HungryBlues

Better Late Than Never: Friday Random Ten

Howe Gelb, Living In A Waterfall

Elliott Smith, Somebody That I Used To Know

Louis Armstrong (Big Band), I'm In The Market For You

Giant Sand, Overture

Freedom Singers, Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around

Shuggie Otis, Shuggie's Old Time Slide Boogie

Frankie Newton, The Blues My Baby Gave To Me

Woodie Guthrie, Pick It Up

Califone, Bottles & Bones (Shade & Sympathy)

M. Ward, The Crooked Spine

ACLU Seeks Information on the Fate of 6,500 New Orleans Prisoners

While most of the press sleeps and the Department of Justice makes us wonder how what the department has to do with justice, the ACLU is on the case.

ACLU Seeks Information on the Fate of 6,500 New Orleans Prisoners

September 28, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: [email protected]

Locked Prisoners Were Abandoned by Guards When Katrina Struck; More Than 500 Missing

NEW ORLEANS - Citing eyewitness reports of locked prisoners being abandoned to drown in their cells in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the American Civil Liberties Union today demanded access to the relocated prisoners it represents under a longstanding class-action lawsuit over prison conditions.

“It is critically important to discover the truth about whether New Orleans officials left these prisoners to die a nightmare death. If true, they not only abandoned their duty, they abandoned basic human decency,” said Eric Balaban of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “While surrounding parishes managed to get guards and prisoners to safety, Orleans Prison Parish was plunged into chaos. We are asking the court to grant us access to our clients so that we can get to the bottom of this horror.”

Earlier this month, the ACLU filed state and federal Freedom of Information Act requests seeking information about what happened to the prisoners, if dead bodies were disposed of, and what evacuation plans were in place at the time Katrina struck.

In a motion filed today before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, the ACLU cites both eyewitness accounts and news reports saying that no evacuation plans were in place and that the sheriff of the prison, Marlin N. Gusman, did not seek state assistance until midnight on August 29, days after other parish prisons had already called for help. The prison is located within miles of the 17th Street Canal Levee, which was breached on August 29, the day the hurricane struck.

The ACLU also cited reports by the New Orleans Times-Picayune that after generators failed and the jail ran out of food, deputies walked off their posts, “tossing their badges down and turning their shirts inside out.”

Further, according to a report by Human Rights Watch, also cited in the ACLU’s legal papers, prisoners housed in one building known as Templeman III reported that as of August 29, there were no correctional officers in the building, which held more than 600 inmates. As the water inside the locked building began to rise, the prisoners frantically signaled people outside the building by setting fire to blankets and shirts and hanging them out of broken windows. The prisoners in this unit were not evacuated until September 1, four days after flood waters in the jail had reached chest-level, the report said.

In addition to today’s motion seeking access to its clients, on September 19 the ACLU filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the U.S. Marshals, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Justice, seeking records regarding:

* Deaths that occurred in the prison since August 26, 2005
* The collection and disposition of dead bodies from the prison since August 26, 2005
* Any evacuation plans in effect as of August 26, 2005
* Any documents pertaining to evacuation plans in effect as of August 26, 2005

Further, on September 22, the ACLU also filed a state public records request seeking information about the collection and disposition of dead bodies and any evacuation plans in effect at the time of the hurricane. That request was sent to Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, Mayor Ray Nagin, Dr. Frederick P. Cerise of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, Richard Stalder, Secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Corrections, and Dr. Frank Minyard, Coroner of the Orleans Parish.

Orleans Parish Prison is the ninth largest in the country, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Under the terms of a longstanding class action lawsuit over prison conditions, the ACLU has acted as counsel for the more than 6,500 OPP prisoners since 1989. In that capacity, the ACLU has sought to enforce court orders regarding the medical and mental health and environmental conditions of the prisoners.

The motion filed today, Hamilton v. Morial, Civ. Action No. 69-2443, is online at: http://www.aclu.org/Prisons/Prisons.cfm?ID=19172&c=26

The Sept. 19, 2005 federal FOIA requests are online at: http://www.aclu.org/Prisons/Prisons.cfm?ID=19176&c=26

The Sept. 22, 2005 state FOIA requests are online at: http://www.aclu.org/Prisons/Prisons.cfm?ID=19174&c=26

The Human Rights Watch report is online at http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/09/22/usdom11773.htm

More On The Prisoners From Orleans Parish Prison

Last week I posted excerpts from the Human Rights Watch press release which revealed an appalling story of hundreds of prisoners in the Templeman III facility of Orleans Parish Prison who were simply left in their locked cells as water flooded in. All prison guards and staff had evacuated the facility while prisoners remained locked inside, water rising to chest level on the ground floor. For four days, those who did not manage to escape were trapped without food or water, with toilets backing up and no ventilation save for where they were able to break windows. Prisoners reported seeing bodies floating in the water while they struggled to survive. What is more, there are still 517 prisoners from the prison who are unaccounted for.

