Thursday, September 15th, 2005

The Beginnings of A New Orleans Land Grab?

Here’s an astonishing piece from the Los Angeles Times about the rush to buy property in New Orleans, even as the city’s residents are being shipped across the U.S.:

“I thought this storm was the end of the city,” said Arthur Sterbcow, president of New Orleans-based Latter & Blum, one of the biggest real estate brokerages on the Gulf Coast.

“If anyone had told me two weeks ago that I’d be getting the calls and e-mails I’m getting, I would have thought he was ready for the psychiatric ward.”

Messages from those wanting to buy houses — whether intact or flooded — and commercial properties are outrunning those who want to sell by a factor of 20, said Sterbcow, who has set up temporary quarters in his firm’s Baton Rouge office.

“We’re pressing everyone into service just to answer the phones,” he said.

These eager would-be buyers may be drawing their inspiration from Lower Manhattan, which proved a bonanza for those smart enough to buy condos there immediately after the Sept. 11 attack.

Of course, in southern Louisiana, everything is hypothetical for the moment. The storm destroyed many property records and displaced buyers, sellers, agents and title firms, so no deals are actually being done. Insurance companies haven’t started to settle claims yet, much less determine how, or whether, they will insure New Orleans in the future. The city hasn’t even been drained.

But people are thinking ahead, influenced by a single factor: the belief that hundreds of billions of dollars in government aid is going to create a boomtown. The people administering that aid will need somewhere to live, as will those doing the rebuilding. So will employees of companies lured back to the area, and the service people that attend to them.

All this will lead to what Sterbcow delicately calls a “reorientation” of the city.

“Everyone I talked to has said, ‘Let’s start with a clean sheet of paper, fix it and get it right,’ ” he said. “Some of the homes here were only held together by the termites.”

What the owners of the city’s estimated 150,000 flooded houses will get out of “reorientation” is unclear, especially if the houses were in bad shape and uninsured.

Some black New Orleans residents say dourly that they know what’s coming. Melvin Gilbert, a maintenance crew chief in his 60s, stood outside an elegant hotel in the French Quarter this week and recalled how the neighborhood had been gentrified.

He remembered half a century ago when the French Quarter had a substantial number of black residents.

“Then the Caucasians started offering them $10,000 for their homes,” he said. “Well, they only bought the places for $2,000, so they took it and ran.”

The white residents restored the homes, which rose quickly in value. Gilbert said he expected the same dynamic when the floodwaters receded in the heavily black neighborhoods east of downtown.

posted by @ 7:49 am | 1 Comment

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

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005

A Prayer For New Orleans

To all the poor people who couldn’t leave the city, to all those called looters for trying to take care of their family, to all those who lost more than they thought they could, our deepest prayers and hopes go out to you.

Here’s Randy Newman on the Flood of 1927:


“What has happened down here is the wind have changed

Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain

Rained real hard and rained for a real long time

Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day

The river rose all night

Some people got lost in the flood

Some people got away alright

The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines

Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne

Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away”

posted by @ 1:31 pm | 2 Comments

Monday, August 29th, 2005

DMC and LL Cool J on Fresh Air Tomorrow

Here’s the promo for tomorrow’s Fresh Air. In the meantime, you can get Herc, Flash, and Melle Mel on their website today:

On the next Fresh Air – Hip Hop week continues with DARRYL MCDANIELS… the
DMC of Run DMC. They were the first rap group to earn gold, platinum and
multi-platinum albums. We’ll also hear from L.L. COOL J. Join us for Hip
Hop Week on the next Fresh Air.

posted by @ 9:23 am | 1 Comment



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