PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Hurricane Katrina: Outraged and Enraged
by Mimi Yahn Monday, Nov. 14, 2005 at 8:32 PM
meemers@surfbest.net

Article that appeared in the October 2005 issue of New People. First of series by former resident of the New Orleans area.

“I wanted to ask [Bush], what did you bring us? Food? Water? Bush said he came to find out our condition. The whole world knows our condition! We need help!”—-Lance Ronsonette, a resident of Biloxi, Mississippi, on one of Bush’s public relations tours




Though Hurricane Katrina hit a great deal of the Gulf South, the story of what happened in New Orleans more closely and urgently mirrors what is happening to our nation.


Already Halliburton’s Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary has been given a $500 million contract to repair naval and marine facilities damaged by Katrina.


Already the real-estate developers and racist political “leaders” are lining up to rebuild New Orleans with gated, exclusive communities and to, in the words of one city leader, “see it done in a completely different way, demographically, geographically and politically.” According to Jordon Flaherty of Left Turn magazine, the new city envisioned by this politician will have “better services and fewer poor people.”


Already private security firms have been hired to enforce a new Jim Crow, a new wall of racial and class separation. One of the firms already patrolling the streets of New Orleans is Blackwater, a company currently providing “security” in Iraq and whose employees include former commandos trained under Pinochet.

Though I left New Orleans four years ago, a piece of my heart and soul will always remain there, waiting for my annual pilgrimage to the family reunions and rich gumbos of Carnival Season. Though I’ve known since I left that the South is not a place for me to live, I love New Orleans in a way I’ll never love anywhere else. It’s a gorgeous, sweet feeling, with a vibrant sense of place and culture so whole and unique, it will always hold a piece of my identity. It is the ancestral home of jazz, the creole queen of interracial society and the heart of so much of Black America.


I tell you this because those who haven’t lived there cannot comprehend why its inhabitants refuse to leave, why so many love it so deeply, and why it’s so vital that we, as a nation, not allow Bush & Company to get away with the premeditated, cold-blooded attempted genocidal murder of an entire city: first by holding her underwater till she drowned, and next by uprooting and eradicating one of the most unique indigenous cultures in the U.S.


And I will tell you first and foremost this is being done because of race, class and Bush’s brand of neoconservative, rapacious capitalism run utterly amok.


The story of what happened to New Orleans, and the list of crimes against humanity perpetrated by Bush against her, will one day fill many books. But to get there, we must begin documenting and publicizing what happened. Already, New Orleanians like ERACISM’s Rachel Breunlein and Abram Himelstein are gathering the oral histories to document what happened. Other activists have already established The People’s Hurricane Fund, a grass-roots, community-based group to provide reconstruction aid to low-income residents, which is demanding “right of return for the displaced of New Orleans.” Others still, like Black Panther Malik Rahim and community activist Andrea Garland, are returning to take back and organize their neighborhoods (see http://www.getyouracton.com).

What follows is the first of my small attempt to document some of what I have learned through friends who remained, friends who evacuated, and various local, national and eyewitness reports. This is not the story of something that happened far away to somebody else: This is our history, as a nation and as a progressive movement, and it is our guide to what has gone so horribly wrong in our nation and why it is we, as a nation, as a progressive movement and as human beings, who must right these wrongs.


YES, BUSH KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA and local and national emergency management officials have been generating reports and studies for decades on the probability and the results of a catastrophic Category 4 or 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans. In recent years, these studies have underlined the urgency of strengthening the aging levees, restoring vast areas of protective wetlands destroyed by pollution and the petrochemical industry, and undertaking a variety of measures to protect the New Orleans area and her people from what everyone knew would someday happen.


Bush, instead, when faced with choosing whether or not to fund the work necessary, vetoed and cut funding for every program, project and study designed to protect New Orleans, and began doing so almost from the day he took office (for more detailed information, go to http://www.swiftianreport.com/essayNOLA2.html). Bush did this knowing full well that none of the area’s levees, canals or pumping stations were built to withstand anything greater than a Category 3 hurricane.


