Where are the jobs?

From the Associated Press comes this sobering piece on how the scandal of FEMA's no-bid contracts to favored corporations for contruction projects in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is exacerbating the distrust of government, born of FEMA's feckless respose to the disaster, among many of New Orleans' African-Americans:

[T]he acting chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency has pledged that millions of dollars of government contracts initially awarded without bids will be reopened for bidding.

But there has been no guarantee those contract reconstruction jobs will go to New Orleanians who desperately need the work and money.

"People we talked to down there said jobs, jobs, jobs," [Mike] Davis[, a writer and historian who recently returned from New Orleans] says. "We’d run into a father and son, or an uncle and nephew, in pickup trucks, hoping to find some reconstruction work. They’re baffled that a month later, there are no real jobs."