From the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/opinion/10sat2.html?ex=1127534400&en=3719996a3586e988&ei=5070&emc=eta1
September 10, 2005
On Thursday, President Bush issued a proclamation suspending the law that requires employers to pay the locally prevailing wage to construction workers on federally financed projects. The suspension applies to parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
By any standard of human decency, condemning many already poor and now bereft people to subpar wages - thus perpetuating their poverty - is unacceptable. It is also bad for the economy. Without the law, called the Davis-Bacon Act, contractors will be able to pay less, but they'll also get less, as lower wages invariably mean lower productivity.
The ostensible rationale for suspending the law is to reduce taxpayers' costs. Does Mr. Bush really believe it is the will of the American people to deny the prevailing wage to construction workers in New Orleans, Biloxi and other hard-hit areas? Besides, the proclamation doesn't require contractors to pass on the savings they will get by cutting wages from current low levels. Around New Orleans, the prevailing hourly wage for a truck driver working on a levee is $9.04; for an electrician, it's $14.30.
Republicans have long been trying to repeal the prevailing wage law on the grounds that the regulations are expensive and bureaucratic; weakening it was even part of the Republican Party platform in 1996 and 2000. Now, in a time of searing need, the party wants to achieve by fiat what it couldn't achieve through the normal democratic process.
In a letter this week to Mr. Bush urging him to suspend the law, 35 Republican representatives noted approvingly that Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and the elder George Bush had all suspended the law during "emergencies." For the record, Mr. Roosevelt suspended it for two weeks in 1934, to make time to clear up contradictions between it and another law. Mr. Nixon suspended it for six weeks in 1971 as part of his misbegotten attempt to control spiraling inflation. And Mr. Bush did so after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, two weeks before he was defeated by Bill Clinton, who quickly reinstated it after assuming the presidency.
If Mr. Bush does not rescind his proclamation voluntarily, Congress should pass a law forcing him to do so.
From the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/opinion/16fri1.html?ex=1127534400&en=720fbdd0872604e1&ei=5070&emc=eta1
September 16, 2005
President Bush said three things last night that desperately needed to be said. He forthrightly acknowledged his responsibility for the egregious mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He spoke clearly and candidly about race and poverty. And finally, he was clear about what would be needed to bring back the Gulf Coast and said the federal government would have to lead and pay for that effort.
Once again, as he did after 9/11, Mr. Bush has responded to disaster with disconcerting uncertainty, then risen to the occasion later. Once again, he has delivered a speech that will reassure many Americans that he understands the enormity of the event and the demands of leadership to come.
But there are plenty of reasons for concern. After 9/11, Mr. Bush responded not only with a stirring speech at the ruins of the World Trade Center and a principled response to the Taliban in Afghanistan. He also decided to invade Iraq, and he tried to do it on the cheap - with disastrous results, for which the country continues to pay every day.
This time, Mr. Bush must come up with a more coherent and well-organized follow-through.
Clearly chastened by the outcry over his slow response to the disaster and his administration's bumbling performance, Mr. Bush said last night that he was prepared to undertake "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen." If he is sincere about his commitment to New Orleans and the other damaged localities, and to the displaced residents, he may have a fight on his hands in persuading Congress to support such an ambitious and necessary effort. Obviously, any official with even a minimal sense of responsibility would understand that this work will have to begin with a promise to give up on any more of the Republican Party's cherished tax cuts.
The speech, as good as it was, marks only a moment of clarity. Mr. Bush's problem in dealing with Katrina has been, at bottom, the same one that has bedeviled the administration since 9/11. The president came to office with a deep antipathy toward big government that has turned out to be utterly inappropriate for the world he inherited. The result has not been less government, but it has definitely been inept government.
We have already seen what happened to the Federal Emergency Management Agency when it was taken over by an administration that didn't like large federal agencies with sweeping mandates. For Iraq, the White House asserted that open-ended and no-bid contracts doled out to big corporations run by people known to government officials would mean swifter, more efficient operations. What we got was gross inefficiency, which has run up costs while failing in many cases to do the jobs required.
Given this history, it's impossible not to worry about what will happen to the billions of dollars being committed to New Orleans, especially since the Army Corps of Engineers' top man in the reclamation effort was once the corps' top man overseeing contracts in Iraq.
The administration is staffed several levels deep with officials who share their leader's distrust of large, expensive federal undertakings. But it is now faced with an unprecedented task: housing hundreds of thousands of homeless people, making sure their children are educated over the short term and eventually getting them a start on a new life. There is no way to do that without a focused federal effort.
Last night, the president was particularly strong when discussing the nation's shocking lack of preparedness for disaster, and the stark fact - obvious to every television viewer around the globe - that the people left homeless and endangered by Katrina were in the main poor and black.
The entire nation, he said, saw the poverty that "has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America." Polls show that black Americans are far angrier and more skeptical than whites about the administration's actions since the storm. Mr. Bush's words could begin a much-needed healing process. But that will happen only if they are followed by deeds that are as principled, disciplined and ambitious as Mr. Bush's speech.
From the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/opinion/16krugman.html?ex=1127534400&en=d57d9460a614d7b7&ei=5070&emc=eta1
September 16, 2005
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Now it begins: America's biggest relief and recovery program since the New Deal. And the omens aren't good.
It's a given that the Bush administration, which tried to turn Iraq into a laboratory for conservative economic policies, will try the same thing on the Gulf Coast. The Heritage Foundation, which has surely been helping Karl Rove develop the administration's recovery plan, has already published a manifesto on post-Katrina policy. It calls for waivers on environmental rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas. And if any of the people killed by Katrina, most of them poor, had a net worth of more than $1.5 million, Heritage wants to exempt their heirs from the estate tax.
Still, even conservatives admit that deregulation, tax cuts and privatization won't be enough. Recovery will require a lot of federal spending. And aside from the effect on the deficit - we're about to see the spectacle of tax cuts in the face of both a war and a huge reconstruction effort - this raises another question: how can discretionary government spending take place on that scale without creating equally large-scale corruption?
It's possible to spend large sums honestly, as Franklin D. Roosevelt demonstrated in the 1930's. F.D.R. presided over a huge expansion of federal spending, including a lot of discretionary spending by the Works Progress Administration. Yet the image of public relief, widely regarded as corrupt before the New Deal, actually improved markedly.
How did that happen? The answer is that the New Deal made almost a fetish out of policing its own programs against potential corruption. In particular, F.D.R. created a powerful "division of progress investigation" to look into complaints of malfeasance in the W.P.A. That division proved so effective that a later Congressional investigation couldn't find a single serious irregularity it had missed.
This commitment to honest government wasn't a sign of Roosevelt's personal virtue; it reflected a political imperative. F.D.R.'s mission in office was to show that government activism works. To maintain that mission's credibility, he needed to keep his administration's record clean.
But George W. Bush isn't F.D.R. Indeed, in crucial respects he's the anti-F.D.R.
President Bush subscribes to a political philosophy that opposes government activism - that's why he has tried to downsize and privatize programs wherever he can. (He still hopes to privatize Social Security, F.D.R.'s biggest legacy.) So even his policy failures don't bother his strongest supporters: many conservatives view the inept response to Katrina as a vindication of their lack of faith in government, rather than as a reason to reconsider their faith in Mr. Bush.
And to date the Bush administration, which has no stake in showing that good government is possible, has been averse to investigating itself. On the contrary, it has consistently stonewalled corruption investigations and punished its own investigators if they try to do their jobs.
That's why Mr. Bush's promise last night that he will have "a team of inspectors general reviewing all expenditures" rings hollow. Whoever these inspectors general are, they'll be mindful of the fate of Bunnatine Greenhouse, a highly regarded auditor at the Army Corps of Engineers who suddenly got poor performance reviews after she raised questions about Halliburton's contracts in Iraq. She was demoted late last month.
Turning the funds over to state and local governments isn't the answer, either. F.D.R. actually made a point of taking control away from local politicians; then as now, patronage played a big role in local politics.
And our sympathy for the people of Mississippi and Louisiana shouldn't blind us to the realities of their states' political cultures. Last year the newsletter Corporate Crime Reporter ranked the states according to the number of federal public-corruption convictions per capita. Mississippi came in first, and Louisiana came in third.
Is there any way Mr. Bush could ensure an honest recovery program? Yes - he could insulate decisions about reconstruction spending from politics by placing them in the hands of an autonomous agency headed by a political independent, or, if no such person can be found, a Democrat (as a sign of good faith).
He didn't do that last night, and probably won't. There's every reason to believe the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, like the failed reconstruction of Iraq, will be deeply marred by cronyism and corruption.
From the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/opinion/14dowd.html?ex=1127534400&en=a5cebc1a7a6916f5&ei=5070&emc=eta1
September 14, 2005
By MAUREEN DOWD
I hate spending time in hospitals and nursing homes. I find them to be some of the most depressing places on earth.
Maybe that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45 in a New Orleans hospital and 34 in St. Rita's nursing home in the devastated St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans, haunt me so.
You're already vulnerable and alone when suddenly you're beset by nature and betrayed by your government.
At St. Rita's, 34 seniors fought to live with what little strength they had as the lights went out and the water rose over their legs, over their shoulders, over their mouths. As Gardiner Harris wrote in The Times, the failed defenses included a table nailed against a window and a couch pushed against a door.
Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, maybe by patients who dreamed of evacuating. Their drowned bodies were found swollen and unrecognizable a week later, as Mr. Harris reported, "draped over a wheelchair, wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor in several inches of muck."
At Memorial Medical Center, victims also suffered in 100-degree heat and died, some while waiting to be rescued in the four days after Katrina hit.
As Louisiana's death toll spiked to 423 yesterday, the state charged St. Rita's owners with multiple counts of negligent homicide, accusing them of not responding to warnings about the hurricane. "In effect," State Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. said, "I think that their inactions resulted in the death of these people."
President Bush continued to try to spin his own inaction yesterday, but he may finally have reached a patch of reality beyond spin. Now he's the one drowning, unable to rescue himself by patting small black children on the head during photo-ops and making scripted attempts to appear engaged. He can keep going back down there, as he will again on Thursday when he gives a televised speech to the nation, but he can never compensate for his tragic inattention during days when so many lives could have been saved.
He made the ultimate sacrifice and admitted his administration had messed up, something he'd refused to do through all of the other screw-ups, from phantom W.M.D. and the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to the miscalculations on the Iraq occupation and the insurgency, which will soon claim 2,000 young Americans.
How many places will be in shambles by the time the Bush crew leaves office?
Given that the Bush team has dealt with both gulf crises, Iraq and Katrina, with the same deadly mixture of arrogance and incompetence, and a refusal to face reality, it's frightening to think how it will handle the most demanding act of government domestic investment since the New Deal.
Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention.
Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf Coast.
The aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek said, because he can be "cold and snappish in private." Mike Allen wrote in Time about one "youngish aide" who was so terrified about telling Mr. Bush he was wrong about something during the first term, he "had dry heaves" afterward.
The president had to be truly zoned out not to jump at the word "hurricane," given that he has always used his father's term as a reverse playbook and his father almost lost Florida in 1992 because of his slow-footed response to Hurricane Andrew. And W.'s chief of staff, Andy Card, was the White House transportation secretary the senior President Bush sent to the rescue after FEMA bungled that one.
W. has said he prefers to get his information straight up from aides, rather than filtered through newspapers or newscasts. But he surrounds himself with weak sisters who don't have the nerve to break bad news to him, or ideologues with agendas that require warping reality or chuckleheaded cronies like Brownie.
The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late.
This piece calls on the Congressional Black Caucus to lead the struggle
for the right of those dispersed from New Orleans to return and control
the rebuilding.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/radio_bc/091505/091505_radio_bc_text.html
Incidentally, in the September 19 issue of Newsweek*, there is a detailed story about the failures on many levels that led to catastrophe, yet again there is a reference to New Orleans being "...turned into a Third World hellhole."
The following commentary by Mukoma Wa Ngugi addresses this Third World designation.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=8694
ZNet | U.S.
New Orleans and the Third World
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi; September 08, 2005
Introduction
The devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina is being compared to disasters in the “Third World� but with no specific countries or disasters named. And if not compared to this black hole or repository of disaster that is the “Third World,� a comparison to Africa is as specific as it gets. “New Orleans is a scene from the Third World�, “like the Third World�, “US Handles the crisis like a third world country�, “bodies floating on water reminiscent of Africa,� etc. This has been a constant with news commentators, analysts, members of the senate and congress and other sections of America commenting on New Orleans. The accompanying statements to this have been “I cannot believe this is America� or “This is not supposed to happen in America�. It is supposed to and can only happen somewhere else. Attending a food festival event in Madison, Wisconsin I overheard a joke – “Where is New Orleans again?� New Orleans is next to Somalia�.
