USA: Coverage and Analysis of the Flood in New Orleans
1. Notes from Inside New Orleans - Jordan Flaherty
2. Will the ‘New’ New Orleans be Black? - Glen Ford
3. How the war in Iraq, “homeland security” and federal tax cuts starved the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project of funds.
4. Timeline of Flood Control Projects Under Bush - Kevin Drum
5. National Geographic predicted New Orleans disaster - Joel K. Bourne, Jr
6. The Louisiana Superdome of shame - Jack Duggan
7. The New World Order, the New Iraq, New Orleans and New Afrika: Death Throes of an Empire in Decay - Michael Novick
8. How the Free Market Killed New Orleans - Michael Parenti
For more articles on the flood and its aftermath and implications click here
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1. 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 He is not
planning on moving out of New Orleans.
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2. Will the ‘New’ New Orleans be Black?
Text of Radio BC audio commentary here
September 2 2005
One of the premiere Black cities in the nation faces
catastrophe. There is no doubt in my mind that New
Orleans will one day rise again from its below sea
level foundations. The question is, will the new New
Orleans remain the two-thirds Black city it was before
the levees crumbled?
Some would say it is unseemly to speak of politics and
race in the presence of a massive calamity that has
destroyed the lives and prospects of so many people
from all backgrounds. But I beg to differ. As we have
witnessed, over and over again, the rich and powerful
are very quick to reward themselves as soon as
disaster presents the opportunity. Remember that
within days of 9/11, the Bush regime executed a
multi-billion dollar bailout for the airline industry.
By the time you hear this commentary, they may have
already used the New Orleans disaster to bail out the
insurance industry - one of the richest businesses on
the planet. But what of the people of New Orleans, 67
percent of whom are Black?
New Orleans is a poor city. Twenty-eight percent of
the population lives below the poverty line. Well over
half are renters, and the median value of homes
occupied by owners is only $87,000. From the early
days of the flood, it was clear that much of the
city’s housing stock would be irredeemably damaged.
The insurance industry may get a windfall of federal
relief, but the minority of New Orleans home owners
will get very little - even if they are insured. The
renting majority may get nothing.
If the catastrophe in New Orleans reaches the
apocalyptic dimensions towards which it appears to be
headed, there will be massive displacement of the
Black and poor. Poor people cannot afford to hang
around on the fringes of a city until the
powers-that-be come up with a plan to accommodate them
back to the jurisdiction. And we all know that the
prevailing model for urban development is to get rid
of poor people. The disaster provides an opportunity
to deploy this model in New Orleans on a citywide
scale, under the guise of rebuilding the city and its
infrastructure.
In place of the jobs that have been washed away, there
could be alternative employment through a huge,
federally funded rebuilding effort. But this is George
Bush’s federal government. Does anyone believe that
the Bush men would mandate that priority employment go
to the pre-flood, mostly Black population of the city.
And the Black mayor of New Orleans is a Democrat in
name only, a rich businessman, no friend of the poor.
What we may see in the coming months is a massive
displacement of Black New Orleans, to the four corners
of the nation. The question that we must pose,
repeatedly and in the strongest terms, is: Through
whose vision, and in whose interest, will New Orleans
rise again. For Radio BC, I’m Glen Ford.
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3. How the war in Iraq, “homeland security” and federal tax cuts starved the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project of funds.
Read the Aug. 30 entry “When the levee breaks” on Attytood’s blog here
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4. Political Animal - Kevin Drum (Timeline of Flood Control Projects Under Bush)
from Washington Monthly
September 1, 2005
CHRONOLOGY….Here’s a timeline that outlines the fate of both FEMA and flood control projects in New Orleans under the Bush administration. Read it and weep:
January 2001: Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a crony from Texas, as head of FEMA. Allbaugh has no previous experience in disaster management.
April 2001: Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces the Bush administration’s goal of privatizing much of FEMA’s work. In May, Allbaugh confirms that FEMA will be downsized: “Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program….” he said. “Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.”
2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three “likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country.”
December 2002: After less than two years at FEMA, Allbaugh announces he is leaving to start up a consulting firm that advises companies seeking to do business in Iraq. He is succeeded by his deputy and former college roommate, Michael Brown, who has no previous experience in disaster management and was fired from his previous job for mismanagement.
