Tuesday, September 20th, 2005

Why Your Money Shouldn’t Go To The Red Cross

From today’s New York Times comes this expose of the Red Cross’s ineffectiveness. They have received 75% of all Katrina donations, yet people on the ground in Mississippi and Louisiana have been frustrated with the results:

“Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck, the Red Cross had only one shelter in the county, and it was far from some of the most populated coastal towns. It had no shelter in New Orleans. ‘It’s purely a safety issue,’ said Armond T. Mascelli, vice president for response operations at the Red Cross. ‘People expect a Red Cross shelter to be safe, not to be at risk of flooding.’

Frustration over the early absence of the Red Cross is now compounded by the realization that the organization has collected the bulk of public contributions, money that will be spent on emergency rescue and relief, not long-term assistance, and may never get to the coastal areas. The organization has garnered almost three-quarters of the $1 billion that Americans have donated to help the hurricane victims, with endorsements from President Bush, corporate America and many nonprofit organizations. Its duty, mandated by Congress, is to provide immediate assistance, a need that is rapidly diminishing as victims leave shelters.”

The article goes on to describe how the Red Cross’s coffers swell during emergencies, yet the money often goes unspent. Fully $40 million of the $1 billion collected after 9/11 remains in the bank.

However, the main long-term issue will be the right of return, that is, the right of New Orleans residents to return to their homes and neighborhoods.

One of the main jobs of the Red Cross in the emergency shelters has been to process families seeking temporary housing. They are given a limited number of choices for housing, usually in a city far away. But they have almost no say in what city they would be sent to, and if they decline, they are put at the end of the housing list once again.

The Red Cross has no plan for long-term care of the displaced, much less a plan for the resettlement of New Orleans for everyone besides the elite.

If you want your money to be of use, look at the community organizations who are beginning to add long-term planning to their ongoing provision of short-term emergency care.

Click here for a growing list or simply scroll down a few entries.

posted by @ 8:35 am | 0 Comments

Monday, September 19th, 2005

"Survive The Rescue": Jordan Flaherty and Naomi Klein on NOLA

Here’s NOLA resident Jordan Flaherty on “surviving the rescue”, a phrase coined by Suheir Hammad.

He’s written some of the most important accounts on what’s happening on the ground. An index of his articles is here. What Mike Davis was for the LA riots, Jordan has become for what folks are beginning to call Hurricane FEMA.

In this piece, he describes the shocking militarization of the relief efforts:

The list of those who are gaining from our loss is large, and it includes everyone from the heavily armed thugs of Wackenhut Security and Blackwater USA to the often well-meaning but ineffective bureaucrats of Red Cross and FEMA, to the Scientology missionaries crowding the shelters, to journalists and disaster-gazers taking up a chunk of available housing, to the major multinationals such as Halliburton, working in concert with rich elites from uptown New Orleans seeking partners with which to exploit this tragedy. These are the institutions and individuals poised to profit from this disaster, while the people of New Orleans face nothing but further dislocation and disempowerment.

Another good piece at Morphizm.com by Naomi Klein on the beginnings of reconstruction, a process that may actually be temporarily halted by Tropical Storm Rita over the next few days. You’ll hear more from our HKR/TWM/CSWS team on community efforts around this as the week progresses.

posted by @ 1:17 pm | 1 Comment

Monday, September 19th, 2005

Kanye Was Right

Van Jones and James Rucker have begun the Color Of Change campaign under the banner “Kanye was Right”. Sign the petition now!

posted by @ 1:13 pm | 2 Comments

Thursday, September 15th, 2005

HKR/TWM/CSWS Report: In The Houston Astrodome, Frustration and Survival

The first Gulf Coast report from the Hard Knock Radio/Third World Majority/Can’t Stop Won’t Stop team is up today at AlterNet.

For more updates in the coming days, come back here or visit any of our collaborating sites in the coming days:

+ Alternet
+ Third World Majority
+ Hard Knock Radio
+ Pop and Politics
+ DaveyD.com
+ Rosa Clemente

Davey D’s current audio updates are as follows:

+Cousin Jeff From Houston Astrodome
We sat down with Cousin Jeff of BET to get a run down of what’s going in with the evacuees in the Houston Astrodome. He and Kanye West were there the other day. Cousin Jeff explained that all is not good. The primary problem is that poor displaced folks from New Orleans are being pitted against poor people from Houston

+ Cousin Jeff and Zin From Houston Astrodome
We continue our discussion with BET ’s Cousin Jeff about life inside the Astrodome for displaced victims of Hurricane Katrina. We are joined by Houston Hip Hop artist Zin who confirms all that Cousin Jeff has mentioned. Both men lay out a number of solutions and plans of action to bring relief and resolve many of these issues in both the long and short term.

+ Rosa Clemente Updates Us From New Orleans
We caught up with Rosa Clemente who is now leaving New Orleans and Baton Rouge after her arrest this past wednesday night. She is doing ok but has a lot to say about what’s really going on…

+ Fred Hampton Jr Updates Us from Mississippi
We got a chance to speak with Fred Hampton Jr of the POCC the other day and he gave us a breakdown of what’s been happening in Mississippi, the plight of prisoners, displaced people in Chicago and the launching of the Black Cross.

Please also support the New Orleans Network, Community Labor United, and the Neighborhood Story Project.

In The Houston Astrodome, Frustration and Survival
Reported By Thenmozhi Soundararajan and Anita Johnson
Written By Jeff Chang
For Alternet/Hard Knock Radio/Third World Majority

To Barbara Bush, the Astrodome was a poor people’s heaven. From the floor of the Dome, however, life seemed a lot closer to hell.

