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Katrina Survivors: difference between the haves and the have-nots
Hotel is a microcosm of evacuee experience
By Greg Thomas
Real estate writer
Alfanao Tony of Meraux stood at the counter of the Baton Rouge Hampton Inn wearing a starched white shirt. His eyes filled with tears as he explained that anonymous donors from Baton Rouge had paid his hotel room bill for five nights now.
The financial help has been critical for an 86-year-old man who has no home, nowhere else to go and wants to avoid shelters.
"I'll sleep in my car before I go to a shelter," Tony said. "At my age, I couldn't take that."
The scene at Baton Rouge area hotels illustrates the socio-economic gap among Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Some are being put up in hotels by the companies they work for. Their jobs are secure, and they will eventually operate out of temporary offices in Baton Rouge.
Others, like Tony, have limited means and are struggling on their own to find shelter in a market where housing is increasingly scarce. They don't know when they can go home, when the money will run out or where they will go when it does.
Tony spent two nights on the fourth floor of his apartment building awaiting rescue after the storm.
He had $1,000 in his pocket when he headed toward Mystic, Texas, but he found no rooms and eventually made his way to the Hampton Inn, where "the staff have been just wonderful."
He's down to less than $200 and doesn't know what will happen after that.
Anna Dennis of Kenner had nine family members crammed into two rooms at the Hampton Inn. They, too, were running out of money, but were given a break on room charges.
Her husband, Warren, was at the local Hilton Garden Inn with his adoptive father, Wilbert Denies, 83. Denies has been a foster parent for decades and three of Warren's adopted brothers were staying with them: two teenagers and a 41-year-old man with an emotional disorder. "He just doesn't talk, and hasn't since he was a child," Anna Dennis said.
Warren Dennis has been hitting the road early every morning to find an apartment, but to no avail.
The one lead they had on an apartment got them excited, but when they went to meet the leasing agent they found a man with a truck unloading his furniture, saying the apartment was his.
"I've been trying to keep my breakdowns to every other day,'" Anna Dennis said.
The Dennis family has been to FEMA and the Red Cross and is trying every avenue they can think of to find housing. Meanwhile, Anna Dennis sent her two daughters, Alyssia, 6, and Alexandria, 5, to live with an aunt in Texas. The daily phone calls always are emotional, with the daughters crying to be back with their mother and father.
But Anna Dennis doesn't know when that will happen.
"I've got to have my daughters back, but I just didn't want them to see all of us going through this," she said.
Many Realtors in the Baton Rouge area were inundated with calls for apartments or rental space of any kind, but most families found that large businesses had already snapped up most of the inventory.
URS, an engineering firm, did just that. The company lined up 28 apartments for its critical employees. One of those units is going to information technology manager David Scripter, his wife Cheryl and their three young children.
The Scripter's Lakeview home is under water and feared totally destroyed. Cheryl Scripter said she felt bad - and a little guilty - for the people who are still in New Orleans and the hundreds more who can't find a place to stay in the Baton Rouge area.
Celeste Nillen-Cade, a teacher St. Robert Bellarmine School, is among those hunting for housing in Baton Rouge. Nillen-Cade was driving around town with the ashes of her husband in the trunk of her car. He died of a heart attack last month.
Along with her stepdaughter, she was crammed into a one-bedroom apartment with an expanded step-family, eleven altogether, many sleeping on the kitchen floor.
She headed to the Embassy Suites, where her brother works, to use the hotel computer to find housing.
"I'm thinking about Oklahoma City. I have my teacher's certificate, and if things can't work out here, I don't think I'll come back," Nillen-Cade said.
Kathie Jacobs, vice president of sales and marketing for Hampton Inn Hotels & Suites of New Orleans, which operates five hotels in metro New Orleans, was walking the lobby of the Baton Rouge hotel Sunday, checking on the customers she has grown to know by first name. She said the company is working hard to get the Elmwood Hampton Inn up and running, with hopes of moving back in as soon as power and water is restored. They were feeding Baton Rouge guests free hot dogs and other easy-to-prepare foods.
Jacobs was upset that many Baton Rouge residents were expressing their anger at "the New Orleans invasion."
