Report from the "camps" in New Orleans.

[trof]

A young friend of mine from New Orleans is staying with her parents, down the street from me. She had just bought her first house there, a cute, funky "shotgun" cottage. I don't know what neighborhood. It's gone now, anyway. She just forwarded this e-mail from a friend of hers who stayed behind.
trof

This is from a friend of mine. He stayed through the storm and aftermath and just got out.
Mary

Begin forwarded message:

From: "jordan flaherty"
Date: September 2, 2005 3:47:37 PM CDT

Thanks to all the loved ones and long-lost friends for your sweet notes of
concern, offers of housing
and support, etc. Yes, I stayed through the storm and aftermath. I’m fine
- much better off than most of my brother and sister hurricane survivors.
Below is my attempt to relay some of what I’ve seen these last few days.

Please Forward

Notes From Inside New Orleans

by Jordan Flaherty
Friday, September 2, 2005

I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I
was staying in by boat to a
helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of
federal and state officials
towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the
refugee camps.

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway,
thousands of people (at least 90%
black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades,
under an unforgiving
sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would
come through, it
would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the
barricades, and people
would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was
going. Once inside (we
were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton
Rouge, Houston,
Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus
bound for Arkansas (for
example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would
not be allowed to get
out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to
go to the shelter in
Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up,
they could not come
within 17 miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation
Army workers, National
Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give
me any details on when
buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other
information. I spoke to the
several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able
to get any information
from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of
them, from Australian tv to local
Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One
cameraman told me “as
someone who’s been here in this camp for two days, the only information I
can give you is this: get
out by nightfall. You don’t want to be here at night.”

There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up
any sort of transparent
and consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to
register contact information or find
family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone
services, treatment for
possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.

To understand the dimensions of this tragedy, its important to look at New Orleans itself.

For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed a incredible,
glorious, vital, city. A
place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70%
African-American city
where resistance to white supremacy has supported a generous, subversive and
unique culture of
vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras
Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz
Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of
art and music and
dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.

It is a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can
take two hours because you
stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where a community pulls
together when someone is in
need. It is a city of extended families and social networks filling the
gaps left by city, state and federal
governments that have abdicated their responsibility for the public welfare.
It is a city where someone
you walk past on the street not only asks how you are, they wait for an
answer.

It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New
Orleans has a population of
just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them
centered on just a few,
overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that
they don’t need to
search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting,
the attacker is shot in
revenge.

There is an atmosphere of intense hostility and distrust between much of
Black New Orleans and the
N.O. Police Department. In recent months, officers have been accused of
everything from drug
running to corruption to theft. In separate incidents, two New Orleans
police officers were recently
charged with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high
profile police killings of
unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas, which has inspired
ongoing weekly protests
for several months.

The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will
not graduate in four years.
Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child’s education and ranks 48th in
the country for lowest
teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people
drop out of Louisiana
schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any
given day. Far too
many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a
former slave
plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates
eventually die in the
prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are
are low-paying, transient,
insecure jobs in the service economy.

Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster
is one that was
constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was
the inevitable spark
igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods
left most at risk, to the
treatment of the refugees to the the media portrayal of the victims, this
disaster is shaped by race.

Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week
our political leaders have
defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina approached, our
Governor urged us to
“Pray the hurricane down” to a level two. Trapped in a building two days
after the hurricane, we
tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and tv stations, hoping
for vital news, and were told
that our governor had called for a day of prayer. As rumors and panic began
to rule, they was no
source of solid dependable information. Tuesday night, politicians and
reporters said the water level
would rise another 12 feet - instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like
wildfire, and the politicians and
media only made it worse.

While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to
get there were left
behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent
the last week demonizing
those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people in it,
this is the part of this
tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.

No sane person should classify someone who takes food from indefinitely
closed stores in a
desperate, starving city as a “looter,” but that's just what the media did
over and over again. Sheriffs
and politicians talked of having troops protect stores instead of perform
rescue operations.

Images of New Orleans’ hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into
black, out-of-control,
criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured
against loss is a greater crime
than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars
of damage and
destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus
on “welfare queens” and
“super-predators” obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the
Savings and Loan
scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being
used as a scapegoat
to cover up much larger crimes.