What role is the “Third World� playing in how Americans are dealing with the disaster? Where does the “Third World� fit in the imagination of the American? What does it mean to say that this is not supposed to happen in the United States? To me, it is almost as if by displacing disasters and human suffering to the “Third World,� the New Orleans disaster is not really happening in the United States. New Orleans is “out there� and everyone else is safe and American – the crisis in New Orleans is happening in a “Third World� outpost and the United States remains rich, strong and invulnerable.
The American citizen has been stewing in nationalism, manifest destiny and the myth of the democratic society that errors but never oppresses or marginalizes for so long that even a natural disaster cannot be seen and understood outside this lens. And the fact that most of the victims are predominantly poor and African American is not being understood as a creation of very specific domestic policies and conservative ideologies; it has to be filtered through the “Third World�. As if a disaster from that “part of the world� somehow managed to sneak through the porous Mexican borders.
Bush’s Remarks
It is interesting therefore to look at President Bush’s remarks after touring New Orleans on September 2nd after four days of inaction. His first sentence was “I’ve just completed a tour of some devastated country�. A detached statement but it gets worse – a little later he says “I know the people of this part of the world are suffering…� and he goes on to talk about how progress is being made. Then he says “The people in this part of the world have got to understand…� Shortly after this, he says “You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute, but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen� and again refers to his constituents as “good folks of this part of the world�. It is almost as if he is in a different country consoling its citizenry. He himself is so detached about what is happening in the very country he leads that he refers to it as “this part of the world�. As far as I know, no one in the mainstream media picked this up, they too are reporting on that “part of the world�.
Believing that humor is the best medicine, in the same speech he also makes a rather tasteless joke: “I believe the town where I used to come [to] from Houston, Texas, to enjoy myself, occasionally too much, will be that very same town, that it will be a better place to come to�. Now, this is a President who up to this point has not visited New Orleans, a disaster area that is being acknowledged as probably the worst in recent U.S. history, yet, speaking to an evacuated, wounded and dying constituency, he refers to their drowned city that was their whole life as his old party ground. All in all President Bush gives the kind of speech a visiting leader would make during a hurriedly prepared press conference after being caught unawares by a natural disaster. It captures his inability to empathize, to really be one with the victims.
The Myth and the “Third World�
An American dying in a natural disaster will look like a human being dying in any natural disaster and not necessarily like an African. A homeless American looks like any homeless human being and not always like an African. And a natural disaster should not be seen as somebody else’s natural disaster but as one that afflicts all humanity. We are of a common humanity. It is the myth that only other nations torture that led to Abu Ghraib. It is the myth that only other countries have political prisoners that keeps political activists like Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier in American jails for fighting American marginalization. It is the belief that only other countries exile those that oppose their policies that has led to the bounty on Assata Shakur – exiled in Cuba for fighting for African American rights – being raised to one million dollars. And it is the myth that only other countries ignore and exploit their poor that led to the disaster in New Orleans.
But there are ways in which America is like the “Third World�. Privatization, which in “Third World� Countries becomes structural adjustment programs, has been happening in the United States since the Reagan years of small government, through the Clinton years that saw a full assault on Welfare and affirmative action originally designed to buoy the marginalized, and through the Bush years that have been rewarding the rich while taking away from the poor through Federal and Supreme Court nominations that support big business and reduce the power of labor unions, among other things. These have been the years of ‘blaming the victim’ while preying on them. They are poor because they are lazy – ! enter the “welfare queen�. While the mainstream United States was busy trying to convince itself that poverty and racism were things of the past or happened only to other nations, the marginalized were becoming even more vulnerable. Most of the victims in New Orleans are black and poor – race and class - an inversion of Frantz Fanon’s one is rich because he/she is white and one is white because he/she is rich to read one is poor because he/she is black and one is black because he/she is poor. Just like in the “Third World� in times of natural disasters and wars, it is the most victimized in New Orleans that are doing most of the dying.
Contradictions
The reasons why the poor couldn't leave the city are quite easy to understand. They couldn't afford it. They simply did not have cars or money for transportation, are jobless, or live pay-check to pay-check and couldn't have had any money saved up for relocation. Where poor people owned houses to which they had mortgaged their lives, where their homes had become the marker of their humanity and achievement, staying put and essentially fighting for their lives was the only option.
Like the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, or the ongoing genocide in Darfur, this particular disaster had been telegraphed – we all knew it was going to happen, and more political and economic will, including a more comprehensive effort to evacuate the city of New Orleans, could have minimized human suffering. What makes it even worse is that the millions being pledged now by private citizens and corporations and the 10.5 billion initially pledged by the government could have saved New Orleans ten times over through improvement of infrastructure. Because of the federal government’s push for privatization which translates into public services being slashed or sold to private companies, perhaps the government simply no longer has structures in place to handle disasters. This could explain why Bush ended his speech with “If you want to help, if you're listening to this broadcast, contribute cash to the Salvation Army and the Red Cross�. Each death in New Orleans was preventable. But money is not made in prevention but in reconstruction. Soon, like in Iraq, the big contracts for reconstruction will be on their way – some corporations will make a killing. Let the bidding begin.
Also, it is with a sense of irony that one reads of corporations like Wal-Mart contributing millions of dollars to the relief efforts. Yet were their employees in New Orleans working in better conditions and with better pay, some of those who couldn't afford to evacuate would have been able to do so. These corporations are responsible for the loss of jobs through outside contracting to sweatshops in “Third World� countries where in turn occasional fires break out leading to hundreds of deaths. In “Third World� countries, they no longer pay government taxes in the tax free trade zones, leading to further destruction of already fragile and poor economies. Where these corporations have remained in the United States as retailers and manufacturers, they have seen to wages being cut. They are rabidly against unions and essentially use the community the same way colonial companies used colonized communities – for cheap labor, extraction of raw materials and of course as buyers of products whose production is finished elsewhere.
Thus coupled with a government that has engineered its own version of structural adjustment to maximize profit, and corporations that economically and politically colonize a community, the vulnerability – which in real terms is the result of victimization – seen in New Orleans is not a surprise. Rather, it is the culmination of well planned and orchestrated policies that consolidate wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the poor. Globalization is not resulting in a world that becomes better as it gets smaller, but rather in a world where poverty becomes more prevalent and more apparent. This globalization of poverty makes New Orleans a village in everybody’s backyard. Instead of outsourcing disaster to an unnamed “Third World� it seems to me that citizens of the United States should be placing the responsibility for the preventable deaths and suffering in New Orleans on their government and corporate board rooms.
Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Conversing with Africa: Politics of Change and the forthcoming, Looking at America: Politics of Change.
________________
*The Newsweek story is entitled, "How Bush Blew It," and will be published in the September 19, 2005 issue.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9287434/
Information forwarded by the UCLA African Studies Center -- www.international.ucla.edu/africa
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 8:22 AM
Subject: Lawyers lives & the justice system devastated
I know your hearts, in particular, are for lawyers. Think of this...
5,000 - 6,000 lawyers (1/3 of the lawyers in Louisiana) have lost their offices, their libraries, their computers with all information thereon, their client files - possibly their clients, as one attorney who e-mailed me noted. As I mentioned before, they are scattered from Florida to Arizona and have nothing to return to. Their children's schools are gone and, optimistically, the school systems in 8 parishes/counties won't be re-opened until after December. They must re-locate their lives.
Our state supreme court is under some water - with all appellate files and evidence folders/boxes along with it. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals building is under some water - with the same effect. Right now there may only be 3-4 feet of standing water but, if you think about it, most files are kept in the basements or lower floors of courthouses. What effect will that have on the lives of citizens and lawyers throughout this state and this area of the country? And on the law?
The city and district courts in as many as 8 parishes/counties are under water, as well as 3 of our circuit courts - with evidence/files at each of them ruined. The law enforcement offices in those areas are under water - again, with evidence ruined. 6,000 prisoners in 2 prisons and one juvenile facility are having to be securely relocated. We already have over-crowding at most Louisiana prisons and juvenile facilities. What effect will this have? And what happens when the evidence in their cases has been destroyed? Will the guilty be released upon the communities? Will the innocent not be able to prove their innocence?
Our state bar offices are under water. Our state disciplinary offices are under water - again with evidence ruined. Our state disciplinary offices are located on Veteran's Blvd. in Metairie. Those of you who have been watching the news, they continue to show Veteran's Blvd. It's the shot with the destroyed Target store and shopping center under water and that looks like a long canal. Our Committee on Bar Admissions is located there and would have been housing the bar exams which have been turned in from the recent July bar exam (this is one time I'll pray the examiners were late in turning them in - we were set to meet in 2 weeks to go over the results). Will all of those new graduates have to retake the bar exam?
Two of the 4 law schools in Louisiana are located in New Orleans (Loyola and Tulane - the 2 private ones that students have already paid about $8,000+ for this semester to attend). Another 1,000+ lawyers-to-be whose lives have been detoured. I've contacted professors at both schools but they can't reach anyone at those schools and don't know the amount of damage they've taken. Certainly, at least, this semester is over. I'm trying to reach the Chancellor's at Southern and LSU here in Baton Rouge to see if there's anything we can do to take in the students and/or the professors. I think I mentioned before, students from out of state have beens stranded at at least 2 of the other universities in New Orleans - they're moving up floor after floor as the water rises. Our local news station received a call from some medical students at Tulane Medical Center who were now on the 5th floor of the dormitories as the water had risen. One of them had had a heart attack and they had no medical supplies and couldn't reach anyone - 911 was busy, local law enforcement couldn't be reached, they were going through the phone book and reached a news station 90 miles away!! It took the station almost 45 minutes to finally find someone with FEMA to try to get in to them!!
And, then, there are the clients whose files are lost, whose cases are stymied. Their lives, too, are derailed. Of course, the vast majority live in the area and that's the least of their worries. But, the New Orleans firms also have a large national and international client base. For example, I received an e-mail from one attorney friend who I work with on some crucial domestic violence (spousal and child) cases around the nation - those clients could be seriously impacted by the loss, even temporarily, of their attorney - and he can't get to them and is having difficulty contacting the many courts around the nation where his cases are pending. Large corporate clients may have their files blowing in the wind where the high rise buildings had windows blown out.
I woke up this morning to the picture of Veteran's Blvd which made me think of my students who just took the bar. My thoughts wandered from there to the effect on the Disciplinary Offices. Then my thoughts continued on. I'm sure I'm still missing a big part of the future picture. It's just devastating. Can you imagine something of this dimension in your state?
Michelle
Professor Michelle Ghetti
Southern University Law Center
Baton Rouge, LA 70813
225-771-4900
*******************************************************************
PART TWO:
11. Katrina's Real Name – Global Warming
12. Cops Trapped Survivors In New Orleans
13. Lawlessness
14. Katrina's Forgotten Victims: Native American Tribes
15. Indian Groups Raise Money For Katrina Victims
16. Ethnic Communities Rally To Help Katrina Survivors
17. National Anti-Racist Organization Calls For U.N. Investigation Of Federal Response To Katrina; Help Rebuild The People's Institute For Survival
18. Support Hard Knock Radio and Third World Majority's Media Justice
19. Castro & Chavez Offer Hurricane Aid
20. Poem: A Prayer Band, By Suheir Hammad
*******************************************************************
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.
Ross Gelbspan is author of ''The Heat Is On" and ''Boiling Point."
*******************************************************************
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.
"We commandeered public transit buses and we took them to higher and safer ground" at the junction of Interstate-10 and Causeway Boulevard where "there was food and shelter," he said.
**********************************************************************
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
The author is an Associate Professor of American Studies and History at New York University. He is the author of Soul by Soul, a book about the slave market in New Orleans.
*******************************************************************
14. KATRINA'S FORGOTTEN VICTIMS: NATIVE AMERICAN TRIBES
News Report, C. Stone Brown,
Imdiversity, Sep 11, 2005
http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=a58740ea9116f7315f40fe4eb23513fc
The early news headlines for Hurricane Katrina highlighted some black New Orleans residents "taking" goods from businesses. Days later, the coverage shifted from "looting" to sympathetic coverage of black evacuees and criticism of President Bush and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But despite the constant media coverage, Native Americans have become Katrina's forgotten victims.
Native American tribes that stretch across the Gulf States of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi affected by the wrath of Hurricane Katrina largely have been ignored.
"What we are hearing is there has been no contact or minimum contact with most of the tribes," said Robert Holden, National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), who estimates there are several thousand Native Americans living in the hurricane's path. But like other news accounts regarding the dead, there are no firm numbers on the death toll.
What we do know is there are at least six federally recognized tribes located in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. They include the Poarch Band Creek in Alabama, Coushatta India Tribe, Jena Band of Choctaw and Tunica-Biloxi Tribe in Louisiana, and the Chitimacha Tribe and the Choctaw Indians in Mississippi.
Although communications with the tribes has been very limited, Holden said there was one particular tribal area near in Chalmette, La., that had a gruesome story. "This tribal representative said they were using Chalmette High School as a morgue. Evidently, they are in proximity to New Orleans, and they have heard from no one in five or six days."
Chalmette is located approximately nine miles east of New Orleans in St. Bernard Parish, one of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina.
