CRS Discussion Board

11. KATRINA'S REAL NAME

By Ross Gelbspan | August 30, 2005
Boston Globe

THE HURRICANE that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.

When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was global warming.

When 124-mile-an-hour winds shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the driver was global warming.

When a severe drought in the Midwest dropped water levels in the Missouri River to their lowest on record earlier this summer, the reason was global warming.

In July, when the worst drought on record triggered wildfires in Spain and Portugal and left water levels in France at their lowest in 30 years, the explanation was global warming.

When a lethal heat wave in Arizona kept temperatures above 110 degrees and killed more than 20 people in one week, the culprit was global warming.

And when the Indian city of Bombay (Mumbai) received 37 inches of rain in one day -- killing 1,000 people and disrupting the lives of 20 million others -- the villain was global warming.

As the atmosphere warms, it generates longer droughts, more-intense downpours, more-frequent heat waves, and more-severe storms.

Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off south Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the relatively blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.

The consequences are as heartbreaking as they are terrifying.

Unfortunately, very few people in America know the real name of Hurricane Katrina because the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars to keep the public in doubt about the issue.
The reason is simple: To allow the climate to stabilize requires humanity to cut its use of coal and oil by 70 percent. That, of course, threatens the survival of one of the largest commercial enterprises in history.

In 1995, public utility hearings in Minnesota found that the coal industry had paid more than $1 million to four scientists who were public dissenters on global warming. And ExxonMobil has spent more than $13 million since 1998 on an anti-global warming public relations and lobbying campaign.

In 2000, big oil and big coal scored their biggest electoral victory yet when President George W. Bush was elected president -- and subsequently took suggestions from the industry for his climate and energy policies.

As the pace of climate change accelerates, many researchers fear we have already entered a period of irreversible runaway climate change.

Against this background, the ignorance of the American public about global warming stands out as an indictment of the US media.

When the US press has bothered to cover the subject of global warming, it has focused almost exclusively on its political and diplomatic aspects and not on what the warming is doing to our agriculture, water supplies, plant and animal life, public health, and weather.

For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the media to accord the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations.

Today, with the science having become even more robust -- and the impacts as visible as the megastorm that covered much of the Gulf of Mexico -- the press bears a share of the guilt for our self-induced destruction with the oil and coal industries.

As a Bostonian, I am afraid that the coming winter will -- like last winter -- be unusually short and devastatingly severe. At the beginning of 2005, a deadly ice storm knocked out power to thousands of people in New England and dropped a record-setting 42.2 inches of snow on Boston.

The conventional name of the month was January. Its real name is global warming.

12. COPS TRAPPED SURVIVORS IN NEW ORLEANS
By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
Sep. 9, 2005 at 10:48AM

Police from surrounding jurisdictions shut down several access points to one of the only ways out of New Orleans last week, effectively trapping victims of Hurricane Katrina in the flooded and devastated city.

An eyewitness account from two San Francisco paramedics posted on an internet site for Emergency Medical Services specialists says, "Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the city on foot."

"We shut down the bridge," Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International, adding that his jurisdiction had been "a closed and secure location" since before the storm hit.

"All our people had evacuated and we locked the city down," he said.

The bridge in question -- the Crescent City Connection -- is the major artery heading west out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River.

Lawson said that once the storm itself had passed Monday, police from Gretna City, Jefferson Parrish and the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.

He added that the small town, which he called "a bedroom community" for the city of New Orleans, would have been overwhelmed by the influx.

"There was no food, water or shelter" in Gretna City, Lawson said. "We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people.

"If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."

But -- in an example of the chaos that continued to beset survivors of the storm long after it had passed -- even as Lawson's men were closing the bridge, authorities in New Orleans were telling people that it was only way out of the city.

"The only way people can leave the city of New Orleans is to get on (the) Crescent City Connection ... authorities said," reads a Tuesday morning posting on the Web site of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, which kept reporting through the storm and the ruinous flooding that followed.