THE DELAYS THAT KILLED PEOPLE

Bush delayed responding to the critical levee breaches that ultimately destroyed New Orleans and killed an unknown number of people. When the levees broke, the federal government made no attempt to stop the waters that flooded the city. When the floodwaters stopped rising, the federal government made no attempt to repair the levees and pump the waters out. In fact, for nearly a week, the federal government—with all its personnel, helicopters, night-vision equipment, backhoes, sandbags, concrete blocks, massive pumps and portable generators—did absolutely nothing.


Bush delayed responding to thousands of people drowning and dying of thirst. For five days, the federal government claimed they could not access the city flooded by the inundation they’d caused. Yet thousands of media personnel from around the globe, private rescuers and convoys of their vehicles went in and out of that city 24 hours a day. It wasn’t until five days later that the U.S. government-—with all its helicopters, cargo planes, humvees and other high-water transports, portable bridges, food, water, and National Guard troops that can’t be used to save American lives because they’re being used to take Iraqi lives--finally arrived with barely enough supplies and personnel to rescue and escort out a handful of white tourists holed up the ritzy W New Orleans Hotel.


Even weeks after the hurricane, Bush continues to stymie rescue and relief operations: Each time he has gone to New Orleans to stage another photo op (in the relatively unscathed French Quarter), the entire city is shut down for security reasons and all operations come to a halt.


THE RACISM THAT KILLED PEOPLE

Long before federal cutbacks began devastating cities across our nation to pay for George’s Folly in Iraq, New Orleans was already in crisis mode, caused in part by centuries of corruption and plantation politics.


I know that funding for schools, medical care, public transportation, repair of the crumbling infrastructure—-in fact, much of what makes a city civilized—-was already cut to the bone. And I know that a city that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) even provide its children with functioning toilets will be hard-pressed to provide transportation and the gasoline necessary to move a half million people to safety.


But that doesn’t explain why the recently-established network of community- and church-based carpooling system was used to transport people to the Superdome instead of out of the city. And that doesn’t explain why the corporations, casinos and sports teams who’ve bled the city dry for decades weren’t mandated to help with provisions and rescue craft. That doesn’t explain why two out-of-state college boys who drove down to rescue people at the Convention Center saw--and videotaped on their fourth rescue trip--a long line of empty Orleans Parish school buses being driven out of New Orleans up to Baton Rouge. And it doesn’t explain why anyone would even consider such an extraordinarily inhumane act as ordering human beings into a facility--and keeping them locked in for days—-with no food or water.


The horrors that took place in the Superdome were the direct result of the utter disregard, the contempt and disdain for dark skin that permeates New Orleans and the American South. The centuries-old problems, the institutionalized racism and classism, the elevation of monied and corporate interests over human needs was compounded and detonated when New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin carried the plantation politics forward into the Superdome.

Coming up:

<>The Uprising that started in the Superdome and spilled into the streets


<>The white looters and gangs


<>Why women were raped and beaten


<>Why drug gangs who’ve terrorized poor neighborhoods for years were able to continue their reign of terror


<>The extraordinary violence of the local police against survivors


<>The new society being born in New Orleans


<>Demilitarizing our national service/National Guard


<>Why shelters outside the area have yet to be built


<>The environmental disaster caused by the Bush Flood


<>How FEMA is re-traumatizing survivors


<>Why survivors can’t cash their federal hurricane relief checks


<>Who can we support and how (see listings of grass-roots, low-income and people of color-led relief organizations at http://katrina.mayfirst.org)



Mimi Yahn is a Pittsburgh-area writer, feminist, human rights activist and singer/songwriter. She is the musical director of the Pittsburgh Raging Grannies, publisher of the Swiftian Report, and a member of the IWW and the National Writers Union. She and her husband moved to Pittsburgh several years ago from New Orleans.

©2005, Mimi Yahn

www.swiftianreport.com