"They were inundated with water, completely washed away, not only their homes, but their livelihood … fisherman, shrimpers, folks who everything they had was destroyed," said Holden.
The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians remains unreachable by phone; however, news reports indicate power outages on the reservation with evacuees seeking shelter at the tribal hotels, according to the NCAI.
The Native American community has taken action. Instead of waiting for relief efforts by local, state and federal government officials, the NCIA has teamed with the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA) to raise relief funds for Native American tribes in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.
The goal is to raise at least $1 million. NIGA started the fundraising effort by contributing $5,000. "The word is beginning to go out … many tribes have already implemented relief efforts. Some have sent trained responders, police, law-enforcement folks," said Holden.
For more information on the NCAI relief fund, go to www.ncai.org
*******************************************************************
15. INDIAN GROUPS RAISE MONEY FOR KATRINA VICTIMS
NIGA announces $1 million goal, Cherokees send people and supplies
Native American Times 9/6/2005
http://nativetimes.com/index.asp?action=displayarticle&article_id=6944
http://www.nativetimes.com/index.asp?action=displayarticle&article_id=6951
The National Indian Gaming Association has set a goal of raising $1 million for the Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief Fund, joining a growing list of Native American groups seeking to help.
NIGA officials say an account has been set up to collect funds from American Indian tribes to help provide relief for the hundreds of thousands of residents of the Gulf Coast states affected by the killer hurricane.
"This is one of the worst tragedies in American history which demands our full-scale attention and concern as these regions begin rebuilding their lives, communities and economies out of the decimation that occurred earlier this week," said NIGA Chairman Ernie Stevens Jr. "NIGA and our member tribes are absolutely committed to assisting in the relief effort and are asking all American Indian tribes to help in this dark hour. Our thoughts and prayers are with all of the victims, the survivors and their families at this time."
NIGA spokeswoman Suzette Brewer said the agency is contributing $5,000 to begin the effort and is calling upon all tribes to help meet the $1 million goal.
Mississippi Choctaw Principal Chief Phillip Martin said that his tribe had been putting up tribal members and non-Indians from the coast at the tribe's casino hotel, but that they will be moved to other areas when the power returns.
"We're going to do everything we can to find a place for them," said Martin. "But we have our hands full trying to get water and power back to the reservation. Clean water is of the greatest importance right now - because so much depends on it."
Donations may be made to the Spirit of Sovereignty Foundation, attn: Hurricane Katrina Fund, 224 Second St. S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003. For more information on how to contribute, please call Brewer at 202-548-3817 or email to sbrewer@indiangaming.org.
Meanwhile the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana is using its casino to provide relief. Officials say casino employees are volunteering to help survivors, food drives are taking place and casino profits are being donated.
"What we saw on the news was total devastation. Many men, women, and children will be without homes, food, and clothing for weeks to come. Our casino associates were quick to reach out to those who sought shelter in Allen Parish," said Stuart John, Interim General Manager at Coushatta Casino Resort. "The casino will continue its support for families in local shelters as needed."
In Oklahoma the Cherokee Nation has dispatched marshals, food and other supplies to hurricane-ravaged areas. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation's tribal council is donating money and health care items to the relief effort, and has actually adopted the Louisiana city of Bogalusa. The tribe is sending relief materials to the city.
The United Keetowah Band of Cherokee Indians is accepting donations to help Katrina victims housed at the Camp Gruber shelter in northeastern Oklahoma.
There are over a thousand people still in the camp. Donations can be dropped off at the tribe's Tahlequah casino.
In Montana the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes of the Fort Belknap Reservation are giving away meat from at least 10 bison in the tribe's herd, said Janice Hawley, personnel manager.
"We are trying to do everything we can on this end to try and help out," Hawley said.
In Washington State the Chehalis Tribe is using their tribal office as headquarters to collect donations of baby diapers, baby food, baby formula, adult diapers, bottled water, blankets and clean clothes.
In Michigan the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians are holding an Indian taco dinner to benefit hurricane victims. Tribal officials have also vowed to match proceeds generated by the dinner.
The National Congress of Indians has already started its own fundraiser.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of the Indian Nations located in the region affected by Hurricane Katrina," said NCAI President Tex G. Hall. "It is times like this when it is important for Native people to come together to help one another out."
The NCAI encourages tribes who wish to aid those affected by Hurricane Katrina to send donations to:
NCAI
1301 Connecticut Ave, NW
Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036
*Please put Hurricane Relief in subject line of check.
All donations will go directly to tribes in the affected region of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
*******************************************************************
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.
The Taiwan-based Tzu Chi Foundation, a Buddhist charity, announced it will donate $4 million to hurricane relief efforts, reports the Chinese daily, Sing Tao. The foundation has set up a relief center in Beaumont, La., for hurricane evacuees, and is giving $100 Wal-Mart gift cards and 30-minute phone cards to displaced Americans. A Thai woman who was one of the more than 700 people who arrived on the first day the center opened cried when she saw the Asian American disaster workers. She said that she had been to Taiwan and remembered how compassionate people there were.
*******************************************************************
17. NATIONAL ANTI-RACIST ORGANIZATION CALLS FOR U.N. INVESTIGATION OF FEDERAL RESPONSE TO KATRINA
THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE FOR SURVIVAL AND BEYOND
Ronald V. Chisom, Executive Director
www.pisab.org
For more information,
Contact Ronald Chisom, 504-782-6525, or Kimberley Richards, 504-722-3213
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SEPTEMBER 6, 2005
The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, a 25-year old, multiracial organization headquartered in New Orleans and one of the nation's foremost anti-racist training organizations, today called for a full investigation by the United Nations of the federal response to the Katrina catastrophe in Mississippi and Louisiana, and especially in the city of New Orleans.
This calamity demonstrates how racism manifests itself in every institution in this country. With the national and international coverage of hurricane Katrina, the world has seen the real face of racism in America. Only an international body will be able to hold accountable the political leaders who had the knowledge but did not act, who had the power, but did not use that power to preserve the lives and human dignity of all people.
Rooted in the culture of New Orleans, The People's Institute is intimately familiar with the history of racism in New Orleans and the south. Although it is a national organization with a national and international network of anti-racist organizers and trainers, The People's Institute feels acutely the impact of Katrina, having lost its offices and the homes of many of its staff.
We need the United Nations to oversee an international Public Works campaign similar to the post-tsunami rebuilding efforts in South Asia and the Pacific. We must prevent this tragedy from becoming a "cash cow" to benefit those who have historically profited from war and crisis. We must build with a vision of social justice and economic equity, so that poor people do not simply end up with "services" but lack economic power. Only an international body can guarantee that."
Founded in 1980, The People's Institute has provided "Undoing Racismâ„¢" workshops and consultations to over 120,000 people of every race, religion, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds throughout the United States as well as internationally in South America, Puerto Rico, Cuba, South Africa, and Japan. The organization is committed to assisting community organizers, leaders and organizations deepen their understanding of the systemic, economic and social impact of racism on their lives, their family, and their communities.
Let's not turn off our TV sets and shrug off the deadly results we have witnessed as someone else's responsibility. Instead of papering over our inequities and pushing poor Black people back into the neighborhoods where other Americans don't have to see them again, we can rebuild a truly equitable New Orleans - a truly humane America.
The People's Institute believes that to accomplish these goals, the people of the United States must examine the roots of our racism, analyze our multigenerational national bias against people of color and its corollary bias in favor of people because they are white. We must critique the effects of decades of neglect suffered by poor people across the country, then transform our institutions, our policies, and our culture.
First, we must let the people flooded out by Katrina come back and be paid a living wage to rebuild their own communities!
###
Ronald Chisom can be reached at 504-782-6525;
Dr. Kimberley Richards can be reached at 504-722-3213.
For more information about The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, visit our website at www.pisab.org
---
PLEASE HELP REBUILD THE PEOPLE'S INSTITUTE!
Dear Friends and Supporters of The People's Institute,
Even as we continue to grieve for the women, men, and children who remain trapped in New Orleans without food and water, we are grateful that the family members of The People's Institute are safe. We give thanks for all the sustaining calls, thoughts, and prayers coming from across the country and the world. We are most thankful that the spirit of The People's Institute continues to survive - and thrive - within each of us!
We ask your help in rebuilding The People's Institute so it can move from Survival to Beyond. Your gift will ensure that the New Orleans-based People's Institute family can meet its immediate, intermediate, and long-term financial needs. With your help, we will move beyond this crisis and continue to organize for a future of justice, equity and full humanity for all.
The headquarters of the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond are likely submerged in water. The organization has lost its home office and many national staff have probably lost their homes. They are living day-to-day in rooms and hotels scattered all over the United States.
Please send your tax-deductible contribution today to the People's Institute Survival and Beyond Fund. You can make a secure electronic donation via the People's Institute new website, www.pisab.org, or mail your gift to Peoples Institute NYC, P.O. Box 250809, New York, NY 10025. Also, as we re-establish our national offices, your contributions of office equipment and supplies will be most welcome. We will make every effort to acknowledge your gifts promptly. The work of The People's Institute continues through its network of trainers and organizers across the country and internationally. Scheduled workshops will continue as planned. We welcome new training opportunities. Contact us today! Call Kimberley Richards at 724-347-2916 or David Billings/Margery Freeman at 212-678-4947. We urge each of you to send this letter, with a personal note of your own, to your colleagues, friends and family. Let's show that we truly are a net that works!
With thanks to each of you for your commitment to the continued work and life of The People's Institute,
Ronald Chisom, Executive Director
Tiphanie Eugene, Administrative Director
*******************************************************************
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:
Stories we are researching to cover (we are still identifying individuals and community organizations as sources):
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.
For any other questions please contact Hard Knock Radio and Third World Majority below:
Hard Knock Radio
C/o KPFA
1929 M L King Jr Way
Berkeley, CA 94704 USA
510-848-6767
hardknock@kpfa.org
Third World Majority
369 15th St
Oakland, CA 94612
510-682-6624
Thenmozhi@ureach.comwandalove@gmail.com
*******************************************************************
19. CASTRO & CHAVEZ OFFER HURRICANE AID
CASTRO OFFERS MEDICAL HELP
www.Nola.com
"Our country is ready to send, in the small hours of morning, 100 clinicians and specialists in comprehensive general medicine, who at dawn tomorrow, (Saturday) could be in Houston International Airport, Texas, the closest to the region struck by the tragedy, in order to be transferred by air, sea or river to the isolated shelters, facilities and neighborhoods in the city of New Orleans, where the population and families are that require emergency medical care or first aid," Cuban President Fidel Castro said in a televised annoucement Friday.
"These Cuban personnel would be carrying backpacks with 24 kilograms of medications, known to be essential in such situations to save lives, as well as basic diagnosis kits. They would be prepared to work alone or in groups of two or more, depending on the circumstances, for as long as necessary.
"Likewise, Cuba is ready to send via Houston, or any other airport of your choosing, 500 additional specialists in comprehensive general medicine, with the same equipment, who could be at their destination point at noon or in the afternoon of tomorrow, Saturday, Sept. 3.
"A third group of 500 specialists in comprehensive general medicine could be arriving in the morning of Sunday, Sept. 4. Thus, the 1100 said medical doctors, with the resources described tantamount to 26.4 tons of medications and diagnosis kits, would be caring for the neediest persons in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.
"These medical doctors have the necessary international experience and elementary knowledge of the English language that would allow them to communicate with the patients.
"We stand ready waiting for the US authorities' response."
The Bush administration, which has imposed travel and trade sanctions against the communist government, isn't likely to accept the offer.
URL:
http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breakingtp/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_Times-Picayune/archives/2005_09.html
-------------------
VENEZUELA'S CHAVEZ OFFERS HURRICANE AID
By IAN JAMES, Thursday, September 1, 2005
(09-01) 16:47 PDT CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) --
Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez is offering planeloads of soldiers and aid workers to help American victims of Hurricane Katrina, while at the same time taking aim at the U.S. government for its handling of the crisis.
Some critics on Thursday said Chavez, a leading voice for the Latin American left, seemed to be using the disaster to try to make the Bush administration look bad.
While confusion reigned in New Orleans, Chavez said the looting was to be expected under such circumstances.
"As more information comes out now, a terrible truth is becoming evident: That government doesn't have evacuation plans," Chavez said Wednesday night during a speech.
He called Bush "the king of vacations" and noted he had been at his Texas ranch and when the storm hit and didn't provide leadership. "There were many innocent people who left in the direction of the hurricane. No one told them where they should go."
A controversy erupted in another disaster situation in 1999 when Chavez turned down an offer for U.S. military engineers to come help reopen a main coastal highway following catastrophic floods and mudslides.
He said Venezuela didn't need the Americans' help.
The U.S. government has yet to respond to Chavez's offer to send planeloads of aid, including 2,000 soldiers, firefighters, volunteers and other disaster specialists. Venezuela, the world's fifth largest oil exporter, also pledged $1 million in aid through its Citgo Petroleum Corp., plus fuel to help in hard-hit areas.
