katrina and common ground:
A full year after Hurricane Katrina, 73,000 New Orleans residents remained encamped in FEMA trailer parks, an aluminum gulag spread all the way to Texas. They were waiting for a chance to reconstruct their homes. They’re still waiting. There’s little or no insurance money, and no one is even allowed to rebuild, nearly two years after the flood, in some of the poorer areas like the Lower Ninth Ward.
(...) The water was still high when Rahim helped create a guerrilla reconstruction corps of local residents. They call themselves Common Ground. When you see progress in the poor sections of New Orleans, you’re often seeing the group’s work crews.
(...)But Rahim and crew are far from defeated. Their call for the residents to take control of their city and their future was not about real estate nor even compensation. It was about teaching self-respect, self-empowerment, and self-defense, the only weapons left to the moneyless in a class war in which one front is New Orleans and another the closing Chrysler plants in Michigan. The battle is now political, as Rahim takes Common Ground’s case and story nationwide. For them, the insurgency has just begun.