a company into the ground. If you want equity, you have to regulate business with the welfare of individuals and families as your "value".

Blaming the rich is throwing water on smoke. It's fire that's making the smoke, and if you throw all your water at the smoke, you will still have a fire.

but don't you see, the government is the rich! I have no voice, I vote I volunteer at election time. I bitch loudly to anyone that listens. It matters not.

also, I never advocated turning them into dogfood... but now that you mention it... (just my poor attemtp at humor)

we knew we would need a landslide to overcome "voter irregularities" and we didn't get it because the candidate we put forward was a lousy fighter on his feet, and certainly not someone who could get EVERYONE who was not a republican (the great majority of America) to stand up and shout with excitement and hope. Our own party picked a reserved patrician candidate indistinguishable from any other run of the mill halo-wearing centrist republican because he was "presidential", and not because he was a great candidate.

That being said, you do have a voice, and it does matter. Don't give up - there are people who have given up who are looking to you to lead through the muck and to help spread a little hope. It's okay to grouch sometimes, but it's going to take every one of us, and even if we win there will be no time to rest on our laurels.

There's a huge crack in the foundation right now. We need to step in and break it wide open and bring down these callous out of touch bastards who were responsible for keeping this from happening in the first place, regardless of their income. Plus, alienating people based on their income level isn't a good battle plan - we want everyone to buy in to democratic and progressive ideas because they are based on human decency - to all humans.

In the short term, we need to set our values and priorities to be on Americans, not on corporations, not on tax breaks, and not on invading every country that has something we want. We are the tide, as unstoppable as the ocean, and we need to sweep the litter off this beach so all of us can enjoy it. I'll nominate Halliburton as the poster child for an operating company needing deep audits.

Evil, selfish political regimes are doomed to fail, and usually from within, and usually through violence. It's a bit like a pendulum, it swings from side to side as people take advantage of openings and loopholes, but in a democracy it is self correcting without resorting to violence. They've had enough rope to hang themselves a dozen times over, so much rope they've hung themselves just trying keep from hanging themselves. With just a little more help from us now this administration is going to be carted out in a pine box of its own making, and I'm perfectly happy to throw a handful of dirt on it as soon as possible.

who was our last "poor boy" president?

and before him Reagan, Carter, and Nixon. Sadly enough, I believe we've seen the end of the Horation Alger "rags to the Presidency" stories.

We vote for capability. If you have built a record of experience relevant to running for office it is usually because you have been employed as either a successful public servant or a successful businessman. The presidency is about administration and leading collaberative effort, with a little bit of inspiration (and being ethically right about it) about doing the "right" thing even if sometimes a majority of people don't agree.

Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer.

Having extraordinary income is sometimes a side effect of achieving that experience. When you choose players for a game of basketball with your pals, most people try to pick the most athletic or agile or tallest guy to be on their team when given first choice, without first asking for a net worth statement.

If the best guy for the job is someone who got rich by playing basketball for a living, then that wealth is a side effect of their experience. I know it sounds crass, but would you vote for someone who just had a great wonderful sense of humanity to be president even if they brought nothing else to the table? We all consider many factors, including our own pet issues.

Bill Clinton was a successful lawyer, but he started from rather ordinary means. John Edwards started from ordinary means. By the time they were qualified to be presidential candidates they had accumulated both wealth and "public notice" through their endeavors.

Dirt poor but politically connected to corrupt party Boss

the poor a chance to come back to the city they love, how are they victims?

Many affluent people honestly believe the world is their Disney Land. They use their influence to always have the least amount of inconvenience and the greatest benefit to themselves. This is no surprise to anyone, is it?

But, how does this help society as a whole? Not everyone will be affluent; "the poor will always be with you." Wasn't our nation formed to say: Rich or poor, you are all the same in the eyes of the law, granted equal protection?

Do the rich now get to skirt this law?

Do we just create genocide, as FEMA did for ** in NO? Do we tell the remaining poor scattered far and wide that they cannot come home to the place of their birth? To the place where their children were born?

