"They Left Us Here To Die"

Organization:  Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition Author:  Muhammad Curtis and Becky Belcore Date Published:  09/04/2005

Not until the fifth day of the federal government's inept and inadequate emergency response to the New Orleans' disaster did George Bush even acknowledge it was 'unacceptable.' 'Unacceptable' doesn’t begin to describe the depth of the neglect, racism and classism shown to the people of New Orleans. The government's actions and inactions were criminal. New Orleans, a city whose population is almost 70% percent black, 40% illiterate, and many are poor, was left day after day to drown, to starve and to die of disease and thirst.

The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funneled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants and the wealthy white districts of New Orleans like the French Quarter and the Garden District. We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans.

Community Labor United (CLU), a coalition of the progressive organizations throughout New Orleans, has brought community members together for eight years to discuss socio-economic issues. We have been communicating with people from The Quality Education as a Civil Right Campaign, the Algebra Project, the Young People’s Project and the Louisiana Research Institute for Community Empowerment. We are preparing a press release and framing document that will be out as a draft later today for comments.

Here is what we are calling for:

We are calling for all New Orleanians remaining in the city to be evacuated immediately. We are calling for information about where every evacuee was taken. We are calling for black and progressive leadership to come together to meet in Baton Rouge to initiate the formation of a Community Oversight Committee of evacuees from all the sites. This committee will demand to oversee FEMA, the Red Cross and other organizations collecting resources on behalf of our people. We are calling for volunteers to enter the shelters where our people are and to assist parents with housing, food, water, health care and access to aid.

We are calling for teachers and educators to carve out some time to come to evacuation sites and teach our children. We are calling for city schools and universities near evacuation sites to open their doors for our children to go to school. We are calling for health care workers and mental health workers to come to evacuation sites to volunteer. We are calling for lawyers to investigate the wrongful death of those who died, to protect the land of the displaced, to investigate whether the levies broke due to natural and other related matters. We are calling for evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans. We are calling for the addresses of all the relevant list serves and press contacts to send our information. We are in the process of setting up a central command post in Jackson, MS, where we will have phone lines, fax, email and a web page to centralize information. We will needvolunteers to staff this office.

We have set up a People’s Hurricane Fund that will be directed and administered by New Orleanian evacuees. The Vanguard Public Foundation has agreed to accept donations on behalf of this fund. The Vanguard Public Foundation has a long history of social justice activism and also has the staff capacity to manage this level of effort.

Danny Glover, who was one of the original conveners of the first national meeting of the Quality Education as a Civil Right Campaign (QECR) at Howard University in March, 2005 and serves as the Honorary Chairperson of the QECR Coordinating Committee. Mr. Glover also is the co-chair of the Board of Directors of the Vanguard Public Foundation.

Tax-exempt donations can be made out to:

The People's Hurricane Fund c/o Vanguard Public Foundation
383 Rhode Island St, Ste 301
San Francisco, CA 94103

(Editor: For more info on Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, see both www.peopleshurricane.org and www.peoplesorganizing.org.)

