Katrina Next Victims - Part 3
Katrina Next Victims - Part 3
Date: Monday, September 19, 2005 11:35 PM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
September 19, 2005 No. 1332
Mexico's Presidente Fox left no room for doubt that he thinks millions of Mexican laborers should be allowed into the United States, and he thinks they should be used to reconstruct New Orleans.
President Vicente Fox also said the United States should
not allow concerns about border security to derail efforts
to adopt new measures to allow millions of additional Mexicans
to become guest workers in the United States.
"The reconstruction of that city and of that region is going
to require a lot of labor," Mr. Fox said of New Orleans,
Mississippi and Alabama. "And if there is anything Mexicans
are good at, it is construction."
Joel Kotkinis, a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, explained that Latin American "immigrants" will displace black and white residents who will flee the city for other suburbs. Kotkinis is describing a migration of African-Americans that bears a striking similarity to the forced relocations that are occurring in Sudan. Let's be blunt - he is saying that Mexicans are going to displace black Americans because in his opinion Mexicans are willing work harder (he didn't say cheaper but of course that's the most important part). In his scenario, Mexican laborers will live in slums at the edge of the city so that they can pamper and service the affluent residents who will be disproportionately gay, single or child-free. What a vision for the future!
As in many cities, the middle- and working-class residents,
both White and Black, have been fleeing the city for the suburbs
or other regions for years. Katrina could greatly accelerate
these trends.
Who would do the hard, everyday work then? Again the model can
be seen in the changing demographics of the "hip cool" cities.
Instead of indigenous working-class people, the tough jobs,
as occur in places like San Francisco, would be taken by
largely Latin American immigrants willing to live on the
margins of the community, or commute from miles away, until
they earn enough to move to the suburbs or perhaps return
home with substantial amounts of cash.
Presidents Bush and Fox both agree that illegal aliens from Mexico must be allowed to take construction jobs in the areas destroyed by hurricane Katrina. As explained in the previous two newsletters on Katrina, Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon act to allow employers to pay substandard salaries to construction workers while the Dept. of Homeland security waived I-9 which requires that employers certify that the employees they hire are eligible to work in the United States. It all fits together, doesn't it?
George Putnam explained what this means for the victims of Katrina:
We've all witnessed pictures of the homeless and dispossessed,
most of them poor African-Americans in need of these construction
jobs. The blacks "drowning" in Katrina appear to be shut out of
the jobs they so desperately need.
Talk show radio host George Putnam interviewed me on two separate days about the use of illegal aliens for the hurricane cleanup, and in addition he wrote the article below. You can listen to the audio clips of the radio show online by going to the following webpage:
http://www.zazona.com/shameh1b/MediaClips.htm
The first minute of Putnam's dialog on 9/16 contains a brief biography of my upbringing and explains why I got interested in the subject of immigration.
Material Used for Newsletter
http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/9/9/103733.shtml
Katrina - A Toxic Time Bomb
by George Putnam
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/international/americas/05mexico.html
Fox Says U.S. Shares Blame for Problems Along Border
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/0918kotkin0918.html
Nouveau New Orleans
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http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/9/19/124237.shtml
Illegals Cleaning Up Again
George Putnam
Monday, Sept. 19, 2005
It is this reporter's opinion that, on the heels of hurricane Katrina and the devastation wrought, it's time to look toward reconstruction, a challenge seldom seen in our nation's history.
With this challenge come the contractors. And wherever there are construction contracts, there will be fat profits for corporations and jobs created in construction-related industries. But who wins the contracts? Who will do the work, and at what price?
Right off the top, we can conclude that the same giant, well-connected corporations involved in Iraq are first in line: The Shaw Group ... Bechtel National ... Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) ... and, of course, the Halliburton Company, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as CEO from 1995 to 2000 when he joined the Republican ticket.
[According to tax filings, his income included $194,852 in deferred pay from the company, which won billion-dollar government contracts in Iraq. Cheney's office says the deferred compensation is "fixed" and is not affected by Halliburton's current economic performance or earnings.]
Not to mention, at least two major corporations are represented by lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Many of the companies seeking contracts in the wake of hurricane Katrina have already received billions of dollars for work in Iraq.
Halliburton alone has earned more than $9 billion, including $1.3 billion in questioned costs, and $422 million in unsupported costs. We're talking big money!
