There’s nothing the matter with teachers that a little less unionization and more COMPETITION couldn’t cure.
– Ann Coulter (racist reactionary right wing pundit)

It would force the district to learn how to run great schools by forcing them to COMPETE.
– Ben Austin (Executive Director LAPU/PR)

Several Emerson Middle School parents, activists, and teachers recently contacted me. They informed me LAPU/Parent (counter)Revolution has an “organizer” going door-to-door gathering signatures to privatize their school, this despite the fact Emerson isn’t on LAUSD Superintendent Cortines’ current privatization list. I asked them to describe the “organizer,” expecting LAPU/PR to have committed one of their most experienced employees, Shirley Ford or Mary Najara, to a project so ideologically important to chief privatizer Ben Austin.

The person gathering signatures they described, while initially unexpected, made complete sense in the context of the class character and demographics of where the canvassing is occurring. We’ll get back to this shortly.

Anyone over the age of 30 should recall phrases including “school choice” were the clarion call of segregationists and southern dixiecrats. It’s no small irony that one of Ben Austin’s Georgetown University Law School predecessors, Milton Korman, argued on the Jim Crow side of Brown vs. Board of Education. While the context of modern white flight isn’t directly comparable to that of the segregationists, its character and motivations are the same. Let’s look at the subtle, insidious racism that fuels the charter/voucher movement.

It’s one thing to discuss the racism charter schools and voucher advocates like Alliance, Bright Star, and Green Dot represent in the abstract. It’s quite another to demonstrate it in practice. For help with this, let’s turn to an Emerson parent who is an ardent Green Dot/LAPU/PR supporter. This parent, posting anonymously as helpemerson on the LAPU/PR Emerson privatization message board, forgets they’re posting in a public forum and lets the code words fly:

I think the Green Dot priorities would be great at Emerson. The kids need more work on their character and decorum and what it means to be a good citizen.¹

Character? Decorum? No, that wasn’t a Sarah Palin speech. It is however, very representative of the language employed by affluent white parents at Los Angeles schools where children of color have been or are currently bused in. In the wealthy white world of Beverly Hills, Westwood, and Franklin Canyon, phrases like “those people,” and questions like “when will they stop bussing?” top the list of code words overheard by social justice minded parents and teachers at schools like Emerson and Mark Twain.² These racist code words employed by westside parents like helpemerson including “character” and “decorum” fit right in with the bigoted westside phrases like “culture of failure” exposed in Carolyn Jacobson’s brilliant article “The Revolution of Separate, but Equal.”

This brings us back to the beginning of our essay, in which we were discussing LAPU/PR’s choice of organizers for their westside offensive. The description people provided of the LAPU/PR petition bearer went as follows: young, thin, blonde hair, blue eyes, and female. They were describing one of LAPU/PR’s newer employees, Nayla Wren. Is it pure coincidence Green Dot would prefer their blonde, blue eyed employee to canvas the affluent, predominantly white westside neighborhoods over their most experienced and seasoned “organizers,” who just happen to be women of color? Probably no more coincidence than the fact that all of Green Dot’s top executives are wealthy white males. Probably no more coincidence than Ben Austin calling 77% white Warner Avenue Elementary wonderful, and 11% white Emerson Middle School failing.³ Green Dot’s pandering to white flight and westside elitism is part and parcel the type of racism and segregation discussed in Jonathan Kozol’s seminal works “Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools” and “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.” One of the reasons Green Dot/LAPU/PR protested, but couldn’t refute⁴ Carolyn Jacobson’s article exposing westside racism, is that when the covers are pulled off the country club elitism of Steve Barr, Marshall Tuck, Antony Ressler, Ben Austin, and Marco Petruzzi, things get ugly.

Let’s be clear, the so called academic apologists for the racism and segregation inherent in charter schools and voucher programs include The Heritage Foundation, The Hoover Institution, The Cato Institute, and other far right think tanks.⁵ While these extreme right organizations are completely unconcerned with racial egalitarianism or class equality, they try to make a case that markets magically fix society’s systemic problems. These racist Milton Friedman cum Ayn Rand fantasies are adopted wholesale (with slight rewording) by the DLC/DFER crowd and presented as “innovation” and “reform.” No wonder Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter are on the same side as Ben Austin and Arne Duncan. Let’s also bear in mind the critics of charter schools and vouchers include left luminaries like Donaldo Macedo, Jonathan Kozol, and Henry Giroux. This is why Ben Austin and Gabe Rose’s specious comparisons of those opposing school privatization and vouchers to right wing health care town hall disrupters⁶ are absurd on their face! Privatization and neoliberalism is the right wing position in the education reform debate, and the charter/voucher crowd represent reactionary ideas like segregation, competition, and union busting with great adeptness.

To those who would claim the motley assortment of business types, lawyers, and political hacks that comprise the pro-privatization camp have good intentions, but just misguided ways of executing them; and claim the reason extreme right forces happen to agree with the DLC/DFER on charters/vouchers is it’s just a manifestation of bipartisan concern for children, it’s reckoning time. Even if the wealthy white males on the leading edge of school privatization were really in it for their concern about society instead the money (exposed in Kozol’s “The Big Enchilada“), then they’d still be exhibiting precisely what Paulo Freire describes as “the false generosity of paternalism.”⁷

What’s more, it isn’t mere coincidence that LAUSD’s sole African American board member, Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte, vehemently opposed the corporate charter choice resolution. It’s been long recognized in communities of color that the underfunding of inner city schools combined with privatization represented by charter/voucher advocates is another way to perpetuate the grip of the white supremacist overclass. Let’s look at how progressive African American writers view the charter/voucher onslaught. Los Angeles Sentinel’s Larry Aubry said of LAUSD VP Yolie Flores Aguilar’s corporate charter choice resolution:

The Public School Choice Resolution continues pattern of indifference to the plight of Black students-that is not acceptable. Parents, teachers, school boards and concerned others must work hard, and together, to guarantee a quality education for these much maligned but immeasurably deserving children.⁸

Black Agenda Radio’s Glen Ford said of charter/voucher privatization:

“Outsourcing of public education only occurs in overwhelmingly Black and brown school districts, places where, like in Los Angeles, public property and public responsibility to students is put on the private auction block.⁹

Black Agenda Report’s managing editor Bruce A. Dixon’s recent article should be read in its entirety, but this quote is especially cogent and to the point:

Improving education is not the goal. Privatization is the goal. The targets of school privatization are not supposedly underperforming students and teachers. The target is democracy itself. Private interests are just that – private. Turning public schools over to private interests frustrates even the possibility of democracy. Charter school apologists often claim that greater parental involvement is a hallmark of their model. But to the extent that it is true at all, it’s involvement of a select group of parents, and not open to those of the entire community. Charter schools undermine what is left of community.¹⁰

There’s much more to explore on this topic, but for now this will have to suffice. Lest the poverty pimps and privatization pushers try and play the oldest card of colonialism, divide and conquer, check out the latest progressive statement from the Association of Raza Educators regarding charters/vouchers.

1. Emerson Middle School. I also created a screen capture, since Green Dot/LAPU/PR is famous for redacting reality. The image captures the Emerson LAPU supporter’s racist code words for posterity. For some excellent articles on racist “code words” in general see:
   Is the racist smear campaign working? by Brian Jones
   Deciphering their racist code words by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
2. In the case of Mark Twain, the wealthy white elite of Venice (particularly the exclusive canal neighborhood from which Green Dot’s ruthless CEO Marco Petruzzi hails). It’s worth mentioning Mr. 90210, Ben Austin, lives near Emerson. Cynical much?
3. First exposed by journalist Caroline Grannan we also discuss this in a blog. Could you imagine Eli Broad and Steve Barr sycophants Jason Song and Howard Blume actually doing real reporting like Grannan? Now that the Los Angeles Times is basically a PR department for Broad’s DFER privatization project, we will never see an honest piece out of them again.
4. Note they state the piece is full of “disgusting and divisive lies,” but provide no evidence to the contrary. In other words, since everything in Ms. Jacobson’s article is true, all the country club klan at LAPU/PR can do is smear the messenger.
5. The racist reactionary right wing loves charters, vouchers, and neoliberal phrases like school choice. They have devoted tons of ink to trying to explain how the free market doesn’t perpetuate racism. Their arguments, with minor modification, have been adopted wholesale by the DLC/DFER. Here are a few of their disgusting works:

   The Heritage Foundation
   The Hoover Institution
   The Cato Institute

6. For feeble prose and an example of these ridiculous comparisons by the right wing privatizers trying to paint the left as right wing on this issue.
7. Paulo Freire “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” p. 54. If you claim to be on the left and haven’t read Freire, you’re fooling yourself.
8. Blacks Not Part of Public School Choice Plan.
9. Outsource It! Privatize It! LA School Reform in the Age of Obama. An astute comment following Ford’s cogent article asks ‘Isn’t this just institutionalization of the “Bell Curve?”‘ Seems like a lot of folks see right through the racism of the charter/voucher “movement.”
10. Obama’s Public Education Policy: Privatization, Charters, Mass Firings, Neighborhood Destabilization. Bruce A. Dixon is a real revolutionary. Unlike those right wingers living in the 90210 zip code claiming and using the word without knowing what it really means.

We were students, teachers, activists, and community members. We were Muslims, Jews, Christians, Palestinians, and allies. We were many, many more than the war criminal and his Mossad protectors. And we were powerful, more powerful than his security checkpoints and his electronically amplified lies. We strapped red tape to our bodies and stashed fake-bloodied clothes in our packs. Those of us who had the required documents, who had student IDs from New Orleans’ universities, passed through the checkpoints while our barred friends and allies gathered outside, armed with truths painted on posterboard and voices amplified by our growing numbers. With less than two weeks’ notice, we had formed a broad coalition that planned a multi-phased action to reclaim the same campus that is home to TIPAC (the Tulane-Israel Public Affairs Committee), that hosted Ann Coulter for “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” in 2007, and that was now inviting Ehud Olmert for a brief respite during his flight from international and Israeli courts. As Tulane University constructed a safe-haven and solicited interviews and meetings on behalf of its delinquent guest, dozens of our neighbors began to organize. And scores more responded to the call for action.

Tulane has long been an unwelcoming environment to our broader community, as well as to Muslim and Arab students. The culture of the white Northeastern American upper class dominates the campus, creating a space that vehemently reinforces a racist and elitist status quo and virulently quells dissent. Olmert’s strategists and local friends had chosen the city’s most Zionist and “secure” nonreligious institution for his visit, and many activists questioned the wisdom of challenging a hostile student body and a sometimes even more hostile private police force. Tulane voices have been almost entirely absent in a great many community dialogues and meetings about Palestine solidarity work, and the prospect of initiating a campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions on Tulane’s campus has always seemed laughable. But New Orleans is a city where so many feel linked to the Palestinian struggle through shared themes like the experience of diaspora, the right of return, and near-daily racist violence and oppression by police and military authorities. There is no space in our city where Israeli war criminals will not be challenged.

Tulane was as hostile an environment as we expected. Hundreds of Tulane students showed up to hear Olmert speak, and many laughed and applauded when he made jokes about the comments of overwhelmed Palestinians who threw up their hands in exasperation at his lies and walked out of the building. Many of our own group were only kept silent by the red tape we’d hidden on our bodies and then used to cover our mouths when Olmert first walked onto the stage. Scrawled on the tape were words that enumerated some of Olmert’s administration’s crimes, such as “human shields,” “illegal settlements,” “white phosphorous,” and “occupation.” We breathed deep and sat through an onslaught of racist lies about our Palestinian friends and family, until Olmert began to talk about the mistake Israel had made in “withdrawing” from Gaza. Then, one by one, our jaws aching from biting down on our testimonials of what we have seen with our own eyes and what our families and friends continue to suffer, we rose from our seats throughout the auditorium, slowly made our way to the aisle, and walked out.

Olmert’s audience, which for a moment became our own, gasped and whispered as more than twenty people stood, staring daggers at Olmert and his Mossad agents speaking into their sleeves, and then trailed down the aisles to the auditorium’s exit. Some of us cried, others shook with rage, but we all celebrated our action, small but fluid, and impenetrable by Olmert’s snide remarks and Mossad’s hidden weapons.

As we left the auditorium we heard the chants of our friends, and breathed freely for what felt like the first time in over an hour. The hostility had been palpable inside the auditorium, but our friends cried out to us and embraced us, and their numbers had easily tripled since we’d last seen them. They’d been shouting for two hours now, competing with calls of “Heil Hitler” and “Palestinians are Nazis” from students passing by. A Muslim woman in hijab had been hit with plates of food thrown from an adjacent third floor balcony while campus police looked on. Within twenty minutes we’d set up the next phase of our action: Four people dressed in bloodied clothes laid down on the ground in front of the auditorium, and we placed cardboard grave markers with the numbers of massacred Palestinians and Lebanese around them. As students began to flow out of the auditorium, we handed out fliers detailing Olmert’s war crimes and tried to prevent passers by from spitting on our friends on the ground. We were mostly successful, and managed to keep a student from urinating on one of the participants.

We were not at all surprised by the hostility we faced, but we were surprised by the positive responses of far more Tulane students than we expected. Members of Tulane Amnesty International, Tulane American Socialist Students United, and individual undergraduate and graduate students printed fliers, spread the word, and were an unmistakable presence in every phase of the actions. A day that we had dreaded and actions we had hated having to plan had resulted in a broadening of our local Palestine solidarity network into a community we had dismissed for too long. Our new friends and allies at Tulane know first-hand how much they are up against in an institution that is between one-quarter and one-third Jewish and regularly equates Zionism with Judaism, but they are aching to take up the challenge. They are Muslims, Palestinians, Jews, and allies. They are freshman, upperclassmen, and graduate students. On October 13th, they joined students from the General Union of Palestine Students and Amnesty International of University of New Orleans, as well as students from Loyola University, in standing up to hundreds of aggressive classmates, taping their mouths shut to announce their presence and their intentions. Suddenly the challenges we face in our local solidarity work seem more surmountable. The despicable war criminal inadvertently gave one gift to New Orleans during his visit: He gave the beginnings of Tulane’s Palestine solidarity movement an unforgettable debut.