March 2003: FEMA is downgraded from a cabinet level position and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is refocused on fighting acts of terrorism.
2003: Under its new organization chart within DHS, FEMA’s preparation and planning functions are reassigned to a new Office of Preparedness and Response. FEMA will henceforth focus only on response and recovery.
Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana’s pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: “You would think we would get maximum consideration….This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it.”
June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay.”
June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.
August 2005: While New Orleans is undergoing a slow motion catastrophe, Bush mugs for the cameras, cuts a cake for John McCain, plays the guitar for Mark Wills, delivers an address about V-J day, and continues with his vacation. When he finally gets around to acknowledging the scope of the unfolding disaster, he delivers only a photo op on Air Force One and a flat, defensive, laundry list speech in the Rose Garden.
So: A crony with no relevant experience was installed as head of FEMA. Mitigation budgets for New Orleans were slashed even though it was known to be one of the top three risks in the country. FEMA was deliberately downsized as part of the Bush administration’s conservative agenda to reduce the role of government. After DHS was created, FEMA’s preparation and planning functions were taken away.
Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It’s the Bush administration in a nutshell.
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5. National Geographic predicted New Orleans disaster
National Geographic Magazine October 2004
By Joel K. Bourne, Jr.
The Louisiana bayou, hardest working marsh in America, is in big
trouble-with dire consequences for residents, the nearby city of New
Orleans, and seafood lovers everywhere.
It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy,
the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were
swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who
invented air-conditioning as they watched TV “storm teams” warn of a
hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in
August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash
Wednesday.
But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As
the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people
evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however-the car-less, the
homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look
for any excuse to throw a party.
The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a
deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of
the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80
percent of New Orleans lies below sea level-more than eight feet below in
places-so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick
ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over
the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through
the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the
Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city,
people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and
industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from
dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to
pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of
putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It
was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
When did this calamity happen? It hasn’t-yet. But the doomsday scenario is
not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane
strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up
there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New
York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the
city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.
“The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before
landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24
hours-coming from the worst direction,” says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal
engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the
coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August
afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city’s
hurricane armor. “I don’t think people realize how precarious we are,”
Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. “Our technology is great when it
works. But when it fails, it’s going to make things much worse.”
The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are
slight, but the danger is growing. Climatologists predict that powerful
storms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from
global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk. “It’s not if it
will happen,” says University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland. “It’s
when.”
Yet just as the risks of a killer storm are rising, the city’s natural
defenses are quietly melting away. From the Mississippi border to the Texas
state line, Louisiana is losing its protective fringe of marshes and barrier
islands faster than any place in the U.S. Since the 1930s some 1,900 square
miles (4,900 square kilometers) of coastal wetlands-a swath nearly the size
of Delaware or almost twice that of Luxembourg-have vanished beneath the
Gulf of Mexico. Despite nearly half a billion dollars spent over the past
decade to stem the tide, the state continues to lose about 25 square miles
(65 square kilometers) of land each year, roughly one acre every 33 minutes.
A cocktail of natural and human factors is putting the coast under. Delta
soils naturally compact and sink over time, eventually giving way to open
water unless fresh layers of sediment offset the subsidence. The
Mississippi’s spring floods once maintained that balance, but the annual
deluges were often disastrous. After a devastating flood in 1927, levees
were raised along the river and lined with concrete, effectively funneling
the marsh-building sediments to the deep waters of the Gulf. Since the 1950s
engineers have also cut more than 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) of canals
through the marsh for petroleum exploration and ship traffic. These new
ditches sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increasing erosion
and allowing lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brackish and
freshwater marshes.
While such loss hits every bayou-loving Louisianan right in the heart, it
also hits nearly every U.S. citizen right in the wallet. Louisiana has the
hardest working wetlands in America, a watery world of bayous, marshes, and
barrier islands that either produces or transports more than a third of the
nation’s oil and a quarter of its natural gas, and ranks second only to
Alaska in commercial fish landings. As wildlife habitat, it makes Florida’s
Everglades look like a petting zoo by comparison.
