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11/14/2005:

"The War at Home: New Orleans, Public Housing, and the "Chilean Option""

The U.S. military, in its' desperate attempt to crush the growing armed Iraqi resistance, is employing what Pentagon strategists call the "Salvador option". To terrorize the Iraqi people into submission the U.S. is funding, training, directing, and sometimes staffing, death squads--as was done during the brutal counter-insurgency campaign in Central America in the 1980s. The U.S. imperialist state is betting that this strategy of terror will effectively beat the Iraqis into submission, thus guaranteeing control of the oil and allowing U.S. forces to be unleashed in new wars of pillage from Damascus, to Tehran, to Caracas.

This war abroad, as some sections of the U.S. anti-war movement have argued, cannot be seen in isolation from the war at home. The brutal colonial war in Iraq is but the flip slide of the war at home against workers, immigrants, and other oppressed people. Indeed, New Orleans, and the whole Gulf coast, has become the latest front in this domestic conflict. Grass Roots activists in the region argue that the Bush-led regime, with support from the Democrats, are using hurricane Katrina to deepen and expand the racist and anti-working class neoliberal offensive of privatization, austerity, and attacks on civil liberties. In short, the U.S. government is coupling its' Salvador option abroad with a "Chilean option" at home. Just as the U.S. and Latin American ruling classes used Pinochet's Chile as a template for the rest of Latin America, the Bush regime wants to "shock and awe" the U.S. working class by rapidly creating a neoliberal wonderland in New Orleans to be exported across the country. This article documents the neoliberal offensive in New Orleans, with a particular emphasis on public housing, both before Katrina and during its' post-disaster intensification. I conclude by highlighting how grass roots movements are challenging this agenda and showing that another anti-racist, pro-working class world, is possible.
zmag.org