Author: jameswagner

Lee Friedlander Sweet Emma Barrett, New Orleans 1958

A BROKEN NEW ORLEANS ROUSES ITSELF

I have no way of knowing how central this particular appeal may become, but it came to me through a friend and I share its anger and its emphasis on preserving a devasatated community intact. The call comes from some really good people, and I believe it should be broadcast widely. I decided not to wait for the promised formal press release.

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 calling for all New Orleanians remaining in the
city to be evacuated immediately.
We are calling for information about where every
evacuee was taken.
We are calling for black and
progressive leadership to come together to meet in
Baton Rouge to initiate the formation of a
Community Oversight Committee of evacuees from all the
sites. This committee will demand to
oversee FEMA, the Red Cross and other organizations
collecting resources on behalf of our people.
We are calling for volunteers to enter the shelters
where our people are and to assist parents with
housing, food, water, health care and access to aid.
We are calling for teachers and educators to carve out
some time to come to evacuation sites and teach our
children.
We are calling for city schools and universities near
evacuation sites to open their doors for our
children to go to school.
We are calling for health care workers and mental
health workers to come to evacuation sites to
volunteer.
We are calling for lawyers to investigate the wrongful
death of those who died, to protect the land of
the displaced, to investigate whether the levies broke
due to natural and other related matters.
We are calling for evacuees from our community to
actively participate in the rebuilding of New
Orleans.
We are calling for the addresses of all the relevant
list serves and press contacts to send our
information.

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

.

[image from Masters of Photography]

A body floats outside the Superdome in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. [Los Angeles Times caption dated Friday]


How rich and white do you have to be to get the attention of your government?

These people are being treated like animals, and I’m not thinking of dog and cat animals. I mean rat animals! Where is the outrage? Where is the accountability? When do we start indicting?
This is an excerpt from a Reuters story posted earlier today, on the sixth day of the disaster in New Orleans:

As dusk fell on Friday evening, a woman’s bloated and brutally distorted figure lay prostrate on the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street in a poor neighborhood.
The black woman lay, arms flaccid, feet splayed, one shoe gone, her face distended from swelling and her chest swollen as gas filled her decaying corpse. Someone had covered her body in a plaid blanket in an anonymous gift offering some dignity.
A woman across the street shouted at photographers taking pictures of her, “She’s been there for five days, since Monday.” Then she approached to beg for bottled water, or anything at all that might help.
A convoy of five sport utility vehicles passed by, each packed with police training rifles with laser sights on the scant few residents out walking. They sped past the corpse without taking any notice.

If the police have been able to get there to protect property and search the victims who still survive, and if the media can get there to write about what’s going on and to take pictures, why are these people still suffering and dying, and why are there bodies rotting in the midst of all this, on both dry land and flooded streets?

[image by James Nielsen from AFP/Getty Images via the Los Angeles Times]

Hundreds of people wait for evacuation buses on the side of Interstate 10 in New Orleans. Many of them were suffering from dehydration after hours of waiting in the heat. [Los Angeles Times caption, image dated August 31]

Gretna police officer Ray Lassiegne stands guard over a busload of evacuees after they were picked up near the Greater New Orleans Bridge just south of New Orleans. [Los Angeles Times caption, image dated September 1]

The following letter was forwarded to me by Steve Quester, who had just received it from a friend. Jordan Flaherty left a refugee camp today on the northern edge of New Orleans.
The first part of the letter is a frightening glimpse of the experience of thousands of hurricane survivors. The remainder is a picture of what they and all of us have lost, together with an indictment of those responsible. He closes with a call for a reconstruction which would honor a great city.
Flaherty is a white activist, originally from Brooklyn, who has lived in New Orleans for the last few years. He is an editor of Left Turn magazine.

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 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.
No sane person should classify someone who takes food from indefinitely closed stores in a desperate, starving city as a “looter,” but thats just what the media did over and over again. Sherrifs 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, de-industrialization 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.

[images from the Los Angeles Times, via Newsday, the first by Carolyn Cole, the second by Robert Gauthier]

outside the New Orleans convention center today

While still lying abed this morning I listened to the BBC World Service coverage of the New Orleans disaster. Unfortunately I did not get the name of the (American?) woman being interviewed in London who used Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” as a very dramatic metaphor for our contemporary U.S.
The BBC guy asked her to explain what she meant when she said something like, “we’re now looking at the picture of Dorian Gray which had been hidden in the attic.” She meant that the world can now see the America we have hidden behind the image of prosperity, liberty, equality and well . . . yes, fraternity.
Poor Americans on television? Poor African-Americans on television? And we can all agree they’re certainly not looking their Sunday best. How is that?
I believe the world knows much better than we do what has been going on here for decades, but now they have good pictures.
There was a related reference to this catastrophe’s elements of race and class in a segment from another show this morning. Although I can’t stand the Brian Lehrer Show, this morning I stayed around during the opening segment in order to hear The Nation‘s Katrina vanden Heuvel (whom Rush Limbaugh, taking childish delight in her given name, has blamed for the hurricane and everything else he sees wrong with America). Before her good sense could be “balanced” by someone from what is euphemistically referred to as a “Right-wing thinktank,” vanden Heuvel pointed out that Americans haven’t seen poor people on television for years, and now they are forced to do so, day after day. I would add (I don’t recall if she said something similar herself) that they see these images now only because of events not unrelated to our long-time abandonment of these folks, the least powerful elements of a very cruel, capitalist society quite full of itself.