Such high stakes compelled a host of unlikely bedfellows-scientists,
environmental groups, business leaders, and the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers-to forge a radical plan to protect what’s left. Drafted by the
Corps a year ago, the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) project was initially
estimated to cost up to 14 billion dollars over 30 years, almost twice as
much as current efforts to save the Everglades. But the Bush Administration
balked at the price tag, supporting instead a plan to spend up to two
billion dollars over the next ten years to fund the most promising projects.
Either way, Congress must authorize the money before work can begin.
To glimpse the urgency of the problem afflicting Louisiana, one need only
drive 40 minutes southeast of New Orleans to the tiny bayou village of Shell
Beach. Here, for the past 70 years or so, a big, deeply tanned man with
hands the size of baseball gloves has been catching fish, shooting ducks,
and selling gas and bait to anyone who can find his end-of-the-road marina.
Today Frank “Blackie” Campo’s ramshackle place hangs off the end of new
Shell Beach. The old Shell Beach, where Campo was born in 1918, sits a
quarter mile away, five feet beneath the rippling waves. Once home to some
50 families and a naval air station during World War II, the little village
is now “ga’an pecan,” as Campo says in the local patois. Gone forever.
Life in old Shell Beach had always been a tenuous existence. Hurricanes
twice razed the community, sending houses floating through the marsh. But it
wasn’t until the Corps of Engineers dredged a 500-foot-wide (150-meter-wide)
ship channel nearby in 1968 that its fate was sealed. The Mississippi
River-Gulf Outlet, known as “Mr. Go,” was supposed to provide a shortcut for
freighters bound for New Orleans, but it never caught on. Maybe two ships
use the channel on a given day, but wakes from even those few vessels have
carved the shoreline a half mile wide in places, consuming old Shell Beach.
Campo settles into a worn recliner, his pale blue eyes the color of a late
autumn sky. Our conversation turns from Mr. Go to the bigger issue affecting
the entire coast. “What really screwed up the marsh is when they put the
levees on the river,” Campo says, over the noise of a groaning
air-conditioner. “They should take the levees out and let the water run;
that’s what built the land. But we know they not going to let the river run
again, so there’s no solution.”
Denise Reed, however, proposes doing just that-letting the river run. A
coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans, Reed is convinced
that breaching the levees with a series of gated spillways would pump new
life into the dying marshes. Only three such diversions currently operate in
the state. I catch up with Reed at the most controversial of the lot-a
26-million-dollar culvert just south of New Orleans named Caernarvon.
“Caernarvon is a prototype, a demonstration of a technique,” says Reed as we
motor down a muddy canal in a state boat. The diversion isn’t filling the
marsh with sediments on a grand scale, she says. But the effect of the added
river water-loaded as it is with fertilizer from farm runoff-is plain to
see. “It turns wetlands hanging on by the fingernails into something quite
lush,” says Reed.
To prove her point, she points to banks crowded with slender willows, rafts
of lily pads, and a wide shallow pond that is no longer land, no longer
liquid. More like chocolate pudding. But impressive as the recovering marsh
is, its scale seems dwarfed by the size of the problem. “Restoration is not
trying to make the coast look like a map of 1956,” explains Reed. “That’s
not even possible. The goal is to restore healthy natural processes, then
live with what you get.”
Even that will be hard to do. Caernarvon, for instance, became a political
land mine when releases of fresh water timed to mimic spring floods wiped
out the beds of nearby oyster farmers. The oystermen sued, and last year a
sympathetic judge awarded them a staggering 1.3 billion dollars. The case
threw a major speed bump into restoration efforts.
Other restoration methods-such as rebuilding marshes with dredge spoil and
salt-tolerant plants or trying to stabilize a shoreline that’s eroding 30
feet (10 meters) a year-have had limited success. Despite the challenges,
the thought of doing nothing is hard for most southern Louisianans to
swallow. Computer models that project land loss for the next 50 years show
the coast and interior marsh dissolving as if splattered with acid, leaving
only skeletal remnants. Outlying towns such as Shell Beach, Venice, Grand
Isle, and Cocodrie vanish under a sea of blue pixels.
