25 Questions about the Murder of New Orleans
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=24875
Mike Davis (whose most recent book is Monster at our Door, The
Global Threat of Avian Flu) and architect Anthony Fontenot have
just returned from New Orleans. They rode out Rita in southern
Louisiana and talked with numerous people involved in local
Katrina rescue efforts. The city is now, Davis says, a huge
crime scene that may never be properly investigated. After
Hurricane Ivan turned away from the Big Easy in 2004, Davis
wrote a singularly prophetic piece, Poor, Black and Left Behind,
about the car-less, unevacuated poor of that city. The arrival
of Hurricane Katrina, which did not spare New Orleans,
essentially proved for the poor a horrifying replay of the
previous year. Nothing had changed for the better. The main
question Davis and Fontenot raise below -- for an investigative
body that may never exist -- is just how deliberate, from top to
bottom, the neglect of the obvious was in New Orleans.
Right now, we're watching the ridiculous spectacle of the
woefully incompetent former FEMA head Michael Brown being thrown
to the Republican wolves in the House of Representatives, while
the two national figures most in charge of the Katrina debacle,
Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff and
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, remain remarkably
untouched by their acts. The man who couldn't wait to invade
Iraq couldn't figure out how to get a soldier into New Orleans.
It's a sorry record. Here, then, are some of the disturbing
questions on the minds of those Davis and Fontenot met in New
Orleans -- questions from the frontlines of an American
shock-and-awe disaster of epic proportions. Tom
The Mysteries of New Orleans
Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy
By Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot
We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana
interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban
planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest
flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains
submerged in anger and frustration.
Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn't the sinister
gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole
neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the
unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so
much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple
"incompetence" or "failure of leadership," locals are more
inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect -- the
murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.
In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent
questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with.
Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover
the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical)
reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.
1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break
on the New Orleans (majority Black) side and not on the Metairie
(largely white) side? Was this the result of neglect and poor
maintenance by New Orleans authorities?
2. Who owned the huge barge that was catapulted through the wall
of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the Lower Ninth
Ward -- the most deadly hit-and-run accident in U.S. history?
3. All of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish east of the
Industrial Canal were drowned, except for the Almonaster-Michoud
Industrial District along Chef Menteur Highway. Why was
industrial land apparently protected by stronger levees than
nearby residential neighborhoods?
4. Why did Mayor Ray Nagin, in defiance of his own official
disaster plan, delay twelve to twenty-four hours in ordering a
mandatory evacuation of the city?
5. Why did Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff not
declare Katrina an "Incident of National Significance" until
August 31 -- thus preventing the full deployment of urgently
needed federal resources?
6. Why wasn't the nearby U.S.S. Bataan immediately sent to the
aid of New Orleans? The huge amphibious-landing ship had a
state-of-the-art, 600-bed hospital, water and power plants,
helicopters, food supplies, and 1,200 sailors eager to join the
rescue effort.
7. Similarly, why wasn't the Baltimore-based hospital ship USS
Comfort ordered to sea until August 31, or the 82nd Airborne
Division deployed in New Orleans until September 5?
8. Why does Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld balk at making
public his "severe weather execution order" that established the
ground rules for the military response to Katrina? Did the
Pentagon, as a recent report by the Congressional Research
Service suggests, fail to take initiatives within already
authorized powers, then attempt to transfer the blame to state
and local governments?
9. Why were the more than 350 buses of the New Orleans Regional
Transportation Authority -- eventually flooded where they were
parked -- not mobilized to evacuate infirm, poor, and car-less
residents?
10. What significance attaches to the fact that the chair of the
Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is Jimmy
Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council
which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and
cleanup of crime in) the city?
11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in
Dallas with the "forty thieves" -- white business leaders led by
Reiss -- reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer Black
areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?
12. Everyone knows about a famous train called "the City of New
Orleans." Why was there no evacuation by rail? Was Amtrak part
of the disaster planning? If not, why not?
13. Why were patients at private hospitals like Tulane evacuated
by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity Hospital
were left to suffer and die?
14. Was the failure to adequately stock food, water, potable
toilets, cots, and medicine at the Louisiana Superdome a
deliberate decision -- as many believe -- to force poorer
residents to leave the city?
15. The French Quarter has one of the highest densities of
restaurants in the nation. Once the acute shortages of food and
water at the Superdome and the Convention Center were known, why
didn't officials requisition supplies from hotels and
restaurants located just a few blocks away? (As it happened,
vast quantities of food were simply left to spoil.)
