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Commentary - Sep 3, 2005 - Printable Version
- "Our Government is KILLING the People of New Orleans"
by Mark Faulk
As rescue efforts finally kick into high gear in New Orleans, the stories are starting to trickle out from "Ground Zero", where thousands of people are still either waiting to be evacuated, or, in some cases, asking to be allowed to stay and receive humanitarian aid in the city itself. While the major media focuses on the reported looting (which those inside of New Orleans say is mostly just desperate and hungry people looking for food, clothing, and other essential items needed to survive), and air the same ten seconds of footage of looters carrying off TVs and electronics in an endless loop (watch for the black girl in the white t-shirt who shows up every eight seconds in the CNN loop, "looting" a store in New Orleans), making it look like the entire city is rife with criminals, those remaining in the city are painting a somewhat different picture.
Articles in the Associated Press and other major publications have perpetuated the negative connotations as well, captioning photos of desperate citizens searching for food with phrases such as "A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005."
Jordan Flaherty at www.leftturn.org , who was evacuated from New Orleans on Friday, said that "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."
In an exclusive interview with Jeffrey Holmes of www.getyouracton.com , who along with fellow New Orleans resident Andrea Garland, is on their way to New Orleans in a donated van (with a layover in Austin, TX to load up on supplies for hurricane victims), another side of the story began to emerge. According to reports they are receiving from those still in New Orleans, the National Guard has one major mission - evacuate every single person from the city, whether they want to leave or not.
"At this point in time, they're more afraid of the National Guard than they are of the looters. They're not wanting to get relief efforts in - there's no logical reason for it," said Holmes. "We're leaving Austin tomorrow morning with a van full of supplies, driving through Houston, and should arrive in New Orleans early Monday morning. We're getting in one way or another."
Even though the outlook for those trapped in the city changed dramatically (for the better) this morning...finally...the questions surrounding the rescue operations remain. In a message sent out to the media on Friday morning by Garland, she describes her contact with friends still in New Orleans.
I am a resident of the Bywater in New Orleans (9th Ward). I am one of the lucky ones that was able to evacuate before the storm.
I have recently managed to speak to some friends stranded in New Orleans. They are starving and dehydrating and there is no news of when they will be receiving food and water. I have spoken to relief efforts and understand that there are plenty of supplies waiting for these people, BUT THEY ARE NOT BEING ALLOWED INTO THE CITY.
The National Guard has the city surrounded and is not letting anyone in or out, except the buses being evacuated. The excuse that they can not bring supplies into New Orleans because of the looting and gun fire is not a valid excuse - if they are too afraid to enter the streets of New Orleans, they need to be air dropping supplies into the city. If the United States is capable of sending planes that can withstand enemy fire to drop bombs in Iraq, certainly they are capable of air dropping supplies into a city where the worst of the gunfire they could encounter would be from semi-automatics.
Our government is KILLING the people of New Orleans. By witholding supplies, they are ensuring more deaths, and I hold them complicit.
Please bring this matter to the attention of the people of the United States. They need to know that New Orleans is deliberately being denied food and water. Perhaps if the people there had food and water, they might not be shooting off guns.
Please feel free to call me for further information or with any questions. I appreciate your attention to this most serious matter.
I fear for my friends.
Even the Red Cross hasn't been allowed to deliver food and water to those who were left to starve in the Superdome, the New Orleans Convention Center, on highway overpasses, and scattered across the city. This is from their website:
* Access to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.
* The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.
Read that last sentence again. "Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city." While the official response has been that it's too dangerous for volunteers to enter the city (supported by the CNN video of the black girl in the white t-shirt), the Red Cross statement suggests that federal officials were deliberately denying food and water to the victims in an attempt to force them to leave.....in effect, starving them out.
There are many who claim that this has been turned into an issue of wealth and race, and the reports coming out of New Orleans seem to support those claims.
At a benefit concert on Friday, aired live on NBC, rapper Kanye West blasted Bush for failing to protect victims of Hurricane Katrina, saying that "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
West didn't spare the media, either. "I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for food."
Michael Rivera at www.whatreallyhappened.com put it more succinctly. In a photo commentary, he posted two pictures of people trying to survive the disaster by taking food from abandoned stores, along with captions from the new services who ran the photos. The first one, of a black man, carried the caption mentioned above, "A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005", while a second photo, of two white people, said, "Two residents walk through chest-deep water after finding bread and water from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in new Orleans"
The commentary, entitled "What's the Difference Between 'Looting' and 'Finding'?", showed both photos and captions, followed by a single phrase...."Skin color."
Reports of buses being diverted from dying black victims at the Superdome to rescue white tourists at the Hyatt Regency Hotel just added to the controversy:
At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line — much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday.
"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.
In addition, while the city's more affluent hospitals were evacuated before the hurricane even hit, the city's poorest hospital, Charity Hospital, was reduced to calling the media on Thursday, begging for help that had been promised since early in the week, but never arrived. When they lost power, all of the patients on life support died. They finally began evacuating Charity and nearby University Hospital late Friday.
Flaherty suggests that the reasons for the mistrust and sporadic outbreaks of violence between victims and rescuers runs deeper then just this disaster. In his commentary, "Notes From Inside New Orleans", he says:
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.
Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment, deindustrialization and corruption.
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.
And finally, on her blog, Andrea Garland says that reports (which Holmes says are as of today unconfirmed) coming out of New Orleans suggest that even the path of the floodwaters was dictated by social class:
Also heard that part of the reason our house flooded is they dynamited part of the levee after the first section broke - they did this to prevent Uptown (the rich part of town) from being flooded. Apparently they used too much dynamite, thus flooding part of the Bywater. So now I know who is responsible for flooding my house - not Katrina, but our government.
I'll close with one more quote from Garland, one that asks just one of the hundreds of questions that surround this tragedy. Let's hope that in the coming months, America finds the answers to those questions.
"It is becoming more and more apparent that the authorities want New Orleans empty. Why? That is the million dollar question of the day."
And THAT'S the Faulking Truth.
If you would like to donate money to help the humanitarian efforts of Jeffrey Holmes and Andrea Garland, go to http://getyouracton.com/
More about the controversies surrounding Hurricane Katrina:
Read "The Blood of New Orleans....," "Hell on Earth....", and "They're Trying to Wash us Away" at:
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/blog/
"It Ain't the Big Easy- It's Dunkirk!"
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/CommentaryToo/1040.html
"Not Acceptable"
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/BlogFest/1053.html
They're Trying to Wash us Away
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/BlogFest/1052.html
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