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Calling for More Youth Jobs in Boston

Since 2001, the city of Bosotn has cut its spending on youth jobs by more than half. Anyone who reads the Boston papers knows that youth violence, particularly among Blacks and Latinos in Roxbury and Dorchester, has been skyrocketing.

The graphic above is from the United Youth and Youth Workers of Boston website. Please sign their petition urging Boston city officials to allocate $5 Million from the FY07 City Operating Budget for summer and year-round youth jobs.

Youth jobs are crucial to stopping violence. In the short term, they provide a positive alternative to young people of all types -- helping those who have already made negative choices, turn their lives around; and helping other young people who are on the fence, stay positive.

In the long term, jobs build the skills and futures of young people, giving them the tools and relationships to stay positive long after a summer job has finished. Indeed, youth jobs do far more than prevent violence: they invest in young people, giving them the resources to thrive as they become adults and community leaders.

Gone to Mississippi

DSCN1170, originally uploaded by BenTG.

Dollars & Sense co-editor Chris Sturr wrote to me today to let me know that "Gone to Mississippi," the feature I wrote about my trip to the Gulf Coast, is now online. This is the opening section:

"You have to come here... you just can't understand unless you see it... please come," Gayle Tart said to me. Kermit Moore, an organizer from the Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights, had referred me to Tart, an African-American attorney in Gulfport, for a perspective on Hurricane Katrina's impact in Mississippi.

Her urgency was persuasive. In late January, after I had traveled around the Gulf Coast region for a week, I met Tart in a private home in Gulfport. "Now we can talk," she said. "Until you saw what I saw, I couldn't talk to you. You had no way of understanding."

Tart was right.

Two things I could not understand from where I sat in Boston were the true extent of Katrina's geographic reach in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama—wiping out an entire region of the country—and the scale of human costs, compounded by government policies, local, state, and federal.

Even before the trip, I knew something wasn't right about the media's coverage of Mississippi. I heard entire towns were wiped out, but I didn't hear anything about African American communities, even though Mississippi has the highest concentration of African Americans in the United States. Even along the Gulf Coast, one of the whitest parts of the state, there are many heavily African-American areas. For instance, Gulfport, the second largest city in the state, is one-third African American; parts of the city are over 90% African American. But Katrina's impact on African-American communities on the Mississippi coast was virtually absent from the news.

On October 11, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour announced the formation of his Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal. "The Coast and South Mississippi will decide their own destiny," Barbour said, "but with strong support from the Commission, our Congressional delegation, state officials and many others."

But whom, exactly, will government support? "It took some seven weeks after that commission was convened to even have a committee on housing, even though housing was the main thing the goddamn storm knocked out," noted Derrick Evans, founder and director of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives, an innovative nonprofit community development corporation in the historic African-American settlement, now part of Gulfport. "They quickly fast-tracked legislation to allow the casinos to be rebuilt on land so that the casino companies and operators wouldn't abandon the Gulf Coast. An opportunity was missed to also require those folks, when they rebuild, to pay into an affordable housing trust fund, like the hotels do in Boston."

To travel through the Gulf Coast region is to move through a twilight zone where thousands of people are in limbo, with no sense of their future. In contrast to the damage Katrina brought in New Orleans, the storm was largely color-blind in its immediate destruction of Mississippi. Like New Orleans, however, there are racial and economic dimensions to everything in the aftermath—from the availability of resources for relief and cleanup to reconstruction plans.

"On September 29, 2005, four weeks after the storm, after weeks of begging FEMA and a visit to Washington, D.C., to get congressional support, a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center finally arrived in East Biloxi," said Ward 2 City Councilor Bill Stallworth, speaking before Congress last December. "That same week, the Red Cross set up an assistance center."

"In emergency room triage, you attend to the person with their arm hanging off, not the one with the splinter," Stallworth continued. "The Red Cross and FEMA seem to have a different mindset. The areas of Biloxi that were not as hard hit received a rapid response, while a good three and half weeks past the storm, we were still awaiting assistance."

"We could see other areas with lights, and we didn't have lights," recalled an African-American accountant in Gulfport, Sam Arnold, who is currently a community organizer with International Relief and Development. "We were like two or three weeks in, and we could see the main highway [49], since our community is only two blocks off the highway. The businesses on 49 had lights, and we didn't have lights. And you know, you really can't function without electricity."

The immediate housing crisis for storm survivors is translating into land grabs in low-income neighborhoods. Most widely at risk are African-American neighborhoods, many of them of historic significance, though not widely recognized as such.

(Read the rest.)

The online version is currently no-frills, without any of the images that appear in the magazine. I've uploaded a PDF of the magazine version [2.2 MB], in case you'd like to see it.

The image, above, appears on the opening pages of my article. Go here to see it large.

It was dumbfounding to drive along the coast in Biloxi and find the Grand Casino on the north side of Highway 90. Before Katrina, the casino was on a barge, docked off the beach, south of the highway. The storm surge lifted the casino barge out of the water, over the beach and over the highway. If you stand at the western end of the barge and look east, you can see the yellow and blue neon sign, a half mile down the road, where the barge originally sat. The same thing happened to two other casino barges—the President Casino in Biloxi, which landed on top of a Holiday Inn, and the Gulfport Grand Casino.

I'm Going to This

If you're in the Boston area, this event looks like an important opportunity to get some current information about life in New Orleans. A friend of mine who is a student at UMass sent me the announcement. Hope to see you there...

WHAT'S HAPPENING IN NEW ORLEANS?
COMMON GROUND COLLECTIVE at UMASS BOSTON

When: Thursday, May 11 from noon to 2:00 p.m.

Where: UMass Boston Wheatley Hall Student Lounge, Room 0148, 4th Floor


Please stop by for as little or as much time as you can!


Adjunct Dispute Resolution Professor Phil Woodbury, who has spent time working in post-Katrina New Orleans, will introduce the work of the Common Ground Collective. Also present will be a long-term Common Ground
volunteer and a lifelong resident of the 9th ward. They will speak about the storm, the failed government response, and Common Ground's work.

Common Ground's mission is to provide short term relief for victims of hurricane disasters in the gulf coast region, and long term support in rebuilding the communities affected in the New Orleans area. Common Ground is a community-initiated volunteer organization offering assistance, mutual aid and support. The work gives hope to communities by working with them, providing for their immediate needs and emphasizes people working together to rebuild their lives in sustainable ways.

Common Ground was founded by New Orleans residents immediately after Hurricane Katrina. Thousands of volunteers have been mobilized to provide hurricane relief and long term organizing in New Orleans and surrounding areas. In addition to providing water, food, clothing and other emergency services, Common Ground has established a free medical clinic with two satellite centers, helped gut and clean churches, houses, and schools, prevented bulldozing in areas of the 9th Ward, established an after-school program, and much more.


Please come with your curiosity and your questions. Learn more about Common Ground at www.commongroundrelief.org

Technorati Tags: activism, katrina, nola

VOICES FROM THE GULF COAST - Special Issue of Dollars & Sense Magazine

March 29, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Chris Sturr
or Amy Gluckman
617-447-2177

VOICES FROM THE GULF COAST

THE STORIES YOU HAVEN’T HEARD
ABOUT
HURRICANE KATRINA & GULF COAST RECONSTRUCTION

When Hurricane Katrina struck six months ago, the mainstream media was shocked to discover the scope of poverty in New Orleans. And that’s about as deep as the coverage has gone.

Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice has just released its 56-page special issue (March/April 2006) on Katrina. In it, you’ll discover how Katrina exposed—and has intensified—a whole range of unjust systems of racial and economic domination.

Did you know:

• When Katrina struck, the New Orleans jail housed about 6,800 prisoners, including violent felons but also plenty of people awaiting arraignment or trial, like a guy arrested for reading Tarot cards without a permit and homeless people arrested for begging or sleeping on the street. Prisoners were locked in first-floor cells as the water rose; some spent days standing in sewage-filled cells with little food or water. Meanwhile, the facility’s scant two-page evacuation plan was on “this guy’s computer” that got flooded.

But the story goes back much farther. The jail’s population has increased eightfold since the mid-1970s—while the city’s population has dropped. Why? Because the parish sheriff makes money for each prisoner he houses. As one sheriff commented, “fewer inmates translates into less revenue for the jail.” Locking up fewer New Orleanians would mean shrinking the sheriff’s fat patronage-based fiefdom.

• When Katrina struck, it devastated nearly the entire Mississippi coast, in some places for miles inland. Thousands lost their homes. But state and federal relief and reconstruction plans are doing little to help people rebuild their homes or find other housing. In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour decided to spend the state’s entire $5.3 billion federal Katrina relief grant on retroactive flood insurance for otherwise insured homeowners—not a penny for renters, uninsured homeowners, or to repair public housing.

But the story goes back much farther. For years, redevelopment plans in coastal cities like Biloxi and Gulfport have been endangering low-income and black neighborhoods. “There are people here who’ll tell you that developers and local politicians have been trying to flood us out of existence, because with each piece of land, they haul in a bunch of red clay, which is semi-impervious, dump it in the wetlands to build up land on which to put a slab or a parking lot, then on the slab they put a building, a big ‘ole Wal-Mart or something,” says Mississippi historian and community organizer Derrick Evans.

• When Katrina struck, the flooding in New Orleans left behind a layer of toxic sediment—contaminants include arsenic and diesel-fuel substances—in neighborhoods throughout the city. The EPA has not begun any cleanup of the sediment. Government agencies are recommending that returnees wear protective gear like Tyvek suits when they work on their homes but, as environmental justice activist Monique Harden notes, “not one government agency provides this protective gear to people returning to the area.”

But the story goes back much farther. For years, low-income and black communities in Louisiana have faced the massive legal(!) dumping of toxic pollutants. In fact, the historic African-American community of Mossville, La., is the focus of the first-ever environmental human-rights lawsuit brought against the U.S. government, now pending before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States.

These are just some of the in-depth stories you’ll read in this special issue of Dollars & Sense. The issue includes:

• Repopulating New Orleans – How did San Francisco do what a top economist says New Orleans cannot?

• Gone to Mississippi – A journey along the state’s devastated coast

• Activist Perspectives on Katrina: Three Interviews

Mississippi historian and activist Derrick Evans – “Ground Zero of Someone Else’s Future”
East Biloxi community activist Jearlean Osborne – “The Storm of Life after Katrina”
Environmental justice activist Monique Harden – Katrina Hits Cancer Alley

• Down by Law – Orleans Parish Prison before and after Katrina

• Bringing Them All Back Home – Housing in New Orleans, six months later

• SPECIAL PULLOUT CENTERFOLD – Rogues’ Gallery of Katrina Profiteers / Map of the Katrina Diaspora / Roster of progressive Gulf Coast organizations

• And more!!!

Authors and editors available for interviews – contact Chris Sturr or Amy Gluckman at (617) 447-2177.


Founded in 1974, Dollars & Sense explains the workings of the U.S. and international economies and provides left perspectives on current economic affairs. It is edited and produced by a collective of economists, journalists, and activists who are committed to social justice and economic democracy. 

In A Blur

DSCN2164, originally uploaded by BenTG.

I started my new job at Physicians for Human Rights the Monday before last (March 6). By the end of my first day, it was decided that I should join other staff in DC on Sunday the 12th to be there for PHR's Health Action Aids Summit. PHR brought doctors, nurses, public health professionals and medical and public health students to DC to meet with members of Congress about putting money into stopping the brain drain of health professionals, and into building health systems, in developing countries—primarily in Africa—that suffer from the AIDS pandemic.

I went to the two days of events on Monday and Tuesday as part of the PHR communications team. Among my duties was to act as staff photographer. On Monday night, after a day of keynote speakers, trainings, and a Congressional briefing, I got lost trying to go to the restaurant where everyone was supposed to gather.

The weather in DC on Sunday and Monday was unseasonably warm, in the 70s. It was a beautiful night. While I walked around second guessing myself about how to get to the restaurant I stopped to take some pictures.

On other fronts, we've started getting back some of the proofs for the special issue of Dollars & Sense, on the Gulf Coast region since Katrina. The magazine should be in print by the end of this month.

I'm getting more settled in my job, and I'm almost done with my work on the d&s issue. Maybe I'll get back to a little more blogging...

My New Job And Other Recent Developments

After a long job search, I finally accepted a job offer on Wednesday.

On March 6, I will start working as Web Community Coordinator for Physicians for Human Rights. After over a year of job hunting, it is great to finally have a full-time job, and it is a dream come true to have an internet communications and organizing job for a human rights organization like PHR.

After my first two weeks at PHR, they will be sending me to Seattle to attend the N-TEN Nonprofit Technology Conference. This will be a cool opportunity to learn from and to network with colleagues in what is still a very new field—and to have some fun in a great city.

For the rest of this month, I'll be finishing my work as guest editor for the March/April issue of Dollars & Sense, devoted to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi since Katrina. We have some exciting interviews with and great articles by local local activists, as well as pieces by other authors, including myself. I'm in the middle of writing my longish article about my travels on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at the end of January. I spent six days in Mississippi and two days in New Orleans. I interviewed numerous storm survivors and learned a lot about the situations of some of the Gulf Coast African American communities. I've been posting some excerpts from my interviews on the Dollars & Sense blog. The magazine should be available by the end of March.

Dollars & Sense is in the process of overhauling its website. The new site is up and running and is a big improvement over what we had before. Watch for web exclusives and multimedia content in the near future. In the meantime, you should check out the online material from the Jan/Feb issue. I highly recommend former d&s intern Rebecca Parish's interview with Lani Guinier and longtime D&S Collective member John Miller's What's Good for Wal-Mart . . .

MS Blogging At Dollars & Sense Blog

I got back from Mississippi on Monday evening and have been blogging over at the dollars & sense blog. Here are some of the recent posts:

Resources

Railroad Tracks

Gayle Tart: "you wanna say no, I can't do it, I just can't, not anything else, not another problem, not another person."

Nothing like this has ever happened in America

Alice T: "I was left there for a reason, to help out."

Miss TT

You can also go over to my flickr page to check out some of my photos from the trip.