Wealthy men and women have tried to separate themselves from the poor throughout history. Their attempts have always ended in disaster for themselves, but not until disaster is unleashed on all.

The mindset of any affluent person who would claim NO is "MY CITY and I say who comes and goes" is chilling, not sympathy-inducing.

It indicates a loathing for the Constitution as well as being a bad omen for American society at large.

until I see many articles with many 'rich white guys' all in agreement I'm not buying this bullshit.

It's designed to work people up by playing on bias and stereotype, and it is succeeding. It's wrong, I call bullshit, and I'm not pulling any punches.

becaue my feeling is if it wern't for the poor, there would be no rich.

Hit reply on your post by mistake.

I agree with what you've said.

and I didn't really expect to get an answer from the person I was replying to either.

because you asked a good question.

please don't be passive aggressive, it makes me positively reptilian, and I usually come here for collaberation, not verbal gladiatorial combat, which, incidentally, I'm very good at.

The answer to your question, which I believe was, do the rich get to skirt the law? is no, BUT

You're being an absolutist. Let's break it down.

You have a city full of people - some people in desperate need of assistance to get out and quite willing to go, and some people who need assistance and are NOT willing to go, and some people who don't need assistance and are NOT willing to go.

You can't make an edict to cover this situation that will be fair, not matter which edict you come up with.

If Honore starts at one end of the city and methodically crosses it forcibly evacuating everyone in his path, then desperately ill people on the other end of the city will fail triage and die.

If Honore starts evacuating people in dry areas who don't want to go while ignoring people who should go because their house IS under water, he's also executing his job with poor judgement.

The evacuation is going to take time to complete. By saying he is going to do triage first and get the neediest out first he is saying that eventually the people that did hold out with the food and water they are bringing in EVERYWHERE (not just to the "rich white guys"), city services will slowly come back on and the point will become moot ("deprioritized").

I'm seeing a lot of complaining about "what is", based on a lot of assumptions that are as ugly as the subjects of the complaint. I don't think it's productive.

There will undoubtedly be inequities and even gross unfairness in the reconstruction. It is our job to separate reality from myth and address REAL core issues, and not "rich WHITE guys" versus "poor BLACK guys" because we come across as shrill and extreme and racist in a weird way when we generalize like that.

Is it really just a coincidence that the poorer areas were so badly flooded? Were the wealthier areas built on higher ground? That tends to be true in L.A. The wealthy live in the hills while the poor live in the flatlands. What was the story on NO? What caused that particular part of the levee to break?

over a 150 years ago.

The areas closest to docks and lading in a port city are going to be the closest to water level, and filled with "working class". When you scoop dirt out of those areas to build higher levees, you end up with below sea level sections of the city.

This is not a conspiracy - it's the way of the world. The wealthy aren't evil. This is not a class war. This is a war of stupidity and irresponsibility of the government to make sure that the ENTIRE CITY was adequately prepared for an inevitable worst case scenario.

I am truly sick and tired of hearing how this is Evil Rich White Guy versus Poor Suffering Black Guy. It's reverse racism, and bigoted, and moreover, wrong.

propose a solution.

I'm waiting.

By the way, "ethnic cleansing" involves political upheaval, murder and genocide, at least according U.N. language. I want you to say exactly who you think has been murdering and genociding, because right now your statement sounds a little batshit crazy.

Duh!

i grew up in uptown in a fairly affluent part of town (at least relative to other parts of new orleans) but still close to some pretty poor areas and i've always thought one of the major problems with the city was the demographic structure of the neighborhoods. it doesn't make any sense to have housing projects so close to the primary source of industry, namely tourism. people want to say "oh you just hate having to face poor black people everyday" and that's not it at all - i hate constantly having to be worried about crime. i was held up at gunpoint on my front porch. so was my mom. my uncle saw someone get shot in the face a block from where we lived. our house was broken into several times. i'll never forget looking out my window as a little kid and seeing three people dressed in black being held at gunpoint on our lawn by my uncle. As a kid I used to fall asleep most nights wondering where i would hide if someone broke into our house. that's no way to live, so it frustrates me to hear that wanting to change things automatically means that there's this oppressive element to it because i fit into a wealthier demographic.

the simple fact is that new orleans needs more revenue to support it's public education system, police dept. etc. and to do that they need to attract more industry. and to do that they need to make the place more livable by decreasing the crime rate. and i think some demographic restructuring may, in the long term, benefit the entire city, poor and wealthy alike. nagin gets it - he's the one who started tearing down the projects near the quarter to build luxury condos. but then again, he hates black people.