Author:  Saladin Muhammad Date Published:  09/16/2005

The magnitude of the destruction and human suffering caused by Hurricane Katrina to the people and communities of the Gulf Coast region, while not the result of an act of "terror," is directly the result of a profit·driven system of capitalist exploitation reinforced by the national oppression of African American people in the U.S. South, a region where the majority of Black people live and where the conditions of oppression, poverty and underdevelopment are most concentrated. As anti-imperialists and progressives engage in work to build support for the Gulf Coast survivors, we must have an analysis and political context for properly understanding the reasons for this crisis and the contradictions surrounding its aftermath. The response to this human tragedy must be more than a humanitarian response in order to deal with the magnitude and complexity of issues, international political ramifications, the legal aspects, and the various levels of local, regional, national and international coalition and network building and mobilizing that must take place to build a powerful movement for social justice. There is much talk about how to define the main social impact of Katrina·-whether it is mainly a major disaster for Black people or for working class and poor people in general. This attempt by the media to separate race from class when dealing with issues where those workers affected are majority African American is no accident. It seeks to divide the political character and content of the working class responses. Thus, it is important to define the race and class character of thecrisis and to call on the larger working class to unite with its most oppressed section--the African American working class··which is also the predominant basis of an oppressed nation and nationality historically denied real democratic rights and subjugated by U.S. imperialism. The government's failure to correct this impending danger, known far in advance, that led to the continuously unfolding massive human tragedy, helps all to see the racist nature of the U.S. capitalist system and how the system of African American national oppression is in violation of human rights and guilty of crimes against humanity. The demand for self-determination is both a national democratic demand for African American people's power as well as a demand for working class and women's power. Thus, national, working class and gender democracy are essential pillars of the politics of a Black working-class-led African American liberation struggle. African American national oppression African American national oppression waslis definitely a major factor contributing to the magnitude of the disaster caused by Katrina. National oppression takes on more factors than race. It includes, among other factors, where people live and work--social and political territories and institutionsuand has a working class character represented by the most exploited strata of the U.S. working class. Thus African American national oppression is at the deepest point of the intersection of race, class. and gender oppression and exploitation of the U.S. working class. As more than 90 percent of Black people throughout the U.S. are workers, African American national oppression places its primary emphasis on the exploitation and oppression of Black workers and their communities. More than two-thirds of New Orleans' inhabitants were African American. In the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood that was one of the hardest hit, more than 98 percent were Black. The slow U.S. federal and state government responses to natural disasters like hurricanes Katrina and Floyd in North Carolina in September 1999, that greatly impacted predominately African American working class communities, made clear that the value of Black and working class life is subordinate to capitalist property and profits. The racist economic, social and political policies and practices of the U.S. government and capitalist system shape society's attitudes about the reasons for the historical oppression of African Americans. They seek to isolate, criminalize and scapegoat African Americans as social pariahs holding back the progress of society. The characterization of the Black working class in this way is a part of the continuous ideological shaping of white supremacy that gives white workers a sense of being part of another working class, different from that of the Black working class. This often leads many white workers to act against their class interests, discouraging them from uniting with the Black working class in struggling to seek common, equal and socially transformative resolutions to their class issues. However, on the ground in New Orleans, the working class regardless of race forged a level of unity as survivors, led by the African American working class that the system wants to hide. The media's different descriptions of acts of desperation and survival by Blacks and whites in obtaining food and supplies following Katrina--"looting" versus "finders"--is an example. The police and National Guard were ordered to stop looking for survivors and to stop "lawlessness." Bush's statements about getting tough on "looters," along with that of Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco when she said, "These troops are battle-tested--have M-16s that are locked and loaded--know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will,1I made clear that New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were becoming areas of military occupation. White supremacists like David Duke and others have utilized this disaster and repressive racist climate to promote hatred for African Americans and Latinos and have . encouraged the formation of racist vigilante bands roaming areas of New Orleans, attacking Black and Brown people. The refusal by thousands of mainly Black people to leave their homes was initially described by the media as the main problem related to the slow evacuation efforts-· blaming the victims. Nothing was initially mentioned about the low wages, level of poverty and high rates of unemployment preventing people from leaving. After it took almost a week for the government evacuation effort to begin, leaving people to fend for themselves without electricity, food and water, it became shamefully clear and impossible for the media to hide that the government had made no provisions for a major evacuation. The acts of heroism by the people themselves in rescuing their neighbors, although not emphasized by the media, could be seen throughout the coverage. These acts by the people have no doubt reduced the numbers expected to die resulting from the slow "emergency" rescue response of the government. The so-called "looting" and "lawlessness" must be addressed and placed in proper context. When it became clear that there was no emergency evacuation plan in place·· people waiting up to a week before any major evacuation effort began--people were forced to take desperate actions for survival, both until they got "rescued" and for their uncertain future as refugees with no resources and sources of income. TVs, appliances, etc., become a form of capital and a means for trade during a crisis. Some survivors were forced to "steal" cars and buses to get their families out of the areas. Should this be considered a crime? NO! Also, when people are oppressed, neglected and left to die, they often engage in spontaneous acts of rebellion, striking out against those who control wealth and power. This is why the term "racism" without the context of national oppression and imperialism is grossly inadequate in describing the scope and depth of the impact of the U.S. oppression of African American people. It often fails to point out the impact that African American national oppression has on influencing the standard of living and social conditions of the general working class, regardless of race, especially in areas where Black workers make up a majority or large minority of the population. U.S. imperialism on the domestic front Not only did the U.S. federal and state government place the working class of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in impending danger, including failing to develop a planned emergency response to the crisis, it has also refused the aid of other countries like Cuba and Venezuela, which have offered to send hundreds of doctors, tons of medical supplies and fuel to help the people in the Gulf Coast region. U.S. imperialism has thus decided that it has the sole right to decide whether the majority African American and working class people and communities in the Gulf Coast region have the human and political right to survive or not. This is clearly an international human rights question where the demand for self-determination must be applied as part of the resolution. Though food, water and transportation trickled in, the government made sure the oil industry was taken care of fast. Over 10 major refineries were knocked out of commission in the Gulf region, but many of them were back operating within the week. Bush released federal oil reserves, but oil companies jacked up gas prices to a criminal level anyhow. Environmental safeguards were loosened for gasoline producers to allow more pollution. All this while the four largest oil companies made profits of nearly $100 billion over the last 18 months. Why isn't this labeled as corporate "lawlessness"? Many of the African American working class majority of New Orleans and parts of the Gulf Coast have been "evacuated" to other cities several hundred, and in some cases thousands, of miles away from their communities. More than 1,800 children are still separated from their families almost two weeks after the flood. Many feel that their communities will never be restored and that they won't be returned home. They have good reason to feel this way, as some majority African American communities have already begun to experience gentrification--the moving of Black and poor people out of the inner cities and replacing them with more affluent arid predominantly middle and upper class whites. Many reports have warned that profit-driven development along the coast had done away with millions of acres of wetlands that buffered coastal communities from storms. Thus, this disaster and the racist and capitalist circumstances surrounding its occurrence and aftermath raise the issue of "ethnic cleansing." The media in some of the cities receiving the "evacuees" are describing them as "the worst of New Orleans' now-notorious lawlessness: looters, carjackers and rapists." This sounds like the racist labels placed on working class and poor immigrants and refugees from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, who have been forced to leave their countries and come to the U.S. for economic and political reasons. Many African Americans experienced these labels when they were forced to migrate out of the South in the first half of the 20th century. Many African Americans in particular will experience problems related to the loss of identification documents in the flood, and fall into a similar status as undocumented and immigrant workers who come from Latin America and the Caribbean. Their residential and citizenship status will be challenged, in most cases, when it comes time to get disaster relief subsistence. The racist nature of U.S. capitalism often makes this reality of being a refugee and undocumented worker within one's "own" country a unique reality for African Americans and other oppressed nationalities, especially during times of natural and social crises. We should expect the U.S. to use this disaster to increase restrictions on forced economic immigration. It is therefore important that African Americans and Latinos unite in challenging the refusal of survivors' assistance on the basis of the lack of documentation or citizenship status. It is also important to point out that countries in Latin America have offered aid to all, without regard for. citizenship status or: nationality, even though the U.S. seeKS to overthrow their governments. For.ging unity between African Arnerica.ns, Latinos and working class ethn~c-groups throughout the U.S. and especially within the Gulf Coast region in responding to this disaster is, an important part. of a larger~ more difficult and absolutely· essential process. of building U.S. multinational working class unity andinternationaJ solidarity against U.S. imperialism. The future. of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in terms of the. reconstruction. of the historical communiti.es, but at a higher quality Of social conditions and standard of livingf will be decided by the U.S. corpor.ate.class. the white power structure, unless. there is an organized and combined African American and workjng .class.struggle Jed by the .African American working class majority in .. New o.rleans and. the, Gulf.· Coast Such a struggle must take the popular form of·a combined struggle for African American se.lf·determination and workers' power, and. must have an international. component. Emphasizing the.majority African American working class character of,the Katrina~U.S. impe.r.ialistdisaster is important to.exposing its unmistakably racist character.' . Katrina disaster .exposes impact of unjust U.S. war. and.occupation against Iraq The Katrina disaster exposes how U.S. imperialist war in Iraq and .throughout the Middl~ East) including. billions of dollars of support for.lsraers. occupation.of Palestine, is direct!y.cormected to the human trageqy in the Gulf Coast region. Vital resources, which had been aUocated by the Bush administration to fix tl:1e substandard levees in· New Orleans ·and the erosion of marshlands along the coast that caused the region to experience such enormous flooding and massive loss of lives, were cut and shifted to the war budget. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have consciously refused to adequately maintain or strengthen the levees that protect New Orleans. Hurricane and flood control has received the steepest federal funding reductions in New Orleans historyndown 44.2 percent since 2001. The emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, La., told The Times-Picayune in June 2004: "It appears that the money has been moved in the President's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq. and I suppose that is the price we pay.1I Requests for an additional $250 million for Army Corps of Engineers levee work in the delta went unmet. There are close to 15,000 National Guard from the Gulf Coast region in Afghanistan and Iraq fighting unjust wars. Their equipment, including generators, water purification systems and other needed life support and disaster preparedness supplies were overseas as well. Precious hours and days were lost as the bureaucratic machinery slowly moved equipment from other parts of the country that could have helped save lives of the thousands who were expected to die. As was the case during every war engaged in by this country, African Americans and working people were sent to fight, kill and die to bring about so-called "freedom II while they and their communities are denied freedom from hunger, imminent dangers, racial violence, gender oppression and state repression. As was also the case during the Vietnam and Korean wars, the U.S. tried to conceal the racist treatment of African Americans on the home front. In both of these wars, the racist treatment of African Americans in the U.S. led to rebellions in the military and drew many former veterans into the civil rights and African American liberation movement when they returned home. Now the U.S. military has the audacity to start recruiting at the Gulf Coast Survivors evacuation shelters in various parts of the country. This is outrageous, as it was the U.S. war in Iraq that was responsible for diverting funds away from repairing the levees in New Orleans. It is important that this connection be raised and exposed to help African Americans better understand the more immediate relationship to the wars abroad and the national and working class oppression of African Americans in the U.S. This will not only serve to strengthen the current U.S. anti-war movement, it will strengthen the U.S. and international anti-imperialist movement. Lessons from North Carolina's Hurricane Floyd [Also see:http://www.labornotes.org/archives/19991119911199a.html] The coalitions and movement that develops to aid the survivors of this disaster must understand the magnitude and how it differs from other disasters throughout U.S. history. When one analyzes the conditions and responses to Hurricane Floyd, labeled the I1Flood of the Century, n that impacted 30 counties in Eastern North Carolina in September 1999, we see at least one major difference that defines how people's aid must be organized. With Floyd, the evacuation of thousands of survivors to far-away cities and states did not occur. People were moved and went on their own to neighboring towns and communities, thus making it easier to build a survivors! organization and movement in the area made up of representatives of the various towns and communities that were impacted. There was a decision to define people as survivors and not "victims" as one way of helping to empower them and to discourage a "victim's consciousness, II which made many feel they had no right to challenge the abuses of FEMA and the state. There was the need to establish a survivors' slogan. "Social Justice, Not Charity, II to promote that aid is a human right. The largest camp housing Floyd survivors was set up on a toxic waste dump, which had not been inspected ahead of time and was located behind a women's prison. Survivors felt they had no right to complain and also feared that if they did, they would be put out of the FEMA camp with no place else to go. The Survivors organization was not a "support" or emergency "relief" organization per se, even though it participated in "relief" activities and worked in food and clothing distribution centers set up by community forces and supporters. Survivors' committees were organized in 15 sites throughout eastern North Carolina and a survivors' summit was organized to bring survivor communities together to hammer out a survivors' manifesto of demands to serve as their program for recovery and reconstruction. The state of North Carolina had established a Floyd Relief Fund that had several hundred million dollars of federal money and private "donations." The survivors' organization demanded that the fund address key needs and ensure that the cutoff period did not leave survivors to fall through the cracks. There was a demand that Floyd Survivors have input in decisions about use of the Floyd Relief Fund. An advisory committee was appointed by the governor that included one representative of the Survivors organization. The majority were company, banker and state and local government management heads. There was no national and international pressure around the demand that Floyd Survivors control the Relief Fund. This is needed for Katrina Survivors. The Survivors organization and support coalitions in the areas organized reconstruction brigades of people who came in from other cities to help repair and rebuild damaged homes. Progressive lawyers and legal clinics were set up to deal with the massive insurance fraud, and with real estate speculators who were trying to get people to sell their homes for little or nothing to get desperately needed money. Volunteer doctors and medical people set up screening and emergency support clinics that wrote prescriptions for medicine, and college students and educators set up schools and day care in the camp areas. A people's transportation service was set up to take people to work, to look for work and to shop for clothes and other items. There were discussions about setting up survivor worker-run businesses to help create employment, but they never materialized. The postal workers' union local led by a member of Black Workers For Justice that was part of the survivors' support organization brought mail transfer forms and workers to assist survivors in getting their mail rerouted. The scope of this work was based on the number of progressive groups and level of participation of the Survivors who were drawn into this social justice work. This is a main reason why it's very important to build a broad network tying together activist groups with allies. It is very important to draw the trade unions into this movement, the Gulf Coast wide coalition and national support network. They should be encouraged to contribute directly to a Survivors and people~driven support coalition in the region, not to the Red Cross or government agencies. The identity of the working class efforts will not be projected by the contributions made to these agencies. It is important that workers see that trade unions have a broader concern and commitment to the needs of the working class and not just to their immediate members. The employers will certainly ask the workers where the unions were during the disaster when they try to organize. Trade unions can play an important role in supporting those evacuated to their cities, especially outside of the South. The unions can help in adopting families and shelters in their areas. They must also playa leading role in helping to combat the racist attempts by the media, white supremacists, the religious right and others to alienate and scapegoat Survivors evacuated to their cities by educating their members and getting them actively involved in support efforts. Distribution centers were designated by FEMA and state crisis agencies. The Black Workers For Justice set up a distribution center at its Workers Center in Rocky Mount, N.C., but had to struggle to demand it be recognized as an official center so that it could receive food and supplies from distribution warehouses that were set up in the area by FEMA. Most of the FEMA~designated distribution centers were the big white area churches, some Black churches, YMCAs and Opportunities Industrialization Centers. The white paternalistic and missionary character of a major portion of the establishment~ designated "formal" relief effort was overwhelming. Disaster relief efforts must be carried out as a political struggle Yes, irs important that organizing be done around the humanitarian aspects of this crisis and recovery. It must not try and substitute for the obligation that the U.S. government has to fully address the problems. A "full" recovery requires some political and economic changes and pressure by a mass movement. We learned that during times of disaster, the state and federal government declarations of a lIstate of emergency" allow local governmental powers to be suspended or placed under the direct demand of the state government. During Floyd, survivors particularly from the Town of Princeville, the oldest historically Black town in North Carolina and some say in the U.S., were organized to demand that their City Council convene itself, even though the town had been destroyed. This was a struggle for self-determination within the context of the struggle for reconstruction. The Princeville City Council held weekly open meetings where activists organized transportation to take survivors by cars and church buses to have input into the decisions and town government struggle for reconstruction. Some towns attempted to weaken Black voting strength through their recovery plans. The city of Tarboro, N.C., established an ordinance prohibiting the construction of lowincome housing in a political district where African Americans constituted a majority. The town was sued, along with mass actions, forcing it to change the ordinance and allow people to move back into the area with affordable, newly built housing. Building a Gulf Coast Survivors Justice and Reconstruction Movement The movement in the Gulf Coast region has major concerns that require the organization, politics and leadership of the African American liberation struggle as a central component to help unite a broad, multi-national, multi-racial and international campaign for social justice and reconstruction. The following areas need to be organized to establish a national and international capacity: 1. There must be efforts to unite the many relief and reconstruction efforts of the Gulf Coast Region into a regional coalition such as a Gulf Coast Survivors Justice and Reconstruction Movement. This will take time and education: It can begin by putting out joint statements, coordinating relief activities where possible, agreeing to related satellite officesnsuch as proposed by the Community Labor United for Jackson, Ms., Lake Charles, La., Baton Rouge, La., and Houston, Texas. 2. Gulf Coast Survivors Justice and Reconstruction Councils should be formed among groupings of Gulf Coast evacuees in the various cities throughout the country with elected representatives to a Gulf Coast Survivors Reconstruction Assembly that would decide demands and direction for the movement. 3. The Gulf Coast Survivors Justice and Reconstruction Movement would help to organize and reconnect the dispersed masses from the region into a representative body that acts somewhat as their provisional government to deal with questions regarding the future of their communities, the blatant neglect of the U.S. government in dealing with the national and international campaign, and particulars related to the reconstruction and redress of the Gulf Coast Survivors and their communities. 4. The Survivors Justice and Reconstruction Movement needs to have a Gulf Coast Survivors Support Network connecting supporters, technical resources, fund-raising and allies throughout the country and internationally. Gulf Coast Survivors and supporters must act now! It is very important that activity begin immediately to set the political tone of the movement. Otherwise, the tone wi1l be set and dominated by the U.S. government and corporate media, who don't want the struggle to go beyond disaster relief and "recovery." The U.S. spin doctors have already begun their work. There is an attempt to place major blame on the local government of New Orleans. The firing of the FEMA director seeks to give the impression that the "wrong" man was in charge. A Gulf Coast Survivors Justice and Reconstruction Petition to the UN should be launched to get Survivors throughout the country to sign. This will begin political intervention among Survivors throughout the country. This could also help in the process or organizing Survivor Councils. Press conferences and rallies could be organized. A Right of Return Committee should be organized and headed by a prominent African American activist figure to begin promoting a campaign for the right of a speedy return of the Gulf Coast Survivors to their communities. This committee could have regional coordinators and should be formed and publicly announced immediately. A UN Petition and Right of Return Committee and campaign would give the Gulf Coast Survivors movement an immediate focus and sense of movement beyond emergency relief. Some of the demands that must be included in this movement include: * The right to return of the people of the Gulf Coast region; * Open up area military bases for no-cost temporary housing to begin moving survivors back into the region; * Extended unemployment and emergency financial relief based on a living wage for all Katrina Survivors until they are returned to their homes and jobs; *A People's Referendum on all decisions affecting the politic and residential issues of the Gulf Coast Survivors; * Establish a public workers' program funded by the federal government and the big corporations to rebuild New Orleans and the affected Gulf Coast region; * Employ the survivors at a living wage as required by the Davis-Bacon Act to work on cleanup and reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, with the right to organize unions; * That major contracts for cleanup and reconstruction of New Orleans Slack and working class communities be allocated to Black contractors; * That the U.S. immediately allow other countries to provide aid to the survivors; * That the United Nations conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Katrina disaster to determine if the U.S. is guilty of human rights violations; * That everyone suffering property damage and destruction, dislocation, death and illness, including emotional and psychological, receive reparations from the U.S. government as victims of a racist act of placing Black majority cities and communities in imminent danger; * Issue a massive bankruptcy executive order for Gulf Coast Survivors forgiving all debt of property lost or destroyed by the disaster; * That the U.S. government take immediate steps to protect people from price-gouging at the gas pumps and profiteering by the big oil companies, including the release of additional oil from the U.S. Strategic Oil Reserve; * Amnesty for all Survivors charged with "crimes of survival" such as "looting," taking vehicles, etc., and acts of self-defense against vigilantes and police brutality; * End wars and occupations in the Middle East, bring the troops home now; * Cut the U.S. military budget and reallocate finances to deal with state and local programs to address social and environmental needs that threaten the lives, safety, health and communities of African American and other working class ethnic populations; * The immediate impeachment of George Bush for his role in the U.S. government in placing people's lives in imminent danger and thereby committing crimes against humanity. The political movement must be organized nationally. The progressive organizations of every political tendency and humanitarian expression should be able to support this movement. However, it is very important and politically necessary to give it its proper anti-imperialist character, that it be led by a national Black united front, in terms of shaping and putting forward its main political demands and representing it at the national and international levels. We must be careful while insuring the presence, politics and leadership of the African - American working class and liberation movement forces, not to narrow the scope and content of the struggle to try and fit a particular ideological perspective. The African American liberation movement forces must help to build a mass movement and work inside of it to try to influence it in a more conscious anti-imperialist direction. There will be multiple responses from progressive forces representing various classes, ideological, political and religious tendencies and social movements. Many will be small groups seeking foundation grants to help in their efforts. They must be careful not to allow competition for funding to create tensions among them. Differences among the progressive forces should be struggled around in a non-antagonistic manner. Instead of abstract and sectarian polemics and arguments at mass meetings, there must be an effort to out-organize opportunist elements who see using this disaster to win favor and reposition themselves with the Democratic and Republican parties or with sections of the corporate class by promoting their image as big contributors to the Katrina Survivors. We must also discourage efforts to create sole dependence on cult-of-the-personality "saviors," political or religious or liberal and paternalistic dominated groups, however well meaning, to solve the problems for the Survivors or to speak on their behalf. This is why irs so important to have Black worker leadership playa major role in helping to organize and promote this struggle in the broad anti-war and African American liberation coalitions. We must make this tragedy and the struggle for Gulf Coast justice a major projection and demand of the anti-war movement and demonstrations, not only in the U.S. but internationally. Survivors must speak at anti·war activities throughout the U.S. and internationally. Likewise, the major African American mobilizations like the Millions More Movement must project this struggle as a major demand of the African American liberation movement. The U.S. Congressional Black Caucus must help make this struggle a centerpiece of the Congress. This human tragedy must be used to organize and mobilize millions of people to challenge the U.S. system of racist national, working class and women's oppression and to build international solidarity against the forces of U.S. and world imperialism who profit from this oppression. The writer is chairperson of Black Workers For Justice and a co-convenor of the Million Worker March Movement in the South.

