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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/ford05092007.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/ford05092007.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>May 9,
2007<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5><b>Big Capital
Swamps the Lessons of Katrina<br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">No
Black Plan for America's
Cities</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5>By GLEN
FORD<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">"K</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>atrina is a metaphor for abandoned urban
America," said Rev. Jesse Jackson as he prepared to lead a
"Reclaiming Our Land" march in New Orleans, late last month.
"There is no urban policy, and there must be." <br><br>
But Rev. Jackson is wrong. An urban policy does exist, hatched in
corporate boardrooms and proceeding at various stages of implementation
in cities across the nation. Urban America is not being
"abandoned"--rather, the corporate plan calls for existing
populations to be removed and replaced, incrementally, a process that is
well underway. And the land is being "reclaimed"--by Big
Capital, with the enthusiastic support of urban politicians of all races
from coast to coast. <br><br>
The problem is not the lack of an urban policy, but the failure to
formulate progressive Black urban policies and plans. Corporate America
and finance capital have both general and detailed visions of what the
cities should look like and which populations and enterprises will be
nurtured and served by these new and improved
municipalities--"renaissance" cities of the (near and, in some
places, very near) future. <br><br>
Corporate planners and developers believed they had been blessed by
nature when Katrina drowned New Orleans, washing away in days the
problem-people and neighborhoods that would ordinarily require years to
remove in order to clear the way for "renaissance." Greed led
to unseemly speed, revealing in a flash the outlines of the urban vision
that would be imposed on the wreckage of New Orleans. As in a film on
fast-forward, the "plot" (in both meanings of the word)
unfolded in a rush before our eyes: Once the Black and poor were removed,
an urban environment would be created implacably hostile to their return.
The public sector--except that which serves business, directly or
indirectly--would under no circumstances be resurrected, so as to leave
little "space" for the re-implantation of unwanted populations
(schools, utility infrastructure, public and affordable private housing,
public safety, health care). <br><br>
The bargaining power of labor would be reduced to zero by the systematic
introduction of itinerant and often undocumented workers to replace the
exiled African Americans--who are the most union-friendly workers
("joiners") of all, a documented fact well-known in corporate
America. Much of the land previously inhabited by the now-superfluous
exiles would be put to other uses (parks and golf courses, etc.) or
designated for no use at all under flood safety or environmental
rationales. As a result, the value of the remainder of land in New
Orleans would in time increase dramatically, making some people richer
than before and rendering low cost housing prohibitive in the future.
<br><br>
Most importantly, the "new" New Orleans would no longer
accommodate a Black majority (previously 67 percent), thus ensuring that
the "renaissance" could proceed politically unencumbered in
what corporate folks call a "stable" and "positive"
business environment. <br><br>
Black New Orleans and its diaspora have
heroically--desperately!--resisted the schemes of national, state and
local capital and governments. They have won some tentative victories
(among them, retaining a Black, although thoroughly corporate, mayor),
and been joined by many ardent allies. Some reduced semblance of the old
Black city will rise from the muck and ruin, thanks to sheer force of
will on the part of residents and the solidarity of scores of progressive
organizations and thousands of individual volunteers. Corporate plans for
the "new" New Orleans--which began surfacing in the most
grotesquely "ugly American" fashion just weeks after the Great
Flood while hundreds of bloated bodies were still unidentified and
unclaimed (some still are)--laid out in some detail schemes to reinvent
the city by allocating land to its "optimum" uses (for
business) and attracting and retaining the most "desirable"
population (for corporate purposes). None of these grand plans projected
a Black population numbering more than 30 percent--apparently, the
maximum proportion tolerable in the "ideal" urban environment.
<br><br>
Against huge odds, Black New Orleans--including activists who commute to
do battle from as far away as Houston--has struggled against the
privatization and charter-ization of what remains of the educational
system. They have fought to preserve the largely intact public housing
stock, despite the Bush regime's determination to wipe the projects off
the face of the city map. They attempt to rebuild their homes in places
where government at all levels erects every conceivable obstacle. Of
necessity, these are largely defensive actions of a people under siege on
all fronts, their ranks and resources drastically depleted. But Black New
Orleans has not failed; they continue to struggle to overcome the
greatest single calamity ever to befall a U.S. city, exponentially
compounded by racist barbarians in government and business acting in
concert. <br><br>
It is African American leadership institutions that have failed Black New
Orleans, and left inner city populations across the land defenseless in
the face of Big Capital's schemes to remake urban America in white-face.