But Venezuelan commentator Ibsen Martinez, a frequent government critic, said the aid offer by Chavez seems to serve other intentions as well.
"He's trying to win a political game," Martinez said.
"It's very astute."
Just as Chavez has been offering preferential oil deals to allies across the Americas, the aid offer and simultaneous criticism appear aimed at influencing international opinion and reinforcing support among the U.S. and Latin American left, Martinez said.
"I think he's speaking for the gallery. He's bragging," Martinez said, adding that sending aid to wealthier Americans could irritate some poor Venezuelans but that in general Chavez's remarks seemed aimed at putting forward a sympathetic face.
Venezuela is a leading supplier of fuel to the United States, though relations have been tense between Washington and Chavez, who says he is leading a "socialist" revolution and blames U.S. "imperialism" for many of the world's problems, from poverty to global warming.
Chavez's criticisms of the U.S. response to the disaster came two days after he met with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who said he hoped their talks would help both sides cut down on "hostile rhetoric."
His government, meanwhile, has demanded U.S. authorities take legal action against conservative commentator Pat Robertson for suggesting on his TV program last week that Chavez should be assassinated because he poses a danger to the region. Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition of America and a prominent Bush supporter, later apologized for his remarks.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/09/01/international/i164729D78.DTL
*******************************************************************
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
suheir hammad
Dear INCITE! Friends & Supporters:
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence is stunned by the catastrophe and tragic loss in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In New Orleans and in many other communities along the Gulf, people are experiencing unimaginable devastating conditions. We are especially alarmed for the people who have the fewest resources, who were unable to evacuate New Orleans because of poverty, who were – and in some cases still are - trapped without food, water, and medical attention. Because of racism and classism, these people are also overwhelming folks of color, and because of sexism, they are overwhelmingly women of color - low income and poor women, single mothers, pregnant women, women with disabilities, older women and women who are caregivers to family and community members who were unable to leave the city. Women living at the intersections of systems of oppressions are paying the price for militarism, the abandonment of their communities, and ongoing racial and gender disparities in employment, income, and access to resources and supports.
As you know, the Historic Treme Community in New Orleans recently hosted INCITE!'s Color of Violence III conference this past March. Treme is the first free community established by Black people in the U.S. and is currently home to hundreds of Black women and their families, many of whom are poor. We are deeply hurting for the families and communities that graciously hosted us and who are now facing profoundly tragic circumstances.
We have heard word from most of the sistas who are part of the New Orleans INCITE! chapter, many of whom were able to evacuate. We also received word that one of the COV 3 volunteers had a mother and sister trapped on the 8th floor of New Orleans City Hall at some point - we sincerely hope that they have reached relative safety at this time. An early letter from Shana Griffin, member of the New Orleans INCITE! chapter and the national INCITE! steering committee, is below. Our hearts and prayers go out to them and we want to provide them with as much support and as many resources as we can so that they can mourn this horrible loss, re-connect with those that are missing, and, eventually, rebuild the rich and vital communities that have been devastated. Our thoughts and prayers are also with INCITE! chapters, members, COV III participants and supporters in other areas affected by the hurricane in the Gulf States.
Many of you have thoughtfully written and asked how you can help. At this time, we are asking for donations from our supporters so that we can send money to our New Orleans chapter members who will use it to help people who need it most. We have not given up on our sisters and brothers in New Orleans and other places that have been hit. We are dedicated to pooling our resources and using those resources to continue to organize plans for survival, safety, and justice in New Orleans.
Please organize fundraisers in your hometowns and communities and send your donations to the following address:
Nada Elia
13112 - 184th Ave. NE
Redmond, WA 98052
(Nada Elia is a member of INCITE!'s national steering committee and will be organizing the donations to make sure the resources get to New Orleans.) Please make checks out to INCITE and put "New Orleans" in the memo line. Thank you very, very much for your generous support.
***
That said, we'd like to take this opportunity to express our deep outrage at the federal government's shamefully slow and pathetic response to this disaster. It is clear that the lack of rapid and effective response is based on a racist assessment of the value of the 150,000 mostly Black and poor people - a disproportionate number of whom are women - left behind in New Orleans. Further, INCITE! lays the blame of this disaster squarely at the feet of the U.S. government and particularly with George W. Bush for the following reasons:
1. GLOBAL WARMING
The Bush Administration's willful denial of the existence of global warming has kept this country from taking seriously global warming's dangerous consequences, one of which is an increase in the severity of hurricanes. Hurricane Katrina, for example, began as a relatively small hurricane off south Florida, but it was intensified to a level five hurricane – the highest level a hurricane can reach – because of the unusually blistering sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico caused in large part by global warming. (Ross Gelbspan, The Boston Globe, 8/30/05) However, the Bush Administration, leveraged by the coal and oil industries, relegated global warming to a myth rather than the emergency environmental crisis that it is. Because the impact of Hurricane Katrina had an exceedingly disproportionate impact of devastation on people of color, Bush's failure at addressing global warming is a catastrophic example of environmental racism.
2. WAR ON IRAQ & TAX CUTS FOR THE WEALTHY
Bush's illegal, imperialist, and racist war on and occupation of Iraq - ironically, to enable consumption of more oil, aggravating global warming - as well as tax cuts to wealthy Americans, directly pulled resources away from levee construction and emergency management in New Orleans, as well as from programs and entitlements which could have provided much needed support to poor people and communities in New Orleans. In 2003, as hurricane activity in the area increased and the levees continued to subside, federal funding was specifically redirected away from addressing these problems because of spending pressures of the war on Iraq. In early 2004, as the cost of the war on Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004 article in New Orleans CityBusiness. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of the war on Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars. (Will Bunch, Editor & Publisher, 8/30/05) The lack of resources to prepare for a disaster like Hurricane Katrina is a tragic example of how imperialism not only devastates communities of color abroad, but also communities of color here at home. This criminal neglect on the part of the government is responsible for thousands more deaths than the 9/11 attacks—deaths that could have been prevented with adequate funding.
3. STATE-SPONSORED VIOLENCE
It is unconscionable that, while thousands of people are suffering from horrible and deadly circumstances, the media continues to harp on the so-called "looting" in New Orleans. The constant media coverage of so-called "criminal behavior" instead of the outrageous and criminal lack of response from the federal government is racist and disgraceful.
Though we are also very distressed about reports of violence- including sexual and physical violence against women and children - in the area caused largely by widespread chaos and desperation, we condemn the current mass militarization of the area. There have been numerous accounts of vicious police brutality experienced by men and women who have survived untold horrors only to be subjected to abuse by the law enforcement officials sent to "save" them. Thousands of soldiers from the U.S. Marines and Army are currently in New Orleans to enforce evacuation orders and bring about "law and order." In response to violence in the area, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco shockingly remarked, "I have one message for these hoodlums. These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary." Besides the fact that it is against the law for federal troops to engage in domestic law enforcement, a militarized response is another piece of a racist pattern of de-humanizing poor people of color. Instead of seeing poor Black people driven desperate by the appallingly weak and unacceptably slow response of the federal government, the media and the government frame these primary victims as criminals or blame them for bringing the circumstances on themselves by "disobeying" mandatory evacuation orders when they had no means to comply.
We demand that there be no further criminalization of survivors of the hurricane as rescue, recovery, and rebuilding efforts go forward. We are particularly concerned about the creation of temporary accommodations - expected to serve as "home" to evacuees for up to six months which are akin to detention facilities, surrounded by barbed wire, in isolated parts of Utah, Oklahoma and other areas, from which inhabitants will be prohibited from leaving without a "pass" and in which they will be housed in gender segregated housing and prohibited from preparing their own meals. The prison-like conditions of such facilities have been justified by the soldiers guarding them as follows "do you know what kind of people we have coming here?"
We are also concerned about the adequate provision of medication, supplies, and child care to women with disabilities, HIV/AIDS, as well as mothers and elderly women. We are calling for support for survivor-led, women of color driven formations within evacuation facilities and for their demands. We are also calling for support of women's individual and collective efforts to ensure their safety from physical and sexual violence within evacuation facilities while submitting that the existence of such violence is no justification for violent repression of evacuee communities.
We call for support and safety for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender survivors of the hurricane, and for respect for the integrity of their families and of their needs in evacuation facilities. We are also deeply concerned for immigrant, and particularly undocumented women, who fear seeking assistance for fear of adverse immigration consequences and deportation. We call for efforts to connect incarcerated women, men, and children with their families, many of whom do not know the location of those dear to them, and for authorities to ensure conditions of confinement that meet international human rights standards. We are asking for charges against those who took food, water, and supplies in an effort to survive be immediately dropped. Finally, we are calling for support of domestic violence survivors who were displaced from shelters, support systems, and places of safety by the storm and may be at greater risk of violence from their abusers under current circumstances.
We demand an organized, rapid, and just response to save the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. We demand a comprehensive plan that is respectful of the value of the people who have been abandoned and responsive to their actual needs for survival and safety. We want immediate action operating from a vision of justice and hope.
We have pulled together a number of analyses of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, information about critical organizing and mobilization of poor people and people of color, letters from sistas from INCITE!, and other ways to help. Please contact us if you have questions, concerns, or resources. Our e-mail is incite_national@yahoo.com and our phone number is 484.932.3166.
In Solidarity,
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
*******************************************************************
Table of Contents:
Because of the length, this newsletter is being sent in two parts. This e-mail is Part One. The table of contents for both parts is below:
PART ONE:
1. Letter from Shana Griffin, INCITE! National & INCITE! New Orleans
2. Letter from Alisa Bierria, INCITE! National & INCITE! Seattle
3. List of Local Groups That Need Your Donation!
4. The People's Hurricane Fund
5. Notes From Inside New Orleans
6. Barbara Lee Blames War For Slow Response To Katrina
7. Chronology: Actions Have Consequences
8. The Untold Story of Katrina's Aftermath
9. Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have To Happen?
10. How New Orleans Was Lost
PART TWO:
11. Katrina's Real Name – Global Warming
12. Cops Trapped Survivors In New Orleans
13. Lawlessness
14. Katrina's Forgotten Victims: Native American Tribes
15. Indian Groups Raise Money For Katrina Victims
16. Ethnic Communities Rally To Help Katrina Survivors
17. National Anti-Racist Organization Calls For U.N. Investigation Of Federal Response To Katrina; Help Rebuild The People's Institute For Survival
18. Support Hard Knock Radio and Third World Majority's Media Justice
19. Castro & Chavez Offer Hurricane Aid
20. Poem: A Prayer Band, By Suheir Hammad
*******************************************************************
1. LETTER FROM SHANA GRIFFIN, INCITE! NATIONAL & INCITE! NEW ORLEANS
August 31, 2005
Peace sisters,
Tears are rolling down my face as I write this email… my family is safe. My son evacuated with my mother and sister on Saturday night. My partner and I left on Sunday morning before the mayor declared a mandatory evacuation out of the city.
I spoke with Kerrie on Monday morning and received a text message from Isabel on yesterday. I emailed Janelle and Tara and haven't heard back. My cell phone is not working…I can only receive text messages. I'm in west Louisiana, near the Texas/LA border. I'm having a very difficult time processing the devastation of the city, the displacement of my community, and the thousands of people who were unable to leave the city, many of whom are feared to be dead.
I will update everyone with the whereabouts of Janelle and Tara…who I suspect made it out of the city.
-shana
*******************************************************************
2. LETTER FROM ALISA BIERRIA, INCITE! NATIONAL & INCITE! SEATTLE
September 3, 2005
I am alternately consumed by rage and by grief. We are desperately trying to locate members of my family that we do not have information about and we cannot find. And I am having a hard time comprehending the destruction of a city that holds so much history and meaning for me, my family, and my ancestors.
Memories of hurricanes and floods past in New Orleans helps to put Katrina in a historical perspective. My mother lived through Hurricane Camille which hit New Orleans in 1969. As the water rose in their home, her father and other men hurriedly smashed wooden barrels to build emergency makeshift rafts to save families from drowning. In 1927, the Great Mississippi Flood poured down into New Orleans, provoking white people to round up Black people and force them into work camps held by armed guards. Black people were prevented from leaving, though the flooding had already begun. Some Black people were used as human sandbags at gunpoint to keep the levee from breaking. New Orleans has a history of Black bravery and ingenuity, as well as violent racism, in the face of environmental disaster.
And as I am searching for ways to deal with this current disaster, I am also feeling a familiar rage that I felt after 9/11/01. A terrible knowledge in my gut that this devastation could have been avoided if it had not been for the actions of my government.
But I am seeking out hope and I am turning my rage into organizing because I refuse to give up on my people.
Solidarity always,
Alisa
*******************************************************************
3. LIST OF LOCAL GROUPS THAT NEED YOUR DONATION!
The People's Hurricane Fund c/o The Young People's Project
99 Bishop Allen Drive
Cambridge, MA 02139
If you have comments of how to proceed or need more information, please email them to Curtis Muhammad ( muhammadcurtis@bellsouth.net) and Becky Belcore (bbelcore@hotmail.com).
