Revolution #94, July 1, 2007
20 Months After Katrina...
The Crimes of the System Continue in New Orleans
“Tonight I also offer this pledge of the American people: we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again.”
George W. Bush
“Our people are dying, because they can’t come home.”
Sharon Jasper, June 6, 2007, former resident of the St. Bernard Development
On January 31, 2007, the New Orleans Police Department’s SWAT Team raided the New Day Community Center located in the St. Bernard Development, a housing project the city shut down after Hurricane Katrina. Kicking in doors and breaking through barriers, the heavily armed police arrested people inside.
For over a year, people had been fighting to reopen St. Bernard, one of the largest housing projects in New Orleans. This was part of a fight to repair and reopen public housing throughout the city. There were demonstrations, often in the face of New Orleans and Housing Authority police. Former St. Bernard residents, now living in Houston or other far-off locations, somehow made it back to their hometown to demonstrate.
Before Hurricane Katrina, there were families living in almost 5,000 public housing units in New Orleans. But rather than work to reopen pubic housing, the federal government and the Housing Authority of New Orleans have been steadily moving to demolish St. Bernard, C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper, and Lafitte, the largest projects in the city. A few weeks after the raid on the New Day Community Center, the City and the Housing Authority of New Orleans tore down the remaining panels and beams of Resurrection City—an encampment next to St. Bernard that had become a center and symbol of resistance to the government trying to prevent people from returning and rebuilding their lives.
New Orleans: An Exposed Wound
Almost two years after Katrina, much of New Orleans remains a wasteland. After the flood, poor and Black people were packed into the Superdome, living in their own feces, without food or water, in a scene that evoked the slave ships that brought African-American people to this country and that reminded people how fundamentally unchanged things are for Black people. As people all over the world watched in horror, while people died, Bush and his cohorts did nothing. And finally, when he did something, it was to put his arm around Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Director Brown, the official in charge, and uttered his famous endorsement, “Good job Brownie.”
Since Hurricane Katrina tracked its course across the Gulf and drew a bead on New Orleans, government agencies, starting at the top of the Bush administration, have clearly decided not to muster every resource available to help the city and its people. Rather, they have worked to control, suppress, and degrade the masses of people, especially Black people, in New Orleans.
For decades, even centuries, New Orleans has given rise to rich cultural expressions that have touched the hearts of people throughout the world. It is an historic city where a legacy of deep oppression of first African and then African American people—and the resistance to that oppression, dating back to the days of enslavement—have been a big part of shaping the consciousness and culture of the people who lived there. Ties of community, neighborhood, and history run deep in New Orleans. Now the people of those neighborhoods—Treme, Gentilly, New Orleans East, Uptown, 7th Ward, the world-famous Lower 9th Ward, and many others—have been scattered throughout the country.
Of this human tragedy, Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson said: "New Orleans is not going to be as Black as it was for a long time, if ever again." Louisiana Congressman Richard Baker put it more baldly: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did."
Approximately one million people were forced to flee New Orleans and southern Louisiana by Katrina, many of them driven to cities such as Houston, Dallas, and Jackson Mississippi. The federal government estimates that now 150,000 people displaced from New Orleans live just in Houston. Mayor Nagin and other political leaders claim that people are able to come back, and will be welcomed back. People want to come back. But the whole system is working to make it impossible for them to return to their homes. As of March 2007, the population of New Orleans was about 225,000—less than half what it was before Katrina.
Evacuation, Then Neglect
During the evacuation of New Orleans, countless families were torn apart, with different people sent to shelters in far-flung parts of the country, usually with little or no sense of where their loved ones were, or even if they were alive. Many people couldn’t help but think about how slave families were torn apart when family members were sold to other plantations. People spent months exhausting themselves and their resources simply trying to reunite.
Two years after Katrina, a system that can ship hundreds of thousands of troops to Iraq in weeks hasn’t been able to rebuild homes for people in New Orleans. What little housing remains or has been fixed up is unaffordable. Many of those who have struggled to return to the Gulf Coast are not able to live in New Orleans because of skyrocketing rental prices, which went up as much as 300%.
Twelve thousand households from New Orleans now live in trailer parks operated by FEMA, overwhelmingly in isolated rural areas. The trailers are often old and run down, sometimes near dump sites, and almost always far from bus routes to urban areas where there may be at least the hope of getting a job and going to school. Most of the people now living in FEMA trailers had been renting homes in New Orleans—which means they couldn't even receive the pittance of rebuilding assistance which has been promised to some home owners.
Local and county governments in places like Pascagoula, Mississippi, St. Bernard Parish, St. John the Baptist Parish, and St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana have passed laws and ordinances that either block the construction of the trailer parks or set deadlines on when they must be shut down. To this system, people driven from their homes are just a drain on local government resources. Many people forced to live in them are continually shunted around from one park to another, their kids forced to go to several schools in a single year, the parents never able to get on their feet and get a job.
A typical example of this occurred in March when FEMA agents descended on a park near Hammond, Louisiana. With absolutely no warning, they told everyone they had 48 hours to pack up and go. FEMA agents wouldn’t tell people where they were being sent. One man told the Leesville Daily Leader, “It was like shock and awe. We called it Hurricane FEMA.” A woman who was swept up and put into a different park along with her two kids said, “They took us from bad to worse. But when you have no other place to go, you have no choice.”
Even with the huge population loss suffered by New Orleans and Louisiana, the amount of uninsured people in the state has risen to over 1.2 million, according to Dr. Michael Ellis, a former president of the Louisiana State Medical Society. Charity Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the country, has been shut down since Katrina, and earlier this year Governor Blanco announced it would never reopen.
Countless people, including many thousands of children, have suffered emotionally and psychologically from the traumas of seeing bodies floating down the streets, and many witnessed their relatives die agonizing deaths. But there are few if any mental health services for people.
