SPEAKERS FROM NEW ORLEANS
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Bill Quigley is a professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans where he directs the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center and the Law Clinic and teaches Law and Poverty.
People are making serious money in this hurricane but not the working and poor people who built and maintained New Orleans. President Bush lifted the requirement that jobs re-building the Gulf Coast pay a living wage. The Small Business Administration has received 1.6 million disaster loan applications and has approved 9 in Louisiana. Maintenance workers at the Superdome are being replaced by out of town workers who will work for less money and no benefits. Seventy-five Louisiana electricians at the Naval Air Station are being replaced by workers from Kellogg Brown and Root -- a subsidiary of Halliburton. No schools. No low-income apartments. No jobs. No healthcare. No justice. You saw the people who were left behind last time [previous hurricane]. The same people are being left behind all over again. You raised hell about the people left behind last time. Please do it again.
Jordan Flaherty is a writer and organizer based in New Orleans. His articles after Hurricane Katrina have appeared in at least fifty publications around the world.
"I'm sitting at the River Shelter in Baton Rouge, surrounded by National Guard, with a Virginia "Police Command Center parked in front of me... A couple days ago I was in a car accident in uptown New Orleans, at the corner of Magazine and Nashville. The driver of the other car was a police officer. Within minutes, there were perhaps fifty police/military/security officers on the scene, and the driver of our car, an independent journalist still wounded and in shock from the accident, was arrested and led off in handcuffs. They told him, "you hit a cop in New Orleans. You,re going to leave town in the trunk of a car. He was taken to the local Greyhound Station, which is functioning as a temporary city prison, and he was held for 22 hours. (He was released thanks to the efforts of various defense lawyers and media activists)."
Allen Ray Bernard, former resident of New Orleans and Director of Louisana Diabled Workers speaks about previous hurricanes that ALSO struck the poorest part of New Orleans:"In 1965, the city of New Orleans, in the face of Hurricane Bessie, loaded a barge and dynamited the levy, diverting the water to the poor, lower 9th Ward because it was about to pour into the French Quarter. Bodies were found... My daughter waited for two days this week on a rooftop ... Helicopters wouldn't pick her up but they picked up people in the wealthy David Duke communities. Alot of people died because if you climb up in your attic in a flood with nothing to break the roof open, you're in trouble. When the sun comes up, you're in an oven, the water is so hot.."
Ted Quant, Director, Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice at Loyola University in New Orleans, is founder of Inner-city Programs for Youth, co-chair of the Mayor's Task Force on Homelessness, director, and an activist against police brutality and the death penalty in Louisiana:
"We started a shelter at the 21st Century Youth Camp. I hooked up with 18 people living in one house. One was my student from a long time ago. I'm beginning to understand the psychological impact of refuges. It's not just your stuff. It's your place in society, where you had meaning and people knew you. No more community and culture. Now, 450,000 more people no longer have a place. The government took the money for war in Iraq instead of doing the repair work . The brutality this nation has perpetrated on others, from torture to imprisonment without trial, is coming home. The treatment of the victims of Katrina is proving to be the testing ground for how far and fast fascism can be established in America. Every abuse visited on someone else that is not opposed lays the foundation for even bolder attacks on our basic human rights. We must unite to stop it now, before it is too late."
Gloria Slaughter, retired public school teacher, Atlanta:
"I cried every time I viewed the chaotic scenes... and now Atlanta is getting an influx of new homeless to add to the already 7000 homeless while the city government and corporate powers such as Home Depot pass"Quality of Life" Ordinances banning loitering or sleeping in the downtown parks, banning panhandling in an area designated the "Tourist Triangle. A movement has been built in Atlanta of the homeless and their advocates...."
Steve Miller, public school teacher, Oakland:"This year, the state took over New Orleans and Oakland Public Schools. We both are getting a good look at what Privatization means. For the rulers of this country, neither Katrina nor the 1989 earthquake in California was a disaster. In fact, its an investment opportunity. In Oakland, after the earthquake, all the ruined property immediately increased in value! Why isn't there discussion about expanding public property in creative ways so the needs of everyone are taken care of? "
Luis Rodriguez, poet and author of the award-winning book, "Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A."
"Capitalism is at the root of the madness we're seeing: Where police are forced to shoot and ward off looters, and letting food rot, instead of opening up the stores and handing them to the people who need it. Where those with means were allowed to leave New Orleans, leaving those who don't have means to fend for themselves ... It's time to imagine and clarify the possible and powerful ways to go beyond the needs of a few rich capitalists who dictate who lives and dies in this country. The fact is - most of those people didn't have to die. The fact is it's within our hands to do something about it. The fact is capitalism is the biggest block to true human freedom, protection, and well-being on earth. If we learn anything at all, we should learn that we, the people, with power in our hands, can do better. Read the complete statement
Jerome Scott, Director, Project South:
Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide"The media is attempting to turn the disaster on the Gulf Coast into a race centered event. They can do that because of the concentrated nature of African Americans in the inner city of New Orleans versus the spread out nature of poor white folks throughout the Gulf area. We must insure that we look at this as a class thing and not a race thing. It affected not only poor blacks, but poor whites, Native Americans and Latinos."
Richard Monje, Education Director,
Chicago Midwest Region, UNITE-HERE Union:"This is the time for an independent political movement to develop. When you see the abandonment of people in such a concentrated way, you know it's about more than incompetence, and more than Bush screwed up. We have to galvanize around a vision of how to reconstruct the government with a program based upon the needs of people so that this never happens again. Its about redistributing the wealth. Republicans and Democrats have done this from the standpoint of their interests. We need a program from the standpoint of the poor and working people."
John Slaughter, author of New Battles Over Dixie: The Campaign For a New South
"As someone who grew up poor in southwest Alabama, in the very area that the storm hit hardest, I can tell you that there are also large numbers of poor whites who have never been in a position to exploit or oppress anyone, and who are themselves victimized by the legacy of Jim Crow segregation designed by a Southern ruling class to exploit, oppress and divide the Southern poor. What is so exciting about our new movement of the poor today is that the edifice of white supremancy is cracking. An equality of poverty is becoming the basis of the poor fighting together for housing, for food and clothing, for living wage jobs, for the distribution of the necessaries of life based on need and not on greed.."
Rev. Edward Pinkney, a minister who fights for the poor in Benton Harbor, MI, returned from a journey to New Orleans to help the victims. (Rev. Pinkney faces charges for alleged vote fraud resulting from a community recall of council members who represent the Whirlpool Corporation.)
"We visited many outlying towns and villages in Mississippi and Louisiana, places that the Red Cross and FEMA hadn't visited. What happened after Hurricane Katrina was shocking and awful. There was a total non-response of the federal government for four days. The world was left to see pictures of tormented Black faces; relief was nowhere to be seen for the poor and have-not U.S. citizens and immigrants.It's time we start doing something different. We are ethe people. We are supposed to be the government."
Laura Garcia, editor of a the Tribuno del Pueblo.
"We need a simple, realizable vision of a new cooperative society -- one that provides food, clothing, shelter, medical care, one that cares for the children and the elderly. Today's world of plenty makes it possible to achieve this. All that stands in the way is an immoral system that defends private property over human life."
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