Though part of Orleans Parish Prison, Templeman III is, in function, a jail.

Many of the men held at jail had been arrested for offenses like criminal trespass, public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. Many had not even been brought before a judge and charged, much less been convicted.

One of the worst human rights violations in the catalog of horrendous human rights violations suffered by the hurricane victims from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the story has garnered very little attention from any corner of the press. In today's New York Times, a full week since the HRW press release, there was a 350 word editorial. A handful of newspapers ran items based on the HRW press release.

Democracy Now! is the only media outlet that has actually taken the HRW press release and developed some extended coverage of the story. The Democracy Now! item reveals that the story of Templeman III is even worse than the HRW press release might suggest.

DN!'s Amy Goodman interviewed Corrine Carrey, the HRW researcher who did the initial investigation, Dan Bright, who had been detained in the Orleans Parish Prison the night before Katrina struck, and two attorneys, Phyllis Mann and Neal Walker.

Dan Bright was one of the lucky prisoners who managed to escape from his cell, by spending hours kicking at the door to knock it off its hinges, and attempted to help others before he finally got out of the prison. The first shocker is that there were deputies on hand, outside the prison, doing nothing to help the prisoners inside:

DAN BRIGHT: When we got out, they had maybe like ten deputies outside the building with boats.

AMY GOODMAN: They had deputies outside the building but none of the deputies inside the building to help you?

DAN BRIGHT: None. It was like, if you get out, you get out. It's not too bad. So when we got out, they took us to a bridge, what’s called an overpass bridge, and they just put us on these boats, brought us to this bridge and left us there for maybe like three days without food or water or anything. They just left us there.

Bright also claims they deputies were stealing the prisoners' property:

AMY GOODMAN: So, what did they say, when you said there are men still in there?

DAN BRIGHT: They didn't say anything. These -- most of the deputies had, you know, just was gone. They didn't even bother to try to help us. And not only that, they had – these same deputies were stealing property, our personal property. My daughter was trying to telephone me and find out where I was at, and a deputy answered my phone.

AMY GOODMAN: Your daughter called, and the deputy answered your cell phone?

DAN BRIGHT: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you ever get your personal property back?

DAN BRIGHT: No.

AMY GOODMAN: Did any of the men?

DAN BRIGHT: No, ma'am.

HRW researcher Corrine Carey explains that the Orleans Parish Prison evacuation plan has not been available in the aftermath of Katrina:

CORRINE CAREY: We have not been able to find the evacuation plan. We heard reports that the evacuation plan was on a website. A Department of Corrections spokesperson told us that it was on the website, but it has since been removed. So we actually, though we have made inquiries, don't know what the evacuation plan was. In any event, the Orleans Parish sheriff didn’t follow any evacuation plan, nor did he fortify the institution to allow people to ride out the storm with food, water and other supplies.

Thus in other of the Orleans Parish Prison facilities, you had stories of chaos and mayhem as prisoners and guards weathered Katrina together, while they waited to be rescued. (Given the information now available from Human Rights Watch and Democracy Now!, I take rosy outcome, reported in the Times Picayune story, linked in my last sentence, with a grain of salt.)

Meanwhile, prior to Katrina, 2,000 prisoners from other New Orleans area prisons were evacuated to Orleans Parish Prison.

CORRINE CAREY: . . . you had a prison that was already at capacity, and then you had maybe 2,000 more prisoners from area prisons brought in. So, that's why when you hear Dan Bright talking about breaking out of cells, there were prisoners in common areas. They were in recreational areas, they were in visiting areas. So they were not locked down, and they were able to grab pipes and break them in the absence of guards and help the other inmates break out of their cells and break the windows.

The horrors did not end for prisoners who managed to get out Templeman III and make it to the central lockup facility from where prisoners and guards were, in fact, being evacuated.

AMY GOODMAN: So you broke out on Tuesday?

