Project Katrina

Harry Shearer has a wonderful (even if depressing) post at the Huffington Post you should take a look at:

New Orleanians get no shortage of hortatory messages about self-reliance from other parts of the nation they thought they belonged to. So Sunday’s Times-Picayune sends the message right back. Here’s a story full of as many touchstones of self-reliance as one can bear—a Charity Hospital nurse, a widow who raised nine children, children who came to her aid when the floods struck, children who rebuilt their own home and rental properties with no government assistance. Read the journey.

Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine has a must read post at the Huffington Post. She writes in part:

Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city’s public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.

The final showdown over New Orleans public housing is playing out in dramatic fashion right now. The conflict is a classic example of the "triple shock" formula at the core of the doctrine.

• First came the shock of the original disaster: the flood and the traumatic evacuation.
• Next came the "economic shock therapy": using the window of opportunity opened up by the first shock to push through a rapid-fire attack on the city’s public services and spaces, most notably it’s homes, schools and hospitals.
• Now we see that as residents of New Orleans try to resist these attacks, they are being met with a third shock: the shock of the police baton and the Taser gun, used on the bodies of protestors outside New Orleans City Hall yesterday.

Democracy Now! has been covering this fight all week, with amazing reports from filmmakers Jacquie Soohen and Rick Rowley (Rick was arrested in the crackdown). Watch residents react to the bulldozing of their homes here. And footage from yesterday’s police crackdown and Tasering of protestors inside and outside city hall here.

So there you have it. I don’t have any words to express my anger.

In almost 400 posts here I have not written a single thing that wasn’t directly related to Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana, New Orleans, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Well I just had to mention this interview of William Gibson in Rolling Stone.

In his most recent novel, Spook Country, the story is set in the present. Kind of different for Mr. Gibson. Well we now know why. He doesn’t have to write about the future anymore because he believes the present is so much more unlikely.

If one had gone to talk to a publisher in 1977 with a scenario for a science-fiction novel that was in effect the scenario for the year 2007, nobody would buy anything like it. It’s too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science-fiction novel. But if you suggested doing them all and presenting that as an imaginary future, they’d not only show you the door, they’d probably call security.

Ouch. And he even left out our federal government allowed a major city to drown and now more then two years later not a whole lot has been done to improve the situation. I guess we ought to be worried when reality becomes more scary then fiction.

Elaborate funeral processions are an essential and historical part of the New Orleans’ culture. The impromptu processions honoring the passing of someone of distinction, especially a musician dates back hundreds of years. For many African American residents who have returned to the city this tradition offers them at least one sense of normalcy and community left from the pre-Katrina days. So you think the local government and police force would have some understanding. Well you would
be sadly mistaken:

On the evening of Oct. 1, some two dozen of New Orleans’ top brass-band players and roughly a hundred followers began a series of nightly processions for Kerwin James, a tuba player with the New Birth Brass Band who had passed away on Sept. 26. They were “bringing him down,” as it’s called, until his Saturday burial. But the bittersweet tradition that Monday night ended more bitterly than anything else—with snare drummer Derrick Tabb and his brother, trombonist Glen David Andrews, led away in handcuffs after some 20 police cars had arrived near the corner of North Robertson and St. Philip streets in New Orleans’ historic Tremé neighborhood. In the end, it looked more like the scene of a murder than misdemeanors.

“The police told us, ‘If we hear one more note, we’ll arrest the whole band,’” said Tabb a few days later, at a fundraiser to help defray the costs of James’ burial. “Well, we did stop playing,” said Andrews. “We were singing, lifting our voices to God. You gonna tell me that’s wrong too?” Drummer Ellis Joseph of the Free Agents Brass band, who was also in the procession, said, “They came in a swarm, like we had AK-47s. But we only had instruments.”