The dispute focuses on the responsibility of relief organizations to speak out against injustice in the communities in which they work. Since September of 2006, St. Bernard Parish has been aggressive in passing racially discriminatory laws and ordinances. Although these laws have faced condemnation in Federal court and in the media, rebuilding organizations active in the parish have so far refused to take a public position.

Racial discrimination has a long history in St. Bernard politics. Judge Leander Perez, a fiery leader who dominated the parish for almost 50 years, was known nationally as a spokesman for racial segregation. The main road through the Parish was named after Perez, and his legacy still has a hold on the political scene there. Lynn Dean, a member of the St Bernard parish council told reporter Lizzy Ratner, “They don’t want the blacks back… What they’d like to do now with Katrina is say, we’ll wipe out all of them. They’re not gonna say that out in the open, but how do you say? Actions speak louder than words. There’s their action.”

The action Lynn was referencing is a “blood relative” ordinance the council passed in 2006. The law made it illegal for Parish homeowners to rent to anyone not directly related to the renter. In St Bernard, which was 85% white before Katrina hit, this effectively kept African Americans, many of whom were still displaced from New Orleans and looking for nearby housing, from moving in. The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center sued the Parish, saying the ordinance violated the 1968 Fair Housing Act. A judge agreed, saying it was racially discriminatory in intent and impact.

The story doesn’t end there. St. Bernard’s government agreed to a settlement, but the illegal ordinance was followed by another, blocking multi-family construction in the Parish. Last month, U.S. District Judge Ginger Berrigan found the Parish to be in contempt of court, saying, “The Parish Council’s intent…is and was racially discriminatory.” An editorial in the New Orleans Times-Picayune agreed, saying, “This ruling strips off the camouflage and reveals St. Bernard’s actions for what they really are: an effort to keep lower-income people and African-Americans from moving into the mostly white parish.”

Relief Work Questioned

St. Bernard Parish was heavily damaged by flooding in the aftermath of Katrina. Thirteen percent of households lived below the federal poverty line, and every home took in water. Many organizations and volunteers have come through to volunteer time and donate money, including United Way, Salvation Army, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

An organization called the St. Bernard Project, which was founded in 2006 by two transplants from Washington, DC, has become one of the most high profile organizations active in the region, with millions of dollars in corporate and individual donations and thousands of volunteers.

This has been a big couple of weeks for the St. Bernard Project. On August 29, President Obama mentioned them in his weekly address, saying, “The St. Bernard Project has drawn together volunteers to rebuild hundreds of homes, where people can live with dignity and security.” Last week, the touring production of the Broadway show The Color Purple, produced by Oprah Winfrey, announced that they will be raising money for the organization, and that author Alice Walker will be personally participating in the fundraising. Last year, CNN named co-founder Liz McCartney its Hero of the Year.

But this national acclamation has only increased criticisms of the work happening in the Parish. Lance Hill, the executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, first raised his voice on the issue in 2006, after the ordinance was passed. Hill is quick to point out that he is not against rebuilding work in the Parish. However, he adds, “If they chose to rebuild homes that Blacks and Jews would be barred from, at a minimum they have a moral obligation to inform volunteers of the policies of the Parish. To not do so is to mislead volunteers and donors and to become complicit with racism.”

Hill is also one of the signatories of an open letter, released this week, which expresses deep concerns over rebuilding efforts in the parish. “Regrettably, many relief and volunteer organizations chose not to respond to the ‘blood relative’ law, remaining silent on this issue,” the letter states. “With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that St. Bernard Parish officials interpreted silence as consent, which has now emboldened this rogue government to pursue other means to defy the Fair Housing Act.”

Organizers say that the letter is intended to pressure organizations to think about larger issues of injustice as they work in the region. “It is time that we take a stand against housing discrimination in St. Bernard and throughout the Gulf Coast,” the letter states. “And make clear what the moral imperatives are for all organizations that seek to rebuild the Gulf Coast as a fair and just society.” Among the signers of the letter are human rights organizations like the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, regional groups like Moving Forward Gulf Coast, and local initiatives like MayDay Nola, which works on housing in New Orleans.

Zack Rosenburg, the cofounder of St. Bernard Project, is angered by the complaints of Hill and others. “We are not an advocacy group and we’re not commenting on that,” he told me, referring to the laws of the Parish. “We’re helping people get home.” Rosenburg added that at least 30% of the families they have worked with have been African American, and he asked me to “think about the Black families who are living in FEMA trailers and want to move home, before writing this piece… try to build things up instead of pulling things down.”

Lance Hill and other advocates claim that working on relief without challenging systemic injustices actually exacerbates the problem. They point out that the number of houses rebuilt for African Americans in the community – perhaps two hundred at the most, if you include all nonprofits working in the area – pales in comparison to the thousands that have potentially been excluded by the laws of the parish. “The main reason that these relief groups have had to disproportionately rebuild Black rentals,” explains Hill, “is because the Parish is tearing down or blocking construction of affordable housing faster than the relief groups can rebuild.”

“This is why this issue in St. Bernard has troubled me so much,” adds Hill. “Exclusion is at the core of the injustices of Katrina. The deliberate efforts to prevent people from returning and the denial that these policies and practices were in place has been the central issue. The exclusionary ideology that was widespread in the white community in New Orleans became law in St. Bernard.”

Organizers hope that the multiple levels of pressure will ultimately challenge elected officials in St. Bernard Parish to make the area an example of rebuilding with justice for all. “Our silence doesn’t help anybody,” says Hill. “It destroys more than the relief groups can ever dream of building.”

Ivor van Heerden is the professor at Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center who warned the levees of New Orleans were ready to blow — months and years before Katrina did the job.

For being right, van Heerden was rewarded with … getting fired. [See Katrina, Four Years Later: Expert Fired Who Warned Levees Would Burst]

But I’ve been in this investigating game long enough to know that van Heerden’s job didn’t die of natural causes or academic issues. This was a hit. Some very powerful folks wanted him disappeared and silenced — for good.

So who done it?

Here are the facts.

Dr. van Heerden has lots of friends, mostly the people of New Orleans, those who survived and cheered his fight to save their city. But he also has enemies, many of them, and they are powerful.

First, there is Big Oil. More than a decade ago, van Heerden pointed the finger at oil drilling as a culprit in threatening New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with flooding.

“Certainly he was critical of what the oil companies did to the coast,” Louisiana engineer HJ Bosworth told me. “Seeing what kind of bad citizens they were. Dozens and dozens of pipeline canals just carved the living daylights out of the coast just to find some oil.”

Well, we need oil, don’t we?

True, but Bosworth, who advises Levees.org, a non-profit group that birddogs hurricane safety work, explained the connection between flooding New Orleans and oil drilling quantified by van Heerden’s research. “Takes a million years to build (the protective coastal marsh); once you carve it up, it’s just like bleeding a wild animal, hang it up, carve some holes in it, and the juice just drains out of it. Saltwater and tide invade. You make [the state] susceptible to flooding from coastal and tidal surges.”

So I was amazed to learn that, shortly after van Heerden, wetlands protector, was given the heave-ho by LSU, a group calling itself “America’s Wetland” gave the university a fat check for $300,000.

After a little digging, I found that it wasn’t really “America’s Wetland,” the group with the oh-so-green name and love-Mother-Nature website, that provided the money. One-hundred percent of the loot, in fact, came from Chevron Oil Corporation. Chevron had merely “green-washed” the money through “Wetlands.”

Was this Big Oil’s “thank you” to LSU for canning van Heerden? The University refuses to talk to me about van Heerden’s firing (”It’s a confidential personnel matter”).

Bosworth notes such a grant to the University “doesn’t come without strings attached.” And this “Wetland” grant appears to have some tangled threads. LSU will monitor the coast’s environment, guided by a committee of what the school’s PR office describes as “experts” in coastal infrastructure and hurricane research. But the school is pointedly excluding its own expert, van Heerden. Instead of van Heerden, LSU announced it will rely on representatives from Chevron — and Shell Oil.

You can’t challenge Shell’s expertise on coastal erosion. The Gulf Restoration Network has calculated that the oil giant, “has dredged 8.8 million cubic yards material while laying pipelines since 1983 causing the loss of 22,624 acres.”

Shell too is a sponsor of “America’s Wetland.”

Bad Behavior

Van Heerden and his team of hurricane experts at LSU have other enemies, notably Big Oil’s little sisters: The Army Corp of Engineers and its contractors. One internal University memo that has come to light is a complaint from the Army Corp of Engineers’ Washington office to an LSU official demanding to know why van Heerden’s “irresponsible behavior is tolerated.”

By van Heerden’s bad “behavior,” they seem to be referring to the professor’s computer model of the Gulf which predicted, years before Katrina hit, that the levees built by the Army Corp were too short. The Army Corp, van Heerden asserts, compounded the danger to New Orleans by going shovel-crazy, with massive dredging and channel-cutting sought by shipping interests.

Following the complaint from Washington, the University took away van Heerden’s computer (no kidding). But they couldn’t take away his voice. He began to speak out. University officials do not deny they told him to shut up, to stop speaking to the press about his concerns. They were worried, they told van Heerden, that his statements jeopardized their government funding.

Van Heerden’s revelations were, indeed, damning. He revealed that the Bush White House knew, the night Katrina came ashore, that the levees were breaking up, but withheld this crucial information from the state’s emergency response center. As a result, the state slowed evacuation and stranded residents were left to drown. [See Big Easy to Big Empty.]

A class action lawsuit has been filed against the Army Corp of Engineers on behalf of all the people of the city who lost homes and loved ones because the Corp-designed levees had failed. Anyone with a TV and two eyes could see that. But the Bush Administration flat out denied it knew its system was flawed and refused any responsibility for the disaster.

Van Heerden, who had warned Washington, long before the flood, that the levees were 18 inches too short, would have been a devastating expert witness for the public. But the university ordered him not to testify, a relief for the Corps. (A verdict is expected soon in the non-jury case.)

The Army Corp and its contractors can feel safer now that van Heerden has been booted. His Hurricane Center will be downsized and instead, the University will expand its “Wetland” program, with Chevron’s checkbook.

Joining Chevron and Shell on the LSU board of “wetland” experts will be the Shaw Group, a huge Army Corp contractor.

If you’ve read John Perkins’ book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, you would know about Shaw Group, or at least the subsidiary for whom Perkins did his dirty work: an engineering outfit that used flim-flam, intimidation and fraud to turn a buck. (I once directed a government racketeering investigation of one of their projects before Shaw bought them up. In the 1988 case, a jury found the company was co-conspirator in a multi-billion-dollar fraud, charges the company settled with a civil payment.)

Shaw Group is also a sponsor of “America’s Wetland.” So is electricity giant Entergy Corporation. That’s the company that shut off the power in New Orleans during the flood, then sold the loose juice elsewhere, pocketing a multi-million-dollar windfall.

Yes, America’s Wetland does have a green cover, Environmental Defense, exposed in the Guardian UK in 1999 for its icky habit of licking the sugar off corporate candy canes. We caught them trying to set up a lucrative financial operation with the very polluters they were supposed to be challenging. [See Fill your lungs it's only borrowed grime]

I spoke with the Chairman of American Wetland, King Milling. Milling’s just a local good ol’ boy, a sincere guy, not a front for Big Oil. But he naively let his group be used to buy the debate over the environment and ice out un-bought experts like van Heerden.

Flood Warning

With LSU deep in the pocket of the corporate powers and under Army Corp pressure, van Heerden didn’t stand a chance. For doing nothing more than trying to save a few thousand lives, he has paid quite a price. As he told me this week from his home, “No good turn goes unpunished.”

That’s van Heerden’s fate. But what about the city’s? Is New Orleans ready for another Katrina?

His answer is not comforting: “No, definitely not. If anything, it’s worse than when Katrina hit. We’ve lost a lot of wetlands protection. It’s not very safe … A section of the flood wall itself has sunk about 9 inches, a result of [Hurricane] Gustav.”

Is anyone listening?

“The [Army] Corp won’t talk to me,” says van Heerden. “Like everybody else, they are crossing their fingers and hoping we don’t have a storm.”

Well, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

I don’t get to use the word “heroic” very often. Van Heerden is heroic. The Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, it was van Heerden who told me, on camera, something so horrible, so frightening, that, if it weren’t for his international stature, it would have been hard to believe:

“By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody.”

On the night of August 29, 2005, van Heerden was shut in at the state emergency center in Baton Rouge, providing technical advice to the rescue effort. As Hurricane Katrina came ashore, van Heerden and the State Police there were high-fiving it: Katrina missed the city of New Orleans, turning east.

What they did not know was that the levees had cracked. For crucial hours, the White House knew, but withheld the information that the levees of New Orleans had broken and that the city was about to drown. Bush’s boys did not notify the State of the flood to come which would have allowed police to launch an emergency hunt for the thousands that remained stranded.

“Fifteen hundred people drowned. That’s the bottom line,” said von Heerden. He shouldn’t have told me that. The professor was already in trouble for saying, publicly, that the levees around New Orleans were no good, too short, by 18″. They couldn’t stand up to a storm like Katrina. He said it months before Katrina hit – in a call to the White House, and later in the press.

So, even before Katrina, even before our interview, the professor was in hot water. Van Heerden was told by University officials that his complaints jeopardized funding from the Bush Administration. They tried to gag him. He didn’t care: he ripped off the gag and spoke out.

It didn’t matter to Bush, to the State, to the University, that van Heerden was right- devastatingly right. Exactly as van Heerden predicted, the levees could not stand up to the storm surge.

In 2006, I met van Heerden in his office at the University’s hurricane center; a cubby filled with charts of the city under water. He’s a soft-spoken, even-tempered man, given to understatement and academic reserve. But his words were hand grenades: the Bush White House did nothing about the levees, despite warning after warning.

