Wednesday, September 14th, 2005

Reporters of Color Harassed and Arrested In Gulf Coast

Hard Knock Radio and Third World Majority have assembled a crew of folks to go down to the Gulf Coast to report on actual conditions there for KPFA and Pacifica Radio. Separately, our comrade Rosa Clemente from WBAI and many other independent journalists have gone down to do the same. You can hear the fruits of this work on Davey D’s site, here and here. I’ll be writing up HKR and TWM’s reporting with a team from the Bay Area.

The thing I wanted to let folks know is that there is systematic harassment going on of young independent reporters of color. In Houston at the Astrodome, the HKR and TWM delegation were harassed at every turn by Red Cross and local officials as they collected stories from evacuees.

Why? Well, we can say this: Many evacuees were reluctant to speak to mainstream media reporters because they worried that if what they said that was negative about the relief efforts they might suffer retaliation. (Many people are standing in line for 6-8 hours to receive basic necessities.) But they were willing to speak candidly to the HKR/TWM crew. In the weeks ahead, check out what you’re hearing from the major outlets against what reporters of color at Pacifica and other alternative outlets will be telling you.

Independent reporters of color in New Orleans, in particular, are being targeted by the military for harassment. By contrast, Chris Matthews broadcast Hardball yesterday live from the heart of the French Quarter. His lead today? Hope In French Quarter.

At the same time, Rosa Clemente was arrested last night in Baton Rouge after returning from New Orleans when the National Guard attempted to confiscate her mini-disc and recording equipment. She is shaken up but back on the street with her equipment and will continue to be reporting.

More on this as we hear…

posted by @ 7:32 am | 0 Comments

Friday, September 9th, 2005

Yuri Kochiyama in Berkeley on Saturday


The Godmother of Asian America

Here’s a great piece on Yuri Kochiyama. She’ll be appearing in Berkeley on Saturday. I’ll be across the country, but if you can, please go and thank her for all she has done for all of us.

“Learn about yourselves and others. There’s more commonality in all of our lives than we think.”
-Yuri Kochiyama

posted by @ 7:31 am | 3 Comments

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

DJ Kool Herc In The Yay…

DJ Kool Herc and Cindy Campbell came through this past weekend to receive the American Book Award with me. It was a great time! Herc also shocked San Francisco Friday night deep into Saturday morning–with folks like Q-Bert, D-Sharp, and Davey D in the house for the celebration.

It was wild, yall…Big shout out to Jonathan McDonald, the Giant Peach, Lydia from Quannum, and everyone who came out. Did anyone catch Herc last night in Honolulu? If so, hit us up on the comments board…

Herc got to do a number of interviews with some of the best hip-hop gen journalists in the Yay. Here are the interviews Kim Chun and Marian Liu did.

Much more to come. Photos also down the line–after a tour of duty back to the east coast and some work coming up next week with the Hard Knock Radio and Third World Majority crew reporting on what’s going on in the Gulf Coast region.

posted by @ 3:50 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

Welcome to New Orleans


The fishin’ is easy, and Barbara’s got cake for all those underpriligees!

posted by @ 10:51 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005

New Orleans Media Blackout?

Even Derkacz, on his AlterNet Blogs, puts together the emerging media strategy FEMA appears to be offering on the aftermath of Katrina: what they don’t see or hear won’t hurt them.

I’ve been receiving word that reporters of color are being turned away from New Orleans. At the same time, a million untold, stories are rising from communities of the NOLA Swamp, Mississippi, and Alabama, stories that the mainstream media will never cover. Stories more unimaginable than Pale Horse conspiracies or X-Files.

More on this very soon.

posted by @ 12:51 pm | 0 Comments

Wednesday, September 7th, 2005

Support NOLA Community Organizers And Musicians

If you, like me, are rapidly becoming skeptical of the way official “relief” agencies are handling the needs of people of the Gulf Coast, and have been wary of the hundreds of scam charities, check out these and consider moving your money in their direction.

The first is New Orleans Network, which has been put together by community-based organizers that, previous to the flood, were working daily on grassroots issues. In particular, there are activists who have been central to the League of Independent Voters and the National Hip-Hop Political Convention. In the coming weeks, we’ll be telling their stories in various spaces–stay tuned for that. In the meantime, their efforts need your assistance. Check out the site and consider giving your money to them.

The other is ReNew Orleans, which is raising funds by selling t-shirts. The effort will directly fund the Preservation Hall Hurricane Relief Fund.

I’m down to list others that any of you may suggest. These are the two that are getting priority from me right now.

posted by @ 10:00 am | 0 Comments

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

New Orleans, the Bushes, and the Politics of Abandonment

In New Orleans, the end of George W. Bush’s term begins. It exposes his morally empty politics of abandonment.

All week, his statements to the press have been terse and out-of-touch, a mix of sunny optimism and defensive posturing, spiked with promises he doesn’t even seem convinced he can deliver. Today he will give a press conference at New Orleans airport, miles away from the Superdome, now Ground Zero of the Flood of 2005.

It will undoubtedly be reminiscent of another Bush speech in the wake of a disaster–his father’s talk in 1992, three days after the start of the Los Angeles riots. At the Superdome, people have been chanting at TV cameras –“we are dying”–and this Bush also cannot escape a sense that he is there with much too little, far too late.

His father’s speech on May 1, 1992 focused on violence, a way of diverting the focus of what was to be the last real debate about urban poverty this nation has had. So instead of rebuilding the city and reversing poverty, the focus of the 1992 urban aid bill shifted to short-term disaster relief, a continuation of years of abandoning the poor to serve the rich.

By now, it’s clear that New Orleans was long abandoned before Hurricane Katrina and the levee breaks forced the city’s actual abandonment. For years, scientists have not only warned of potential levee breaks that could inundate this city, but provided potential solutions. It ranked as one of FEMA’s top 3 most likely catastrophic disasters to occur.

Yet a city that is 2/3rds black and a quarter impoverished never merited the little money that had been asked for to study and shore up sinking levees. Instead, the money went to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that uprooted and then abandoned the poor to once again serve the rich.

As Paul Krugman writes:

I don’t think this is a simple task of incompetence. The reason the military wasn’t rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn’t get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on protective measures. And they never ever ask for shared sacrifice…

So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do governemnt that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.

New Orleans, and other places in Mississippi and Alabama today, are not too different from Los Angeles in 1992, the Bronx in 1977, or Baghdad and Kabul in 2005.

They provide parallel images now–a complicated visual jigsaw of mass tragedy, starvation, disease, thug warfare, and at the same time, a spontaneous outpouring of collective empathy, sacrifice, and support.

This is death from above.

posted by @ 9:35 am | 13 Comments



Previous Posts

Feed Me!

Revolutions

Word

Fiyahlinks


twitter_logo

@zentronix

Come follow me now...

Archives

We work with the Creative Commons license and exercise a "Some Rights Reserved" policy. Feel free to link, distribute, and share written material from cantstopwontstop.com for non-commercial uses.

Requests for commercial uses of any content here are welcome: come correct.

Creative Commons License