DAN BRIGHT: Right. After the storm had passed. And when we got out to central lockup area, back to the central lockup area, these were the other guards waiting for us outside with the boats. So they took us from central lockup area to the bridge. It was nighttime. The city was completely dark. We stood on the bridge until maybe like two days, two-and-a-half days.

AMY GOODMAN: Two-and-a-half days.

DAN BRIGHT: Yeah. No food, no water. We couldn't stand up. They made us sit down. We couldn't even get up and urinate. We had to urinate on ourselves. They didn't even want us standing up.

AMY GOODMAN: You said you urinated on yourselves because you couldn’t stand. Were you chained?

DAN BRIGHT: Excuse me?

AMY GOODMAN: Were you chained?

DAN BRIGHT: No. They didn't have any chains. They didn't have anything. They were just rushing us -- as we broke out and thought we were trying to get to our families or whatever. We weren't trying to escape. We were just trying to get away from that prison. When we got out, they snatch us, put us on airboats and bring us to the bridge.

AMY GOODMAN: So you stayed there for two days, no food. Water?

DAN BRIGHT: No water. No food. They had water. But they wasn't giving us any.

AMY GOODMAN: And how many of you were there?

DAN BRIGHT: It was a lot. I would say maybe like -- I couldn't tell. It was over 400. It was a lot of us.

AMY GOODMAN: And then after those two days, what was it? Thursday or Friday?

DAN BRIGHT: It was Thursday when they moved us. They put us on the buses. And they brought us to this place, another jail called Hunt’s Correctional Center.

AMY GOODMAN: Near Baton Rouge.

DAN BRIGHT: Right. And they just put all of us in this one huge gate and made us sit on a field. And they left us there.

AMY GOODMAN: Sitting on the field?

DAN BRIGHT: Right. You had to sleep on the wet grass. They didn't have anywhere we could urinate or defecate. We had to do that out in the public. You know. They gave us one blanket. We had -- that was it. You had to sleep on the wet grass. You had -- we didn't have hot food. We didn't have cold water. In fact, they come once a day and throw peanut butter sandwiches over the gate. They wouldn't even come in the gate. They would just throw it over the gate.

AMY GOODMAN: They threw the sandwiches at you.

DAN BRIGHT: Correct. They were throwing them over the gate.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you would race for them.

DAN BRIGHT: Right, we would fight over sandwiches. You know, it wasn't -- there wasn't any order in this yard. In fact, you had -- the entire prison system was in there. You had guys with life sentences. You know, all kind of guys that wasn't supposed to be around one another. You had federal prisoners in there. They even had this guy Len Davis in there.

AMY GOODMAN: Who is Len Davis?

DAN BRIGHT: He was convicted -- he was a cop. He was an NOPD police officer, convicted for all the murder of a female. He was on death row.

AMY GOODMAN: He was a New Orleans Police officer on death row, and he was in there in the field with you?

DAN BRIGHT: Right. He was back down here trying to get some time back, and he got caught up when the storm came. So they drove him in there, too.

Attorney Neal Walker has interviewed scores of prisoners from New Orleans Parish Prison and Attorney Phyllis Mann has interviewed or overseen interviews of thousands of the prisoners since September 4. Both say that the prisoners' stories are remarkably consistent with what Dan Bright has recounted on Democracy Now! Here's Phyllis Mann:

I have personally interviewed or overseen the interviewing of over 2,400 men and women between September 7 and as late as last night. And these are men and women who were at the various facilities in Orleans and the others, as Corinne referred to, that were brought to Orleans from other affected parishes. These people didn't have a chance to talk to each other.

Like Dan describes, it was complete pandemonium in Orleans. As people got out of the various buildings that comprised the Orleans Parish complex there, you know, some of them spent one day on the bridge, some of them spent three days on the bridge. From there, they were randomly loaded into buses, and there was no rhyme nor reason as to who got on what bus. And they -- most of them went through Hunt Correctional and spent time on that football or soccer field or whatever it was. Some of them were there for two or three days. I saw large numbers of people who were badly, badly sunburned as a result of being out in the elements at Hunt Correctional while they waited.

And then these people again randomly got distributed to in excess of 35 facilities throughout the state, and some of them are prisons, some of them are private prisons. Many, many of them are parish jails operated by local sheriffs in each parish. And as I have gone from place to place and talked to different people who had been held, they are all telling remarkably consistent stories. And many of these people have not even seen television at the point that I have talked with them. You know, it would be a week or two weeks after the hurricane, and they still had not been able to watch television to know what had happened there. So, for all of these people to tell such remarkably consistent stories, to me, is a very serious indication of the truth of what they're saying.