Those who believe diversions are the key to saving Louisiana’s coast often
point to the granddaddy of them all: the Atchafalaya River. The major
distributary of the Mississippi River, the Atchafalaya, if left alone, would
soon be the Mississippi River, capturing most of its flow. But to prevent
salt water from creeping farther up the Mississippi and spoiling the water
supply of nearby towns and industries, the Corps of Engineers allows only a
third of the Mississippi’s water to flow down the Atchafalaya. Still, that
water and sediment have produced the healthiest wetlands in Louisiana. The
Atchafalaya Delta is one of the few places in the state that’s actually
gaining ground instead of losing it. And if you want to see the delta, you
need to go crabbing with Peanut Michel.
“Peanut,” it turns out, is a bit of a misnomer. At six foot six and 340
pounds, the 35-year-old commercial fisherman from Morgan City wouldn’t look
out of place on the offensive line of the New Orleans Saints. We launch his
aluminum skiff in the predawn light, and soon we’re skimming down the broad,
café au lait river toward the newest land in Louisiana. Dense thickets of
needlegrass, flag grass, cut grass, and a big-leafed plant Michel calls
elephant ear crowd the banks, followed closely by bushy wax myrtles and
shaggy willows.
Michel finds his string of crab pots a few miles out in the broad expanse of
Atchafalaya Bay. Even this far from shore the water is barely five feet
deep. As the sun ignites into a blowtorch on the horizon, Michel begins a
well-oiled ritual: grab the bullet-shaped float, shake the wire cube of its
clicking, mottled green inhabitants, bait it with a fish carcass, and toss.
It’s done in fluid motions as the boat circles lazily in the water.
But it’s a bad day for crabbing. The wind and water are hot, and only a few
crabs dribble in. And yet Michel is happy. Deliriously happy. Because this
is what he wants to do. “They call ‘em watermen up in Maryland,” he says
with a slight Cajun accent. “They call us lunatics here. You got to be crazy
to be in this business.”
Despite Michel’s poor haul, Louisiana’s wetlands are still a prolific
seafood factory, sustaining a commercial fishery that most years lands more
than 300 million dollars’ worth of finfish, shrimp, oysters, crabs, and
other delicacies. How long the stressed marshes can maintain that production
is anybody’s guess. In the meantime, Michel keeps at it. “My grandfather
always told me, Don’t live to be rich, live to be happy,” he says. And so he
does.
After a few hours Michel calls it a day, and we head through the braided
delta, where navigation markers that once stood at the edge of the boat
channel now peek out of the brush 20 feet (six meters) from shore. At every
turn we flush mottled ducks, ibis, and great blue herons. Michel, who works
as a hunting guide during duck season, cracks an enormous grin at the sight.
“When the ducks come down in the winter,” he says, “they’ll cover the sun.”
To folks like Peanut Michel, the birds, the fish, and the rich coastal
culture are reason enough to save Louisiana’s shore, whatever the cost. But
there is another reason, one readily grasped by every American whose way of
life is tethered not to a dock, but to a gas pump: These wetlands protect
one of the most extensive petroleum infrastructures in the nation.
The state’s first oil well was punched in south Louisiana in 1901, and the
world’s first offshore rig went into operation in the Gulf of Mexico in
1947. During the boom years in the early 1970s, fully half of the state’s
budget was derived from petroleum revenues. Though much of the production
has moved into deeper waters, oil and gas wells remain a fixture of the
coast, as ubiquitous as shrimp boats and brown pelicans.
The deep offshore wells now account for nearly a third of all domestic oil
production, while Louisiana’s Offshore Oil Port, a series of platforms
anchored 18 miles (29 kilometers) offshore, unloads a nonstop line of
supertankers that deliver up to 15 percent of the nation’s foreign oil. Most
of that black gold comes ashore via a maze of pipelines buried in the
Louisiana muck. Numerous refineries, the nation’s largest natural gas
pipeline hub, even the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are all protected from
hurricanes and storm surge by Louisiana’s vanishing marsh.
