Hurricane Katrina Alert!
Calls For Progressive Emergency Supports to the Victims!
September 5, 2005
An Appeal from ActionLA
URL: http://www.ActionLA.org
ActionLA Coalition and several other progressive organizations, will launch
a national call for a donation drive to supports New Orleans areas
progressive agencies for the humanitarian-aid efforts. Detail will coming soon and
please donate generosity!
Lee Siu Hin
ActionLA Coalition
For More Information please visit our Hurricane Katrina Alert Webpage:
http://www.actionla.org/features/index.php?TypeId=59
How You Can Help!
Donations
Several Suggest Agencies To Donate Your Hurrican Katrina Relief
http://www.actionla.org/features/view.php?id=247
Volunteer Opportunities to Help Katrina Victims!
http://www.actionla.org/features/view.php?id=248
News Blogs
Katrina Blogosphere Digest
http://katrina05.blogspot.com/2005/09/katrina-blogosphere-digest.html
Katrina News Digest
http://katrina05.blogspot.com/2005/09/katrina-news-digest.html
Missing People Database
Katrina Missing/Found Persons Digest
http://katrina05.blogspot.com/2005/09/katrina-missing-personsfound-persons.htm
l
Red Cross Missing People Database
http://www.familylinks.icrc.org/katrina/people
Katrina Survivor-Connector List (Gulf Coast News)
http://wx.gulfcoastnews.com/katrina/status.aspx
Emergency Housing Information
Hurricane Housing Webboard
http://www.hurricanehousing.org/?id=5949-3540231-neEKZ816c5CI2UUnfwYR0g
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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.
Jordan Flaherty is an editor of Left Turn Magazine (www.leftturn.org)
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
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