[image, a pool photo by David J. Phillip, from the NYTimes]

A blanket covers the body of a woman who died in a wheelchair, and another body is wrapped in a sheet Thursday at the convention center in New Orleans. [CNN caption]

If we actually were to be the victim of a major deliberate attack any time in the near future it’s now certified that we have no plan, no defense, no means of recovery. This was just a big storm, a very big storm, but just a storm, and there’s no radiation or poison weaponry involved, yet it’s been five days and virtually no help of any kind has arrived for our good neighbors, the people of New Orleans. They’re dying in the attics, on the roofs and in the hell of the “shelters.”
This time even the major commercial media can’t keep quiet about the incompetence of what passes for government today in our benighted land:
New Orleans hospitals desperate as food runs low

The Associated Press
Doctors at two desperately crippled hospitals in New Orleans called The Associated Press Thursday morning pleading for rescue, saying they were nearly out of food and power and had been forced to move patients to higher floors to escape looters.
“We have been trying to call the mayor’s office, we have been trying to call the governor’s office … we have tried to use any inside pressure we can. We are turning to you. Please help us,” said Dr. Norman McSwain, chief of trauma surgery at Charity Hospital, the larger of two public hospitals.
. . . .
Earlier, McSwain described horrific conditions in his hospital.
“There is no food in Charity Hospital. They’re eating fruit bowl punch and that’s all they’ve got to eat. There’s minimal water,” McSwain said.
“Most of their power is out. Much of the hospital is dark. The ICU (intensive care unit) is on the 12th floor, so the physicians and nurses are having to walk up floors to see the patients.”
Dr. Lee Hamm, chairman of medicine at Tulane University, said he took a canoe from there to the two public hospitals, where he also works, to check conditions.
“The physicians and nurses are doing an incredible job, but there are patients laying on stretchers on the floor, the halls were dark, the stairwells are dark. Of course, there’s no elevators. There’s no communication with the outside world,” he said.
“We’re afraid that somehow these two hospitals have been left off … that somehow somebody has either forgotten it or ignored it or something, because there is no evidence anything is being done.”
Hamm said there was relief Wednesday as word traveled throughout University Hospital that the National Guard was coming to evacuate them, but the rescue never materialized.
“You can imagine how demoralizing that was,” he said.

And here is the Reuters lead headline at this moment (try to get past the racist analogy and digest the substance of the story):
Bodies, gunfire and chaos in New Orleans’ streets

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – Rotting bodies littered the flooded streets of New Orleans on Thursday and mounting violence threatened to turn into all-out anarchy as thousands of survivors of Hurricane Katrina pleaded to be evacuated, or even just fed.
The historic jazz city has fallen prey to armed looters since Katrina tore through and it now more closely resembles Haiti or another Third World trouble spot in a refugee crisis than one of America’s most popular vacation centers.
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco warned rioters and looters late on Thursday that National Guard troops were under her orders to “shoot and kill” if needed to restore order.
“These troops are battle-tested. They have M-16s and are locked and loaded,” she said. “These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will.”
Police units, rescue teams and even hospital workers came under gunfire on Thursday and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded for urgent help in getting thousands of evacuees to safety. “This is a desperate SOS,” he said.
People became increasingly frustrated at the slow pace of rescue and evacuation efforts a full three days after Katrina tore up the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Elderly people in wheelchairs braved flooded streets in search of help, and entire families were trapped on elevated highways without food or water in sweltering heat.
“We want help,” people chanted at the city convention center, where thousands of evacuees were told to seek shelter only to find woefully inadequate supplies of food or water.
Several corpses lay in nearby streets. The body of one elderly woman was simply abandoned in her wheelchair, covered with just a blanket. Officials feared thousands of people were killed but they could still only guess at the death toll.

And all the suits and uniforms seem to be thinking about is how to put down “looting” by desperate people reduced to nothing. Fifty thousand troops have been promised, no, threatened, and they have orders to shoot, but still there is no sign of food, nor water, nor rescue, nor means of evacuation from the city, nor decent shelter once they get out.
We are truly fucked, and next time it won’t be mostly just the poor, the old, the sick and the powerless.

[image, photographer uncredited, from CNN]