You can smell the petrodollars burning at Port Fourchon, the offshore oil
industry’s sprawling home port on the central Louisiana coast. Brawny
helicopters shuttle 6,000 workers to the rigs from here each week, while
hundreds of supply boats deliver everything from toilet paper to drinking
water to drilling lube. A thousand trucks a day keep the port humming around
the clock, yet Louisiana 1, the two-lane highway that connects it to the
world, seems to flood every other high tide. During storms the port becomes
an island, which is why port officials like Davie Breaux are clamoring for
the state to build a 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) elevated highway to
the port. It’s also why Breaux thinks spending 14 billion dollars to save
the coast would be a bargain.
“We’ll go to war and spend billions of dollars to protect oil and gas
interests overseas,”
Breaux says as he drives his truck past platform anchors the size of
two-story houses. “But here at home?” He shrugs. “Where else you gonna
drill? Not California. Not Florida. Not in ANWR. In Louisiana. I’m third
generation in the oil field. We’re not afraid of the industry. We just want
the infrastructure to handle it.”
The oil industry has been good to Louisiana, providing low taxes and
high-paying jobs. But such largesse hasn’t come without a cost, largely
exacted from coastal wetlands. The most startling impact has only recently
come to light-the effect of oil and gas withdrawal on subsidence rates. For
decades geologists believed that the petroleum deposits were too deep and
the geology of the coast too complex for drilling to have any impact on the
surface. But two years ago former petroleum geologist Bob
Morton, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed that the highest rates
of wetland loss occurred during or just after the period of peak oil and gas
production in the 1970s and early 1980s. After much study, Morton concluded
that the removal of millions of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic feet of
natural gas, and tens of millions of barrels of saline formation water lying
with the petroleum deposits caused a drop in subsurface pressure-a theory
known as regional depressurization. That led nearby underground faults to
slip and the land above them to slump.
“When you stick a straw in a soda and suck on it, everything goes down,”
Morton explains. “That’s very simplified, but you get the idea.” The
phenomenon isn’t new: It was first documented in Texas in 1926 and has been
reported in other oil-producing areas such as the North Sea and Lake
Maracaibo in Venezuela. Morton won’t speculate on what percentage of wetland
loss can be pinned on the oil industry. “What I can tell you is that much of
the loss between Bayou Lafourche and Bayou Terrebonne was caused by induced
subsidence from oil and gas withdrawal. The wetlands are still there,
they’re just underwater.” The area Morton refers to, part of the
Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, has one of the highest rates of wetland loss
in the state.
The oil industry and its consultants dispute Morton’s theory, but they’ve
been unable to disprove it. The implication for restoration is profound. If
production continues to taper off in coastal wetlands, Morton expects
subsidence to return to its natural geologic rate, making restoration
feasible in places. Currently, however, the high price of natural gas has
oil companies swarming over the marshes looking for deep gas reservoirs. If
such fields are tapped, Morton expects regional depressurization to
continue. The upshot for the coast, he explains, is that the state will have
to focus whatever restoration dollars it can muster on areas that can be
saved, not waste them on places that are going to sink no matter what.
A few days after talking with Morton, I’m sitting on the levee in the French
Quarter, enjoying the deep-fried powdery sweetness of a beignet from the
Café du Monde. Joggers lumber by in the torpid heat, while tugs wrestle
their barges up and down the big brown river. For all its enticing
quirkiness, for all its licentious pleasures, for all its geologic
challenges, New Orleans has been luckier than the wetlands that lined its
pockets and stocked its renowned tables. The question is how long Lady Luck
will shine. It brings back something Joe Suhayda, the LSU engineer, had said
during our lunch by Lake Pontchartrain.
“When you look at the broadest perspective, short-term advantages can be
gained by exploiting the environment. But in the long term you’re going to
pay for it. Just like you can spend three days drinking in New Orleans and
it’ll be fun. But sooner or later you’re going to pay.”
I finish my beignet and stroll down the levee, succumbing to the hazy, lazy
feel of the city that care forgot, but that nature will not.——————————————————————————-
6. The Louisiana Superdome of shame
from Pravda
08/30/2005 15:10
Can you imagine New Orleans’ wealthy elite meekly submitting to such microscopic searches of their persons and property for drugs?