Why? A hurricane is an Act of God. But a levee failure is an Act of Bush — of the federal government. Under the Flood Control Act of 1928, once the levees break, it’s Washington’s responsibility to save lives — and to compensate the victims for lost homes and lost loved ones.

By telling me this, the professor had to know he was putting his job on the line. This week marks the fourth anniversary of the drowning of New Orleans.

Shakoor Aljuwani of the Rebuilding Lives Coalition reminds me it is also the fourth year of exile for more than half of the low-income Black residents who once lived in the Crescent City. In the Lower Ninth Ward, 81% have yet to return.

And it marks the end of Dr. van Heerden’s career at LSU. They got him. Once the network cameras were turned away from New Orleans, as America and Anderson Cooper shifted attention to Brad and Angelina and other news, the University put an end to Dr. van Heerden. “In 2006 they started the nonsense — they stopped me from teaching. They tried last year to get faculty to vote me out.”

His contract was not renewed; he was forced out too, dumped along with the chief of the Hurricane Center who led the academics who supported van Heerden’s research. The Man Who Was Right was fired.

Cronies and Contracts

I did not seek out professor van Heerden about Bush’s deadly silence. Rather, I’d come to LSU to ask him about a strange little company, “Innovative Emergency Management,” a politically well-connected firm that, a year before the hurricane, had finagled a contract to plan the evacuation of New Orleans.

Innovative Emergency Management knew a lot about political contributions, but seemed to have zero experience in hurricane response planning. In fact, their “plan” for New Orleans called for evacuating the city by automobile. When Katrina hit, 127,000 wheel-less New Orleans folk were left to float out.

And van Heerden knew all about it. Well before the hurricane, I discovered, he’d pointed out flaws in the “Innovative” plan — and was threatened for the revelation by a state official. The same official later joined the payroll of Innovative Emergency Management.

When I asked the company, at their office, for a copy of the plan, they body-blocked our Democracy Now! camerawoman and called the cops.

Not everyone shared the harsh fate of van Heerden. Just this month, Innovative Emergency Management, the firm with the drive-for-your-life plan, was handed a fat contract by the State of Alabama to draft – you guessed it – a hurricane evacuation plan for Mobile.

The City That Care Forgot

After the flood, I filmed the uplifting story of Common Ground, the commune of Katrina survivors who, under the leadership of the community organizer Malik Rahim, rebuilt a shattered hulk of a building with their own sweat and donated materials. They housed 350 displaced families.

Since I broadcast that film in 2006, Rahim and the tenants were evicted by speculators who bought the building. Just before Christmas, elderly residents were carried out and dumped in the street, literally, by marshals. The speculators paid the families who build their new edifice not one dime.

We also filmed the story of Patricia Thomas, a woman fighting to return to her home in the beautiful Lafitte public housing project. Speculators have long lusted for this property on the edge of the French Quarter.

And now the speculators have it. Patricia’s home, unscathed by Katrina, was nevertheless bulldozed. As Rahim puts it, “They wanted them poor niggers out of there and they ain’t had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers.” Their plan succeeded. Patricia, homeless, died last year.

This Friday, take a moment to remember a courageous professor, an indefatigable activist and the refugee families who once lived in what was once called, “The City That Care Forgot.”

Now, in 2009, you could call it the city that everyone forgot.

Up a darkened stairway and through the detritus of a building that looks like its been scavenged for anything of value to sell, Rohn and Miller enter a sundrenched room. Inside is Michael Palmer, a 57-year-old white former construction worker and merchant seaman who has made a home here. Palmer – his friends call him Mickey – is in some ways lucky. He found a room with a door that locks. He salvaged some furniture from other parts of the hospital, so he has a bed, a couch, and a rug. Best of all, he has a fourth-floor room with a balcony. “Of all the homeless,” he says, “I probably have the best view.”

Mickey has lived here for six months. He’s been homeless since shortly after Katrina, and this is by far the best place he’s stayed in that time. “I’ve lived on the street,” he says. “I’ve slept in a cardboard box.” He is a proud man, thin and muscled with a fresh shave, clean clothes and a trim mustache. He credits a nearby church, which lets him shave and shower.

But Palmer would like to be able to pay rent again. “My apartment was around $450. I could afford $450. I can’t afford $700 or $800 and that’s what the places have gone up to.” Keeping himself together, well-dressed and fresh, Mickey is trying to go back to the life he had. “I have never lived on the dole of the state,” he says proudly. “I’ve never been on welfare, never collected food stamps.” Palmer rented an apartment before Katrina. He did repairs and construction. “I had my own business,” he says. “I had a pickup truck with all my tools, and all that went under water.”

Palmer is one of thousands of homeless people living in New Orleans’ storm damaged and abandoned homes and buildings. Four years after Katrina, recovery and rebuilding has come slow to this city, and there are many boarded-up homes to choose from. The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center counts 65,888 abandoned residential addresses in New Orleans, and this number doesn’t include any of the many non-residential buildings, like the hospital Mickey stays in. Overall, about a third of the addresses in the city are vacant or abandoned, the highest rate in the nation. UNITY for the Homeless is the only organization surveying these spaces, and Miller and Rohn are the only fulltime staff on the project. They have surveyed 1,330 buildings – a small fraction of the total number of empty structures. Of those, 564 were unsecured. Nearly 40% of them showed signs of use, including a total of 270 bedrolls or mattresses.

Using conservative estimates, UNITY estimates at least 6,000 squatters, and a total of about 11,000 homeless individuals in the city.

UNITY workers have also found that not all people living in New Orleans’ abandoned homes are squatters. In the last three months alone, they have found nine homeowners living in their own toxic, flood-damaged, often completely unrepaired homes. These are people living in buildings — identified as abandoned and not fit for human habitation — that they (or extended family members) actually own.

The abandoned building dwellers they’ve found are generally older than the overall homeless population, with high rates of disability and illness. The average age of folks they have found is 45, and the oldest was 90. Over 70% report or show signs of psychiatric disorders, and 42% show signs of disabling medical illnesses and problems. Disabling means “people that are facing death if not treated properly,” clarifies Rohn. “We’re not talking about something like high blood pressure.”

Life in Abandoned Homes

“This leg here bent backwards and the muscle came up,” says Naomi Burkhalter, an elderly Black woman in a wheelchair, sitting outside of the abandoned house she lives in and gesturing to her badly twisted leg. She was injured during Katrina, and can’t walk. She stays in a flood-damaged house in New Orleans’ Gert Town neighborhood, with no electricity or running water. She says the owner – who cannot afford to repair the home – knows she lives there, along with two other women. When they need water, they fill bottles up from neighbors. When she needs to get in and out of her house, she crawls, very slowly dragging herself up and down the steps with her hands, leaving her wheelchair outside and hoping no one takes it. Miss Naomi worked at a shrimp company and rented an apartment before Katrina. Now, between her injury and higher rents, she can no longer afford her former home. “My rent was 350 dollars,” she explains. “But when I came back, my rent was up to $1200.” Burkhalter has been homeless since then.

UNITY has received funding from the federal government for 752 housing vouchers specifically to help house the city’s homeless population. They have put people on a list, with those in the most danger of dying if they don’t get help on the top of the list. However, the vouchers still have not arrived, and at least 16 people from the list have already died while waiting. “The stress and trauma that these people have endured cannot be overstated,” says Martha Kegel, executive director of UNITY. “The neighborhood infrastructure that so many people depended on is gone.”

This problem was exacerbated by the demolition of thousands of units of public housing, an act which not only took away the community that many people found brought them comfort and safety, but has also made affordable rentals for poor New Orleanians even harder to find. Section 8 subsidized housing has been offered as a solution for those displaced from public housing and other poor renters, but a new study from Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC) shows that discrimination keeps many people from finding quality housing through the program. According to the report, 82% of landlords in the city either refused to accept Section 8 vouchers, or added insurmountable requirements.

The study found that both discrimination on the part of landlords (99% of Section 8 voucher holders in Orleans parish are Black) and mismanagement on the part of the housing agency were barriers. One prospective landlord told a tester for GNOFHAC that he wouldn’t rent to Section 8 holders, “until Black ministers…start teaching morals and ethics to their own, so they don’t have litters of pups like animals, and they’re not milking the system.”

The mismanagement from the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) was also a big problem for prospective landlords. “I faxed HANO the needed information 12 times for the rent I was never paid” said one landlord. Another housing provider said, “I called every day for a month and never got a call back.”

Last month, more than a hundred members of STAND for Dignity, a grassroots membership project of the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, protested outside of the offices of HANO, decrying their lack of action. A single mother named Ayesha told the crowd that she had been on the Section 8 waiting list for eight years, and still hasn’t received any help. She is paying 80% of her income on rent, and has been forced to go months at a time without water, gas or lights. George Tucker, another member of STAND, and also (like Mickey Palmer) a former merchant mariner, told the assembled crowd his story of being evicted from his apartment because HANO lost his paperwork. Because of bureaucratic carelessness, he was homeless for thirteen months. “This governmental crookedness is not new,” he said. “But it cannot continue without consequences.”

Last week, at least partly in response to criticism from folks like the members of STAND, HANO announced that they would accept new applications for Section 8 vouchers, for the first time in six years. The period that they will accept applications in is only a week long – from September 6 through 12.

Fear and Harassment

“My best friend died three weeks ago in this chair,” says Mickey Palmer gesturing next to him in his room in the abandoned hospital. “There was two other people staying here with me. One gentleman got in an accident about two months ago and he’s paralyzed in the hospital. Another friend of mine OD’ed and died here three weeks ago. My best friend. So I’m here alone.”

Palmer also fears police harassment. “The police hate homeless people,” he declares. “They’ll arrest me on drunk in public,” he says. “I haven’t had a drink in months.” Gesturing around the room that he has made into a home, he adds, “Of course, this is illegal. If I get caught I can not only be evicted, but incarcerated. I could go to jail for trespassing.”

This fear drives the homeless further underground, and makes it even harder for organizations like UNITY to find them and offer help. “Our city has a long history of police criminalization of homelessness, so people have reason to hide,” explains Martha Kegel.

Despite the size and scope of this problem, help has been hard to come by, from either the city, state, or federal government. “I’m not a politician and I’m not politically savvy,” says Palmer. “But I don’t think they care.”

In a rare step forward last month, both houses of Louisiana’s legislature unanimously passed a bill creating a statewide agency – to be almost entirely funded by the federal government – to address the issue of homelessness. However, Governor Jindal vetoed the bill. Jindal also vetoed funding for the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital, further reducing medical and mental health services in the city – another factor that has made life hard for many homeless folks in the city. As rates of mental illness rise in the city, we now have less treatment available then ever before.

For people like Mickey, caught in a city with few good paying jobs, much more expensive housing, and ever-decreasing social services, there are not many options. “At one time we were part of the city and part of the workforce,” Mickey says. “But people cannot afford the housing in New Orleans anymore. I find most of the people I know, my friends, they can’t afford the rent.”

Like most people in his position, Palmer has felt hopelessness at his plight. “I try not to get depressed, he says, nervously flicking his lighter. “But this can get you depressed. Coming back here last night got me a little depressed.”

Tall and self-assured, Freedia is a powerful performer and brings an undeniable energy to the play. During rehearsals, says Lucky, “when Freedia comes in, the cast lights up, and everyone does their best.” Freedia is best known as part of a community of gay rappers self-identified as sissy bounce artists. She rejects that label, saying, “I’m a gay rapper, don’t get me wrong. But there’s no such thing as separating it into straight bounce and sissy bounce. It’s all bounce music.”

Bounce is the name given to the style of New Orleans Hip-Hop recognized for a distinctive beat and call-and-response lyrical style that owes much to Mardi Gras Indians and other local cultural traditions. Although not widely listened to outside of the south, bounce dominates New Orleans clubs, and is so identified with the poor neighborhoods of the city, it’s sometimes called “project music.”

“When you hear bounce,” says Lucky, people in a club go wild. “They just forget about it. They throw their hands up in the air, they catch the wall.” However you label Freedia’s music, she is one of several gay rappers who have broken down barrier after barrier to become some of New Orleans’ most popular musicians.

Spreading New Orleans Culture

Catch Dat Beat attempts to spread the love of bounce, and it proves infectious. The play advertises that it has no profanity or “obscene body gestures,” (a challenge, when capturing the bounce experience, which often involves a lot of both). Lucky Johnson is a cousin of popular director/actor Tyler Perry, and like a Tyler Perry script, Catch Dat Beat has positive characters and an accessible story. The basic story follows a hair stylist (played by Freedia) who throws a block party to show a visiting cousin how New Orleans gets down. There are moments of conflicts (will Freedia’s grandfather, played by Lucky, accept her sexuality? Will police break up the block party?) but the show is really about celebrating local culture. Lucky also acts in the play, along with bounce trendsetter Tenth Ward Buck

The second act of the show recreates a block party on stage, and features short appearances by many of the biggest names in bounce. During the opening weekend, the crowd rose cheering to their feet as stars including Ms. Tee, Gotti Boy Chris and Katey Red took over the stage.

Lucky wants Catch Dat Beat to help popularize bounce and New Orleans. He structured the play around a block party to show that New Orleans celebrations are really about building community and supporting your neighbors.

“Growing up in less fortunate neighborhoods, your parents would have card games, or suppers,” explains Lucky. “Say Miss Carol across the street’s light bill was due. Miss Carol would have a supper. Everyone in the neighborhood would buy a plate to help her pay the light bill.” In other words, continued Lucky, the block party comes from this tradition, and is ultimately about “how a people are able to come together in a time of need.”

Lucky has produced many of New Orleans bounce hits, and sees producing as a way to support positive work. “I can’t sign a hip hop gangster rapper,” he says. “I don’t advocate killing and drugs or slap that bitch. I’m not into that. I’m not gonna put my money behind it. If you come to me with something that says ‘get on the dance floor and have a good time,’ then I can support it.”

He is excited about all of the play’s actors, heaping praise on the accomplishments of Tenth Ward Buck and Freedia. “Buck was the first in so many ways,” he says of his star, listing his accomplishments. “The first to speed up bounce, the first to take an R&B track and bounce it out.” Through more than ten years of albums, plus a film, an upcoming book, and his dedication to working with youth, Buck has earned the praise.

