This is what you have to do sometimes.

NEW ORLEANS, August 31, 2007 – Public housing residents staged a three hour sit-in this Friday at the New Orleans Public housing office in hopes of meeting with the regional HUD director. Residents displaced from their homes for two years by the Katrina/FEMA disaster are still being denied the right to return to their home. Local authorities responded to the sit-in as if it were a terrorist attack; evacuating the building and militarizing the surrounding two block area with a combined force of local police, SWAT and National Guard troops. When questioned by the residents the authorities gave no explanation for their overreaction. The residents left peacefully after three hours, there were no arrests. Despite this heavy-handed response the residents plan to continue in their struggle for the right to return to their homes.

Technorati : New Orleans

Palast is doing some really great investigative reporting down in New Orleans.

I wasn’t naïve. I had a good idea what this scam was all about: 89,000 poor and working class families stuck in Homeland Security’s trailer park gulag while their good homes were guarded against their return by mercenaries. Two decades ago, I worked for the Housing Authority of New Orleans. Even then, the plan was to evict poor folk out of this very valuable real estate. But it took the cover of a hurricane to do it.

The people guarding those homes are non other than the un-American security corporation Blackwater. But here’s more on what some folks have been trying to do to take back their land and property.

Malik’s organization, Common Ground, wouldn’t wait for permission from the federal and local commissars to help folks return. They organized takeovers of public housing by the residents. And, in the face of threats and official displeasure, restored 350 apartments in a destroyed private development on the high ground across the Mississippi in the ward called, “Algiers.” The tenants rebuilt their own homes with their own sweat and their own scraps of cash based on a promise of the landlords to sell Common Ground the property in return for restoring it.

Why, I asked Malik, was there this strange lock-out from public housing?

Malik shook his dreds. “They didn’t want to open it up. They wanted them closed. They wanted them poor ni**ers out of there.”

For Malik, the emphasis is on “poor.” The racial politics of the Deep South is as ugly as it is in Philadelphia, Pa. But the New Orleans city establishment has no problem with Black folk per se. After all, Mayor Ray Nagin’s parents are African-American.

The Malik Palast talks about is Malik Rahim whom I felt should have been elected the next mayor of New Orleans. None the less Rahim is doing a lot of great work possibly more than Nagin is doing as mayor through what Paul Hawken has highlighted in his latest book “civil society”.

It’s the Black survivors without the cash that are a problem. So where New Orleans once stood, Mayor Nagin, in connivance with a Bush regime more than happy to keep a quarter million poor folk (i.e. Democrats) out of this swing state, is creating a new city: a tourist town with a French Quarter, loose-spending drunks, hot-sheets hotels and a few Black people to perform the modern version of minstrel shows.

Malik explained, “It’s two cities. You know? There’s the city for the white and the rich. And there’s another city for the poor and Blacks. You know, the city that’s for the white and rich has recovered. They had a Jazz Fest. They had a Mardi Gras. They’re going to have the Saints playing for those who have recovered. But for those who haven’t recovered, there’s nothing.”

And why do we not even realize what’s happening? It’s because the media is complicit for the most part in not showing us the reality of what’s happening right now in New Orleans. What’s sad is after all the work was done to restore that one housing project that Common Ground worked on they were evicted.

And the one bright star, Malik’s housing project? The tenants’ work was done this past December. By Christmastime, they received their eviction notices – and all were carried out of their rebuilt homes by marshals right after the New Year, including a paraplegic resident who’d lived in the Algiers building for decades.

Hurricane recovery is class war by other means. And in this war of the powerful against the powerless, Mr. Bush can rightly land his fighter plane in Louisiana and declare that, unlike the war in Iraq, it is, indeed, “Mission Accomplished.”

This is the news that we’re not getting…..

Technorati : blackwater, greg palast, malik rahim, new orleans, nola

House Hearing on Katrina Shows Massive Wage Abuse by No-Bid Contractors

Workers who headed to New Orleans in 2005 to help rebuild the Hurricane Katrina-devastated city were abused and exploited, according to a report by Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) and testimony from worker groups at a House hearing today.