Before Katrina: Modern Day Debtors' Prison In Gulfport, MS

Gulfport, MS was in the news over the weekend with a jaw-dropping story. Saturday's US News & World Report told of a class action suit against the city, concerning what amounted to a debtors' prison before Hurricane Katrina:

Last July, a homeless man named Hubert Lindsey was stopped by police officers in Gulfport, Miss., for riding his bicycle without a light. The police soon discovered that Lindsey was a wanted man. Gulfport records showed he owed $4,780 in old fines. So, off to jail he went. Legal activists now suing the city in federal court say it was pretty obvious that Lindsey couldn't pay the fines. According to their complaint, he lived in a tent, was unemployed, and appeared permanently disabled by an unseeing eye and a mangled arm. But without a lawyer to plead his case, the question of whether Lindsey was a scofflaw or just plain poor never came up. Nor did the question of whether the fines were really owed, or if it was constitutional to jail him for debts he couldn't pay. Nobody, the activists say, even bothered to mention alternatives like community service. The judge ordered Lindsey to "sit out" the fine in jail. That took nearly two months.

[U]p until Hurricane Katrina hit, [Gulfport police were] beating the pavement looking for those who owed fines for things like public profanity--at $222 a pop. The result of Gulfport's fine-reclamation project was that while it collected modest sums of money, it also packed the county jail with hundreds of people who couldn't pay. The Southern Center for Human Rights filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Gulfport last July. Attorney Sarah Geraghty says that before bringing the case against the city, she witnessed hundreds of court adjudications involving Gulfport's poor in which no defense attorney was present or even offered. Many defendants, Geraghty said, were obviously indigent, mentally ill, or physically disabled, like Hubert Lindsey; some had been jailed for fines they had already paid. One mentally ill woman attempted suicide by jumping from an elevated cell in the county jail after she was picked up for having failed to pay several city fines; the lawsuit alleges that police then grabbed her again on the same charge a few months later, causing her to miss the surgery scheduled to fix the broken bones in her feet.

As we attempt to understand the observable disparities in who gets relief and what gets rebuilt, it is important to keep in mind the city's demonstrated attitude towards its poor. It is also important to keep in mind what strips of pavement the city was beating and whom it tended to be looking for. The Amended Complaint from the lawsuit, which attorney Sarah Geraghty has sent me, describes

a special force of police officers charged with patrolling the streets of Gulfport to arrest citizens who have failed to pay fines assessed by the Gulfport Municipal Court. These officers conduct periodic sweeps, during which they search the streets for people who look as though they might the City old fines. During these sweeps, the officers go into predominantly African-American neighborhoods and stop people in the streets without any independent reason or suspicion, but for the sole purpose of checking to see if they owe the City old fines. Those who owe fines are taken to jail.

The state of Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black Americans in the country [PDF]. Second is Louisiana. Mississippi and Louisiana are pretty much tied for the highest poverty rates in the US, both hovering just below 20% statewide. We cannot discuss the effects of Katrina and the issues around reconstruction without serious, ongoing considerations of race and poverty.

Further Reading
• Sun Herald, "A lawsuit alleges that practices in Gulfport's Municipal Court are creating a DEBTORS PRISON"
• Southern Center for Human Rights Indigent Defense Cases In The News

(Cross posted on the d&s blog.)

Gulf Coast Trip - January 22-29, 2006

This town has stood up in the face of things
Lots worse than a ninety mile wind
It's not bad storms I'm afraid of today
But the greed that our leaders walk in.

I'll walk along the Boardwalk rail
And feel and hear this ninety mile gale
I can hear the ocean mourn and groan
And I wonder about ships lost out in this storm.

So come on wind and blow out your brains
Blow like a Cyclone across the flat plains
This is just an echo of our world wide storm
That's ripping away our balls and our chains.

--Woody Guthrie, "Ninety Mile Wind" (1944)

This summer, I joined the Editorial Collective of Dollars & Sense, a national popular economics magazine, which has presented progressive analysis of current economic issues and trends for over thirty years. Since September I have been guest editing the March/April issue of the magazine, which we are devoting to economic issues in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

While New Orleans caught one edge of Hurricane Katrina, the storm hit the Gulf Coast of Mississippi head on, causing unfathomable destruction. Nonetheless news coverage of New Orleans has overshadowed, Mississippi. When the mainstream news media does report on Mississippi, we may hear about places like Waveland, Pass Christian, Gulfport, Bay St. Louis, and Biloxi, but we don't hear about the African Americans who live there. There are few images of Black Mississippians from the Gulf Coast and no discussion of their communities. Except for Waveland, all of these cities have African American populations that are larger than the national average of 12.3%. As of Census 2000, Pass Christian is 28.2% African American. Gulfport is 33.5% African American. In Bay St. Louis and Biloxi, the numbers are 16.6% and 19%, respectively.

As I have pursued writers who are local activists and survivors from the Gulf Coast region, I have been moved by the experiences of African American activists in Gulfport and Biloxi, whom I have had the opportunity to talk to. In Mississippi, as in New Orleans, the slow responses of FEMA and the Red Cross have harmed storm victims of many ethnicities and economic backgrounds. In both places, however, government inaction has especially harmed African Americans. At this writing, as recovery gets underway, white neighborhoods in Biloxi have been substantially cleaned up; on the other side of town, the African American neighborhood still looks like a bombed out war zone.

One of our writers for the March/April issue is an African American attorney, named Gayle. Gayle is in Gulfport, doing legal advocacy for Katrina survivors facing unfair, opportunistic evictions and other housing problems. She is also a hurricane survivor whose brother and two-year-old nephew died in the storm. Speaking with her on the phone has been overwhelming. In a number of our conversations, Gayle has connected me with other survivors who have lost loved ones or property or both and have first-hand experience of the unavailability of government disaster relief. They tell of FEMA trailers sitting unused in storage lots while survivors live in tents in winter weather; the outsourcing of jobs to corporate contractors; and price gouging on building materials.

The first time we spoke, Gayle expressed considerable gratitude that I cared enough to seek her out. There just hadn't been outside attention to the plights of people in her community, though it had been months since the storm hit. She was eager to write an article for Dollars & Sense, but she also said, urgently, "you have to come here... you just can't understand unless you see it... please come." When they heard about my conversations with Gayle and others from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, the Dollars & Sense Collective agreed that in addition to publishing Gayle, we need to respond to her request.

Dollars & Sense is sending me to Gulfport and Biloxi, and to New Orleans, for eight days, from January 22 - 29. I will document my trip with still images, audio recordings, and video clips. While I am on the Gulf Coast, I will be posting to the Dollars & Sense blog, which we have just added to the Dollars & Sense website. To the extent that time and internet connections allow, I will provide regular updates and photos from my trip. In addition to the photos that you will find in Dollars & Sense blog posts, I will post a larger selection of my photos on my flckr account.

After I return from the South, I will write a report of what I saw there for the March/April issue of Dollars & Sense, and possibly for other publications. I will also get the word out about survivors' experiences in the Gulf by presenting my audio, photographs and video through the Dollars & Sense website and live presentations. As with the March/April issue as a whole, we hope the information I gather on this trip will be useful for activists. The communities I visit will be allowed full access to the audio recordings, photos, and video that I make of them. I will also make a list of the local organizations we have been working with, and of others I may learn about on my trip, that directly address the needs of Katrina survivors; Dollars & Sense will publish the list in the March/April issue and on our website, and I will distribute it at presentations about my trip.