NCAI
1301 Connecticut Ave, NW
Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036
*Please put Hurricane Relief in subject line of check.
All donations will go directly to tribes in the affected region of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
Hard Knock Radio
c/o KPFA
1929 M L King Jr Way
Berkeley, CA 94704 USA
510-848-6767
hardknock@kpfa.org
The Southern Relief Fund
c/o The Mississippi Workers' Center For Human Rights
PO Box 1223
Greenville, MS 38702
Phone: 662-334-1122 Fax: 662-334-1274
Att: Beni Ivey
Center For Democratic Renewal
PO Box 50469
Atlanta, GA 30302
Phone 404.221.0025 Fax 404.221.0045
Please make checks payable to CDR and write S.O.S. on the memo line.
They continued to demonstrate their commitment to uplifting communities even after leaving D.C. by teaching in public schools in New York and New Orleans, teaching at an HBCU in New Orleans, organizing a conference on traditional spiritual healing practices at NYU, working with underprivileged youth, opening their homes to friends and strangers alike, and making positive music.
Now Dorise, Michaela, and Tanya need our help. Their homes were located near Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. They lost almost every material thing in the hurricane and subsequent flooding – their houses, jobs, clothes, recording equipment, original recordings – everything. They need financial assistance to support them immediately and in the coming months. Please help. Because they are unable to access their bank accounts, please send cash or make donations of any amount payable to: e. christi cunningham or June Mines.
Please send donations to:
Fundraiser for Dorise, Michaela, and Tanya
c/o e. christi cunningham
1335 Jefferson St. NW
Washington, D.C. 20011
In addition, they will be coming to D.C. and have CDs for sale and are available for performances at social events. www.mothertonguemusic.net
MADRE
121 West 27th St., #301
New York, NY 10001
Funds will be used to:
- Relocate domestic violence survivors displaced by the hurricane.
- Purchase basic necessities, such as baby formula, food, diapers, and clothing.
- Pay for medical treatment and prescription medications.
- Pay for car repairs, gas, and public transportation to bring women and their children to safe housing in other communities.
The Twenty-First Century Foundation is a national public foundation created to promote strategic philanthropy by the African American/Black community. The Hurricane Katrina Recovery Fund of the Twenty-First Century Foundation will partner with organizations in the region to ensure that resources get to the people who need them most, and achieve the justice goals at the heart of this initiative.
You can also help by sending a check to the "FFLIC Hurricane Relief Fund" to: 920 Platt Street, Sulphur, LA 70663.
Please send checks payable to St. Thomas Health Services (their online capacity is down) to:
The Praxis Project (www.thepraxisproject.org)
1750 Columbia Road, NW, Second Floor
Washington, DC 20009
Please make sure that checks are payable to St. Thomas Health Services. Donations are tax deductible.
The NAACP is setting up command centers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama as part of its disaster relief efforts. NAACP units across the nation have begun collecting resources that will be placed on trucks and sent directly into the disaster areas. Also, the NAACP has established a disaster relief fund to accept monetary donations to aid in the relief effort.
*** You can mail or ship non perishable items to these following locations***
*******************************************************************
4. THE PEOPLE'S HURRICANE FUND
(9/4/05)
Displaced New Orleans Community Demands Action, Accountability and Initiates A People's Hurricane Fund
Not until the fifth day of the federal government's inept and inadequate emergency response to the New Orleans disaster did George Bush even acknowledge it was "unacceptable." "Unacceptable" doesn't begin to describe the depth of the neglect, racism and classism shown to the people of New Orleans. The government's actions and inactions were criminal. New Orleans, a city whose population is almost 70% percent black, 40% illiterate, and many are poor, was left day after day to drown, to starve and to die of disease and thirst.
The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funneled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants and the wealthy white districts of New Orleans like the French Quarter and the Garden District. We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans.
Community Labor United (CLU), a coalition of the progressive organizations throughout New Orleans, has brought community members together for eight years to discuss socio-economic issues. We have been communicating with people from The Quality Education as a Civil Right Campaign, the Algebra Project, the Young People's Project and the Louisiana Research Institute for Community Empowerment. We are preparing a press release and framing document that will be out as a draft later today for comments.
Here is what we are calling for:
We are in the process of setting up a central command post in Jackson, MS, where we will have phone lines, fax, email and a web page to centralize information. We will need volunteers to staff this office.
We have set up a People's Hurricane Fund that will be directed and administered by New Orleanian evacuees. The Young People's Project, a 501(c)3 organization formed by graduates of the Algebra Project, has agreed to accept donations on behalf of this fund. Donations can be mailed to:
The People's Hurricane Fund c/o The Young People's Project
99 Bishop Allen Drive
Cambridge, MA 02139
If you have comments of how to proceed or need more information, please email them to Curtis Muhammad ( muhammadcurtis@bellsouth.net) and Becky Belcore (bbelcore@hotmail.com).
Thank you.
*******************************************************************
5. NOTES FROM INSIDE NEW ORLEANS
by Jordan Flaherty
Friday, September 2, 2005
I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.
In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.
I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess.
One cameraman told me "as someone who's been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don't want to be here at night."
There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to register contact information or find family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.
To understand the dimensions of this tragedy, it's important to look at New Orleans itself.
For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed an incredible, glorious, vital, city. A place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70% African-American city where resistance to white supremacy has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.
It is a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two hours because you stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where a community pulls together when someone is in need. It is a city of extended families and social networks filling the gaps left by city, state and federal governments that have abdicated their responsibility for the public welfare. It is a city where someone you walk past on the street not only asks how you are, they wait for an answer.
It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them centered on just a few, overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don't need to search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the attacker is shot in revenge.
There is an atmosphere of intense hostility and distrust between much of Black New Orleans and the N.O. Police Department. In recent months, officers have been accused of everything from drug running to corruption to theft. In separate incidents, two New Orleans police officers were recently charged with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high profile police killings of unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas, which has inspired ongoing weekly protests for several months.
The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years.
Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child's education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.
Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the treatment of the refugees to the the media portrayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by race.
Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week our political leaders have defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina approached, our Governor urged us to "Pray the hurricane down" to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane, we tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and tv stations, hoping for vital news, and were told that our governor had called for a day of prayer. As rumors and panic began to rule, they was no source of solid dependable information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters said the water level would rise another 12 feet - instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians and media only made it worse.
While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.
No sane person should classify someone who takes food from indefinitely closed stores in a desperate, starving city as a "looter," but that's just what the media did over and over again. Sheriffs and politicians talked of having troops protect stores instead of perform rescue operations.
Images of New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control, criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus on "welfare queens" and "super-predators" obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.
City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, its been widely known the danger faced by flooding to New Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this week's events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the money to protect this poor, overwhelmingly black, city. While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the floodlines, the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous disregard of our elected leaders.
The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped shape the elections of both a US President and a Governor, and ushered in the southern populist politics of Huey Long.
In the coming months, billions of dollars will likely flood into New Orleans. This money can either be spent to usher in a "New Deal" for the city, with public investment, creation of stable union jobs, new schools, cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be "rebuilt and revitalized" to a shell of its former self, with newer hotels, more casinos, and with chain stores and theme parks replacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs.
Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment, deindustrialization and corruption. Simply the damage from this pre-Katrina hurricane will take billions to repair.
Now that the money is flowing in, and the world's eyes are focused on Katrina, it's vital that progressive-minded people take this opportunity to fight for a rebuilding with justice. New Orleans is a special place, and we need to fight for its rebirth.
-----------------------------------------------
Jordan Flaherty is a union organizer and an editor of Left Turn Magazine (www.leftturn.org). He is not planning on moving out of New Orleans.
-----------------------------------------------
Below are some small, grassroots and New Orleans-based resources, organizations and institutions that will need your support in the coming months.
Social Justice:
www.jjpl.org
www.iftheycanlearn.org
www.nolaps.org
www.thepeoplesinstitute.org/
www.criticalresistance.org/index.php?name=crno_home
Cultural Resources:
www.backstreetculturalmuseum.com
www.ashecac.org/
http://198.66.50.128/gallery/
www.nolahumanrights.org
http://www.freewebs.com/ironrail/
http://www.girlgangproductions.com/
Current Info and Resources:
http://neworleans.craigslist.org/about/help/katrina_cl.html
*******************************************************************
6. BARBARA LEE BLAMES WAR FOR SLOW RESPONSE TO KATRINA
Friday 02 September 2005
Oakland, CA - In a statement issued Friday September 2nd, Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) lambasted the Administration's slow response and lack of action to help the Gulf Coast communities destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
"The slow response to the needs of the people in the areas hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina is inexcusable. We had several days advance notice that the Hurricane was coming, but where was the preparedness? Why weren't the hospitals, schools, and seniors evacuated immediately? Is this is an example of the Administration's idea of homeland security? If so, we are in trouble.
"If ever anyone doubted that there were two Americas, this disaster has made this division clear. The victims have largely been poor and black. The devastation from Hurricane Katrina only underscores the disastrous consequences of the Administration's failure to take even the most basic steps to alleviate poverty in the United States. The Administration can not ignore this reality.
"Furthermore, has the Administration shortchanged homeland preparedness, in favor of funding a misguided war in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthy? What other critical services, such as funding for levees, have been cut from the budget to fund this war? Now is the time for Congress to aggressively pursue oversight hearings. We need answers.
"I have been in close contact with the congressional members from the states affected by Hurricane Katrina and have heard from the American Red Cross. We all agree that it is time for our country to work together and help those who have so little and have lost so much.
"I call on President Bush and FEMA Director Michael Brown to follow through on their promises and deploy immediate emergency aid. Furthermore, I challenge the President to address this national catastrophe with the same resolve as he did in leading America into the war in Iraq.
"I am working with private citizens, business leaders and places of worship within my district as well as fellow congressional members to deliver immediate assistance to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. For example, I am working with the California State University, the University of California, the Peralta Colleges, and local universities to find space for displaced students.
"On Wednesday, September 7, 2005 at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building at 1301 Clay Street in Downtown Oakland, from 8am-8pm, we will be collecting supplies and accepting donations for the relief."
*******************************************************************
7. CHRONOLOGY – ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
Kevin Drum,
Washington Monthly
CHRONOLOGY....Here's a timeline that outlines the fate of both FEMA and flood control projects in New Orleans under the Bush administration. Read it and weep:
January 2001: Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a crony from Texas, as head of FEMA. Allbaugh has no previous experience in disaster management.
April 2001: Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces the Bush administration's goal of privatizing much of FEMA's work. In May, Allbaugh confirms that FEMA will be downsized: "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program...." he said. "Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level."
2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three "likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country."
December 2002: After less than two years at FEMA, Allbaugh announces he is leaving to start up a consulting firm that advises companies seeking to do business in Iraq. He is succeeded by his deputy, Michael Brown, who, like Allbaugh, has no previous experience in disaster management.
March 2003: FEMA is downgraded from a cabinet level position and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is refocused on fighting acts of terrorism.
2003: Under its new organization chart within DHS, FEMA's preparation and planning functions are reassigned to a new Office of Preparedness and Response. FEMA will henceforth focus only on response and recovery.
Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana's pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: "You would think we would get maximum consideration....This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it."
June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay."
June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.
August 2005: While New Orleans is undergoing a slow motion catastrophe, Bush mugs for the cameras, cuts a cake for John McCain, plays the guitar for Mark Wills, delivers an address about V-J day, and continues with his vacation.
When he finally gets around to acknowledging the scope of the unfolding disaster, he delivers only a photo op on Air Force One and a flat, defensive, laundry list speech in the Rose Garden.
A crony with no relevant experience was installed as head of FEMA.
Mitigation budgets for New Orleans were slashed even though it was known to be one of the top three risks in the country. FEMA was deliberately downsized as part of the Bush administration's conservative agenda. After DHS was created, FEMA's preparation and planning functions were taken away.
Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices. It's the Bush administration in a nutshell.
*******************************************************************
8. THE UNTOLD STORY OF KATRINAS' AFTERMATH
By Malkia A. Cyril
Katrina has been called a disaster of biblical proportions. And it is. But the disaster is not confined to weather. The loss of life is being compounded by the frightening political decision to withhold rescue services from survivors and instead focus on fighting crime. It seems that Katrina has not only uprooted homes and trees, but also uncovered the stark truth about race in Louisiana. Racial injustice in New Orleans is on fire. And the news coverage of Katrina is fanning the flames.
Over 1 million people with the means to leave fled before the storm, but nearly 150,000 were left behind, trapped by poverty and neglected by disaster plans. Those who got out were mostly affluent and white. Those left behind were not. They represented the poorest 15-20% of New Orleans population and were predominately black. This is not simply the result of a natural disaster. This is the consequence of human decisions about who deserves to live and who should be left to die. And the death toll is still rising. Survivors are floating in stagnant debris-filled water, huddled in attics or on rooftops.