Author:  Jeremy Scahill Date Published:  09/23/2005 Link:  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/23/1338246

In this week's cover story in The Nation, Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill reports on how mercenaries from private security firms like Blackwater USA and BATS are patrolling the streets in New Orleans. [includes rush transcript]

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In his article in The Nation, Jeremy Scahill writes:

"As business leaders and government officials talk openly of changing the demographics of what was one of the most culturally vibrant of America's cities, mercenaries from companies like DynCorp, Intercon, American Security Group, Blackhawk, Wackenhut and an Israeli company called Instinctive Shooting International (ISI) are fanning out to guard private businesses and homes, as well as government projects and institutions. Within two weeks of the hurricane, the number of private security companies registered in Louisiana jumped from 185 to 235. Some, like Blackwater, are under federal contract. Others have been hired by the wealthy elite"

• Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! correspondent.
  - Read Jeremy Scahill's article: "Blackwater Down"

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RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, can you talk about the security scene that is enforcing what Naomi Klein has just described to us?

JEREMY SCAHILL: One of the things that I think is really important to point out is that the very forces that Naomi’s talking about that are now trying to implement these sort of austerity measures in some ways and then these policies that target the poor. The forces that are implementing these policies are being backed up now by the very forces that we see operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. You have the U.S. military, of course and the National Guard and there’s an enormous number – It seems like everyone with a badge and gun is now descending on New Orleans. But you also have these private security companies like Blackwater. We have talked extensively about the role of Blackwater in New Orleans here on Democracy Now!.

I think we have to view this in the context of what we have seen for decades, in U.S. foreign policy and that is the hidden hand of the free market and the corporate elite, and then the iron fist of military force. So, these measures are being backed up by these private security firms. One of the people who’s brought in private security companies is a powerful businessman by the name of James Reese. He lives in the wealthy, elite, gated community of Audubon Place. They have the only privately owned street in the city of New Orleans. Well, he brought in a company called Instinctive Shooting International, which is an Israeli firm, and it's actually owned and operated by a guy who lives in New Jersey and has had contracts to train New York City police officers, but he is an Israeli martial arts expert.

This is part of a bigger trend of outsourcing the training of homeland security to Israeli firms. He brought in these Israeli paramilitaries one of whom bragged to me about having been involved with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. They're standing there in front of the Audubon Place community. I went up and talked to them, and one of the guys said to me, we fight the Palestinians all day every day of our lives, and then tapping on his M-16, he said, most Americans, when they see this, they get scared. It’s enough to scare them away. But a lot of Americans, I think, would be shocked to know there are Israeli paramilitaries patrolling the streets of a U.S. city.

But what's more significant is who James Reese is, the man who brought them in. He serves in Mayor Ray Nagin's administration. He also runs a powerful business lobby, and Naomi has talked about him as well. He also was quoted openly in the Wall Street Journal saying he doesn't want black people or poor people to return to New Orleans. These kinds of sentiments are then being backed up by these military and paramilitary forces. Blackwater is also a very interesting case. They got a lucrative $400,000 contract from the federal government to provide security for FEMA reconstruction projects.

The head of Blackwater, the founder, is a man named Eric Prince. He is a mega-billionaire from Michigan. His father was a close friend of Gary Bauer. His father helped to found the Family Research Council. His sister, Betsy, is married to Dick DeVos, who is going to be the gubernatorial candidate of the Republican Party in the state of Michigan. He, Dick DeVos, is the son of Richard DeVos, the founder of Amway, the greatest benefactor in the history of the Republican Party, the man who largely funded the Republican revolution in 1994, this Christian fundamentalist corporation, Amway. So he comes from a powerful Michigan family. He has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican Party. He started this firm Blackwater Security. He himself is a former navy S.E.A.L. He staffs it with people he describes as patriots, although, it’s interesting, they have been doing recruiting in Chile, hiring men who were trained under Augusto Pinochet's regime. So these forces are now – there are about two hundred of them – in New Orleans right now. One hundred and sixty-four of them are on a no-bid federal contract with FEMA to provide protection for these sites. This is part of a bigger push by these paramilitary firms to gain contracts here in the United States. For instance, Blackwater seized on the fact that four of their employees were killed in Fallujah in March of 2004. Eric Prince viewed this as a profit moment. So, what he did is hired –

AMY GOODMAN: This is that horrible moment –

JEREMY SCAHILL: Where we saw the charred bodies. They were hanged, and it resulted in the massive U.S. onslaught against Fallujah that resulted in tens of thousands of people having to flee the city, scores of people being killed, innocent civilians. Of course, now Fallujah has become an international symbol of resistance against the U.S. occupation in Iraq. Well after these four Blackwater mercenaries were killed in Fallujah and then their bodies mutilated and hung from a bridge, Eric Prince hired the Alexander Group which is a powerful Republican lobby firm tied to House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, and then hired a former C.I.A. Department of – C.I.A., State department official, named Coffer Black, to help promote their cause in Washington. I

In fact, just as the hurricane was hitting, another high-level person from the Pentagon was hired by the Prince Group, the parent company of Blackwater, Joseph Schmitz. He had just resigned as the Inspector General of the Pentagon. He himself was involved with numerous scandals. So he is then brought on board, and then they get this contract. What's interesting is that when I spoke to the Blackwater mercenaries in New Orleans, they said clearly, we're here on a Department of Homeland Security contract.