City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at
least the mid-1800s, its been
widely known the danger faced by flooding to New Orleans. The flood of
1927, which, like this
week’s events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural
disaster, illustrated
exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently
refused to spend the money to
protect this poor, overwhelmingly black, city. While FEMA and others warned
of the urgent impending
danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and
protect the city, the
Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund
New Orleans flood control,
and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of
global warming. And, as the
dangers rose with the floodlines, the lack of coordinated response
dramatized vividly the callous
disregard of our elected leaders.

The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped shape the elections of both a US
President and a
Governor, and ushered in the southern populist politics of Huey Long.

In the coming months, billions of dollars will likely flood into New
Orleans. This money can either be
spent to usher in a “New Deal” for the city, with public investment,
creation of stable union jobs, new
schools, cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be
“rebuilt and revitalized” to a
shell of its former self, with newer hotels, more casinos, and with chain
stores and theme parks
replacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs.

Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism,
disinvestment,
deindustrialization and corruption. Simply the damage from this pre-Katrina
hurricane will take
billions to repair.

Now that the money is flowing in, and the world’s eyes are focused on
Katrina, its vital that
progressive-minded people take this opportunity to fight for a rebuilding
with justice. New Orleans is
a special place, and we need to fight for its rebirth.


-----------------------------------------------
Jordan Flaherty is a union organizer and an editor of Left Turn Magazine
(www.leftturn.org). He is not
planning on moving out of New Orleans.

Below are some small, grassroots and New Orleans-based resources,
organizations and institutions
that will need your support in the coming months.

Social Justice:
www.jjpl.org
www.iftheycanlearn.org
www.nolaps.org
www.thepeoplesinstitute.org/
www.criticalresistance.org/index.php?name=crno_home

Cultural Resources:
www.backstreetculturalmuseum.com
www.ashecac.org/
http://198.66.50.128/gallery/
www.nolahumanrights.org
http://www.freewebs.com/ironrail/
http://www.girlgangproductions.com/

Current Info and Resources:
http://neworleans.craigslist.org/about/help/katrina_cl.html

[iconoclastic cat]

1. I posted these two earlier; btw, Baton Rouge sounds like hell, too.

Two posts:

"They'll use you for target practice" --NOPD

by not lois
Fri Sep 2nd, 2005 at 17:26:18 EDT

My friend is ALIVE!

I'm so happy, I'm shaking. He got out on Wednesday night. His words, below the fold, with a Bush quote I hadn't heard yet:

every time you blink it gets worse. evacuated sunday, early morning..we had gone to mississippi, but then learned we weren't safe there. when I heard how terrible it was going to be, I had to return to new orleans to move my cats, as I knew my 1 story house would be flooded and maybe blown to bits. I just split to drive back there, because I knew everyone would try to stop me if I told them. I moved our cats to my brother in law's larger, sturdier house in Metairie. I planned to stay with them through the storm, but was inundated with calls saying I had to go to a hotel downtown where at least there were other people and supplies. I went there sunday night, and gave the animals lots and lots of food and water, thinking maybe it would be a day or two or three or at the worst, four, before I could return to them. Monday morning around 5 am the hurricane began getting intense. They evacuated us downstairs while it raged. By late afternoon it had mostly passed, leaving tremendous destruction in the business district where I was located. Most of it was wind damage. I came out just before sunset to survey the wreckage, which was extensive, to say the least. I thought..ok, many homes will be lost and it will take a long time to clean up the incredible mess, but we're alive and life will return. I went to bed and when I woke up tuesday morning, there was six feet of floodwaters covering the cars--a rainbow sheen of gas and chemicals as far as you could see. We were trapped. All power was down and the heat was close to unbearable. If the hurricane was a category 5 on monday, it turned into a category 19 when the levy broke...that was the beginning of the end of new orleans. As the floodwaters continued to rise, it was decided that, with heavy vehicles, we might be able to relocate to another place on drier ground. Everyone was packed and brought downstairs. They made us dip our legs into buckets of iodine before walking out into the floodwaters. I was in the back of a flatbed truck, as we crossed canal street. Marshalls with pump shotguns lined the median of the roadway while looters by the hundreds on both sides of the street were dragging everything you can imagine through the broken windows and out into the river of muck. I have lived in New Orleans a long time now, and seen many poor and desperate people, also angry people and scary characters you would not want to be alone with. But THESE people were something else...I've never seen them, I don't know where they came from. They bubbled up out of the sewers. It was like Liberia--stoned kids loaded down with weapons...completely crazed. The second hotel was already infested with these looters...they were going to the various downtown hotels, breaking in to steal the liquor supply and robbing anyone they found. We had no food or water at this second hotel, so the staff went back in trucks to the first one to try to rescue our supplies there. As they left, police gave our hotel staff loaded weapons and told them to do anything to get the guests out of the city, because we would likely be killed. "They will use you for target practice" was what I was told. By some miracle, which I still can't begin to fathom, they were able to commandeer a bus to baton rouge for 55 people---no more. I made it. That was my ticket out of hell.