The exodus from New Orleans, and the effective lockout that followed,
were like a giant wave crashing down on the city. Elsewhere in Black
America, these same corporate Black-removal forces propel a rising tide
of gentrification that does not ebb. Big Capital's urban offensive
threatens to irrevocably disperse the population base of Black political
power, rendering forever moot all dreams of meaningful African American
self-determination. If Black America fails to come to grips with the
profound change in corporate investment and development strategies that
has occurred over the past several decades, other "chocolate
cities" will soon share the same fate as New Orleans--only on a
slower schedule. <br><br>
Of the top 12 cities in Black population, seven saw a loss in African
Americans as a percentage of total residents between 1990 and 2000:
<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>New York City (1) <br><br>
<dd>Chicago (2) <br><br>
<dd>Houston (5) <br><br>
<dd>Los Angeles (7) <br><br>
<dd>Washington (9) <br><br>
<dd>Dallas (11) <br><br>
<dd>Atlanta (12) <br><br>
</dl>Katrina events, of course, would push New Orleans (previously Black
city #10) into the African American population percentage loss column, in
the most horrific fashion imaginable. <br><br>
Four cities among the top 12 became Blacker in the 1990-2000 decade:
<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>Detroit (3) <br><br>
<dd>Philadelphia (4) <br><br>
<dd>Baltimore (6) <br><br>
<dd>Memphis (8) <br><br>
</dl>(See U.S. Census Bureau links
<a href="http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t16/tab05.xls">
www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t16/tab05.xls</a> and
<a href="http://afgen.com/popula.html">afgen.com/popula.html</a> for
Black city populations in 2000 and 1990, respectively.) <br><br>
There is no question that some of the slippage in the Black proportion of
population in seven top cities is due to immigration, mainly Latino.
However, the U.S. Census Bureau drastically changed the way it counts
Hispanics between the 1990 and 2000 censuses, making it impossible to
reliably measure the impact. What is immediately apparent is that the
seven cities that became less Black in the Nineties are all concentrated
corporate headquarters locations or, in the case of Washington, DC, the
headquarters of the federal government. These are places that corporate
and finance capital are most keen to "make over" in order to
provide the urban "ambience" believed most amenable to their
employees, management and clients, and for the general sake of corporate
prestige. <br><br>
Let there be no doubt, however, that the general "back to the
cities" corporate imperative--resulting in gentrification--will soon
begin tilting other heavily Black municipalities in the same direction.
Newark, New Jersey, once considered among the quintessential
"chocolate cities," went from 58.5 percent Black in 1990 to
53.5 percent in 2000. Since then, the center city "renaissance"
project has gone into high gear, attracting thousands of prized white
professionals. By 2010, Newark is likely to no longer have a Black
majority. Atlanta will be significantly less Black. <br><br>
New York's de-Blackening has been the most dramatic. For the first time
since the so-called Draft Riots of 1863 (actually, a monstrous anti-Black
pogram that slaughtered hundreds) forced tens of thousands of African
Americans to flee the city permanently, the 2005 U.S. Census update
showed a net loss of Black population for the city as a whole. Also for
the first time, Latinos suffered a net loss in population in Manhattan,
Ground Zero for the nation in both gentrification and corporate
headquarters. Black numbers in Manhattan have been dropping for some
time. Political impacts inevitably follow. <br><br>
Others will maintain that the decline in Black proportions in central
cities is a sign of progress, because African Americans are rapidly
suburbanizing. However, as anyone who knows the environs of Washington,
DC, understands, a great chunk of the Black exodus across jurisdictional
lines is "push-out"--the direct result of gentrification of the
inner city. In many cases, the ghetto has simply moved across the city
line. Upscale Blacks--and the term is quite relative, especially when
considering wealth, or net worth--are also priced out of the most
attractive city neighborhoods, and encamp on the periphery to occupy
homes formerly owned by whites who have fled the poorer Blacks who were
forced out of the city. <br><br>
The result is a scattering of African Americans and dilution of Black
political power in a growing number of central cities. There can be no
comparison between the political, cultural and social impact of Black
majorities in suburban jurisdictions such as Prince Georges County,
Maryland and Dekalb County, Georgia, and Black political control of great
cities like Washington and Atlanta. And the frenzy of gentrifying in
Chicago may preclude that city from ever again electing a Black mayor.
