WWAV has made national news for leading the fight against Louisiana’s Crime Against Nature Statute, which targeted poor women of color, transgender women, and anyone forced to trade sex for food or a place to sleep at night. The law forced women to register as sex offenders in a state database and placed a “sex offender” label on their drivers license, among other requirements. With the grassroots leadership of WWAV, a national coalition that also included Center for Constitutional Rights, Loyola Law School, and police misconduct attorney Andrea Ritchie was able to get the law off the books and has won a series of further victories in the process of removing the sex offender registration requirements for those convicted in the past.

The attack seemed political in its nature, directly targeting the crucial information, files, and materials needed for WWAV’s work. According to an email report from Bill Quigley, a social justice attorney and friend of the organization:

Major fire damage was done to a room which contained education and outreach materials. The arsonist seemed to have deliberately targeted this room. Destroyed were: three plastic and silicone breast models which were used to help people learn how to do self-examinations for breast cancer; a plastic pelvic model of a vagina; a two feet by one and a half foot plastic model of a woman’s reproductive system; boxes of male and female condoms; flip charts demonstrating the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV; several wooden penises which were used for condom demonstration; and boxes of educational materials. The fires in that room seem to have been set with some accelerant and scorched the walls, ceiling fan and ceiling and destroyed everything in the room….The offices were ransacked leaving drawers pulled out and papers and files on the floor. A TV and a laptop were taken but many valuables were left including computer monitors, office equipment, even some beer left over from a reception held earlier in the week. Several small fires were started inside the offices, in the bathroom, the hallway and in a sitting room.

News of the attack has sent shock waves across social justice communities around the US, and offers of help and donations have been coming in, but much more is needed. The fires have put the organization out of business at that location. They are seeking emergency temporary new quarters, as well as donations of clothing, supplies, and more. The organization has released a letter that lays out many of their needs.

In a video released on Friday afternoon WWAV executive director Deon Haywood shows the damage and discusses the effects, concluding, “We are fighters, we are warriors here at Women With a Vision, and we continue our work.” Here is the official statement from WWAV.

The Secretary of State has recommended that the application [for the pipeline] be denied…I agree…This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but [on] the arbitrary nature of a deadline.

Obama even hinted at his future support of the pipeline: “[there may be] development of an oil pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico.” These deceptive words used by the President made me think:  Is the president heavily influenced by Big Oil or is the statement he made in the 2008 campaign, “I don’t take money from oil companies” true?

The election campaign of 2008 was a hard-fought campaign on all sides, mostly which involved lots of corporate sponsors since all the “frontrunners” were awash with money. Then-Senator Barack Obama raised $745 million dollars and spent $730 million dollars. $916,162 of those dollars came from the Oil and Gas industry according to OpenSecrets. A FactCheck.org post continued this message, nine months before the Presidential election was held, noting that Obama received over $66,000 dollars from employees at ExxonMobil, Hess, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and British Petroleum (BP). In addition, the post noted that “two oil industry executives…bundl[ed] money for Obama” one of which was a multi-billionaire. A Reuters article in May 2008 noted that BP contributed more to Obama’s campaign than it had contributed to federal candidates since the late 1980s. Even with these contributions, one may be unsure of Big Oil’s real impact on Barack Obama.

Steve Coll’s new book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Empire, sheds light on part of that impact, especially on ExxonMobil’s role in the election. According to Coll, in the 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama “spoke most pointedly about ExxonMobil…[and] offered none of the nuanced support he had voiced to Chad’s dictator Idriss Deby [in 2006]” about the inviolability of international oil contracts.  Even with this aggressive tact, he seemed to exploit the unpopularity of ExxonMobil for his own benefit. He pushed the idea of American ‘energy independence’ even though, according to Coll, it is “not achievable [or] desirable.” In addition, every time he used the word “ExxonMobil” it seemed to work in his favor. But, according to the Washington Independent, individual Exxon, Chevron and BP contributors preferred Barack Obama. At the same time, he boldly declared that “we must end the age of oil in our time.” Still, the Washington Post wrote in January 2008 that “one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers on the Middle East [Daniel Shapiro]… registered to lobby for several corporate clients…including…the American Petroleum Institute.” Also, three political aides on the Obama’s campaign payroll were lobbyists for corporations such as BP. Still, after his victory over John McCain in the Presidential election, ExxonMobil changed its approach to the political arena.

As Obama was entering the Presidency, Eric Foner, of The Nation Magazine, called him “Our Lincoln” and Time Magazine named him “Person of the Year.” Just like the online game, Oiligarchy, made by Mollenindustria, President Obama became “oiled,” and would work in the interest of Big Oil due to its campaign contributions to his presidential election campaign.

In May 2009, Obama appointed Steve Koonin, the former Chief Scientist of BP, to be second Undersecretary for Science in the Department of Energy (he was confirmed shortly after by the U.S. Senate). The next year, Koonin became a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.  Also, the former contact employee for Goldman Sachs, Rahm Emanuel, who was Obama’s Chief of Staff for 21 months, lived for five years in a “rent-free…D.C. apartment of…Rep. Rosa DeLauro…and her husband, Stanley Greenberg,” whose firm was the creator of “BP’s…green…slogan “Beyond Petroleum.”” At the same time, Goldman Sachs had a huge investment in BP, which it sold in early 2010 for an unknown reason, pocketing “slightly more than $266 million” according to Raw Story, an independent news site. Currently the company owns about 2% of BP’s stock.

This connection of Obama to Big Oil is not based around stocks, rather around policy that has been enacted or pushed. In the early days of his administration, a cap-and-trade bill failed in Congress. According to an online site about cap-and-trade this policy has its problems. Ralph Nader says it would cause a war “between interest groups seeking billions in carbon credit handouts and the regulator[s].” The Institute of Energy Research states it will hurt jobs, “make Canadian oil more expensive than oil from the Middle East…[and] create…incentives to import more oil from the Middle East.” The political magazine, Corporate Knights continues this criticism. They remark that “the President has not stood up to the climate-denial machine” and has been increasingly silent on the issue of a changing climate. At the same time, they wonder why Obama is not doing “far more to defend the science” of global warming.

In November 2009 the pro-Big Oil policy was evident once again. According to AlterNet, Obama and “his administration [were]…vocal and active proponents” of an Iraqi law that permitted new oil contracts in the country, which are also called protection sharing agreements (PSAs). The law offered oil companies “a 75 percent stake” in oil development, “reduced the amount the foreign companies pay in taxes…allow[ed]…them to use private security forces to protect their facilities” and let foreign companies to “hire and train [non]Iraqi workers and…transfer…needed technology.” At the same time, the law made companies pay “reimbursement fees for capital and operational expenses…[and] den[ied foreign] companies [from]…book[ing] reserves.”  Under this agreement, different corporations were given the ability to drill in Iraqi oil fields: BP, ExxonMobil and Shell Oil Company got sweet deals in Iraq, drilling in areas with 4-18 billion barrels of oil. Other foreign oil companies won out as well, but these American companies were some the big bread winners and the Obama Administration’s support of the law is no coincidence.

The next year, the international environmental NGO, the Bellona Foundation, noted a Presidential decision that missed the headlines. President Obama, one month before the explosion of the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig reversed a “20 year moratorium…open[ed much of]… the Atlantic coast line, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling…[and] at the same time [he] reject[ed]…some sites that had been propose[d in]…Alaska, California and Oregon.” Then less than thirty days later, the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill began. The aftermath showed the collusion of policy with Big Oil. Even, Sarah Palin, roundly denounced by “liberals” for her seemingly crazy statements told a Fox News show, “I don’t know why the question isn’t asked…if there’s any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration.” Recently, others have even suggested that “the Obama administration went easy on BP before the 2010 oil spill in return for a pledge to support cap-and-trade legislation.” Two years later, Black Agenda Report came out with an article attacking Obama’s inaction: “Barack Obama and his Democrats passed no new laws, promulgated no new executive decisions to regulate Big Oil…the damages recoverable from BP’s holdings [were restricted to]…its Gulf revenues [not revenues on other continents]… [which] ensur[ed]…BP’s reckless operations in the gulf of Mexico [would]…continue.”

After the spill occurred, President Obama and his administration quickly worked to clean up the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. In that process, a dispersant named Corexit was poured into Gulf, 2 million gallons by mid-June 2011, with the green light from Obama and his administration. But everyone didn’t follow the administration line. According to Democracy Now!, “many lawmakers and advocacy groups sa[id]…the Obama administration [was]…not being candid about the lethal effects of dispersants.” At the same time, residents on the Gulf Coast were outraged that Kenneth Feinburg’s “$20 billion government-administered claim fund [would]…subtract money cleanup workers earn by working for the cleanup effort.” Also this claim fund was seen as an “effort to limit the number of lawsuits against BP.” Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst of the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response at the time, boldly said the government was “sock puppets for BP in this cover-up…by hiding the amount of spill [which]…sav[ed] [BP] hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in fines.” In addition to this corruption, many numbers of EPA and OSHA Administrators said the chemical was safe, but it was not. Kaufman went even further saying that the company, BlackRock is run by Larry Fink who has connections to “Mr. Geithner, Mr. Summers and others in the administration.” He concluded that the go ahead to disperse Corexit was part of a cover-up to hide BP’s use of “the volume of oil that has been released” into the Gulf from the American public.

The string of pro-Big Oil policy continued despite the “biggest investment in stimulating a green economy in history,” the creation of more green jobs, tax credits for wind energy, money for environmental maintenance, and greening federal buildings in the stimulus bill according to TreeHugger. For one, no one in BP has been criminally charged for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. A community fund to pay victims of the spill was set up, but there was no real damage to BP’s profits. Even a prosecution has started against BP but the trial was delayed by Judge Barbier until January 14, 2013, conveniently after the November presidential elections. In mid-2011, when the debt-ceiling crisis was occurring, the “Obama administration gave $12.4 million in research grants to oil and gas companies…to help the industry improve the way it drills for oil and gas” according to Daily Beast Contributor Daniel Stone. At the same time, Democrats in Congress were decrying a deal which would not cut subsidies for oil companies (about a year later, Obama would support gutting those subsidies). As the year continued, his policy was still deeply connected to Big Oil despite what was said in the articles of “clean capitalist” magazines like Corporate Knights.

Earlier that year in March 2011, President Obama began a war in Libya. Officially its purpose  was to “assist an international effort authorized by the United Nations…Security Council…to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe…[and stop] all attacks against civilians…[by] target[ing]…air defense systems, command and control structures…of Gaddafi’s armed forces.” As a result, this war was advertised by the Obama Administration as a humanitarian war. But the real reason for war was not humanitarian reasons, it was oil. Antiwar.com lays it out clearly. In 2008, Gaddafi threatened the oil companies in Libya and then made an agreement that promised billions of barrels of oil with tough conditions to American oil companies. At the same time, the U.S. government plotted to stop the Russian oil company Gazprom from gaining Libyan oil. When the Libyan revolution began, Gaddafi refused to step down.  The 2008 agreement and the plot to stop the Russian oil company, connected to Vladimir Putin, was threatened. In addition, University of London Professor Gilbert Achar noted that a huge massacre in Libya would cause an “embargo on Libyan oil” which would hurt the volatile oil markets. This revealed the real reason for entering a war into Libya: Oil. Representative Ed Markey at the time also said the war was because of oil.

The connections of the war to oil are different depending on what source the information comes from. Black Star News in an April 2011 post echoed the positions of antiwar.com and Gilbert Achar. They argued that the war occurred because “America wants to control Africa’s oil supply…[and protect] U.S. oil companies and others are presently invested in Libya; these companies include Marathon, Hess, Conoco, Gulf, Occidental, British Petroleum (BP).” The post finally gets to the punch: “This [war] is about oil and power, not saving people.  It’s about maximizing profits.” Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation had a different analysis. He noted that “Libya’s new leaders…plan to favor their NATO backers [one of which is the United States] when handing out access to Libya’s oil.” Peter Dale Scott goes even farther, saying that the war was about protecting the declining “global petrodollar economy” which Gaddafi threatened just like Saddam Hussein did before the Iraq invasion in 2003. Whatever the reason, it is clear that the war was about oil (it cost over $1.1 billion dollars, according to Politifact) and was in Big Oil’s interest.

In the month of the Libya war beginning, March 2011, President Obama made a speech at Georgetown University officially about “America’s energy security.” In the speech, Obama touted the use of alternative energy, nuclear power, coal, natural gas and oil all together, later called the “all-of-the above” strategy. More importantly, he announced a goal to cut America’s dependence on oil by one-third through his “all-of-the above” energy plan. However, he noted that to achieve this plan, America’s oil supply would have to be increased through expediting drilling permits for oil companies. Yet again, the President was on the side of Big Oil. He remarked casually that after new supposedly “higher standards” had been put in place, the government had “approved 39 new shallow-water permits…seven deepwater permits…two permits last year for every new well that the industry started to drill” offshore. The influence of Big Oil in government was apparent once again as the discussion switched back to the aftermath of the Gulf Oil Spill. In the speech, Obama revealed that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was sent by him down to “the BP offices [where]…he essentially designed the cap” that supposedly stopped the oil from leaking into the Gulf. If this doesn’t sound like collusion between BP and the national government, I don’t know what is.

A few months later in June 2011, President Obama made a rash decision. He decided to release 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. One news outlet, the Cable News Network (CNN) considered this an “economic stimulus…[in a time of] a looming supply  shortage…a wake up call to OPEC…[or] a warning shot to speculators in the oil market.” Other times in his administration he has tapped the national reserve, especially in times of “crisis”. This reserve was about 695.9 million barrels as of February 2012, which is about 36 days of oil consumption. Even though this is true, the releasing of oil just keeps America’s addiction on oil, which doesn’t solve any problems. It just keeps things at the status quo.

In late 2011 the policy of helping Big Oil continued. The infamous Keystone XL pipeline was proposed by TransCanada. It would be a pipeline that would snake across the western United States and would consist of drilling in dirty tar sands and overtopping the largest aquifer in the world, the Ogallala Aquifer. Environmental activists and other politicians opposed the action while others stood their ground, saying the pipeline would create jobs. An opinion posted on the Qatari-based news service, Al Jaazera, by a Tar Sands activist Bill McKibben expresses his frustration with the Obama Administration four months before the project was rejected. In his opinion, there were numerous “indication[s] from this administration…that it is prepared to grant the necessary permission for [this] project…[even] the State Department, at the recommendation of Keystone XL pipeline builder TransCanada, hired a second company to carry out the environmental review [which]…considered itself a “major client” of TransCanada.” This collusion of business and government to McKibben was “simply corrupt [and] potentially the biggest scandal of the Obama years,” an ongoing crime that President Obama didn’t even try to stop.

The Keystone XL pipeline’s rejection seemed a lapse in pro-Big Oil policy. But the pipeline was not delayed in January 2012 because of environmental considerations, but due to “the arbitrary nature of the deadline.” Even though there was a review done, it occurred with the help of one of TransCanada’s major clients. However, this was not a powerful pro-Big Oil development.  The powerful move was the renewed support of the “All of the Above” energy policy which was touted back in March 2011. In the 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama touted the same energy policy based in the nationalist idea of “energy independence.” In February 2012, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House Communications Director, justified such a policy by numerous statistics one would expect under a Republican administration:

Since 2008, U.S. oil and natural gases production has increased each year…[and] imports of foreign oil have decreased…[and] the Obama Administration put in place..new standards that ensured that [oil] drilling continued [after] the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

These were not the only justifications for this new energy policy. After the BP oil spill in the Gulf, hundreds of drilling permits for the region were approved by the Obama Administration. These numbers were higher than what Obama spoke of in March 2011. 308 permits were approved for “deep water drilling activities…and…113 permits for shallow water wells in the Gulf of Mexico.” More evidence of government collusion with Big Oil is the permitting of oil drilling “at levels seen before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill” on land and in the water. This resulted in “more oil produced [in 2011] in this country…since 2003.” This was conveniently made possible because America has more “oil…rigs at work in the field than the rest of the world.” While this seems like an overstatement, this phenomenon led the government to another conclusion. Obama allowed the “further exploration in the Arctic” and he established “an interagency Alaska working group…[to] review…Shells proposed exploration…in the Arctic.” For many environmentalists, this may be a betrayal of the initiatives in his administration that have helped the planet (pushing solar, wind, biofuels a little bit). Arctic exploration is not the only place the President pledges his support. Obama has allowed the building of dozens of pipelines in his term of office and has pledged to work with “TransCanada…to expedite the necessary federal permits” for the Keystone XL pipeline.

The next month, those permits were expedited. Obama signed an Executive Order on March 22nd, 2012 titled “Improving Performance of Federal Permitting and Review of Infrastructure Projects”. The Executive Order told all Federal Agencies and departments to “significantly reduce the…time required to make decisions [on]…permitting and review of [Federal government] infrastructure projects.” Also it mandated that all steps be taken “to execute Federal permitting and review processes with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, ensuring the health, safety, and security of communities and the environment while supporting vital economic growth.”  Even though there is talk of a safe community and the environment, this was meant to expedite the Keystone XL pipeline and future pipelines.

How can a full analysis occur if time is limited and “economic growth” is promoted? In the speeches he made the same day, March 22, his support of the pipeline is evident. He told a crowd, mostly of his supporters, in Maljamar, New Mexico that “we’ve announced our support for more [pipelines] including” the Keystone XL pipeline.  He repeated the same message at Ohio State University and in Cushing, Oklahoma. Cushing is where the President explained his justification for approving this leg of the pipeline, echoing the themes of his executive order:

There’s a bottleneck…here because we can’t get enough…oil to our refineries fast enough… TransCanada has applied to build a new pipeline to speed more oil from Cushing to…refineries down on the Gulf Coast.  And today, I’m directing my administration to cut through the red tape…and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done…So the southern leg of it [is] a [government] priority…The northern portion…[is] going to…[be] review[ed] properly…if [the government approves this pipeline]…we going to see jobs and growth…all across the country.

The following month, after the pro-pipeline speeches, Obama tried to act all tough against the oil and gas industry. According to an April 18th CNN Article, he required “drillers to capture emissions of certain air pollutants from new wells.” But under his direction, the Environmental Protection Agency allowed companies to “burn the pollutants [in question]…until the start of 2015” in a “nod to industry concerns [that the]…rules were being enacted too quickly.” This is not only a pro-Big Oil move, but it shows he weighs the concerns of the common American lower than that of Big Oil.

This month, the Obama Administration made what the independent blog site, Firedoglake, called “a deeply corrupt move.” Companies that used hydraulic fracturing (fracking) only needed to “disclose what chemicals they use after the well has been drilled.” This was giving in to Big Oil, thanks to meetings at the White House after the original rule was proposed three months earlier. Lobbyists representing those interests helped change the rule to their liking. As Firedoglake put it, the decision “to side with big oil over the American people and basic common sense” is pathetic. This decision is a further sign that Obama is an “oiled” president.

This corrupted nature comes back again when you look at Obama’s stance on speculation. His response has been weak-handed. He has said that should be investigated by Attorney General Eric Holder, “but nothing [really] has happened [because]… he seems to kind of accept the logic [that] we need to produce more domestic oil…and alternative energy sources” according to Paul Jay of the Real News Network.  In addition, Jay notes that Obama “doesn’t…talk…about the issue of speculation, about position limits [or about] the financialization [of oil].” Fidelity Investments continues this idea saying that “Obama would like to crack down…but he doesn’t talk about it often…or have enough friends in Congress [and that]…Obama’s attack on oil speculators…[is] doomed to join his legislative Wish List to Nowhere.” But this is not an issue isolated to Obama. The lack of action on these issues goes from the President to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and lack of a meeting of the CFTC’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee, created by the Dodd-Frank Act, since 2009. Then Fidelity gets to the punch: “Obama can’t keep his eye on the crude [oil] bubble for very long.”