No matter what you do wherever you have entrenched "poverty" you will be "displacing" or denying someone something to fix the problem.

I completely don't agree with removing people to build luxury condos -and I think that there are better solutions to local crime than relocating neighborhoods.

But crime exists, and it pays better than minimum wage. That's what you have to address in moving the association of poverty and crime to "working poor" and middle class.

And when there's enough crime, it organizes and competes for ascendancy, and that form of crime isn't always limited to poor black neighborhoods, or even poor neighborhoods.

It starts with keeping our jobs here. It starts with educating our population. It starts with attracting business from all over the spectrum because tourism alone tends to widen the class gap with disproportionally higher service sector jobs.

New Orleans is going to rebuild in fits and starts. Nobody is going to keep people of any ethinicity out. If "black people" (or any other kinda people) don't want Nagin tearing down their homes, then they need to change government with their vote. If Louisianians don't like gay married terrorists more than flooded cities and homeless flood survivors, they need to vote blue next time and get the fuck out of my bedroom.

We need to be productive and constructive here. We need to be innovative and look for solutions and do the things that we as progressives and caring humans are good at. We need to stop exaggerating and sensationalizing and playing at emotional masturbation so that our eyes will be clear to see what needs to be done and to keep unethical interests from taking advantage of us and of New Orleans, as they will surely try.

it's not something i think is fair by any means but if displacing some people means that in the future they'll be more likely to get a job or a good education then i'm all for it. but i think the long term solutions are going to be hard on some people who are very vulnerable. my hope is that the displaced populations would be given more respectable subsidized housing in areas that aren't inundated with the culture of drugs and violence that's so pervasive in new orleans.

it's tough though. the reason i left new orleans is because i felt no hope for the city as much as i love it and the people. i think it's easy for some of us to say let's just start from scratch because it's not our neighborhoods that would be starting from scratch. but personally it's also a very attractive idea, the thought of redesigning the city so that i might actually want to move back one day.

i have a problem with the idea of having these separate living quarters for the poor. it's a kinder gentler form of segregation but it's still an awful way for a society to exist. it happens in every major city but the degree of the segregation is far too extreme in new orleans for it to continue in the same fashion.

ideally, new orleans can be rebuilt in such a way as to attract the middle class to be close to the CBD and i hate to say it but some of these extremely poor neighborhoods get in the way of that. right now people who have money are moving across the lake and paying taxes for their suburban schools and police departments. if we can get some of that tax money back into new orleans we can work on our infrastructure, improving our schools and police departments, attracting businesses and jobs. until that happens we'll be in this continuous cycle of poverty and everyone will suffer except the people who live across the lake. (it's no coincidence that my family that lives across the lake is conservative and the ones who stayed in the city are much more liberal.)

anyway, i appreciate your well thought out posts. it's much more complicated than just "rich white men" vs. the poor. if a city is an organism then right now new orleans is on life support and it needs innovative solutions - sometimes they may sound harsh to some people, so you compromise and come up with a better solution. hopefully there will be progressive voices to make sure that all populations are respected in this compromise. considering that 72% of New Orleans voted for Kerry, I think they're in good shape in that regard.

As I said, in L.A., wealthier people live in the hills. The poor live in the flatlands. Although you are right about that, you are wrong if you are trying to suggest that it is not Evil Rich Guy versus Poor Suffering Guy. The fact is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer every day.