We there you have it. A traditional that before Katrina could be a tourist attraction and has been around for hundreds of years can now get you arrested. I guess it is just a matter of time till we read a story about a 65 year old man getting “stun gunned” outside Preservation Hall for playing some Louie Armstrong

"I’m gonna die in this bitch!" screams Denise, a sixth-generation New Orleanian who clings to the bed she has wedged into her hallway to ride out Hurricane Katrina. This isn’t a CNN special report to honor the two-year anniversary of the storm. It’s the fifth chapter of a 12-part non-fictional Web comic called A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, written and drawn by American Splendor illustrator Josh Neufeld. It is simply amazing. From an overview on the site:

When the levees broke, nothing was the same for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge is about escaping and surviving Hurricane Katrina–and what happens next in the lives of a cross-section of Crescent City residents. Told in webcomic form, A.D. is free and presented by SMITH Magazine.

A.D. tells the story of Katrina and its aftermath from the perspective of real people still dealing with the storm each and every day. A two-part prologue sets the scene and shows the storm, almost like a silent movie. In chapter one, we meet the people whose lives we’ll be following over the course of one year, with audio and video augmenting the comic itself on our active blog. A.D. is a nonfiction graphic novel, a new approach to storytelling, and a multifaceted peek into the personal tales emerging from the storm of the century.

This comic is well worth your time.  A more detailed analysis and/or overview with additional background is located here.

On the LiveJournal site Dispatches from Tanganyika “Docbrite” takes a post, My List of 13 Reasons Why We Are Not OK that was written on March 31, 2006, and revisits where we are today.

6. There is hardly any medical care in the city. As far as I know, only two hospitals and an emergency facility in the convention center are currently operating. Emergency room patients, even those having serious symptoms like chest pains, routinely wait eight hours or more to be seen by a doctor. We have, I believe, 600 hospital beds in a city whose population is approaching (and may have surpassed) 250,000.

More hospitals and private doctors are open for business, but the state of our medical care is still pretty dire. In a city where almost everybody is going crazy in one way or another, there’s virtually no help for mental patients, who are usually either held in emergency rooms or jailed. State Attorney General Charles Foti failed in his attempted case against Memorial Medical Center doctors and other medical personnel who stayed through the storm and were accused of euthanizing elderly patients, but Foti’s idiocy will probably drive medical personnel out of the city at a time when we desperately need them, and will certainly ensure that fewer will stay through the next storm.

Of course there are 12 more reasons which all of you should read.

Shelley Midura a New Orleans City Council member from District A wrote the following open letter to President Bush. It is thoughtful, respectful (or at least a lot more then I would be), and outlines many things that the Feds could do to help New Orleans if only the White House would listen to the elected leaders and citizens that live in New Orleans.

Dear Mr. President:

Thank you for visiting New Orleans for the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the worst federal levee-failure disaster in United States history followed by the worst federal disaster response in United States history. We’re also grateful for the $116 billion federal allocation for the Gulf Coast. That $116 billion has served you well, as your spokesmen often cite it as an indicator of your dedication to our recovery. But, it hasn’t served us as well— it’s not enough, it’s been given grudgingly, and only after our elected officials have had to fight for it. So I feel I must correct the record about you and your administration’s dedication to our recovery and implore you to take action to make things better.

Indeed, you have allocated $116 billion for the Gulf Coast, but that number is misleading. According to the Brookings Institute’s most recent Katrina Index report, at least $75 billion of it was for immediate post-storm relief. Thus only 35% of the total federal dollars allocated is for actual recovery and reconstruction. And of that recovery and reconstruction allocation, only 42% has actually been spent. In fact, while your administration touts "$116 billion" as the amount you have sent to the entire area affected by Katrina and the levee failures, the actual long term recovery dollar amount is only $14.6 billion. This amount is a mere 12% of the entire federal allocation of dollars, billions of which went to corporations such as Halliburton for immediate post-storm cleanup work, instead of to local businesses. Contrast that to the $20.9 billion on infrastructure for Iraq that the Wall Street Journal reported in May 2006 that you have spent, and it’s an astonishing 42% more than you have spent on infrastructure for the post-Katrina Gulf region. The American citizens of the Gulf region do not understand why the federal obligation to rebuilding Iraq is greater than it is for America’s Gulf coast, and more specifically for New Orleans.

Continue Reading »