16. City Hall's emergency command center had to be abandoned
early in the crisis because its generator supposedly ran out of
diesel fuel. Likewise many critical-care patients died from heat
or equipment failure after hospital backup generators failed.
Why were supplies of diesel fuel so inadequate? Why were so many
hospital generators located in basements that would obviously
flood?
17. Why didn't the Navy or Coast Guard immediately airdrop life
preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why wasn't
such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals?
18. Why weren't evacuee centers established in Audubon Park and
other unflooded parts of Uptown, where locals could be employed
as cleanup crews?
19. Is the Justice Department investigating the Jim Crow-like
response of the suburban Gretna police who turned back hundreds
of desperate New Orleans citizens trying to walk across the
Mississippi River bridge -- an image reminiscent of Selma in
1965? New Orleans, meanwhile, abounds in eyewitness accounts of
police looting and illegal shootings: Will any of this ever be
investigated?
20. Who is responsible for the suspicious fires that have swept
the city? Why have so many fires occurred in blue-collar areas
that have long been targets of proposed gentrification, such as
the Section 8 homes on Constance Street in the Lower Garden
District or the wharfs along the river in Bywater?
21. Where were FEMA's several dozen vaunted urban
search-and-rescue teams? Aside from some courageous work by
Coast Guard helicopter crews, the early rescue effort was
largely mounted by volunteers who towed their own boats into the
city after hearing an appeal on television.
22. We found a massive Red Cross presence in Baton Rouge but
none in some of the smaller Louisiana towns that have mounted
the most impressive relief efforts. The poor Cajun community of
Ville Platte, for instance, has at one time or another fed and
housed more than 5,000 evacuees; but the Red Cross, along with
FEMA, has refused almost daily appeals by local volunteers to
send professional personnel and aid. Why then give money to the
Red Cross?
23. Why isn't FEMA scrambling to create a central registry of
everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will
evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the
crucial February municipal elections that will partly decide the
fate of the city?
24. As politicians talk about "disaster czars" and
elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects
and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically
cleansed "new urbanism" in New Orleans, where is any plan for
the substantive participation of the city's ordinary citizens in
their own future?
25. Indeed, on the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting
Rights Act, what has happened to democracy?
Mike Davis is the author of many books including City of Quartz,
Dead Cities and Other Tales, and the just published Monster at
our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) as well
as the forthcoming Planet of Slums (Verso).
Anthony Fontenot is a New Orleans architect and community-design
activist, currently working at Princeton University.
Copyright 2005 Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=24875
============
Subject:
Important .............DOWNLOAD THIS NOW...
From:
"Be Kind Whenever Possible/ It is ALWAYS Possible"
Date:
Tue, 27 Sep 2005 09:07:14 -0400
To:
"IPCUSA"
Download this to your computer now, before it
disappears.
----- Original Message -----
From: Th
Peace to all
This is a graphic real life video footage of one woman's
nightmare story of the atrocities in New Orleans. She explained
that the helicopters were flying over the people while they are
being eaten and beaten by snakes and alligators, and the
National Guards shouted die die. They offered no help. This
woman is a hero she save many of people's lives. Warning this is
a 6 min tear jerker. If you can are saturated with the graphic
events of New Or Liens (Not a typo, if you have been paying
attention to my e-mails you will realize that this was globally
witnessed foreclosure and settlement procedure. To be rebuilt by
Haliburn and crew in the the New Ve-gas) don't down load, if you
develop the courage you have 6 days to down load it. This is for
those who have a hard time believing that the U.S. government
could possibly be so cruel to there citizens. The sooner we wake
up and connect the dots, then maybe we can stop the remainder of
their plans from coming into further manifestation. Rita will be
the last straw to total tyranny, it will be the excuse to Jack
the oil prices because most to the oil reserves are in Texas. If
you ask how did they pull Katrina off and now Rita study HARP
and Teslar Scalar Wave technology all the answers will fall
right in place. At last weeks lecture of Phil Valentine's 2 part
lecture he showed what a natural occuring Hurricane looks like
and what a HARP induced hurricane looks like. There is a big
difference. Part 2 of his lecture is this Sunday at The Soul
Brother's Boutique at 4:00 p.m. Call Big man for the DVD's
Peace Myra
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