As a result of all of these connections to Big Oil, it wouldn’t be a surprise that the President gets money from them. Even though this is true, Republicans receive most of the money from them resulting in ThinkProgress’s derogatory name: the “Grand Oil Party.” But, the facts are undeniable: Big Oil has given to the Obama reelection campaign. The ExxonMobil Corporation has already given Obama $14,914 and Chevron Corporation has given him $9,750; still both corporations favor Mitt Romney for President in terms of money. In addition, Koch Industries, which is usually considered a Tea Party financier, is also an oil refining company, has given Obama a measly $1,000. Not surprisingly, after the administration’s response to the Gulf Oil Spill, BP favors Obama’s reelection. More money was given to him than contributions to Eric Cantor and John Boehner combined. Overall, OpenSecrets details that President Obama is the 12th biggest recipient of money, out of the top 20 recipients in the oil and gas industry.  He has received $181,957 in his campaign coffers. This comes at a time after Obama supposedly led the effort to end Big Oil’s big tax breaks, which was defeated in the Senate due to their influence. In recent times, however, especially in the past year, it has become evident that Obama is on the side of Big Oil, more than ever.

Big Oil (the “supermajors”) is the world’s five or sometimes six biggest publicly-owned oil & gas companies including American-based Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips Company British-based Royal Dutch Shell and BP and French-based Total S.A. Of the American companies, Obama seems to be on their side completely and overall on Big Oil’s side. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s eight years in office was much more on the side of the oil companies, but Obama still has a significant stake. What benefits the powerful oil corporations in America will, in turn, benefit the other world players. If such companies have headquarters in the United States like BP and Royal Dutch Shell, this is firmly the case. President Obama is on the side of Big Oil and is subsequently an “oiled” President. Until the President admits that he is more on the side of the world’s large oil corporations than the middle class, he will continue rhetoric that seems to speak for all Americans.

The legal score came just twelve hours after the mayor ordered a pre-dawn raid of the camp, in which thousands of dollars worth of equipment, including tents, cookware, and personal effects, were destroyed. In a statement after the proceeding, Occupy NOLA attorney Davida Finger said the legal team witnessed this happening: “We watched all the belongings being thrown into trash trucks and (getting) ground up.” The timing of the raid on the morning of the court case was an act of executive trespass that Quigley said he has never seen in his long career: “This has never happened in my thirty years of practice that one side argues we don’t need a TRO today because we are not going to move and then they move anyways.”

Fortunately, the outrage at this singularly disgraceful act was not limited to protesters. The federal judge assigned to the case, Jay Zainey, was also not pleased about the mayor disrespecting the pending federal procedure. He responded to Quigley’s statement by saying: “I am not particularly happy that the mayor did this either.” In a visit to the encampment afterwards, Quigley told protesters that he believed the mayor’s overstep is what won Occupy NOLA the case: “If the mayor hadn’t acted, they probably would have given us 48 hours to vacate.” Mayor Landrieu, known as “Mini Moon” by critics (in reference to father Moon, former mayor himself), shot himself in the foot with his wanton act of aggression.

He did not use rubber bullets, instead opting to conceal his offensive in a cloud of connivance. Like other mayors throughout the country, he played the role of sympathetic “liberal” early on, as he visited the camp and pronounced his support for their first amendment rights. However, suspicions were raised when dozens of new faces joined Occupy in late October, after being displaced from a “homeless encampment” beneath the Pontchartrain Expressway at Calliope Street. While the movement has steadily been open to those with nowhere else to go, a large inundation of society’s most vulnerable has proven to be an overwhelming burden for an encampment that lacks the necessary resources, including medical and psychiatric care.

Whether or not the city intentionally diverted the Calliope “refugees” to Occupy NOLA or not, their presence at the camp has served to refocus local attention on the continued crisis in housing. New Orleans, continues to suffer from an acute homeless epidemic, six years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city’s housing stock. There are currently 10,000 people lacking permanent shelter, according to data provided by UNITY, a local homeless non-profit. Much of this stems from city officials using the storm’s devastation as cover to engage in a historic privatization bonanza, which saw four reparable public housing facilities razed. Meanwhile, 40,000 houses remain battered and vacant, and the current administration has elucidated no plan to rehabilitate them. Instead, the mayor has just issued a “10 year plan to end homelessness,” which leans heavily on an already-tapped non-profit community, and is short on any concrete explanation of how the current bed shortage is going to be addressed.

While the city denies malicious intent in its closing of the Calliope camp, there is no denying their recent machinations. Just two days before his Friday closure announcement, mayoral spokesman Ryan Berni claimed that there were still no plans to shut down Occupy NOLA. In an email to me, he said: “We are closely monitoring the issue in Duncan Plaza and have been working with the group to keep the area safe while they exercise their first amendment rights. Public safety and public health are our priorities. There is no deadline at this time.” Less than 48 hours later, Landrieu pulls an about-face and invokes an immediate deadline. In so doing, he said: “It is a violation of the law to be in Duncan Plaza from 10:30pm to 6:00am. It is unlawful for people to be in Duncan Plaza while they are storing equipment that includes tents, palettes, kitchen supplies or other items.”

This press conference was replete with lies and deception. Firstly, he said that protesters “are aware they are in violation of the law.” This is despite the fact that he had yet to communicate such to the encampment. Meanwhile, the movement naturally questions the legitimacy of any law restricting their right to remain on site. Secondly, he claims that the encampment has encroached on the rights of others to peaceably assemble in the plaza: “There were a couple of other groups that had permits that had to be pulled because Occupy NOLA was using the space.” This statement is ludicrous, as permits for use of Duncan Plaza are generally not granted. Furthermore, the city has not responded to requests to provide proof of this claim. Thirdly, he says that giving protesters notice prior to closing camp is not required: that he is being especially conciliatory in so doing. This further demonstrates the mayor’s narrow grasp of the law, and his duty to make public space regulations clear prior to enforcement. Fourthly, he tells the public that the park’s homeless population will all be provided some form of shelter. In reality, the administration shipped a few dozen homeless individuals off to Exodus House, a local shelter, where director Donald Wilkerson describes available services as such: “It’s probably not going to be a lot of housing. It’s going to be a lot of services. Housing might be available for some people. That’s the end goal. But we’ve got to get that other stuff out of the way.” Many of these individuals will wind up back at Occupy NOLA, which slowly reassembled late Tuesday after word spread of Judge Zainey’s decision.

The camp is now required to play by new rules, including a ban on “open flames,” “animals” and “weapons.” Meanwhile, the gazebo that often housed GA’s is now fenced off. The protesters will also be required to provide their own port-a-lets, which Mr. Quigley arranged for them. As part of his heroics, he also arranged for donors to put up the necessary $5,000 bond.

Through the day Wednesday, the park will begin to resemble the full-fledged Occupy encampment, if only for another six days. Next week, the lawyers will attempt to extend the restraining order indefinitely, as the case gets passed over to Judge Lance Afrik. Attorney Davida Finger warns that Occupy NOLA still faces an “uphill battle.” However, the contest already won is quite significant. Few other Occupy camps have victored in court, with only Occupy Nashville also securing a TRO. The movement needed a little help from a mayor that was ready to encroach on the hallowed domain of a federal judge. With that and a dynamic legal team at their disposal, Occupy NOLA schooled Mini Moon in court on Tuesday.

Given its pre-American history, New Orleans has always been more culturally complex than the country that came to contain it. This city knew Creoles, free people of color (“gens de couleur libre”), quadroons and octoroons, while Americans saw things in terms of white and black. The latter’s dichotomous worldview was ultimately thrust upon the pre-existing system of Creole social gradation, thus threatening social instability. Meanwhile, a linguistic element of cultural cleavage was added, as the new occupiers spoke English. They would ultimately move into “uptown” New Orleans, across Canal from the French Quarter.

The Civil War brought yet another occupation: this time the “Yankee.” Historian Christopher Benfey describes the situation as such: “The precarious status of the Creoles – beaten up by the uptown “Americans” before the Civil War, and by the Northern Yankees during and after it – had another, more troubling result, in their increasingly desperate attempts to restore their lost prestige.”¹ This troubling result was the 1874 “Battle of Liberty Place,” in which the Crescent City White League fought the Metropolitan police, resulting in 30 deaths, over frustration regarding the perceived opportunism of northern politicians and their implementation of the corrupt elections of 1872 (which briefly resulted in an African-American governor.)

In sum, northern efforts at reconstruction exacerbated racial tensions rather than tempering them. The Yankee, like the American occupier before, introduced a more restrictive system of race relations than had previously existed. Historian John Blassingame explains: “Because of their historical intimacy with Negroes, most Louisiana whites manifested far less abhorrence for blacks than did their brothers in the North and far less than their rhetoric often implied.”² This rhetoric, as represented by the White League and other racist organs, was the result of Creole frustration and desperation. The violence of Liberty Place, meanwhile, was born of resentment over another wave of occupation.

The Creoles and their language gradually lost their footing in New Orleans, though the era of northern occupation did not cease with the end of the Civil War. As Josh and Rebecca Tickell elegantly demonstrate in their recently released documentary The Big Fix, the state of Louisiana thereafter became a colony of northern oligarchs, eager to cash in on the state’s natural resources, particularly the oil. While last year’s Deepwater Horizon accident brought global attention to the immediate ecological risks associated with the plunder of this resource in an increasingly unregulated environment, Louisianans have long felt the social and economic consequences thereof (not to mention the long-term ecological consequences wrought via the depletion of the wetlands). The two principal oil companies present in the first decades of the last century were Standard Oil and Texaco: the latter almost as northern as the former, insofar as most of its financial backing came from investors up north. Nonetheless, it was Standard Oil that would come to wield mammoth control over the industry, even after its breakup in 1911 under the Sherman anti-trust law. One result of their unparalleled economic influence and power was, naturally, near monopolistic control of political power in Louisiana.

This was until the political consciousness of Louisiana discovered a means of counter-occupation, in the form of the redoubtable Huey Long. As the social implications of the preceding era of monopoly capitalism began to take hold in the form of economic malaise, Long was swept into the governor’s mansion in 1928 on a populist platform that included loosening the stranglehold of Standard Oil on Louisiana’s political system. Other elements to his populist agenda included vast expenditures on public works projects such as roads, bridges and schools, and, famously, the provision of free textbooks for schoolchildren. In order to help pay for these programs, he introduced a tax on the oil refineries. For his efforts, he was rewarded with an impeachment attempt in 1929, which ultimately failed. Meanwhile, Standard Oil attempted to withhold payment of their obligations under the new tax, thus provoking Long to send in the National Guard to seize their oil fields until payment was made.

In speech, the “King Fish” echoed the sentiments of today’s populist movement. On the two political parties of his day: “They’ve got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side, but no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.” At the time, northern progressives treated him disparagingly, as his plain-talking southern demeanor repelled their bourgeois sensibilities. This runs parallel to the similar treatment now given by “liberal” commentators to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Nonetheless, he was the first to admit to not being an intellectual, and his rhetoric is just as relevant today. On the imbalance of wealth:

According to the tables which we have assembled, it is our estimate that 4 percent of the American people own 85 percent of the wealth of America, and that over 70 percent of the people of America don’t own enough to pay for the debts that they owe.

Any man with a thimble-full of sense ought to know that if you take 85 percent off of that table and give it to one man that you are bound to have 2/3 the people starving because they haven’t got enough to eat.

How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what’s intended for 9/10th of the people to eat? The only way to be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub that he ain’t got no business with!

Long was assassinated on September 8th, 1935, and politics in Louisiana quickly reverted to the usual Wall Street fare. This was probably most notable in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the natural disaster was used as cover for the implementation of a radical neo-liberal agenda in devastated New Orleans. As in other major cities driven by a reactionary austerity agenda, this commenced with deconstruction of a majority of the city’s public housing units, including St. Bernard, C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper, and Lafitte. One couldn’t imagine a more opportune time to close down housing units than when they are vacant. With public housing went the historic Charity hospital, a public hospital and historic New Orleans fixture. The disrepair of these facilities after the storm provided a convenient pretense for the political class of the state and city to enact a private take-over that their major funders had always dreamt of.

The most striking privatization, meanwhile, has come in the realm of education. While the entirety of the system was vacated in the weeks following the storm, the Emergency Session of the Louisiana legislature used the occasion to pass Act 35, which put the vast majority of the city’s public schools in state hands, under the auspices of the “Recovery School District” (RSD). The RSD existed prior to the hurricane as a mechanism to bring schools deemed as “failing” under state supervision. However, Act 35 changed the guidelines by which a school was deemed “failing,” so that any school below the state average was grabbed. In all, 102 of the city’s schools were transferred to the RSD (bringing the total to 107). Once in the hands of state bureaucracy, the process of transferring the schools to charters was made easier, as the Republican-led state government had long since begun the school charterization/privatization process across the state.

The city is now the nation’s only charter-majority system, with 61 of the 88 open schools being run by state or parish sanctioned charters. The Orleans Parish School Board only directly operates six schools, while the RSD operates 33. To help administer this transformation, the RSD hired Paul Vallas as superintendant in 2007. He had previously proved his worth by commencing the charterization process in Chicago while this author attended school there. At the end of his tenure in 2010, he candidly discussed the impact that charters have had on the composition of the workforce at the city’s schools: “I submit to you that part of the problem in education is, there is not enough turnover. I’m very comfortable. I’m running a district where half of my teachers are the university elites and the college elites from programs like Teach For America, and the other half of my teachers veteran teachers. I think there’s a very healthy balance.”

Indeed, one of the principle objectives of charter school proponents is weakening teachers’ unions. Nowhere is this more vivid than New Orleans, where the United Teachers of New Orleans was essentially busted by this regressive state school grab. Membership in the union prior to the storm stood at about 7,500, and has only recently re-grown to 1,000. As Vallas alludes to in the quote above, the charters have lent more heavily on Teach for America and similar programs designed to bring in recent graduates with no teaching experience. While most of these young people are well-intentioned, their role is effectively that of a scab. Furthermore, there are racial undertones to this union busting, as the UNTO has always been predominantly African-American. Inner-city teachers have long composed an intrinsic part of the black middle class in this country. One source of the recent implosion of that demographic has been the attack on urban teachers’ unions with this widespread politics of “austerity” and privatization. In short, school privatization is one of the principal routes to gentrification, insofar as it functionally replaces large swathes of middle-class black workers with young, predominantly white workers.

From the French imperialists to the neo-liberal capitalists, New Orleans history has been replete with top-down occupations. Meanwhile, its unique cultural dynamism has produced significant counter-occupiers: those that have reclaimed the humanity of the city by producing an unparalleled music tradition. The African-American population that has endured slavery, servitude, political repression and socio-economic persecution has given this country its popular music. By maintaining occupation of the human spirit in spite of the nation-wide encroachment by unfettered capitalism, New Orleans has maintained its status as a rare refuge of creative ingenuity in the Empire.

As part of the vibrant social movement that has sprung up in cities across the country, Occupy NOLA has set up camp in Duncan Plaza. One of the first significant decisions of their General Assembly was to rename said plaza after Avery Alexander, a local civil rights activist who was integral in efforts to resist segregation in the 1960’s by organizing boycotts, sit-ins and marches. They have taken public space bearing the title of a politician from a locally influential family and reclaimed it for the counter-occupiers, the activists, those who recognize the human propensity to enact meaningful social and political change, and those unwilling to accept the narrative of the exploiters in our midst.

Meanwhile, they have eschewed adopting leaders and introducing hierarchy. The movement of the 99% is meant to surpass human limitations. Huey Long was killed and his counter-occupation dissipated immediately thereafter. A superior model of counter-occupation is offered in the city’s music, which endures beyond the death of any single artist. The jazz funeral provides the opportunity to celebrate life while mourning, by appropriately marching from the burial site in a festive and musically-driven march. It recognizes the cultural contribution of the fallen and immediately demonstrates the spirit that carries on.

This movement has already endured over a month: monumental for an encampment in 21st century America. It has also made its mark by addressing political issues marked as taboo by the two corporatist political parties. It has re-occupied a realm of restricted discourse, and promises that “it is not leaving.” As such, it should only be a matter of time before it re-occupies our schools, hospitals, public housing, natural resources, banks and financial institutions. We are finally making the 1% come back with “some of that grub that (it) ain’t got no business with.”

1. Benfey, Christopher. Degas in New Orleans (University of California Press, 1997) pp. 14-15.
2. Blassingame, John. Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), xvi.

The amount of energy and water  required to make the oil useable, not to mention burning the oil itself, will put so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that internationally renowned NASA climate scientist James Hansen has said that extracting and refining the oil means it’s “essentially game over” in the global battle to avoid catastrophic climate change.  The question needs to be asked: how did we get from a president who once promised real action on climate change to a man who is complicit in the environmental crime of the century?  And having taken on that question, how should environmentalists respond?

Extracting oil from tar sands has only become economical as we have approached the End of the Age of Easy Oil and the price has shot above $100/barrel.  There’s plenty more out there but it’s dirty, dangerous, hard to extract and hence ripe for environmental calamities such as last year’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  This explains not only the development of Canadian tar sands, which require mining two tons of tar sands to obtain a single barrel of oil, as Shell, Exxon-Mobil and that paragon of environmental responsibility, BP, are all in on the action, but also underpins the hunt for oil in deep-water deposits off-shore and in the new oil frontier of the Arctic as well as shale gas extraction from hydrofracking.

Furthermore, it brings sharply into focus the reality that under capitalism, particularly its unregulated neoliberal variant, massive transnational oil companies will not hesitate to bolster their bottom lines and appease their shareholders before any concern about the stability of the biosphere filters through into corporate head offices.

One tar sands mine in Alberta has excavated more rock and soil than was required to build the Great Pyramid at Cheops, the Great Wall of China, the Suez Canal and the world’s 10 largest dams combined.  Mining and processing is enough to heat three million homes and such is the electricity demand, it’s helping to fuel the requirement to build another environmental and health menace: more nuclear power stations.   Water use is 349 million cubic meters annually; water that becomes so heavily contaminated that it can’t be put back in the rivers it’s bleeding dry.  It must be kept sequestered in vast lakes of highly toxic effluent that already cover 50 square kilometers and are large enough to be seen from space.  The negative impacts on indigenous land and culture, wildlife, forests, water, air and downstream pollution run on and on.

Considering some of the facts of tar sands mining, and the appalling environmental damage it will cause, this is surely an area where one would expect democratically-elected governments to step in and say: we must find an alternative.  Yet, it seems almost certain that President Obama, who has the authority to stop the pipeline without recourse to Congress, will give the green light to further expansion as Canada seeks an export market to justify further production expansion.  The Keystone XL project, a 1,700 mile pipeline that will be able to carry 700,000 barrels a day from Canada all the way down to the refineries in Texas, cutting through multiple states and risking the contamination of such essential fresh water sources as the Ogallala aquifer is essential to Canadian plans for tar sands development.

Yet we know from Wikileaks that the State Department has been in collusion with TransCanada, the pipeline company, to ensure favorable press and hired a state dept official formerly with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign team to guarantee that her new department won’t look too closely at the negative environmental implications.   A company who counts TransCanada as one of their major clients, Cardno Entrix, was hired by the State Department to carry out the environmental assessment.

Desperate to retain their members’ dues base and taking a nationalist and short-term position with regard to “American jobs”, the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters union, rather than actively campaigning for jobs with a real future such as those in an expanded renewable energy sector, energy conservation and infrastructure development are backing the pipeline.