HOUSTON, September 13—Outside the Houston Astrodome earlier this week, dozens of tents for State Farm Insurance, the Bank of America, Chase, Veteran’s Aid, and many more seemed to promise a quick return to something like shopping-mall normalcy. It was easy to sign up for a credit card. An ATM city had sprung up, so you could slide your new card in and get cash right away, and pay the bill later.

At press briefings organized by local officials, the story was upbeat, a shining example of government, business, and charity coming together to do good. Thousands of evacuees were being processed, more than 500 children were been reunited with their families, and life went on.

But behind the doors of the Astrodome, survival and frustration were the order of the day. Jamel Bell, who fled his flooded Ninth Ward in New Orleans, found no salvation here. “Inside it feels like prison,” he said. At curfew, he says, the evacuees were locked in.

News teams from independent sources, such as our own, were continuously harassed by local officials and police. Reporters from KPFT, the Pacifica station in Houston, tossed their press badges for Red Cross volunteer badges in order to do their work. In Baton Rouge, hip-hop journalist and WBAI reporter <Rosa Clemente was arrested and briefly detained after National Guardsmen attempted to confiscate her recording equipment.

Despite news reports that evacuees were being moved through the system and out of the center efficiently and quickly, there were up to 35,000 evacuees daily in the building. Cots of weary people stretched across the floor. Celebrities, followed by television cameras, filed in and out. The food was terrible, the meat in the sandwiches sometimes served still frozen. Surveillance was heavy, and the tensions on the floor remained thick.

Many evacuees tried to forget the brutal images of their evacuation: skin sores on a man wading through toxic waters, a chaotic stampede of evacuees on a bridge towards a line of buses, the traumatic separation of families at evacuation checkpoints. An unnamed woman survivor told KPFT radio host Robert Muhammad that National Guardsmen had raped her friend and left her in the swamp. Amidst apocalyptic scenes that seemed biblical, Dionne Wright, a custodian in her mid-30s, tried to calm her daugher. “This is not the end,” she said. “This is not the end.”

Raver Price, a 19-year old woman from the largely black and poor Ninth Ward, felt she heard rumblings before the levee break, and wondered if they were the sounds of man-made dynamite. When she and her hungry friends took food from a flooded store, she encountered a Guardsman who sneered at her, “I can’t wait to kill you bitches.”

Among the displaced New Orleans youths in the Astrodome, some neighborhood rivalries did not go out with the tide, and fights sometimes broke out between different crews. Many evacuees said that when they went to sleep, they kept one eye on their belongings.

Before dawn, often as early as 5:30am, lines for basic services—including those to find housing or obtain the much-desired $2000 relief check from FEMA and the $235 relief check from the Red Cross—began forming, and processing continued until 8pm.

Many were mystified by FEMA rules. Households are only allowed to report one address for the one-time check to be sent to. But for families still in the midst of being reunited, or on the verge of being sent to another evacuation center or even another city, the logic seemed bizarre.

Yet some families left without anything. Immigrants, including many of the estimated 30,000 displaced Vietnamese Americans here in Houston, were being turned away. Even legal residents learned that their green cards are not enough to qualify them for disaster aid. These realizations invariably came after hours of waiting. FEMA and the Red Cross had no translators on hand.

Au Huynh came down from Philadelphia to help in the relief efforts. “I was a refugee, I came here in 1989,” she said. “I don’t think there is a political mark on being a refugee. (Being a refugee means) being displaced because of political reasons or environmental reason. It’s important to recognize the rights of refugees, it shouldn’t be based on being a citizen in terms of getting relief.”

Huynh had called the Red Cross to volunteer as a translator, but they said they had no need for her. So, through the internet, she found a small Houston group called Save The Boat People SOS that was setting up relief efforts. The organization is one of the Asian American community organizations working with a network of Buddhist temples in Houston on an extraordinary parallel relief effort.

With most Asian American evacuees being routed away from the Astrodome, volunteers took them in at the Hong Kong City Mall. In the parking lot, there are piles of donated clothing. At a card table, volunteers work on their own personal laptops and cellphones to find shelter, make urgent medical referrals, and reunite families.

Some 50,000 Vietnamese worked the Louisiana coast as fisherman and in New Orleans in the service and manufacturing sectors, alongside a large community of Filipino American shrimpers, the oldest Filipino community in North America. So the volunteers at the Hong Kong City Mall expect many more evacuees.

But these efforts are short-term. Houston officials have been pushing to move all the evacuees out of the Astrodome and the Reliant Center by Saturday into the Reliant Arena. They say that they might not be able to complete the efforts until next week.

Meanwhile, the evacuees wonder and worry about their future. Many want to return, and most believe they will be able to do so in a week or two. But while New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin has allowed the homeowners and business owners of the Garden District and the French Quarter to return this week, there are still no dates set for poor, largely African American neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward to reopen.

Evacuees are being shipped off all over the country—San Francisco, Michigan, and New York—with no return ticket. As pundits and planners across the country have begun to call for neighborhoods like the Ninth Ward to be bulldozed and permanently abandoned, many evacuees have begun to ask if there is an agenda afoot to eliminate the city’s poor and people of color. Organizers from the New Orleans organization Community Labor United have begun calling for “evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans.”

In the Astrodome, Dolores Johnson has another cold sandwich and shakes her head. She asks, “We are able-bodied. Why can’t we be involved in the process to rebuild our homes?”

NEXT: How New Orleans’ evacuees and community organizers are reacting to redevelopment and resettlement plans.

posted by @ 8:04 pm | 3 Comments

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



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