More than 60,000 people have gathered at the Superdome stadium for evacuation and remain there in increasingly horrific conditions. One man couldn't bear it and jumped to his death. In the aftermath of this natural disaster, relief efforts are being hindered by racial mistreatment and racist decisions that are as dangerous as any storm.
Emergency systems and disaster protocol must put life above law. And yet, when it comes to the lives of blacks and poor people in the aftermath of Katrina, looting is the leading headline. Interestingly, in the face of absolute tragedy, President Bush's message is about zero tolerance for crime and not about encouraging and applauding the humanity of those helping each other to live. There is no question that survival is the primary issue of the day. And yet Reuters reported that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered police to suspend rescue efforts and arrest people instead. Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco told reporters that she will use the 12,500 National Guard troops in or en route to New Orleans to bring law and order to the area, and not to continue rescuing survivors. Officials have either ceased or redirected the relief and evacuation efforts of the Red Cross, FEMA, local police and the National Guard. Black and poor residents of New Orleans are paying for this decision with their lives.
While the decision to arrest people for trying to survive seems misplaced, it could have something to do with the news coverage of Katrina, which has been saturated with descriptions of blacks chest-deep in water looting food, while referring to whites in virtually the same circumstances as survivors finding food. Or perhaps it is because almost no news outlets have even mentioned the demographics of those left behind or raised life and death questions about how evacuation plans, search and rescue operations, relief distribution, and emergency care are being influenced by race.
Where were the resources and political will that would have prevented this tragedy from reaching such deadly proportions? In the aftermath of this devastating natural disaster, the media can expose the racism and help prevent the man-made disaster at hand? Even CBS reported that in one neighborhood the police helped homeless survivors carry stolen supplies from Walmart to another area that had been hit harder. Across the country concerned communities are demanding that the arrests for so-called looting should cease and search and rescue efforts should continue unhindered, that all resources should be used to evacuate survivors immediately, and people should be provided with clean water and food. Not everyone agrees that your race or income should determine whether you survive the storm.
*******************************************************************
9. DID NEW ORLEANS CATASTROPHE HAVE TO HAPPEN?
By Will Bunch
Editor & Publisher
Wednesday 31 August 2005
'Times-Picayune' had repeatedly raised federal spending issues.
Philadelphia - Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters may still keep rising in New Orleans. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until it's level with the massive lake.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."
In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
"That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said."
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late.
One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday.
The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."
Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."
--------
Will Bunch is senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 when he reported for Newsday. Much of this article also appears on his blog, Attytood, at the Daily News.
*******************************************************************
10. HOW NEW ORLEANS WAS LOST
By Paul Craig Roberts
AntiWar.com
Thursday 01 September 2005
Chalk up the city of New Orleans as a cost of Bush's Iraq war.
There were not enough helicopters to repair the breached levees and rescue people trapped by rising water. Nor are there enough Louisiana National Guardsmen available to help with rescue efforts and to patrol against looting.
The situation is the same in Mississippi.
The National Guard and helicopters are off on a fool's mission in Iraq.
The National Guard is in Iraq because fanatical neoconservatives in the Bush administration were determined to invade the Middle East and because incompetent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refused to listen to the generals, who told him there were not enough regular troops available to do the job.
After the invasion, the arrogant Rumsfeld found out that the generals were right. The National Guard was called up to fill in the gaping gaps.
Now the Guardsmen, trapped in the Iraqi quagmire, are watching on TV the families they left behind trapped by rising waters and wondering if the floating bodies are family members. None know where their dislocated families are, but, shades of Fallujah, they do see their destroyed homes.
The mayor of New Orleans was counting on helicopters to put in place massive sandbags to repair the levee. However, someone called the few helicopters away to rescue people from rooftops. The rising water overwhelmed the massive pumping stations, and New Orleans disappeared under deep water.
What a terrible casualty of the Iraqi war - one of our oldest and most beautiful cities, a famous city, a historic city.
Distracted by its phony war on terrorism, the U.S. government had made no preparations in the event Hurricane Katrina brought catastrophe to New Orleans. No contingency plan existed. Only now after the disaster are FEMA and the Corps of Engineers trying to assemble the material and equipment to save New Orleans from the fate of Atlantis.
Even worse, articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and public statements by emergency management chiefs in New Orleans make it clear that the Bush administration slashed the funding for the Corps of Engineers' projects to strengthen and raise the New Orleans levees and diverted the money to the Iraq war.
Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune (June 8, 2004): "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Why can't the U.S. government focus on America's needs and leave other countries alone? Why are American troops in Iraq instead of protecting our own borders from a mass invasion by illegal immigrants? Why are American helicopters blowing up Iraqi homes instead of saving American homes in New Orleans?
How can the Bush administration be so incompetent as to expose Americans at home to dire risks by exhausting American resources in foolish foreign adventures? What kind of "homeland security" is this?
All Bush has achieved by invading Iraq is to kill and wound thousands of people while destroying America's reputation. The only beneficiaries are oil companies capitalizing on a good excuse to jack up the price of gasoline and Osama bin Laden's recruitment.
What we have is a Republican war for oil company profits while New Orleans sinks beneath the waters.
By Will Bunch
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001051313
Published: August 31, 2005 9:00 PM ET
PHILADELPHIA -- Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters may still keep rising in New Orleans. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until it's level with the massive lake.
New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.
Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."
In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.
On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.
The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.
There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
"That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said."
The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late.
One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer: a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday.
The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."
Local officials are now saying, the article reported, that had Washington heeded their warnings about the dire need for hurricane protection, including building up levees and repairing barrier islands, "the damage might not have been nearly as bad as it turned out to be."
By E&P Staff
http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054719
Published: September 05, 2005 7:25 PM ET updated 8:00 PM
NEW YORKAccompanying her husband, former President George
H.W.Bush, on a tour of hurricane relief centers in
Houston, Barbara Bush said today, referring to the
poor who had lost everything back home and evacuated, "This is working very well for them."
The former First Lady's remarks were aired this
evening on American Public Media's "Marketplace"
program.
She was part of a group in Houston today at the
Astrodome that included her husband and former
President Bill Clinton, who were chosen by her son,
the current president, to head fundraising efforts for
the recovery. Sen. Hilary Clinton and Sen. Barack
Obama were also present.
In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of
evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost
everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to
Houston."
Then she added: "What I’m hearing which is sort of
scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is
so overwhelmed by the hospitality.
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you
know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she
chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."
By E&P Staff
http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054586
Published: September 04, 2005 10:40 AM ET
NEW YORK -- The Times-Picayune of New Orleans on Sunday published its third print edition since the hurricane disaster struck, chronicling the arrival, finally, of some relief but also taking President Bush to task for his handling of the crisis, and calling for the firing of FEMA director Michael Brown and others.
In an "open letter" to the president, published on page 15 of the 16-page edition, the paper said it still had grounds for "skepticism" that he would follow through on saving the city and its residents. It pointed out that while the government could not get supplies to the city numerous TV reporters, singer Harry Connick and Times-Picayune staffers managed to find a way in.
It also cited "bald-faced" lies by Michael Brown. "Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach," the staffers pointed out. "We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry."
Here is the text.
***
We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."
Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.
Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.
How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.
Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.
Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.
Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.
Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.
We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.
Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.
It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?
State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.
In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."
Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.
Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."
That’s unbelievable.
There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.
We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.
No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.
Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.
When you do, we will be the first to applaud.
By E&P Staff
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?schema=&vnu_content_id=1001057161
Published: September 08, 2005 11:24 AM ET
NEW YORK -- Forced to defend what some critics consider its slow response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said on Tuesday it does not want the news media to take photographs of the dead as they are recovered from New Orleans.
FEMA, which is leading the rescue efforts, rejected requests from journalists to accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims, Reuters reported.
A FEMA spokeswoman told the wire service that space was needed on the rescue boats and assured Reuters that "the recovery of the victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect."
"We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media," the spokeswoman told Reuters via e-mail.
On Wednesday, journalist groups protested the move.
"It's impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story," Larry Siems of the PEN American Center told Reuters.
Rebecca Daugherty of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said: "The notion that, when there's very little information from FEMA, that they would even spend the time to be concerned about whether the reporting effort is up to its standards of taste is simply mind-boggling. You cannot report on the disaster and give the public a realistic idea of how horrible it is if you don't see that there are bodies as well."
FEMA's policy of excluding media from recovery expeditions in New Orleans is "an invitation to chaos," Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of Columbia University's journalism school, told Reuters.
"This is about managing images and not public taste or human dignity," Rosenstiel said. He said FEMA's refusal to take journalists along on recovery missions meant that media workers would go on their own.
Rosenstiel also noted that U.S. media, especially U.S. television outlets, are generally reluctant to show corpses.
"By and large, American television is the most sanitized television in the world," he said. "They are less likely to show bodies, they are less likely to show graphic images of the dead than any television in the world."
There is also a question of what the American PEN Center's Siems called "international equity," noting that American news outlets cover stories around the world showing the effects of natural disasters and wars in graphic detail.
But Mark Tapscott, a former editor at the Washington Times newspaper who now deals with media issues at the Heritage Foundation, said the FEMA decision did not amount to censorship.
"Let's not make a common decency issue into a censorship issue," Tapscott told Reuters. "Nobody wants to wake up in the morning and see their dead uncle on the front page. That's just common decency."
After this article ran, Tapscott contacted E&P to add the following quote Reuters left out of its article, an omission Tapscott said allowed for a "misrepresentation" of his words.
"The biggest news stories often have dead bodies and cannot be fully reported without showing those bodies in some way," Tapscott wrote via e-mail. "The question is how that is done, from a distance with no personally identifying detail as FOX News and MSNBC have been doing all week, or up close, grisly and sensationally."
Orleans Breaking News
A small ray of hope: Death toll not so dire
Scorned FEMA chief is sent back to Washington
http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tporleans/index.ssf?/mtlogs/nola_tporleans/archives/2005_09_10.html
Saturday, September 10, 2005
By Bruce Nolan
Staff writer
Eleven days after Hurricane Katrina plunged New Orleans into agonies of flood, panic and chaotic evacuation, authorities finally began searching house-to-house in once-flooded neighborhoods Friday for those who did not escape.
Early results retrieved far fewer bodies than officials expected.
That led one key official to hope the death toll might be much less than 10,000, Mayor Ray Nagin’s early estimate that quickly became an unchallenged benchmark.
That figure was based on the speed with which Hurricane Katrina flooded the Lower 9th Ward and other poor, densely populated neighborhoods as the storm roared past on Aug. 29 with winds of at least 105 mph.
The estimate became more credible as thousands of traumatized refugees slogged into the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center during the next two days, bearing nightmarish tales of pushing bloated bodies out of the way or passing them sprawled on rooftops.
But in the first day of organized searching, there seemed some reason for hope.
“I think there’s some encouragement in what we found in the initial sweeps that some of the catastrophic death that some people predicted may not, in fact, have occurred,� said Terry Ebbert, chief of homeland security for the city.
“The numbers so far are relatively minor as compared to the dire predictions of 10,000,� he said.
At least in the Lower 9th Ward, federal, state and local teams along with officers from all over the country broke open doors and entered homes, calling out for survivors and looking for corpses.
Where they found neither, they scrawled “0-0� on the house and moved on.
As they worked, Katrina claimed a victim of a different sort: Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown was relieved of his onsite command Friday.
Brown was the focus of scorching criticism from state and local officials, as well as evacuees who cursed his relief agency’s ineffectiveness.
They charged that his agency arrived too late with too little, as tens of thousands suffered on rooftops, highway overpasses and squalid evacuation centers in the first days after Katrina flooded the city.
Brown was replaced by Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, who was overseeing New Orleans relief, recovery and rescue efforts, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced.
Chertoff said Brown will return to Washington and resume his duties as head of FEMA, where he will concentrate on making sure the agency is prepared to deal with other potential disasters.
Asked if he was being made a scapegoat for a federal relief effort that has drawn widespread and sharp criticism, Brown told The Associated Press after a long pause: "By the press, yes. By the president, no."
But a source close to Brown, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the FEMA director had been considering leaving after the hurricane season ended in November and that Friday's action virtually assures his departure.
While Brown prepares to return to Washington, Bush will make his third visit to Louisiana and Mississippi on Sunday, the White House announced.
While some searched for bodies Friday, other soldiers and police continued to urge holdout residents to leave the city. But after two days of warning they would judiciously employ force to move people, if necessary, officials appeared to be delaying that.
“At this time, force is not being used,� said City Attorney Sherry Landry. “Rather, our offices and troops continue to strongly encourage those not assisting with the recovery effort to leave.�
Landry said crews are working to clear glass from the streets of the Central Business District, where power should be restored by the end of next week.
Entergy New Orleans President and Chief Executive Officer Dan Packer said he hopes to have power restored to the French Quarter and Uptown neighborhoods within two weeks.
