On August 30, Yahoo front-page news showed two pictures of people wading in water carrying supplies. The caption under the picture of the Black person read: "A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans." The caption under the picture of a White couple wading through the water pulling supplies reads: "Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store." Got that? Whites "find," Blacks "loot."
MSNBC interviewed dozens of people who had managed to get out during the first few days. Every single one of them was white.
Some tourists trapped in the Monteleone Hotel pooled their funds and paid $25,000 for 10 buses to get them out. The buses were sent (there was no shortage of available buses -- why didn't the government use them?) but the military confiscated all ten of them for its own use. The tourists were not allowed to leave the city and were ordered to the Convention Center.
How simple it would have been for the government to have provided buses before the hurricane hit, and throughout the week. AMTRAK says it offered free rides out of town but that City officials never got back to them to finalize arrangements. Evacuating the 100,000 people trapped in the city should not have been that difficult. Even without AMTRAK or private cars, it would have taken at most 3,000 buses to get them out, fewer than come into Washington D.C. for some of the giant anti-war demonstrations. Even at $2,500 a pop -- highway robbery -- that would only be a total of $7.5 million for transporting out of harm's way all of those who did not have the means to leave.
The people who are poor (primarily Blacks but many poor Whites as well) who were trapped in the city as well as those thousands who were refusing to evacuate, not wanting to leave their pets or their homes and who had neither money nor places to go, were locked in the Superdome and not allowed to leave -- five days of hell. Those who survived the first dome were then -- finally! -- bussed out of the area to another stadium, the AstroDome in Houston. Call them "People of the Dome."
The Grassroots Organizing Itself
Gulf Coast resident Latosha Brown reports that the first group to send emergency supplies was TOPS, The Ordinary Peoples Society, a prison ministry in Dothan Alabama founded and staffed by ex-offenders. They organized food, pooled their money for additional goods and brought the supplies to a second organization of former prisoners in Mobile who distributed them, while they went back to Dothan for more. "That's why we tell everybody now that it was felons who were the first to feed, the first to respond to need, the first to get up and do something. They didn't wait for permission or for a contract. That's real leadership." ("Rescue Came from the Grassroots: The People, Not FEMA, Saved Themselves," by Bruce Dixon, in The Black Commentator.)
Volunteer medics established free clinics with the Common Ground Collective: www.commongroundrelief.org in defiance of governmental edicts and machine guns. Common Ground has also mobilized thousands of young people from all over the country to come to New Orleans and help with the rebuilding, while using non-toxic alternative methods of mold removal and prevention that they developed. Others, working in solidarity with tribal leaders, have created a dedicated relief effort for Native American communities: www.intuitivepath.org/relief.html. Food Not Bombs volunteers have been feeding people all over the region, with no help from the government or the Red Cross: www.foodnotbombs.net/ dollar_for_peace.html.
On the other hand, from Day One huge war profiteering corporations such as Halliburton, Bechtel and other private contractors began descending on the region, their pockets stuffed with billions of dollars in government handouts. Currently, thousands of poor homeowners and rental tenants -- including those unable to return to New Orleans just yet, having been evacuated to the far away domed stadiums -- are being evicted and their homes confiscated and torn down, says Mike Howell, who is organizing tenants to resist eviction. The phony "reconstruction" of New Orleans begins with the land grab, and with Mayor Nagin proposing gambling casinos, which he says would "rescue" the city, while destroying the remaining wetlands. Wetlands are nature's way of protecting large areas from floods; their destruction prior to Katrina contributed to the devastation of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta. The city, meanwhile, sprayed massive amounts of cancer-causing pesticides over the entire flooded areas.
Many people are resisting this blatant confiscation of their lands and homes. As the resistance grows, New Orleans may soon become known as the first battle of the new American revolution.
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Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "G", the newspaper of the NY State Greens, and the coordinator of the No Spray Coalition www.nospray.org. Write to Mitchel directly at mitchelcohen@mindspring.com. If you'd like to donate funds and be sure the money is going to a good purpose, donate to CommonGroundRelief.org .
1Blackwater, Inc. billed the federal government $950 per man, per day -- at one point raking in more than $240,000 a day. At its peak the company had about 600 contractors deployed from Texas to Mississippi, reports Jeremy Scahill in his pathbreaking book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books.
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