KBR is at the center of scrutiny for receiving a five-year no-bid contract to restore Iraqi oil fields. Halliburton reports being paid $10.7 billion for Iraq-related government work during 2003 and 2004. Its pre-tax profits from that work are pegged at $163 million.
Pentagon auditors are questioning tens of millions of dollars of Halliburton charges for its operations in Iraq.
Daniel Brian, Executive Director of the Project on Government Oversight, is appalled. Brian says, "The government has got to stop stacking senior positions with people who are repeatedly cashing in on the public trust in order to further private commercial interests."
Congress has already appropriated more than $60 billion in emergency funding as down payment on recovery efforts projected to cost well over $100 billion. But the president appears to be aiding and abetting the big-buck corporations to win rebuilding contracts.
Adding insult to injury, on September 6, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would not require employers to use the I-9 forms (these forms are the documentation required under Section 274A of the Immigration and Nationality Act used by employers to verify their employees are eligible to work in the U.S.).
This means that without the I-9 requirement, employers will be able to hire illegal aliens without fear of being sanctioned. The DHS will not bring sanction actions against employers for hiring illegals.
And on September 8, President Bush issued an executive order allowing federal contractors (rebuilding in the aftermath of Katrina) to pay BELOW the prevailing wage. This means the corporations can use illegal aliens to rebuild and will not have to worry about breaking immigration laws because they are exempted.
So now companies such as Halliburton will reap immense profits while low-paid illegals toil in the disease-infested floodwaters. NO LAW - NO WORRY.
Bush's action drew rebukes from Congressman George Miller (D-Calif.) and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). They charge the administration is using the devastation of hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately trying to rebuild their lives and their communities.
Miller says, "Bush should immediately realize his colossal mistake in signing these orders and rescind them." While the illegal aliens, mostly Mexican, go to work to rebuild New Orleans, Bush and Cheney will probably call this "competitive bidding."
I reiterate: President Bush has waived rules that would require federally funded contractors to pay a competitive wage to workers in the clean-up and rebuilding. This is an unfair giveaway to big business!
To accomplish this, the White House is lifting part of the Davis-Bacon Act, created during the Great Depression,* which requires companies receiving federal contracts to pay at least the average wage for the region. Richard Trumka (AFL-CIO) calls the suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act "a shameful government-sponsored wage race to the bottom for workers."
All of this maneuvering at top government levels means construction contractors won't even have to meet the average wage of $9.00 an hour.
We've all witnessed pictures of the homeless and dispossessed, most of them poor African-Americans in need of these construction jobs. The blacks "drowning" in Katrina appear to be shut out of the jobs they so desperately need.
According to the Pew Hispanic Center, there are as many as 800,000 illegal aliens currently employed in the U.S. construction industry. The large majority are Mexicans who are dominating the industry throughout the entire U.S.
Yet the president, by his actions and executive orders, has authorized the robber barons to use illegal aliens to rebuild the damage done by Katrina! Here we are again with illegals competing with American blacks who are struggling to rebuild their lives and earn a living.
Tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents lost everything in this hurricane, yet our own government is making it harder for them to rebuild their lives. It's just one more scenario where illegals are encouraged to break our laws without having to worry about the consequences. NO LAW - NO WORRY.
* Davis-Bacon has been waived before, by President Roosevelt - for three weeks during the New Deal transition. Also, by Nixon, for one month in 1971. And by President George H. W. Bush after Hurricane Andrew. It was reinstated when Clinton took office.
Related Links:
--Rob Sanchez of the Job Destruction Newsletter (www.zazona.com)
--Davis-Bacon Act - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/international/americas/05mexico.html
September 5, 2005
Fox Says U.S. Shares Blame for Problems Along Border
By GINGER THOMPSON
MEXICO CITY, Sept. 4 - President Vicente Fox responded over the weekend to criticism from American authorities about a recent surge in violence and illegal immigration along the border, saying that the United States shares responsibility for the problems and should work harder with Mexico to fix them.
Mr. Fox said he rejected "forcefully" the statements by the Bush administration and governors of border states, contending that they had unfairly depicted Mexico as a safe haven for organized crime, though his government has arrested more leading drug traffickers and dismantled more cartels than any of its predecessors. He also said Mexican immigrants had been portrayed unfairly as potential terrorists when they had in fact become a pillar of the American economy.
In an interview aboard the presidential airplane on Saturday, Mr. Fox acknowledged that his government had a long way to go to make the border secure. But he said the United States should stop casting blame for problems created by both countries.