As for the star of the show, “Freedia is outstanding,” says Lucky. “Every time he’d get the mic, he’d just light up the room.” Buck also Is quick to praise Freedia. “As Freedia was coming up, a lot of people tried to drag him down,” Buck says. “And he didn’t care about what they said, he kept moving forward. I don’t care if you straight or what, everyone is bouncing to Freedia’s music.” In fact, the sissy bounce community that Katey Red birthed ten years ago with her album Melpomene Block Party has rejuvenated the form, and gay rappers like Freedia have gone from a novelty to a central part of bounce culture.

Conquering Obstacles

Bounce music faces many obstacles on the way to national popularity. It is in many ways so distinctly New Orleans, with most songs featuring neighborhood-specific references, that it’s hard to imagine a bounce party in any other city. However, elements of bounce have appeared in songs by national acts like David Banner, Mike Jones and Beyonce.

Here in New Orleans, bounce artists bring lines around the corner when they perform. Freedia believes bounce will keep growing, and isn’t worried about any potential obstacles. She has struggled in a sometimes-homophobic music scene and become one of the leading stars — gay or straight — in New Orleans. “We been working really hard all these years of getting people to accept us,” she says. “Maybe get throwed at and screamed at, but over time all that has changed. All the hard work has finally paid off.”

With a show at this year’s Jazz Fest by Big Freedia, Katey Red and Sissy Nobby, as well as a photo spread in hipster music magazine XLR8R, the music form is clearly reaching new audiences. “For me it was the determination to change the people and make them love what we do,” says Freedia. “And that’s what my job was. When I became a gay bounce rapper I said that I was going to change it and make people love me, and make them love gay people.”

“People say negative things,” about gay rap stars, acknowledges Lucky. “I don’t care, at the end of the day it’s about the message. People who are homophobic, it tells me about that person’s character, because god loves us all no matter what.”

* Check out Ya Heard Me, the definitive Bounce Film.

Tourists drive by and people with cameras gawk. Richard looks directly at the camera and says, “It looks like there’s more money to be paid in devastation than regeneration. If y’all keep paying your money to see it, should we rebuild it?”

The short film New Orleans For Sale, which has garnered several awards, was made by 2-Cent Entertainment, a group of young Black media makers in New Orleans. The group, which currently has 10 members , made New Orleans for Sale to convey the frustration felt by many New Orleanians as the city has become a national spectacle and a backdrop for countless national politicians, while the aid the city needs to rebuild still hasn’t arrived. In 2008, the film won several awards including an NAACP image award in a competition, called Film Your Issue, which featured a high-powered jury with the likes of news anchor Tom Brokaw and media executives from MTV Networks, Lionsgate Entertainment and USA Today.

Working at the intersection of art and justice, as well as entertainment and enlightenment, 2-Cent has attracted a wide and growing audience. In New Orleans, they’ve also collaborated with the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, produced shows on local television and radio stations, and created mix CDs and scores of short videos. Beyond creating inspiring programming, 2-Cent members also seek to pass their skills onto the next generation, and have taught and presented their work and in New Orleans high schools and colleges.

“Huey Newton said the young people always inherit the revolution,” says Brandan “B-Mike” Odums, 2-Cent’s founder. “And that’s what 2-Cent is, it’s how our generation responded to that call.”

Positive Images

The collective formed in 2004, when Odums gathered a group of friends (most of them fellow students at the University of New Orleans) to produce a TV show with a message.

“A lot of TV promotes a monolithic way of thinking, saying there’s only one way to be, or promoting ignorance as cool,” says Odums. “We say it’s hot to stand up for yourself and speak for yourself.”

The group was still newly formed when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and in the aftermath of the storm, with 2-Cent members spread across the United States, they nearly disbanded. “Katrina made us realize that this is what we want to do,” says Odums. “We’d done two episodes before the storm. Everybody was scattered. We had to decide if this is something we really want to do. Katrina forced us to make the decision.”

The collective briefly relocated together to Atlanta, then made the decision together to return to New Orleans.

Kevin Griffin, another of the founding members of 2-Cent, joined because he shares Odum’s desire to change the images and messages delivered to today’s youth. “We were seeing the images that BET and others were putting out,” Griffin says. “And we wanted to do something different, more positive.”

Griffin is not just a media activist; he is also one of the leaders of a citywide movement spearheaded by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, an organization whose mission is to close the Youth Studies Center, the city’s youth prison. The group has led campaigns to shut down other youth prisons around the state including the notorious youth prison in Tallulah, Louisiana, and they are also working to create more options for young people beyond jail.

For Griffin, these struggles have personal meaning. “At the age of 10, I was sent to the Youth Studies Center,” Griffin explains. “A year later I was moved to Tallulah, which was known as the worst youth prison in the country. I was 11. The next youngest person was 17, so I was a child among adults. And I was there for five years.”

When he was released, Griffin was determined to turn his experience into something positive. “I could have stayed on that path that was laid out for me,” says Griffin. “But I didn’t want to become that.” He credits his family for helping support him when he got out.

Griffin now works full-time at WBOK, a Black-owned talk radio station (their slogan is “Talk back, talk Black”). Art also runs in his family. His cousin Mannie Fresh, the music impresario of New Orleans’ Cash Money record label, produced much of the music that made New Orleans hip hop famous.

Humor and Style

2-Cent videos are notable for both humor and great production values. “We liked a lot of the messages you would see on Public Access TV,” explains Griffin. “But we wanted to make something with better production.” This combination of form and content, and a mix of serious and comic, defines the 2-Cent style.

“We take education and comedy and we mix it all together,” says collective member Manda B, who writes and acts in many of the group’s videos. “We can trick people into learning. We built it off a foundation of edutainment. Even with our most crazy and bizarre scripts, we have a meaning.”

The group seems to have limitless energy and ideas, and they bring new angles to their subjects, finding humor in unexpected places, and bringing ideas to young people by using that humor. Their piece on Jena, Louisiana, is filmed at the September 20, 2007 protests in Jena, when tens of thousands of young people converged in what was called the birth of the 21st century civil rights movement. But the 2-Cent video intercuts with one of their members—an effortlessly humorous young performer named Stiggidy Steve—wandering confused on Jena Street in New Orleans and wondering where everyone is.

“Older folks may try to put out similar ideas,” says Manda B. “But it’s like they’re preaching. I think we know how to connect with our generation.”

These young media activists praise Gil Scott Heron, who said the revolution will not be televised, but for 2-Cent, media is a tool to be taken and used for the mission of social change.

“Other generations marched, and we march too,” says Odums. “But in this age we have a whole new range of weapons, and we’re trying to use those weapons. I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would want to be on YouTube, to have his speeches distributed that way. Malcolm X would love to make mixtapes, have those out on the streets. The same reasons they boycotted and had protests in that era are our reasons too. We’re coming from that same mindset, but we’re using new tools, trying to get our inheritance.”

After nearly five years together, the group has survived Katrina and all the connected stresses of living in New Orleans during this time, and their bonds become stronger and closer. When asked what aspect of their work they were most proud of, various 2-Cent members expressed the same sentiment as Manda B, who explained, “For me, the best element of all this is that we’re family.”

For a large collective, 2-Cent seems to have no problem working together, creating new content every week, and continually expanding the range of work they do and the audiences they reach. “We’re all together like family,” says Griffin. “And we can’t imagine not staying together.”

New Orleans’ immigrant communities are often ignored or under-represented. But through grassroots organizing, legal action, and political lobbying, Asian and Latino organizations in the city have won some important victories. Activists from New Orleans’ Arab population — which is largely Palestinian — have expressed hope that they can follow these examples.

The city’s Vietnamese community gained influence through post-Katrina struggles to bring their New Orleans East neighborhood back in the first months after the storm. This effort, which also involved a fight against a city landfill located near their homes, turned grassroots protests into political power, including the recent election of the nation’s first Vietnamese-American congressman.

The city’s Latino community has grown and changed as thousands of recent immigrants came looking for work in rebuilding after the storm. Despite continuing problems, including police harassment of undocumented immigrants, grassroots efforts have helped translate those numbers into political influence and leverage over employers who had sought to exploit them. While employers and politicians have sought to pit the city’s Latino and Black workers against each other, organizers have built alliances between these communities.

These examples, together with a sense that there is a need for their community to be heard, have provoked Arab New Orleanians into action. According to Angelina Abbir Mansour, a student activist at UNO, outrage caused by the devastation in Gaza was a catalyst. “When the Gaza massacre happened, the first thought that came to everyone’s head was ‘we can’t be quiet anymore,’” she explained. Young activists have also been inspired by successes in other cities, such as a recent successful campaign to get Hampshire College to divest from companies that supply the Israeli military as well as sit-ins and building occupations on other campuses in the US and Europe.

Mass Protests

At Jackson Square, in the center of New Orleans’ French Quarter, more than a thousand people gathered on January 4 for one of the largest demonstrations this city has seen in recent years. Tracie Washington, a civil rights leader in the city and the director of Louisiana Justice Institute, attended with her son. Addressing the crowd on a megaphone, she said, “My son asked me today about what is happening in Gaza. He asked, ‘Is it like if I pinched you and you punched me?’ I said to him, ‘No, its like if you pinched me and I shot you with an AK-47.’”

The cheers of the crowd were audible from several blocks away. Palestinian youth led raucous chants of “No Justice, No Peace,” and “Gaza Gaza don’t you cry, in our hearts you’ll never die.” Children held up signs saying, “This is what an Israeli target looks like.”

The Louisiana Justice Institute was one of several New Orleans social justice and civil rights organizations that Palestinian organizers have built ties with — others included INCITE New Orleans, The Women’s Health and Justice Initiative, Pax Christi, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and Mayday Nola, an organization that works on public housing issues. “I’ve seen a huge amount of support from the African American community,” says Mansour, who is co-founder of a chapter of the General Union of Palestinian Students on the campus of the University of New Orleans. “Because they know more than anyone what its like to face racism. Alliances between our communities make sense.”

The January 4th march was the second of four mass demonstrations for Gaza during the Israeli bombing. The first demonstration, brought together in less than 24 hours, brought out more than 300 people. Palestinian youth from New Orleans organized and led the march, and entire families participated.

The size of the demonstrations surprised even the organizers. “New Orleans is a small town,” says activist and business owner Emad Jabbar. “For 1,200 people to come out with just a few days notice — I’m speechless.” Every local TV station covered the demonstrations. However the Times Picayune, New Orleans’ local paper, refused to send a reporter. In response, activists organized a demonstration the following week, bringing almost 100 people to protest outside the paper’s offices.

Beginnings

Organizing in New Orleans’ Arab community is not new — it goes back to at least the late 80s, during the first Intifada, a time of increased activity in the Palestinian Diaspora around the world. Since then, activism has surged and receded in waves, with support and trainings from national organizations such as the Muslim American Society and US Campaign to End The Israeli Occupation playing an important role.

The two years before Katrina saw mass action, as well as coalition building and education, among local Palestinians and their allies, and in some aspects today’s movement is built from work that happened then. From 2003 through 2005, activists presented a breathtaking array of events; from films, demonstrations and speakers; to art shows, a Palestinian hip-hop concert, presentations in high school and college classrooms, and a regional conference. They met with newspaper editorial boards, appeared on radio shows, set up literature tables at busy public locations, and spoke at churches.

A coalition of activists also organized human rights delegations to the Middle East, sending nine delegates from diverse backgrounds and communities to Palestinian cities on the West Bank in the summer of 2004. They self-published a book and a released a newsletter, made and distributed a film (chronicling one member’s journey to Palestine), and worked on several art projects, including a hip-hop show, a photography exhibition, and collaborations with the New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival.

A multiracial and multi-generational coalition of Palestine activists met on the campus of Xavier University, a historically Black college, and its core group included Muslims, Christians, Jews, and secular activists. The group collaborated closely with many different aspects of the Arab and Muslim community in the city — meetings were attended by representatives of New Orleans’ Muslim Shura Council, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee of New Orleans, New Orleans’ Palestine American Congress, and Stop The Wall — a local group made up of more than 200 New Orleanians with family in the Palestinian village of Beit Anan.

Another core member of the group was a white Episcopal minister who had traveled to Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and several members were Palestinian Christians. Nation Of Islam members were a part of the group, as well as several Jewish activists, including a woman who had gone on a pro-Israel delegation organized by New Orleans’ Jewish Federation — and came home disturbed by the Palestinian suffering she’d seen, causing her to break with the Federation and become an activist for Palestinian rights.

A Small Community

According to the US census, New Orleans’ pre-Katrina population was 67 percent African American and 27 percent white, with all other categories adding up to about 6%. Maher Salem, a young community leader and business owner, adds that, “The Palestinian community is a small minority in New Orleans. The city is mostly African American and white, then you have Latinos, then Vietnamese, and Palestinians are the smallest group. We’re at the bottom of the list.”

As with many immigrant communities, New Orleans’ Palestinian community is both spread out and insular. Families are located in various suburbs on New Orleans’ Westbank (on the other side of the Mississippi river), but there isn’t a particular neighborhood where most live. The community is rarely discussed in national coverage of New Orleans, or even in the local media. “Growing up, I didn’t know there was a Palestinian community here,” Mansour says. “I guess because we’re a small population and were not making headlines.”

Many of New Orleans’ Palestinians are from a handful of small towns and villages near Ramallah and Jerusalem, such as Silwad, Al-Bireh, Al-Mizra’a, and Beit Anan. They are often small business owners, owning restaurants, convenience stores, and clothing stores. In the aftermath of Katrina, much of the city’s Arab community was displaced, losing both their stores and homes. “A lot of us lost businesses,” says Salem, “and many from our community moved to other cities.” Although they no longer live here, many of those that are displaced still feel connected to the city. “I know guys that are in Dallas now,” Salem says. “But every time we have a protest or something else happening they call and ask what happened. They miss living here.”