Yes, we certainly need jobs, but why do we only ever get offered jobs when it’s in the interests of the fossil fuel corporations or the banks and we have to trade them off for environmental stability?  Or when the government wants young American’s to go and fight and kill other young people in far off lands?  What about the millions of jobs that could be created by manufacturing a clean energy economy, with a new energy grid, retrofitting buildings across the country for energy conservation and in building an updated and efficient sanitation system?  Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of teachers we’d need to educate such a workforce.  The bankers foreclosed on our homes and the capitalists and politicians that serve them seem intent on foreclosing on the planet.

Organized by Bill McKibben of 350.org, over 1,000 people were arrested outside the White House this summer to pressure Obama into refusing to sign off on the pipeline project.  While this was a highly commendable and impressive action, it was also rather confusing as McKibben urged activists not to give up on Obama.  Despite more than two years of unremitting disappointment on environmental questions (and much else) activists were encouraged to wear their 2008 Obama campaign buttons at the protests and on their way to jail.  It was confusing because you can’t protest someone you simultaneously support and hope to build a robust and uncompromising movement for change in the teeth of corporate malfeasance and lobbying power.  Either you protest and create a large enough oppositional movement that forces a rethink of government policy, as has happened in Germany with the German government’s u-turn on nuclear power, or you weaken the movement and bamboozle your supporters with misplaced calls for loyal protest actions to get our supposed friend in the White House on the right track.

McKibben has called Obama’s upcoming decision a “watershed moment” for his presidency and environmentalists who previously enthusiastically campaigned for him have vowed to sit out his 2012 re-election campaign if he doesn’t follow through and refuse to authorize the project.  I hope they do.

In a statement that underscores the cynicism with which the Democratic Party take their most enthusiastic supporters, the New York Times quoted democratic pollster Mark Mellman: “Whatever qualms or questions they may have about this policy or that policy, at the end of the day the one thing they’re absolutely certain of — they’re going to hate these Republican candidates…So I’m not honestly all that worried about a solid or enthusiastic base.”  In other words, the Democrats will simply run a negative campaign that only promises to be not quite as bad as the Republicans.  Meanwhile, not quite as bad as the Republicans will fry the planet just as surely as if the Republicans had been in charge of the furnaces.

So this is a watershed moment not just for Obama, but also for McKibben and the mainstream environmental movement.  Only a complete and irrevocable break with the Democratic Party will get us anywhere.  In several articles written over the lifetime of the Obama presidency, including when he had super-majorities in both houses of Congress and could have acted with purpose on environmental questions, I have argued that, despite the rhetoric, Obama’s default position would always be to side with the corporations against a rational and forward-thinking environmental program.  One that would protect health, create jobs and give us a chance of avoiding global climate meltdown.  Obama has yet to provide any evidence that my analysis is incorrect.

In a coffin that should really have received its last nail some time ago, it is highly likely that he will further confirm my analysis with his commitment to the pipeline project.  The question then will be, will the mainstream environmental organizations such as 350.org follow through, ditch the Democratic Party, make good on their promise not to campaign for an Obama second term, and help build the only thing that will save us: the construction of a broad-based but completely independent movement for real social and ecological change.

Paradoxically, the only force that might prevent President Obama from burning all his bridges to the environmental movement is Occupy Wall Street, which has already sharply moved the political narrative to the left in the United States precisely because it is independent of the two-party corporate duopoly that masquerades as democratic political choice.  Yet, if OWS continues to grow and the Democratic Party are forced to respond by tacking to the left on environmental and social issues so as not to lose every last shred of liberal credibility, it further serves to underline my argument that we will only win real change when we categorically refuse to get taken for a ride by the Democratic chariot that is hitched so firmly to the corporate horse.

The excursion did us some good, in particular, leaving insular Manhattan, and facing the faded, crumbling Industrial Age grandeur of Pittsburgh. Walking, once again, among the plaintive rasps of the ghosts of the devastated laboring class (the social setting of our youth) provided us with a humanizing contrast to our present day circumstances stranded amid the manic chattering of the preening demons of banal self-regard possessing Manhattan careerists.

Nowadays, the island of Manhattan is tediously bright and shiny — a sterile, oligarchic controlled dystopia. Accordingly, any sign of redemptive decay and hint of shabby ass human glory has been banished by official caveat and collective collusion.

In contrast, while in Pittsburgh, because I was born in a steel and coal town, Birmingham, Alabama, I shuffled among familiar shades. Deep in my being, I know the social setup — once manifested in forged steel, living flesh and human longing — now lost to the ravages of time (more accurately, the consequences of neo-liberal economic doctrine).

In Birmingham, under the statue of the Roman god of the forge, Vulcan, his mortared gaze lording over the city from atop Red Mountain, I witnessed men, hardened by years of grinding labor and demagogic political manipulation, sacrifice their bodies to (Pittsburgh plutocrat-owned) mines, foundries and smelting plants for subsistence pay.

In childhood, when I watched local men labor in the city’s metal foundries, their sweat-lacquered faces, reflecting the fiery glow of smelted steel, seemed to glisten with rage, as angry blue sparks showered the heat-seared air around them.

These were hard-drinking, short-tempered men who were calloused of hand and possessed of humiliation-hardened hearts — rendered so, by a life of the strenuous labor, mandated by an exploitive economic system that bequeathed to them little but a hard scrabble existence — and the promise of a future bearing more of the same.

Little wonder, they swore into the soot-choked air, brawled among themselves, and clutched (self-defeating but politically useful to the ruling elite) racial animus, as their vitality was harnessed to build the structure and infrastructure of the industrial state and increase the wealth, privilege and political power of steel and coal plutocrats up in Pittsburgh (the absentee owners of the area’s coal and iron mines, smelts, and processing plants) — but, in so doing, we locals further diminished the steerage of the course of our lives.

I learned early the girding lie that sustains the oligarchic state i.e., the illusory promise: Work hard and you will set yourself free. In fact, as was the rigged economic setup of the Birmingham of my youth, the harder one works within the inverted totalitarian structure of the corporate state, the more one increases the wealth, hence the political power of the ruling elite…by enabling the parasitic class to consolidate yet more power. Therefore, by working harder and longer for their benefit, one further diminishes one’s control over the trajectory of one’s fate.

(Caveat: This is not to be confused with hard work and diligent effort — a million acts of responsibility create freedom. The distinction being…be aware of who benefits from your efforts and mindfully choose where to apply your labors.)

At present, in cities such as Birmingham and Pittsburgh, the structures, built in the mechanized fury of the Industrial Age, stand idle…decaying around legions of the unemployed and the woefully underpaid and under-compensated. In the oxidized scream of rust, one can almost hear the wails of rage of those souls who surrendered their life force to erect and work the now abandoned factories, mills and foundries of the nation.

Outsourcing, downsizing, work speed-ups, i.e., the most recent mechanisms of capitalism’s death cult of dehumanizing efficiency goes all but unchallenged in the official narrative of the corporate state. By means of intimidation and the proffering of small bribes, the work force is induced to transmute their body’s vitality and soul’s pothos into the profits of an advantaged, ruthless few. In this way, one’s pothos (Greek: yearning plus libido) is rendered into the convenient pathos (alienation, paranoia, displaced rage, consumer addiction) of the corporate age.

Why do so many in the U.S. accept this pernicious, self-defeating setup? Perhaps, because they have been convinced by constant saturation by the commercial propaganda of the consumer state that capitalism will bestow to those who abide by its (rigged) rules and (gamed) economic arrangements everything one could possibly need and desire.

Accordingly, all an individual needs to know and experience is at his impulsive, electronic mass media-happy fingertips. He can click from virtual reality enactments of explicit porn to obscene interpretations of Christian prophecy (e.g., the present field of Republican presidential hopefuls) thus, in an instant, transmigrating from fake sin to phony salvation … What more, in the whole of boundless creation, could one possibly want?

Yet, where does a veritable (as opposed to virtual) sense of place exist in social and economic arrangements such as these?

The present era of weightless perception serves to obscure the crushing consequences of the short-sighted cupidity of both the economic elite and underclasses alike. Reflecting this, wealth now exists as constellations of electrons; money is no longer the vaulted riches of miserly plutocrats nor payday cash of the laboring class burning in the pockets of worn work clothes.

Currency exists in precincts of pixels–a fever dream of appliances — the effluvia of the schemes of the elitist illusionists of high finance whose machinations have wrought an age of electronic razzle-dazzle and devastating real world consequences — whereby the solid architecture and durable accoutrement of the Machine Age, manifested as the sturdy structures of Industrial Era cities, such as Pittsburgh and Birmingham, has been transmuted into the manic, evanescent imagery of the mass media hologram.

In the years since Katrina, I’ve been known to rage at the indifferent sky, why the Hell (or, at least, its earthly exurb: Houston) did nature’s impersonal fury have to descend on New Orleans, about the last outposts within this corporate simulacrum of a country where an individual pulse and collective heart beat could be found — where the primordial songs of bone, heart and flesh — of the arias rising from steam-caressed sidewalks and the riffing currents of rivers — have not been forced into the Clear Channel/Disney/Time-Warner überculture blandification machine?

In order for the U.S. — a nation whose populace possesses the collective capacity for cognitive depth and emotional resonance of a Louisiana gnat flurry in high summer — to rise from its destructive swoon of insularity-engendered anomie, the embrace of a view of the world imbued by anima mundi, embodied in the living architecture of a city like New Orleans, is essential.

In New Orleans, interred corpses will not remain buried in the earth…the water sodden ground causes the dead to rise to the surface. Axiomatically, we must not deep-six our grief and rage. In the name of Katrina’s dead and walking wounded, we must not allow the casuistry-shattering verities of the human heart to be buried and forgotten nor allow mass media schlock to drown out the lamentations of the city’s restless dead from memory.

To honor her dead, displaced and deeply scarred, we must remember the mortifying sights and heart-shaking sounds of both the natural disaster that was Katrina and the official shit storm of human negligence, flat-out deceit and malevolence that rendered the Crescent City a corpse-choked drowning pool. Instead, we must gaze down into the dark water of memory, remembering the water-deluged streets of the city…awash with bloated bodies, raw sewage, industrial sludge and the floating debris and submerge detritus of peoples’ lives.

Yet, to properly mourn what was lost to the storm (in the tradition of the city itself) one must allow one’s grieving heart to be seduced by the soul of the world. Personally, as is the case with many who knew the city, pre-Katrina — beautiful, disloyal, capricious creature she was (and remains) — I retain a lover’s ardor for her.

For: Being enveloped by the redolence of orange blossom and jasmine, held on her humid, late afternoon air, as I sat, swigging a Turbo Dog, on the banks of the Mississippi, as evening tilted over the Lower Ninth. For: The exquisite indifference of starlight above the Bywater, and the manner those distant, celestial bodies would stand in stark contrast to the redemptive immediacy of the sweat-soaked bodies near me, as we would lie on our backs, upon the sidewalk, watching steam (borne of the mass of humanity within) rise from the roof of Vaughan’s Lounge — listening, as inside, Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers wailed into the early morning hours.

I suspect my years in New Orleans saved/cursed me from being agenda-prone. I’m not of the reductionist school. I’m drawn to swamps, not so much the muck — but the mindfulness needed to negotiate the terrain. Of course, swamps will bog one down; yet, I’m drawn to the cacophony and filtered light, to its minute gradations of green upon green. One is forced to slow down in order to take in the revealed beauty and hidden dangers therein.

Moreover, the swamp exists for its own sake and feels no obligation to explain its mystery. It can be known, but its mystery is just that — ever growing, always dying.

One must not, and this is a habitual misstep of the contemporary left, approach politics, personality and place as a strictly intellectual exercise — as a thought experiment that will yield to logic. If the swamp of the human psyche were that simple to negotiate, then life would be a dry, blood-bereft trudge indeed.

And yet, how the world wounds us; at times, delivering an aching sorrow that one will always carry. But rejoice in your wounded condition…for the open wound harbors a mouth to kiss…a womb from which to be perennially reborn. As Octavio Paz testifies, “Love is a wound, an injury… Yes, love is a flower of blood.”

As far as the struggle to be included in the present political narrative, we, on the left, remain marginalized to the point of near invisibility. But don’t lose heart: The problem is the solution. Apropos, empire carries the seeds of its own demise. Therefore, in the shadow of the house of cards economy, now tottering over the ruins and detritus of the nation’s shuttered factories, foreclosed upon farms, and abandoned mills, one should go about the business of working on what will replace the hollow and decayed system when it collapses from within.

Accordingly, Rainer Maria Rilke averred (paraphrasing) everyone has a letter written within and if you refuse the life your heart wants to live, you don’t get to read this letter before you die. An individual must risk the world, with all its attendant woundings, or he risks having a dead letter office piling up lost correspondence from his neglected heart.

Politics continues to shape how the changes to New Orleans are viewed. For some, the city is a crime scene of corporate profiteering and the mass displacement of African Americans and working poor; but for others it’s an example of bold public sector reforms, taken in the aftermath of a natural disaster, that have led the way for other cities.

In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans saw the rise of a new class of citizens. They self-identify as YURPs – Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals – and they work in architecture, urban planning, education, and related fields. While the city was still mostly empty, they spoke of a freedom to experiment, unfettered by the barriers of bureaucratic red tape and public comment. Working with local and national political and business leaders, they made rapid changes in the city’s education system, public housing, health care, and nonprofit sector.

Along the way, the face of elected government changed in the city and state. Among the offices that switched from black to white were mayor, police chief, district attorney, and representatives on the school board and city council, which both switched to white majorities for the first time in a generation. Louisiana also transformed from a state with several statewide elected Democrats, to having only one — Senator Mary Landrieu.

While black community leaders have said that the displacement after the storm has robbed African Americans of their civic representation, another narrative has also taken shape. Many in the media and business elite have said that a new political class – which happens to be mostly white – is reshaping the politics of the city into a post-racial era. “Our efforts are changing old ways of thinking,” said Mayor Mitch Landrieu, shortly after he was elected in 2010. After accusing his critics of being stuck in the past, Landrieu — who was the first mayor in modern memory elected with the support of a majority of both black and white voters — added that “We’re going to rediscipline ourselves in this city.”

The changes in the public sector have been widespread. Shortly after the storm, the entire staff of the public school system was fired. Their union, which had been the largest union in the city, ceased to be recognized. With many parents, students and teachers driven out of the city by Katrina and unable to have a say in the decision, the state took over the city’s schools and began shifting them over to charters. “The reorganization of the public schools has created a separate but unequal tiered system of schools that steers a minority of students, including virtually all of the city’s white students, into a set of selective, higher-performing schools and most of the city’s students of color into a set of lower-performing schools,” writes lawyer and activist Bill Quigley, in a report prepared with fellow Loyola law professor Davida Finger.

In many ways, the changes in New Orleans school system, initiated almost six years ago, foreshadowed a battle that has played out more conspicuously this year in Wisconsin, Indiana, New Jersey and other states where teachers and their unions were assailed by both Republican governors and liberal reformers such as the filmmakers behind Waiting for Superman. Similarly, the battle of New Orleans public housing — which was torn down and replaced by new units built in public-private partnerships that house a small percentage of the former residents — prefigured national battles over government’s role in solving problems related to poverty.

The anger at the changes in New Orleans’ black community is palpable. It comes out at city council meetings, on local black talk radio station WBOK, and in protests. “Since New Orleans was declared a blank slate, we are the social experimental lab of the world,” says Endesha Juakali, a housing rights activist. However, despite the changes, grassroots resistance continues. “For those of us that lived and are still living the disaster, moving on is not an option,” adds Juakali.

Resistance to the dominant agenda has also led to reform of the city’s criminal justice system. But this reform is very different from the others, with leadership coming from African-American residents at the grassroots, including those most affected by both crime and policing.

In the aftermath of Katrina, media images famously depicted poor New Orleanians as criminal and dangerous. In fact, at one point it was announced that rescue efforts were put on hold because of the violence. In response, the second-in-charge of the New Orleans Police Department reportedly told officers to shoot looters, and the governor announced that she had given the National Guard orders to shoot to kill.

Over the following days, police shot and killed several civilians. A police sniper wounded a young African American named Henry Glover, and other officers took and burned his body behind a levee. A 45-year-old grandfather named Danny Brumfield, Sr. was shot in the back in front of his family outside the New Orleans convention center. Two black families – the Madisons and Bartholomews – walking across New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge fell under a hail of gunfire from a group of officers. “We had more incidents of police misconduct than civilian misconduct,” says former District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who pursued charges against officers but had the charges thrown out by a judge. “All these stories of looting, it pales next to what the police did.”

District Attorney Jordan, who angered many in the political establishment when he brought charges against officers and was forced to resign soon after, was not the only one who failed to bring accountability for the post-Katrina violence. In fact, every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed. For years, family members of the victims pressured the media, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and Eddie Jordan’s replacement in the DA’s office, Leon Cannizzaro. “The media didn’t want to give me the time of day,” says William Tanner, who saw officers take away Glover’s body. “They called me a raving idiot.”

Finally after more than three years of protests, press conferences, and lobbying, the Justice Department launched aggressive investigations of the Glover, Brumfield, and Danziger cases in early 2009. In recent months, three officers were convicted in the Glover killing (although one conviction was overturned), two were convicted in beating a man to death just before the storm, and ten officers either plead guilty or were convicted in the Danziger killing and cover-up. In the Danziger case, the jury found that officers had not only killed two civilians and wounded four, but also engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy that involved planted evidence, invented witnesses, and secret meetings.

The Justice Department has at least seven more open investigations on New Orleans police killings, and has indicated their plans for more formal oversight of the NOPD, as well as the city jail. In this area, New Orleans is also leading the way – in a remarkable change from Justice Department policy during the Bush Administration, the DOJ is also looking at oversight of police departments in Newark, Denver, and Seattle.

In the national struggle against law enforcement violence, there is much to be learned from the victims of New Orleans police violence who led a remarkable struggle against a wall of official silence, and now have begun to win justice. “This is an opening,” explains New Orleans police accountability activist Malcolm Suber. “We have to push for a much more democratic system of policing in the city.”

In the closing arguments of the Danziger trial, DOJ prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein fought back against the defense claim that the officers were heroes, saying the family members of those killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect justice system that initially betrayed them.” The jury apparently agreed with her, convicting the officers on all 25 counts.

*  This article first appeared in Root magazine.

The officers’ conviction on all 25 counts (on two counts, the jury found the men guilty but with partial disagreements on the nature of the crime, which could slightly affect sentencing) comes nearly six years after the city was devastated by floodwaters and government inaction. The verdict helps rewrite the history of what happened in the chaotic days after the levees broke. And the story of how these convictions happened is important for anyone around the U.S. seeking to combat law enforcement violence.

The results of this trial also have national implications for those seeking federal support in challenges to police abuses in other cities. New Orleans is one of four major cities in which the Department of Justice has stepped in to look at police departments. Any success here has far reaching implications for federal investigations in Denver, Seattle, Newark, and other cities.

The Danziger Bridge case begins with Hurricane Katrina. As images of desperate survivors played on television, people around the world felt sympathy for people waiting for rescue after the storm. But then images of families trapped on rooftops were replaced by stories of armed gangs and criminals roaming the streets. News reports famously described white people as “finding” food while depicting black people as “looting.” Then-Chief of Police Eddie Compass told Oprah Winfrey that “little babies (are) getting raped” in the Superdome. Then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced she had sent in troops with orders to shoot to kill, and the second in charge of the police department reportedly told officers to fire at will on looters.

Evidence suggests that the NOPD acted on these instructions. On Sept. 2, just days after the storm, a black man named Henry Glover was shot by a police sniper as he walked through a parking lot. When a good Samaritan tried to help Glover get medical help, he was beaten by officers, who burnt Glover’s body and left it behind a levee. The next day, a 45-year-old named Danny Brumfield, Sr., was killed by officers in front of scores of witnesses outside the New Orleans convention center when he ran after a police car to demand that they stop and provide aid.