Human Rights Watch is asking the US Department of Justice to conduct an investigation. It is crucial for more of the press to do the job of investigating and reporting on this story to help make sure the DOJ does its job.

UPDATE: Jeanne D'Arc has done some very interesting forensics on the news coverage of this story. Also, a slight clarification, thanks to a passage from the DN! transcript, which Jeanne, quoted. According to Neal Walker, all of Orleans Parish Prison, not just Templeman III, is a jail, despite what the name suggests. I was confused because Dan Bright had reported that after he was transferred to Hunt's Correctional Center, he shared open air accommodations in a field with convicted criminals, including a murderer on death row. These other prisoners must have been evacuated to Hunt's CC from other prisons.

Abandoned And Some Other Stuff New To The Sidebar

ABANDONED
Fifty miles southwest of New Orleans, the Houma Navigation Canal is a 36 mile man-made linear gash running from the Gulf of Mexico to the small city of Houma in Terrebonne Parish. The canal bypasses several small fishing villages perched like wading birds with one leg on the two lane blacktop of State Road 57 and the other anchored in the marshy bayou. Small brackish creeks and channels connect the shrimping villages with the canal and the open water of the Gulf.

When Hurricane Rita collided with the Louisiana coast, the storm pushed a wall of water into thousands of square miles of bayou backed by south winds that kept the water bottled up for days.

The same Houma Navigation Canal that allows ships to penetrate the marsh grass and hardwood swamps of the bayou allowed the storm surge from Rita to do the same. A flood of muddy water and silt up to eight feet high ran through the bayou and swallowed up the small fishing villages of southern Louisiana. Alongside Highway 57, the towns of Ashland, Bayou Calliou and Dulac found themselves under flood waters and the sheen of diesel fuel spills.

The town of Dulac, home to a large community of Houma Native Americans was hit especially hard, their levees crippled by the same underfunding of flood protection that made New Orleans vulnerable. President Bush's 2006 budget included no money for flood protection efforts in Terrebonne despite a request for $10 million by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans District. Standing in a foot of muddy water in front of the Dulac community center, Houma native and methodist pastor Kirby Verret observed, "No one really sees us down here."

FEMA certainly doesn't see Dulac or the other towns. Despite the constant buzz of helicopters in the air, and nearly 10,000 homes in Terrebonne Parish destroyed, FEMA has yet to declare this parish a disaster area. When FEMA was asked about the flood damage in Terrebonne Parish during a Sunday press conference, the government mouthpiece stated, "We have helicopters flying over the area. We are assessing the damage."

Adding ignorance to insult, folks living along Highway 57 were told by FEMA they could not remove the rapidly molding furniture and appliances from their homes or else they would void disaster funds. With 90 degree temperatures turning such an absurd restriction into a serious heath hazard, most families are emptying their homes as soon as the water recedes, FEMA's "poverty pimping" be damned.

Read the rest at Naomi Archer's blog, Real Reports of Katrina Relief. Naomi is an activist and freelance writer who has traveled from North Carolina to volunteer at the Common Ground, the community health clinic and relief center established by Malik Rahim in the Algiers neighborhood.

Real Reports is among the blogs and websites in the new NOLA section in my sidebar. Follow the links for local, grassroots people's organizations like Common Ground, CLU/PHRF, and Friends And Families Of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children and for more independent reporting about conditions on the ground in NOLA and around the Gulf Coast. See, for example, Getting Home Before It's Gone on Third World Majority.

nola blogs digest is my Kinja digest of all the blogs in the NOLA section. I hope to change that over to a feedpaper on feedster, which would have an rss feed; so far my feedpaper is not working right... Humid City is a "networking point for New Orleans in exile," with frequent updates and commentary. It probably should go without saying, but the Times-Picayune has been providing ongoing, in-depth, invaluable coverage of NOLA and surrounding areas.

Bring The Evacuees Home, Mayor Nagin

Naomi Klein used the Census 2000 vacancy rates in the neighborhoods Mayor Nagin has declared habitable to identify 23, 267 uninhabited apartments that could be rented to New Orleans evacuees right now.

Available Housing Units by Neighborhood
Neighborhood	Vacant Housing Units
Central Business District	252
French Quarter	1,736
Uptown/Carrollton	2,383
Algiers	2,713
New Aurora/ English Turn	115
Central City/Garden District	4,418

Adding them all up equals 11,617 vacant housing units in New Orleans' dry zones. When we include neighboring Jefferson Parish to the west of the city, the total jumps to 23,267.