Dollars & Sense is a small non-profit organization on a shoe string budget. This may be the first time that Dollars & Sense has sent someone to do investigative work. If you would like to make a tax deductible donation to help us pay for the trip, you can make donations in $25 increments through our website, or send a check for any amount, with "Katrina Project" in the memo line, to Dollars & Sense, 29 Winter Street, Boston, MA 02108.

(Cross posted on the Dollars & Sense blog.)

"Diggin' coals so the world can run / And operators can have their fun"

I started to post Pete Seeger's rendition of Malvina Reynolds' "Mrs. Clara Sullivan's Letter," as a tribute to the twelve miners who died after the explosion that trapped them in the Sago Mine on Monday. But I stopped myself because I thought that it might be a stretch to apply the words of the song to this particular situation. This disaster was in West Viriginia; the Reynolds song is about Perry County, KY. This disaster is about safety violations and bad oversight; the Reynolds song is about other labor problems, like "goons on the picket line" who intimidate striking workers.

Turns out there was no reason to hesitate. In one of yesterday's Portside mailings, Jack Radey wrote:

If you really like Dramamine, the NPR reporting on the Sago Disaster was truly charming. They prattled on and on about how the news media got the story wrong, how did this happen? How were the wrong headlines printed?How were people put on this emotional roller coaster?

Then they interviewed a local pastor about the importance of accepting all this and not getting angry. They, like the rest of the media, mentioned in passing that a fight broke out where the families were waiting when the news of the dead was announced. But why were people fighting? There was even mention in one broadcast that the local SWAT team was deployed around the corner from where the families waited, in case disorder broke out. Oh, mine safety violations? Why would that be news? No doubt the families were so angry at the misleading news. Maybe about the fact that 12 of their men were killed in a mine with triple the normal (bad enough) rate of safety violations?

That the local goon squad is there to protect the mine owner and his property from the wrath of the families of the men murdered for his greed?

Oh come now, would anyone suggest that would be news? Remember why our flag (not the one on the courthouse, where no doubt those $25 fine were handed out), our flag, is the color it is?

And then it turns out the Sago Mine is owned by an Ashland, Kentucky company, known as Horizon Natural Resources (HNR). HNR had been facing bankruptcy since 2002 and was bought out in 2004 by the International Coal Group (ICG), led by New York billionaire Wilbur Ross. Ross' m.o. isn't pretty:

After the sale, six union operations previously owned by Horizon were shut down. The nonunion mines remained open.

Under the bankruptcy and reorganization plan, U.S. Federal Bankruptcy Judge William Howard in August agreed that Horizon should not be responsible for $800 million in health insurance contractual obligations to more than 3,000 active and retired United Mine Workers of America union members.

The judge threw out the contract and voided the collective bargaining agreement to make the sale of the mines more appealing to Ross and his partners.

As John Bennett, whose father James was killed in the Sago Mine, said to Matt Lauer on the Today Show (via American Rights At Work):

It’s not just the men that go down there every day that know the mines is [sic] unsafe…we have no protection for our workers. We need to get the United Mine Workers back in these coal mines, to protect [against] these safety violations, to protect these workers.

It's the same old story:

Lauer then asked Bennett “You feel as if the miners speak out they are at risk of losing their jobs?” “Yeah” Bennett answered.

Lest we forget where the rest of the responsibility for these deaths resides, David Corn explained the big picture three and a half years ago (via Jodan Barab), after another mine disaster, in Green Tree, Pa., which, fortunately, was not fatal:

That spirit, though, was not present earlier this year when the Bush administration proposed cutting the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) by $7 million. The administration defended the 6-percent reduction by noting the number of coal mines has been decreasing. Yet coal mining fatalities have gone up for three years in a row. There were 42 mining fatalities in 2001, 29 in 1998. In March, Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, maintained the funding cut would cause a 25 percent reduction in the government's mine-safety inspection workforce. As of March, 612 federal mine inspectors were responsible for enforcing safety regulations in 25 states, and there were signs the system has not been functioning well.

Thus Jordan Barab concludes:

And finally, let's take one more step back and take a look at the even bigger picture. This administration has been obsessed with one thing since it took office: tax cuts and favor for its friends. What that translates into is "Shrinking government..." -- at least the part that provides protections for workers -- "to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" as Bush Administration ideolouge Grover Norquist says.

Well "government" isn't some abstract thing. Shrinking government means that agencies like OSHA and MSHA have less power to enforce the law and maintain safe working conditions. So, while drowning government in a bathtub, we're also asphyxiating workers in a coal mine.

So, then, here's Pete, in memory of the twelve men and in solidarity with the one survivor and with all of the affected families and friends. You can read the lyrics here.

The People’s Declaration: Survivors Assembly Demands

The People’s Declaration: Survivors Assembly Demands
Identified by survivors on December 9, 2005

We demand that the local, state and federal government make conditions possible for our immediate return. This includes the following:

The Nagin Administration must make temporary housing such as apartments, hotel rooms, trailers and public housing developments available for us while we rebuild our homes.

The government must put an end to price gouging, stop all evictions and make rents affordable.

Local residents must take the lead in rebuilding our communities and must be hired to do the rebuilding work.

There must be immediate debt relief for debt associated with this disaster.

Quality public education and childcare must be provided for our children.

Quality affordable health care and access to free prescriptions must be provided.

The government must immediately clean up air, water and soil to make it safe and healthy for people to return home.

We demand that the government provide funds for all families to be reunited and that the databases of FEMA, Red Cross and any organizations tracking our people be made public.

We demand accountability for and oversight of the over $50 billion of FEMA funds and the money raised by other organizations, foundations and funds in our name.

We demand representation on all boards that are making decisions about relief and reconstruction. We also demand that those most affected by Hurricane Katrina be part of every stage of the planning process.

We demand that no commercial Mardi Gras takes place until the suffering of the people is lifted.

We are calling for survivors and supporters to participate in a Martin Luther King Jr. Weekend 2006 conference and demonstration to make these demands heard!

Update: The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition (PHRF), From Outrage to Action: The People Must Decide

The People’s Assembly and The March for Human Rights brought over one thousand Hurricane Survivors and supporters of a survivor lead movement together for 3 days of planning and action.

Youth Speak Out

Held at Jackson State University, the Youth Speak Out evening in Thursday, December 8th was coordinated by area youth who put together a program that called for survivor’s to share their stories and included performances and testimony that spanned from; gospel music, urban and classic West African dance and drumming, poetry, to statements of solidarity. One survivor story came from Brandy who talked about the attempts of those displaced to New York City to fight off hotel eviction and homelessness.

Survivor Assembly

The Survivor’s General Assembly and Conference was held Friday, December 9th and took place at Anderson United Methodist Church. Survivors and support organizations from Houston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, South Carolina, California and Atlanta came together to share their stories and organizing efforts taking place in the areas where they currently reside. The day was full of workshops and information sharing, included a film that illuminated an example of the injustices that took place at Orleans Parish Prison. Approximately 450 delegates participated, including more than 150 hurricane survivors. By the end of the day the survivors put forth the People’s Declaration: Survivors Assembly Demands. These demands were read at the March for Human Rights (12/10/05) and at a rally held in Washington, DC (12/14/05) calling for FEMA to be held accountable for their lack of transparency in relief efforts. The demands are also being submitted to New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin to request and audience and significant representation by those most impacted by Hurricane Katrina on those commissions set up in New Orleans to address reconstruction and community redevelopment.