Similar announcements appeared on the Web site of local radio station WDSU and other local news sources.

"Evidently, someone on the ground (in New Orleans) was telling people there was transport here, or food or shelter," said Lawson. "There wasn't."

"We were not contacted by anyone" about the instructions being given to survivors to use the bridge to get out of town, he said.

The two paramedics, who were trapped in the city while attending a convention, joined a group of people who had been turned out by the hotels that they were staying in on Wednesday. When the group attempted to get to the Superdome -- designated by city authorities as a shelter for those unable to evacuate -- they were turned away by the National Guard.

"Quite naturally, we asked ... 'What was our alternative?' The guards told us that that was our problem, and no, they did not have extra water to give to us.

"This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile law enforcement."

As they made their way to the bridge in order to leave the city "armed Gretna sheriffs (sic) formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads."

Members of the group nonetheless approached the police lines, and "questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge ... They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City.

"These were code words," the paramedics wrote, "for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans."

The authors say that during the course of that day, they saw "other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated."

Efforts to contact the authors of the Internet posting were unsuccessful, but UPI was able to confirm that individuals with their names are employed as paramedics in San Francisco.

Lawson says that his officers "acted in the manner they were instructed to" and defends the order to close the bridge as "the right decision."

He said that in addition to his security concerns, an unmoored vessel on the river "raised the threat that it might crash into and breach the levee, which would have flooded Gretna."

He says that his officers did assist about 4000 people who "arrived at the doorstep of (Gretna City)" either by crossing the bridge before it was closed or approaching from another route.

13. "LAWLESSNESS"
By Walter Johnson

The word of choice to describe the last several days in New Orleans seems to be "lawlessness" (NYT, 9/2), either that or its rougher-edged synonym "anarchy." These words suggest that what has happened in New Orleans is that the absence of functioning civil authority -- the absence of law -- has resulted in the terrible scenes of debasement which run in an endless loop on our television screens. And because New Orleans is the way it is, largely poor and largely black, they symbolically identify African-Americans with that state of lawlessness; never more clearly so than with the photo run on the front page of the Daily News today under the heading "Anarchy" -- a broken white body being hauled out of the Superdome.

I suppose the idea behind these words and behind the stupefied amazement that anyone would ever do something as depraved and counter-productive as shoot at a helicopter that was trying to medivac old ladies or hijack a truck carrying desperately needed water to refugees who needed it to mix their baby formula, is that the abandoned citizens of New Orleans should simply behave in an orderly manner and sit tight: so many Negroes sitting on the veranda of the Superdome waiting for the U.S. government to bail them out. They should be patient.

Here's the thing: they have been waiting. For years. For decades. And the law hasn't done them any favors. They have been suffering not from lawlessness, but its opposite: laws which have allowed corporations to loot their resources and destroy their environments; laws which have plowed millions and millions of dollars into subsidizing the exodus of whites from the city of New Orleans (the oft-mentioned, now-destroyed Ponchartrain Causeway was one such project, a huge federally funded corridor built so that white suburbanites could beat a retreat from the city as soon as they picked up their paycheck); laws which have used the image of duck-hunting sportsmen as a justification for allowing an unscrupulous firearms industry to flood our cities with handguns and assault weapons; laws which have allowed property to go untaxed and schools unfunded; laws which have left their children vulnerable to police violence and harassment even as their elders go unprotected; laws which have steered resources away from a levee system that everyone always knew was inadequate and toward a war that everyone always knew was unnecessary.

To say that the disaster that has befallen New Orleans has been decades in the making is to slightly mis-state the case. This disaster has been ongoing for decades. Chronically rather than acutely, out of the sight of the spectacle-driven media. (Is it any accident that the one-to-one correspondence between the Superdome and the Astrodome, the two great sites of gladitorial spectacle rendered the piteous thousands at the Convention Center almost invisible, assembled there to be forgotten as the died on the sidewalk?). These people have been forgotten. Excluded. Left Behind. And now that the process has finally reached its conclusion, now that the car-less and card-less and the old and the lame and the addicted and un-educated and impoverished of New Orleans have finally reached the breaking point and staggered out into public view, they are being scolded for not waiting patiently enough for the very governments that have for so long abandoned them to get their attention focused and come in their and rescue them. Really: is it any wonder?