But she also pointed out the generosity of the community. Some area residents have been coming to the front desk anonymously and offering to pay at least one room night for a New Orleans family. Others have been dropping off diapers, formula and other necessities
And employees of Hilton Corp. were calling and putting room nights for New Orleans evacuees on their credit cards.
"They just call up and say, 'I want to sponsor a family,''' Jacobs said.
Christoper Perry, a concierge at the Hampton Inn on Convention Center Boulevard, went through the survival ordeal of other city folks, including spending two nights on his roof before being rescued. He's helping out at the Hampton Inn and eager to get back to clean up the city and get things up and running.
"I just want to get home and help out," Perry said.
Real estate writer
Alfanao Tony of Meraux stood at the counter of the Baton Rouge Hampton Inn wearing a starched white shirt. His eyes filled with tears as he explained that anonymous donors from Baton Rouge had paid his hotel room bill for five nights now.
The financial help has been critical for an 86-year-old man who has no home, nowhere else to go and wants to avoid shelters.
"I'll sleep in my car before I go to a shelter," Tony said. "At my age, I couldn't take that."
The scene at Baton Rouge area hotels illustrates the socio-economic gap among Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Some are being put up in hotels by the companies they work for. Their jobs are secure, and they will eventually operate out of temporary offices in Baton Rouge.
Others, like Tony, have limited means and are struggling on their own to find shelter in a market where housing is increasingly scarce. They don't know when they can go home, when the money will run out or where they will go when it does.
Tony spent two nights on the fourth floor of his apartment building awaiting rescue after the storm.
He had $1,000 in his pocket when he headed toward Mystic, Texas, but he found no rooms and eventually made his way to the Hampton Inn, where "the staff have been just wonderful."
He's down to less than $200 and doesn't know what will happen after that.
Anna Dennis of Kenner had nine family members crammed into two rooms at the Hampton Inn. They, too, were running out of money, but were given a break on room charges.
Her husband, Warren, was at the local Hilton Garden Inn with his adoptive father, Wilbert Denies, 83. Denies has been a foster parent for decades and three of Warren's adopted brothers were staying with them: two teenagers and a 41-year-old man with an emotional disorder. "He just doesn't talk, and hasn't since he was a child," Anna Dennis said.
Warren Dennis has been hitting the road early every morning to find an apartment, but to no avail.
The one lead they had on an apartment got them excited, but when they went to meet the leasing agent they found a man with a truck unloading his furniture, saying the apartment was his.
"I've been trying to keep my breakdowns to every other day,'" Anna Dennis said.
The Dennis family has been to FEMA and the Red Cross and is trying every avenue they can think of to find housing. Meanwhile, Anna Dennis sent her two daughters, Alyssia, 6, and Alexandria, 5, to live with an aunt in Texas. The daily phone calls always are emotional, with the daughters crying to be back with their mother and father.
But Anna Dennis doesn't know when that will happen.
"I've got to have my daughters back, but I just didn't want them to see all of us going through this," she said.
Many Realtors in the Baton Rouge area were inundated with calls for apartments or rental space of any kind, but most families found that large businesses had already snapped up most of the inventory.
URS, an engineering firm, did just that. The company lined up 28 apartments for its critical employees. One of those units is going to information technology manager David Scripter, his wife Cheryl and their three young children.
The Scripter's Lakeview home is under water and feared totally destroyed. Cheryl Scripter said she felt bad - and a little guilty - for the people who are still in New Orleans and the hundreds more who can't find a place to stay in the Baton Rouge area.
Celeste Nillen-Cade, a teacher St. Robert Bellarmine School, is among those hunting for housing in Baton Rouge. Nillen-Cade was driving around town with the ashes of her husband in the trunk of her car. He died of a heart attack last month.
Along with her stepdaughter, she was crammed into a one-bedroom apartment with an expanded step-family, eleven altogether, many sleeping on the kitchen floor.
She headed to the Embassy Suites, where her brother works, to use the hotel computer to find housing.
"I'm thinking about Oklahoma City. I have my teacher's certificate, and if things can't work out here, I don't think I'll come back," Nillen-Cade said.
Kathie Jacobs, vice president of sales and marketing for Hampton Inn Hotels & Suites of New Orleans, which operates five hotels in metro New Orleans, was walking the lobby of the Baton Rouge hotel Sunday, checking on the customers she has grown to know by first name. She said the company is working hard to get the Elmwood Hampton Inn up and running, with hopes of moving back in as soon as power and water is restored. They were feeding Baton Rouge guests free hot dogs and other easy-to-prepare foods.