He also said the United States should not allow concerns about border security to derail efforts to adopt new measures to allow millions of additional Mexicans to become guest workers in the United States.
"Security is a shared responsibility," President Fox said. Then, referring to the United States, he said, "I don't understand that now they only cast blame and accusations, and they do not collaborate or cooperate so that together we can resolve this problem."
On the changes in immigration policy, he said: "There is will on the part of President Bush, according to what he has expressed publicly, and what he has expressed in conversations with us. So, I trust that in the coming weeks and months, we will succeed finally in arriving at a positive resolution for the benefit of both countries."
More pressing realities, however, may once again stand in the way. Work on immigration policy was first postponed four years ago, after the Sept. 11 attacks. Then it was put off for Mr. Bush's re-election campaign. Now, it may be set aside again as the United States struggles to recover from Hurricane Katrina.
But Mr. Fox has little time left; he is entering his last year in office.
His comments were aimed at what many here perceive as a troubling shift in United States attitudes and diplomatic policy toward Mexico.
In recent weeks, the United States has openly berated Mexico for failing to stop a wave of drug-related violence that has taken close to 1,000 lives along the 2,000-mile border. The Bush administration has issued numerous travel advisories and temporarily closed its consulate in the city of Nuevo Laredo, which has turned into a murder capital as drug traffickers fight for control of lucrative routes into Texas.
Last month, the governors of New Mexico and Arizona declared states of emergency, saying they needed federal help to fend off a flood of undocumented migrants.
Neither Mr. Fox nor his aides denied the problems. But the authorities here said that the responses from the United States did not reflect the complexities of the problems, nor did they acknowledge that Mexico had undertaken significant efforts to address them.
"This self-sustained blaming someone else, is it going to help anything?" said a high-level intelligence official who asked not to be named because of the diplomatic sensitivities involved. "If everyone in the United States keeps profiting politically from this very difficult situation, then we are not going to be able to make things better." He added, "We are trying to do our job, even with our limited resources."
Mr. Fox said trade and other day-to-day interactions between the countries had not been affected by the political tensions, and he said he trusted that President Bush would not allow concerns over security to stall efforts to pass changes in immigration requirements.
"Let there be no doubt, that we are going to win this battle," he said, referring to his government's efforts in Nuevo Laredo. "So it cannot be used as a pretext to provoke a distancing in relations between the United States and Mexico."
He said his country shared the pain of the hurricane. An estimated 140,000 Mexicans were affected, he said, and 70,000 are unaccounted for. But now, he said, the contributions of Mexican workers could be more important than ever.
"The reconstruction of that city and of that region is going to require a lot of labor," Mr. Fox said of New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama. "And if there is anything Mexicans are good at, it is construction."
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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/0918kotkin0918.html
Nouveau New Orleans
Rebuilt city to offer path from poverty
By Joel Kotkin
Special for The Republic
Sept. 18, 2005 12:00 AM
In coming weeks, much of the discussion about rebuilding New Orleans will focus on the physical: repairing levees, restoring historic structures and reopening oil and port facilities.
Yet the most critical questions for the region and the country will center on the fate of the city's poor and working-class households, nearly 40 percent of whom earned less than $20,000 a year before the storm, far below the national average.
The hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the storm left a city that was in decline.
New Orleans has been losing population even as other cities in the Gulf region have been growing.
Despite its location at the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans has been unable to create or maintain blue-collar, port-related jobs in wholesale trade or manufacturing or in white-collar fields, most of which moved upriver or to more business-friendly locations like Houston.
Unless these trends are reversed, the city's poor would only return to a life of chronic poverty.
Even if the New Orleans economy can be resurrected, the city finally must address its vulnerability to disaster. Its revival will require enormous modifications to the lower Mississippi Delta and surrounding wetlands, much of which are subject to intense environmental controversy.
These challenges, as several polls indicate, could bring many Americans to conclude that the city should either not be rebuilt or, at any rate, not at public expense.
Three scenarios characterize the way that practical concerns and politics may shape the future of New Orleans in the coming months and determine whether the displaced population from the city will ever return home.
The first option, which would appeal most to high-brow urban planners, cultural advocates and environmentalists would focus the reconstruction effort largely on only the most appealing features of the old New Orleans. Most of the city's key tourist assets escaped the worst damage.