For a lot of Americans, the city of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast represent "the past." There are two parts to this identification of a place with a time: there is the Creole gentility and old-time Jazz past identified with the French Quarter and there is the violent racist pre-Civil Rights past that the South -- no matter how many aging klansman murderers are jailed -- is never seen to have quite left behind. But what if "the South," this imagined South, represents not our past, but our future: a world without environmental and labor protection; a world where white people have huge iron fences around their houses and black people live behind bars; a world where white flight and capital flight have left young black people with a poisoned choice between lives in the military or life in the Supermax; a world in which plaid uniforms, standardized tests, and "intelligent design" are promoted as solutions for schools where students are lucky if they can find a flushing toilet.

What if when we look at the desperate, angry people on the television screen we realize that we are seeing not the result of anarchy but of the rule of law? What if we are seeing not some atavistic upwelling of the nation's lawless past, but a premonition of its future?

Walter Johnson
New York, NY

14. KATRINA'S FORGOTTEN VICTIMS: NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES
News Report, C. Stone Brown,
Imdiversity, Sep 11, 2005

15. INDIAN GROUPS RAISE MONEY FOR KATRINA VICTIMS
NIGA announces $1 million goal, Cherokees send people and supplies

Native American Times 9/6/2005

16. ETHNIC COMMUNITIES RALLY TO HELP KATRINA SURVIVORS

By Daffodil Altan, Pacific News Service

SAN FRANCISCO--Ethnic media across the country are tracking an outpouring of support for the various ethnic communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Nearly 20,000 Vietnamese refugees coming in from Mississippi and Louisiana have been welcomed in Houston, reports Radio Saigon in Houston. Although the Astrodome has been the focus of attention for many of the hurricane's evacuees, the Hong Kong strip mall in Houston is serving as a receiving center for the many displaced Vietnamese. Vietnamese were directed to the mall instead of the Astrodome by Vietnamese radio stations like Radio Saigon, which feared a replay of the violence and chaos in the Superdome. At the mall, the displaced were greeted by Vietnamese charity groups as well as ordinary citizens who provided shelter, food and clothing. "We all know what it's like to be refugees," says Thuy Vu, from Radio Saigon Houston.

Although images of Katrina's hardest-hit victims have been gracing the covers of newspapers and television sets across the country, images of mostly foreign-born Latino New Orleans residents who were also caught in the grips of the storm have been scant. Local, federal and consular authorities are having trouble locating Latino victims because many are undocumented, reports the Spanish language daily, Hoy. Authorities say it has been difficult to track victims because many undocumented survivors leave shelters in the early hours of the morning. Honduran Consul Maria Eugenia Lobos says her office has only been able to locate about 100 of the approximately 150,000 Hondurans who reside in New Orleans and the surrounding area.

The Spanish-language daily La Opinion reports that the United States has accepted the help of the Mexican Navy for search and rescue and medical care for Hurricane Katrina-affected persons. Mexico's Secretary of Foreign Relations Luis Ernesto Derbez urged Mexicans in the disaster area not to fear reprisal by authorities over their immigration status. As of Monday, the secretary knew of three Mexican citizens killed by the hurricane, reports La Opinion. New Orleans was home to some 100,000 Mexican people, according to the paper.

Last week the Afghan government pledged $100,000 to Katrina victims, and preparation for food drives and clothing drives are underway at the Afghan Coalition community center in Fremont, Calif., reports the Afghan Journal.

"This is a nice way of removing the stigma of "terrorist" from Afghans and Muslims," says Habib Zelgai, Director of Lemar-TV. Feeling both sympathy and empathy toward those who have had to flee their homes, the Afghan community has quickly responded, reports the journal. "We understand what it feels like to have to escape your home at the last minute and bring nothing with you but the clothes on your back...there are no pictures, no birth certificates, nothing but memories to carry," said Rona Popal, executive director of the Afghan Coalition.

