by Matt Taibbi
But when I got to East Biloxi, the storm-tossed ghetto that Mississippians are quick to call “our Ninth Ward,” what I heard at first was a familiar rundown of paranoid-sounding complaints about preferential treatment supposedly given to white hurricane victims. I had meetings with black activists and storm victims in which agencies such as FEMA and the Red Cross were described as being involved in a sweeping conspiracy to turn the Katrina disaster area into a sort of secret Club Med resort for white people, complete with shuffleboard, back rubs, and fancy dinners. “Bags of chicken,” says Ruby Campbell, an East Biloxi native. “They was giving out bags of chicken in the white neighborhoods.”
“We learned that the Red Cross is basically a paramilitary organization,” says Jaribu Hill, founder of the Mississippi Workers’ Center, “subsidized by the government.”
It struck me suddenly that being an effete, overeducated, basketball-playing New Yorker who read Soul on Ice six times in college did not require me to endorse any of this paranoid bullshit. The next hurricane, I knew, could touch ground in my bedroom and nobody from the government was going to give me anything, much less a bag of fucking chicken.
The problem with racial politics in the Katrina story is that a lot of the real ugliness is buried far under the surface of this same petty and mostly infuriating he said–she said historical argument about Who Got What in the first days after the storm.
When I was in New Orleans after Katrina, I saw white cops in clean, crisp uniforms lazing at the edges of the flood lines while civilians of both races went out in boats into the black neighborhoods to rescue people. I also had grown black men in the Houston Astrodome complain to me that their free amusement-park privileges (some evacuees were given passes to Six Flags in the first weeks after the storm) had been cut off.
In between those two poles there is an argument to have, and those who want to can have it. My own feeling is that accusations of chicken-hoarding are an insult to white invidiousness everywhere. Institutional racism has always aimed a lot higher than chicken. And the Katrina reconstruction effort has been one of the all-time masterpieces of bloodless institutional racism, a resounding tribute to America’s unparalleled ability to fuck the poor under pressure.
Biloxi has been one of the earlier test cases of the post-Katrina racial dynamic. Before the hurricane, the city had been a booming casino and vacation territory, crammed along the coastline with glitzy gaming palaces, hotels, and restaurants, while remaining geographically segregated in the interior—mostly white on the west side, mostly black and Vietnamese on the east side. Home to the state’s first legal casinos after the passage of the 1990 Mississippi Gaming Control Act, Biloxi had become something of a showcase city for a new Republican ethos of vice-funded political power in an era of vanishing manufacturing revenues, as symbolized by the rise of biped swine like Jack Abramoff. This was the new America: tourism, shopping, fast food, and poker, fueled by transient traffic. The old communities parked behind the casinos were the anachronism.
What’s happening now is that legal processes have been instituted that are all but guaranteed to cause a rapid outflow of those poor blacks from the eastern interior, while at the same time a new wave of commercial developers will float in on a cloud of government largesse. The mechanism here is an uneven application of new safety guidelines for residential home owners, passed quietly alongside a colossal tax break for commercial investors. It’s a high-stakes hand of real estate poker, and the casinos, the condo developers, and contractors such as Halliburton are the ones drawing extra cards.
The scam in East Biloxi centers around flood maps, and it mirrors what is likely to be a similar fiasco in New Orleans. New guidelines called Advisory Base Flood Elevations, or ABFEs, issued quietly and unilaterally by FEMA in late 2005, place the average suggested elevation above sea level for house construction in most of peninsular East Biloxi at eighteen feet. In order to qualify for any federal assistance in rebuilding your home, you must rebuild according to these guidelines.
Currently, most houses in the neighborhood are at about nine feet or less.
“Now you’ve got to build your house on stilts, so to speak,” says city councilman Bill Stallworth, who represents the sunken, screwed portion of East Biloxi. Well over six feet tall, with a religious man’s equanimity and a wry smile brought on by what appears to be extreme exhaustion, Stallworth holds his hand high above his head. “Here’s where your floor has to be now.”
