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SPP resources SPP Summit - New Orleans SPP Summit - Montebello Teach-in |
January 29, 2008 According to President Bush in his final State of the Union address last night, the next SPP summit will take place in New Orleans this April 21 and 22. "Tonight the armies of compassion continue the march to a new day in the Gulf Coast," said Bush, referring to the record number of charitable and faith-based groups filling in where the U.S. goverment continues to pull out of social service provision and disaster recovery plans.
At a press briefing prior to Bush's speech, Ed Gillespie said the President chose the location, "to demonstrate how this great American city of New Orleans is rebounding, and is resilient." Resilient, sure, but according to an Associated Press article today: "Rent has increased by over 40 per cent since the disaster. About half of the homeowners who were promised money from the federally funded and state run Road Home program have yet to see their grants. And the Federal Emergency Management Agency's efforts to rebuild infrastructure have been mired in bureaucratic delays." There is also the ugly fact that the levies in New Orleans might never have failed had it not been for Bush's invasion of Iraq, which after 2003 soaked up desperately needed flood-control dollars that should have gone to the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project. Photo: New Orleans after the flood of August 2005 Credit: Wikipedia The symbolism is overwhelming, as Naomi Klein can attest. Her most recent book, The Shock Doctrine, speaks at length about how in New Orleans, like in Iraq, the Bush administration outsources almost every normal government function, including hurricane relief, to the point where private companies soak up almost all of the relief cash, even charitable donations. It's as if the government courts disaster in order to create "blank slates" on which to create private-sector paradises, suggests Klein in her book. "One year ago, New Orleans's working-class and poor citizens were stranded on their rooftops waiting for help that never came, while those who could pay their way escaped to safety," wrote Klein in The Nation on August 29, 2006. "The country's political leaders claim it was all some terrible mistake, a breakdown in communication that is being fixed. Their solution is to go even further down the catastrophic road of 'private-sector solutions.'" In other words, New Orleans is a perfect location for governmenet executives, top bureaucrats and big business leaders to gather to discuss a new corporate vision for North America through the SPP. On her website in December, Klein quoted Kali Akuno, executive director of the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, from a clip out of a Democracy Now documentary about the recent police crackdown on citizens in New Orleans. According to a description of the documentary: "The New Orleans City Council has unanimously voted to move ahead with the demolition of 4,500 units of public housing. Under the plan, the city’s four largest public housing developments will be razed and replaced with mixed-income housing. Hundreds of people were turned away from the City Council meeting. Police shot protesters with pepper spray and tasers." "This is just one particular piece of this whole program," says Akuno in the film. "Public hospitals are also being shut down and set to be demolished and destroyed in New Orleans. And they've systematically dismantled the public education system and beginning demolition on many of the schools in New Orleans--that's on the agenda right now--and trying to totally turn that system over to a charter and a voucher system, to privatize and just really go forward with a major experiment, which was initially laid out by the Heritage Foundation and other neoconservative think tanks shortly after the storm. So this is just really the fulfillment of this program." Canadian, U.S. and Mexican groups will be mobilizing to oppose the bigger experiment called the SPP when our leaders meet in New Orleans this April. Click here to read a letter to Prime Minister Harper demanding a debate on the SPP, which was signed by Maude Barlow (Council of Canadians), David Suzuki, Ken Georgetti (Canadian Labour Congress), and Maher Arar and Monia Mazigh. ACTION ALERT: No SPP summit in New Orleans, consult Canadians now To read Naomi Klein's op-ed in The Nation on the last SPP summit in Montebello, called "Big Brother Democracy," click here.
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