The demands will also be pursued with the mandate of the people by the work groups of the PHRF.

The established workgroups are as follows:

Arts, Culture and Story Collection, Economic Justice, Education, Environmental Health and Justice,

Finance and Fund Raising, Health Care, Legal, Media, Reconstruction, Safety Justice and Accountability

These work groups will be supported and monitored by The National Solidarity Caucus and Women’s Caucus.

The March for Justice

The March for Justice brought together approximately 1,500 participants who represented a diverse cross-section of New Orleans culture. Old school second-liners, musicians, students, blue collar workers, home owners, renters, grassroots relief workers and elders of the New Orleans community joined in chants and prayers to welcome their return to the city, demand support and justice in the rebuilding process and to share their stories of hardship and organizing since the storm.

The March ended at city hall where The People’s Declaration was announced.

The People’s Hurricane Fund will continue to do outreach among those displaced to highlight their voices and support organizing efforts that address the diverse needs that must be met to accomplish comprehensive reconstruction of communities and lives. Survivors Councils are being planned around the country for this purpose.

Honoring the work, commitment and spirit of Meg Perry

Saturday, November 10th, Common Ground volunteer, Meg Perry, 26, died in a bus accident in New Orleans. In Portland, Maine, Meg was a coordinator with the People's Free Space, a community group fighting social, ecological and political injustices. After Hurricane Katrina, Meg volunteered at Common Ground Collective (CGC), working on roof repairs, mentoring youth and coordinating a community garden.

The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition (PHRF) extends its deepest condolences to Meg’s family, friends and the Common Ground Collective. In memory of a woman that dedicated so much of herself to this cause PHRF would like to donate and participate In planting a sapling tree in Ms. Perry's honor, for the hope of a just and environmentally sound reconstruction of New Orleans.

To see Common Ground Collective’s tribute to Meg, please go to http://www.commongroundrelief.org/2005/12/meg_perry_1979_2005.html

2006

We look forward to strengthening the organizing efforts of survivors/evacuees throughout the country and connecting the work with supported actions in the areas where we are displaced and in those areas where these grassroots efforts are most needed, for a just and comprehensive redevelopment of New Orleans and the Gulf South.

Regular updates should be posted on the website. For more information contact

People’s Hurricane Relief Fund & Oversight Coalition

1.888.310.PHRF (7473)

info at communitylaborunited dot net

www.communitylaboruntied.net

From Sea To Shining Sea

From Baltimore to San Francisco, with Chicago and most other places in between . . .

I received this letter from Mary Ratcliff via the SF Bay View email list. In her email to the list, Ms. Ratcliff added that "Phone calls to the mayor's office, (415) 554-6141, and/or the mayor's press office, (415) 554-6131, would be helpful."

Francisco Castillo
Deputy Director of Communications
Office of Mayor Gavin Newsom
City Hall
San Francisco, California

Dear Francisco,

Please bring this matter to the attention of the mayor right away.

Bayview precinct officers visited the home of Bay View managing editor and staff writer Ebony Colbert again this morning – at 7 a.m. We cannot imagine any other reason for the visit than a resumption of the intimidation campaign that began after we published an editorial by Ebony on Oct. 19 (http://www.sfbayview.com/101905/wakeup101905.shtml). Ebony’s latest story about the SFPD, this time prompted by the video scandal, was posted to our website yesterday (http://www.sfbayview.com/120705/truecolors.shtml).

The officers’ visits began a few days after the Oct. 19 editorial came out, the same day Mayor Newsom called Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff asking him to retract Ebony’s editorial. They continued several times daily for several weeks (http://www.sfbayview.com/110205/sfpdstung110205.shtml) with gradually decreasing frequency until about a week ago. This morning they resumed.

The excuse for every visit is “a 911 hang-up call.” But Ebony’s home phone stopped working the day the visits started. It’s unplugged and stored in a closet. She uses her cell phone instead. No one in her household – consisting of mom and dad and two little ones, a 2-year-old daughter and 11-month-old son – is calling 911.

Last night, Ebony was up until 3:30 a.m. with a teething baby. Getting awakened by the police at 7 a.m. didn’t set well. She was born and raised in Bayview Hunters Point and lives here now. She is very familiar with the behavior of officers from the Bayview station; one of them is her relative. A brilliant and caring young woman, she wants and works hard to uplift her community.

She simply wants the SFPD to do their job, to protect and serve, not occupy and terrorize her neighborhood. If those words sound strong, consider the terrorism of Sept. 9, when several officers chasing 18-year-old Tyrelle Taylor on foot shot him repeatedly in the back, then, when he had fallen on a neighbor’s floor face down, threw themselves on him and viciously beat him in what could be nothing less than an attempted murder.

She also wants an end to the economic lockout of the people of Bayview Hunters Point, especially from City-funded construction jobs, like those on the Third Street Light Rail project. Please remind the mayor that the $125 million maintenance barn for that project is yet to be built, and ensuring that BVHP builds it – that most of the contracts and jobs, including on-the-job training, go to our people – would greatly uplift this community and win the mayor some good will.

Ebony and her peers know that once, when 10,000 of the jobs at the Hunters Point Shipyard were held by people living in Hunters Point, peace and prosperity characterized this community. They also remember that in September of 1966, when those jobs were being phased out and people’s frustration and fury at joblessness (nearly all other jobs then, as now, were off limits to Black people) and police brutality (shooting 16-year-old Matthew Johnson in the back and killing him, see page 15-16 in http://www.bvhp-pac.org/ConceptPlan.doc and many other sources) exploded into an uprising, the young people did not destroy their community.

They let SFPD know that they were not needed in Hunters Point by blocking police from entering any of the streets leading east from Third Street. Instead of commending the youngsters for a largely peaceful protest, tanks rumbled up and down Third Street and SFPD sharpshooters lined up three rows deep on Third Street and shot into the Bayview Opera House, where youngsters had fled for sanctuary, hitting several of them.

Francisco, please tell the mayor that, for the same reasons as in 1966, Bayview Hunters Point is once again close to the boiling point. The video scandal and the looming specter of an execution at San Quentin on Tuesday – which we pray the governor will reject – could lead to another uprising.

Frustration and fury over joblessness and police brutality and disrespect is now a challenge squarely facing Mayor Gavin Newsom. Current feeble attempts at job training and policing won’t cut it. Blatant attempts to intimidate a young writer with the courage to speak truth to power merely intensify community outrage.

I am available by phone 24/7 and look forward to discussing these issues with you.

Mary Ratcliff, executive editor
San Francisco Bay View
www.sfbayview.com

Twenty-Fve Years

Twenty-five years ago today (12/9), I was eleven years old, going on twelve. I swear I knew every Beatles song by heart, knew every published detail of the band's history. And John was my favorite. He was the coolest one. His songs were the best ones. HIs solo work was the strongest. He had real politics.

I was eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast. My mother was making my lunch for school. My dad still smoked then, and he was out on the front porch in his bathrobe, having a cigarette in the cold because he wasn't allowed to smoke in the house.