That was denied by the Department of Homeland Security. One them showed me a badge, said he had been deputized by the Governor of the State of Louisiana. That was then denied. Well, after this report came out, and it went all over the web, and we talked about it on Democracy Now!, the response was tremendous.

Blackwater was then under siege from reporters confronting them with this, and they were forced to admit and so was the federal government, that in fact, Blackwater was on the Department of Homeland Security contract and that, in fact, they did operate with a letter from the Governor of the State of Louisiana, authorizing them to carry loaded weapons. So they're patrolling in unmarked cars around the streets, and they said that they were confronting criminals and stopping looters.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You actually interviewed some who claimed to have been involved in shootouts and to have actually shot people?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right, and this is something that really underscores the danger of having these kinds of private security forces on the streets. I was – I walked down to a hotel on the corner of Bourbon and Canal in the French Quarter called the Astor Crown Plaza. It's a five star hotel operated by one of the wealthiest businesspeople in the state of Louisiana, a man named F. Patrick Quinn III. He is married to Republican State Senator, Julie Quinn. They are a powerful Louisiana Republican family. He is the owner of the largest hotel chain in the state of Louisiana, and is a powerhouse hotel owner in the South, in general.

I was talking to his head of security, a guy named Michael Montgomery. He told me he was with a company based in Alabama called Body Guard and Tactical Security. Actually, Juan, when I was talking to him, he – I said that I was from New York, and he said, “Oh, I was in New York once.” I said, “Oh, yeah?” He said, “I was there for the New York Daily News strike,” and I naively thought somehow that he was an employee, that he had been an employee of the Daily News and I said, “My colleague and friend, Juan Gonzalez, was one of the leaders of that strike. He goes, “Oh, I know Juan Gonzalez. I spiked his car.” I said, what do you mean? He goes, “I was working security there, and we spiked about forty Daily News employees’ cars at La Guardia airport. He said he put sugar in the gas tanks of the car. So that was my introduction to the guy. So we start talking, and then I asked him, well –

JUAN GONZALEZ: So you solved the riddle of that big repair bill I had back in 1990.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, what's interesting, Juan, is you could send it to the BATS Company, Bodyguard And Tactical Security, except they don't exist. I talked to the Secretary of State offices in Alabama and Louisiana. There's no company called BATS registered. They were wearing uniforms that said Bodyguard and Tactical Security. So as I talked to him, this representative from the phantom company hired by a powerful Republican businessman, married to a Republican State Senator, a major donor to the Republican party and the Bush-Cheney campaign, operator of a five star hotel, that’s, he said, under consideration for lucrative FEMA contract to house their workers, it's interesting, because the hotel remains pretty much empty. There are no FEMA workers coming in there.

But as I talked to this man who said that he had spiked your car, he told me a very scary story, that I think is the source for potential litigation against these private security firms. Michael Montgomery, the head of BATS, said that on the second night he was in New Orleans he was going to pick up one of Mr. Quinn's associates. They got stopped in the ninth ward. He said they came under fire from a group of people on an overpass that he described as black gang bangers. He said, “At the time I was on the phone with my business partner.” I said, “What did you do then?” He said, “I dropped the phone and opened fire.” I said, “With what kind of weapons?” – “AR-15 assault rifles and Glock 9's.” Fired up at the people he described as black gang bangers on this bridge. I said, “Then what happened? Did you kill them?” He said, “Well, let's just put it this way, I heard a lot of moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. Enough said.”

Well then he said that the Army came and responded to the incident, surrounded them and thought that “we were the enemy.” That's how he said it. He said, “I then explained to the Army soldiers that we were security. They didn't care. They didn't file a report. They left.” Five minutes later, Louisiana State Troopers come. They ask what happened. He explains the story to them. They then ask him, “How do we get out of the city.”

So this is the climate of impunity. This man – and as Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights points out, how do we know that he was fired upon? How do we know what that incident was? Why wouldn't law enforcement file any kind of report on a shootout in which this guy is openly bragging to having shot up a bunch of people he described as black gang bangers on an overpass?

So if I, as an investigative journalist, cannot track down this company, what if you were one of the people who was shot and wounded by this guy? What if you are the family member of someone who was killed by him and you cannot trace down this company? In fact, the Louisiana agency that governs and licenses private security firms, when I talked to them, they were furious, and they say that they are going to be serving papers on him today to cease and desist operating as a security officer in the State of Louisiana.

What's key is that he was hired by Patrick Quinn. Patrick Quinn is liable for the torts of his employees. So if this man, in fact, did shoot up a bunch of people, Patrick Quinn, this wealthy, powerful businessman is also responsible for it. What's interesting is that Patrick Quinn, bringing in an apparently unlicensed company to provide security, is that while you have shelters teeming with people desperate for work, Patrick Quinn is bringing in Mexican workers from Texas to clean out his hotel, and because of Davis-Bacon, they don’t have to pay them – because of the wipe out of the Davis-Bacon Act, they don't have to pay them livable wages. So that’s why they don't want to go in and hire, for instance, African-American men and women to come and clean the hotel, because that gives them jobs and keeps them in the community. Instead, you bring in cheap labor from Texas, Mexicans piled on the back of a truck.

AMY GOODMAN: Soon after you did your piece, Jeremy, on Blackwater, when you first got down to New Orleans, and we posted it on the website, we started to get letters and email. There's an email petition of Blackwater employees. Describe it.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, the Blackwater employees and families have initiated a petition against me. What's interesting is that they don't take issue with any of the facts that I have reported. They take issue with the fact that I quote one of the Blackwater employees complaining that he's only getting paid $350 because normally, they get $1,000 or more –

AMY GOODMAN: A day.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right, a day. They say they're just trying to provide for their families and put food on the table. These guys are making $1,000-plus a day in Iraq and have all sorts of tax breaks. Well, now they're complaining of only getting $350 a day.

The letter, this petition goes on to talk about how they're like any computer programmer or any auto worker. What's interesting is – I don't know about you, but I have never met an auto worker who makes $1,000 a day.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, you can describe how this security scene that Jeremy is describing on the streets of New Orleans fits in to your assessment of purging the poor?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, Amy, I think what it really underscores is the violence of the economic project itself. I mean, what we are talking about is a wrenching process of uprooting hundreds of thousands of people, who are deeply rooted culturally, historically, economically, in the city of New Orleans. New Orleans is a city with a rich radical history, and people aren’t going to accept this without a fight. That's why the radical gentrifiers of New Orleans are arriving with their own private armies.

You know, I was talking about this with Jeremy yesterday. It's almost like a kind of yuppy sci-fi version of old-school colonial warfare. It's like the military industrial complex has been replaced by the mercenary condominium complex. Because, what we are talking about here, the characters that Jeremy is describing like Quinn and Reese, these are the key land developers in New Orleans. They are the ones who are hiring these mercenaries to be the muscle behind the projects. So, I think that that is really the message.

But there's something else at play. You hear these names like Blackwater and then on the contracting side, the people getting the job to rebuild New Orleans are Bechtel, Halliburton, Fluor. These are the same companies that are in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they arrived very, very quickly, and the reason they arrived so quickly is because reconstruction now is a standing multi-billion dollar industry, global industry. Whenever there is a war or natural disaster, they move in instantly, often with pre-signed contracts.