Entergy set up a huge tent city in Kenner to house, fuel and equip 1,500 utility workers setting out each day at first light. Company officials said it may soon grow to 4,000. Two smaller communities have sprouted on the West Bank.
Meanwhile, Ebbert said that close to one-third of the city’s drainage pumps are working to remove water from the city.
In Kenner, authorities reported that two-thirds of the city remained without power, but the city was pumped dry and roads were open.
Elsewhere in Jefferson, at least 60,000 residents appeared to be in their homes, a condition that did not please authorities.
Parish President Aaron Broussard opened the parish so homeowners could make quick inspection trips Monday through Wednesday. But many have stayed, without power or a functioning sewerage system.
"Sewage can lead to another disaster, which is disease," said Emergency Operations Director Walter Maestri.
He said that until sewerage services are fixed, parish officials will continue to bar "nonessential" workers from Jefferson and enforce a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew. But bowing to pressure, parish officials asked residents wanting to enter the parish Monday to collect entry passes at Blue Bayou Water Park, at Interstate 10 and Highland Road in Baton Rouge.
Meanwhile, St. Tammany reported increasing signs of life.
“The majority of the parish should be back to normal, at some level, in two or three weeks,� said Parish President Kevin Davis.
But in some devastated areas like the southern part of Slidell and communities like Oak Harbor and Eden Isles, “it’s going to be months,� he said.
By late Friday, Cleco, the dominant power supplier in the parish, and Washington-St. Tammany Electric Cooperative had restored electricity to about 40 percent of the parish.
Crews from Boh Brothers Construction Co. will begin making emergency repairs Monday to the I-10 twin spans linking New Orleans and Slidell, said Mark Lambert, communications director for the Department of Transportation and Development.
One of the two bridges should be open to one-lane, two-way traffic in about six weeks, Lambert said. Engineers are still assessing which of the two spans is the least damaged and can be brought into service.
The state probably will solicit bids early next year to rebuild both bridges entirely at a cost of $350 million to $500 million, Lambert said.
Police and fire officials reported a quiet night Thursday evening, with only three fires and no major incidents overnight.
With reporting by Ed Anderson, Paul Bartels, Gwen Filosa, Michelle Krupa, Jan Moller, Laura Ricks and Steve Ritea.
The Critical Race Studies Program at UCLA School of Law is helping to facilitate a dialogue between concerned members of our community and civil and human rights activists in the Gulf Coast. We hope to create awareness and understanding of the emerging context for the people of the Gulf Coast most severely impacted by Hurricane Katrina and to help identify potential roles for supporting their efforts to build a "People´s Reconstruction.
This week, we have asked UCLAW Alumnus, Jennifer Lai, a civil and human rights activist in Lousiana, to tell us about the legal and human rights issues facing residents in the area. She will be at a meeting at the law school tomorrow nite and she can also be heard on Pacifica Radio, tonite. Below is information about the two events.
Law School Meeting
On Tuesday, September 13, at 6:30 p.m. in Room 1457 there will be a strategy session on responding to the tragedy in the Gulf. This meeting will include interested students from UCLA School of Law´s Critical Race Studies Program (CRS), Program in Public Interest Law and Policy (PILP), and a number of student organizations that have expressed an interest in consulting with an emerging network of civil rights organizations working in the region. Our alum, Jennifer Lai, who has been working with one such organization in New Orleans, Quality Education as a Civil Right, will be giving some information on the situation on the ground as well as identifying some of the short term and long term needs that those of us in the legal profession might be uniquely qualified to provide. This will provide a grounding for our discussion of a range of interventions or projects that might ultimately be adopted by the Program, student organizations or school wide, after appropriate consultation.Radio Show:
We are also compiling information in this weblog related to the democratic reconstruction of New Orleans, the race/class and other forms of subordination that are implicated in this tragedy, and efforts to ensure equity and justice in the wake of the disaster. We encourage you to submit postings that enrich this endeavor. Some of the issues we would like to make a call for submissions include:
Native American nations in the region
The large Honduran population in the region, both immigrant and non-immigrant
Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in the region
Disabled people and family members and caregivers attempting to navigate the relief effort.
Other minorities of racial, religious, sexual and other aspects that may not be getting covered in the news media´s coverage.
Please feel free to add to this list and request that others post information here on an issue you are interested in learning more about.
Published September 9, 2005 http://www.freep.com/news/nw/katf9e_20050909.htm
BY TAMARA AUDI
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
NEW ORLEANS -- Just after sunrise Wednesday, more than 100 New Orleans police officers and federal agents gathered quietly on the expansive outdoor entrance to Harrah's casino on the city's waterfront. Their commanders huddled around the day's mission plan, spread like a football playbook on the trunk of a black stretch limo.
At the center of the crowd, leaning over the plan and talking softly with the captain of the New Orleans Police Department SWAT team, was Roger Guthrie, a federal agent and father of three from Grosse Ile -- one of hundreds of Michigan law enforcement officials and National Guard members who streamed to the gulf coast to help restore order after Hurricane Katrina.
Before long, Guthrie -- chief of an elite Detroit-based tactical squad from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives -- would help lead a large raid on the Fisher projects, a notoriously violent housing development, where snipers were firing at workers trying to repair a cell-phone tower.
His men covered themselves in 80 pounds of body armor and weaponry. As they prepared to set out, Jeff Winn, the New Orleans police SWAT captain, gathered everyone and said, "If you hear footsteps on the other side of the door and they're not communicating, do what you got to do."
Everyone knew what he meant.
The agents climbed into lumbering beige light armored vehicles. By 8:30 a.m., they were on the ground at the Fisher complex, rifles up, snaking through abandoned buildings in search of the shooters. The frenzied barking of Brody and Cisco, two dogs, echoed between the buildings. Wind whished over uncut grass.
By 9 a.m., the teams had rounded up one man, now on his knees in front of an apartment building. Another, shirtless, stood surrounded by guns against a wall. Police said they discovered weapons in one of the men's apartment and arrested him. They let the other man go after determining he wasn't involved.
Not long after, the phone repair workers returned. The Michigan agents, rifles drawn, watched over them -- another small portion of the perilous city reclaimed.
Officials unite in fight
Since arriving last weekend, the ATF team from Detroit rescued 18 people from floodwaters, helped snag three snipers, helped make the first federal arrests in New Orleans and prowled the pitch-black streets at night by car and on foot.
Alongside New Orleans' SWAT and ATF agents from Dallas, they secured every rotting, foul foot of the sweltering New Orleans convention center, stepping past four dead bodies, ramming through locked doors and spreading Vicks VapoRub under their noses to get through it.
"We wouldn't be able to do what we've done without those guys," said Winn, the weary SWAT captain.
No job has seemed too dangerous or too delicate for the agents or any of the other Michiganders who arrived in Louisiana to help secure the region and save stranded residents. Michigan's own turned up in nearly every corner of the disaster.
They range from a 250-person National Guard contingent dispatched to Monroe, La., where they are keeping safe 4,000 evacuees, to a two-man crew from the Birmingham Police Department who've patrolled neighborhoods and helped brighten the day of a displaced, sleep-deprived police captain in New Orleans' 6th District by delivering strawberry ice cream (his favorite) packed in ice.
Thirteen officers from Ferndale, Royal Oak and Auburn Hills were living at a powerless Hampton Inn, across from the garbage heap that was the convention center. Another dozen from Birmingham, Berkley, Southfield and Farmington Hills were camped in tents at State Police headquarters in Baton Rouge, driving daily into New Orleans to patrol and bring supplies to weary 6th District cops. That district lost its headquarters in the flood, and officers -- many of whom lost their homes -- slept in the parking lot of a looted Wal-Mart.
Wednesday morning, a lone Franklin Village police officer, Steve Major, arrived at the Wal-Mart after driving all night from Michigan with a friend to drop off food and clothing for New Orleans officers.
"This tragic event has brought our departments together," said Southfield Detective David Clevenger, who also was in New Orleans.
"We never met before this, and we have bonded."
Patrolling the streets Wednesday in their hometown squad cars, cops from Southfield, Birmingham and Farmington tried to convince the city's last straggling residents to leave, bolstered by a mandatory evacuation order from Louisiana officials.
"Hi there, do you want to get out of here? Are you all right?" 27-year-old Southfield Police Officer Brian Bassett called to four adults clustered on a stoop surrounded by foul-smelling, knee-deep water.
"We're fine," 39-year-old Bennett Marceline called out. "The water's going down."
"I ain't going nowhere!" 46-year-old Stephanie Burkhalter yelled to Bassett. "We got enough food for six months."
The four friends said they did not want to leave because they had heard on the radio that other states were turning away evacuees, and because nobody could guarantee where they might end up.
Bassett warned that authorities eventually would remove them by force.
"We'll wait till eventually," Burkhalter said.
Being resourceful
Most of the Michigan visitors, whether federal or local, had to compete for resources with agencies from across the country this week, turning New Orleans into a patchwork of military and police agencies run out of abandoned businesses and city landmarks.
Harrah's casino was law enforcement headquarters, the scene of briefings and meals for hundreds of cops. The Wal-Mart was the new headquarters for 6th District police. Captain Tony Cannatella held daily briefings under a sign for Wal-Mart's 1-hour Photo/Pharmacy/Optical center.
Two New Orleans officers manned a guard post outside the Wal-Mart garden center and stuck U.S. flags in a pile of overturned shopping carts to mark their spot.
The New Orleans SWAT officers, who allowed a Free Press reporter and photographer to embed with them this week, settled into an elementary school cafeteria, still decorated with cutout bumblebees in the windows. Battle-weary police were briefed on shootings at long kiddie lunch tables, squeezing adult-size rears onto little orange stools.
The Berhman Heights Winn-Dixie became a helicopter pad; the abandoned local insurance company housed the New Orleans police canine team. Down the road, fire trucks and emergency vehicles crammed the parking lot of a nursing home.
Cannatella, the 6th District captain, acknowledged to his officers that supplies were getting tight with the influx of visitors. But he assured them that the 6th District was filled with creative, can-do officers.
"We got some pirates in here that can mooch the drawers off a nun," Cannatella crowed.
The supply pinch was felt all the way up the chain, as officers, eager to help arrest bad guys and rescue the dwindling number of flood victims, wrangled over gas, boats and vehicles.
"Try ordering gas or boats or anything -- it's a bitch," Charlie Smith, the leader of the Dallas ATF team, complained before a joint mission with New Orleans SWAT officers. Smith and Guthrie of the Detroit-based ATF team slyly bartered for supplies, trading gas for airboats with other agencies. "That Roger, he can sweet talk anyone," Smith said, laughing.
Smith was being modest.
When ATF and SWAT agents secured helicopters from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to conduct reconnaissance missions, Smith handed the helicopter pilot a cigar before even saying hello. "Hey, so where do you want to go tomorrow?" the pilot cheerfully responded.
It was classic Smith, who grew up in New Orleans and who "will keep you laughing all night," according to SWAT Sgt. Dwayne Scheuermann. All week, Smith had a cigar in his mouth and a curse on his lips.
Smith's rowdy, southern charm was balanced by Guthrie's midwestern, low-key humor and choirboy vocabulary.
Among the 18 members of Guthrie's ATF team were seven from Michigan. The rest are assigned to the Detroit regional office, but live in neighboring states.
The group included Tony Primak of Royal Oak, a fantasy football geek; Jeff Kiser of Rochester, whose paper-bag turkey recipe was legend during the manhunt for convicted bomber Eric Rudolph; Mark Haddad of St. Clair Shores, who studied accounting before he took to strapping M4 rifles to his chest; Jeff Perryman of Plymouth, whose stony game face melted into an adoring smile when his search dog, Brody, was around, which was always; Brian Mamayek of tiny Luna Pier, whom the boys call Mama, and Mike Martin, who spent his downtime ruminating about how he might be able to contact his son Drew, who turned 10 Thursday in Sterling Heights. (Your dad says Happy Birthday, Drew).
Guthrie, their raspy voiced leader with war-hero-movie good looks, had attained near-mythic status among his squad. He survived a plane crash, guys whispered. He was shot in the face -- really, his buddies said, ask him about it.
The man seemed to have nine lives. And, except for the inconvenient detail that Guthrie refuses to talk about himself, it might all be true.
Nobody aside from a few federal agents and maybe some cops knew much about him, or his crew. Which is how most ATF agents like it. So when Guthrie, his 17 agents and one German shepherd -- one of four ATF special-response teams in the nation -- arrived in New Orleans, they did what they usually do: quietly risked their lives in a strange city, telling no one.
Always on call
At one point earlier this week, the men from the SWAT unit and ATF were sweating in a hallway of the massive convention center, waiting to head to the next floor to roust suspected snipers. Perryman slipped Brody, the dog, a bowl of water and stroked his head. Guthrie, swinging a 50-pound battering ram, walked over to his men and said, "The bad news is this is the part of the building with air-conditioning."
"The good news is, I just saved a bundle on my car insurance," Guthrie joked, mimicking an insurance-company TV commercial.