Stallworth says the ABFE regulations add an average of $30,000 in new costs to those returnees who want to rebuild their homes—homes that are mostly worth no more than $110,000.
And that’s not all. According to Stallworth, regulations for handicapped-access ramps require ten inches of run for every inch of rise. “So what that means,” he says, “is that if you have to raise your house up twelve feet, you need a hundred-and-twenty-foot ramp. You’re starting your ramp three houses down.”
Stallworth says that when he approached a FEMA rep about the dilemma for the elderly (Biloxi has a high percentage of retirees), the FEMA official told him, in a line straight out of Marie Antoinette, “They can build an elevator.”
Like the Ninth Ward and many other New Orleans neighborhoods, East Biloxi is located on much lower ground than the surrounding white neighborhoods. Therefore, while the ABFEs in places like North Biloxi might be listed at the same levels as the East Biloxi ABFEs, the reality is that they are meaningless to North Biloxi residents whose houses already sit at those levels but are quite consequential to those in East Biloxi. Think about it. Would you bother to rebuild a house if you had to walk up ten feet just to get to the ground floor?
“I asked the FEMA guy, ‘Do you understand what you’re telling me?’” says Stallworth. “People will get a picture in their mind: ‘You can’t live here.’”
Compounding the ABFE dilemma are the usual array of bureaucratic stupidities and leprechaun tricks designed to separate the poor individual from public money. For instance, the federal government did issue a $4 billion grant for reconstruction aid under the auspices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, through which individuals are entitled to “up to” $150,000. But, according to Stallworth, the fine print indicates that applicants are eligible to receive only the difference between the value of their insurance policies and the value of their settlements. If you have no insurance you get nothing. If you received a $20,000 settlement on a $30,000 policy, you can’t get any more than $10,000.
You can also get up to $26,500 for housing from FEMA, but in order to get the money you have to jump through a dizzying array of bureaucratic hoops. For one thing, you can’t even apply for FEMA money until you get rejected for a loan from the Small Business Administration. Why a sixty-year-old personal home owner should have to apply to the SBA is not a question that anyone has a good answer for, but it’s the rule. Even getting that rejection letter can take months (many in East Biloxi are still waiting), but it’s almost worse for you if the SBA accepts your application—then the money is not a gift but a loan, a loan you probably didn’t want in the first place.
“We have at least ten elderly clients who have actually been approved for SBA loans,” says Teresa Manley, vice president of Urban Life Ministries, a relief organization that has been one of the most effective aid agencies in East Biloxi. “We don’t think it’s right that seventy-year-old people should be saddled with thirty-year commercial loans. But they had no choice.”
Then, in another trick that smacks of the chicanery-filled good old days before the Voting Rights Act, nearly all applicants for FEMA aid get a slippery bit of misdirection in the mail early on in the process.
“What we’ve found out is that FEMA automatically sends you a turn-down letter,” says Stallworth. “At the top, it says, ‘You are not eligible.’ Only at the bottom does it say that you can reapply. If you have no experience with these things, you just think yo
u’re not eligible.”
Of course, the way around all of this is to skip government aid entirely and rebuild your home with your own private funding, in which case the old zoning guidelines still apply. (Local officials expect a hideous patchwork of high-built and low-built houses at the end of reconstruction.) Here is where the true face of American capitalism—protection for the seller, risk for the individual consumer—shows itself. According to Stallworth, 82 percent of East Biloxi residents did not have flood insurance. I must have met more than a dozen families who had been paying home owner’s premiums for decades but got either nothing at all or a negligible settlement after the storm. The insurance companies didn’t even show up on the field of play for this one. To the last, they classified most all Katrina damage as flood damage, even when the water only washed away houses already destroyed by wind and rain.
“You had people who were standing in their houses when the wind blew it down,” says Marvin Koury, a real estate adviser in Gulfport, Mississippi, “and the insurance companies were trying to tell them it was flood.”
