Posted on 07/17/2007 12:20:13 AM PDT by Lorianne
"Katrina is about the sudden and complete loss of all that home means—safety, respite, privacy, comfort and security.”
On a chilly autumn night, Jocquelyn Marshall opened the door to her new home, an apartment tucked in a maze of quiet streets lined with townhouses south of downtown New Orleans. She’d been here only two weeks since making it back from Houston, and the newly-built, two-bedroom apartment was sparkling but almost completely bare. She sat on a milk crate in the middle of the hardwood living room floor, while her 12-year-old son, Justin, watched television on the white carpet in his bedroom.
This was their third residence in an odyssey that began when the floodwaters washed over New Orleans. It took them from their home of more than 10 years—a public housing unit inherited from Jocquelyn’s mother—to an overcrowded shelter in Mississippi, then an apartment shared with 14 other people in Houston, and finally to this eerily empty new place in their beloved city.
“I know we’re living in difficult times. People who don’t understand that, they’re not gonna survive,” Jocquelyn said calmly. “You have to have faith, and that’s basically what I’m living on day by day, faith. Me and my child, that’s it.”
She was among the few public housing residents who counted themselves lucky enough to make it back to New Orleans. Most of her friends and neighbors remained scattered in Houston, Atlanta, and other cities, living on FEMA assistance with families often doubled or tripled up in apartments.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.ncmonline.com ...
Man that is one long article that basically comes down to this:
GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME.....Wheres the money!!!
I’m a victim of social injustice!
A media frenzy, followed by riots, repercussions, and perhaps even revolution.
Back in the 1930s the federal government came to the conclusion that there existed a certain percentage of the population who were simply incapable of taking care of themselves. The unworkable free-market capitalist system had reached its inevitable breaking point; Depression had put thousands of these people on the streets, and the potential for communist revolution was very real. Knowing full well that communism was an unworkable alternative, and that any move in that direction by the rabble would kill any chance of reviving the dead capitalist goose, alternatives were considered. At that time, the decision was made to adopt a system of quasi-socialistic “welfare” under which the federal government would become the employer, insurer, and/or caretaker of last resort for those who simply could not make their own way in the world. Social Security was the first of these programs, designed to care for those incapable of saving for their own retirement. More, much more, was to come: federal highways, giant bomber programs, food stamps, college financial aid, oil depletion allowances, agriculture subsidies, dams, electrification, the space program, and more.
This strategy largely succeeded, in that it prevented the collapse of the capitalist system long enough for middle-class welfare programs (e.g. World War II military spending) to pump enough cash into the system to revive it. Of course these “new deal” programs didn’t fix the problem; the problem was that boom-and-bust cycles were endemic to and inseparable from free-market capitalism. Without the welfare state providing jobs, money, housing, and other benefits, we would quite likely have seen the rise of a real communist movement in the United States during the late 1930s. Ironically, the “socialist” New Deal and its successor programs were instrumental in preventing a “Red Deal” from coming to fruition. By propping up the corpse of capitalism with government welfare cash, FDR became the savior of American capitalism.
Unfortunately, these welfare programs created a permanent underclass in America — a constituency of voters with no marketable skills, no capital for investments, no culture of ambition, and no love for the society that “kept them down”. Generation followed generation in dependence to the federal dollar, eventually breeding the super-dependent urban poor of today. Add to this the hordes of aged, working-class retirees, many of whom spent their whole lives building fighter jets and aircraft carriers for companies supported by massive federal programs and are now utterly convinced that they are “owed” are free ride on the taxpayer dime (and damn the consequences) and the size of the permanent underclass becomes prodigious.
So what is to be done? The sad fact is that the class of people incapable of taking care of themselves has only grown larger. The bottom line is that so many people (both poor and not so poor) are receiving checks from the federal government that it is politically impossible to stanch the flow of government entitlements. Any politician advocating cuts in Housing For The Poor or the elimination of XM-67 Willliam Calley Rapid-Fire Village Decimation System is going to end up looking for work himself once the voters in his/her district find out. Add to this a media culture in which the idea of victimhood is equated with saintliness and the problem becomes more intractable.
At the current time, the government check is simply too integral to the economy to be removed entirely; and, since everyone who gets a government check is convinced that they truly deserve it, any effort to eliminate payments to the “undeserving” will fail. If the billions of dollars given to people in the form of cash, retirement benefits, bloated procurement programs, state park and highway funds, disability payments, low-cost housing, free medical care, and other forms of financial aid were ever to be significantly decreased or cut off, the Red Revolution we avoided in the 1930s would suddenly become a real threat again.
Ask yourself the following question: How many people do I know that receive a check or other benefit from the federal government on a regular basis?” Odds are you know several such people; you may even receive a government benefit yourself.
Then ask yourself what would happen if those checks stopped coming...
No President, no Congress is or will ever be willing to destroy the welfare state. The welfare state IS the state; without it, the state ceases to exist. All we are left with is the knowledge that Something cannot be made out of Nothing forever; someday, the whole rotten system will collapse on its own. Then, and only then, will a chance exist to destroy the welfare state.
I had to read only as far as “sitting on a milk crate watching TV” to understand the where this piece was going.
We gotta have the TV, even before there is milk in the fridge.
My company donated over a hundred carpet remnants for temporary cushioning at the arena where evacuees were housed.
Not one person came to help us load them up at the warehouse, and only one person helped us unload the remnants at the arena.
A fight did break out over some of the thicker carpet remnants but the victor could not carry the heavy carpet. Since no one would help him after the fight, he left it where he dragged it to and complained loudly about how he was mistreated.
We only had three people from out-of-state apply at the warehouse for work and neither came back after the walking tour of the job site.
What contractor puts WHITE carpet into a public housing unit? No earthtones available anywhere in New Orleans? I'll bet that it was not even FHA weight, which it should have been in federal housing.
And how does one get "a public housing unit inherited from Jocquelyn’s mother"?
Since when does public housing become inheritable real property?
Please keep them coming, you educate us all with your first hand experience.
I learned some property law. I didn't know public housing units could be bequeathed to heirs. Can they be sold to third parties as well? Subleased?
We did meet some pretty good folks that had lost everything of financial value, as near as we could tell.
These men would not stop working until their families were taken care of, usually out of pocket. One guy rented a trailer in Venus (50 min south of Dallas) rather than have his family spend a second night at the arena. Lets just say that Venus TX is not located on any D/FW tourist guides, and they felt it was better than the arena.
You wouldn’t believe the trash apartments that landlords would rent out under gov’t assistance programs. I was amazed to hear that some of these places were described as “better” than what they left in NO.
**Background** Our company served mostly rental homes in southern Dallas county. Southern Dallas does not have many large scale tenements, but does have 40,000 homes that are rental units. Like many areas that were built shortly after WW II, age has not been kind to the area. Lots of good neighborhoods, even more places that are shuttered and covered in burglar bars. Also, many of the cheap homes and apartments built in the 80’s are now beyond realistic repair.
Think $450 month rent to working folks, and the same place may rent for $1200 to Section 8. Between the landlord vultures and the subsidized tenant vultures, HUD is just that much more fresh carrion to them.
And when they tried to close the arena weeks after Katrina, there were dozens of families still there. Complaining to every TV camera in sight.
I had that same question. The article is astonishing in the breadth of its hubris, casually mentioned.
When I lived in New Orleans, the only thing south of downtown was the Mississippi River. I wonder where this is?
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