If each unit houses three people, that's 70,000 out of the estimated 200,000 left permanently homeless in the aftermath of Katrina. That's over one third. Bringing them home is only a matter of political will.

Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, whose Houston district includes some 150,000 Katrina evacuees, says there are ways to convert vacant apartments into affordable or free housing. After passing an ordinance, cities could issue Section 8 certificates, covering rent until evacuees find jobs. Jackson Lee says she plans to introduce legislation that will call for federal funds to be spent on precisely such rental vouchers. "If opportunity exists to create viable housing options," she says, "they should be explored."

Malcolm Suber, a longtime New Orleans community activist, was shocked to learn that thousands of livable homes were sitting empty. "If there are empty houses in the city," he says, "then working-class and poor people should be able to live in them." According to Suber, taking over vacant units would do more than provide much-needed immediate shelter: It would move the poor back into the city, preventing the key decisions about its future--like whether to turn the Ninth Ward into marshland or how to rebuild Charity Hospital--from being made exclusively by those who can afford land on high ground. "We have the right to fully participate in the reconstruction of our city," Suber says. "And that can only happen if we are back inside." But he concedes that it will be a fight: The old-line families in Audubon and the Garden District may pay lip service to "mixed income" housing, "but the Bourbons uptown would have a conniption if a Section 8 tenant moved in next door. It will certainly be interesting."

Equally interesting will be the response from the Bush Administration. So far, the only plan for homeless residents to move back to New Orleans is Bush's bizarre Urban Homesteading Act. In his speech from the French Quarter, Bush made no mention of the neighborhood's roughly 1,700 unrented apartments and instead proposed holding a lottery to hand out plots of federal land to flood victims, who could build homes on them. But it will take months (at least) before new houses are built, and many of the poorest residents won't be able to carry the mortgage, no matter how subsidized. Besides, it barely touches the need: The Administration estimates that in New Orleans there is land for only 1,000 "homesteaders."

The truth is that the White House's determination to turn renters into mortgage payers is less about solving Louisiana's housing crisis than indulging an ideological obsession with building a radically privatized "ownership society."

Aside from the assured ideological opposition from the Bush administration, local racism and economic opportunism further impede the political will to bring a third of the homeless evacuees back home to NOLA. It is this racsim that calls the lie of local business leaders who speak of mixed income utopias that will rise from the ashes of New Orleans.

Before Mayor Ray Nagin called for a second evacuation, the people streaming back into dry areas were mostly white, while those with no homes to return to are overwhelmingly black. This, we are assured, is not a conspiracy; it's simple geography--a reflection of the fact that wealth in New Orleans buys altitude. That means that the driest areas are the whitest (the French Quarter is 90 percent white; the Garden District, 89 percent; Audubon, 86 percent; neighboring Jefferson Parish, where people were also allowed to return, 65 percent). Some dry areas, like Algiers, did have large low-income African-American populations before the storm, but in all the billions for reconstruction, there is no budget for transportation back from the far-flung shelters where those residents ended up. So even when resettlement is permitted, many may not be able to return.

As for the hundreds of thousands of residents whose low-lying homes and housing projects were destroyed by the flood, Drennen points out that many of those neighborhoods were dysfunctional to begin with. He says the city now has an opportunity for "twenty-first-century thinking": Rather than rebuild ghettos, New Orleans should be resettled with "mixed income" housing, with rich and poor, black and white living side by side.

Strike while the iron is still hot, Mayor Nagin. Hold a press conference with Jefferson Parish President Broussard, at which you each present your respective city governments with ordinances authorizing Section 8 vouchers for 35,000 homeless New Orleans residents. With the whole world watching, how could anyone say no?

Remember Sproul & Associates?

You know, the Arizona-based consulting firm that conducted voter registration drives around the US in 2004 and was accused in some places of destroying Democratic registrations and in others of changing them to Republican registrations, without the voters' consent.

Well, back in July Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas published a story, little discussed in the blogosphere, detailing how the RNC paid Sproul $8 million and then tried to hide it.

Election Fraud: Team Bush Paid $8 Million for Dirty Tricks to Suppress Votes - and Tried to Hide It

By Mark Crispin Miller and Jared Irmas
The Baltimore Chronicle

Wednesday 13 July 2005

In the months before the 2004 presidential election, a firm called Sproul & Associates launched voter registration drives in at least eight states, most of them swing states. The group - run by Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Christian Coalition and the Arizona Republican Party - had been hired by the Republican National Committee.

