Gov’t inaction deepens suffering for Katrina survivors

The U.S. government is pulling back on its promise to provide relief for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

The absence of political will combined with excessive red tape has denied most hurricane survivors the opportunity to take advantage of the limited relief plans that have been belatedly implemented.

The Bush administration is reported to be reducing its spending request for new Hurricane Katrina relief to a meager $20 billion. (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 19) Repub lican leaders assert that this amount is adequate to address future needs.

Congress has recently removed a forgiveness clause that allowed state and local governments applying for funds to opt out of repaying loans originating with the federal Community Disaster Loan program. (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 18)

This has left localities such as St. Bernard Parish, on the edge of New Orleans and which now has a much-reduced tax base, hesitant to apply for loans it knows it cannot repay.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of families have still not been placed in the trailers that the government promised as temporary housing for those left homeless by the hurricane.

Now it appears that the provision of temporary housing has come at a cost to poor and working people who live on the cheap land the government has identified as necessary for locating the emergency trailers.

Reports from New Orleans indicate that government dealings with landowners in Jefferson Parish have provided an incentive for the eviction of current tenants to free up space. (NOLA.com)

Governor Kathleen Blanco’s stay of evictions expired Oct. 25, exacerbating the problem even further.

Lost in all the noise around budget maneuvering are the personal stories of families who are suffering from government inaction in the wake of Katrina.

Antoinette Landry and her family are among those being evicted from trailer parks in East Jefferson, as part of the government program designed to divide the poor as a prerequisite for providing emergency housing to hurricane survivors.

In response to the trailer park’s decision to evict her along with her mother and two children, Landry expressed what many evicted tenants must have felt when she said, “We were their bread and butter for years. Now we’re nothing.”

This sentiment is echoed in the sometimes haunted faces of survivors who struggled daily and played by the only rules they were given.

These are the survivors who lived just to see the U.S. government—which depends on the exploitation of their labor for its existence—turn its back on them during their neediest hour.

These are the families left behind while the Senate debates whether or not to give itself a 1.9 percent cost-of-living raise.

They are the exact workers whom Congress and the president are attempting to prevent from receiving a modest increase in the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour.

And now this very same government is attempting to leave them with nothing.

If any event in modern times has stripped so-called democratic capitalism of its façade of compassion and justice, it is the brazen manner in which the U.S. government has launched its attack on those fortunate enough to have survived the catastrophe of New Orleans.