today, Bush was in Mobile Alabama...smile smile...chuckle.."and the good news is...and the good news is.." Later, he said (I wrote it down) "There's a lot of chaos right now on the Gulf Coast. Trent Lott's house was destroyed. But we're gonna build a new house there...a beautiful house. And I'm gonna sit on the porch."

I'm waiting to wake up--it is so horrible. I'm at my brother's in houston. I hear his infant screaming at night, and I feel like I'm listening to the sound of my own mind.

Ripple Effect: Eyewitness, Baton Rouge

I'm sitting cozy up in the Great Plains watching and hurting. Being this far away has helped me appreciate how the boulder was dropped on New Orleans, but the ripples are forming tsunami type waves soon to hit. There will be no section of these United States that will NOT be touched.

Upon receiving this email, I had to start this awareness drumbeat. I have purposely removed identifying marks from it. You'll have to just guess why I did that.

This is from a college kid. 22 years old. He's with compatriots with the same training and skillset.

Now focus on the ripple - this is Baton Rouge. Once filled up to overflowing with humanity, where will it go next?

See the extended entry for the "censored" email, and to pre-empt the question. This message was received in the past 24 hours.

yes I am still alive.
I have been doing rescue operations for the past few days and I am just getting a chance to check my personal email. I have been working around the clock, getting a few hours of sleep when I can.

THIS IS PURE HELL. The refugees are coming in by the thousands. They have nothing but the clothes on their back. We keep shoving people into shelters, making them sleep on concrete floors with no padding. The blankets and few cots we have go only to the critically ill. We are short on food, water, medicine, and fuel. At most locations, we are not even dealing with the dead bodies anymore, just pushing them out the way to reach those still alive.

Riots have broken out at many locations, even here in Baton Rouge. It is no longer safe to go to any store here in BR. Most of BR is under lockdown. Martial law is in effect for most areas. People are desperate.

I sat and listened to a man tell me that he was trying to find a gun so that he could rob a bank as soon as possibile. He felt that if law officials killed him, it would be worth it since he was trying to provide for his family mambers that were still alive.

Hostages are being taken in some locations here in Baton Rouge. Law no longer exists in New Orleans.

The news media is only getting half the story. I have seen a lot over the past few days, and I can tell you what is really going on. There is chaos at most shelters because we do not have the supplies we need.

People are willing to kill over a blanket and a warm meal. Our detachment has turned into a command center run by cadets. Think of times one thousand in terms of intensity. Civilian volunteers are coming to us because they are tired of the Red Cross people in the field not knowing what to do.

We at least have the skills to lead people, something the other agenices lack horribily. I am making life or death decisions, I am soaking in sweat, my muscles hurt, and I have others' blood on me. I am taking a break now before 50,000 more refugees get here.

I don't know how many more will come tomorrow. I am not sure when school will start again. I am not sure if I even care. My house in XXXXX survived, but many of my friends no longer have a home. Many no longer even have a hometown, it simply does not exist anymore. LSU is filled with students' families. I am not even sure who else is living in my on-campus apartment right now.

I will try to send out another email later. Right now, saving people and keeping them alive is all I really care about. I don't know what else to say. This is a nightmare.

My God, where do we go from here?

We should be collecting stories like these.

[trof]

2. Thanks for the addition.

[trof]

3. kick