Jacobs was upset that many Baton Rouge residents were expressing their anger at "the New Orleans invasion."
But she also pointed out the generosity of the community. Some area residents have been coming to the front desk anonymously and offering to pay at least one room night for a New Orleans family. Others have been dropping off diapers, formula and other necessities
And employees of Hilton Corp. were calling and putting room nights for New Orleans evacuees on their credit cards.
"They just call up and say, 'I want to sponsor a family,''' Jacobs said.
Christoper Perry, a concierge at the Hampton Inn on Convention Center Boulevard, went through the survival ordeal of other city folks, including spending two nights on his roof before being rescued. He's helping out at the Hampton Inn and eager to get back to clean up the city and get things up and running.
"I just want to get home and help out," Perry said.
For more information:
http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tporleans/ind...
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Published: September 6, 2005
The wretchedness coming across our television screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families.
It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans. The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.
But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even President Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush.
If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.
More
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html
It is now being reported that as many as ten thousand human beings, fellow citizens, or even more, may have perished during the past week. They are dead because of the incompetence, negligence, and indifference of the government. They are dead because the United States is a country in which millions of people live in or on the brink of poverty. They are dead because this is a capitalistic society where the accumulation of vast personal wealth for a small percentage of the population is deemed more important than the welfare of the people as a whole.
With the full dimensions of the hurricane disaster still unclear, the Bush administration and the various state and local governments are engaged in an exercise in mutual finger-pointing, seeking to affix blame for the catastrophe. From the standpoint of the working class, however, they are all guilty: the Republican president, the Democratic governor and mayor, the legislators of both parties at every level. All of them uphold the profit system which is the root cause of the disaster.
American society is organized on the basis of the profit motive. In no other country are the economy, the political structure and the entire culture so completely subordinated to the principle that personal accumulation of wealth is the highest goal. The destruction of New Orleans, by a disaster that was predictable and came with ample warning, demonstrates that the principle of private accumulation is incompatible with a rational and humane society.
Modern society is mass society. Despite the reigning ideology of individualism—or, in the current terminology, “personal responsibility”—hundreds of millions of people in the United States rely upon complex social systems to provide them with the essentials of life: food production and distribution, water, electricity, heat, transportation, education, health care. Failure of these systems, particularly in a major urban area, quickly reduces the population to barbaric conditions.
Working people perform the labor which keeps the social infrastructure operating, but they have no decision-making power over it. These social systems are for the most part owned and controlled by giant corporations for whom profit, not human need, is the determining criterion. Those systems for which the various levels of government are responsible, such as the levees and canals surrounding New Orleans, are likewise subordinated to profit interests, through the control of American politics by the wealthy.
The New Orleans region is a particularly critical nodal point in the US economy. Not only is it one of largest sources of oil and gas, both in terms of domestic production and imports, but it is a hub of transportation for the lower South and for freight shipments throughout the interior of the United States.
Now millions of working people are paying the price, not only in the mass suffering of the survivors of the New Orleans catastrophe, or those in the wider Gulf Coast region, but nationally, where the cost will be registered in economic losses, skyrocketing prices of gas and heating oil, and spreading economic dislocation.
Why was the disaster not prevented?
Why did the US political system prove incapable of allocating the resources necessary to prevent this catastrophe?
Press reports now indicate that the destruction of New Orleans and the deaths of thousands of innocent people could have been prevented by the expenditure of relatively modest sums. About $2 billion was needed for immediate reinforcement and upgrading of the levees and canals, while $14 billion was the estimated cost to restore the ecosystem of the Mississippi delta, which would provide longer-term protection against the impact of hurricanes. But the mania in Washington for tax cuts and deregulation made such expenditures, tiny compared to the cost of the disaster, politically impossible.
The Bush administration repeatedly cut funding for the maintenance and upgrading of the levee system, despite pleas by local and state officials, in order to uphold more urgent priorities: the enormous military budget, including the cost of the war in Iraq, now more than $200 billion, and trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy.