You know, we were all in New Orleans, and I think, you know, that city needs a lot of things. It needs pumps. It needs affordable housing. It needs water, and it needs electricity, but I didn't see any shortage of law enforcement. As Jeremy said, you know, everybody with a badge and gun is there. So, the presence of these privatized police forces, I think is more ideological than it is anything else. Ideology is really driving the reconstruction project, and if you listen to what's being said by groups like the Republican Study Committee, they're very clear about this.

They talk in the language of experimentation. They talk, like Ted said, “Bringing free market ideas to the disaster zone is white hot right now.” Treasury secretary, John Snow, said, you know, “This is a time for all sorts of experiments.” It's almost like they're putting on lab coats and seeing this area of massive humanitarian devastation as a place where they can vindicate their ideology. Their ideology, you know, suffered a pretty serious blow by the disaster itself.

I mean, there was talk in the first couple of days after the levees broke, that this was going to be for neoconservativism what the fall of the Berlin wall was for communism. That this was itself this incredibly graphic, damning event for the ideology of privatization, and Harry Belafonte, the other night, you know, he had a great quote at the fund-raiser organized by Wynton Marsalis where he said “This was the result of a political authority that subcontracts its responsibility to the private sector and abdicates responsibility altogether,” but of course what Jeremy is describing is a radical abdication, further abdication in response to the disaster.

What I saw when I was in New Orleans was really the emergence of an absolutely unmasked corporate military state. Now, I know these sound like buzz words, but I'll give you an example. One of the images that's really stuck in my mind is the conversion of a huge Wal-Mart into a military base in downtown New Orleans. They call it Camp Wal-Mart. So here you have – and we even hear people suggesting that Wal-Mart should replace FEMA at running disaster response.

Another example of this is: There's a building in Baton Rouge, which is the Capital Annex, which is attached to the state legislature. It's where a lot of the government offices are located. Well, after the flood, the state – the Capital Annex building was opened up to many of the business groups that we have been discussing.

So, now, you have in that building, a complete merger of government interests. You have got the Mayor's office working out of that building. You have the state legislature working out of that building, but you also have James Reese's business association. You also have Greater New Orleans, Inc., which is a private lobby group representing everyone from Shell and Chevron to Coca-Cola, in that building. Then you have the Association of Conventions and Tourism, which is another private business group in that building.

Every morning – I was told this by the Assistant Secretary of Economic Development for Louisiana, he said, every morning there's an 8:30 meeting where seven to ten people from government and business sit down and plan the reconstruction of New Orleans. So, it is literally the merger – completely unmasked – of corporate and state interests. There's no distinction. No, they're not inviting the Teacher's Union to be at these meetings. They're not inviting housing rights activists to be at the meetings. You even see this in the repopulation plans for this city.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Naomi, if I can just interrupt, because we have to cut this segment off, I'd like to ask Jeremy, any final remarks?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Senator Barak Obama has questioned giving this $400,000 contract to the Blackwater security firm. I think that's a question that people need to be posing to their officials, because Congress could move swiftly to cut the welfare chain off for these private security firms, and it's something concrete that people can do right now as we look at the reconstruction of New Orleans, is to insure that as people do try to come back and rebuild their communities, that they don't have to face down the very paramilitary thugs that are killing people in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, Naomi Klein, thanks so much for being with us. This is Democracy Now!

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Author:  Catherine Jones Date Published:  10/25/2005 Link:  http://www.floodlines.blogspot.com/

A post-Katrina blog which I'm cautiously restarting, mostly as a testament to the increasing complexity of life in this city, as well as an homage to the thousands of unsung people who are pouring their hearts and souls into fighting for justice and equality as we rebuild.

Monday, November 28, 2005
Photos

here's a link to the first set of photos i took... pardon the awkwardness with my new digital camera :) http://www.flickr.com/photos/33985017@N00/sets/1469457/

posted by catherine at 8:26 PM

Friday, November 25, 2005
Sometimes things do go right

Every day for the past few months, I've seen people's stuff out on the street. Every day. Sofas, photographs, laundry, musical instruments; I'm sure you're sick of me talking about it. Sometimes, the stuff is all soggy and moldy and turned inside-out and you know it got flooded out with everything else. Lots of times, though, everything is intact and there's a big "For Rent" sign in front of the house, and I wonder.

A few weeks after I got back, it was a beautiful Saturday and lots of people had started returning to my neighborhood to clean out their houses. In less than an hour, I'd talked to three different people who had all gotten evicted by their landlords. One landlord even told her tenant, an older Black gentleman who'd been living in the place for 15 years, and doing all the renovations for free (!), that she wanted him out so she could make more money.

"That's cold," he told me. "Where does she think I'm gonna go?" He ended up moving to Baton Rouge; he says there's nothing for him here anymore.

We keep hearing stories of people coming back to find all their stuff out on the street with no notice at all. The 73-year-old neighbor of some friends in Treme who went out of town one night and came back to find everything thrown, shattered, into the street. He ended up setting up a camp on the curb outside his house because he had nowhere else to go, and that night the temperatures started dropping. Cold, cold, cold.

Until very recently, there were hardly any tenant protections in New Orleans, and people were reluctant to fight evictions anyway, because they didn't know if it was worth the hassle. One of my neighbors said he wasn't going to fight his landlord in court even if he was in the right, because he couldn't afford a lawyer, and didn't know where to find one, and wasn't sure he'd win anyway, and it still didn't resolve the fact that he needed to find someplace new to live.

Sometimes, though, things do go right.

A few days ago, team of lawyers from the People's Hurricane Fund and New Orleans Legal Assistance (NOLAC), as well as other groups, won a major victory that now makes it impossible for Katrina survivors to get evicted without adequate due process. They will be mailed eviction notices and their trials can't even be scheduled until 45 days later. And FEMA is obligated to provide information to protect survivors.

Wow!

And then, the next day, FEMA, after tremendous public outcry from evacuees in hotels around the country, pushed back its deadline for evacuees to move out of FEMA-subsidized hotel rooms, giving people breathing room to look for a place until January 7.

These are 2 major victories! And they wouldn't have happened without people organizing together to improve their conditions: hurricane survivors and grassroots organizations creating a strong voice to demand real justice and accountability. What potential we have in this moment, I keep thinking.

Let's keep our voices up, y'all: right now it may be all we've got.

posted by catherine at 12:02 PM

Wednesday, November 23, 2005
The camera, the love and the recipes

Yesterday I got back from Washington, DC. It was the first time I'd left Louisiana since I'd returned here, about five days after the storm. I was strangely apprehensive about leaving. I know this storm has made us weird down here: I am used to people cooking huge pots of red beans for strangers on the neutral ground; I am not used to eight different kinds of toothpaste in Walgreens. What would it mean for me, I wondered, to go to a place where people take the subway to work, and don't talk to each other, and then go home, or maybe stop for groceries or a beer on the way? Could I function in a place that wasn't so marked, as we are here, by such deep collective grief?

And of course I had those moments of culture shock: looking at my friend's enormous pile of junk mail in her entryway; being amazed that I could recycle my Arizona tea can at a party; getting snapped at by a shopworker when I pocketed a tiny perfume bottle that I'd really assumed was free. (In New Orleans right now, you can find huge crates of bottled water, and dry food, and hot meals, and cleaning supplies, and toiletries, and blankets and coats and pants and baby clothes and diapers, almost anywhere. I kind of forgot that in the real world, if there's stuff in a big bin, you can't just walk up and take it.)

And of course there were all those reminders that DC is a functioning city: garbage, for example, does not consist of furniture and electrical wire and sheetrock and decaying animals. It can fit into cans that people organize neatly on their curbs. And it doesn't get picked up by tractors and bulldozers, but by garbage trucks. And every single billboard has an advertisement on it. And every single streetlight works, and the mail comes, and there are no 1-800-GOT-JUNK? signs on the telephone poles, and the power lines don't lean down over the sidewalks like nooses. But I knew about all that. I had been expecting it, and it was somehow less weird than I'd thought it would be to see so much intact-ness.

