NY and New Orleans Reconstruction
Hides Gentrification

What does reconstruction have to do with class war? Rebuilding lower Manhattan and New Orleans have given the powers-that-be the opportunity to "lighten" and "gentrify" their respective inner cities that had been home to working class, minority and poor people. In both cases it looks as if "reconstruction" has become the new, improved "slum clearance," in which the poor and darker-skinned are driven out in favor of whites with higher incomes.

It is the predominantly black and poor Ninth ward in New Orleans that Mayor Nagin has declared uninhabitable. In addition, he and the Federal Government have withheld money and permissions that would enable former tenants to move back into lightly damaged public housing. Others have remarked that the "new" New Orleans will be smaller and "lighter." It will also be more Republican. Forty-two percent of black residents have so far been unable to return, according to some reports, while a much higher percentage of white residents are back in the city.

Similarly, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki have been given power over access to New York's "Liberty Bonds," and inhabitants of lower Manhattan complain that the reconstruction allocations have favored wealthy businesses like Goldman Sachs and high campaign contributors, like Litvin's Glenwood Management Corp. Further, bonds for residential reconstruction favored wealthy neighborhoods like Tribeca and the Financial District, where median family incomes are $110,000, instead of building affordable housing in Chinatown and the Lower East Side, where incomes average $28,500.

As a reporter remarked, "The firemen and policemen, the first responders we saw on TV, where are they going to live?" The same question could be asked in New Orleans about the people who clean the hotels and man the restaurants and bars.

There is a pattern here. It's not a conspiracy, like Nero's fire in Rome, which drove out the poor so he could launch a reconstruction project that enabled a grander palace complex and townhouses for the Senatorial class; it's much broader than a conspiracy. It's part of the conservative worldview; the poor are only to blame for their own misfortune; government should help those who can help themselves; the wealthy are their "base," an attitude that is strikingly similar to that of the Senatorial class in fifth century Rome. Click on Reconstruction to see how the selfish class works.

If that also means that New York and New Orleans become more Republican, or at least more conservative, that is so much the better. What happens to the people who are driven out? Not worth worrying about.

If this isn't class warfare, I'd like to know what class war looks like.