Then there’s the flip side. The Bush administration opened the door for big corporate developers by offering huge tax incentives. And they’re jumping on it. According to residents, within a month of the storm much of East Biloxi was papered with little pink flyers that read: IF YOU OWN LAND IN EAST BILOXI AND WOULD LIKE TO SELL YOUR LAND TO A CASINO/DEVELOPER, CALL (228) 239-XXXX
Around the time that FEMA was issuing its ABFEs for East Biloxi, Congress was passing the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, colloquially known as the GoZone Act. When President Bush signed the law on December 21, he made it sound like a relief program for the little guy. “It’s a step forward to fulfill this country’s commitment to help rebuild,” he said. “It’s going to help small businesses, is what it’s going to do.”
Well, not exactly. GoZone does an important thing. It provides a first-year bonus depreciation of 50 percent for commercial real estate investors within the designated areas, which include East Biloxi and most of the lower parts of Mississippi, Louisiana, and western Alabama. What this means, essentially, is that investors who bought into large projects after August 28, 2005, will pay a fraction of the usual taxes in the first year of the investment.
The GoZone law is just another hand job for the rich, of the sort that has become a staple of the Bush administration’s post-Katrina strategy. If the strategy for keeping public money from reaching the poor is to force people to first stand upside down and sing “Come On Eileen” backward and blindfolded, the strategy for giving money to the rich is a little more subtle. First, you give them tax breaks for indulging in the same activity you told the poor was dangerous, then you issue aid packages that find their way down to needy recipients only long after the value has been torn from the package’s spine by a string of rapacious subcontractors, each taking its cut, who of course never had to enter into a competitive bid for their trouble. Carrying charges, my boy, carrying charges!
“The labor starts off at twenty-seven, thirty bucks [a yard], and by the time it gets down to me, it’s five or seven dollars,” says Richard Rispoli, a gregarious Georgian contractor who came to East Biloxi to work after the storm. In Rispoli’s case, the chain started at a local construction company and passed down through three subcontractors on the way to Rispoli, who ended up not being paid at all by the last subcontractor, who simply split with the money. (The common thief who steals the last exposed bits of the public-aid package is a recurring character in the Katrina story.) Living now in a trailer in East Biloxi while he awaits payment for his work (“If the trailer’s a-rockin’, don’t come a knockin’!” says his girlfriend Diane), Rispoli is now faced with the prospect of selling his equipment in order to raise money for the trip back to Georgia.
Rispoli was one of the lucky ones, relatively. Vicky Cintra of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance has been compiling cases of undocumented migrant workers in the area who have been hired for recovery work—and left unpaid—by subcontractors of KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton. Some of them live in squalid trailer parks and tent cities on the outskirts of Gulfport. (KBR/Halliburton has denied using undocumented workers in their operations.)
“Latino workers are being invited to New Orleans and the South without the proper conditions to protect them,” Cintra says.
Forget bags of chicken. This is the kind of thing that made white people famous around the world—charging the government sixty-five bucks an hour for labor, then hiring illegals to do the same work for free.
The Katrina story is just the same old story of all of earth’s history, only in concentrated form. Big fish eating little fish. Little fish eating smaller fish. And the smallest fish being told they have to build plank houses on fucking stilts. And wait to be eaten.
The story here will probably end with East Biloxi slowly disappearing against a steady advance of condo developments and curio shops; sometime around 2010, the last black resident, a poor grandmother who bought her home for 60K in the fifties, will finally sell after her property-tax bill, reflecting a new assessment, shoots past her annual Social Security disbursement.
By then, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour will be running for president, and his Gulf Coast will be a showpiece microcosm of an ideal America—plenty of condo space, casinos on every block, no abortions, and no darkies. Thank you, Hurricane Katrina!