Here's what I wasn't expecting: the love, the camera, or the recipes.

I'd decided to take a train, partially because it was so much cheaper than flying, and partially because I wanted to look out a window for 24 hours and watch the land change. I had all these visions of myself sitting alone on a train gazing out of a window for hours and hours, not doing anything, not thinking anything. I knew it would be exactly what I needed.

Here's what really happened on the train: 20 minutes after pulling out of New Orleans, my whole car started talking. Everybody. About the storm, obviously: it's become a sort of dysfunctional security blanket for us. It gives us definition and purpose. We don't go anywhere without it, tucked, barely visible, into our back pockets.

But not only about the storm, not only about houses, jobs, relatives, schools. Not only about jail and being evicted and not being able to find the doctor. No, not only about those things. We talked about grandparents, holidays, the games we used to play as kids. We talked about cooking for about three hours. We got into arguments about how long it takes to learn how to make good red beans. A 23-year-old cook was going back to Pittsburgh, where his fiance' and three-week-old son were waiting for him. He'd found a job in Pittsburgh restaurant, where he'd convinced them to let him cook "real New Orleans" food. Now the restaurant is making all kinds of money.

"Yes, indeed," the 90-year-old great-aunt across the aisle kept saying. "Yes, indeed. But I bet it's cold up there."

"Baby, it's cold everywhere," the old man said in front of her, buried in his jacket.

Once people found out I was in medical school, that was it. "Congratulations!" people told me. The seat next to me was never empty again. "But I'm not a doctor yet," I kept saying over and over again."I don't care, baby!" everybody said as they showed me their rashes, told me about allergies and headaches.

Then I started speaking in Spanish with a construction worker from Panama. He had gotten on the train with paint still drying on his clothes. He was going up to Atlanta to get his truck and his five roommates to come down here to work. After that all the Spanish speakers on the train made a little corner in the lounge car. Deep into the night we drank hot chocolate and talked about food and kids and immigration policy and how to fix cars.

No alone-time on that train. That was ok. Privacy might be nice sometime, but I guess now's the time for us to be together. "This is what's happening to me now," I thought, surrounded on that train by so many beautiful people. "I am so, so grateful." --

The reason I went to DC in the first place was to meet with other national leaders of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA), a joyously progressive and dynamic group of medical students from across the country. I was really apprehensive about the meeting, because I'm so aware, even back in New Orleans, of how much my own capacity for doing work has shrunk in the past few months. I was worried about being around people who can function at a really high level. (And if you think medical students in general are super-high-functioning, try spending some time with these brilliant, committed, activist medical students. Whoa.) Energy is dizzying to me these days. I was worried I wouldn't be able to keep up with folks, and that people might think I was a slacker.

But then I got there, and spent the next few days being crushed in all these enormous hugs the AMSA people are sort of famous for. There is so much love among these folks. And so much commitment to social justice.

And here's what else: AMSA is serious. They are totally committed. We spent a huge part of the time there talking about how to be strategic about ending healthcare disparities based on race. This is an enormous national organization of medical students, taking on institutionalized racism in the healthcare system as a number-one priority! That's huge!

I spent so many moments, maybe while I should have been trying to catch up (!), looking at all these people who are doing so much amazing work, and thinking, "if this is the future of medicine, we might have a chance."

At the end, they gave me a digital camera.

A digital camera!!

I'd been talking to someone about how I usually hate cameras, how I feel like they interfere with memory and how they have the capacity to intrude upon the lives of the people you're filming; but how right now I feel like I really need one. I feel this huge sense of responsibility to communicate to people what's really happening here, and I think I need to be taking pictures. The next thing I knew, Wanda and Rachel had organized with all the other national leaders to collect money... and they got me a camera!!

Nothing like that kind of gift to keep you accountable. Expect pictures soon.

posted by catherine at 9:56 AM

Wednesday, November 16, 2005
No Losing Us

Today my mother called me to say that a family friend, a well-respected doctor, had killed himself last night. He had lost most of his patients after the storm and was struggling to rebuild his practice. Everyone knew he was depressed. I played with his kids when I was little: I remember rolling Hot Wheels through their kitchen, grabbing CapriSuns from their overflowing pantry. He hung himself in their house. All those closets we used to play hide-and-seek in.

He hung himself. After my mom told me that I couldn't breathe. I sat down on someone's pale blue steps in the middle of Dauphine Street and I couldn't even cry.

He was a good person and a good doctor. He will be missed.

Fittingly, perhaps, I went to the All-Saints' second-line this afternoon. Irvin Mayfield was playing trumpet and, as expected, lots of tourists and media showed up. At the beginning I had that "where are all the locals?" feeling that still marks so many of our cultural events. Where were we, in the midst of all those TV cameras? There are so many cameras marking our lives these days, it is hard to tell where we are sometimes. It was a little too much for me. I went into the St Louis No.1 and walked alone among the graves, the evening sun turning all those decaying tombstones silver.

Then the music started and I walked back out onto Basin Street and then I could see us. There we were! Suddenly I felt so silly: there is no losing us, even amongst all these strangers.

There is no losing us.

The sun hung low over the empty Iberville projects and the St Louis No.1, and the music started, and all the New Orleans people started dancing like we have for centuries. The way we move our feet, even the streets know it's us.

Here are my people: Mostly, we are not the ones with video cameras. We are not wearing Mardi Gras beads. We are not the ones not dancing. We do not say to each other, "Irvin Mayfield is a really good trumpeter." We do not say, "Such a shame, all the devastation," or "Martha will be so sorry she missed this."

Here are my people: the ones who did not have time to change after work. The ones who have come to the second-line in coveralls and scrubs, and chambermaids' dresses and hardhats, and Burger King T-shirts and security-guards' uniforms and cook's pants and even some people in all-white haz-mat suits. The ones who are back, the ones who never left, the ones who are here. The mothers carrying babies and groceries. The friends embracing wildly on corners saying, "how'd y'all make out?"

This is what we say to each other:
"I didn't get any water but my mama, she got about six feet of water."
"Girl, I never thought I'd see you here!! I thought y'all went to Dallas!"
"Everybody's over by my sister's house and she about to kill us all."
"I lost my house and my job but I'm ok. How you doing?"
"Baby, this is my first second line since the storm. I'm all right!"

Here are my people: the ones shivering on this first cold day; we are the ones who bundle up when it becomes 54 degrees out. We are the ones drinking '40's out of paper bags, the ones who know all the words to all the songs, the ones who know how to dance and walk at the same time. The old people pushing walkers and still keeping time!

Did I say there is no losing us? Even amongst all those strangers, all those cameras, all that water? Even amid all that distance? Even though we have been scattered to the four corners of this huge planet, even though I have seen so many of you for the last time? Did I say there is no losing us? Even with everybody's baby pictures decaying on the neutral ground, and all our refrigerators standing out on the curb with the magnets still on them, and all the trophies and trumpets and graduation suits warped and stiff and moldy, piled on sidewalks for miles and miles and miles?

Did I say there is no losing us? Did I say it?

Look around you. Listen. Here we are. We are everywhere. We are even in the air we breathe.

posted by catherine at 5:47 PM

Monday, November 14, 2005
How we hold each other, and how we don't

I had another amnesia moment today, in the Walgreens on Decatur Street. I didn't realize until I got inside that it was the first time since the storm that I'd been inside a fully-stocked chain store, and I suddenly had no idea why I was there. For a long time all I could do was wander down the aisles, gazing at the neat rows of deodorants and Tylenol. Finally the manager came up to me and asked me if I was ok. I told him it was the first time I'd been a store so well organized; I was feeling mystified and trying to remember why I'd gone in.