The following morning, two families were crossing New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge, which connects Gentilly and New Orleans East, two mostly middle-to-upper-class African American neighborhoods. Without warning, a Budget Rental truck carrying police officers arrived and cops jumped out. The officers did not identify themselves, and began firing before their vehicle had even stopped.

Officers had heard a radio call about shootings in the area, and according to prosecutors, they were seeking revenge. James Brisette, a 17-year-old called studious and nerdy by his friends, was shot nearly a dozen times and died at the scene. Many of the bullets hit him as he lay on the ground bleeding. Four other people were wounded, including Susan Bartholomew, a 38-year-old mother who had her arm shot off of her body, and her 17-year old daughter Lesha, who was shot while crawling on top of her mother’s body, trying to shield her from bullets. Lesha’s cousin Jose was shot point-blank in the stomach and nearly died. He needed a colostomy bag for years afterwards.

Further up the bridge, officers chased down Ronald Madison, a mentally challenged man, who was traveling with his brother Lance. Ronald was shot in the back by one officer and then stomped and kicked to death by another. Lance was arrested and charged with firing at officers, and spent weeks behind bars.

At the time, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that officers “sent up a cheer” when word came over police radios that suspects had been shot and killed.

A cursory investigation by the NOPD justified the shooting, and it appeared that the matter was closed. In fact, for years every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed to find any fault in this or other officer-involved shootings from the days after the storm.

Eddie Jordan, the city’s first black district attorney, pursued charges against the officers in late 2006. When the cops went to turn themselves in, they were greeted by a crowd of hundreds of officers who cheered for them and called them heroes. Before the case could make it to trial, it was dismissed by a judge with close ties to the defense lawyers, and soon after that Jordan was forced to resign.

After the dismissal of Jordan’s charges, the story of police violence after Katrina remained untold. Jordan believes an indifferent local media bears partial responsibility for the years of cover-up. “They were looking for heroes,” he says. “They had a cozy relationship with the police. They got tips from the police; they were in bed with the police. It was an atmosphere of tolerance for atrocities from the police. They abdicated their responsibility to be critical in their reporting. If a few people got killed that was a small price to pay.”

Other elected officials, like the city coroner, went along with the police version of events. For example, the coroner’s office never flagged Henry Glover’s body, found burned in a car, as a potential homicide.

But the Madisons, the Bartholomews, and the Glovers, along with family members of other police violence victims, refused to be silent. They continued to speak out at press conferences, rallies, and directly to reporters. They worked with organizations like Safe Streets Strong Communities, which was founded by criminal justice activists in the days after Katrina, and Community United for Change, which was formed in response to police abuses. Monique Harden, a community activist and co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, helped to bring testimony about these issues to the United Nations. Another post-Katrina organization, Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, presented the charges to an international tribunal.

Activists worked to not only raise awareness of specific issues of police violence, but to say that these problems are structural and that any solution must get at the root causes.

“This is about an entire system that was completely broken and in crisis,” says former Safe Streets co-director Rosana Cruz. “Everyone’s job in the criminal justice system depends on there being a lot of crime in the city. The district attorney’s office doesn’t work on getting the city safer, they work on getting convictions at any cost. As long as that’s the case, we’re not going to have safety.”

Former District Attorney Jordan feels that investigators should pursue charges up to the very top of the department, including Warren Riley, who was promoted to police chief shortly after Hurricane Katrina and served in that role until 2010. “Riley, by his own admission, never even read the report on Danziger,” Jordan points out. “It’s so outrageous, it’s unspeakable. It’s one of the worst things that anyone can do. It’s hard to understand why he’s not on trial as well.”

“Fish starts rotting at the head,” adds Jordan. “This was all done in the backdrop of police opposition at the very top. It’s not surprising that there was a cover-up. You just have to wonder how far that cover-up went.”

In 2008, journalist A.C. Thompson did what New Orleans media had failed to do, and seriously investigated the accusations of police violence. His reporting, published on ProPublica and in The Nation, spelled out the shocking details of Glover’s killing and pointed toward police coordination with white vigilantes in widespread violence. It brought national attention to the stories that had been ignored. Activists took advantage of the exposure and lobbied the Congressional Black Caucus and the Justice Department for an investigation.

In early 2009, a newly empowered civil rights division of the Justice Department decided to look into the cases. Federal agents interviewed witnesses who had never been talked to, reconstructed crime scenes, and even confiscated NOPD computers. They found evidence that the Danziger officers had radically rewritten their version of what happened on the bridge that day. When FBI agents confronted officers involved in the Danziger case, five officers pleaded guilty and agreed to testify about the conspiracy to cover-up what happened. They revealed that officers had planted evidence, invented witnesses, arrested innocent people, and held secret meetings where they worked to line up their stories.

Before last week’s verdict, the Justice Department had already won four previous police violence convictions, including of the officers who shot Glover and burned his body, as well as of two officers who killed Raymond Robair, a pre-Katrina case in which officers beat a man to death and claimed (with the support of the city coroner) he had sustained his injuries from falling down. About half a dozen other investigations are ongoing. The Justice Department is also looking at federal oversight of the NOPD, a process by which they can dictate vast changes from hiring and firing to training and policy writing.

The Danziger trial has been the most high-profile aspect of the federal intervention in New Orleans, and this verdict will have far-reaching implications for how the effectiveness of federal intervention is perceived. The convictions and guilty pleas in the case reveal a wide-ranging conspiracy that reaches up to sergeants and lieutenants. Marlon Defillo, the second-in-charge of the NOPD, was recently forced to retire because of his role in helping cover-up the Glover killing.

Most importantly, the verdict has helped shift the narrative of what happened in those days after Katrina.

The defense team for the Danziger officers was steadfast in describing their clients as heroes. Attorney Paul Fleming described the cops as “proactive,” saying, “They go out and get things done. They go out and get the bad guys.” Police attorneys in the Glover and Danziger trials also sought to use the so-called “Katrina defense,” arguing that the exceptional circumstances following the storm justified extra-legal actions on the part of officers. With these convictions, the juries have definitively refuted this excuse.

In her closing arguments, Bobbi Bernstein, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, fought back against the claim that the officers were heroes, saying the family members of those killed deserved the title more. Noting that the official cover-up had “perverted” the system, she said, “The real heroes are the victims who stayed with an imperfect justice system that initially betrayed them.”

Officers went out with a mission to deliver “their own kind of post-apocalyptic justice,” she added. “The law is what it is because this is not a police state.”

In comments immediately after the verdict, family members of those killed on the bridge expressed gratitude for those who had helped them reach this point, but stressed that their pain continued.

Speaking outside the courthouse after the verdict, Sherrel Johnson, the mother of James Brisette, said that the officers, “took the twinkle out of my eye, the song out of my voice, and blew out my candle,” when they killed her son.

Jacqueline Madison Brown, the sister of Ronald Madison, told assembled press, “Ronald Madison brought great love to our family. Shooting him down was like shooting an innocent child.” Commenting on officers who had testified for the prosecution in exchange for lesser charges, she added, “We regret that they did not have the courage and strength to come forward sooner.”

Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso, and Faulcon, the officers involved in the shooting, could receive life sentences. Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, who was not on the bridge, but was convicted of leading the conspiracy, could receive a maximum of 120 years. Sentencing is scheduled for December, but will likely be delayed.

•  This article was first published in Colorlines

Much of the defense relied on the scenario that there were armed civilians on or near the bridge firing at officers, or that officers could reasonably have believed that was the case. Shawn Gasaway, a paramedic on the scene that day, testified that he saw people on the grass beside the bridge firing up at officers. The defense also read grand jury testimony from Heather Gore and Donald Haynes III, two officers on the scene who have not been charged in the killings or cover-up. Haynes testified that he saw two Black males “facing the officers with their hands extended.” Haynes admitted he didn’t actually see weapons in their hands, but he insisted the males must have had guns that they were firing at police. “Standing toe to toe with the officers like that I believed he was shooting,” said Haynes.

Gore, who was the last cop to exit the Budget rental truck that carried officers to the bridge, testified that she saw a “Black male with an assault rifle” pointing his weapon at officers and then running up the bridge. Gore said she only saw the man briefly and couldn’t say for sure he was not an officer; however, she insisted that he couldn’t have been with law enforcement because his gun had been pointed in the direction of police.

However, the prosecution repeatedly raised doubts about the credibility of defense witness accounts, pointing out that the various stories did not match up and accusing Haynes and Gore of lying to protect their fellow officers. Prosecutor Cindy Chung also said that the other paramedics traveling with Gasaway that day disputed his version of events and had said that gunfire had ended by the time they arrived on the scene.

Perhaps the most powerful testimony for the defense was a recording played in court of a conversation between officers Barrios and Villavaso. Barrios, who pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the prosecution, secretly recorded a conversation with Villavaso, his friend and former partner. On the tape, Barrios repeatedly tries to get Villavaso to admit that civilians on the bridge were unarmed, but Villavaso refuses to budge, insisting that the victims had guns.

The taped conversation also revealed that Villavaso and Barrios feel that the alleged cover-up crafted by Sergeant Kaufman and others unfairly directs the blame at them, as well as at Officer Faulcon. Some observers at the trial have speculated that the cover-up exonerated white cops at the expense of Black officers, although there are other factors aside from race that divide the officers, such as rank, place of work, and social circles.

This element of the story also unfolded earlier in the trial, during the testimony of Jeffrey Lehrmann, a former NOPD investigator and current government witness. Lehrmann admitted that the report he helped write noted that Villavaso fired an AK47, but failed to mention that Bowen also fired the same type of weapon.

The so-called “Danziger Seven” includes three white cops; Sergeant Kenneth Bowen, Sergeant Robert Gisevius, and Officer Michael Hunter; and four Black officers; Robert Barrios, Anthony Villvaso, Robert Faulcon and Ignatius Hills. Villavaso and Barrios were the only two officers not from the seventh district. Faulcon had been with the seventh, but left the force weeks after Katrina.

Hunter, Hills and Barrios have since pleaded guilty, while the four remaining officers are currently on trial along with Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, who was not part of the shooting but is accused of leading the cover-up.

Officer Faulcon was the only defendant to take the stand. Speaking confidently, Faulcon testified to seeing armed men firing at him, saying that he returned fire “until the threat was neutralized.” During a contentious cross-examination by government prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein, Faulcon refused to admit to almost any laws or restrictions on police use of deadly force.

Asked repeatedly about situations when an officer may or may not fire or whether it was necessary to shout a warning first, Faulcon responded, “It’s hard to say yes and it’s hard to say no, that’s up to that individual.” When asked if an officer should follow guidelines on use of force he had been trained on in his years in the military and NOPD, he responded, “According to textbook, yes. According to reality, not necessarily.”

Bernstein also questioned Faulcon’s denial that he had collaborated with the other defendants in conspiring to change their stories. She listed several dates when Faulcon had apparently spoken on the phone with the other defendants, including several calls during the days in January of 2006 when officers gave their official statements for the NOPD internal investigation of the incident. When Faulcon claimed to not have the phone numbers of some of the other officers, Bernstein asked, “Can you sometimes talk to people on the phone even if you don’t have their phone number?”

While we won’t know until the verdict comes down what the jury thought of Faulcon, his testimony may have damaged other officer’s cases, especially Kaufman’s. When asked by Bernstein if he agreed that there was a cover-up, Faulcon responded, “Based on what I learned now, yes.”

The Republican presidential candidates have torn into the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a recent decision supporting organized labor. Mitt Romney claimed President Obama packed the NLRB with “union stooges.” Newt Gingrich wants Congress to remove all NLRB funds and President Obama to stop the NLRB actions. Tim Pawlenty called the decision “preposterous.” Michele Bachman not only said the NLRB is “way out of bounds,” but declared if she were president she would appoint “free-market conservatives who believe in job growth,” thus making the NLRB a political arm of her beliefs rather than the independent agency that was created to protect workers from management exploitation.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who isn’t a presidential candidate but is strongly anti-union, declared the decision “is nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama’s re-election campaign.” Other Republican senators have claimed they will block the nomination of NLRB acting general counsel Lafe Solomon to a permanent post.

At issue is an NLRB decision that Boeing violated federal law by trying to stop a production line in its Seattle-area plant that manufactures the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and opening a new facility in South Carolina, an anti-union “right-to-work” state. The NLRB agreed with a complaint filed by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) that Boeing’s decisions were retaliation for the actions of the Seattle workers. In both public and internal memos, Boeing stated it didn’t wish to deal with unionized workers in Seattle. The NLRB suit is currently in federal court.

At a recent press conference, President Obama sidestepped support for both the NLRB and unions by claiming, “I don’t know all the facts,” and that he didn’t wish to interfere in the process. However, he did state that corporations “need to have the freedom to relocate . . . . and if they’re choosing to relocate here in the United States, that’s a good thing.”

When Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency, he promised to support the working class. If there was a picket line, or if the workers were being threatened, he promised to “put on a comfortable pair of shoes” and walk side by side with them.

That has not happened. He never spoke out in defense of the workers in Seattle during their two year fight against Boeing, nor after they filed their complaint in April. Nor has the President given support to the millions of citizens in several states where conservative governors and legislatures have launched campaigns to break unions, while giving special benefits to the business and executive classes.

Giving Mr. Obama the widest possible excuse, perhaps the Secret Service declared it would be dangerous for a president to be in a crowd of protestors, no matter how peaceful it is.

But, there is no excuse for President Obama’s weak record on environmental and wildlife protection, something he placed high on his list as a candidate, but failed to defend as president.

Strong words as a candidate turned to “compromise” and then near-abandonment when confronted by extremists who refuse to read or understand any of thousands of studies about the effects of global warming.

To please the oil lobby, the same one that dominated the previous administration, President Obama approved deep-water drilling – just weeks before the BP oil disaster in the Gulf coast. And then, months after the disaster approved continued deep water drilling.

His wildlife management policies, while based on good intentions, are not something he has rolled upon his sleeves to fight for.

Confronted by the cattle industry lobby, which believes 10,000 wild horses and burros are threats to the existence of more than 92 million cattle, President Obama has virtually abandoned protection of the few wild horses and burros left in the country.

And now his Department of the Interior is about to allow Wyoming to begin the wanton killing of gray wolves, including pups in dens, outside of Yellowstone national park.

The plan yields to extremists who see wolves as threats to cattle. But, numerous research studies show that wolves seldom attack cattle. And, when they do, the government pays the rancher, even if the steer is new born or headed to a slaughterhouse the next day. But the cattle industry is as dominant in American politics as is the NRA.

And that leaves hunters. Wolves cull the weakest animals from the herd. And that’s the problem. There are only 5,000 wolves in the continental United States. But a few million hunters see the wolf as competitors for 20 million deer, 250,000 moose, or any animal that can be killed and then mounted as a trophy in someone’s den.

Although the mean-spirited and uncompromising vindictiveness of the ultra-right has blocked much progress, it is the President’s own actions in labor, environment, and wildlife that have deteriorated into compromise and retreat. His inability to defend the principles he believes and campaigned for threatens any chance he will be remembered as a great president.

The charges stem from an incident on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge on September 4, 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina. Police officers, who apparently had misheard a distress call on their radios, piled into a Budget rental truck and sped to the scene. When they arrived, they came out shooting. James Brisette, a 17-year-old described by friends as nerdy and studious, and Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old man with the mental capacity of an 8-year-old, were killed. Four others were seriously wounded, including Susan Bartholomew, 38, who had her arm shot off of her body, and Jose Holmes, 19, who was shot point blank in his stomach. Susan’s son, Leonard Bartholomew, 14, was shot at by officers, badly beaten, and arrested. Ronald Madison’s brother, Lance, was arrested by officers under false charges that were later dropped.

Witnesses for the government include survivors of the harrowing ordeal on the bridge, as well as several officers who have plead guilty to lesser offenses in exchange for their testimony. They have described shocking scenes of violence – one officer is accused of kicking and stomping Madison to death after he had already been shot seven times – and a wide ranging cover-up. “When the shooting stopped, these men realized they had a problem,” said federal prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein during opening arguments. “They lied because they knew they had committed a crime.”

The New Orleans police department has developed a reputation as one of the most violent and corrupt in the nation, and the revelations in this case has stoked anger and outrage, especially in New Orleans’ African-American community. “This case shows the total dysfunction of the New Orleans Police Department,” says Malcolm Suber, a longtime activist against police brutality and project director with the New Orleans chapter of the American Friends Service Committee. “It shows they were just going wild after the storm.” Suber and other activists have called for the DOJ to launch a wide-ranging investigation into a pattern of abuse they say goes back decades. “What Danziger represents is for the first time there’s been acknowledgment that this police department is rotten to the core,” says Suber.

A Department With A Troubled History

Like most southern police departments, NOPD was explicitly segregationist for much of the 20th century. The first Black New Orleans police officer was not hired until 1950 and it was several more years before Black officers were allowed to carry a gun or arrest whites. In 1980, the city was rocked by protests when Sherry Singleton, a 26-year old African-American mother, was shot by police while she was naked in a bathtub, in front of her four year old child. Police said she was armed, but a neighbor testified that she heard her pleading, “please don’t shoot, please don’t shoot.”

The issue of police violence continued to dominate in the 1990s. Revelations of corruption in the force inspired both mass protest and Department of Justice investigations. Federal involvement combined with aggressive actions on the part of a new mayor and police chief led to 200 officers fired and criminal charges brought against more than 60 cops. Two NOPD officers received the death penalty for killing civilians. One of those officers, Len Davis, was caught on a federal wiretap ordering the assassination of a woman who had complained about police brutality. As officers were being fired and disciplined, the city’s murder and violent crime rates dropped dramatically, and the prosecution of corrupt officers was widely seen as making the city safer.

Advocates say that the changes begun in the 90s were cut short when Mayor C. Ray Nagin became mayor, at around the same time that the Clinton presidency ended and the Bush administration begun. Both Bush and Nagin seemed uninterested in continuing to prosecute police, and New Orleans slipped back into being the nation’s murder capital, as well as the capital of police violence.

Renewed Outrage Brings Energy for Change

The revelations of post-Katrina police violence have brought in a new era of outrage. Political and civic leaders, across boundaries of color and class, have called for systemic change in the NOPD. “The public has a right to know what really happened,” says Anthony Radosti, vice president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, which plays the role of an unofficial watchdog over the NOPD. “The police department failed in their mission,” adds Radosti, a 23-year veteran of the NOPD.

Ronal Serpas, who has hired by Mayor Landrieu to run the department in 2010, admits that the department has a long way to go. “Chief Serpas has always acknowledged that he inherited a fundamentally flawed department,” explains NOPD spokesperson Remi Braden. “He has done a lot, but there is much more to be done.”

Federal agents are looking into at least 9 cases of police killings from the past several years, but that is just one aspect of their involvement. In March, the DOJ released a 58-page report that describes a department facing problems that “are serious, systemic, wide-ranging, and deeply rooted.” The report highlighted a range of areas in which it found “patterns or practices of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law.”

The bad news keeps coming out of the NOPD. In just the past two weeks since the Danziger trial began, scandal has reached the very top of the department. The NOPD’s second in charge, Marlon Defillo, was found in an investigation overseen by the state police to have neglected his duty to investigate police violence, in effect helping to hinder official investigations. Three police commanders – the position under Defillo, and third in the overall NOPD hierarchy – have also been the subject of internal investigation. One commander was accused of directing officers to specifically target young Black men for questioning during the city’s Essence Festival, one of the nation’s largest Black tourism events.

