Category: General

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]

are they invisible?

Is the story about lost or missed flights and the attendant inconvenience for thousands of travellers, or is it about humiliating and discarding hundreds of low-paid Asian workers struggling in a racist society?
There have been headlines about the British Air interruptions everywhere in the mainstream media since last Wednesday, but you’d have to be a very determined newsy indeed if you wanted to know what started the disruption.
Most American accounts, when they included any information about the origin of the toubles, referred to “wildcat ground staff strikes” or some equally vague and pejorative description of the original offense.
I did some digging and I’ve come up with some facts which have been reported almost nowhere within the reach of most U.S. news consumers. They must have been considered too complex for us to understand, or, more likely, too destructive of the conventional wisdom of contemporary American society about the evils of labor unions. Besides, images of people (especially attractive blond people, and most especially young women) stranded at Heathrow are a better sell to corporate media advertisers than the background facts and images which might assault their Olympian indifference to the people in real markets.
In a front-page article in the NYTimes this morning, at least four days after the [“unofficial strike,” in the brief, enigmatic description found in the piece’s first lines] you would have to read through thirteen paragraphs and move onto page 4 before you would find anything about the origins of the disruption in London.

And in fact, the dispute at the heart of the walkout – over employment practices at Gate Gourmet, an independent catering firm based in the United States [my italics] that provides food for British Airways and other airlines – is only indirectly related to the airline.
The strike began when the catering firm abruptly fired about 670 of its Heathrow-based workers on Wednesday, causing the rest of the catering staff to walk out in a show of support. On Thursday, about 1,000 other airport workers – including baggage handlers, bus drivers, ramp workers and check-in staff, walked out, too, for an unofficial strike.

To give the paper credit, the larger image accompanying the article on the inside page is of a group of Gate Gourmet [ex-?] employees assembled at the airport.
But the context of the firings is missing, as is any attempt to describe why they might have been kicked out in the first place.
I went looking and turned up this story on thisismoney, a financial website belonging to Britain’s [populist right-wing] Daily Mail/Evening Standard:

But what happened last Wednesday in a car park in Hounslow, near Heathrow, was everything that [Sir Rod Eddington, British Airways’ departing chief executive] says he condemns. It was crude, unintelligent and ultimately totally counter-productive.
When Gate Gourmet sacked 650 workers – some of them pregnant – by bellowing through a megaphone in the car park [italics mine again], it was, he believes. the inevitable trigger for retaliation.
In the closeknit Asian community around Heathrow, sacking lowly paid workers in such humiliating terms was an outrage.
Many Gate Gourmet workers had relatives employed by BA – not surprising since the airline sold its catering division to Gate Gourmet in 1997 for £60m.
The illegal sympathy strike action by 1,000 BA staff had the understanding and sympathy of all BA workers, even at the highest level.
Eddington, whose wife is Asian, has diplomatically refused to comment on Gate Gourmet’s management style. Publicly, he says: ‘I would like to apologise unreservedly to our customers who have suffered because we have been dragged into a dispute not of our doing.’
But he has not hidden his anger to close friends at the ‘stupidity’ of Gate Gourmet. ‘When you tackle change, you need to be clever and box clever,’ he said. ‘What happened out there was unintelligent and stupid,’ he is alleged to have said, adding ‘You can’t treat people in this way. They were not fat cats for God’s sake, they were hard-working lowly paid people.’
As for Gate Gourmet, it is satisfied it has not made any mistakes in its handling of the dispute, which started after an attempt to change working conditions and cut the workforce. A spokesman said it was haemorrhaging cash and unless there were agreed changes, the company would go into administration. As for sacking people by megaphone, he said: ‘ Sometimes the only way to communicate with the staff is by megaphone.’

Or whips?

[image by Andrew Stuart for the Associated Press via the NYTimes]