From Square 1
Using these locations as the centerpiece, the city could be reborn as a more compact, clean, upscale Disney-like version of itself, shorn of its previously unattractive and dangerous neighborhoods, which could be turned into a protective zone of parks and wildlife refuges.
Despite the widespread poverty revealed by Katrina, it is little known that New Orleans' Whites and its wealthiest residents actually were richer and better educated than their counterparts in the rest of the country.
As in many cities, the middle- and working-class residents, both White and Black, have been fleeing the city for the suburbs or other regions for years.
Katrina could greatly accelerate these trends.
This process of population reshuffling has occurred before in other disasters. The 1927 Mississippi flood displaced 700,000 people, half of them African-American. Many of them left and never returning, headed north to places like Detroit and Chicago.
Disasters and economic cataclysms tend to drive people, including the most ambitious, elsewhere.
New Orleans' hardest working and most determined people could end up finding new lives in less hip but more aspirational cities such as Houston, San Antonio or even Phoenix.
The remaining affluent residents, disproportionately gay, single or child-free, would constitute the new "core" of the city, much as they do in places like Portland, San Francisco and Seattle.
Leading property owners and developers are likely to be keen to accelerate the gentrification process. They also may devise a strategy to use their cleaned-up urban landscape to attract new, high-tech medical and other urban-friendly business to the city.
Who would do the hard, everyday work then?
Again the model can be seen in the changing demographics of the "hip cool" cities. Instead of indigenous working-class people, the tough jobs, as occur in places like San Francisco, would be taken by largely Latin American immigrants willing to live on the margins of the community, or commute from miles away, until they earn enough to move to the suburbs or perhaps return home with substantial amounts of cash.
Gaza on the Gulf
Refashioning the city as a mega "New Orleans Square" actually may be good business, but the politics of the displaced poor could well lead to pressure for a second alternative. Even as tonysections of the city are rebuilt and repopulated by the privileged, there will likely be substantial political pressure to do something for the less fortunate. Already African-Americans have been positioning to control at least some of the relief funding starting to pour into New Orleans. Democratic strategists also are fretting that if too many poor Black residents remain in places like Houston, Louisiana's politics, now very much on the political margins, may take a decidedly red-state tilt.
These and other considerations, such as a demand to change the historically limited role that FEMA and other agencies have played in assisting disaster-stricken poor families, could well lead to an enormous U.N.-style refugee program.
We could see the emergence of a kind of Gaza on the Gulf with makeshift developments in the areas outside the tourist zones. Pockets of dense, subsidized housing would emerge, a low-income complement to the market-supported high-end reconstruction.
The biggest problem with the Gaza model is that, without an economy that can stimulate upward mobility and opportunity, the people "helped" by recovery programs eventually become trapped again at the lower rungs of society. These units would lack the neighborhood networks of mutual support that often sustain poorer areas. Such government-built dense housing complexes - as we have seen in New York, Chicago, St. Louis - almost inevitably breed despair.
Revived business center
If this tragic re-division of New Orleans society is to be avoided, the rebuilding effort needs to follow a third model, the reconstruction of the city's role as a commercial enterprise center. The present core of the area's export economy - hotels, convention centers and other leisure industries - stimulate jobs, but at generally low wages. The AFL-CIO estimates, for example, roughly half of all hotel workers barely earn enough to keep their families above the poverty line.
Perhaps a more diversified approach makes sense. At the same time that New Orleans spruces up its most charming assets, it also could provide tax, zoning and other incentives for new warehousing, manufacturing and business service expansion based largely on its traditional role as a great entrepot.
After all, there will be plenty of cheap land, abandoned properties and perhaps federal grants. These industries would provide the job base for assuring that the city's poor have economic opportunities to uplift themselves. The rebuilding process itself provides a chance for the city to reclaim its heritage as a city of aspiration. Instead of relying on imports of workers from Texas or Florida or Mexico, train New Orleans' residents to do a large part of the reconstruction.
This would allow people who formerly could at most aspire to bus tables in the city's famed eateries to learn skills as electricians, masons, plumbers and carpenters. A newly trained workforce would not only support a local industrial revival, it also would acquire construction capabilities that are almost certainly going to be in demand as the U.S. population continues to expand.
For generations, New Orleans has been a city that has showed America how to enjoy good music, art, food and revel in a joie de vivre. It would be a great accomplishment indeed if the city could now be helped to show the nation how a once great urban economy can regain its place in the world.
Joel Kotkin is an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author of ?he City: A Global History?(Modern Library: 2005).
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