For those that have returned, rebuilding has been a struggle — as it has been for other New Orleanians in this city where a third of all properties are still empty. Sandra Bahhur is a Palestinian-American woman originally from Al-Bireh. A nurse and restaurant owner, she has been a strong voice for social justice in New Orleans. Sandra’s home in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans was so destroyed by flooding that she couldn’t get the doors to open. Her business on Carrollton Avenue was destroyed, just days before it would have been ready to debut. They had been working all day on the restaurant the day before the hurricane, as they did many days. “We had just bought a new oven, new refrigerators, new kitchen equipment,” she told me days after the storm. “Everything’s destroyed. Our home is destroyed, the business is destroyed. We lost everything. Everything.”

Like many New Orleanians, Sandra and her husband Luis love New Orleans, and refused to give up. After two more years of work, their restaurant reopened in late 2007 to positive reviews and full houses. However, Sandra and Luis were never able to fully recover from the debt they went into to rebuild after the storm. With the recent economic downturn, the restaurant hit hard times, and closed permanently last month. Although they love the city, Sandra and Luis’ future in New Orleans is uncertain.

Changing The Media

Although disappointed with local media coverage, activists have created powerful video and images documenting their own movement, and spread the word through social networking sites, email, texting, and word of mouth. 2-Cent Entertainment — a group of young African-American video activists who are responsible for some of the most exciting media organizing happening in New Orleans today — made a pair of powerful videos documenting the activist uprising, which have been widely distributed online.

The young activists that organized the actions are determined to make their mark in the city, through changing the media landscape and shifting public opinion. “We’re a part of this city,” says Emad Jabbar. “We identify with it. If you ask most New Orleans Palestinians where they’re from they’ll say New Orleans — especially the young ones.” It was this spirit that led dozens of Palestinians to join with African American community leaders in last month’s annual Martin Luther King march. Community leader Maher Salem explains, “My cause, my goal is about the Palestinian people, Gaza, and freedom for everyone. However you describe me — businessman, father, community leader — what I am is someone who stands for justice.”

As they move forward, Palestinian activists in New Orleans are excited at the possibilities. “People call me, come to me in the street and in the Mosque, and ask me what are you up to, what’s next,” says Jabbar. “Our organizing in New Orleans is moving forward. People in the community are passionate, and have a lot of energy. We just need to keep stepping up.”

Resources:
New Orleans Palestine Solidarity
New Orleans Palestine Solidarity, updates
2-Cent Entertainment
New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice
Muslim American Society
Left Turn Magazine

Darby’s admission came after government documents were provided to defense attorneys representing Bradley Crowder and David McKay. The activists were arrested in early September during the Republican National Convention and charged with one count of possession of firearms. They remain in jail awaiting trial.

According to an Associated Press report, the pair allegedly bought supplies for “constructing explosive devices” at a St. Paul Wal-Mart. However, it cannot be ruled out that Darby set these activists up in connivance with his Bureau handlers. It wouldn’t be the first time the FBI has sought to instigate violent confrontations in order to roll-up entire organizations.

With a history of traveling around the country and no visible means of support, by his own admission Darby is a mercenary who wormed his way into left-wing and anarchist groups while proclaiming bogus allegiance to “social justice.” But with the cat out of the bag he candidly stated, “the simple truth is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Although he claims he has done his best “to act in good conscience” and “to do what I believe to be most helpful to the world,” evidence suggests Darby worked as an informant for a considerable period, infiltrating a multitude of activist groups for the U.S. government.

While hoping his work as a snitch will result “in discussion” between himself and the victims of his spying, the self-serving nature of Darby’s letter reveals the cynical game he played. Betraying his friends, Darby has the temerity to assert that his “job” as an FBI spy was “a good moral way to use my time.”

But hidden behind such inane pieties lurk the tradecraft of a seasoned intelligence asset. And according to documents, including a sworn affidavit by FBI Special Agent Christopher Langert, Darby “carried out a thorough surveillance operation that dated back to at least 18 months before the Republican gathering. He first met Mr. Crowder and Mr. McKay in Austin six months before the convention,” The New York Times reports.

According to a statement by the Austin Informant Working Group,

Darby has been characterized by many people who have known and worked with him as both persuasive and manipulative, with a history of provocation, instigation, and incitement. According to Lisa Fithian, who worked with Darby for years, “Brandon was always provoking discord and aggression, in the anti-war movement in Austin in 2003, in protests in Houston against Halliburton, and in disaster relief at Common Ground in New Orleans. I worked with Darby in all of those places and saw the disruption he caused.”

The FBI documents make it clear that Darby did not restrict his informing to people he alleges were planning illegal activities. He also gathered information on numerous people who were engaged in lawful activism; including some who had no plans to attend the Republican Convention. “The wider net cast by Darby in his information gathering shows that he was part of an FBI campaign to suppress political dissent and activism,” said Will Potter, an award-winning independent journalist. “By gathering information on law abiding activists and then defending his actions as stopping violence, Darby contributes to the public perception that political dissent is criminal, which has a chilling effect on free speech.” (”Austin RNC Informant Brandon Darby is Provocateur Not Hero,” Austin Informant Working Group, January 6, 2009)

In addition to casting an electronic surveillance driftnet over anti-RNC organizers, the Bureau relied on what they euphemistically term “confidential human sources” to do the dirty work. According to the Times, though Darby refused to provide details about his “undercover activities,” he confirmed that “he had also worked as an informant in cases not involving the convention.” The Times reports,

Mr. Darby provided descriptions of meetings with the defendants and dozens of other people in Austin, Minneapolis and St. Paul. He wore recording devices at times, including a transmitter embedded in his belt during the convention. He also went to Minnesota with Mr. Crowder four months before the Republican gathering and gave detailed narratives to law enforcement authorities of several meetings they had with activists from New York, San Francisco, Montana and other places. (Colin Moynihan, “Activist Unmasks Himself as Federal Informant in G.O.P. Convention Case,” The New York Times, January 5, 2009)

FBI spokesperson E. K. Wilson told the Times, “as a matter of policy, we’re not going to confirm or deny the identity of anybody who gives us information confidentially.”

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, citing a leaked planning document published by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, the Minnesota Homeland Security and Emergency Management agency (HSEM) closely coordinated with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in the run up to the Republican National Convention.

The 31-page document, “Special Event Planning: Republican National Convention,” is a dense schematic used by repressors to plan their response to protests. Along with local police and the FBI, agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the United States Secret Service and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) coordinated an action plan to squelch dissent, preemptively arresting activists and journalists, seizing cameras, recording equipment, computers and reporters’ confidential notes.

In addition to Crowder and McKay (the “Texas Two”), eight activists associated with the RNC Welcoming Committee now face serious felony charges resulting from preemptive state repression prior to the Convention.

According to the Friends of the RNC 8, protest organizers were charged with “conspiracy to riot in the 2nd degree in the furtherance of terrorism.” Three additional felony charges were added in mid-December, according to a letter to defense attorneys from the Ramsey County District Attorney’s office. Pre-trial motions in their case will be heard January 26.

Apparently, Darby’s “relationship” with the FBI went back several years. After Hurricane Katrina he surfaced in New Orleans and worked with Common Ground Relief, a grassroots organization founded by former Black Panther Party member and current Green Party activist Malik Rahim to aid hurricane victims criminally abandoned by federal, state and local authorities as New Orleans drowned.

While Brownie may of been doing “a heck of a job” before being sacked by DHS head honcho Michael Chertoff, Common Ground Relief was one of the few organizations that actually provided help to flood victims. That they did so without benefit of plum federal contracts handed to Bush cronies, including armed mercenaries from Blackwater Worldwide, drew the ire of local elites–and the police.

On several occasions, Common Ground was the target of repressive maneuvers by the New Orleans Police Department and the Department of Homeland Security. In one documented incident in November 2005, an activist outside the free medical clinic the group created, was arrested and tossed into the back of a squad car. While handcuffed, he was threatened by police who told him he “would be shot, and his body tossed into the river,” according to an eyewitness report posted on the Portland IMC website.

One cannot rule out that repeated threats and harassment against Common Ground workers weren’t instigated by FBI point-man Brandon Darby. Indeed, he had embedded himself so well into the fabric of the organization that he is cited on the group’s website as a founding member. The Bureau snitch acted as a spokesperson and even appeared on PBS’ “The Tavis Smiley Show.”

Scott Crow, a co-founder of Common Ground Relief, had defended Darby publicly when charges against him first surfaced and warned against “rumors, conjecture and innuendo.” He told the Times, “I put it all on the line to defend him when accusations first came out. Brandon Darby is somebody I had entrusted with my life in New Orleans, and now I feel endangered by him.”

With good reason.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that documents linking the Maryland State Police to widespread spying on activists, in concert with federal agencies that included the National Security Agency and FBI “was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored–and labeled as terrorists–activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.”

Such reports began to surface in 2005 when it was revealed that the Pentagon’s now defunct Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), illegally spied on antiwar and other activist groups at the behest of their political masters at the Defense Department. Some 90% of former CIFA employees, as I reported in April, were drawn from 30 defense and security firms that have profited handsomely from the burgeoning “Homeland Security” market.

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Bush administration and Congress–with Democrats and Republicans marching in lockstep–have pursued repressive policies that resulted in ubiquitous domestic surveillance under the rubric of Washington’s endless “war on terror.” While deep cover intelligence assets such as Darby are beneath contempt, they are symptoms of wider, and more troubling, antidemocratic trends in the U.S.

As the economy continues to meltdown, the incoming Obama administration seeks to widen imperial wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond, including the current Israeli slaughter in Gaza which Washington fully supports. Under conditions of systemic crisis, the ruling capitalist elite will continue to rely on dictatorial police state methods–fear, repression and intimidation–as a first resort.

Above all else, the case of Brandon Darby is a cautionary tale for activists everywhere and confirmation of the old adage: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

A single older woman, clinging to her heavy bag and a single crutch, sighed as she got off the bus from Kentucky. A little boy with a Lightning McQueen backpack, almost bigger than he was, gave a tiny fist bump to the first person he saw. A middle aged woman sat in a plastic chair, eyes closed, head in her hands, slowly rocking.

Outside, black and gold fans of the New Orleans Saints were drinking and barbecuing preparing for the noon game. Their smoke drifted over the bus station and mixed with the exhaust from dozens of big buses and the contents of dozens of port o lets.

Over a thousand people are expected to be bused home to New Orleans sometime Sunday. They are the last of around 30,000 people evacuated by the government to hundreds of shelters across the country.

Though 26% of Louisiana was reported Sunday to still be without power, people were more than ready to come home.

The bus station was full of dark blue uniformed police, camouflaged National Guard soldiers, Health Department workers in sky blue shirts, red shirted Catholic Charities and Red Cross personnel, lime green day-glo jacketed volunteers from the local Medicaid office and many others.

One local judge observed after days at the bus station, “It is unbelievable just how many disabled and elderly people actually live in our community. They just keep getting off these buses with their wheelchairs, their canes and crutches. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. Many must usually be housebound, because we rarely see them.”

A disabled older woman trudges along with a cane and a garbage bag of belongings as a volunteer pushes the wheelchair of her full-grown absolutely silent son. “Next time,” she said, “we’re just going to have to ride it out at home. This was too much.”

An old man angrily spurned the offer of ready to eat meals from a volunteer. “I need money. Can you help me with that? No? I didn’t think so! I spent all my money on this and I’m about to get put out of my house!”

A University of New Orleans professor is collecting information from returning evacuees and will release a study soon. Reports from the New Orleans Worker Justice Center for Racial Justice point out that 1500 people were housed in an abandoned Sam’s Club warehouse that was not set up for habitation. “Mothers have been forced to bathe babies in portable toilets parked outside while diabetics are receiving food that puts them at risk.” The Worker Center also published a state policy memo that sent people who evacuated on their own to one type of shelter and people who used public transportation to another type entirely. Another 1200 were housed in an old Wal-Mart in Bastrop with insufficient toilets and had no shower facilities for at least three days. Others complained that shelter officials rationed everything, even tampons, telling evacuees to come back later when they needed another one.

Another problem were the arrests of evacuees after local officials on their own decided to run unauthorized background checks on each person. Arrests were reported in Atlanta, Bastrop, Chicago, Knoxville, Louisville, Marshall, Memphis, Oklahoma City, and Shreveport. Many arrests were for outstanding warrants. The problem is that the New Orleans warrant system is widely criticized as unreliable.

Officials in New Orleans told the Associated Press they had no knowledge of the background checks. Those wishing to use the city’s assisted evacuation system had been assured they would not be pressed for identification in order to board buses out of town. The evacuation is seen as key to saving lives and maintaining order during and after a hurricane.

“The problem is there have been massive holes in the warrant system in New Orleans for years,” said New Orleans civil rights attorney Mary Howell. “Sometimes the warrants have been thrown out but are still in the system; some people don’t know they have warrants out for them.” What’s worse, Howell said, is that such arrests will have a chilling effect on getting people to evacuate in the future.

At noon, the Saints kicked off in the Superdome. A few blocks away, publicly contracted buses continued to return with hundreds of passengers. The elderly, the disabled, children and those to poor to evacuate on their own, who had not been home in a week. The teary eyed woman continued the search for her missing suitcase.

In Haiti, Gustav killed 77 with another 8 missing and damaged nearly 15,000 homes. Tropical storm Hanna, which closely followed Gustav, killed at least another 60 people. Tens of thousands of people have sought safety on rooftops and temporary shelters. Rotting cows drift in the flood waters.

Louisiana is the poorest state in the U.S., home to nearly 4 million people, with per capita income of around $16,000 per year. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, home to nearly 9 million people, with a per capita income of less than $400 per year.

In Louisiana, gas and water are scarce. On Thursday September 4, 2008, authorities reported a 3 mile line of people waiting for food and water outside of New Orleans. The evacuation of 1.9 million people in Louisiana went relatively smoothly. The return has been much more difficult.