He came inside with the morning paper, the Albany Times Union, and the terrible headline. I don't remember what the wording was, but I remember pouring over the article, reading it again and again, trying to understand how it could have happened, how that man could have done something like this. I remember the heat in my face, not quite crying but tears blurring my eyes.

These were the suburbs, the middle class life my father had striven for. When we moved there it was part of my parents' decision, half conscious, half not, that I would grow up insulated from politics and violence.

It took a long time for me to lose the innocence cultivated in the Albany suburbs. This violence was senseless, without political valence. But it was the first chink, the first time I felt loss, December 9, 1980.

Miscounting Prisoners Hurts Rural Communities As Well As Urban Ones

Peter Wagner has a fascinating new piece on Prisoners of the Census. If you're new to what Peter does, his organization, the Prison Policy Initiative, does innovative research and advocacy on the problems that ensue from counting mostly urban Black and Latino prisoners as residents of the predominantly white rural communities where many are imprisoned. Miscounting prisoners in this way diminishes the political clout of the communities the prisoners come from and provides the host communities with a windfall of tax revenues, based on the "increase" in their populations. The surprising thing is that communities who lose money to this arrangement are not the urban ones where the prisoners come from, but the the other adjacent rural areas that don't host prisons.

[M]ost of the money redirected by prison census counts is raised in specialty taxes (liquor taxes, cigarette taxes, recreational park usage fees, hunting-fishing licenses, etc.) and county sales taxes. Not all states have these revenue sources, and in the big picture this is small change, but it is important to see who pays for the windfall received by some.

Dutchess County, NY, can provide a detailed example. In 2003, the town of Fishkill and the small City of Beacon argued over whether the prison counted in one town was really in the other because $85,000 in county sales tax revenues was at stake. Although the prisoners were from New York City, neither the prisoners nor New York City had a valid claim on these funds.

This was not a state sales tax being distributed within the state on the basis of population, but a county sales tax being distributed on the basis of population within the county. The county sets the tax rate — about 3% of each purchase — and keeps that money locally. As a result of their "population" based formula, towns with elevated populations due to prisoners get an extra share. So if that money doesn't belong to New York City or to the prison towns, to whom does it belong?

That money belongs to every other town in the county that does not have a prison. The towns with prisons get a windfall, and every community without a prison is deprived of about 1.7% of the tax receipts it would otherwise receive.

(Read the rest.)

Heartbreak

My writing for this blog has been lighter for a little while now. That's not the reason for my title, but in case you were wondering, these are some of the things I've been doing instead of writing lengthy posts:

• three weeks of work on that article in In These Times
• a follow up piece, currently in the works
• a contract research job
• a flurry of job applications and interviews
• shepherding a special issue of Dollars & Sense

Writing less means that though I'm still reading a lot of blogs, many things slip by that under other circumstances I'd be blogging as I saw them. One such thing was yet another amazing blog post by Clayton Cubitt, this one about going back to McKain Street in New Orleans, the spot now nestled under the I-10 highway ramp that is still home to the shotgun shack where his grandmother lived almost her whole life and where she raised his mother and his aunt. I'm not going to quote it, just go read it and check out the photograph. It's heartbreaking, but it is also gorgeously elegiac. The post is about a month old, but as far as I can see, only two other people have linked to it. It's got the timelessness of art, which means that telling you about it now is still timely.

There isn't really a neat way to write about the other kind of heartbreak my title refers to. I don't know how many people check the comments over here, but one byproduct of my urge to document underpublicized injustices is that others who are suffering similar circumstances occasionally write in with own experiences, sometimes because they are desperate for help or even just because no one else seems to care.

The single post that's gotten the most of these kinds of comments is More On The Prisoners From Orleans Parish Prison, posted at the end of September. In October, I got two comments from people who had loved ones in Orleans Parish Prison at the onset of Katrina. And then last night, I received three more comments (from two people).

It has been more frequent than not that when I've known small ways to help Katrina survivors who contact me here, it's been impossible to reach them with the information they might need. In one case, for example, Juana Bourgeois said she was looking for her friend Byron Joshua. Angela Wessels from the Southern Center for Human Rights helped me determine what prison Mr. Joshua was relocated to (turns out he is one of the Coleman 900), but I was not able to reach Juana to give her the information.

On one of my posts, about the the class action suit brought by Katrina survivors against FEMA, got this wrenching comment from JeanMarie Arend:

I was filing for disability in La. at time of hurricanes Rita and Katrina. I relocated to MN. I still haven't got any housing or financial assistance. On Nov. 2 2005 it was inperative that I have a anterior cervical dysectamy and fushion with them putting in a steel rod. The vertabra affected are c-4,c=5,c=6. I suffer from partial paralysis in my arms and hands, as well as suffer from extreme headaches. Yet I am still homeless and penniless. The medical assistance I get from the state of MN. does not cover my teeth which due to the injury are broken off and abcessed. And the state of MN. allowed me 203.00$ per month which they are now taking away as of Dec. 2005, although just the healing on the surgery will be 1 and 1/2 years. I can not work and I can not get help from anywere. And yes I am filed with FEMA. They are sending me mail with my astranged husbands number on it although I have my own FEMA number I must use to refer to my case.I call them weekly and have been told 3x now to fax certian papers in which I do and yet they never get to my file.HELP ME PLEASE DISABLED IN MN> P.S. yes I refiled here in MN for my disability.

I emailed JeanMarie back immediately, but my message bounced. I think her comment is for real, since my sitemeter showed that she was writing from Minnesota and that she found HungryBlues by googling "free disaster relief for katrina victims with disabilities." I wanted to tell her that I have a friend in Minnesota who has formed a People's Hurricane Relief Fund Solidarity Group. One of the things that PHRF Solidarity Groups do is locate evacuees in their area and help them organize and obtain resources that they need.

Last night's messages were from Anicia Chatters, who is looking for a friend of hers who was in Orleans Parish Prison before Katrina, and Sherre Boteler, whose husband has been stuck in jail for 125 days, waiting for a trial for a crime she does not believe he committed.

my husband was in orleans parish jail also on a rape charge that he didnt do.....i have evidence that he was lied on and falsely arrested and still cant get help for him.....also my husband is very ill and they knew that and still left him there to die. he was also left out in the rain on the field at hunts [info]. it is all true! he has been to 3 prisons since hurricane and has been incarcrated now for 125 days just waiting to go to court.

The heartbreak is not that Ben Greenberg feels helpless to do anything for individuals who've contacted him. Rather, it's that these glimpses of individual tragedies is most of what we get to know about the lives of those worst affected by Hurricane Katrina and that each fragment of a story that we hear can be multiplied by thousands.

Sherre Boteler gets the last word:

you know what i dont understand about our "great mayor"...lol ray nagin....he's more worried about the city having mardi gras and hearing people parting in the streets than geting help for these men and women that they left to die in the wake of a cat. 5 hurricane. what a joke he is!! who gives a damn about mardi gras? and the city rebuilding for the partiers.... we want out family members back ! i have not sen my husband in 4 months. it took me 8 days to even find out that he was still alive after the hurricane. i lived from shelter to shelter all alone for 8 weeks with not even help from fema....because they are a joke too. the entire government is a joke! the "declartion of independence" says all men and women are to created equally. DOSENT THAT COUNT FOR THE ONES IN JAIL ALSO.....THEY SAVED THE ANIMALS BUT TREATED OUR HUSBANDS, MOTHERS, FATHERS, BROTHERS, AND SISTERS WORSE. WHO IS GONNA STAND UP AND BE MEN AND SAY THEY WERE WRONG....and now they are saying it may be another 6 months to a year before anyone even sees a court room. they say they lost their evidence on the cases they had well, i have proof of my husbands innocense and they still dont care. but they gonna have mardi gras! WHAT A JOKE! "I'LL NEVER GO BACK!"