Watching news coverage of the refugees trying to enter the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans for safety from the approaching force-five Hurricane Katrina, I was incredulous how the people attempting to enter the stadium were being treated by the national guard troops and local police. The people were made to stand for hours outside in the awful Louisiana climate while they were admitted one or two adults at a time so they could be searched “for firearms and alcohol.”
The frail elderly, many grasping walkers and others in wheelchairs seemed to be near collapse. They, along with hundreds of small children needing water and rest-room relief, were forced to wait as long as four hours to get to safety. It was often repeated during the video reports that the last time the Superdome was used as a hurricane shelter, a few of the temporary occupants removed some furniture. But this time, they had a large security force on hand, so that was NOT going to happen again, no-siree-bob.
During coverage by Geraldo Rivera Sunday night, Fox News’ video cameras zoomed inside the foyer deck of the Superdome and viewers could see a national guard person going through a powder compact from of a woman’s purse that was ‘way too small to hold a liquor bottle or a gun. It was obvious that they were looking for drugs in warrantless searches. They instructed all the refugees far back in the seemingly endless lines to have their prescription-pill bottles out when approaching the security checkpoint and also a photo ID to prove that they belonged with the prescription.
There were thousands of poor, mostly black citizens of the lower Louisiana area, many of them little children and sickly elderly, being forced to stand for hours while the government violated their civil rights with forced searches that were patently unconstitutional, unjust and unreasonable under the dire circumstances. ‘Don’t want to be searched? That’s okay….now turn around, go outside and die!’ Big choice.
Can you imagine New Orleans’ wealthy elite meekly submitting to such microscopic searches of their persons and property for drugs? Heads would roll. But poor people who had no money to escape the deadly storm’s onslaught had no choice. They had nowhere else to go to save their children’s and parents’ lives. They were humiliated just for trying to survive. Their grandfathers and grandmothers suffered as slaves on Southern plantations decades ago, while today, they suffer as slaves to the state, the state that cancels their human rights and dignity in the name of ‘protecting’ them.
Did you see that, America? Nothing has changed in the South. Poor people of are still being herded and treated as criminals because of the color of their skin. The Sheriff and Louisiana National Guard knows the profile of likely drug users: black people and anyone associating with them; they were searched just as if they were entering a state penitentiary visiting a death-row prisoner. Maybe the refugees would have fared better if they had had season tickets in their hands.
Think about it. They can allow in 30,000 screaming fans with fifty-dollar bills and costly NFL tickets in their hands in a few minutes, but poor black people fleeing for their lives, four hours. Four hours!
None of the news people I saw on the major cable and broadcast networks noticed this outrage. Apparently, they are still “embedded” with the government and couldn’t possibly risk dislodging their heads long enough to report the truth right before their eyes.
We let morons take away our rights to person and property at the airports, all for the false ‘protection’ they promised us and can’t possibly deliver, so now we see them doing it to helpless citizens even when the citizens’ lives are in danger. ‘First, we got to check you for weapons and drugs…...pull your dress up, lift up your arms….’ -let those old people collapse and those kids soil themselves- ‘This is for your own safety.’
God forbid that anyone have a hip flask to calm their nerves during a traumatic life-and-death experience. Someone else might actually toke up or take a non-prescription pill! And a few might take their right to keep and bear arms seriously, when everyone knows that only government employees deserve self-protection, not their citizen ‘bosses.’ The constitution doesn’t apply when the government thinks it can make you safer by judging you, disarming you, and denuding you of your rights.
Who gave the order to make all these exhausted, miserable poor people wait for hours while they were searched so illicitly? Under what actual law did they search these refugees for anything whatsoever on their person? Do they search football game fans this thoroughly and for this long? Suuuuuure they do….
Could all this form a mass tort against the State of Louisiana? Maybe. Some of the Superdome refugees must be hopping mad.
Let’s face it. If you’re poor in America, you’re a ‘suspect,’ maybe. If you’re poor and black in America, you’re a ‘criminal,’ definitely. Even if your life is in peril, no excuses. Your rights don’t count as long as any badge or weekend warrior in BDU’s says they don’t.
This is the real story of the Louisiana Superdome. Hurricane Katrina can certainly destroy the environs of the Louisiana and her neighboring states, but that can all be rebuilt. What will never be rebuilt is the dignity of the poorest citizens of that region, since the government acted with a greater destructive force than a hurricane. The lamp of freedom has been blown out by force-five bureaucrats, their sycophants and their head-embedded media enablers who will insure that it will never get re-ignited. For our own good, of course.