Reports from community organizations in Haiti say people have not eaten since Monday. Melinda Miles from Konpay reported: “Twenty four hours of rain drenching the huts of the poor, perched on the cliffs, and drowning the slums, huddled on the edge of the sea. Homes were washed away by overflowing rivers, and others had flash floods tear through their walls. Fields of plantain trees are now stagnant puddles – breeding ground for mosquitoes – and agricultural fields were destroyed throughout the region. Almond trees floated into the sea and coconut trees were uprooted.”

Tens of thousands of people in Louisiana remain displaced. A thousand people in one shelter reported there were no bathing facilities at all. People washed up in a bucket. Another shelter reported 30 people arrested outside a nearby convenience store. Buses will start bringing people back on Friday.

Haiti was in deep trouble before being hit by a series of storms. Hunger is widespread. Sky high food prices sparked riots and turmoil as people could not afford to purchase enough food.

Louisiana had not yet recovered from Hurricane Katrina, three years ago. New Orleans still has over 65,000 vacant and abandoned homes and over 100,000 fewer people since Katrina. Many of the elderly, disabled and African-American working poor remain displaced.

“There is no food, no water, no clothes,” the pastor of a church in Gonaives, Arnaud Dumas told the Associated Press. “I want to know what I’m supposed to do. … We haven’t found anything to eat in two, three days. Nothing at all.”

Critics question why prisoners in New Orleans were returned by public transportation days before tens of thousands of citizens had the same opportunity.

President Rene Preval of Haiti told Reuters, “We are in a really catastrophic situation. There are a lot of people on rooftops and there are prisoners we cannot guard.” In Gonaives, a city of 160,000, half the homes remain flooded, according to UN troops. People begged for food and water outside the UN troop base.

“All and all, the response has been excellent,” U.S. President Bush told the nation. The U.S. Embassy in Haiti announced it was releasing $100,000 in emergency aid to Haiti.

In Haiti, the situation is critical. “If they don’t have food, it can be dangerous,” Haitian Senator Youri Latortue told the AP. “They can’t wait.”

“We expect a surge of evictions and power cutoffs,” said Brother Don Everard of Hope House, a social service agency in New Orleans. “People were having trouble making rent and utilities before evacuating for Gustav, now it will be worse because they have spent all their money to evacuate.”

Haiti is 1300 miles away from New Orleans. Other hurricanes are now approaching the Caribbean.

The bad news is that most people have not been allowed to return.

Since the storm, New Orleans and numerous other coastal communities have continued 24-hour curfews and prohibited people from returning by posting law enforcement at all entrances.

Officials argue that neighborhoods are without electricity and return would be challenging due to the presence of downed trees and power lines.

Locking people out is quite a hardship and also very challenging for the hundreds of thousands of displaced working families. As one local resident put it, “I understand that most public officials are saying for us to stay away as a safety aspect, but they do not realize that some of us cannot afford to stay away that long.”

Garland Robinette, a respected radio voice of WWL radio, was also pleading with elected officials on air this afternoon: “What are you going to do about the poor people who can’t afford another hotel room?”

When the average weekly wage for workers in the hotel and restaurant business is less than $400 a week, the least expensive hotel, plus gas and meals for a family since last Saturday or Sunday, can eat up a week’s wages in no time. Additionally, tens of thousands of people have also lost a week of work because most workers are not paid for the time during evacuation. That puts families two weeks of wages behind.

That it why there are widespread reports of families now parked on the side of the highway or in parking lots waiting for permission to come home.

Over 60,000 people are in 300 shelters across the South. Those who came by publicly paid buses will not be allowed to return until perhaps the weekend.

People who cannot come home are now being told to contact the Red Cross and local churches to see if they will provide bed space.

Despite our continuing problems, we are all thankful for the good fortune we have had. We are also grateful for the help of our neighbors, families and friends who have put us up, given us money for gas, and allowed us to shower and use their phones.

Nearly two million people cooperated in the evacuation. New Orleans and other coastal communities reported only a handful of arrests. This has worked really well so far. But unless officials are sensitive to the serious financial crunch that working and poor families are in, the risk is that next time large numbers of people will be less likely to evacuate.

A steady river of people arrived at the bus station, many walking from home. People lined up, men, women, young babies and people with walkers. Suitcases, Batman backpacks, pillowcases stuffed with belongings, even black plastic garbage bags clutched tightly in nervous hands.

How many of us would shove some things in a pillowcase, turn out the lights, leave our home and catch a bus filled with strangers going to places unknown? In New Orleans and all along the Gulf Coast, tens of thousands are doing exactly that.

Big 64 passenger buses roll into the station from across the country to pick up the people of New Orleans. Some going to public shelters, some to military bases, some to churches.

Spent the day unpacking and opening hundreds of boxes of MREs (military meals ready to eat) to distribute to people getting on buses out of town. Spaghetti, barbecue, even vegetarian in slick brown packets complete with plastic spoon. Tastes much better than you would think, especially if you are, as most are, pretty hungry.

Outside satellite TV trucks idle by waiting buses and ambulances. The sun is out and the wind is up. Soldiers, who yesterday clutched their M-16s, today sat on folding chairs texting their families.

Volunteers pitch in with city, state and federal officials. Every kind of police and military you can imagine, many in full battle gear.

Women volunteers in day-glow vests guide the blind, carry bags for the unable, and lift the wheelchairs into the ambulances. Hundreds and hundreds of people with walkers and canes and wheelchairs are flushed out of their homes and forced to flee.

The occasional big shot strolls through and people politely allow them to fantasize that they are in charge.

Outside the wind continues to pick up. The U.S. flag flaps ferociously clanging the chains against the metal flagpole.

Those who say they hate government please consider our situation. Since Katrina our Gulf Coast has benefited from thousands of faith-based groups and hundreds of thousands of volunteers. But we need the public sector to help make it all work. Think where New Orleans would be tonight without the buses we all helped pay for, the police and soldiers we all helped pay for, the water, the MREs, the bus drivers, the shelter workers and the Coast Guard. As you watch the disaster unfold on TV, think where we would be without public help. We need each other. In a complex society like ours, we help each other and build the common good through the public sector. If it is bad, we fix it, not destroy it. Please think about it.

Back home, a mandatory evacuation has started. Curfew starts at dusk. The buses continue to arrive and depart but the passengers slow to a trickle. Generators and engines roar as the air smells of dust, MREs, and humidity.

As dusk starts, waves of cicadas humm. Thousands of people are in shelters. Hundreds are still riding buses. Gustave is coming.

According to a study by PolicyLink, 81 percent of those who received the Federally-funded, State-administered Road Home grants had insufficient resources to cover their damages. The average Road Home applicant fell about $35,000 short of the money they need to rebuild their home, and African-American households on average had an almost 35% higher shortfall than white households.

More than one in three residential addresses — over 70,000 — remain vacant or unoccupied, according to a report by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. While workers with Brad Pitt’s Make It Right project are working on overdrive to finish the first of their scores of planned houses in the notoriously devastated Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood overall ranks far behind other neighborhoods in recovery, with only 11 percent of its pre-Katrina number of households. The same report notes that since the devastation of the city, rents have raised by 46% citywide (much more in some neighborhoods), while many city services remain very limited; for example, only 21% of public transit buses are running.

Divided City

Its not just activists that speak of race and class divisions in New Orleans. A poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 70% of residents feel we’re divided by class and/or race. The Kaiser survey also found unity among New Orleanians: we’re united in feeling forgotten by the rest of the US. Eight out of 10 said the federal government has not provided sufficient support. Nearly two-thirds think that the US public has largely forgotten about the city.

The survey found large percentages saying that their own situation has deteriorated. Fifty-three percent of low-income residents report that their financial situation is worse today than pre-Katrina. The percentage of residents who say they have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness such as depression has tripled since 2006.

There is a continuing debate about how many people live in New Orleans, with no definitive figures until the next complete census. But last year, the census bureau estimated a population of 239,000. Other analysts — and Mayor C. Ray Nagin — estimate the population to be nearly 100,000 higher. By any measurement, the growth has stagnated, while even optimistic figures report that 150,000-200,000 former residents (out of a former population of nearly 500,000) have been unable to return. The once nearly 70% African American city is now estimated to be less than 50% African American, a change reflected in the changing face of electoral politics statewide. While Republicans have been losing across the US, Christian Coalition candidate Bobby Jindal was easily elected Governor last year, and in the city, decades of Black-majority city council shifted to a white majority.

Blank Slate or Burial Ground

Much of the change in the city is led by a new strata of the city’s population — planners, architects, developers, and other reformers. Many of them self-identify as “YURPs” — Young, Urban Rebuilding Professionals — in their work with countless nonprofits, foundations, and businesses. Some of New Orlean’s newer residents have spoken of the city as a blank slate on which they can project and practice their ideas of reform, whether in health care, architecture, urban planning, or education. What this worldview leaves out, according to some advocates, is the people who lived here before, who are the most affected by these changes, and have the least say in how they are carried out. “It wasn’t a blank slate, it was a cemetery,” says poet and educator Kalamu Ya Salaam. “People were killed, and they’re building on top of their bones.”

The vast majority of New Orleans’ new professionals have come here with the best intentions, with a love for this city and a desire to help with the recovery. However, many activists criticize what they see as token attempts at community involvement, and a paternalistic attitude among many of the new decision makers.

For example, our education system was in crisis pre-Katrina, and certainly needed revolutionary change. Change is what we have gotten; the current system is in many ways unrecognizable from the system of three years ago; but this revolution has been overwhelmingly led from outside, with little input from the parents, students and staff of the New Orleans school system.

Shortly after the post-Katrina evacuation of the city, the entire staff of the public school system was fired. Not long after that, school board officials chose to end recognition or negotiation with the teachers’ union — the largest union in the city, and arguably the biggest outlet of Black middle class political power in the city. Since then, the school landscape has changed remarkably — from staff to decision-making structure to facilities. According to Tulane professor Lance Hill, “New Orleans has experienced a profound change in who governs schools and a dramatic reduction of parent and local taxpayer control of schools.”

The school system used to consist of 128 schools, 124 of them controlled by the New Orleans School Board. Now according to Hill, 88 have opened for the fall, and “50 of them are charter schools (privatized management) governed by self-appointed, self-perpetuating boards; 33 are run by the State Department of Education through the Recovery School District; and only five are governed by the elected school board.”

“There are now 42 separate school systems operating in New Orleans,” Hill continues, with their own “school policies, including teacher requirements, curriculum, discipline policies, enrollment limits, and social promotions. Publicly accountable schools in which parents have methods for publicly redressing grievances are limited to only five schools (5.6% of the total).”

Several recent articles have expressed excitement and admiration for the new school system, including extended pieces in the New York Times and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. For school reformers, who came to New Orleans with a desire to try out the changes they had imagined, this represents a dream come true. They have media support, federal, state and city officials on their side, and a massive influx of money and cheap (and young, idealistic) labor. Teach for America supplied 112 teachers last year, has committed 250 this year, and a projected 500 next year, while tens of millions of dollars in funding is coming through sources such as the Gates and Walton foundations.

There is no doubt that some students receive an excellent education in the new New Orleans school districts, but critics are concerned that the students that are being left behind, are those that need the most help — those without someone to advocate for them, to research and apply for the best schools. According to New Orleanian Kalamu Ya Salaam, who is director of a school program called Students at the Center, the new systems represent “an experimentation with privatization, and everything that implies.”

Although the new charter schools have been able to choose from the best facilities and have used methods such as state standardized tests to pick only select students (including 40% fewer special education students), there are still serious questions over the extent to their much-heralded success. G.W. Carver School, the subject of a fawning NYTimes piece last Spring, received an 88% failure rate for English and an 86% failure rate for Math on state standardized tests.

Anniversary and Commemoration

August 29, the anniversary of the devastation of the city, falls between the Democratic and Republican conventions. While the Democratic and Republican parties crown their nominees, activists on the ground will be on the streets, still fighting for a just recovery. “It ain’t to rain on Obama’s parade,” says Sess 4-5, a New Orleans-based hip hop star and activist, “but the people down here need the world to understand that its still a tragic situation. The rent has tripled, the health care system is in shambles, we have less access to education for our kids. The working class and poor are being exploited, while everyone at the top is getting fat off our misery.”

“We think August 29 should be holy day, not a day for business as usual,” explains Sess, who is one of the organizers of a Katrina March and Commemoration, starting Friday morning in the Lower Ninth Ward, and marching into the 7th Ward. That march is one of two activist commemorations in the city that day, the other starting uptown, near the BW Cooper development, one of the major housing developments torn down this year. “The Mayor announced to the world that New Orleans was ‘open for business’ but we’re here to tell you that it is closed for families,” declares former public housing resident Barbara Jackson, who will be part of the demonstration at BW Cooper, called Sankofa Day of Commemoration. “Five thousand demolished homes. Eight thousand new jail beds. This is their one for one replacement plan for us.”

Taking to the streets is not the only agenda of local activists. In New Orleans, people have been organizing at the grassroots, working together to build a movement. In the aftermath of the US Social Forum last year in Atlanta, a broad coalition of social justice organizations began meeting monthly to combine efforts. This group, called the Organizers Roundtable, is an important spot for collaborations and community building.

It’s been community, not foundations or government, that has led this city’s recovery at the grassroots. Bayou Road — a street of Black-owned, community-oriented, businesses in New Orleans’ seventh ward — has rebuilt post-Katrina to more businesses than they had before the storm. It hasn’t been government help that has enabled these businesses to come back, but the effort of community members coming together. It was also community, and local support, that has brought back the membership of many local cultural organizations, like the network of Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, who organize secondline parades nearly every weekend throughout the year, as well as benefits that provide school supplies for area youth.

The Right to the City alliance (RTTC), a nationwide coalition of organizations that focuses on urban issues such as health care, criminal justice, and education, sees the continuing crisis in New Orleans as central to their work. They are co-sponsoring the march in New Orleans, as well as actions in seven other cities, including Los Angeles, New York City, Oakland, Providence, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Miami.