Hear Peter Wagner Speak About Prison Policy

I received the following announcement from Peter Wagner's Prisoners of the Census email list:

Tomorrow, Saturday Dec. 3 in Providence RI, I'll be giving the keynote lecture at the "U.S. Prison System: Community and Political Impacts" conference. My lecture will be at 1pm in Starr Auditorium, MacMillian 117
at Brown University. This conference is organized by Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Education Department, Africana Studies, Brown Green Party, Brown Democrats, Democracy Matters, American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Informed Democracy, and Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance.

Next Saturday, Dec. 10, I'm going to be in New York City as the guest speaker at the Community Service Society of New York Roundtable Discussion on Prisoner Re-entry Issues. The discussion is from noon to 3pm in Conference Room 4A at 105 East 22nd Street.

More info about Peter Wagner:

Peter Wagner, JD, Executive Director. Peter Wagner teaches, lectures, and writes about the negative impact of mass incarceration in the United States. His current focus is on working to demonstrate - through graphics, legal research, and state-by-state analyses - the distortion of the democratic process that results from the U.S. Census Bureau's practice of counting the nation's mostly urban prisoners as residents of the often remote communities in which they are incarcerated. The New York Times editorial board has twice supported his efforts to change the way prisoners are counted, and the Boston Globe identified him as the "leading public critic" of the prisoner miscount. He has presented his research at national and international conferences and meetings, including a Census Bureau Symposium, a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, and a keynote address to a conference at Harvard University. Mr. Wagner's publications include Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York (2002); The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (2003); and, with Eric Lotke, Prisoners of the Census: Electoral and Financial Consequences of Counting Prisoners Where They Go, Not Where They Come From, [PDF] 24 Pace L. Rev. 587 (2004).

Also see the Prisoners of the Census and Prison Policy Initiative websites.

Outrage To Action

Chris Clarke, December First is "Blog Against Racism" Day:

Intentions are all well and good, but more important are the assumptions from which those intentions spring. Garbage in, garbage out: bad information times good intentions equals bad results. And those results are the most important thing of all.

David Neiwert, New Orleans: racial cleansing?

Recall, if you will, the vicious outpouring of racial hatred by New Orleans' most noted white supremacist, David Duke, and his fellow white supremacists in the wake of the disaster. Recall how much of the mainstream media coverage -- rife with images of black looters and tales (later proven false) of shootings, rapes, and multiple murders -- fed that outpouring....

As it happens, much of what white supremacists want to see happen to the city is, in fact, what is happening....

[S]ure enugh, a couple of months ago, HUD administrator Alphonso Jackson made clear that the city's demographics were indeed going to be reordered in the rebuilding:

"Whether we like it or not, New Orleans is not going to be 500,000 people for a long time," he said. "New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again."

... Alphonso Jackson predicted New Orleans will slowly draw back as many as 375,000 people, but that only 35 to 40 percent of the post-Katrina population would be black.

Jackson said that's because the worst-hit areas were low-income black neighborhoods that may never fully be repopulated.

Prior to Katrina, the population was 67 percent black and 28 percent white.

People's Hurricane Relief Fund & Oversight Coalition:

Hurricane Survivors Assembly & March for Human Rights

Who: Representative Gulf Coast hurricane survivors and evacuees will converge will their allies in over 50 grassroots organizations which make up The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund and Oversight Coalition and The Mississippi Distress Relief Coalition. Together, they will share, heal and develop plans for organizing to move forward in their struggle for justice after Katrina.

What: The Gulf South Youth Assembly, The Gulf South National Assembly and The March for Human Rights.

Why: This will be the first assembly that provides those most negatively impacted by Katrina and its aftermath a chance to participate in developing national solutions for their own futures. A declaration of the people will be drafted and presented to Congress in an upcoming hearing sponsored by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, 11th District GA. These events will unite the movement of survivors, who continue to have their basic civil and human rights eroded away, as they build a sustainable and comprehensive plan for rebuilding their communities and lives.

Schedule:

December 8, 2005, Thursday
Business School of Jackson State University, 1300 Lynch St. Jackson, MS room 134
7-11 pm ~ Gulf Coast Youth Assembly: Youth speak out on Katrina

December 9, 2005, Friday
Anderson United Methodist Church, 6405 Hanging Moss Road
9am – 6pm ~ Survivor’s Assembly and Conference
8pm – 11pm ~ Rally and Cultural Program featuring Amira Baraka, Sonya Sanchez, Dead Prez and more

December 10, 2005, Saturday
Congo Square, North Rampart And St. Phillip Streets, New Orleans, LA
12:30 pm ~ Survivor’s March for Human Rights, Self Determination and The Right to Return.

For this story and more, please visit www.katrinainfonet.net, a project of the Katrina Information Network (KIN). KIN is an information and action clearinghouse. KIN shares expert viewpoints and action from the communities that have been devastated by Katrina, with up-to-the minute news and analysis.

Evictions On Hold; Notices To Be Mailed

A major victory for Katrina survivors who were renters before the storm.

All pending evictions are on hold until landlords send eviction notices to their tenants, according to a settlement struck Tuesday in federal court that ends a lawsuit brought by unions, activists and individual renters. Eviction hearings cannot take place until 45 days after those mailings are postmarked.

"No longer can landlords just rely on tacking notices on doors while the tenants don't know they're getting evicted," said Judith Browne, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs. "It's going to provide fair rules so that people can come and defend themselves and, ultimately, protect their property."

In an added twist, the Federal Emergency Management Agency agreed to supply court clerks, constables and justices of the peace with addresses of evacuees -- a first in litigation since Katrina, Browne said.

"FEMA will have to supply the addresses to the evictions courts in Orleans and Jefferson," Browne said. "They know where they are."

FEMA will make every effort to provide names and addresses of tenants, upon request by the courts, from its database within five business days, the settlement says. But clerks are not to share the information with anyone, the deal said, and the federal Privacy Act will protect that information.

The settlement, approved by U.S. District Court Judge Stanwood Duval Jr., resolves a lawsuit filed Nov. 10 against every parish and city official who deals with evictions in Orleans and Jefferson. The rules are good for one year from Tuesday.

"There won't be any eviction hearings next week or the week after, or for at least 45 days." said attorney Bill Quigley of the Loyola Law Clinic, which represented plaintiffs. "It is going to help every renter in the metropolitan area, and renters, by and large, are people who don't have a lot of money or resources."

Note the irony of the parts in bold. As I detailed in my article in In These Times, it took Louisiana Secretary of State Al Ater much more time and quite a lot more trouble to reach a compromise where FEMA would attempt to reach evacuated voters with information about how they can vote in upcoming elections.

