Fwd: Jordan Flaherty: Notes from Inside New Orleans

[Guest guest]

Corporate media's current echoes are to attack those critical of the latest

Bush-created disaster (and there are so many). All of the networks and monopoly

newspapers across the land chant " This is a time of crisis, and people should

not be criticizing the president. "

 

Well, the bastards have done this for five years now, so we ask " When will it be

time to criticize? Huge tax cuts for the rich and deficits for the

grandchildren of the working class-- no criticism allowed. Invasions all over

the Moslem world based on lies-- corporate media haven't even asked for

evidence. As the economy collapses, Bush's answer is to push for a repeal of

the estate tax, so that descendents of the robber barons, too wealthy to pay

other taxes, may go untaxed their entire lives, leaving us peasants to finance

their prisons and wars while doling out corporate welfare to the transnational

investors who rule us like satraps.

 

Bush privatized a lot of the FEMA, where profit is now more important than

helping people in disasters. Cheney's Halliburton has contracts for repairs and

cleanup from Katrina, and their Blackwater Security mercenaries are being sent

in with no police training, which will cost taxpayers a fortune compared to the

National Guard. This disaster is about profit-- ripping off all that is

possible from the taxpayer, with fixing the disaster running a far second in

priorities.

 

Bush is refusing help from Fidel Castro, who has English-speaking medical teams

standing by to go help those in need, each with backpacks full of medical

equipment. The Russians have offered to help with food-- also denied.

Meanwhile folks are bleeding and starving on the Gulf Coast. If we were for

capital punishment, we would be all for hanging Bush, after, of course, a fair

trial. He did announce yesterday that he thinks the relief effort is going

well.

 

A local reporter, Mary Kay Mallonee, interviewed women in Mississippi yesterday

who said armed thugs are walking through their houses, stealing whatever they

want, unopposed. They were without food or water and down to their last few

ounces of baby formula for an infant. Mary Kay gave them what she had in her

truck-- food, water, baby wipes. Tears ran down their faces from thankfulness

that somebody cared about them.

 

There are too many excellent articles on the disaster for us to go with only one

this morning. None of these which follow would be allowed in the corporate

media, because they contain too many hard facts that get in the way of ongoing

propaganda.

 

Greg Palast gives us some excellent history with which to put this disaster in

perspective:

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0902-32.htm

 

Chris Floyd does a brilliant job of noting recent history for understanding how

we got here:

http://chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content & task=view & id=91 & Itemid=1

 

And the magnificent Michael Parenti couples irony with facts on the situation:

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-09/03parenti.cfm

 

It is exactly the right time to criticize Bush, before billions in disaster aid

are stolen by his corporate pals --Jack

 

 

 

 

Don't You Know Me, I'm Your Native Son...Notes from Inside New Orleans

By JORDAN FLAHERTY

 

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, 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 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, there 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,

its 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. He can be

reached at: anticapitalist

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you wish to be removed from this list, please let us know

 

To join the Liberty Underground news service visit

libertyunderground/ where we put out a daily

news/opinion piece which goes beyond the narrow range of corporate media

propaganda.

 

You may also join our talk group at

libertyundergroundtalk/ if you would like to

participate.

 

Liberty Underground of Virginia (LUV) is at http://luvsite.org

 

Tell your friends about us because some people just don't get it

 

 

" When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have

peace. "

Jimi Hendrix