The work of RTTC deserves special notice, as a coalition that has worked to support the struggles of the people of New Orleans, and to bring that struggle and solidarity home to their own communities, while taking guidance from voices on the ground. In this time of many competing visionaries struggling to reshape this city, that willingness to listen to the people who lives are being affected, and to take that struggle and those lessons home to their own communities, may be the radical change New Orleans needs most.

0. Number of apartments currently being built to replace the 963 public housing apartments formerly occupied and now demolished at the St. Bernard Housing Development.

0. Amount of data available to evaluate performance of publicly financed privately run charter schools in New Orleans in 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school years.

0.008. Percentage of the rental homes that were supposed to be repaired and occupied by August 2008 which were actually completed and occupied — a total of 82 finished out of 10,000 projected.

1. Rank of New Orleans among U.S. cities in percentage of housing vacant or ruined.

1. Rank of New Orleans among U.S. cities in murders per capita for 2006 and 2007.

4. Number of the 13 City of New Orleans Planning Districts that are at the same risk of flooding as they were before Katrina.

10. Number of apartments being rehabbed so far to replace the 896 apartments formerly occupied and now demolished at the Lafitte Housing Development.

11. Percent of families who have returned to live in Lower Ninth Ward.

17. Percentage increase in wages in the hotel and food industry since before Katrina.

20-25. Years that experts estimate it will take to rebuild the City of New Orleans at current pace.

25. Percent fewer hospitals in metro New Orleans than before Katrina.

32. Percent of the city’s neighborhoods that have fewer than half as many households as they did before Katrina.

36. Percent fewer tons of cargo that move through Port of New Orleans since Katrina.

38. Percent fewer hospital beds in New Orleans since Katrina.

40. Percentage fewer special education students attending publicly funded privately run charter schools than traditional public schools.

41. Number of publicly funded privately run public charter schools in New Orleans out of total of 79 public schools in the city.

43. Percentage of child care available in New Orleans compared to before Katrina.

46. Percentage increase in rents in New Orleans since Katrina.

56. Percentage fewer inpatient psychiatric beds than before Katrina.

80. Percentage fewer public transportation buses now than pre-Katrina.

81. Percentage of homeowners in New Orleans who received insufficient funds to cover the complete costs to repair their homes.

300. Number of National Guard troops still in City of New Orleans.

1080. Days National Guard troops have remained in City of New Orleans.

1250. Number of publicly financed vouchers for children to attend private schools in New Orleans in program’s first year.

6,982. Number of families still living in FEMA trailers in metro New Orleans area.

8,000. Fewer publicly assisted rental apartments planned for New Orleans by federal government.

10,000. Houses demolished in New Orleans since Katrina.

12,000. Number of homeless in New Orleans even after camps of people living under the bridge has been resettled — double the pre-Katrina number.

14,000. Number of displaced families in New Orleans area whose hurricane rental assistance expires March 2009.

32,000. Number of children who have not returned to public school in New Orleans, leaving the public school population less than half what is was pre-Katrina.

39,000. Number of Louisiana homeowners who have applied for federal assistance in repair and rebuilding who have still not received any money.

45,000. Fewer children enrolled in Medicaid public healthcare in New Orleans than pre-Katrina.

46,000. Fewer African American voters in New Orleans in 2007 gubernatorial election than 2003 gubernatorial election.

55,000. Fewer houses receiving mail than before Katrina.

62,000. Fewer people in New Orleans enrolled in Medicaid public healthcare than pre-Katrina.

71,657. Vacant, ruined, unoccupied houses in New Orleans today.

124,000. Fewer people working in metropolitan New Orleans than pre-Katrina.

132,000. Fewer people in New Orleans than before Katrina, according to the City of New Orleans current population estimate of 321,000 in New Orleans.

214,000. Fewer people in New Orleans than before Katrina, according to the U.S. Census Bureau current population estimate of 239,000 in New Orleans.

453,726. Population of New Orleans before Katrina.

320 million. The number trees destroyed in Louisiana and Mississippi by Katrina.

368 million. Dollar losses of five major metro New Orleans hospitals from Katrina through 2007. In 2008, these hospitals expect another $103 million in losses.

1.9 billion. FEMA dollars scheduled to be available to metro New Orleans for Katrina damages that have not yet been delivered.

2.6 billion. FEMA dollars scheduled to be available to State of Louisiana for Katrina damages that have not yet been delivered.

With more than 20,000 dead, possibly 40,000 missing, and close to one million homeless, the junta made it clear that it, not the international community, would provide whatever humanitarian aid was necessary.

A week before the cyclone hit, President Bush extended sanctions against Myanmar by another year because of what he called that junta’s “large-scale repression of the democratic opposition.” Paranoid about anything that could threaten its power, the junta was frightened that the United States would use the cyclone as a reason to invade the country.

The junta’s response the first week of May was little different than the international concern almost three years earlier. It wasn’t the destruction of villages and the rice farming industry, but the destruction of cities and the shrimp industry. It wasn’t a cyclone named Nargis, but a hurricane named Katrina.

It’s been well documented that the Bush-Cheney Administration, with its head in Iraq, wasn’t prepared for a natural disaster. Like the leaders in Myanmar, the Bush-Cheney Administration was slow to inform the people, and slow to act during the crisis. Less known is that President Bush refused innumerable offers of assistance to the people of the Gulf Coast.

More than 20 countries — including Israel, Mexico, China, England, and the Dominican Republic — quickly offered humanitarian and financial assistance. President Bush’s first response was to tell the audience of ABC-TV’s Good Morning, America:

“I’m not expecting much from foreign nations because we hadn’t asked for it. I do expect a lot of sympathy and perhaps some will send cash dollars. But this country’s going to rise up and take care of it. . . . You know, we would love help, but we’re going to take care of our own business as well, and there’s no doubt in my mind we’ll succeed.”

Cuba, which has one of the best health care and disaster response systems in the world, offered substantial medical supplies and 1,600 physicians, most of them specialists. Rejected.

Venezuela offered $1 million, in addition to oil and humanitarian supplies. Rejected.

Russia offered medical supplies, evacuation equipment, a water cleansing system, a rescue helicopter, and 60 persons specially trained in search and rescue operations. Rejected.

Germany sent a military plane carrying 15 tons of emergency provisions. The United States denied it landing rights.

Not only did the federal government reject humanitarian offers from other countries, it either rejected or ignored offers by the American people and its own governmental agencies.

Before the storm hit, Amtrak offered trains to evacuate New Orleans. Ignored.

The Forest Service, shortly after Katrina came ashore, offered water-tanker aircraft to fight the fires. Ignored.

The Coast Guard, which would fly more than 20,000 rescue operations, offered 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel to Jefferson Parrish. The federal government refused to allow delivery.

The captain of an amphibious assault ship off the Gulf Coast offered to send her sailors onto land to help the people, have her helicopters assist in rescue operations, provide as much as 100,000 gallons of drinkable water a day, and open her ship’s operating rooms to provide medical assistance and 600 beds for the relief effort. The federal government ignored and then delayed her offer.

During the first week of the disaster, the federal government had ordered the Red Cross and Salvation Army not to go into the New Orleans disaster zone, falsely citing a lack of adequate security. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico offered 400 National Guard soldiers the day the hurricane hit; however, they weren’t sent for four more days because of what Richardson called “federal paperwork” that the Pentagon insisted had to first be completed.

Chicago offered firefighters, police, health workers, sanitation workers, a mobile health clinic, trucks, boats, and cars. Rejected.

The Florida Airboat Association offered to send in 300 fully equipped boats with trained pilots. Rejected.

About 75 companies volunteered to use their own corporate aircraft to ferry supplies into smaller local and regional airports. When the federal government ignored the offer, the companies flew in more than 130,000 pounds of food and critical supplies, making determinations without federal assistance or appreciation of where the needs were the greatest.

Hundreds of companies tried to provide several million gallons of drinking water and ice for the evacuees. The federal government either blocked their delivery or routed them on a circuitous path throughout the South, and never allowed them to unload their cargoes. Members of the International Bottled Water Association did provide 10 million bottles of fresh water for evacuees, but received no assistance from the federal government, which refused to return several phone calls.

A national corporation offered free telecommunications equipment but the federal government rejected it, according to Ern Blackwelder of the Business Executives for National Security. Blackwelder told the Atlanta Journal–Constitution that the government later contracted with the same company and paid for equipment that had previously been offered at no charge.

About a week after Katrina hit, the U.S. began accepting humanitarian aid, but only from countries it determined were its allies.

Make no mistake about it, the leaders of Myanmar are dictators who trample human rights, have led their nation into an extended economic crisis, and are interested only in keeping their own power. Almost a month after Nargis hit the Irrawaddy Delta, the junta is now finally allowing foreign aid, but not from the United States.

But also make no mistake about this. The United States under its current administration will continue to refuse humanitarian aid and personnel from Cuba, Venezuela, and any other country that doesn’t agree with the Bush-Cheney politics.

The Myanmar regime is not a regime that I will defend. It is a militaristic clique that has seized power and rules by force. Nevertheless, much the same can be said about the US regime. Unlike the US regime, however, the Myanmar regime, basically, confines its perfidy to within its own borders.

Of course, whenever humans are in trouble, a responsible government will see to it that those humans are attended to, fed, and cared for.

The Myanmar government is accused by western governments and western media of negligence and worse towards its own citizens.

UK prime minister Gordon Brown declared: “It is being made into a man-made catastrophe by the negligence, the neglect and the inhuman treatment of the Burmese people by a regime that is failing to act and to allow the international community to do what it wants to do.”

“Man-made catastrophe.” Isn’t that what the UK engineered in Iraq as junior partner (poodle) to the US? Over a million excess Iraqi civilian mortalities estimated since March 2003 (and there is no reason to ignore the US-UK supported UN sanctions that killed another million or so Iraqi civilians after 1991).² That is genocide, and genocides are always man-made.

Brown added, “The responsibility lies with the Burmese regime and they must be held accountable.”

Fine, and to be fair and honest, at the same time, Brown and erstwhile prime minister Tony Blair must be held accountable for their role in the murderous carnage in Iraq.

If being accountable is to have any meaning, then Britain must, at long last, also be judged and do penance for its crimes, among others, in the Chagos archipelago, on the Indian subcontinent, against the Indigenous peoples in the western hemisphere and Oceania, throughout the Middle East, particularly its complicity in wiping of Palestine off the map.

The Plank Stuck in the Western Eye

The Europeans are calling for a forced intervention, and some US members of the House of Representatives are imploring president George Bush to intervene in Myanmar.

The Europeans, US, and Canada are complicit with Zionists in the starvation of Palestinians. This is in addition to demolishing homes, carrying out assassinations, withholding money transfers, destroying vital utilities, etc. in Gaza,³ and yet they are calling for an intervention elsewhere.

French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert called for immediate action in Myanmar: “We are shifting from a situation of non-assistance to people in need to a situation that could lead to a true crime against humanity if we go on like that.”

One might wonder why the British and French “leaders” wail and moan about disaster-stricken Myanmar but are silent about disaster-stricken New Orleans. Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina struck the coast of Louisiana, people in New Orleans are waiting on assistance.⁴

The 43 US representatives calling for intervention in Myanmar are apparently unaware of the tardy US response to the victims of Katrina⁵ or that the US regime rejected aid from certain countries, such as Cuba. ⁶

Venezuela, which contributed generously to the victims of Katrina, was reportedly rebuffed initially by the Bush administration.⁷ An excuse proffered by a senior State Department official, according to the Washington Post, was that “unsolicited offers can be ‘counterproductive.’”⁸

And, where are the voices of British and French government figures about the genocide Israel perpetrates against Palestinians? Obviously, these western government figures are selectively speaking out on man-made catstrophes and crimes against humanity.

Corporate Media Deluge on Myanmar vs. Silence on Palestine

A sampling of corporate media headlines reveals an animus toward the Myanmar government:

“Aid stymied off Myanmar shores and borders,” International Herald Tribune
“Myanmar Neighbors Seek Ways To Press Country on Cyclone Aid,” Wall Street Journal
“International Pressure on Myanmar Junta Is Building,” New York Times
“Diplomats tour cyclone zone, but Myanmar still refuses aid,” Euronews.net

That the corporate media would go into a frenzy over Myanmar while ignoring the man-made catastrophes in Palestine and in Iraq is telling.

In the case of Myanmar, the western corporate media is behaving as it should: criticizing a non-democratic regime and, supposedly, putting the interests of the Myanmarese people front and center.

But one must ask: why is this same media falling over itself to celebrate 60 years in power by Jewish segregationists who contrived and meted out a catastrophe (al-Nakba) to the Palestinians? Why has this same media remained so quiescent over the travails that still bedevil the citizenry of New Orleans? Why does the same media collaborate in the ultimate international crime of aggression-occupation against Iraq?

The contrasting response to cyclone-ravaged Myanmar with other contemporary disasters — whether man-made or acts of nature — scathingly exposes the nasty double standards of western governments and their corporate media.

1. In this fluid situation, there are reports of 78,000 dead, 56,000 missing, and an estimated 2.5 million survivors. The Red Cross reported that the total cyclone death toll may be as high as 127,990, and that up to 2.5 million people are in urgent need of food, water and shelter.AP, “Red Cross: Myanmar death toll as high as 128,000,” newsday.com, 15 May 2008.
2. Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey,” Lancet, 368: 21 October 2006: 1421-1428. Gideon Polya, “Two Million Iraq Deaths, Eight Million Bush Asian Holocaust Deaths And Media Holocaust Denial,” Countercurrents.org, 7 October, 2007.
3. Saleh Al-Naami, “Darkness, starvation and imminent death,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 24-30 January 2008.
4. Bill Quigley, “Half New Orleans Poor Permanently Displaced: Failure or Success?” Dissident Voice, 4 March 2008.
5. Julian Borger and Duncan Campbell, “Why did help take so long to arrive?” Guardian, 3 September 2005.
6. Hector Carreon, “Bush accepts aid from Mexico, silent on Venezuela but rejects help from Cuba,” La Voz de Aztlan, 8 September 2005.
7. Duncan Campbell, “Bush rejects Chávez aid,” Guardian, 7 September 2005.
8. Cited in Cleto Sojo, “Venezuela Offers $1M, Oil, Food and Equipment for U.S. Victims of Hurricane Katrina,” Venezuelanalysis.com, 1 September 2005.