Criminal justice activists have demanded more federal investigations and a wider scope. “This represents a real opportunity for New Orleans to raise some fundamental questions about the nature of police and what they do,” says organizer Malcolm Suber. “But unless we talk about the entire system, this will repeat again.”

Originally appeared at TheLoop21.

The shootings occurred on September 4, 2005, as two families were fleeing Katrina’s floodwaters, crossing New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge to get to dry land. Officers, who apparently heard a radio report about shootings in the area, drove up, leapt out of their vehicle, and began firing. Ronald Madison, a mentally challenged man, was shot in the back at least five times, then reportedly stomped and kicked by an officer until he was dead. His brother Lance Madison was arrested on false charges. James Brissette, a high school student, was shot seven times, and died at the scene. Susan Bartholomew, 38, was wounded so badly her arm was shot off of her body. Jose Holmes Jr. was shot several times, then as he lay bleeding an officer stood over him and fired point blank at his stomach. Two other relatives of Bartholomew were also badly wounded.

Danziger is one of at least nine recent incidents involving the NOPD being investigated by the US Justice Department, several of which happened in the days after the city was flooded. Officers have recently been convicted by federal prosecutors in two other high-profile trials. In April, two officers were found guilty in the beating of death of Raymond Robair, a handyman from the Treme neighborhood. In December, a jury convicted three officers and acquitted two in killing Henry Glover, a 31-year-old from New Orleans’ West Bank neighborhood, and burning his body.

From Survivors to Looters

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people around the world felt sympathy for New Orleans. They saw images of residents trapped on rooftops by floodwaters, needing rescue by boat and helicopter. But then stories began to come out about looters and gangs among the survivors, and the official response shifted from humanitarian aid to military operation. Then-Governor Kathleen Blanco sent in National Guard troops, announcing. “They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will.” Warren Riley, at that time the second in charge of the police department, reportedly ordered officers to “take the city back and shoot looters.”

In the following days, several civilians – almost all of them African American – were killed under suspicious circumstances in incidents involving police and white vigilantes. For years, family members and advocates called for official investigations and were rebuffed. “Right after the hurricane there were individuals and organizations trying to talk about what happened on Danziger,” says Dana Kaplan, executive director of Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), a legal and advocacy organization based in New Orleans. “But their voices were marginalized.”

There is evidence that local media could have done a better job. Alex Brandon, a photographer for New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper who later went on to work for Associated Press, testified in the Henry Glover trial that he knew details about the police killings that he didn’t reveal. “He saw things and heard things that proved to be useful in a criminal investigation. He didn’t report them as news,” wrote Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry after the Glover trial concluded.

Former Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who led an initial investigation of the Danziger officers, believes an indifferent local media bears partial responsibility for the years of cover-up. “They were looking for heroes,” he says. “They had a cozy relationship with the police. They got tips from the police, they were in bed with the police. It was an atmosphere of tolerance for atrocities from the police. They abdicated their responsibility to be critical in their reporting. If a few people got killed that was a small price to pay.”

Family members and advocates tried to get the stories of police violence out through protests, press conferences, and other means. Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, an organization dedicated to justice in reconstruction, held a tribunal in 2006 where they presented accusations of police violence – among other charges – to a panel of international judges, including members of parliament from seven countries. Activists even brought charges to the United Nations, filing a shadow report in February 2008 with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva.

But it was not until late 2008 that a journalist named AC Thompson did what the local media failed to do, and investigated these stories in detail. “It’s unfortunate that it took a national publication to really dig to the root,” says Kaplan, referring to Thompson’s work. “In New Orleans the criminal justice system has been so corrupt for so long that things that should be shocking didn’t seem to be raising the kind of broad community outrage that they should have.”

In 2009, after years of pressure from activists and the national attention brought on by AC Thompson’s reporting, the US Justice Department decided to look into the accusations of police violence. This has led to one of the most wide-ranging investigations of a police department in recent US history. Dozens of officers are facing lengthy prison terms, and corruption charges have reached to the very top of the department.

The Danziger trial is expected to last two months. Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso, and Robert Faulcon, the officers involved in the shooting, could receive life sentences if convicted. Sergeant Arthur Kaufman, who was not on the bridge, is charged only in the conspiracy and could receive a maximum of 120 years. Justice Department investigations of other incidents are continuing, and it is likely that some form of federal oversight of the department will be announced in the coming months.

• This article originally appeared at Truth-out.org.

Parts of the story are less familiar. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, groups ranging from young public school students to Palestinian and Vietnamese communities organized for the right to play a part in rebuilding the city. New projects arose, providing services ranging from women’s healthcare to expunging criminal records, fighting for public housing, defending New Orleans’ historic black culture, and creating alternatives to the brutal and racist criminal legal system in New Orleans Parish. Although the long-term demands of these organizations were too often quashed, the stories of those who fought back after Katrina are as precious as they are little-known.

Luckily for us, writer and activist Jordan Flaherty was there. And Flaherty was not in New Orleans to observe or cover a story—he was there, in 2005 and in the years that followed, because he lives there. He was one of the people who did not evacuate during the storm, and literally watched from a rooftop as New Orleanians were abandoned by the government and smeared by the media as “looters” and criminals. He was one of the people to seek out and record the stories of those trapped in prisons with no charges and no trial for weeks, months, and even years after Katrina. He was one of the rare people to expose the continuing torture of political prisoners at Angola Penitentiary, the targeting of transgender women as sex criminals, and the outrageously lousy defense lawyers who did little to help poor New Orleanians after the storm, sometimes sleeping through their own court appearances. He was also the first journalist to report nationally on the story of the group of young men from rural Louisiana who came to be known as the Jena 6. These young African-American men were arrested for attempted murder after a fight erupted at school in response to white students hanging nooses from a tree in the schoolyard; they have since had their charges dropped or reduced, largely due to a surge of national attention.

Floodlines:
Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six
By Jordan Flaherty,
Publisher: Haymarket Books
August 17, 2010
Paperback, 292 pages
ISBN-10: 9781608460656
ISBN-13: 978-1608460656

Floodlines begins with a firsthand account of Flaherty’s experience directly after Hurricane Katrina, and proceeds to weave together personal accounts, cultural history, detailed records of activist work, and reflective analysis. The chapters cover education, immigration, prisoner organizing, housing rights, cultural activism, and the workings behind the displacement and disillusionment of so many New Orleanians. As he shares these stories, he is clear about his own privilege as both a white person and as a journalist. While Flaherty is not afraid to editorialize and criticize, a tone of both humility and commitment permeates Floodlines.

In his chapter on prisons, Flaherty is characteristically straightforward about his view: “Prison makes us all less free—by breaking up families and communities, by dehumanizing the imprisoned both during and after their sentences, by perpetuating a cycle of poverty, and by making all citizens complicit in the incarceration of their fellow human beings.” Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the United States, and the threat of incarceration is a constant part of life for many black New Orleanians. Flaherty paints a vivid picture of the “cradle-to-prison pipeline,” the process by which impoverished young people of color are funneled towards a life in prison virtually from the time of birth. As organizer Robert Goodman puts it, “Every time a black child is born in Louisiana, there’s already a bed waiting for him at Angola State Prison.”

Goodman is part of a new organization called Safe Streets/Strong Communities. Founded in 2006, the group interviewed over a hundred people who had been locked up prior to Katrina. Flaherty says that when he heard some of their stories, he “felt a chill.” The stories included children abandoned in lock-down during and after the storm; the warehousing of massive groups of people in open yards with no food, shelter, or space to defecate; and a public defender’s office so inept that even a Criminal District Court Judge called it “unbelievable, unconstitutional, totally lacking the basic professional standards of legal representation, and a mockery of what a criminal justice system should be in a western civilized nation.” Katrina opened up space for increased policing and militarization even as the city slashed funds for indigent defense and social services.

While exposing injustice is a part of Flaherty’s thrust, Floodlines does not come across as a shocking exposé, the kind of thing that flashes across television screens for a day or two and then disappears, leaving a sense of powerlessness in its trail. Instead, the book reveals how the events we see unfolding in the news are part of a complex history of black cultures of resistance dating all the way back to the beginnings of slavery in the south. Taken all together, Floodlines is a hopeful, revealing account of five years of hardship and displacement. Outsiders and insiders alike will benefit from Flaherty’s uniquely personal and unabashedly political account of some of the most important untold stories of our time.

The details of a recent lawsuit, as reported by Business Week, highlights the ways in which contractors – including some of the same players who profited from Hurricane Katrina-related reconstruction – have continued to use their political connections to gain profits from others’ suffering, receiving contacts worth tens of millions of dollars while the Haitian people receive pennies at best. It also demonstrates ways in which charity and development efforts have mirrored and contributed to corporate abuses.

Lewis Lucke, a 27-year veteran of the US Agency for International Development (US AID) was named US special coordinator for relief and reconstruction after the earthquake. He worked this job for a few months, then immediately moved to the private sector, where he could sell his contacts and connections to the highest bidder. He quickly got a $30,000-a-month (plus bonuses) contract with the Haiti Recovery Group (HRG).

HRG had been founded by Ashbritt, Inc., a Florida-based contractor who had received acres of bad press for their post-Katrina contracting. Ashbritt’s partner in HRG is Gilbert Bigio, a wealthy Haitian businessman with close ties to the Israeli military. Bigio made a fortune during the corrupt Duvalier regime, and was a supporter of the right wing coup against Haitian president Aristide.

Although Lucke received $60,000 for two months work, he is suing because he says he is owed an additional $500,000 for the more than 20-million dollars in contracts he helped HRG obtain during that time.

As Corpwatch has reported, AshBritt “has enjoyed meteoric growth since it won its first big debris removal subcontract from none other than Halliburton, to help clean up after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.” In 1999, the company also faced allegations of double billing for $765,000 from the Broward County, Florida school board for clean-up done in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma.

Ashbritt CEO Randal Perkins is a major donor to Republican causes, and hired Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour’s firm, as well as former US Army Corp Of Engineers official Mike Parker, as lobbyists. As a reward for his political connections, Ashbritt won 900 million dollars in Post-Katrina contracts, helping them to become the poster child for political corruption in the world of disaster profiteering, even triggering a congressional investigation focusing on their buying of influence. MSNBC reported in early 2006 that criticism of Ashbritt “can be heard in virtually every coastal community between Alabama and Texas.”

The contracts given to Bush cronies like Ashbritt resulted in local and minority-owned companies losing out on reconstruction work. As Multinational Monitor noted shortly after Katrina, “by turning the contracting process over to prime contractors like Ashbritt, the Corps and FEMA have effectively privatized the enforcement of Federal Acquisition Regulations and disaster relief laws such as the Stafford Act, which require contracting officials to prioritize local businesses and give 5 percent of contracts to minority-owned businesses. As a result…early reports suggest that over 90 percent of the $2 billion in initial contracts was awarded to companies based outside of the three primary affected states, and that minority businesses received just 1.5 percent of the first $1.6 billion.”

Alex Dupuy, writing in The Washington Post, reported a similar pattern in Haiti, noting that “of the more than 1,500 US contracts doled out worth $267 million, only 20, worth $4.3 million, have gone to Haitian firms. The rest have gone to US firms, which almost exclusively use US suppliers. Although these foreign contractors employ Haitians, mostly on a cash-for-work basis, the bulk of the money and profits are reinvested in the United States.” The same article notes that “less than 10 percent of the $9 billion pledged by foreign donors has been delivered, and not all of that money has been spent. Other than rebuilding the international airport and clearing the principal urban arteries of rubble, no major infrastructure rebuilding – roads, ports, housing, communications – has begun.”

The disaster profiteering exemplified by Ashbritt is not just the result of quick decision-making in the midst of a crisis. These contracts are awarded as part of a corporate agenda that sees disaster as an opportunity, and as a tool for furthering policies that would not be possible in other times. Naomi Klein exposed evidence that within 24 hours of the earthquake, the influential right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation was already laying plans to use the disaster as an attempt at further privatization of the country’s economy.

Relief and recovery efforts, led by the US military, have also brought a further militarization of relief and criminalization of survivors. Haiti and Katrina also served as staging grounds for increased involvement of mercenaries in reconstruction efforts. As one Blackwater mercenary told Scahill when he visited New Orleans in the days after Katrina, “This is a trend. You’re going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations.”

And it’s not just corporations who have been guilty of profiting from Haitian suffering. A recent report from the Disaster Accountability Project (DAP) describes a “significant lack of transparency in the disaster-relief/aid community,” and finds that many relief organizations have left donations for Haiti in their bank accounts, earning interest rather than helping the people of Haiti. DAP director, Ben Smilowitz, notes that “the fact that nearly half of the donated dollars still sit in the bank accounts of relief and aid groups does not match the urgency of their own fundraising and marketing efforts and donors’ intentions, nor does it covey the urgency of the situation on the ground.”

Haitian poet and human rights lawyer, Ezili Dantò, has written:

Haiti’s poverty began with a US/Euro trade embargo after its independence, continued with the Independence Debt to France and ecclesiastical and financial colonialism. Moreover, in more recent times, the uses of US foreign aid, as administered through USAID in Haiti, basically serves to fuel conflicts and covertly promote US corporate interests to the detriment of democracy and Haitian health, liberty, sovereignty, social justice and political freedoms. USAID projects have been at the frontlines of orchestrating undemocratic behavior, bringing underdevelopment, coup d’etat, impunity of the Haitian Oligarchy, indefinite incarceration of dissenters, and destroying Haiti’s food sovereignty essentially promoting famine.

Since before the earthquake, Haiti has been a victim of many of those who have claimed they are there to help. Until we address this fundamental issue of corporate profiteering masquerading as aid and development, the nation will remain mired in poverty. And future disasters, wherever they occur, will lead to similar injustices.

They sent me to the doctor that morning, a health maintenance organization: skilled, meticulous care, responsive to the patient as a human being and a trivial expense for the people who sent the car. In darkest Africa you have a right to health. Uganda has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights – the right to health is Article 12. Ugandans wrote the covenant directly into their constitution. Under constitutional Article XIV(b), the state “shall endeavour to ensure rights, opportunities and access to health care.” In Uganda’s constitution, medical services are a national objective and directive principle of state policy, Objective XX. Uganda’s no exceptional case – human rights are the state of the nation-building art.

The project I was there for went ahead without a hitch. It was volunteer food security work, the best work I’ve ever done for free. As soon as I finished – it’s always that way – my hip, or back, went out, revealing tissue where I thought there was only bone and reducing me to howling fetal helplessness, just in time for the return flight. Back home in the states I did not seek medical attention. It wasn’t worth the risk.

Here in America you have to avoid the health care system as you avoid the correctional system. They’ll treat you with abandon and demand exorbitant surprise payments based on secret rules, and maybe find some agonizing malady that costs too much and cut you off for crossing some “i” or dotting some “t” on a form, and then to survive you’ve got to beggar yourself and your loved ones with snowballing debt. Or they’ll dose you with some lethal snake oil that’s corruptly deemed safe. That’s with the best plan money can buy. The industry’s a viper’s nest. Fifty-nine million of us have no health care coverage at all. People in 48 countries live longer than we do. It’s not because we’re fat or prone to vice. We’ve been taking better care of ourselves but we’re still being killed by the perfidy and waste that plagues our health care.

With education, food, and housing it’s the same, you have to watch your step. The state has weaned us off security at home. You used to hear about freedom from want or fear but those are quaint old Norman Rockwell virtues, long revoked. It so happens that those freedoms are among your human rights. In our patriotic murk here in America we’ll occasionally hear about human rights, when some enemy breaches them, or when we ostentatiously uphold them, always vaguely. We never go into the detail of chapter and verse. Just eight percent of Americans can tell you where our human rights are written down (in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.) Half of us do not believe that any such document exists.  You can get perfectly respectable schooling here and never know your rights. The state prefers that human rights be a warm glow in our hearts, and not specific binding obligations. That’s why we never, ever hear about the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR).

The CESCR is one of a pair of treaties that define the state’s duties to the people. The International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (CCPR) protects people from arbitrary state coercion.  The CESCR makes states responsible for the living conditions they permit. Together the two covenants bind states to keep the promises of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

When a state becomes a party to the CESCR it acknowledges peoples’ self-determination, free disposition of natural wealth, and specific listed rights:

• The right to work (Article 6)
• The right to minimal standards for working conditions (Article 7)
• The right to form and join trade unions (Article 8)
• The right to social security, including social insurance (Article 9)
• The right to protection of the family (Article 10)
• The right to an adequate standard of living (Article 11)
• The right to physical and mental health (Article 12)
• The right to education (Articles 13 and 14)
• The right to cultural life and benefits of science (Article 15).

It sounds like so much motherhood and apple pie, perhaps, but the state’s decree is not enough. In acceding to the treaty, states commit to progress. If the strongest share nothing else with the weak, they can share this commitment to advancement. It’s the least that a country can do.

The United States is one of 28 countries that have not ratified the CESCR. We’ve fallen in with a motley group, by no means all laggards: some Micronesian specks on the map, much of the Mideast, Singapore, Hong Kong, Andorra, Botswana, Bhutan, Myanmar, they’ve all demurred so far, for diverse reasons. But none of them pretend to be a shining example for the world, as we do.

In American lore, there are two kinds of rights, ours and theirs: the dual covenants came of tensions between individualist American rights and the collectivist ones asserted by Soviets. The UN split the draft treaty in two, so the story goes, consigning the suspect, Bolshy rights to the CESCR. It wasn’t quite that simple. There was plenty of cold-war gamesmanship, of course. As the treaties took shape, a tag team of Soviet gadflies reveled in America’s embarrassments: A.P. Pavlov needled us about housing predation and ruinous health-care cost, plus ça change…, and Alexander Bogomolov had a ball when the NAACP petitioned the UN for redress.

But the primary split wasn’t red versus blue. The battle lines united the superpowers against the rest of the world. Neither superpower wanted the CESCR. Pavlov called it “weak and completely unacceptable.” The Russians tried to negate each article with countervailing duties to the state, or provisos that the state would see to it that rights are granted. Soviet Delegate, Alexander Borisov, played dumb or worried every jot and tittle. The US resisted more passively. To head off preparation of the covenants, America tried to put their reporting provisions into the UDHR: that way the declaration would gauge compliance instead, but toothlessly, with no basis in binding treaty law. Our government then tried to strip the covenant of legal, “self-executing” force. When the majority decided on a binding treaty, the US largely sat out the work of drafting it.

Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the UN Human Rights Commission at the time. Her minder, James Hendrick, described what the State Department wanted: a “carbon copy” of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. The CCPR gave America’s citizens far too many rights. The CESCR was even worse. Either convention would subject the state to international scrutiny, and judge the state’s treatment of the people. Our statists would never accept that without a fight. The American Bar Association said it best, in 1967: “The regulation by a state of relations between it and its own citizens… constitutes the very essence of domestic jurisdiction.” In America’s naive youth it was thought that citizens should regulate the state and not the other way around. The state did not own citizens then, citizens chose to constitute their state. But now the state doles out your rights like food stamps, only so much and no more.

Charles Malik of Lebanon summed up the debate and the global majority view: “I’m not arbitrarily setting the state against the individual. But which, I ask, is for which? I say the state is for the individual.” The issue pitted the statist superpowers against humanists from older civilizations. The majority ruled. The humans prevailed. Mrs. Roosevelt slipped America’s leash and sided with the world. The treaties took shape over tea at her house. The world’s other founders are all but unknown here at home: Malik, John Humphrey, René Cassin, Chang Peng-Chung. They weren’t working for America, they were working for its people, against the express wishes of the state.