I worked in the administration of a non-profit for the homeless for many years and watched how the rich try to "help" the poor. Even when the rich mean well, they take from and use the poor. It is sad but true. It is just the way it works. You can lessen class distinctions, lessen "class war" if you will, but you cannot completely end them or it. The Republican fanaticism about free enterprise, their disdain for government programs that even the playing field for the poor and restrain the greed of the rich make the divisions between rich and poor much greater and more painful for the poor. The lack of a social net places the lower middle class and poor precariously close to destitution. Events like Katrina push many of them completely over.

I still do not know why the levee broke where it did. Do you? Was that the lowest point of the levee? Was it the most worn? What happened at that particular point? Why did it break there?

This is the way the city was built. I presume many cities were built this way -- housing for the poor is only an afterthought.

Which does not excuse the abominable way this crisis was handled.

hide the poor.

If you can't see it, it doesn't exist.

Unless, of course, its an angry, vengeful God who loves you but hates everyone else. He, of course, if very real.

tehy get rid of the long-standing culture that built the city, if they turn it into some fake suburb it'll be as inconsequential as Veil and Destin....

and since you cant have slaves anymore why do you want "those people back" sarcasm off

Just to see some old white guy dancing
the soft shoe on the sidewalk.

Can you imagine a Neo Orleans jazz band????

The rich build their homes on high ground. Especially in the south. You can always tell who the richest residents in a town are by how high the hill is upon which they've built their home.

It actually does concern flooding, another reason goes back to the Middle Ages, Castles were built on high ground because high ground is easily defensible, and higher you are the more territory you can see, you can see your enemies approaching that much sooner.

High ground is much more expensive in flood prone areas. Low lying areas are far cheaper, and the first to get flooded when it does happen. It happens everywhere, not just New O'rleans. At least this much is not a conspiracy, the levees could have broken anywhere along the borders of New O'rleans and the same areas would be flooded, water flows down, it's that simple. Those who can afford the house on the hill stay dry, while those who live below are flooded.

Water settles in low areas, the poor tend to live in low areas, because higher ground is more expensive.

Sid

made to leave?

But after reading about how dangerous the water is, and how the risk for illness is high, I decided it was probably the safest thing to do...

And on a totally different note: if they force all those poor people out, they better DAMN well force the owners of the "Gracious homes" out, too!!

Are these rich people who were able to stay high and dry also going to be forcibly evacuated?

Re >>And on a totally different note: if they force all those poor people out, they better DAMN well force the owners of the "Gracious homes" out, too!!<<

If the city is so contaminated that everyone who stays is at risk of contagious diseases, then it isn't safe for ANYONE, rich or poor.

But if so, why are they making such an effort to get the utilities working again? I just saw a report on CNN about the repair work on the hotels in the French Quarter. The power is back on and they are drying the carpets and putting the kitchens back in working order.

But to what purpose? There aren't going to be any tourists coming to New Orleans for a LOOOOONG time! Unless they're going to be using these hotels as housing for the National Guard and other rescue workers, it doesn't make any sense to make refurbishing them a top priority.

I guess it would be good PR. If they get the French Quarter up and running, it will serve as a "See? We're doing a wonderful job!" moment for Bush n Pals.

Plus, I think you are right. It'll be a staging area for Halliburton contractors and NG.

I've never been to NO, but always wanted to go. The heritage and flavor of the city seemed to be mostly from the Cajans and Blacks. The food and jazz. I can't imagine all whites keeping that flavor. That would make it a "Disney" New Orleans.

And as for the poor - when the city rebulds and if they should hire the ones that left at a fair wage - that would elimiante the proverty. They would have jobs for years. They would be able to more the city into a more people friendly place than a corporate casino place.

Get used to it. They will even hire people to pretend to be poor and underprivileged. All the fun and none of the crime.

It has an African area to it with a neat truck ride through an area with lots of animals from Africa. I was over there right before the public opening of it. Not one black person was in sight anywhere in the park. Last time I was there (couple of years ago) they did any Blacks and a lot from Africa. But I thought that was intersting.

...enjoy the toxin-laded soil in their new paradise. I'll be interesting to see how many cases of cancer and other medical problems pop up in Neo Orleans.