It must be frustrating for everyone that keeps on writing about and blogging about NOLA since Katrina. But all I can think of is imagine how hard it must be for the victims? Now they are making victims out of the workers that are trying to rebuild the area. This is the work of the Bush administration for dealing out No-Bid contracts. After all, another corporation who got No-Bid’s in Iraq and probably in NOLA was Halliburton and see how well that turned out?

Technorati Tags: nola

I saw this on the BBC:

Nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina lashed the US Gulf Coast, $1bn (£502m) has been spent to fix hurricane-protection systems.

But many areas of the city would still be vulnerable in a storm much weaker than Katrina, the US Army Corps of Engineers study found.

Nearly 1,700 people were killed in the wake of the devastating hurricane.

It’s a shame.

Technorati Tags: new_orleans, katrina

Looks like the powers that be who seek to gentrify the city have not yet done so:

Up to 40 people were believed to be living in the Economy Motor Lodge on Tulane Avenue when a fire struck the long-abandoned property on the night of March 7. Located six blocks from the mayor’s office and just down the street from the Superdome, the fire was the fourth at the boarded-up motel since hurricane Katrina. Rescue workers spent the next day searching the ashes for possible victims. None were found, though one man who had apparently slept though the blaze emerged from the building the next morning. The city has since ordered the property torn down.

Behind that four-alarm fire lies a disturbing trend: Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans faces a major crisis with homelessness. Already taxed to the breaking point on many fronts, the city has a homeless population that is now approximately double what existed before the storm – in a city half its previous size.

This is the serious problem that only certain groups in New Orleans seem to be addressing. Those groups are ACORN and the AFL-CIO.

I saw this post up on TPMcafe written by Boyd Blundell talking about why New Orleans should be more important to Americans than the Israel Lebanon situation right now.

Here’s an interesting snippet:

I don’t know how to say this without offending someone, but Israel is a foreign country, while New Orleans is an Amercian city. Americans should care more about the latter, just like I should care more about my son’s allergies than I do about an acquaintance’s illness, even if it’s more serious, and that aquaintance is an important person. We need to care more about those closest to us; they are in our care.

Then here’s this:

I think part of the problem is that it’s fun to play geo-political game master with the Israel situation, while New Orleans isn’t nearly as dramatic. Also, the New Orelans flood response was an unmitigated American failure, and it’s just a downer to think about that too much. But when Americans ignore the ongoing mistreatment and suffering of other Americans in favor of dramatic foreign policy arguments, I think it’s a form of procrastination…..

Finally he ends with this:

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next few weeks, because I think that most people will just want the New Orelans story to go away because it’s just depressing. And it is depressing. It was only when I was away that I realized how stressful just being in this city is. So I think I understand the urge, but I think it would be irresponsible to just let everyone give into it.

That is why we cannot ever forget what happened. We cannot forget the injustice that occured. And we must support and help the rebuilding of the city with state of the art leevees in place that can withstand category five hurricanes. In his post Mr. Blundell talks about how the political blogosphere does not blog about New Orleans enough, well here’s one blogger that’s going to blog about it a lot more. Hurricane Katrina is on par with many of the acts of terror that were committed on US and foreign soil. It deserves the same attention. Just because the hurricane did not take human form to create death, terror, and destruction, those things still happened on a mass scale. Let’s not forget the earthquake in Pakistan last year and the South East Asia tsunami in 2004. All these things deserve more attention. But Katrina was American and deserves more attention from Americans, the press, and the Internet.

Union fund awarded buildings for Katrina housing initiative
NEW ORLEANS — The AFL-CIOs investment trust and a partner charity were awarded 196 properties owned by the city as part of a plan to develop housing here.

I’m happy to see the AFL-CIO getting involved in building affordable housing for the thousands of New Orleanians in need.

Photographer for Times-Pic Arrested As He Begs Cops to Kill Him
NEW YORK A photographer for the Times-Picayune of New Orleans who has undergone severe personal trauma since Hurricana Katrina hit was arrested Tuesday after trying to get police to shoot him to death. Police said he claimed he was depressed after he found out he didnt have enough insurance money to rebuild his Katrina-damaged home.

Kudos to Americablog for pointing this out.