Conservatives fought the threat of foreign rights with the Bricker Amendment, a well-funded popular movement to keep treaty law from granting rights at home. In 1954 President Eisenhower preserved constitutional treaty powers by defeating the amendment in Congress, at the price of the Dulles Doctrine. With the Dulles Doctrine, the State Department promised to keep the government free from human rights obligations. ¹

Despite the superpowers dragging their feet, the UN General Assembly approved both covenants in 1966. The wider world took our resistance in stride and went ahead without us. Europe and Latin America built human rights into their regional institutions and began to lay down precedents and case law. In the 1980s the UN set out the state’s obligations in the Siracusa Principles and the Limburg Principles, so that each covenant entailed a set of detailed, concrete standards states must meet. Our UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick dug in her heels for her government, but the rights that she derided as “a letter to Santa Claus” came to seem more like an entrance exam for some posh school that we can’t get into. The new standards made it clear that our country wasn’t up to snuff. Meanwhile new countries used human rights as a nation-building template. America was obliged to approve, but fledgling nations increasingly went elsewhere seeking practical human-rights advice. Our pretension to a crucial leading role in human rights was wearing thin.

The nearest we came to freedom from want was 1976. The time seemed right. We had imposed civil rights on our white supremacists, so their fight against human-rights treaty law became a lost cause. President Kennedy had skirted the Dulles Doctrine, letting the Senate dip a toe in the water with an easy one, a treaty abolishing slavery. We had already swallowed some economic and social rights to join the Organization of American States. Yet we weren’t feeling wholly secure in our rights: hints of COINTELPRO’s secret police state had come out. The sacrifice of Richard Nixon, and his pardon, didn’t lift the people’s mood. Seizing the moment, Jimmy Carter campaigned as a champion of human rights and won.

The following year Carter’s fervent lip service led to some awkward moments at the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). At the CSCE conference in Belgrade, allies joined our enemies in pointing out that America loves to talk about human rights but they won’t put anything in writing. Chastened, Carter signed both covenants as soon as he got home, but to convince the free world he had to get them ratified in time for the next conference, in Madrid.

To grease the skids and avoid controversy, Carter’s State Department festooned the conventions with caveats, a shyster’s recital of ifs, ands, or buts. They made reservations meant to bend the rules for states; understandings meant for Congress; and “declarations” and “statements” with no meaning whatever in law. The State Department marked up the treaty like third-graders signing a plaster cast:

• What we couldn’t slip into the treaty itself, we put in a declaration: the treaty has no legal force, we said, it’s not self-executing.
• We backed away from any hint of obligations on the state. Goals, that’s what they are, we said.
• With another declaration that was pointless in law, we reminded everyone that we have property rights. For good measure we declared that twice.
• Article 5 set us off. That article tries to make it clear that the treaty cannot be used to limit rights. In response, we affirmed our American freedom of speech. It wasn’t the non sequitur it seemed, if you knew what we were thinking: we were anxious to make sure that the cultures we hate could not inhibit hate speech with their rights.
• Article 28 guarantees rights even in federal states, so that progress won’t be balked by petty local autocrats or fiefdoms. Perhaps we felt singled out, because we hashed the article with some gibberish about jurisdiction and subject matter and competent authorities and jurisdiction and constituent units and subject matter. Between the lines we promised all deliberate speed.

The import was clear: no change. The state had no intention of permitting the rights it proclaimed. Government provisos would subvert the Constitution’s supremacy clause to negate the covenant. The state was clinging to the Dulles Doctrine: how our state treats its people is none of the wider world’s business.

Carter finally submitted the treaties to the Senate in November 1979. The Foreign Relations Committee considered ratification in four days of hearings. By the time the committee took it up, Iranians were parading US hostages for the cameras, inflation had driven the Fed’s lending rate past 13 per cent, and the opposition scented blood. The doomed hearings went unnoticed but the proceedings show how the state puts the kibosh on our rights.²

The CESCR took more punishment from the outset. There was something fishy about it. Testimony variously described the problem: a non-Western bias; Soviet Marxist ideology; an infatuation with democratic socialism; ideological appeasement of the third world. The American Bar Association blamed the UN’s majority rule: with all that democracy, nobody gets what they want.

In the hearings Senator Jesse Helms set out to amend the treaty itself, proposing to tear up and renegotiate decades of multilateral diplomacy. He wanted explicit property ownership rights enshrined worldwide. He didn’t trust Article 5(2), which leaves all existing rights intact.

At the time we were busy toppling Central American reformers, and Helms grilled the State Department about Nicaragua. They had nationalized some private enterprises, compensating the owners in accordance with international law. They tinkered with their banking system. We cut off their aid but Cubans helped them meet their basic human needs. These were brazen acts of self-determination, and signing the convention would only make it worse.

The committee put Phyllis Schlafly up to speak and she delivered a remarkable stemwinder. She told us what would happen if we put America’s head in the noose. The covenant would bankrupt us for world equality, she said. Equality would wreak further havoc in our very homes. Non-discrimination would undercut the husband’s duty to support his wife. The covenant promised maternity leave, which is for societies “in which all mothers have a continuing obligation to remain in the labor force, as in Communist countries.” We had no say in writing these grotesque rules, as many lesser nations had joined the UN and shouted us down with promiscuous majority rule. Knowing this, we tried to sign up “fingers crossed,” as Schlafly – accurately – put it. We’d be a laughing stock, caught out in double dealing. The world would hold us to our pledge, and we would see: we gave our sacred rights away to gloating Commies.

Other experts amplified the warning. Sore losers here at home were turning to a malign UN to negate and destroy the lawmaking authority of Congress. The promise of human dignity and well-being will erode our liberties: as restive groups clamor for more and more rights, an emboldened government will frogmarch us to progress in defiance of constitutional restraint. No fear was too fanciful to voice. Under Article 1, self-determination would lead to secession. Under Article 2, nondiscrimination rules would outlaw nepotism. (How would prosperous men provide for their dimwitted sons?) The best efforts demanded in Article 2 would subvert the essence of public life in America: the vicious conniving through which our politics expresses the national spirit. The covenant would hobble us abroad as well. Social and economic obligations would turn our foreign aid into demeaning conditional grants unworthy of America’s benevolent, no-strings largess.

The State Department half-heartedly backed the treaty. The treaty is for states where citizens have few domestic remedies, so State said. We sign it only to help the huddled masses overseas. Joining up would be a feather in our cap abroad but inconsequential here at home. The treaty’s goals dovetail with our policies. We comply fully right now. So when we ratify the treaty, no further effort will be needed. Accordingly, the Justice Department undertook to keep extraneous rights out of reach of the people and the courts. It wouldn’t do to upset our intricate body of law, they explained. The state has seen to all these rights, as Commissar Pavlov would say.

The Senate did not ratify the treaties for President Carter. We eventually ratified the CCPR, in 1992, but not the CESCR. Civil and political rights were permissible, but not economic, social, or cultural rights, or even goals. America opted out of these unwelcome rights and the wider world moved on, but in the eyes of the world, our state is shirking its duties. In 1993 UN members expressed their consensus in the Vienna Declaration:

All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis. While the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

All of them, all human rights. As even our handpicked Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon would later say, states can’t pick and choose the peoples’ rights. But in America the state picked a few of our rights, American ones, and withheld the rest.

Our unnatural “collectivist” rights sank without a ripple here at home. We’ve even managed to forget where those rights came from. In 1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his Four Freedoms message to Congress. One of those freedoms was freedom from want. He was serious. In 1944, before Congress, FDR proposed a full-fledged economic Bill of Rights. He said, “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” The rights he proposed were the following:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home and abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

He boiled it all down to security. “For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.” So these rights may be alien to us, but they’re hardly un-American. They surfaced, briefly, when Bill Bradley tried to run for president. Bradley made security an overarching theme. Al Gore fought Bradley harder than he fought George Bush, and then security was guns and bombs again.

What if the Communists won? What if the covenant came to be adopted as supreme law of the land? The treaty, itself, involves only the mildest suasion. Our state’s compliance with the treaty would be reviewed and judged by the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Committee, 18 members chosen to represent the world. The UN Economic and Social Committee (ECOSOC) elects them by secret ballot. Selected for their expertise in human rights, members serve in their personal capacity for renewable four-year terms. They don’t get pulled up short by diplomatic cables. On a five-year cycle paced by required state reports, the committee measures each state by the covenant’s standards and suggests ways to improve. The committee works with non-governmental advocacy groups to balance the position of the state with voices of the people.

Even though we’ve kept out of ECOSOC’s reach, America got a taste of global scrutiny at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Starting in 2010, under a procedure called Universal Periodic Review (UPR), UN members examined reports from the US government and independent advocacy groups. Then the members questioned US government representatives about the state’s compliance with its obligations and its duties.  Domestic press accounts of the Human Rights Council define it as a feces-flinging mob of tyrannical rogue states, typically in a subordinate clause in the topic sentence, but awkwardly, our ordeal included dressings-down from Japan, Switzerland, Commonwealth countries, and NATO allies. Much of the spectacle centered on our putative civil and political rights, adopted as supreme law of the land and shredded in perfect bipartisan concord after 9/11. Yet much criticism focused on derelictions of an economic, social, or cultural sort.

The council picked at scabs we never touch: re-segregation in housing and education; the hopeless underclass from which we muster troops; forced eviction, by demolition, or by our trick of letting mother nature flush them out with storms.

Bolivians embarrassed us about our treatment of indigenes, tactlessly adverting to our inveterate chiseling and treachery. It would have been easy to dismiss it as a grasping red-Indian gambit, but Germany and Norway horned in, too. Norway pried into the misery of our sickly brown helot caste, and Japan seconded Bolivians in pointing out the disparate racial treatment that our equal opportunity leaves untouched. Class came up as well as race. Russia cited indelicate facts about our spreading third-world poverty. The council turned over all sorts of rocks. With no Article 8 protections and labor laws a dead letter, our H2A and H2B visas permit a handy modern form of slavery. Bolivia and Mexico brought that up in the least private forum in the world. In the good old days we could have had some death squads chop them up but now we have to be polite.

Many countries pointed out that we have failed even to sign most core human rights conventions. The international community seemed bemused to see us opt out of the rudiments of modern civilization. They asked when, exactly, America is going to go beyond lip service and lectures and let us humans exercise our rights.

The panel noted that America has no national human rights institution. What that body must do is set out in the Paris Principles. President Clinton signed Executive Order 13107 but no one’s fooled, except soup-hoarding New World Order bumpkins – there’s no fearsome world tribunal there at all. To diffuse human-rights responsibilities throughout the government, the order created a low-priority interagency working group, a tempting dumping ground for misfits, and gutted it, in Section 6:

Nothing in this order shall create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable by any party against the United States, its agencies or instrumentalities, its officers or employees, or any other person… This order does not supersede Federal statutes and does not impose any justiciable obligations on the executive branch.

That is our sole guarantor of human rights. The world is pointedly waiting for a real one.

Our human rights sanctimony makes us a cruel joke worldwide but Americans’ appalling ignorance shields our government from ridicule at home. Europeans old and new pulled that thread, asking when we will teach human rights in the schools, as our state has pledged to do.

Obama’s State Department took it with aplomb. The old Bush-era style was to proclaim human rights compliance with a trancelike fixity that Kim Il-sung’s top echelon would envy. Obama’s envoys were different. No superstitious jingoes, these were clearly the best and the brightest. Our urbane delegation candidly acknowledged great struggle — though they could hardly do otherwise with our galloping misery, collapsing services, and hair-raising atrocities and torture. Yet State cooked up a remarkable twist on American exceptionalism: America handles human rights uniquely, they said. Unlike other countries that pledge to improve, America complies with the treaties first, then ratifies in glory. Under this ingenious dodge, failure itself relieves the state of the duties and scrutiny of treaty law. In the grand tradition of outclassed Ivy-League overachievers, State ducked responsibility and salved the national ego with a sort of paralyzing perfectionism. In detailing executive priorities, State made no mention of the CESCR. Forget about freedom from want, we’re not ready for that. “Too bad, Mr. and Mrs. America!” — as Phyllis Schlafly said to Congress back in 1979.

Our institutional human rights void did not faze US diplomats a bit. State had a clever answer for that too. Here, again, America does it differently. Rather than impose a monolithic human rights bureaucracy, we let a thousand flowers bloom. Official neglect spawns multiple protections of stupendous complementarity, much greater than the sum of the many little parts. In this way, presumably, sadistic Maricopa County gulags and Texan “plenty guilty” legal doctrines interact synergistically with the wistful resolutions of the one-horse college town of Carrboro, North Carolina, providing unmatched protection for our peoples.

No one so much as cracked a smile throughout.

Such mild reproof can be ignored at home but under the CESCR, America’s standing in the world would rise or fall with a new and more rigorous test: whether the state meets the minimal needs of the people. If too many are deprived of essential food, health care, education or shelter, the state is held to be breaching obligations. With state duties set out in such stark relief, the courts might elect to view domestic law quite differently.

BP’s rupture of the earth’s crust at Macondo well makes a helpful test case. When BP cut the last corner and poisoned the Gulf, the coastal peoples who live by tourism or fishing were deprived of their means of subsistence. This violates Article 1(2). Rubber-stamp regulation permitted a spill and response that tainted and decimated fisheries. As the CESCR has been applied, the minimum core of the right to food requires that the government not destroy or contaminate food sources.

BP offered scanty settlements that forced fishermen to work in its toxic waste, forbidding respiratory protection as a condition of employment and suppressing diagnosis or treatment of chemical exposure. This breaches Article 7(b), which guarantees safe and healthy working conditions. BP spread toxic dispersants in an unprecedented experiment in public health and environmental intervention. It remains to be seen how that arbitrary action comports with our right to health under Article 12, or with the state’s obligation to improve environmental hygiene. BP had imprisoned workers trucked to the spill zone in containers, like livestock, and penned in the sweltering miasma until needed. With the slave states’ tradition of reliance on convict labor, prisoners know better than to refuse a work detail but Article 6 requires that work be freely chosen or accepted under conditions safeguarding fundamental political and economic freedoms.

The state ceded police powers to BP, and BP used them to coercively suppress public investigation of the disaster. Federal officials in state jurisdictions helped intimidate observers while making false claims about the danger and extent of the spill. The Coast Guard denied watercraft access for sampling or independent observation. Residents were forbidden to take samples on their damaged property. As BP hired local scientists and gagged them with nondisclosure agreements, out-of-state scientists resorted to covert sampling with the help of local people. Under Article 15(2), states undertake to respect the freedom indispensable for scientific research.

BP even hired local law enforcement to choke off free inquiry. When even the police are private property, the “sacred right” of property gets murky. But BP’s proprietary clampdown makes it clear that the region as a whole belongs to them.

In practice our sacred property rights are marvelously flexible things. Panicked by collapsing housing markets, the state of Florida created a special-purpose foreclosure court that authorizes fraudulent documentation from firms with no legal standing to foreclose. In most other states, fraudulent evictions proceed with no court review at all. The resulting mass illegal forced evictions breach Article 11(1) by failing to respect legal security of tenure. Though UN special procedures have focused on forced evictions as ‘gross violations of human rights,’ we Americans are to have no redress. The sale of a residence gained by eviction cannot be reversed.

The covenant is silent on property rights. Here that’s thought to be a sop to the third world, to accommodate more primitive societies. Could be. The third world knows a lot about disgraces like the Gulf Coast spill. Foreign capital suborns the colonial government, suspends the state’s protective role, and secures a free hand in land and resource exploitation. The pervasive corruption of the Minerals Management Service fits a classic third-world pattern. Corruption entrenches a class of “indigenous colonizers,” in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s mordant term: “Accidents Happen,” as Senator Lieberman said; the Hon. Joe Barton apologized to BP; government bank overseers posed for photos taking a chainsaw to prudential rules. Booms and busts wrench the economy and hollow it out. Your people’s home becomes a blighted wasteland brutally repressed. It’s called the resource curse.

Resource-exploitation tensions show in the covenant’s drafting. Article 1(2) qualified peoples’ free disposition of their wealth and resources with the provisions of international law. Article 1(2) encourages mutual benefit too, but as third-world peoples know, law trumps mutual benefit every time. So the majority of the world imposed Article 25: “Nothing in the present Covenant shall be interpreted as impairing the inherent right of all peoples to enjoy and utilize fully and freely their natural wealth and resources.” Colonized by stateless enterprises and held helpless by America’s comprador state, the Gulf Coast’s northern shore is now part of the third world. Article 25 means something now. Northern Gulf Coast people might come to see why the global majority took its defiant stand.

In modern America, the resource curse is not restricted to the downtrodden natives of the Gulf Coast states. Mountaintop removal razes Appalachian peoples’ lands. Uranium mining kills Indian miners and contaminates tribal lands. Elsewhere, the extractive technique of fracking is used to force gas out of deep shales. Natural-gas concessionaires press individual landowners to cede all control over land use with no right of refusal. They will drill anyway if you don’t consent. Sometimes flammable water comes from the tap, showers become gas chambers and the right to decent housing is held in contempt. The practice is poisoning groundwater in several states, having been exempted from oversight under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The covenant might complicate the frackers’ sacrosanct American property rights: in Comment No. 15, the ECOSOC rights committee declared a universal right to water for personal and domestic use.

The measure of our rights is development. To assess it the UN compiles the Human Development Index (HDI), a composite of income, health, and education data. Based on 2009 data, the US ranked 13th. We slipped from our best showing, a tie for second in 1980, as more and more countries overtook us. A reformulated index bumped us up to fourth in 2010 (we look better when you set literacy aside and look at all the years we spend in school instead.) However, the new index shows the same slow slide.

As the composite nature of the HDI shows, development’s a matter of choices. Our state has always opted to keep us richer but sicker, as Hans Rosling points out. Still, even at the peak of our recent boom, 30 per cent of us could not meet the expenses of a basic family budget, and corruption and collapse in the financial sector haven’t helped. The full effect of our slump and financial crisis is not yet clear. The poverty rate had passed 14 per cent as of 2009, according to the Census Bureau. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports its most inclusive measure of joblessness as 17 per cent. By the old depression-era measures, depression days are here again.

For many countries development, itself, is a right, though not in the US. Development is something of a privilege here. We safeguard our traditional extremes of poverty and wealth. As measured by the Gini index, inequality here is greater than in developed countries, and clusters with middle-income banana republics and the kinder, gentler kleptocracies. For all our vaunted wealth, we’re a rich-world leader in child poverty — only Mexico’s is worse. Uniquely among the rich countries of the OECD, our youth are less educated than their elders, as the lucky fraction of our people that gets a secondary education slowly shrinks. Who decided we would be like this? It wasn’t me. It wasn’t anyone I know. People want their wealth shared out like Sweden’s, if you ask them. Nine in ten like the Swedish model better. We think it’s fair if the top fifth owns about a third of all the wealth. We think the top fifth actually owns 59 per cent of it all, but the joke’s on us: they own 84 per cent.

Here in America, basic human needs are used as bait by predatory enterprises. Your rights are a reward for good behavior – education, housing, even health – and they’re bound up with debt, your promise of future service. Rights are conditional, contractual, contingent. Commercial schools tap state coffers to fund worthless degrees with debt that cannot be expunged. Banks ramp the price of housing to draw buyers, and encumber them with ruinous debt. Health insurers cut off coverage whenever your misfortunes displease them.

Some of these abuses have broken down and the state is attempting to amend them. The state says that the only cure is markets. By markets the state means power relations rigged by industry-dictated laws that isolate buyers and subject them to colluding sellers. Commercial charters in these industries are functionally equivalent to strip-mining concessions, extractive industries for people’s future livelihood. The covenant’s guarantees would wreck this arrangement. The right to an adequate standard of living and to continuous improvement of living conditions; full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity? It would be as if the rebels seized the mines that work the rich veins of want and fear on the slippery slope.