Heads should roll in Louisiana, for all those whose civil rights were violated on Sunday, August 28, 2005, outside the Louisiana Superdome of Shame.
Jack Duggan
New Jersey
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7. The New World Order, the New Iraq, New Orleans and New Afrika:Death Throes of an Empire in Decay
by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-LA/People Against Racist Terror
Here’s a quick pop quiz on meteorology, cosmology and sociology:
The destruction of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta by Hurricane
Katrina, and the unrelieved suffering and deaths of tens of thousands, was
caused by:
a) the vengeance on a Satanic/sinful/hypocritical America by
Allah/Yahweh/Jehovah, for whom the last straw was Pat Robertson’s call to
assassinate Hugo Chavez
b) an unavoidable, horrific natural disaster that will give America a
chance to show it can still roll up its sleeves and rebuild things better
than they were before
c) the result of 500 years of racism, colonialism and industrialism,
compounded by a decade of heedless profit-oriented neo-liberal and
neo-conservative militarism
The answer is obvious even to those most blinded by religion or
flag-waving. The heart-rending devastation and the terrible cost in human
lives and destroyed homes are driving home to people throughout the U.S.
what the people in the region are experiencing directly.
The U.S. social, political and economic system - the Empire - is not only
incapable of meeting the most fundamental human needs - it is the immediate
cause of irreversible calamity and destruction of the natural and social
environment.
The evidence is clear. Scientific debate notwithstanding, the force of the
hurricane was indisputably a result of the global warming caused by
industrial pollution and its effects on atmospheric and oceanic
temperatures. The inability of the New Orleans levee system to withstand
the ocean surges and the rain was directly a result of decades of
destruction of the surrounding wetlands, compounded by the diversion of
needed funding to Iraq and “Homeland Security.” The total lack of
preparedness and evacuation measures, or of effective rescue operations,
was a manifestation of deep-seated racism and class prejudice. It exposed a
political economy and society based on individualism and privatization,
compounded by the assignment of the bulk of the Mississippi and Louisiana
National Guard and their equipment to military duty in Iraq.
The racism of the media that showed white survivors “finding” bread and
soda in stores, while Black survivors “looted” supplies from the same
stores in the same flood waters was matched only by the state’s diversion
of police and Guard troops from search and rescue operations to property
protection under martial law. Bringing the National Guard troops home
immediately from Iraq is all well and good, but what will it gain us if
they are dispatched to wage war on the poor, Black and homeless residents
of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta?
Reality has smacked us all upside the head with a tragic wake-up call. But
where do we go with this new awareness? What do you do when you wake up and
discover that the long national nightmare is just beginning?
We need to understand that total social, political and economic
transformation - revolution - is on the agenda, now. The “American Way of
Life” has demonstrated its unsustainability for all to see. Forget “The Day
After Tomorrow” - Hollywood films cannot come close to the actual
devastation we are facing today. Is Los Angeles more capable of dealing
with the inevitable 9.0 earthquake?
The Empire does not only stand in the way of human and planetary survival;
every day of its continued existence makes matters worse. We must begin
immediately the process of de-colonization, democratization,
decentralization and demilitarization that is our only hope.
For the people of African descent in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama,
Georgia and Carolina, along with their white and Mexicano/Caribbean
neighbors, that means that the rebuilding process must be based in creating
a new social order of liberation, collective responsibility and harmony -
New Africa, not Dixieland. For the rest of us, it means beginning a similar
process of dismantling and opposing the Empire by every means at our
disposal. That means turning out massively to the border on September 17-18
to denounce the vigilantes, the coyotes and the Border Patrol. That means
mobilizing massively on September 24-25 to demand immediate U.S. withdrawal
from Iraq and Afghanistan and to stop the war machine. But even more, it
means living each day to build unbreakable ties of human solidarity and
community while reversing the damage caused by profligate waste of energy
and poisoning of the water, air, and soil.