The school system is being systematically dismantled and privatized. Before Katrina, the New Orleans Parish school district operated 117 schools and had 78,000 students. In the fall of 2006 there were only 36,000 students in schools operated by the school district. Thirty-one of the 58 schools opened since the storm are privately run charter schools, and the rest are run by the newly created “Recovery School District,” a state of Louisiana entity intended to direct and control “under performing” New Orleans schools.
Criminalizing the People—And Treating Them as Subhuman
“When I watched the scenes of white cops confronting at gunpoint groups of mostly black residents, I flashed back to startlingly similar scenes of apartheid South Africa, where I grew up and went to school.”
From “The Storm,” by Ivor van Heerden, Deputy Director of the LSU Hurricane Center
From the very first moments after the floods swept through the city down to today, systematic and brutal repression against the people has been justified by the authorities and the media portraying New Orleans as a city in the grip of endless violence and infested by criminals and thugs.
Just two days after the flooding began, in the River Center of Baton Rouge, an early evacuation center, dozens of people expressed their anger and bitterness to a Revolution reporter at the stories then beginning to blare through the media that murderers and rapists were on the loose in the city, and that people were shooting at those who were trying to rescue them, and burning the city down. They told how heavily armed military caravans were going through the desperate city, driving by people literally fighting for their lives, ignoring and often mocking them.
Brigadier General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, said at that time, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia, we’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”
An incident on a bridge over the 17th St. Canal on September 4, 2005 concentrates what the police and military were doing in those early, desperate days. Several people were shot and killed by police, and their deaths were openly celebrated by New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass and other cops. The New Orleans Times Picayune reported that “a cheer erupted among commanders who were huddled away at ‘headquarters,’ the valet parking apron at Harrah’s Casino. When asked what the celebration was about, one captain answered, ‘We got six of them. None of our guys hurt.’”
In December 2006, a man now living in Dallas came forward to testify about what he had seen from the vantage point of a nearby rooftop. He said a van load of unmarked, un-uniformed police shot at two unarmed brothers, Lance and Ronald Madison, who were trying to cross the bridge and at another group of people also trying to get across. Ronald Madison died from seven shots in the back. Susan Bartholomew’s arm was severed from a shot gun blast. James Brissette died from multiple gun shot wounds. Nineteen-year-old Jose Holmes was shot repeatedly, including at point blank range when he lay on the bridge bleeding.
New Orleans was a poor city with one of the highest unemployment rates in the country before Katrina. Now, with the situation much worse, how can anyone be shocked that some people have been driven to desperate means to survive? But who is to blame? Who neglected the levies? Who moved the jobs? Who abandoned the housing? Who shut down the schools? The same system that now paints the victims of all this as thugs and criminals.
Restoring the Tourist Industry
During a period of intense crisis in the lives of thousands and thousands of people, when much of the city remained without power or drinkable water, when schools and hospitals remained closed, the government poured millions into protecting some property.
According to a report in the Daily Reveille of Louisiana State University, 185 million dollars, 116 million of which was paid by FEMA, was spent on restoring the New Orleans Superdome alone while much of the city still lay in ruins.
A lot of money and attention has gone into multi-billion-dollar tourist industry areas like the French Quarter and the business district—for example, 60 million into restoring the Morial Convention Center, 37 million into a new parking garage for luxury cruise boats leaving the Port of New Orleans. New Orleans was once the center of the slave trade in the South, boasting over two dozen slave auction houses. Today, vacation rentals in the French Quarter blatantly advertise rooms in the “slave quarters” of their establishments!
Earlier this year, J. Stephen Perry, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, said, “It’s almost a tale of two cities. We have some outlying post-World War 2 neighborhoods that suffered damage that is incomprehensible. But the original city areas that the tourists come to—the French Quarter, the Garden District and the Arts District—are not only intact, but look better than they did before the storm.”
It Doesn’t Have to Be This Kind of a World
While the government turned its back on the people, ordinary people were heroes. In the days, weeks, and months after Katrina, people all over the world sought ways to help. Entertainers raised money. People took in strangers. Grade schoolers around the country took up collections and sent money to New Orleans. People plunged into dangerous waters to rescue people. People broke into abandoned stores to get food, clothing and water to share so they could survive when the government didn’t give a damn about their survival. College students gave up Spring break to help clean up schools and homes.
And yet, in the richest country in the world, everything about the way the system “works,” worked against all that. One of those who went down to New Orleans after Katrina to help clean up schools and homes, wrote in the pages of this paper: “Living in the 9th Ward of New Orleans at the Common Ground volunteer center for five days was profoundly different than anything I've known. Third world conditions. War zone like destruction. Blocks and blocks of homes in ruins. From the 9th ward to upscale homes, the French Quarter to the projects. Everything is at a standstill. The government isn't doing anything and each attempt to rebuild becomes a battle.” (Thoughts on New Orleans: Seeds of a Radically Different Future, Revolution #43, by Alice Woodward).
And reflecting on her experiences, of working together with people from all around the country, from all walks of life and all kinds of perspectives, and also how the government was useless and worse, she wrote: “There in New Orleans was the seeds of a radically different future, which cannot truly come to fruition without a revolution and a radically different kind of state power. Imagine a state that would mobilize the tens of thousands of people who were angered and saddened by the hurricane and want to help. Instead of a state that murders, represses, and neglects people when disaster hits. Imagine a state that unleashes people to meet the basic needs of society without exploitation and oppression. Imagine people coming together and creating a spirit and a culture around that. Not unlike the way in which the people have managed to apply their creativity and cultivate an atmosphere down here, around struggling to rebuild the city, and help the masses of people who have been affected.”