It is symptomatic that as the levees collapsed, Congress was returning from its August break to take up, as its first order of business, a bill to extend or make permanent the virtual elimination of the estate tax, a measure which would funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to only a few thousand families, the richest of the rich.
This neglect of vital public works is the end result of three decades in which the American ruling class has sought to systematically dismantle the extremely limited elements of social infrastructure and a social safety net left over from the New Deal programs of the 1930s. These had been established under Franklin Roosevelt in response to the greatest social and economic crisis of the 20th century, which included not only the financial collapse that produced the Great Depression, but an acute environmental crisis affecting the Great Plains (the “Dust Bowl”).
The New Deal created not only social welfare systems like Social Security and regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, but public works programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built dams and levees to curb flooding and provide cheap and reliable electrical power.
Despite the howls of Roosevelt’s enemies within the ruling class, these measures were not socialistic. They sometimes infringed on the short-term profit interests of particular groups of capitalists, or even of the entire capitalist class, but only to forestall a social upheaval from below that would threaten the profit system as a whole.
Today, by contrast, the US political system is dominated by a frenzied drive to destroy all barriers to the accumulation of personal wealth. Taxes have been virtually eliminated on the principal sources of income of the super-rich, such as capital gains and other forms of financial speculation.
The driving force of the shift to the right in the politics of both major parties, the Democratic as well as the Republican, is the economic polarization of American society. The vast majority of the population has been proletarianized, working from paycheck to paycheck for corporate employers, large or small. The sizeable property-owning middle class of Roosevelt’s day—the family farmers and small businessmen—has been largely absorbed into the working class, which now comprises the vast majority of the population. Even the best-paid workers face mounting insecurity, living on the edge, facing the danger that a layoff or serious illness could plunge them into the abyss.
At the other pole of society, there has been an accumulation of wealth in private hands on a scale unmatched in history. In the richest country in the world, less than one percent of the population owns over 40 percent of the wealth. Excluding housing, this privileged elite owns close to 90 percent of the wealth—stocks, bonds and other financial assets, as well as commercial businesses. It is this class which controls both the Democratic and Republican parties and the government at every level—local, state and federal.
The political consequences
Under different circumstances, and with a different political system, the abysmal performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies would call into question the survival of the government. Certainly, governments have fallen from power for far less.
But the US political system, more than any other nominal “democracy,” is thoroughly insulated from the sentiments of the masses. The only “public” that counts for the Democratic and Republican parties, for the media pundits and the rest of the political establishment, is the ruling elite and its hangers-on among the wealthiest sections of society. With incomes in the high six figures and above, and massive personal assets, they are divided from the working people by an unbridgeable social gulf.
This was reflected in the expressions of scorn and contempt for the working class families who would not or could not leave New Orleans before the storm hit. The political and media establishment cannot conceive of the conditions of those who either had no car, had nowhere to go, or no money to spend, or who were waiting for an end-of-month check.
Even if Bush were to resign the presidency tomorrow, he would be replaced by Cheney or some other Republican or Democratic politician, and the system would go on as before. No serious alternative for working people can emerge in such a fashion. Nor would the replacement of the Republicans by the Democrats in the 2006 congressional elections or the 2008 presidential election make a significant difference.
There is no simple or easy answer to the crisis facing the working class, because the issues are so fundamental. It is necessary for working people to draw basic conclusions about the nature of the social and economic system which has produced imperialist war, attacks on democratic rights, growing inequality and now complete breakdown in the face of a natural disaster.
Mankind has entered the 21st century with science and technology that are continuously being revolutionized, and which carry with them the potential for abolishing poverty, hunger, disease and all other social ills. But this is impossible so long as society is constrained within an economic framework and class structure that developed in the 18th and 19th centuries: the private ownership of the productive assets of society by a small minority of capitalists, whose sole concern is their individual profits.
The choice before the American people is to cling to an anti-social and egotistical individualism, obsessed with the gluttonous accumulation of personal wealth, or to form a new political movement based on the struggle for social equality and the commonweal.
For the working class, this means recognizing that the great questions confronting American society require a struggle for political power. It is not a matter of pressuring the ruling elite, or replacing one section of that elite with another. The working class must organize itself as a political force and make itself the master of society. This requires the creation of a new political party of the working class, independent of and opposed to the Democrats and Republicans, and based on a socialist program.
More
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/stat-s06.shtml