“Necessitous men are not free men.” FDR said so to Congress. To two thirds of the UN’s members, economic rights are the most basic ones, because people will submit for survival. Civil and political rights don’t last when desperate people struggle to subsist. Our survival’s now contingent on obedience to many tacit rules and petty private rulers. That’s why your bank cuts you off from redress in the courts, imposing captive arbitrators from its handpicked list. That’s how, if you go broke, your creditors can put you on a food budget of 300 dollars a month. That’s why they’ll fire you if you try to form a union, and you’ll starve before the Wagner Act protects you. The threat of destitution persists because it serves a purpose — it keeps your desperation quiet. So it seems that your rights are collective after all. But the collective to which you must subordinate yourself is the firm. The firm took the rights that were meant for you. It’s not accountable to you as it delimits your options and your life. Producer sovereignty, some call it — Edward Herman, Wharton’s apostate professor, coined the term.

Sovereign producers with the blessing of their state push more and more people to the edge, where you’re trapped in rapacious legal usury, your dicey wages mostly gone at once for fixed expenses and your solvency a matter of sheer luck. Lose a job or get sick, and you’re lost on a remorseless slide to peonage, stripped bare by courts that impose sumptuary penance, or just jail you, and attach your future wages for life. You’re made to bid frantically, all against all, for the few homes with adequate schools, fighting for the sort of vocational and obedience training that’s thought to give your child some edge in a glut of faceless labor. For those who don’t comply, it’s the abyss.

It’s different in the civilized world. Our periwigged, grudging clutch of rights is obsolete. No country has copied our constitution for a hundred years. Human rights law has been called the true revolutionary movement of the 20th century. Economic and social rights in particular would weaken many of the indirect controls on which our state relies. Controls would instead be imposed on the state — the covenant focuses global scrutiny and shame like a burning glass on peoples’ want and fear. In testimony to Congress, John L. Hargrove described how human rights threaten an oppressive state:

What they rightly fear is being caught in a web of living law from which they cannot extricate themselves without large cost, but in which they cannot remain without occasionally yielding to pressure for change.

He was talking about the Soviet state. Our own state also fears that pressure, rightly so. In 1991 America’s UN ambassador called these rights “a dangerous incitement.” People secure in their dignity, with recourse to the wider world, won’t stand for quite so much.

1. Lash, Joseph P., “Eleanor, the Years Alone”, New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1972, Ch. III passim
2. U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. International Human Rights Treaties. Hearings, 96th Congress, 1st session. November 14-16, 19, 1979. Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 197

With 3,500 beds in a city of about 350,000 residents, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP) is already the largest per capita county jail of any major US city. Sheriff Marlin Gusman, the elected official with oversight over the jail, has submitted plans for an even larger complex. A broad coalition of community members is seeking to take the city in a different direction. They want a smaller facility, and they are demanding that the money that would be spent on a larger jail be diverted to alternatives to incarceration, like drug treatment programs and mental health facilities. With the first public hearings on the issue scheduled for this week, the battle is heating up.

At first, it seemed like an expansion of OPP was inevitable. This is a city with one of the highest rates of violent crime in the US, and politicians rarely lose votes by calling for more jail cells. But in a city that has led the nation in incarceration, residents across race and class lines are questioning fundamental assumptions about what works in criminal justice.

A broad array of criminal justice experts and community leaders has spoken in favor of a smaller jail. This is an issue that has allowed the religious foundation Baptist Community Ministries and prison abolition organizers from Critical Resistance to find common ground. The online activist group ColorOfChange.org also recently joined in the conversation, with an appeal that has generated hundreds of emails to the mayor and city council. “In all the work we’ve been doing on criminal justice reform, this is definitely a pivotal moment,” says Rosana Cruz, the associate director of V.O.T.E., an organization that seeks to build power and civic engagement for formerly incarcerated people. “We’re finally getting local and state government to think about public safety from a perspective of real safety, not an incarceration perspective.”

The OPP Reform Coalition, a pre-Katrina alliance that has recently been revitalized, has led the campaign. In September, when it seemed like the prison expansion was proceeding without public debate, they took out a full-page ad in the city’s daily paper listing other things that the money spent on OPP could be spent on. The ad featured an assortment of New Orleanians – including musicians, local politicians, community leaders, and members of the cast and crew of the HBO show Treme. The diverse assembly of public figures not only signed the ad, but also helped pay for it, donating $22.39 each, the amount that the jail currently charges the city for every prisoner. In the aftermath of the ad, attention turned to a working group formed by the mayor to address the issue. That body is expected to make its recommendations this month.

Incarceration Industry

Orleans Parish Prison is a giant complex in Midcity New Orleans, made up of several buildings spread across a dozen blocks employing nearly a thousand non-union workers. The city jail is a small empire under the absolute control of the city Sheriff, who can use jail employees for election campaigns, and send out prisoners to work for local businesses. The majority of the metropolitan area’s mental health facilities are also located within the jail, meaning that for many who have mental health issues, the jail is their only option for treatment.

Louisiana’s incarceration rate is by far the highest in the world – more than ten times higher than most European countries, and twenty times higher than Japan. Pre-Katrina, OPP had 7,200 beds. In a city with a population of about 465,000, this came to about one bed for every sixty-five city residents. Neighboring Jefferson Parish has 100,000 more people than Orleans Parish, and has only 900 beds. Caddo Parish – in the northeast of the state – has more violent crime, but still imprisons far less people. If OPP had the same number of beds as the national average of one for every 388 residents, the jail would shrink to about 850 beds.

Aside from its size, OPP is unique in other ways. Under the terms of a lawsuit over prison conditions filed in 1969, the jail’s budget is based on a per-diem paid by the city for every inmate in prison. The more people locked in OPP, the higher the funding Sheriff Gusman has at his disposal. “Our current funding structure is creating a perverse incentive to lock more people up,” explains Dana Kaplan, the director of Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, a criminal justice advocacy organization and member of the OPP Reform Coalition.

The institution of OPP is also exceptional in that it is a county jail and a state prison combined into one entity. About 2,700 people in the jail are mostly pre-trial detainees – the majority being held for drug possession, traffic violations, public drunkenness, or other nonviolent offenses – and are legally innocent. An additional eight hundred people are state prisoners who have been convicted in court, who may spend years or even decades at OPP.

Almost 60,000 people passed through OPP in the last twelve months, a staggering figure for a city of this size. The average length of stay was 20 days. The largest portion of pre-trial prisoners in the jail are there for nonviolent, municipal offenses that even under conservative standards should not warrant jail time, including 20,000 arrests this year for traffic violations. “New Orleans is basically the incarceration capitol of the world,” says Kaplan. “You’re hard-pressed to find a resident of New Orleans – especially in poor communities – that hasn’t had their lives disrupted in some way by this institution.”

An article by journalist, Ethan Brown, in one of the city’s weekly papers noted, “thanks to the profound misallocation of law enforcement resources in New Orleans, you’re more likely to end up in Orleans Parish Prison for a traffic offense than for armed robbery or murder.” Ultimately, this struggle over the size of the jail is also about the city’s incarceration priorities. If the city builds a larger jail, it will have to keep filling it with tens of thousands of people. If a smaller facility is built, it will change who is arrested in the city, and how long they spend behind bars.

Because much of the jail was under water during Katrina, many of the buildings have either been closed or need massive renovation. By one estimate, the new jail that the sheriff seeks would cost 250 million dollars, much of that to come in reimbursements from FEMA. The sheriff has yet to reveal how much of the construction costs would come from federal dollars, although the state chapter of the ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the information.  Even if most of the construction were paid for by FEMA, as the Sheriff has indicated, the continued upkeep would fall to the city.

Sheriff Gusman did not respond to requests for comment, but he has said, at a meeting of mayor’s task force on the jail, “I’ve always advocated for a smaller facility,” and spoke of being satisfied with 4,200 beds. The plans he has submitted to various planning bodies, however, indicate otherwise.

The Sheriff has issued several conflicting statements and reports about the size of the jail he is seeking, as well as where the funding will come from. A Justice Facilities Master Plan, prepared in collaboration with the Sheriff’s office, called for 8,000 beds, which would give the jail capacity to imprison nearly one of every 40 people currently in the city. A planning document recently prepared by the Sheriff called for 5,800 beds. No plans or public documents issued by his office have called for building a jail smaller than the current facility.

Spotlight on Abuse

With seven reported deaths in jail this year, OPP is under the spotlight for violent and abusive treatment of prisoners. A September 2009 report from the US Department of Justice  (DOJ) found, “conditions at OPP violate the constitutional rights of inmates.” The DOJ went on to document “a pattern and practice of unnecessary and inappropriate use of force by OPP correctional officers,” including “several examples where OPP officers openly engaged in abusive and retaliatory conduct, which resulted in serious injuries to prisoners. In some instances, the investigation found, the officers’ conduct was so flagrant it clearly constituted calculated abuse.”

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people who had not been convicted of any crime were lost in the city’s prison system. Last month a jury awarded two men from Ohio a $650,000 judgment for their treatment after the storm. The men were on a road trip and stopped in New Orleans for a drink on Bourbon Street. They were arrested for public drunkenness and spent a month disappeared in the system, without being allowed even one phone call to their families.

In a city under fiscal crisis, advocates have focused not only on the decades of evidence that mass incarceration has only made people in the city feel less safe, but also on the financial costs of this massive jail. In addition to calling for reforms that would cause less people to be locked up, the reform coalition demands that, “funds dedicated to building a bigger jail must be reallocated to building the infrastructure of a caring community, including recreational, educational, mental health, and affordable housing facilities.”

“Parents are crying out, saying where’s the recreation for our children?” explains Andrea Slocum, an organizer with Critical Resistance.  Slocum says that when she talks to city residents, the idea of redirecting money from the prison has wide support.

“It’s an exciting time for the city in a lot of ways,” says Michael Jacobson of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit organization that has been advising the City, including the Sheriff. Jacobson, who served as correction commissioner for New York City in the mid-90s, managed to reduce the population of New York City’s jail system even in the midst of the mass arrests of the Giuliani administration. He believes similar change is possible in New Orleans. “You can’t create or innovate unless you’re willing to step out and change what you’re doing,” he says.  The Vera Institute has received funding from the US Department of Justice for a pre-trial services program that has reduced incarceration in other cities, and they project New Orleans will also be able to see a reduction.

But the drive to build more jail cells is hard to stop, and many barriers remain.  Sheriffs in Louisiana have no term limits, and there are few leverages on their influence. Sheriff Gusman was first elected in 2004 and has faced little opposition since then. The previous Criminal Sheriff held the position for 30 years, only leaving when he ran for state Attorney General.

Meanwhile, the Sheriff’s department has begun construction on a building to hold 400 additional beds. He initially told reporters that he would close other facilities and the new construction would not add up to additional capacity. However, in a letter to the State Bond Commission, he predicted increased revenue from holding additional inmates.

Advocates believe that the tide is beginning to turn, but the new construction already underway indicates that there is still a lot of work to be done and not much time. “We really need to keep the pressure on and the momentum consistent,” says Rosana Cruz. “They’ll shake our hands and make these promises but meanwhile these deals are being made behind closed doors.”

The newly opened area is about 60 miles east of the Macondo wellhead. About 9,400 square miles of fishing waters remain closed, 4% of federal waters, down from 37% earlier.

From the start, The New Times provided cover for BP and the administration, at first denying the existence of a spill, then minimizing the disaster. On May 3, writers, John Broder and Tom Zeller Jr., headlined, “Gulf Oil Spill Is Bad, but How Bad? saying “news analysis” indicates it’s really not serious after all, when evidence showed the potential for disaster.

On August 4, writer Justin Gillis headlined, “US Finds Most Oil From Spill Poses Little Additional Risk,” saying:

The government is expected to announce… that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.

This at a time, and later on, when independent research showed most oil remained. Corexit dispersants increased toxicity manyfold. Seafood was contaminated and unsafe. Vast areas of the Gulf and shorelines were (and continue to be) hazardous, and the risk to wildlife and human health was extreme. In other words, by downplaying the disaster, The Times defended government and BP lies, fearing the April 20 explosion provided “new fodder” for opponents.

Other Times reports highlighted the vanishing oil, low concentrations of deep sea toxic compounds, and conditions slowly returning to normal. In an October 12 update, The Times said:

… evidence is increasing that through a combination of luck (a fortunate shift in ocean currents that kept much of the oil away from shore) and ecological circumstance (the relatively warm waters that increased the breakdown rate of the oil), the gulf region appears to have escaped the direst predictions of the spring.

And preliminary reports (suggest) the damage already done (may) be significantly less than was feared – less, in fact, than the destruction from the much smaller Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989.

In fact, the truth is mirror opposite. BP and administration officials are responsible for the greatest environmental crime in history, an ongoing disaster, affecting vast parts of the Gulf, coastal waters from Texas to Florida, most or perhaps all wildlife, and the health of millions of residents, no longer safe since April.

Drill Baby Drill

On October 12, the May imposed moratorium was lifted, six weeks ahead of its scheduled November 30 date, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar declaring:

We are open for business…. We have made and continue to make significant progress in reducing the risks associated with deepwater drilling.” (Therefore), I have decided that it is now appropriate to lift the suspension on deepwater drilling for those operators that are able to clear the higher bar that we have set.

In fact, so-called “new rules” mimic old ones. Drilling remains unregulated and unsafe, so it’s just a matter of time before the next disaster strikes, besides natural seepage and annual hundreds of smaller, unreported spills. Cumulatively over time, their toxicity destroys global water and human health. Moreover, according to former NOAA supervisory researcher Jeff Short:

“Once you have a spill, you are pretty much screwed. That’s because oil spreads on water at a rate of one-half football field per second. Recovery can take decades,” so calling the coast clear and water safe is willfully deceptive, echoed by the dominant media, The New York Times in the lead.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Coverup

The level is staggering, numerous reports countering BP and administration claims. On September 3, Boston Chemical Data Corp. laboratory findings, commissioned by the United Commercial Fishermen’s Association, revealed toxic Corexit levels in test samples, meaning, besides oil contamination, Gulf seafood is extremely hazardous and unsafe.

Moreover, though BP denies it, Corexit spraying continues, mostly at night but some during day time. Fishermen report seeing it, in some cases hit by its mist. Reports say BP hired out-of-state contractors using unregistered boats, besides nightly aerial spraying. The administration’s response to the entire disaster remains firm — coverup and denial, helped by a major media blackout after BP reported sealing the Macondo well on September 19.

In early October, however, four working reports issued by investigators from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling revealed systemic coverup and censorship to suppress the disaster’s magnitude, one very much ongoing.

They explained that stonewalling began in April and continued, one report concluding:

By initially underestimating the amount of oil flow and then, at the end of the summer, appearing to underestimate the amount of oil remaining in the gulf, the federal government created the impression that it was either not fully competent to handle the spill or not fully candid with the American people about the scope of the problem.

In fact, willful misinformation was released. In contrast, independent researchers produced accurate findings. BP, the administration, and major media accounts suppressed them, including evidence of criminal negligence.

Local Reports Exposing the Big Lie

On October 23, New Orleans Times-Picayune writer, Bob Marshall, headlined “Massive stretches of weathered oil spotted in Gulf of Mexico,” saying:

“Just three days after (Coast Guard admiral Thad Allen, BP’s front man) declared little recoverable surface oil remained in the Gulf of Mexico…. Boat captains working the BP clean-up effort” reported seeing it, confirmed by Times-Picayune photojournalist, Matt Hinton, in a fly-over. In addition, “fishermen’s groups….insist their members have” spotted it all along, refuting official claims that don’t explain large fish kills, big enough to suggest widespread toxicity, affecting humans as well as wildlife.

On the six month anniversary of the disaster, marine biologist, Riki Ott, reported “people (are) now dropping dead,” adding:

I am dealing with about 3-4 autopsies right now…. I know of people who’s esophagus’ are de-solving, disintegrating…. I know of people with 4.75% of their lung capacity, with enlarged hearts…. All of these people have oil (and dispersants) in their bodies.

She added that “4 to 5 million people in the Gulf were exposed to oil (and dispersants) at dangerous levels that is going to have incredible public health ramifications… and possibly force the President out of office for lies.” In fact, he should be impeached and prosecuted for war crimes abroad and ones against humanity at home.

Deaths continue to be reported as well as people finding volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and other toxins in their blood. According to one observer, corruption, cover-up and poisoning are occurring in plain sight. The entire region is affected and will be for decades, the dirty secret BP, government officials, and major media won’t explain.

Local accounts, however, are disturbing. On October 21, New Orleans WWL-TV reported:

“The oil is not evaporating. It’s not dissipating. It’s sitting there,” according to PJ Hahn, Plaquemines Parish Coastal Zone Management Department head.

On October 20, AP reported Byron Encalade, president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association, saying “oyster beds are all dead or dying…. I’m very pessimistic about it.”

In early September, Mississippi Department of Marine Resources officials found 80 – 90% of oysters dead, citing no cause. Clearly oil and Corexit are responsible.

On October 21, Cynthia Sarthou, Gulf Restoration Network executive director, said:

“There is still so much oil and dispersant in the environment, and the Gulf has not yet begun to heal because we have yet to determine what the injury is that it has suffered,” and its extent. For sure it’s massive and destructive.

On October 16, the Louisiana Shrimp Association’s Clint Guidry called using Corexit a “horrific mistake,” adding:

Potential ecosystem collapse caused by toxic dispersant use during this disaster will have immediate and long term effects on the Gulf’s fishing communities’ ability to sustain our culture and heritage.

On October 22, a pilot said he “was surprised (and saddened) to witness a seemingly unrelenting tide of oil hammering our beaches, bays, and estuaries.”

Other recent reports included:

– fishermen sprayed while sleeping in groups of boats tied together;
– a boat captain, Lori DeAngelis, said her vagina and anus are bleeding, adding: “This thing is killing me;”
– Lorrie Williams in Ocean Springs, MS said the oil sheen is “a lot worse” now than earlier, calling it an “absolute mess;”
– tides keep washing up tar balls and sheen on coastal beaches and other areas;
– large deposits are found buried in sand;
– researchers found “vast volumes” of oil on the seafloor, including “thick raw crude;”
– a massive shelf of exposed tar was found on Pensacola beaches;
– fishermen said “we’re starving; there are no fish in the waters” or not enough; and “any fish we would see, we would not eat;” and
– various other reports were just as disturbing – clear evidence of an ongoing disaster because of the worst ever environmental crime.

A Final Comment

On June 14, as conditions worsened, AP reported that Obama “pronounce(d) Gulf seafood safe to eat… things are going to return to normal…. I am confident that we’re going to be able to leave the Gulf Coast in better shape than it was before.”

In fact, then, now, and for decades, contamination will remain, hazardous to wildlife and human health, what he knew yet lied and said otherwise, fronting for BP and other industry giants.

Oil and dispersants contaminate much, perhaps the entire Gulf. It’s now poisoned and will remain potentially lethal for decades, maybe generations. Nothing in it should be ingested. Millions in the region are at risk. Families with small children should leave. No one should swim in coastal waters or eat any Gulf seafood, perhaps ever again. Responsible officials should ban it.

Instead, Obama, the Interior Department, NOAA, the Coast Guard, state governors, coastal mayors, regional health officials, BP, and major media reports gave the all-clear, saying conditions are nearly again normal, claiming the worst of the crisis was avoided.

In fact, a silent epidemic of cancers and other diseases will ravage coastal and inland areas for decades. The livelihoods of many residents are lost, and southern Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida may never be the same again, at least not for those now living there.

Moreover, 4,000 Gulf oil platforms now operate, the deepest and most hazardous by a consortium of companies, including BP. In addition, about 50,000 old wells pockmark the seabed, thousands with temporary or failing plugs believed to be leaking oil, gas and other toxins.