The ATF team worked to produce intelligence reports for the SWAT team, overwhelmed with shoot-outs and street patrols.
On Tuesday, with a tip that gangs were terrorizing a dry, isolated section of the city, SWAT and ATF agents targeted the area. Guthrie led his crew by boat. Smith led from the air.
"If we take fire from the ground ..." the helicopter pilot began to say. Dallas agent Dave Millen cut in: "We'll handle it."
The chopper hovered so close to the ground that the crew could smell the rancid water. Primak walked slowly through abandoned streets, his rifle up and ready.
There were no shoot-outs or bad guys on this mission.
The agents packed up and headed back to their tents pitched a block from the SWAT headquarters at the elementary school.
They barely had time to rest before another call came. And they were back on the streets again.
Copyright © 2005 Detroit Free Press Inc.
Please distribute.
Sept. 7
Dear folks with loved ones who were OPP or the youth detention centers in the New Orleans area,
(Those without a loved one in OPP or youth detention, please forward in any way you think may help reach individuals who have folks locked up in Orleans/Jefferon; this is not an efficient way to contacting people, but it is the best we have right now in a moment where there is no official information and no systems being set up to get info out about people who were locked up…sorry for cluttering mailboxes.)
I joined members of Families and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) these past few days walking through shelters in Louisiana and Texas trying to help families connect up with their children who had been locked up in detention centers and/or loved ones who had been in OPP.
Some info we gathered that may be helpful:
Adults in OPP or Gretna
Latest info is that all OPP prisoners who are still in state custody are currently being held at either Angola (225) 655-4411 or Hunts (225) 642-3306. Folks looking for their people should call those numbers and ask to speak to their loved ones directly. You will probably be told that's not possible. If officials won't connect you directly, demand that the prison official pass on a message, and then call back later in the day to confirm that the message has been passed on. There is word also that people who were being held at OPP on less than $1000 bond either will or could (depending on who you talk to) be released if a family calls and is able to provide some kind of address. Other family members have been told that records are not available yet, but once the computer system (?) is up, they intend on holding hearings in "a couple of weeks" to process releases.
We have not been able to find out how many of the 6000+ OPP prisoners are accounted for. The NYTimes today reports that Sheriff Gusman claims the prisoners have all been moved outside the city. As of this morning, however, it seems the OPP computer system was still down, so it is hard to fathom how the Sheriff could credibly make such a claim. We have heard disturbing accounts of the evacuation of OPP. If you have any first or second person accounts, please send/forward here to my email lkung@schr.org and/or xochit@mediajumpstart.org.
It seems Gretna in Jefferson Parish was evacuated as well, but we have no information on when or how it was evacuated. We found one individual at Angola, so if your person was at Gretna, you should probably call Angola or Hunts (see above).
We also know now that at least some of the people who were arrested during the general evacuation are now being held at Gretna (504) 374-7700 in Jefferson Parish. The media reports earlier in the week reported people arrested were being held in the Greyhound station. We don't know whether this is still the case, and haven't been able to get a phone number for families to call.
Youth in detention
All youths held in Bridge City Center for Youth (BCCY) are accounted for and are now held at Jetson Correctional Center. Call Jetson at (225) 778-9000 and ask for John Anderson, Michael Gaines, Ricky Wright, or Linda London. Family members should demand that their child be brought to the phone immediately and be allowed to talk to their family.
Youths held at the Youth Study Center, Plaquemine Detention Center, St. Bernard Center, Terrebonne Detention Center, and Riverde Detention Center have been routed to placements in other parts of the state. Family members should call Perla at (225) 287-7988 or (225) 328-3607 (cell) or Stacey at (225) 287-7955 to find out where their child is located. Ask Perla for a phone number, call, and demand that they be permitted to speak to their child immediately on the phone.
FFLIC has not confirmed that all youths have been accounted for.
We do not yet know where people age 16 or under who were arrested during the general evacuation are being held.
Please help
Families scattered around 9 states are desperately trying to find out where their kids and other family members are being locked up, where everyone is, what's going on. If you have any additional info, please email to me or Xochitl.
We also need help getting out the information we do have to folks who need the info. If your city has a shelter, small or large, you can help by going in to post an informational flyer that at least gives people phone numbers to call. If you are able to do so, please email me for a copy of the most updated flyer.
Here are examples of disaster relief handbooks:
(a) 9-11 Helping Handbook:
http://www.mofo.com//about/pbhandbook/index.htm
(b) Southern California Wildfires Helping Handbook:
http://www.mofo.com/about/socalfirehelp/index.cfm
(published today in The Nation, The Guardian, and several other newspapers)
by Naomi Klein
On September 4, six days after Katrina hit, I saw the first glimmer of hope. "The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funneled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants?. We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans."
The statement came from Community Labor United, a coalition of low-income groups in New Orleans. It went on to demand that a committee made up of evacuees "oversee FEMA, the Red Cross and other organizations collecting resources on behalf of our people?. We are calling for evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans."
It's a radical concept: The $10.5 billion released by Congress and the $500 million raised by private charities doesn't actually belong to the relief agencies or the government; it belongs to the victims. The agencies entrusted with the money should be accountable to them. Put another way, the people Barbara Bush tactfully described as "underprivileged anyway" just got very rich.
Except relief and reconstruction never seem to work like that. When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimizing them all over again. A council of the country's most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to tourist developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies for food and water. They called reconstruction "the second tsunami."
There are already signs that New Orleans evacuees could face a similarly brutal second storm. Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told Newsweek that he has been brainstorming about how "to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic." The Business Council's wish list is well-known: low wages, low taxes, more luxury condos and hotels. Before the flood, this highly profitable vision was already displacing thousands of poor African-Americans: While their music and culture was for sale in an increasingly corporatized French Quarter (where only 4.3 percent of residents are Black), their housing developments were being torn down. "For white tourists and businesspeople, New Orleans' reputation is 'a great place to have a vacation but don't leave the French Quarter or you'll get shot,'" Jordan Flaherty, a New Orleans?based labor organizer told me the day after he left the city by boat. "Now the developers have their big chance to disperse the obstacle to gentrification?poor people."
Here's a better idea: New Orleans could be reconstructed by and for the very people most victimized by the flood. Schools and hospitals that were falling apart before could finally have adequate resources; the rebuilding could create thousands of local jobs and provide massive skills training in decent paying industries. Rather than handing over the reconstruction to the same corrupt elite that failed the city so spectacularly, the effort could be led by groups like Douglass Community Coalition. Before the hurricane this remarkable assembly of parents, teachers, students and artists was trying to reconstruct the city from the ravages of poverty by transforming Frederick Douglass Senior High School into a model of community learning. They have already done the painstaking work of building consensus around education reform. Now that the funds are flowing, shouldn't they have the tools to rebuild every ailing public school in the city?
For a people's reconstruction process to become a reality (and to keep more contracts from going to Halliburton), the evacuees must be at the center of all decision-making. According to Curtis Muhammad of Community Labor United, the disaster's starkest lesson is that African-Americans cannot count on any level of government to protect them. "We had no caretakers," he says. That means the community groups that do represent African Americans in Louisiana and Mississippi -- many of which lost staff, office space and equipment in the flood -- need our support now. Only a massive injection of cash and volunteers will enable them to do the crucial work of organizing evacuees -- currently scattered through 41 states -- into a powerful political constituency. The most pressing question is where evacuees will live over the next few months. A dangerous consensus is building that they should collect a little charity, apply for a job at the Houston Wal-Mart and move on. Muhammad and CLU, however, are calling for the right to return: they know that if evacuees are going to have houses and schools to come back to, many will need to return to their home states and fight for them.
These ideas are not without precedent. When Mexico City was struck by a devastating earthquake in 1985, the state also failed the people: poorly-constructed public housing crumbled and the army was ready to bulldoze buildings with survivors still trapped inside. A month after the quake 40,000 angry refugees marched on the government, refusing to be relocated out of their neighborhoods and demanding a "Democratic Reconstruction." Not only were 50,000 new dwellings for the homeless built in a year; the neighborhood groups that grew out of the rubble launched a movement that is challenging Mexico's traditional power holders to this day.
And the people I met in Sri Lanka have grown tired of waiting for the promised relief. Some survivors are now calling for a People's Planning Commission for Post-Tsunami Recovery. They say the relief agencies should answer to them; it's their money, after all.
The idea could take hold in the United States, and it must. Because there is only one thing that can compensate the victims of this most human of natural disasters, and that is what has been denied them throughout: power. It will be a long and difficult battle, but New Orleans' evacuees should draw strength from the knowledge that they are no longer poor people; they are rich people who have been temporarily locked out of their bank accounts.
Those wanting to donate to a people's reconstruction can make it out to the Vanguard Public Foundation, 383 Rhode Island St., Ste 301, San Francisco, CA 94103. Checks should be earmarked "People's Hurricane Fund." For more information on how to donate see
The following is a message from Tobias Wolff to his father, Robert Paul Wolff, professor in the Afro-American Studies Department at UMass Amherst, and contains an eyewitness account of two friends of Tobias who were trapped in New Orleans in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina.
Dad --
Forward this message to your friends in
the department (and elsewhere) - it's
critical!
t.
Begin forwarded message:
Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences
Larry Bradshaw, Lorrie Beth Slonsky
Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen's
store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen's windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.
The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized and
the windows at Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours
playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.
We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived
home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreen's in the French Quarter.
We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the "victims" of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators.
Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to
ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.
Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from
members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water. On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had seen them.
We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48
hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had.
We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.
By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was
dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street
crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the
National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole.
The guards further told us that the City's only other shelter, the
Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only 2 shelters in the City, 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".
We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to
camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to
the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group.
He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain
Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City.
The crowed cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and
explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there
were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and
stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there."
We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with
great excitement and hope. As we marched past the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news.
Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour
down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of
the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs
informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us
to get us to move.
We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as
there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. 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 for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.
All day long, we 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. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot.
Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and
disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.
Our little encampment began to blossom.
Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts.
Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation,
community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood
pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).
This was a process we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic
needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working
together and constructing a community.
If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in. Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.
From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.
Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was
correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.
Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law
enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or
congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims" they saw "mob" or "riot". We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.
In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs
with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.
The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off
near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard.
The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.
We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The
airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of
humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush
landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.
There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief
effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some
of the buses did not have air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds
if us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) we were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.
Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been
confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet, no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to
be "medically screened" to make sure we were not carrying any communicable diseases.
This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt
reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost
that did not need to be lost.
What accounts for the starkly differing perspectives on race in the context of the tragedy affecting the people of the South? What are the consequences, on public policy, public opinion and the law, of each of the following perspectives?
From the LA Times, "Images of the Victims Spark a Racial Debate:"
Ward Connerly, chairman of the conservative think tank American Civil Rights Institute, in Sacramento, said it was simply coincidence that most of the hurricane victims on television are black.Connerly said the hurricane happened to hit New Orleans, which happens to be predominantly black and poor.
To seek out deeper, more insidious reasons for the crisis in New Orleans is to focus on the wrong thing, Connerly said.
"I wish we were not talking about race at all. It's a needless distraction," he said. "We all ought to be praying and crying about the people whose lives have been totally ripped asunder. Those who are misbehaving are doing it out of desperation. It just so happens those who are doing it are black, but the city of New Orleans has a lot of black people."
Connerly said he was disappointed with those African American leaders and whites who were accusing the government of being lackadaisical in its response. The underlying charge is that the sluggish response is because of racism.
"The people accusing the government of racism are looking for someone to blame. They can't blame God, so they're going to blame the government or the president. Or racism," Connerly said. "So many blacks have been conditioned to view everything through the prism of race that it's easy to come to that conclusion. But for the black leaders who are blaming racism, shame on them."
From Jordan Flaherty, Editor of Left Turn Magazine:
To understand this tragedy, its important to look at New Orleans itself.For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed a incredible, glorious, vital, city. A place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70% African-American city where resistance to white supremecy has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.
It is a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two hours because you stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where a community pulls together when someone is in need. It is a city of extended families and social networks filling the gaps left by city, state and federal goverments that have abdicated their responsibilty for the public welfare. It is a city where someone you walk past on the street not only asks how you are, they wait for an answer.
It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them centered on just a few, overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don't need to search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the attacker is shot in revenge.
There is an atmosphere of intense hostility and distrust between much of Black New Orleans and the N.O. Police Department. In recent months, officers have been accused of everything from drug running to corruption to theft. In seperate incidents, two New Orleans police officers were recently charged with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high profile police killings of unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas, which has inspired ongoing weekly protests for several months.
The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years. Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child's education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.
Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the treatment of the refugees to the the media portayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by race.
Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week our political leaders have defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina approached, our Governor urged us to "Pray the hurricane down" to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane, we tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and tv stations, hoping for vital news, and were told that our governor had called for a day of prayer. As rumors and panic began to rule, they was no source of solid dependable information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters said the water level would rise another 12 feet - instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians and media only made it worse.
While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.