<br><br>
The flow of Big Capital to the cities signifies the end of a cycle that
began after World War Two. Fearing a return of Great Depression-like
conditions with the end of defense industry hyper-production, and the
political turmoil that would follow among the millions of returning
soldiers and sailors, the federal government and corporate America
launched the biggest public works and private investment project in human
history: the suburbanization of a continent-wide nation. The grand design
flipped the script on patterns of habitation that had prevailed since the
dawn of civilization. The rich had always lived in the centers of cities,
where the amenities are, while the poor were relegated to the periphery.
That pattern still obtains everywhere else on the globe--except in the
United States. <br><br>
Blacks were left out of the Great Makeover, but inherited the
cities--many of which lost half or more of their white populations to the
suburbs, over time--by default. After many decades of suburbanization the
inevitable happened, a phenomenon closely resembling a classic capitalist
crisis of overproduction. The suburbs had stretched too far, commutes
were too long, the infrastructure was strained by the artificial and
historically unnatural sprawl and the impossibility of providing
city-style amenities to far-flung suburbs. The over-stretched rubber band
began to snap back. <br><br>
In the interval between the post-war urban white exodus--which was well
underway long before the Black rebellions of the Sixties, and was much
more a "pull" than a "push"--and today's encroaching
gentrification, African Americans won nominal political power in many
cities. Now the fin de cycle is upon us. African Americans in general,
and Black politicians in particular, seem to have never considered that
the era of "chocolate cities" might end, or the consequences to
Black welfare and political power. On the contrary, most Black
politicians, having had no plan of their own for their cities, made
careers of bending over frontwards--deeply--to attract corporate
investment on any terms (as do most of their white counterparts). At the
current stage of the cycle, for many heavily Black cities, there is no
need to bend over--the corporations are coming for their own reasons,
with briefcases full of plans for another Great American Makeover.
Large-scale Black removal is integral to the project. <br><br>
Katrina showed everyone with eyes and ears the full scope of the
corporate plan, whose outlines had long been evident in New York,
Chicago, Washington, Atlanta and elsewhere. Gentrification is actually
the result of methodical corporate penetration, a planned process
requiring intimate collaboration with local government. In the absence of
Black plans for urban makeovers, corporate plans will prevail, and a slow
and tortuous African American exodus will result. The conclusion is
obvious: Blacks that aspire to leadership must dive into urban planning
with a vengeance. As I wrote on July 29, 2004: <br><br>
"We must disrupt and supersede corporate development schemes, by
becoming city planners in the service of the people. We must take the
initiative away from the corporations, who are currently in possession of
all the data that make up the life of a city, and who use it selectively
to present their self-serving brand of "development" as the
only option available. We must redefine the term "development,"
to mean change that benefits the people impacted by the project.
Development that does not meet that definition, is unacceptable."
<br><br>
Had the post-1970 crop of urban Black leadership used the intervening
decades to formulate urban plans and policies that transformed the cities
in ways that served the needs of the new Black majorities and
pluralities, they would now be capable of bargaining with onrushing
capital--and would have had something to offer to the people of New
Orleans as corporations presented plans for the coup de grace on the
Black majority. But the misleadership class spent their terms in office
wasting the historical opportunity, and the window is rapidly closing.
<br><br>
Only an urban movement for democratic development, rooted in mass
mobilization of city residents around comprehensive plans for the
betterment of the existing population within the city's borders, can tame
the corporate juggernaut and preserve urban Black political power. When
the window shuts--after Black populations are scattered--the game will be
over. <br><br>
Glen Ford</b> is executive editor of the
<a href="http://www.blackagendareport.com/">Black Agenda Report</a>. He
can be contacted at Glen.Ford (at) BlackAgendaReport.com. <br><br>
<br><br>
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