The police official said, according to newspapers, that this was only one of many examples of the mental damage that Katrina has caused, “and he sees it all the time now.”

Here’s more:

Besides losing his house, McCucker had photographed that post-hurricane catastrophe. “”You have to understand the depth of the horror that the city was,” McCusker says in the article. “Tens of thousands of people on the freeways stranded. The children begging for food and water. The looting at the Wal-Mart. It was of biblical proportions.” Devastated, he was not able to help his own family very much, he admits.

I’d also like to add that Ray Nagin was a miserable failure in this debacle as well.

In this article it is no surprise that Katrina loss is causing mental illness.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 (UPI) — The loss of the social network and familiar surroundings as a result of Hurricane Katrina can lead to serious psychological problems, says a U.S. expert.

Victims of national disasters often experience trauma that can lead to psychological disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression and substance abuse.

Katrina and its aftermath left whole communities particularly vulnerable to such psychological disorders, not only because of the ongoing stress and upheaval of the storm, but also because of the challenging circumstances that many storm victims lived with before Katrina, according to Gerald P. Koocher, president of the American Psychological Association.

Katrina displaced more than 1 million people, mostly African-Americans, said Koocher.

“One year after the storm, it is apparent that while many people are making Herculean efforts to provide mental health services to storm victims, the mental health professions need to do more to ensure that amongst our ranks are providers with the skills and experience to provide culturally competent services to members of minority groups, including African-Americans, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong Americans and Hispanic Americans,” says Koocher.

Yes, I agree. It’s very sad that these people are still fighting to get basic services that are needed after a traumatic period that was Katrina. Meanwhile in this disgusting story here we come to learn that car dealerships are actually pawning off used formerly flooded Katrina cars on unsuspecting customers.

One example is Diane Zelinski. She was excited to buy her son his first car. But three weeks later, the engine exploded while her son was driving.

That’s when she found out the car had been flooded during the hurricane.

“I think I’m being careful putting him in something safe, when I was actually putting him in a time bomb,” she said.

These people make me sick. How could they do this? I tell you why it’s greed and the need to make money. Lastly, there are still people without homes.

CHALMETTE, La. — It has been 11 months since Hurricane Katrina hit and Janice Tambrella still does not have a home. She doesn’t even have a trailer of her own.

Tambrella is currently jammed in with 10 other relatives in a single trailer delivered to a luckier relative. Sleeping on the floor, living out of cars surrounded by overgrown grass and storm-felled trees, she sighs, “I need a place to stay.”

Oh and here’s the kicker:

St. Bernard Parish President Henry “Junior” Rodriguez is often the one people ask for help. While he doesn’t have the authority to get them trailers, they’ve figure it’s worth asking him since countless calls to the Federal Emergency Management Agency have failed to help.

“The trailer situation is ridiculous,” he said.

Heckuva job they’re doing there, that FEMA.

LA Daily News – Spike Lee tells his version of Katrina
NEW ORLEANS — From the beginning, Spike Lee knew that Hurricane Katrina was a story he had to tell. Watching the first television images of floating bodies and of desperate people, mostly black, stranded on rooftops, he quickly realized he was witnessing a major historical moment. As those moments kept coming, he spent almost a year capturing the hurricanes sorrowful consequences for a four-hour documentary, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” to be shown on HBO this month.

The film, which Lee directed and produced, comes 20 years after the August 1986 debut of his first hit, “Shes Gotta Have It,” about Nola Darling, a Brooklyn graphic artist, and her three lovers. The provocative films that followed “Do the Right Thing,” “Jungle Fever,” “Malcolm X,” among others, with their searing cultural critiques, cemented Lees reputation as his generations pioneering black filmmaker. This year he had a commercial and critical success with “Inside Man,” about a bank heist.

Like him or not, Lee, 49, is an artist many people feel they know. People, black and white, approached him and the “Levees” crew here, he said, imploring: “Tell the story. Tell the story.”

“It becomes like an obligation we have,” he said.

As i’m reading Douglas Brinkley’s book about Katrina which really gives you an entire picture of what happened and who failed in their duties, I’m glad to be hearing that Spike Lee has done this documentary. It is true that the story has to be told and more than once. The injustice was just too much.