Not long after I arrived in Biloxi, I read about a storm-damaged black church in Saraland, Alabama, where the image of Christ had appeared in a piece of drywall. As any godless northern journalist would in that situation, I quickly raced over there in search of what I thought would be a good laugh. My carpetbagging vampire heart pumping malevolently, I went inside, put on a solemn face, and tried not to burst out laughing at the sight of the “Christ”—an incoherent ripple that looked more like a sideways version of a waterlogged Houston Texans logo than the prophet.
But when I decided to stay awhile, I watched in shock as dozens upon dozens of people came to kneel and weep before the image. Suddenly, I felt very guilty. “Man,” I thought. “How rough must your life be if you’re praying to a piece of freaking drywall?”
Then, one of the ministers, a woman named Marlette Holt, leaned over to me. “Folks,” she said, “have had it tough.”
Thank You, Tom DeLay
You were the Hammer—the most brutal and feared
of all Republican leaders—but only your rank
incompetence saved us from your revolution
May 4, 2006
The halls of Congress already feel different. Under the old House majority leader, the Rayburn Building had the Kubrickian feel of the Full Metal Jacket barracks—heels audibly clicking, something evil hissing in the background. Now it just feels like a building.
I ran into a Democratic staffer friend. “Admit it,” I said. “You’re going to miss Tom DeLay.”
He frowned at me. “Taibbi, you ever have a hemorrhoid?”
I shrugged. “Sure,” I said.
“You miss it?” he asked, then walked away not waiting for my answer.
There are some people out there who think that Tom DeLay is too easy a target, that it’s cheap to hit him now, while he’s down. It makes sense on the surface. DeLay is a short guy with a paunch and an ass-crack face who spent most of his pre-congressional life cutting rat bait and growing the state of Texas’s silliest set of sideburns. He was ugly outside and in. His religious conversion came while watching a videotaped James Dobson sermon, which means that the most important moment of his spiritual life occurred as he sat in front of a television. In a hilarious example of petty capitalist parasitism, he bought his pest control company, Albo, in order to feed off the dubious largesse of the Alpo dog food company. Like our current president, he’s an ex-drunk (he claims he used to suck down twelve martinis a night) given to preposterous rhetorical excesses (he once compared the Audu
bon Society to the Klan), making him a sort of cartoon version of a shameless, pig-hearted right-wing hypocrite.
He was, moreover, all of these things, always, without ever for a second exhibiting any countermanding positive qualities. Tom DeLay was never handsome, never eloquent, never profound, never engaging, and certainly never funny. Chicks did not dig DeLay. There is no secondary career as an adored, turtlenecked, coed-ogling poli-sci professor awaiting him. No bar back home full of tough guys is waiting to serve him up a congratulatory cold one, nobody at NASA will name the next comet after him, and he will not be a candidate for the next commissioner of the NFL. The only people left to honor his name will be a bunch of dingbat Christian dispensationalists with big ears and sky-blue suits eager to reward him for his undeniable role in speeding humanity toward the Apocalypse.
No, without his hands on the levers of power, DeLay is a total zero, a loser, two hundred–odd pounds of the world’s purest pussy repellent, and with his resignation many out there will be tempted to revel in that fact without considering the larger picture.
And the larger picture is this: Tom DeLay was the Stalin of the Republican revolution. The difference is we caught him in time.
The right-wing revolution started out as all revolutions start out: as a piece of upper-class political theater that used the unwashed masses as a stage prop, a pair of crossed pistols on the wall. It was always absurd, this idea of a savage campaign against “elites” being led by a poofy wordsmith like Rush Limbaugh, a Harvard fatty like Grover Norquist, a dickless academic like Newt Gingrich, and a diaper-dumping oligarch like George W. Bush. They were just another band of mischievous aristocrats who played at being the voice of the common man—these new wingers sold themselves as the champions of the fucked-over little guy, in this case the terminally frustrated boobus Americanus, who for decades had been made to sit idly by while ethnics stole his job, evil liberals mocked his religion and his simple way of life, and media “elitists” shut out his views and sent porn and married queers into his living room via the television set.