His face softened. "Lotsa people are having that," he said, and put his hand on my shoulder. "You just let me know what you need, baby. I'm here for you." As soon as he said that I remembered: barrettes and a Sharpie marker. I started to feel a little normal again.

Right after Walgreens I went to the A&P on Royal, where some shelves are so bare you can see the rust that happened even before the hurricane. Yellow collard greens wilt onto the produce shelves; there isn't any lettuce. "This is more like it," I thought, before I even realized it.

It seems like everywhere I go, everyone's talking about the cops. Since the time I got pulled over a few days ago, I have been stopped by police two more times. Once they said they were checking the licenses of people who were driving around "in this neighborhood" and once a sheriff waved me over to the side of the road because he said I was speeding. Probably I was. Again, I didn't get a ticket. He even said something like, "I wouldn't give a ticket to a person like you."

Wow. A person like me? What on earth does this sheriff know about me, besides what I look like?

Two days before that, my friend Greg, who is Black, was arrested while he was watching the police arrest someone else, next door to the clinic in Algiers. They never told him what he was being charged with, and they took hold of his shirt collar and banged his head against the windshield of the car, again and again.

We have a patient named Mr Ross who comes to the Central City clinic every day we're there, so we can check his blood pressure, and so he can remind me to call FEMA, and so he can tell us stories of what Central City was like when he was growing up here, back in the '40s. His mother owned lots of apartment buildings in the neighborhood, and one day we were sitting on the corner and he pointed to a building a few blocks away that now has an entire wall missing, desks and bedroom sets still arranged for the whole world to see. "If my mama was alive," he said, "I would have found me some tools already, and fixed that whole place up for her. She liked to keep her places nice."

"Your pressure's amazing!" we say, every single time he comes. But he still comes every day. "Y'all are basically the only people I have to talk to anymore," he told me the other day.

Yesterday my friend Joanna was talking about how people just come up to her on the street and start talking. So many people's networks are completely disrupted, especially people who are poor. One of her neighbors said she was the first person he'd talked to in three days. He told her everything. I wonder if this is what it's like when you get older, when all your friends die and you don't have the desire or energy to build new relationships. Will we become a city of mourners, sitting alone on stoops watching other people's lives parade by? All these broken hearts we wear on our sleeves.

posted by catherine at 11:04 AM

Wednesday, November 09, 2005
This is real, and a step toward justice

I keep having conversations with people about how "surreal" everything is right now. On so many levels, it's true: we're running a free integrative medicine clinic out of a mosque; we set up other clinics in churches and parking lots and baseball diamonds; military police patrol the streets in Humvees; people have dinner in fancy restaurants like nothing ever happened. There are so many day spas open uptown! Huge parts of the 7th Ward still don't have power. My block is still lined with drowned cars and upside-down refrigerators. I spent a large part of this afternoon lugging huge vessels of water to my house so we could flush toilets; a house in my parents' neighborhood has a sign out front that says, "Cox! When can we get our cable back?" The animal rescue people are still out in full force. I really wonder what they do all day.

But I'm not sure about the word "surreal." On some level it seems like too much luxury for us to declare that ultimately this is anything but real.

Today I gave a ride to a man who had been walking all day. He walked from the Greyhound station all the way to his house in the Lower 9th ward; he looked at his house for 20 minutes, couldn't take it anymore, and walked back. Water had gotten up to the roof. The military had kicked in his front door and everything was all over the place. So many people talk about how it's one thing to come to the knowledge from far away that you've lost everything; to see it before your eyes is another thing entirely. He won't come back, he says. He will get a job in Baker, Louisiana (right outside Baton Rouge); his wife and 12-year-old daughter are in Texas, where they will stay so his daughter can finish out the school year. He only wishes he could be with them at the end of a long day. His daughter is growing up too fast.

Yesterday we went to the March on Gretna, which was organized in protest of the time during the hurricane when hundreds of weary African-American people tried to cross the Mississippi River Bridge to safety and were turned away by armed police with guard dogs. The police shot at the people and sent them back to New Orleans, which was flooding, and which had no food or water or electricity or medical care. People had to go back to the Convention Center, where they made orderly stacks of bodies in corners and on sidewalks as the people died.

Over 100 people crossed the bridge yesterday, but still I felt surrounded by ghosts. I have never been more conscious of the people who weren't there: all these families scattered to the winds, picking up new lives in Texas and Wyoming and Ohio. It seemed fitting to me that the most beautiful aspects of this march were the drivers in the opposing lanes of traffic: a driver of an 18-wheeler who couldn't stop honking, who kept yelling over and over, "I feel y'all, man! I just feel y'all!" The backs of pickup trucks full of work crews, shouting and cheering, their fists up in the air.

posted by catherine at 9:16 PM

Friday, November 04, 2005:
Littering, and what we remember

Yesterday at the clinic I had a patient who couldn't remember the name of the street he used to live on. The Times-Picayune had a big story in the Living section today about short-term memory loss. I find myself gazing at people and wondering where I've met them before. The other day, a woman drove by the clinic and said, "I can't find the Winn-Dixie anymore! I've been living in this neighborhood my whole life, and I don't even know where the grocery store is."

I remember one of my first patients ever since the storm, a woman from Chalmette who spent twelve days tied to a steeple. She says the only way she could survive was by forgetting many, many of those days. "I lost nine days of my life," she told me. "That's why I'm here now."

What does it mean that so many of us have forgotten some of the things that used to define our world; things like numbers and names and addresses, places, people? What has taken up that space in our minds? How, and why, and what, must we remember now, in order to keep surviving?

I dressed up as fire for Halloween and it was all right. People danced on Frenchmen Street until about one-thirty in the morning, when the National Guard actually tried to enforce a Last Call in this 24-hour city. On the way home from the street party, our friend L. got stopped by the police because some paper fragments of her costume fell onto the sidewalk. They were wearing pig noses and she thought they were joking. They ended up arresting her for littering and she spent that night and most of the next day in jail.

Littering! On my block there are twelve refrigerators, with contents that have been rotting since August. There are bales of electrical wire; there are heaps of sofa cushions, moldy mattresses, soggy shirts and trousers. There are warped bookshelves, their contents spilling out into the street. There are entire trees, shattered and dusty. There are broken chairs rattling on the curb like kindling. There are the bones of animals. How can anyone be arrested for littering here, in this whole desert city full of garbage?

Our other friend, M., spent most of the night trying to figure out how to get L. out of jail, a disaster even when New Orleans is functioning normally, but in this case it involved even extra questions, like, Where is jail these days? She asked about 8 cops and no one knew, since a few days ago they'd closed down the Greyhound station they had been using as a makeshift jail. After over an hour of searching, she found what they're using as jail these days, a garage in the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's building. Court is a cubicle in the garage, where thirty male prisoners, shackled at the ankles, sat on the floor awaiting their hearings. No one had seen a lawyer. Our friend L didn't have any water for almost 24 hours since she'd been in jail, even though in the court next the the judge there was a crate of Ozarka bottles. L asked the judge for one but the judge said, "Those aren't for you. Those are for the staff."

Our friend M says this experience brought home to her how the prison system doesn't only lock up its inmates, but all their loved ones too. She felt like she couldn't leave the jail at all, because maybe that would be the time they'd decide to let L out, or give out some tiny bit of information. She, too, felt captive. All that time she spent waiting for L to get out, she couldn't' read or talk on the phone or do anything. She slept and looked around a lot. All she wanted was a hot shower and some food that wasn't peanuts.

Today the thing about this Halloween arrest story that sticks with me is its ordinariness. it is not abnormal in New Orleans, especially for people who are poor or people of col