Yet deepwater drilling continues. Oil and gas pipelines keep compromising Gulf marshes, causing 15,000 acres to be lost annually, eroding wetlands and other areas. According to experts, unless restorative changes are made, the entire ecosystem will be lost in a generation.

On November 2, consider that before voting. Remember Obama’s complicity in the greatest ever environmental crime, but don’t imagine Republicans or Tea Party extremists will fix things. They’re all beholden to power, not popular interests at a time they’re being systematically eroded to divert money for militarism, imperial wars, bankers, BP, and other corporate favorites, ordinary people and ecological considerations be damned.

Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and left activist who has lived in (and loved) New Orleans for years. His recently published book, Floodlines:Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, not only fills the hole left by the retreat of the mainstream news media from New Orleans, it also reveals the true nature of the so-called reconstruction of the city. In the course of telling his tale, Flaherty uncovers the successes and shortcomings of aid organizations from the Red Cross to the Common Ground collective. He also strips away the layers of half-truths and lies regarding the role the police, military and other self-appointed guardians of law and order played in the days and months following the disaster known as Katrina.

Unrelenting in his attack on the racism of New Orleans bureaucracy and certain businesses, Flaherty is also unafraid to challenge the assumptions and accompanying actions of white anarchists, leftists and progressives as they arrived to assist in the rescue and reconstruction operations. In fact, it is this self-reflective aspect of Flaherty’s journalism that provides the reader with insights useful not only in analyzing what went wrong in the New Orleans post-Katrina effort to reclaim the city, but in reacting to future crises.

Floodlines opens with a history of New Orleans and closes with a quietly hopeful call to action. In between is a narrative of love, loss, anger, despair, indifference, murder and music. Personal in nature, the narrative is introduced to individuals instrumental to the culture and politics of the neighborhoods Flaherty discusses. Their histories and the histories of their organizations and neighborhoods are presented with the idea that it is these personalities and others like them that are the true New Orleans. Furthermore, writes Flaherty, the history and culture of New Orleans is a history and culture rich in resistance. Examples he provides range from the largest slave uprising in US history in 1811 to the Black Panthers in the 1970s and to the people’s struggle to reclaim their New Orleans neighborhoods in the wake of Katrina. Floodlines reminds us that it is people that make history.

In discussing the recovery and reconstruction efforts undertaken by grassroots and non-governmental organizations Flaherty saves some of his harshest criticism for NGOs whose funds come from foundations. He describes a system where energy spent on gaining and keeping funding is taken away from grassroots organizing and spent on what often amounts to mere publicity stunts. He continues, relating how the more radical elements of a movement that dared to challenge the system that creates crises like post-Katrina New Orleans were ignored or expelled from the coalitions by a leadership more interested in maintaining funding then ending the racism and oppression they claimed to be opposed to.

Carrying his attack into the broader realm of movements for social change, Flaherty lambastes the role foundations and other nonprofits have played in the professionalization of activism. This situation has created a dynamic where the needs of communities are often secondary to the desires of foundation boards. Furthermore, it has prevented a systemic analysis from taking front and center. After all, if it is the system that creates poverty and racism, how does one fight it without critiquing that system? Or as Dom Hélder Câmara put it many years ago: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.”

The city of New Orleans will never be the same. Large portions of its population have been displaced with little hope of returning. Many of the politicians and business people who run the city are working hard to make certain that this remains the case. Meanwhile, these same folks are working with outside corporations and the federal government to turn New Orleans into a city where working people and the poor (especially those of color) can not afford to live. Flaherty’s book is the story of New Orleans residents who are working to sidetrack those plans.

Floodlines is an electric piece of journalism. Not only does he tell a story that needs to be told, he does it with a style that reads like the best of reportage. There is lots of detail, yet it is never tedious. The writing here is reminiscent of two of the United States’ best journalists–Lincoln Steffens and I.F. Stone. Like the city Flaherty loves so much, this book has soul.

It turned this aging senior into a writer and radio host, furious over federal, state and local authorities using it to reward business at the expense of New Orleans’ poor Blacks. Five years later, their lives remain in disarray through no fault of their own.

Levies protecting their neighborhoods were left weak, vulnerable to fail as they did, then Congressman Richard Baker (R. LA) saying, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it but God did,” with considerable willful negligence help.

Malik Rahim, (New Orleans) Common Ground Relief (CGR) co-founder said:

“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, you know? And that’s just the bottom line.”

Blank is beautiful. Ethnic cleansing was long-planned, the scheme, of course, to erase poor neighborhoods, replacing them with upscale condos and other high-profit projects on choice city land, New Orleans developer Joseph Canizaro saying, “we (now) have a clean (slate) to start (over and take advantage of) big opportunities.”

A year later, an affected resident spoke for many saying:

“They(‘re) just messing all over us. Putting me out of our own house. We (try going) back and when we get there they got the police there putting us out… they ain’t letting nobody in… but where (am I) going to go – me and my kids?”

Rahim calls New Orleans two cities, one “for the white and rich, (the other) for the poor and Blacks. (The former) recovered. They had a Jazz Fest… a Mardi Gras…. But for those who haven’t recovered, there’s nothing.” Most haven’t been allowed back. Their neighborhoods were stolen for development, Katrina a chance to wage class warfare against them, no match for predators turning tragedy into profit.

It’s a familiar pattern nationwide and in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, commerce following the flag abroad and exploiting natural disasters at home, complicit politicians easing “free market” solutions for the privileged.

Though no match against dark, entrenched forces, Rahim’s Common Ground Relief fought back. Founded right after Katrina in the Lower 9th Ward, it’s a volunteer not-for-profit organization running numerous projects, including new home construction, free medical and legal help, education for school children, community gardening, a women’s shelter, job training, wetlands restoration, food security and environmental science.

By mobilizing people to work together against long odds, it provides hope through “short term relief for victims (and) long term support in rebuilding” destroyed communities. In the Lower 9th alone, 14,000 people and 4,800 homes were affected, most residents with longstanding neighborhood roots, enjoying “the highest percentage of African American home ownership of any city” in America. Losing them meant “the disappearance of (their) major asset, economic livelihood and, as a result, their future.”

Bill Quigley is a longtime activist/Law Professor, Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director, and former Loyola University, New Orleans Director of the Law Clinic and Gillis Long Poverty Law Center.

Three years post-Katrina, his aftermath assessment was disturbing but unsurprising, including:

– renters getting no financial aid;
– rental homes not repaired;
– unaffordable housing for poor and low income people because rents, on average, rose 46%;
– no rebuilding plans for destroyed public housing;
– thousands of poor neighborhood homes demolished to prevent residents from returning;
– half the city’s public schools destroyed, replaced by privatized ones; today, 75% are for-profit, favoring Whites, shutting out Blacks;
– all unionized city school employees fired, then selectively rehired for less pay and few or no benefits;
– displaced Blacks entirely disenfranchised;
– four of the 13 city Planning Districts as much at flood risk as before Katrina;
– only 11% of Lower 9th families returned, the community formerly one of the richest culturally, now destroyed by design; today about 20% are back;
– 25% of hospitals gone and 38% fewer beds available;
– thousands still living in temporary trailers; many others displaced across other states, still unable to return;
– 72,000 vacant, ruined or unoccupied houses;
– the city’s Black population reduced by half;
– thousands of their children never returned to public schools;
– new hurricane protection construction barely started, and much more, the city wrecked for corporate predators, the poor exploited for profit.

In his early August article titled, “Katrina Pain Index 2010 New Orleans,” Quigley, Davida Finger and Lance Hill updated the disturbing picture, saying:

“….tens of thousands of (New Orleans) homes….remain vacant or blighted. Tens of thousands of African American children who were in the public schools (aren’t) back, nor have their parents been able to return.” The metro area lost over 140,000 people, the city itself over 100,000. “Thousands of elderly and displaced people (were affected). Affordable housing” is in short supply, poor and low income people forced either to pay up or do without.

Displaced residents were scattered across the country, in as many as 5,500 cities, “the largest concentrations in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and San Antonio.” Most are women. “A third earn less than $20,000 a year” – for a family of four, it’s below the Census Bureau’s $22,000 poverty threshold and well below minimum needs in any US metropolitan area.

In addition, one fourth of area housing is either vacant or blighted, “by far the highest” US rate. As a result, about 58% of city renters and 45% of suburban ones pay “more than 35 percent of (their) income on housing.” Above 30% is unaffordable, forcing families to do without, including for essentials like enough nutritious food and health care, less available to poor people throughout the country, especially in New Orleans where the official poverty rate is double the national average. The unofficial one is even higher, given the indifference to Blacks communities five years post-Katrina.

In greater New Orleans, everything they need is in short supply, including schools, medical care, jobs, public assistance, and affordable housing, the number of public apartments down 75%. Destroying them was planned, upscale properties intended for well off White folks. Blacks aren’t wanted.

The same holds for schools, mostly privatized, 85% of their students White in a formerly Black majority city. No longer, and a result, less public ones accommodate 43% fewer students, poor Blacks most affected. They also get less public assistance, fewer social services overall, or none at all.

The entire region was affected, nearly 100,000 square miles of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama communities destroyed or heavily damaged. Over one million people were permanently displaced. Hundreds of thousands lost everything, compounded by the spring Gulf disaster, the greatest ever environmental crime, potentially affecting the lives and livelihoods of millions.

Billions of dollars in promised aid never arrived, going instead for luxury hotels, casinos, private clubs, the oil industry and gentrification, the polite term for dispossessing poor communities, replacing them with upscale ones for the rich and well off, a similar pattern across the country, especially impacting Blacks and Latinos. They’re victimized by class warfare under Democrat and Republican administrations, destroying the lives of millions. An uncaring nation left them on their own and out of luck.

New Orleans is a metaphor for as bad as it gets, poor Black communities devastated and ignored, most of the two hardest hit still uninhabited – the Lower 9th and St. Bernard Parish back to less than one fourth of pre-Katrina levels.

After it hit, FEMA provided 120,000 trailers throughout the region. Now, they’re gone, sold at public auction, some to families using them. On August 20, Newsweek said only 860 Louisiana families were still accommodated, excluding buyers still in theirs.

Getting no federal, state or local help, others now pay unaffordable rents, live in destroyed or damaged houses, double up with relatives, or go homeless, the numbers twice the pre-Katrina rate, south Louisiana’s social infrastructure gutted to displace Blacks for preferred Whites.

Even New Orleans levee rebuilding isn’t finished, the Army Corps of Engineers estimating completion by late summer or early fall 2011 at the earliest. Some experts say the new system still won’t protect adequately against another major hurricane.

Post-Katrina, New Orleans bears testimony to a callous, uncaring nation. “America the beautiful” is for the privileged alone – no one else, especially people of color, the poor and disadvantaged, “The Big Easy” their ground zero.

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe…
— Lewis Carroll

Enough for everyone; too much for none
— Woof

Riff One

My house is foreclosed on, my job is outsourced, and my wife runs away with a banker.  So…I figure there’s nothing left to do but pack up the old mini-van, head on down to New Orleans and start a new life as a singer of blues.  My border collie, Woof, rides shotgun, his handsome muzzle sticking part way out the window.

Woof and I have worked out a way of communicating that started when he was a pup.  It began as a simple, binary system.  I realized early on that, while border collies are the smartest of dogs, I happened to have a genius of the species!  I began by asking Woof simple questions to which he could bark once for “Yes” and twice for “No.”  I’d wait till I knew he was good and hungry and then I’d ask him, “Are you hungry, boy?”  If he barked once, I’d reward him with food.  If he barked twice, he’d get nothing.  He soon caught on.  Gradually, we advanced to metaphysics.

I decide to head for the Gulf Coast because the President has said we can eat the food and swim in the water.  The networks have shown a picture of the Prez and Sasha laughing in the waves.  How anyone can tell it’s the Gulf is totally beyond me.  You’d think with all the technology, they’d be able to get a satellite picture.  They can read license plates from space, can’t they?  So… they could have had a long shot with an expanse of water and it would be clear from the general topography that it was the Gulf; then they could get closer and closer until we see plainly it’s POTUS himself gimbling in the wabe.

But, what do I know?

It’s just like when I hear they’re testing the seafood by having people smell it.  “You’d think they’d have a more sophisticated way of knowing whether something’s safe to eat, wouldn’t you”? I ask Woof.

Woof barks once.  He gives me one of his iconic, ironic looks.  That, of course, is another thing about border collies — why they’re so good at herding.  They can hold your eyes; they let you know with their big, black eyes! 

Driving down I-85, I get spun around Atlanta and wind up in the East Point ghetto. Some 30,000 people have shown up to get about 800 Section Eight applications.  We high-tail it out; that many desperados sends up my blood pressure.  I’ve seen riots begin with far less provocation than thousands of absent forms (and the inadequate housing they signify!).

We tool past Montgomery.  Back in the 70s, cops had frisked me there because I was walking around downtown with long hair, looking like the anti-war, long-haired, pot-smoking hippie that, in fact, I was.  It was during a short break on a Greyhound Bus cross-country trip, and I had the balls to complain to the friskers afterwards that they had no right to harass a guy for taking a stroll around their fair city.  A white guy could still say such things back then without getting bopped on the head… but, with Homeland Security, I wouldn’t recommend it now…. I still have long hair—though some mite thinner and grayer, matching the grizzled look I’ve acquired thanks to the heartaches of living.

“Wasted and wounded, it ain’t what the moon did, I got what I paid for now” … Tom Waits sings from my C.D. as we drive past ugly Mobile and pretty Lake Pontchatrain.  And lickety-split we’re in the Big Easy, promenading in the French Quarter, in the Vieux Carre, down Bourbon Street, et. al.  There are black kids dancing on a street corner—dancing good!—and people dropping coins or dollar bills into their caps; there are college girls flashing their cotton-candy  breasts on a dare and for the fun of it; and sad-eyed, dark-mascaraed hookers in the business far too long; and dragging-trousers John Does holding out their palms for greasing.

I follow my heartbeat to Preservation Hall.  It’s like an old saloon inside with all kinds of people sitting on benches, listening and grooving.  And the music revives me because … black and white, old and young, male and female—we are joined in the temple of reverberations: they go down into marrow; the stuff that can’t be killed though it wallows; the stuff that gets damn near to dying then rises up again.

I’d left Woof to do his thing with a vivacious French poodle and we meet at the van a couple of hours later.  “You’re not going to be a singer?” he asks me with his eyes.

“No point,” I mutter.  “These folks have been living with it a long time.  They grow up with it and it scars them.  They sing and they summon it to make them whole again, to heal them.  And then there’s a Katrina or a B.P. oil disaster and they’re knocked back on their heels and they have to summon it all over again — and it comes back stronger and better and deeper.  It’s always good to sing your own song, but it’s better to know when to take a breather, when to hang out in the holiness of one’s own awed silence before the greater choir.”

Woof barked once.   

Riff Two

Homer is studying my 2-page resume, his thumb tapping down every other line, while Tammy Wynette whines from a scratchy vinyl on an old phonograph, “Stand by your man, stand by your man,” and one of the three TV sets advises me in a Sears ad that I had better stay home because the elements are over-rated and another TV shows a skinny woman attacking a heavy woman while the audience cheers, “Jerry!  Jerry!”, and the third TV hurriedly describes all the dangers in taking the pill they’ve just recommended, and a computer screen shows an “Inbox.”

Homer sends a quick text message, then gives me his divided attention.  “So, you’re a graduate of Florida State U.,” Homer observes, eyeing me with with a mixture of suspicion and reassurance.  He pauses to slather ketchup and A-1 steak sauce on a 4-egg omlette thick with American cheese and bacon.  The Sears ad switches back to CNN which airs a report on the egg recalls because of salmonella.  “That’s good,” Homer assures me after taking a big bite, talking out of his cheesy mouth.  “We like to hire local talent when we ken…. An’ frankly, the fac’ that yer not one-a these science boys is gonna help, if ya know what I mean.  We got enough-a them types muckin’ up the works, if ya know what I mean.”

I assure Homer that I know what he means.

“Now… this English Lit degree here…. You won’t be lookin’ ova my shoulder here correctin’ my gramma’?” Homer wonders.

“No, sir.  It’s all about usage, they taught me.  Usage trumps grammar.”

Reassured, he takes me into the back office to administer “the test.”  There are two plates of fish.  “Now this one’s the bad one, and this one’s the good one,” he explains, holding the plates towards me.  “Can you smell the difference?”

I assure him I can, though they both smell a little rancid to me.  Homer gets a call on his Blackberry and holds up his index finger for me to wait.  “That’s pretty much all there is to it,” he affirms when he’s done.  “We’ll get you a nice, starchy uniform with your name on it an’ you ken start bright-early Monday.  It’s easy.  Most of the stuff is good, ya see.”  Homer nods and I know what he means, and he knows that I know.

And so I become a smeller for the Empire.  Day after day I am in a big room with a few white guys, a few blacks and a lot of illegals looking at the haul of the day from the shrimpers and the other vessels, opening up oysters and smelling them, until it all collides like the odor of one awful ordure in our heads.  Every day I hear Tammy Wynette and “Jerry! Jerry!” from the front office and also some Mexican ballads coming out of the juiced-up Sony headphones on the senora sitting next to me, and every day I stamp “approved” on the official forms with my neo-cortex exploding.

And once in a while I hear CNN in the background—how there’s a big fuss over whether to put a mosque near Ground Zero…, but nobody’s mentions the fact that our “combat mission” in Iraq is over, and our corporate-military complex butchered over a million humans because some idiots claimed their leader had weapons he never had.

In the evenings, I walk with Woof along the beach, watching the sun melt in the water.  If I dig my toes deep into the sand, my toenails emerge shining with a thin, oily film.

“I wonder what Corexit smells like?” I ask Woof.  “I wonder if it breaks up the smell of the oil?”  He looks at me with doleful eyes, and there’s nothing more doleful than a border collie’s doleful eyes. 

“I’m an innocent victim of a blinded alley,” Tom Waits sings in my head….“And I’m tired of all these soldiers here.”

Woof looks away to the Gulf.  “This was a beautiful country once,” I tell him.  “People ate real food and they cared for one another.  People had families and roots and identities beyond what the screens gave us—the manufactured bullshit.  There was a common music we all could hear if we listened–a culture that came together out of its different strands… and we talked to each other.  There wasn’t all this twittering, this fragmentation.  You could sit down and eat a meal that wasn’t processed by corporations.  People had a wholeness and solidity; they weren’t flowing away from themselves.  They had some sense of their own history, and maybe even a sense of dignity and right and wrong—or if they didn’t… an inkling of what they might be missing.”  Then I caught myself.  “We had some idea of where we were going, crazy as it got sometimes… and it got plenty crazy—I know, I was there!… A sense of who we were, I’m saying, who we were supposed to be…. I’m ranting, ey?…. Am I ranting?”

Woof barks twice, letting me know it’s okay.

“Maybe it was just a dream,” I say, a dark, blue mood surging like the surf.  “There was a lot of rot underneath.  I don’t want to pretend it was something it wasn’t.  But the dream was real.  There’s a difference between a real dream and all the tinsel ones like now.  We had presidents like Kennedy and Eisenhower and Carter who told us some hard truths—as much as they could get out past the censors, anyway…. Now it’s Mourning in America, Woof, and… I’m trying to say… I can’t go on like this….  If I’ve got to forage for my food, then I’ll do it.  I’d rather raid the dumpsters…. I’ve got to pass my own smell test, you see.”

Woof barks once.  “You can go back now,” his eyes tell me, “back to the Vieux Carre…. You’re ready now.  The crust is coming off your eyes.  You can sing your own song now—the song of the one and the all.”  And he barks again.

A pelican wheels over the Gulf as the red sun dips behind it.  A couple of gulls caw in the violet-red-ochre… and it’s almost like it used to be….

But will never be again.