Please Forward


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, 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, 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, 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.

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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.

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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