On October 5, Ater asked FEMA’s liaison to his office, Arvin Schultz, for FEMA’s list of evacuees. Schultz responded On October 14 to Ater’s requests with a terse e-mail, writing that FEMA “will not fund the outreach program. They will not let you have a copy of the FEMA applicant list. Sorry!!!” Two days later, Ater appealed to Deputy Federal Coordinating Officer Scott Wells, the top FEMA official in Louisiana. Ater’s appeal was rejected, this time with the rationale that releasing the list of evacuees would violate the Privacy Act of 1974.

Ater then went to Washington, D.C., to negotiate with FEMA and lobby Louisiana’s representatives and senators to push the agency to reverse its decision. He suggested a compromise: FEMA could take the voter rolls from him and mail the election materials itself to avoid disclosing the evacuees’ addresses. Though FEMA said it wanted to work with Ater, agency officials dragged their heels for nearly two weeks. FEMA Spokesman Butch Kinerney says the main problem was “mechanical questions” about the best method for reaching voters while protecting privacy.

On November 8, FEMA finally made a clear concession. The agency said it would pay to send a one-page flyer to all evacuees that would explain voting rights and include ways to contact Ater’s office. Yet, Ater still does not know when FEMA will mail the flyer.

FEMA would not agree to give the information to Ater to protect voting rights, and "mechanical questions" made reaching a compromise position a protracted and demanding process. Apparently protecting the property rights of New Orleans landlords makes FEMA feel comfortable sharing the personal information with numerous people—"clerks, constables and justices of the peace"—while to protect voting rights, FEMA would not share the information with even one, high ranking state official.

See also: Katrina Survivors Win Stay of Evictions

Montgomery, Alabama — 1956

(Via Marsha Joyner.)

Ted Poston, "They Are No Longer Afraid." The New York Post
June 19, 1956.

You'd been living with [the bus boycott] daily for nearly three weeks in Montgomery, but you couldn't quite put your finger on it. Only through the words of others were you finally able to articulate a feeling, which had been with you from the beginning.

Mrs. Jo Ann Robinson, dynamic president of the Women's Political Council, had been one of the first to pinpoint it for you.

"Pass the lowliest, the most ignorant one, on the street and you'll see it," she said. "He walks a little straighter, his head is a little higher... They no longer lack courage; they're no longer afraid. They're free for the first time in their lives and they know they've won their own freedom. This goes not only for the lowest domestic but for the highest Negro professional also."

J. E. Pierce, Alabama-born economist whom you'd known a decade ago in your native Kentucky, expanded it:

"What you're seeing here is probably the closest approach to a classless society that has ever been created in any community in America. The whites have forced the Montgomery Negro to recognize one thing—that they are Negroes first and then domestics, doctors' wives, scholars or lawyers second.

"But for the first time the Negro is accepting with pride, not shame, the fact that all Negroes look alike to white people. Through their unity, their car pools, their determination to share and share alike, they have found each other—as Negroes... Walk a little straighter... head a little higher.

"This new dignity is not accidental. And it is no accident that they call each other 'ladies' and 'gentlemen' on every possible occasion. For the first time in their lives they feel like ladies and gentlemen from the bottom to the top."

Copyright © 1956 The New York Post. Selected from the Library of America anthology. See Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941-1963.

"If the US can rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq, why not New Orleans?”"

Thus asked Dr. Arjun Sengupta, the United Nations Human Rights Commission Special Reporter on Extreme Poverty, who visited New Orleans and Baton Rouge last week. The quote comes from New Orleans attorney and law professor Bill Quigley, in his latest report:

Fully armed National Guard troops refuse to allow over ten thousand people even to visit their property in the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood. Despite the fact that people cannot come back, tens of thousands of people face eviction from their homes. A local judge told me that her court expects to process a thousand evictions a day for weeks.

Renters still in shelters or temporary homes across the country will never see the court notice taped to the door of their home. Because they will not show up for the eviction hearing that they do not know about, their possessions will be tossed out in the street. In the street their possessions will sit alongside an estimated 3 million truck loads of downed trees, piles of mud, fiberglass insulation, crushed sheetrock, abandoned cars, spoiled mattresses, wet rugs, and horrifyingly smelly refrigerators full of food from August.

There are also New Orleans renters facing evictions from landlords who want to renovate and charge higher rents to the out of town workers who populate the city. Some renters have offered to pay their rent and are still being evicted. Others question why they should have to pay rent for September when they were not allowed to return to New Orleans.

(Read the rest.)

Don't Evict Them. Employ Them.

The AP's Alan Sayre reports in nola.com:

Orleans Parish Civil District Judge Kern Reese issued a temporary order blocking eviction hearings from taking place at the New Orleans' post-hurricane court headquarters in Gonzales, roughly 60 miles west of the city. . . .

Reese, who set a Nov. 2 hearing on whether to make his order permanent, said eviction proceedings could be held in a city court in nearby Algiers that was not affected by flooding from Hurricane Katrina. The suit said thousands of renters do not have personal transportation from New Orleans to Gonzales.

The filing attorney is Bill Quigley, whose recent article on conditions in New Orleans some may have read here or elsewhere. The legal petition lists as plaintiffs in the suit:

Gizelle Smith, a working mother with three children who is a resident of Orleans Parish who has rented the same property in Orleans Parish for over ten years, and who is now being threatened with eviction; Central City Partnership, an association of citizens from Central City New Orleans who include many renters; Rebuilding Louisiana Coalition, (RLC) an association of people that includes many people in Orleans Parish who are renters; ACORN, the Association of Communities for Reform Now, New Orleans chapter, which is an association of low and moderate income people in Orleans Parish including many persons who are renters; New Orleans Housing Emergency Action Team (HEAT), a group of people in Orleans Parish affiliated with Common Ground collective who have come together to fight against wrongful and unjust evictions; The People’s Hurricane Relief Fund Committee, an organization of many people in the area including many renters.

We are clearly talking about thousands of possible evictions from landlords who are very eager to get their current tenants out by whatever means necessary (from the AP article):

Landlords in the New Orleans area have been filing eviction suits, saying they have thousands of apartments that could help remedy a severe housing shortage cited as a major obstacle to getting employee-hungry businesses running. Many tenants who fled the region have not contacted their landlords.

At the same time, some residents say they've returned to their rented dwellings to find that landlords have thrown out personal belongings as trash.

Is anyone getting cognitive dissonance yet? Here's what I'm talking about again, with a direct quote. See if you hear it this time:

The National Apartment Association had pushed for an end to the eviction ban, saying it would help rehabilitate property, provide homes for workers and help with the city's economic recovery (emphasis added).

NAA Executive Vice President Doug Culkin, who visited New Orleans last week, said Tuesday that he hoped the suit "is not going to delay repairing those apartments and getting people back into them" (emphasis added).

Which workers? What people? Economic recovery for whom? If there is a need for workers, why not invite the current tenants back to their own homes and offer them a job?

It would be interesting to find out if the number of apartments which landlords think could be gained through evictions is greater than the 23,267 rental units Naomi Klein has estimated were vacant prior to Katrina in the French Quarter, Garden District and other unaffected areas in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. It would be interesting likewise to learn if any of the landlords pursuing evictions also own some of those undamaged units that were vacant before the hurricane.