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September 30, 2005
The Bramble Bush
by Kevin Morford

Victims as Victuals

     The vultures are feasting on the corpses. These are opportunistic carrion feeders who are out to gorge on as much as they can rip off from disaster victims. It is not just in the Gulf Coast that this is happening. The Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean has its own vultures.

     Within days after the tsunami, Sri Lanka formed plans to turn the former fishing villages along its devastated coast into major tourist developments, displacing the fishing families who formerly lived there. Official reconstruction plans are being developed by TAFREN, a new development agency composed of big business leaders with vested interests in the tourism and construction industries. Its proposals call for multi-lane highways, tourist resorts and the wholesale elimination of entire coastal villages. The government is preventing villagers from rebuilding their homes on the coast. With no access to the ocean, they will be unable to support themselves with fishing.

     The Indonesian government has used the Boxing Day tsunami as a weapon against the people of Aceh Province, where it had long been fighting a separatist movement. The Indonesian government continued offensive military operations in Aceh Province following the tsunami, in a manner that significantly hindered relief efforts, so that it could strengthen its control over the Province. That tactic was effective, and on August 15 of this year the leadership of the Free Aceh Movement signed a disarmament agreement and agreed to give up its struggle. Unfortunately, the impaired relief efforts resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many tsunami victims.

     Closer to home, plans are afoot for massive land grabs in New Orleans as well. Independent journalist Naomi Klein reports that government and business leaders are sharing space in the capitol building, and meeting together daily to plan the reconstruction of New Orleans. Those plans include making radical changes to the city, so that it is smaller, safer, whiter and wealthier than it was before the hurricane. It is a profoundly undemocratic process that excludes representatives of unions, environmentalists, and poor neighborhoods in the city.

     Naomi Klein also reports that many vacant but usable housing units in the French Quarter are not being made available to house victims from the city. Before the hurricane, the French Quarter, which was 90 percent white, had a 37 percent vacancy rate in its housing, totaling tens of thousands of housing units. The French Quarter was one of the first to be opened up to be re-inhabited, but only by former residents. Vacant units could have been made available for victims from other neighborhoods, but a little thing like hundreds of thousands of homeless victims apparently isn’t a good reason to allow a nice white neighborhood to be opened up to riff-raff from other neighborhoods.

     But for the Bush administration, the hurricane is an excellent reason for giving even more corporate welfare to the likes of Haliburton, Bechtel and Fleur. No bid contracts have been handed out like candy to these and other favored corporations. Blackwater USA has a contract with the Department of Homeland Security. The Davis Bacon Act’s requirement that the prevailing wage be paid on federal contracts has also been suspended. The benefits of that decision will go to the contractors at the expense of the workers. John Snow, Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, has stated that, “this is the time for all kinds of experiments.” Among the reactionary proposals now being supported with arguments based on the hurricane are auctioning off federal land, cutting research into sustainable energy, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and eliminating the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the military from being used for civilian law enforcement.

     The plans for remaking New Orleans are being backed up with military and paramilitary forces. In addition to Blackwater, mercenaries from Chile, Mexico and Israel have been brought in, in some cases by private land developers. The private security forces, carrying military weapons, appear to be operating with impunity in New Orleans, while its former residents are kept out.

     Many or most of the former residents of New Orleans have probably lost their homes for good. With no flood insurance, no savings, no jobs and no political pull, they (and their assets) are nothing more than a tasty snack for the vultures who thrive in this type of environment






Kevin Morford is a political activist and an attorney in private practice in the Anchorage area.  He can be reached at kmorford@insurgent49.com.
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The
Bramble Bush
by Kevin Morford





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in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership.