August 31, 2006

Hurray for the Yes Men (theyesmen.org). The clever group of performance artists and activists once fooled all of England when a member appeared on the BBC, posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman, to apologize for the Bhopal disaster and offer billions of dollars in compensation to victims. Dow was forced to retract the phony apology and deny plans to offer aid.

Now the Yes Men have managed to hoodwink government officials who are leading the foot-dragging reconstruction of New Orleans.

On Monday, a group member announced that the federal government had changed its mind about closing four public housing projects, and instead would reopen the complexes shortly, so thousands of displaced poor people in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward could move back in.

"Our charter here at HUD is to ensure access to affordable housing for those who need it the most," the "HUD official" said in a fifteen-minute speech. "This past year in New Orleans, I am ashamed to say that we have clearly failed to do this," he told an audience at an investors' conference in New Orleans, including the governor of Louisiana, the mayor of New Orleans, and various businessmen, reporters, and other local officials.

The federal government has announced that the four housing projects are to be scheduled for demolition and replaced with mixed-income housing. The plan drew criticism from the NAACP and advocates for the poor. "It's clear what they want to do. The developers want the land," Sharon Sears, a former resident of one complex scheduled for demolition, told the LA Times.

The NAACP has called on the government to repair and reopen the units within six months. The units are in relatively good shape, the NAACP, adding that it makes no sense to demolish them while thousands of people are waiting in trailers and other temporary housing arrangements for some sort of shelter to become available.

The Yes Men member who pulled off the stunt was Andy Bichlbaum, a.k.a. Rene Oswin (Rene is French for renewal, and Oswin is the patron saint of people who have been betrayed). He managed to get on the program for the conference after another member of the Yes Men posing as a PR flak from Hill and Knowlton called conference organizers and persuaded them that HUD would like to use the conference platform to make a "major announcement."

Now HUD has had to issue denials that it will reverse course and save the public housing complexes.

The hoax was well timed. The Bush Administration has had to deal with more news this week about its gross mismanagement of the Katrina disaster. An AP poll on the recent one-year anniversary of the disaster showed that 67 percent of Americans disapprove of how the President handled Katrina. News coverage of Bush's recent tour of the damaged city pointed out the slow pace of recovery. Only $44 billion of the $110 billion approved by Congress has been spent on the recovery so far. Much of that went for no-bid contracts to Halliburton, Bechtel, and other well-connected corporations that have reaped a huge windfall from the disaster. Meanwhile, thousands of people are still homeless as debate rages on about whether to rebuild or simply do away with the large poor sections of the city that were hardest hit.

Wednesday’s editorial in the Detroit Free Press urged the President to stop making Pollyanna pronouncements and "get a clue": Half of New Orleans residents have not returned, the levees are not adequately repaired, there is still no electricity in about half of the affected area, hospitals are still closed, and mental health services are missing for the people who are still there, living in FEMA trailers and dealing with incredible hardship and stress. These people need more than upbeat speeches from Federal officials. They need concrete help.

The Yes Men's promise brought home how inadequate the government's actual response to Katrina has really been.