Koreans displaced by the storm have found refuge in Korean mom and pop stores in Houston that have been converted into aid centers, reports the Korea Times. Koreans are receiving everything from host families to job leads there. Throughout Houston, some Korean landlords have lowered the rent for those in need, while other Koreans have been paying for the meals of the displaced they meet in restaurants.

Ethnic communities have also expressed anger over the government's slow response to those stranded by Katrina. In New Orleans, one Korean man who returned to the city found his store gutted by looters and blamed the government for not disbursing aid sooner to prevent the looting, reports the Korea Times. Indians fleeing New Orleans are worried about the fate of the Sri Venkata Satyanaryana temple, which has served Hindus in New Orleans since 1994. Priests Thangam Bhattar and Srinivas Lanka have taken shelter with friends in Baton Rouge. New Orleans is home to between 5,000 and 6,000 Indians.

American Indian groups are finding unique ways to come to the aid of tribes affected by Katrina, according to Indian Country Today. The Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribe of Fort Belknap in Montana sent meat from 10 of the tribe's bison to groups like the Poarch Creek Band in Alabama, the Coushatta Indian Tribe and the Jena Band of Choctaw in Louisiana. Some, like the Mississippi Choctaw are housing displaced members in casinos until power returns to the reservations. The National Indian Gaming Association set a $1 million goal for contributions to the Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund, and jump-started its drive with a $5,000 donation.

17. NATIONAL ANTI-RACIST ORGANIZATION CALLS FOR U.N. INVESTIGATION OF FEDERAL RESPONSE TO KATRINA

18. SUPPORT HARD KNOCK RADIO AND THIRD WORLD MAJORITY'S MEDIA JUSTICE

Support Hard Knock Radio and Third World Majority's Media Justice fact finding and relief delegation of Journalists of Color to the Gulf States impacted by Hurricane Katrina. The cities covered include Houston, TX, New Orleans, LA, Biloxi, MS, Jackson, MS, and Selma, AL from September 11-21, 2005. This delegation will be traveling to cover the personal stories of Black, Latino, and Asian families neglected by mainstream media and criminalized by local and national government. The delegation will provide much needed office infrastructure to the community institutions on the frontlines courageously struggling to help their people survive. Organizers from these areas have requested their stories of survival and resistance in this intense conditions be told because it could make the difference between organizations receiving aid, rescue, and rebuilding funds. The collection of these stories document the lack of response from local, state, and federal government agencies who have been unaccountable to poor communities of color. These collected stories will ensure future accountability of the local, states, and federal government.

To maximize the impact of these stories, Jeff Chang, a national award-winning author, will submit write ups of the collected stories to print and internet outlets. In addition, radio interview stories will be broadcasted on the Pacifica network and available via podcast, while video documentary will be available via progressive television and news outlets.

Stories we are confirmed to cover:

• Ongoing harrowing stories of survival by people of the Gulf States. This includes stories of separation, cooperation, kindness, and despair as people were abandoned by their local, state, and federal government who were responsible to protect them.

• Abuse of citizens trying to flee or survive by the militarized force of local police, national guard, and army. Many are reporting the racist impacts of this martial law and have heartbreaking stories, many of them involve people whose attempt to leave resulted in them being forced to stay at gunpoint to "prevent looting". These situations will only worsen as the government infrastructure and military jurisdiction in the area increases over time.

• The courage of community organizations supporting their communities despite their exclusion from relief funds by the Red Cross and FEMA. From churches, labor unions, youth, and other social justice groups, members of these organizations have bravely supported their memberships. At the same time staff and members, have also personally lost their homes, livelihoods, and family members.

• The independent monitoring of the body count in New Orleans by parallel media journalists to guarantee accuracy and accountability of the government.

