‘Poor left to fend for themselves’

A delegation to the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina has found that, six weeks after the storm, the poor and largely Black residents of the Gulf States have yet to see any real form of relief from the government or Red Cross.

The delegation included Elena Everett, state chair of the North Carolina Green Party and national co-chair of the party’s Peace Action Committee; Peter Gilbert, a national leader with the youth group Fight Imperialism—Stand Together (FIST); Sara Flounders, co-director of the Interna tional Action Center; and Dustin Langley, a Navy veteran and IAC activist.

They reported that the French Quarter of New Orleans had electricity and water while the poor neighborhoods of the city had neither. Millions of dollars in contracts have been handed out to Bush cronies to enable the Quarter to open for business while, just blocks away, the streets have still not been cleared of storm rubble.

Despite criminal neglect, curfews and racist threats, however, many people in the region are asserting their right to remain in their neighborhoods.

Mama D, a community activist in the city’s Seventh Ward, has turned her home into a relief center for her neighborhood. The area, which was under 5 feet of water, has yet to see any help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), other government agencies or the Red Cross. Instead, those who have remained in their homes have faced harassment from local law enforcement, curfews and threats from gangs of racist vigilantes.

In the Bywater neighborhood, local activists with Get Your Act On are collecting food, cleaning supplies, bleach and other supplies to help people stay and to encourage others to return.

At the Common Ground Collec tive in the Algiers neighborhood, local activist Malik Rahim has transformed his home into a relief and organizing center. Acti vists from across the country are working with the community to distribute food and other supplies, to organize cleaning teams to help people move back into their homes, and to put tarps on rooftops damaged by Kat rina. They have established an emergency medical clinic in a neighborhood mosque that has treated more than 2,000 patients.

Law enforcement and the military are visible everywhere, maintaining roadblocks to keep residents from returning to their neighborhoods. Returns have only been allowed in a carefully controlled neighborhood-by-neighborhood plan in which residents have no say.

In whiter, more upscale neighborhoods, people have been allowed to return and been provided with water and electricity. In poor and Black com munities, troops with M-16s enforce a curfew and harass residents.

Rahim says the people experienced “a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing, a deliberate attempt to remake New Orleans. There was no need to relocate anyone outside of the city. Algiers, which was not flooded, has enough space to house the entire population of evacuees. We have 20 parks where they could set up tents and 17 schools that could be opened to provide shelter.”

The delegation toured a FEMA tent city used by a handful of police, firefighters and corporate contractors. The compound contained large, 30- by 18-foot air-conditioned tents, showers, laundry facilities and field kitchens. It could have housed 2,000 evacuated residents but was filled to only about one-fifth of capacity.

Langley, the Navy veteran, says, “The government has stockpiles of these tent cities—they were also used to house soldiers during the invasion of Iraq. They could easily house every resident of New Orleans who wanted to stay if the government were interested in providing any real assistance. Instead, the agenda is to displace them and scatter them across the country.”

‘The working-class Red Cross’

Saving Our Selves After Katrina is an ad-hoc coalition of community activists operating out of donated warehouse space in Mobile, Ala.

Elena Everett said, “It was amazing to see how much can get done when helping people is the priority. S.O.S After Katrina’s base operates as a dispatch center to provide supplies to more than 75 community distribution centers throughout the region. Organizers have distributed more than 200 tons of food, water, diapers, medical supplies, personal hygiene kits, generators, bleach and tools. We saw Vivian, an organizer with SOS, sending out medical teams, food and equipment all over the region. This small group of volunteers is doing more than the entire government and Red Cross combined.”

Paul Robinson, a leader of S.O.S. After Katrina and a director of the Alabama Alliance to Restore the Vote, a coalition working to restore voting rights to ex-felons, described how the organization came together: “We were riding around after the storm and we realized that the poor folks living next to these relief sites were not getting served—simple things like ice and water. These are folks who had no resources before the flood, and now they were really out. We tried to go through official channels, called up some government officials, but they said FEMA handled everything. I called up my coalition partners and they had similar experiences across the state, so we decided to come together and launch S.O.S. We’re the working-class Red Cross.”

In Biloxi, Miss., some neighborhoods were under 25 feet of water right after the storm. The delegation delivered a generator to a neighborhood that had not yet seen any relief. The houses in the area are filled with sludge and toxic black mold. The residents are sleeping in cars or camping out in their back yards. To get any help, one resident said, they have to go to a FEMA or Red Cross center in Montgomery, Ala., more than 150 miles away.

Just a quarter of a mile away, however, was a parking lot filled with trucks, trailers, supplies and contractors hard at work on rebuilding a local casino.

Delegation member Gilbert noted, “It’s not that capitalism doesn’t work—it’s working just like it’s supposed to. The poor are left to die and all the resources go to making sure that the profits keep coming in.”

Flounders agreed, saying that the government’s agenda is to “leave the poor to fend for themselves and to clear out the City of New Orleans to be redeveloped.”