This is but the tip of the iceberg. In what can only be termed circumstances similar to those of foreign workers hired by US and British companies to work on the ill-fated reconstruction of Iraq, the litany of abuses against those—both US-born and foreign—hired by various corporations to work in the reconstruction of New Orleans and the rest of the US southern coast hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A recently released report by the New Orleans Worker Justice Coalition is an ongoing litany of corporate corruption, worker abuse and outright illegal and immoral violation of human rights.

Also in Mississippi, beginning July 1st, 2008 it will become a felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job. Anyone caught working without papers “shall be subject to imprisonment in the custody of the Department of Corrections for not less than one (1) year nor more than five (5) years, a fine of not less than one thousand dollars ($1000) nor more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000) or both.” Furthermore, anyone charged with the crime of working without papers will not be eligible for bail. In Iowa, federal ICE agents arrested hundreds of workers at the Agriprocessors, Inc. meat packing plant. The reason given by law enforcement was that the workers were using false social security numbers. Of course, the facts are that people can’t work without a social security number and cannot get one unless they have been given some kind of legal status by the government—a status becoming more difficult to acquire by the day. This is but one more Catch-22 in the life of an immigrant in the US.

Meanwhile, in Danbury, CT a court upheld the use of undercover police acting as day-labor employers to arrest men and women looking for work in that city. The workers were then deported. In San Diego County, plans are underway to build two large detention centers that will hold immigrants without papers for indeterminate amounts of time. Haliburton hopes to get the contract. In South Carolina, Georgia and some other states, legislators have introduced laws forbidding the use of any language but English in the workplace.

Take a moment and imagine a country where some residents have more rights than others. These residents can hold almost any job they desire. They live in neighborhoods away from those of darker skin and lesser means. The latter cannot hold any job they desire. Part of the reason for this is because of the law and part of the reason is because of the nature of their education and social status. Everyone must have identification that also signifies their social status, even though that status is primarily determined by the color of one’s skin. If one does not have such identification (especially if they are not white), they are arrested. If they or their relatives can not produce identification, the arrestees once released are doomed to a life living in the shadows, always wondering if they will be turned in by their employer or enemies.

The country I am talking about was apartheid South Africa. Now, since the advent of NAFTA and other so-called free trade agreements, the national boundaries between North and South America have been economically erased. If one stretches their imagination just a bit, it is possible to perceive the southern lands of Mexico and Central America as the equivalent of bantustans with the United States as their Capetown. Furthermore, the identification legal immigrants to the United States are required to carry can be compared to the passes blacks in South Africa needed to get into different parts of the white-ruled South Africa. If those passes were not in order or nonexistent, blacks were subject to arrest. Likewise, if the various documents that the US government requires immigrants to carry and produce at will are not in order or nonexistent, those immigrants will be arrested. Those immigrants without papers must live their lives in the shadows, always wondering if they will be turned in by their employer or enemies. If they live in some parts of the United States, the discovery of their lack of documents might occur as the result of a roadblock set up by police to check people’s identification.

Of course, there are a multitude of ways that these historical instances are not similar, but it is the underlying consciousness of fear is distressingly similar. It is questionable whether or not most US citizens agree with the efforts listed above that target immigrants. However, the lack of outcry by those who disagree with these attempts to dehumanize undocumented immigrants provides those invested in destroying immigrants’ lives with a voice hopefully well beyond their numbers. So does the willingness of the US public to ignore the family-shattering raids and imprisonment of thousands of immigrants for no other reason than not having the approved documents. Implicit in this willingness is a sense that those being picked up and thrown in detention centers are not as human as “real Americans.” If the lessons of authoritarian states have taught us anything, they should have taught us that we should be wary of those who would define a human being in ever-narrowing terms.

But you’re savvy about how influence-molding works and you know that with the right kind of massive publicity and P.R. campaigns, you probably can “spin” public perception in your direction.

So, on a foundation of lies and deception, you decide to launch your project, careful to keep absolutely secret the most controversial aspects. And then, under the table, you hire (a.k.a. “bribe”) numerous journalists, opinion pundits and respected “consultants” to speak on behalf of your product.

It works! The public is snowed by the P.R. momentum and by the overwhelming consensus of the “experts,” and your project takes off. This is how such things are done every day in the business and advertising world. What’s the big deal?

THE LIES & DECEPTIONS

Well, as you’ve probably figured out, I’m talking about the way the CheneyBush Administration sold the Iraq War/Occupation to us citizens.

We’ve known for a long time about the various lies and deceptions that took America to war — the supposed “weapons of mass destruction” that Saddam was supposed to possess but didn’t, his alleged ties to al-Qaida that didn’t really exist, his supposed but non-existent complicity in the 9/11 attacks, and so on. Eventually, even the Administration was forced to concede there were no WMD, no ties to 9/11, no relationship to Al Qaida, though it vowed never to let those inconvenient facts get in the way of continuing its occupation of Iraq. (And Cheney and his minions still continue to this day to hint at the old deceptions.)

Also revealed some years back was that the Administration secretly put various conservative TV/radio/print journalists on the payroll to write/speak favorably about various programs and policies emanating from the Executive Branch.

THOSE PENTAGON “EXPERTS”

What we didn’t know about until the New York Times broke the story a few weeks ago was that the CheneyBush Administration, to help sell the pending Iraq war to members of Congress and the citizenry at large, marshaled a huge phalanx of retired military officers and sent them out disguised as private, independent “experts” and “consultants” to deliver the pro-war spin the Administration wanted. The author of the story, David Barstow, used the term “media Trojan horse” to describe the impact of this deception.

Because the media, always eager to curry favor with the Administration, did not vet the bona fides of these “private consultants,” the public had no knowledge of the retired officers’ deep and abiding connection to the Pentagon. These ex-military officers received special briefings, including by Rumsfeld himself, on the Administration’s daily spin points, and they either had or would soon be receiving high-paying jobs with various defense contractors.

What the public now knows is that the daily commentary and advice by the “military experts” — supposedly independent analysts, free of any conflicts of interest — helped “catapult the propaganda” (to borrow Bush’s own term) in favor of war with Iraq.

And it worked: CheneyBush and their neo-con ideologues inside the Administration got U.S. boots on the ground in Iraq, controlled the oil flowing out of that country, created chaos and catastrophe from which their huge private-corporation sponsors could make huge pots of money, built the world’s largest new embassy in Baghdad, and constructed permanent military bases inside that country from where the U.S. will help control the geopolitics of the greater Middle East for generations to come, etc. etc. All this presents a perfect illustration of Naomi Klein’s thesis of “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism.”

This use of hired guns — all those prestigious, smart-looking ex-generals and such — to do their propaganda work for them is further confirmation of the mendacity, duplicity and illegality Bush&Co. employ to get their way.

LITTLE OR NO COVERAGE

True to form, of course, the corporate mainstream media have paid scant, if any, attention to this story of how dozens of retired officers helped shape American military policy while secretly still attached to the Administration teat. See here, here, and here.

In this instance, and many more that could be named, the mainstream press, by not mentioning or following up on such CheneyBush scandals, does democracy a dangerous disservice.

Our political system depends on citizens receiving accurate information about what’s being done in their names so that they can make intelligent decisions when voting for those who represent them.

LIES & DECEPTIONS

If they respond at all, Busheviks tend to say that even if these stories are true, how we wound up in Iraq is “old news,” it’s history, we’re there, let’s just make the best of it, “finish the job” and then go home.

However, if your original reasons for invading a sovereign country were based on lies and deceptions, and a lot of incorrect assumptions and ignorance, then your occupation policies will never work and you will have alienated and angered the local population to the point of violent resistance against you. The result: You will be stuck in a quagmire of your own devising, where the most you can hope for is endless stalemate. This was the case of the U.S. screwup in Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, and it’s the case today with the its five-years-and-counting occupation of Iraq.

Now, it can be argued that endless stalemate is of no great concern to the shock-doctrine practitioners of Bush&Co.; indeed, it may be the desired result as it guarantees prolonged chaos and thus more need for companies like Blackwater, Bechtel, Halliburton, KBR, et al. to help keep the broken society together. The US and Iraqi dead and maimed are but the inevitable “collateral damage.”

But, as CheneyBush have learned, domestically you can push the US military, and American citizens, only so far before both begin to push back and call for a new, more rational approach to political and foreign-policy adventuring.

Key military officers within the Joint Chiefs of Staff (even, to some extent, Defense Secretary Gates) are watching their armed forces stretched much too thin around the globe. Because there is no military draft, the Pentagon is forced to use and abuse its existing troops to the point of near-rebellion, resulting in lower morale and increased psychological damage, including 300,000 Iraq veterans returning home with mental problems and a rising rate of suicides.

‘08 VOTE A REFERENDUM ON WAR

This abuse includes overuse of the stop-loss policy of refusing to let soldiers go home after they’ve completed their Iraq rotation, constantly recalling troops who have been sent home after completing their extended service, lowering the army’s physical, intellectual, psychological and moral standards in order to fill the recruiting gap when the services can’t meet their enlistment quotas, returning physically or psychologically wounded soldiers to battle despite their doctors’ recommendations, etc. etc.

Moreover, the citizens appear to have had enough. Since two-thirds of polled Americans believe the Iraq invasion and occupation are outrageously expensive follies and it’s time to start bringing the troops back home, the opposition party is about to nominate as its presidential candidate someone who aims to get the troops out within 16 months. The Republican Party is set to nominate someone who wants to continue the CheneyBush war even if it means keeping US troops in Iraq for a hundred years or more, and probably starting more conflagrations in the Greater Middle East.

In a fair and open election, the Democratic candidate should win that contest easily. However, there is compelling evidence that in the past eight years, US elections have been corrupted through the use of hackable, unverifiable, paperless “touch-screen” machines, and vote-tabulating computers, which utilize secret software, manufactured and programmed by companies with Republican affiliations.

BOMB, BOMB, BOMB IRAN

All this isn’t just “old history.” CheneyBush are itching to bomb Iran’s military installations and scientific laboratories while they are still in control of the Executive Branch, and are “catapulting the propaganda” for such an attack in ways eerily similar to how they deceived Congress and the American people into bombing and invading Iraq.

There are reports that Secretary Gates has been trying to stop such attack-Iran moves, or at least to greatly reduce the scale of the operation. But other reports suggest that the decision to bomb already has been made, and the appointment of Gen. David Petraeus to take over at Central Command is a key sign that all the ducks are just about lined up in a row.

(The former head of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, said there would be no attack on Iran on his watch; he was forced out, and CheneyBush lackey Petraeus was moved over from Iraq.)

BURMESE MILITARY’S “OPPORTUNITY”

“The shock doctrine” is not employed solely by American governments and multi-national corporations. In Burma (Myanmar), the military junta ruling that country, having just put down a potential revolt led by Buddhist monks, clearly is terrified that a coup might be organized by individuals or organizations who want to bring aid into the country to help the residents in the wake of the cyclone disaster. And so they’re keeping those aid workers out of the country, thus putting at risk the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into Rangoon and elsewhere in search of medical care, food, shelter.

The effect of the disaster and the Burmese government’s insufficient response to it means that a good share of the junta’s political opposition is now dead or dealing with the aftermath of the huge, rampaging storm. In other words, the disaster offers a great “opportunity” for the ruling elite to settle old scores by continuing to repress the opposition and to remake the affected areas as they wish. (There have been reports, unconfirmed, of bodies of monks being found in the cyclone rubble — burned in a suspicious manner — mixed in with the tens of thousands of other corpses found floating in the rice fields and ditches and rivers.)

The long time-delay in getting food, water and shelter to the hundreds of thousands of displaced survivors of the cyclone is reminiscent of the way the Bush Administration dilly-dallied with regard to the post-Katrina period in New Orleans and Mississippi. In her book, Klein used the Katrina experience as a perfect example of “disaster capitalism” in the US: A government watches a natural catastrophe wipe out an entire population sector, and lets the catastrophe play out over days and weeks and months — with large numbers of citizens abandoning their homes, forced to go elsewhere for adequate assistance — and then giving no-bid contracts to Blackwater and Halliburton and KBR for the reconstruction phase, in accord with social planning as laid out by the ideologues in the White House.

In Burma, the government may not be operating out of an exactly similar motivation, but the result appears to be much the same: using a natural calamity to reshape the economic, political and social future of the affected region for their own political and economic aims.

NATURAL RESOURCE SHORTAGES

As for the huge worldwide “run” on commodities — especially important staples such as wheat, rice, oil — already local greed-merchants and multi-national companies are salivating at the prospect of selling, at exorbitant rates, food and shelter and clothing and oil and the like. They will be literally “making a killing” on the backs of the starving, the poor, the dispossessed.

In so doing, in line with Klein’s “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism” theses, these elite forces will be re-shaping the politics, economies and social arrangements of these countries for generations, both to consolidate and expand their reigns of power and to benefit themselves and their rapacious, greedy supporters.

In short, when catastrophes are being dealt with, it doesn’t seem to matter what the operating governmental system is, be it fascist, communist, dictatorial, democratic, etc. By and large, the power/economic/political elites see the unfolding tragedies of their citizens as “opportunities” for expansion of control, for ways to eliminate or dilute their opposition, for fattening the bank accounts of their large-corporation supporters in rebuilding and reconstructing these devastated societies, in line with their own greed agendas.

This is the world that only will change when these elites and systems are systematically confronted, changed, or overthrown by citizens operating under a different moral system, who decide they’ve finally had enough.

It would be more effective, of course, if a strong progressive movement were to develop overnight in America to affect such wide-sweeping reforms in this country. However, removing Republicans from the White House in 2008 at least would be a significant sign of the beginnings of the public’s strong desire for significant changes.