• The abandonment of youth and adult inmates in prison in the Gulf States area. In addition the ongoing criminialization of survivors "stealing food and water", branding them as looters in temporary jails.

Stories we are researching to cover (we are still identifying individuals and community organizations as sources):

• The independent monitoring of the toxic clean-up by environmental justice organizers.

• The connection to this "natural disaster" with global warming and environmental racism

• The rebuilding of New Orleans by corporate profiteers from oil, gambling, and real estate industries, and the community struggle of the People's Committee for New Orleans to fight for oversight and community accountability in this struggle.

• The experience of Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and other communities living in the Gulf States. Their stories of resistance have been marginalized in the coverage of Katrina as the racial divide in the region and the country has been framed again and again solely as black
  and white, effectively making these communities' plight invisible. Of note is what has happened to the undocumented workers in this area.

Some of the Organizations we hope to connect and help (not a full list and we are still attempting to contact folks):

The People's Hurricane Fund & Community Oversight Committee Incite Gulf States Chapter FFLIC (Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children)
Louisiana Welfare Rights Organization
Louisiana Bucket Brigade
Southern Echo
21st Century Youth Leadership Movement
Malcom X Grassroots Movement Gulf States Chapters NAACP/MER-C in
Missisippi Southern Relief Fund c/o Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights

Ways that you can help.

19. CASTRO & CHAVEZ OFFER HURRICANE AID

20. POEM: A PRAYER BAND, BY SUHEIR HAMMAD

a prayer band

every thing

you ever paid for
you ever worked on
you ever received

every thing

you ever gave away
you ever held on to
you ever forgot about

every single thing is one
of every single thing and all
things are gone

every thing i can think to do
to say i feel
is buoyant

every thing is below water
every thing is eroding
every thing is hungry

there is no thing to eat
there is water every where
and there is no thing clean to drink

the children aren't talking

the nurses have stopped believing
anyone is coming for us

the parish fire chief will never again tell anyone that help is coming

now is the time of rags
now is the indigo of loss
now is the need for cavalry

new orleans
i fell in love with your fine ass poor boys sweating frying
catfish blackened life thick women glossy seasoning bourbon
indians beads grit history of races
and losers who still won

new orleans
i dreamt of living lush within your shuttered eyes
a closet of yellow dresses a breeze on my neck
writing poems for do right men and a daughter of refugees

i have known of displacement
and the tides pulling every thing
that could not be carried within
and some of that too

a jamaican man sings
those who can afford to run will run
what about those who can't
they will have to stay

end of the month tropical depression turned storm

someone whose beloved has drowned
knows what water can do
what water will do to once animated things

a new orleans man pleads
we have to steal from each other to eat
another gun in hand says we will protect what we have
what belongs to us

i have known of fleeing desperate
with children on hips in arms on backs
of house keys strung on necks
of water weighed shoes
disintegrated official papers
leases certificates births deaths taxes

i have known of high ways which lead nowhere
of aches in teeth in heads in hands tied

i have known of women raped by strangers by neighbors
of a hunger in human

i have known of promises to return
to where you come from
but first any bus going any where

tonight the tigris and the mississippi moan for each other as sisters full of unnatural things flooded with predators and prayers

all language bankrupt

how long before hope begins to eat itself?
how many flags must be waved?
when does a man let go of his wife's hand in order to hold his child?

who says this is not the america they know?

what america do they know?

were the poor people so poor they could not be seen?

were the black people so many they could not be counted?

this is not a charge
this is a conviction

if death levels us all
then life plays favorites

and life it seems is constructed
of budgets contracts deployments of wards
and automobiles of superstition and tourism
and gasoline but mostly insurance

and insurance it seems is only bought
and only with what cannot be carried within and some of that too

a city of slave bricked streets
a city of chapel rooms
a city of haints

a crescent city

where will the jazz funeral be held?

when will the children talk?

tonight it is the dead
and dying who are left
and those who would rather not
promise themselves they will return

they will be there
after everything is gone
and when the saints come
marching like spring
to save us all