This is the lead editorial in the new issue of “Turning the Tide: Journal
of Anti-Racist Action, Research & Education,” published by ARA-LA/PART. A
free sample copy in the US is available by writing to ARA-LA/PART, PO Box
1055, Culver City CA 90232, calling 310-495-0299, or emailing
antiracistaction_la@yahoo.com A one-year, six-issue subscription is $16
($26US outside the US or to institutions) payable to Michael Novick at the
above address.
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8. How the Free Market Killed New Orleans
By Michael Parenti
The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Armed with advanced warning that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.
They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just as the free market dictates, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.
It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. This is the way the invisible hand works its wonders.
There would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island last year, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.3 million people, more than 10 percent of the country’s population, with not a single life lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.
On Day One of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, it was already clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American lives had been lost in New Orleans. Many people had “refused” to evacuate, media reporters explained, because they were just plain “stubborn.”
It was not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to call their own, they had to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not work so well for them.
Many of these people were low-income African Americans, along with fewer numbers of poor whites. It should be remembered that most of them had jobs before Katrina’s lethal visit. That’s what most poor people do in this country: they work, usually quite hard at dismally paying jobs, sometimes more than one job at a time. They are poor not because they’re lazy but because they have a hard time surviving on poverty wages while burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.
The free market played a role in other ways. Bush’s agenda is to cut government services to the bone and make people rely on the private sector for the things they might need. So he sliced $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction. Plans to fortify New Orleans levees and upgrade the system of pumping out water had to be shelved.
Bush took to the airways and said that no one could have foreseen this disaster. Just another lie tumbling from his lips. All sorts of people had been predicting disaster for New Orleans, pointing to the need to strengthen the levees and the pumps, and fortify the coastlands.
In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite reactionaries also allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands. Again, that old invisible hand of the free market would take care of things. The developers, pursuing their own private profit, would devise outcomes that would benefit us all.
But wetlands served as a natural absorbent and barrier between New Orleans and the storms riding in from across the sea. And for some years now, the wetlands have been disappearing at a frightening pace on the Gulf? coast. All this was of no concern to the reactionaries in the White House.
As for the rescue operation, the free-marketeers like to say that relief to the more unfortunate among us should be left to private charity. It was a favorite preachment of President Ronald Reagan that “private charity can do the job.” And for the first few days that indeed seemed to be the policy with the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina.
The federal government was nowhere in sight but the Red Cross went into action. Its message: “Don’t send food or blankets; send money.” Meanwhile Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network-taking a moment off from God’s work of pushing John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court-called for donations and announced “Operation Blessing” which consisted of a highly-publicized but totally inadequate shipment of canned goods and bibles.
By Day Three even the myopic media began to realize the immense failure of the rescue operation. People were dying because relief had not arrived. The authorities seemed more concerned with the looting than with rescuing people. It was property before people, just like the free marketeers always want.
But questions arose that the free market did not seem capable of answering: Who was in charge of the rescue operation? Why so few helicopters and just a scattering of Coast Guard rescuers? Why did it take helicopters five hours to get six people out of one hospital? When would the rescue operation gather some steam? Where were the feds? The state troopers? The National Guard? Where were the buses and trucks? the shelters and portable toilets? The medical supplies and water?
Where was Homeland Security? What has Homeland Security done with the $33.8 billions allocated to it in fiscal 2005? Even ABC-TV evening news (September 1, 2005) quoted local officials as saying that “the federal government’s response has been a national disgrace.”
In a moment of delicious (and perhaps mischievous) irony, offers of foreign aid were tendered by France, Germany and several other nations. Russia offered to send two plane loads of food and other materials for the victims. Predictably, all these proposals were quickly refused by the White House. America the Beautiful and Powerful, America the Supreme Rescuer and World Leader, America the Purveyor of Global Prosperity could not accept foreign aid from others. That would be a most deflating and insulting role reversal. Were the French looking for another punch in the nose?
Besides, to have accepted foreign aid would have been to admit the truth-that the Bushite reactionaries had neither the desire nor the decency to provide for ordinary citizens, not even those in the most extreme straits. Next thing you know, people would start thinking that George W. Bush was really nothing more than a fulltime agent of Corporate America.
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For more on the flood click here