Mikaela says:
A Louisiana Republican representative, elected from a mostly white, suburban part of Baton Rouge, is championing what the NY Times is calling a "big-goverment" solution to the rebuilding of New Orleans.
Representative Richard H. Baker's housing recovery plan "would make the federal government the biggest landowner in New Orleans - for a while, at least. Mr. Baker's proposed Louisiana Recovery Corporation would spend as much as $80 billion to pay off lenders, restore public works, buy huge ruined chunks of the city, clean them up and then sell them back to developers."
This sounds less like big government and more like massive privatization machine that will take "worthless" (meaning we refuse to value it) property, use public money to clean it up, and then turn it over to developers who will make massive profits building housing for people who can afford to live there, who will NOT be the same people who lived there pre-Katrina. They won't be the same color, and they won't be the same income level.
It's the Iraq model domesticated. Use government forces to take the land, then turn it over to private corporations so they can make money. Gotta love Republican consistency. When they find something that works, watch out! Export the model and go go go.
Sound like a good plan to you? Well, it may not matter.
"It's the only game in town,"says James A. Richardson, director of Louisiana State University's Public Administration Institute.
The question for me is this: how do you assure controls? Oversight on windfall profits... Oversight on what gets sold to whom and for how much... Oversight about fair prices for buy-backs?
We sure don't have a good track record as a nation for paying enough for what we take. Think: our treatment of Native American tribes when we kicked them off ancestral lands. Think: our treatment of inncer-city residents when we kicked them out of their neighborhoods during urban renewal.
Why will this be any different? Can it be? More importantly, how can we ensure that it is?
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