Sproul got into a bit of trouble last fall when, in certain states, it came out that the firm was playing dirty tricks in order to suppress the Democratic vote: concealing their partisan agenda, tricking Democrats into registering as Republicans, surreptitiously re-registering Democrats and Independents as Republicans, and shredding Democratic registration forms.

The scandal got a moderate amount of local coverage in some states - and then the election was over. Now anyone who brought up Nathan Sproul, or any of the other massive crimes and improprieties committed on or prior to Election Day, was shrugged off as a dealer in "conspiracy theory."

It seems that Sproul did quite a lot of work for the Republicans. Exactly how much did he do? More specifically, how much did the RNC pay Sproul & Associates?

If you went online last week to look up how much money Sproul received from the Republicans in 2004, you would have found that, according to the party (whose figures had been posted by the Center for Responsive Politics), the firm was paid $488,957.

In fact, the RNC paid Sproul a great deal more than that. From an independent study of the original data filed by the Republicans with the Federal Election Commission, it is clear that Sproul was paid a staggering $8.3 million for its work against the Democrats.

(Read the whole thing.)

A Tale Of Two Parishes

SCHOOL OPENINGS [as of 9/26/05]

ORLEANS PARISH

• Public: Some schools may reopen late this year or early next year
• Teachers and other public school employees can pick up their checks at any Western Union office in the country

JEFFFERSON PARISH

• Public: Oct. 3 target date for some schools
• Ecole Classique to open Oct. 3. Call (225) 819-2846 to register
• Concordia Lutheran in Marrero to open Oct. 3
• John Curtis Christian School in River Ridge to open today

(Also see Rita Won't Delay Jeff Schools Opening.)

Here's why we're told Orleans Parish cannot open its schools anytime soon:

A few of the 126 schools in New Orleans' public system are expected to reopen during the next two months, but education officials say that most won't be up and running until January. By some estimates, the schools, which serve 60,000 children, won't be fully operational until the fall of 2006.

And the 22-school parochial school system is debating when and how to open its doors, though some of its 20,000 students are expected to be at their desks sooner than those in public schools. Meanwhile, private school teachers, unable to work here, are getting jobs elsewhere.

"If you have kids, you don't want to come back here right now. You can't, really," Gartman said. The toxic sludge left behind in many areas, he said, was another disincentive for parents contemplating a return.

Presumably conditions are significantly better in Jefferson Parish.

Well, not really. According to parish president Aaron Broussard:

We are at a catastrophic, disastrous impasse. There are a tremendous amount of trees down, gas leaks, low water pressure, and downed electrical lines which could start a fire that we have no way of putting out. There are no traffic controls. Many places are still flooded and this standing water will become toxic.

Jefferson Parish emergency managers will need this time to at least clear major East/West thoroughfares so that you can enter Jefferson Parish. However, I strongly suggest that you just come here to gather more belongings and leave, as it will still be a dangerous place. I cannot stress strongly enough that there will be no stores to purchase food or supplies so please do so prior to coming back to Jefferson Parish.

Try to stay with friends and relatives out of the hurricane affected area during the weeks to come. We cannot sustain any viable quality of life in Jefferson Parish at this time or for some time to come.

That was a statement released on August 29, but as of last week things do not appear to have gotten substantially safer in Jefferson Parish.

Here is some other relevant data:

According to Census 2000 in Jefferson Parish the racial makeup was

69.82% White, 22.86% Black or African American, 0.45% Native American, 3.09% Asian, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 2.03% from other races, and 1.72% from two or more races. 7.12% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race.

According to Census 2000 in Orleans Parish the racial makeup was

67.25% African American, 28.05% White, 0.20% Native American, 2.26% Asian, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 0.93% from other races, and 1.28% from two or more races. 3.06% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race.

There are already reports of non-Orleanians coming finding employment in New Orleans.* What Orleanians with families, who need work, will return to their homes to look for it if there are no schools for their children?

~
*Warning: The TP intermixes some anti-immigrant overtones with the substance of the linked article. Here's the main point, if you don't want to read the rest:

It will be impossible to get every New Orleanian to move back to the city. Some are making better lives for themselves elsewhere and can hardly be faulted for staying where they are.

But there are plenty of residents who are longing to get home and have yet to make lives for themselves in other cities. These are the people who should be at the top of the list of prospective workers in the rebuilding effort.

Of course, you can hardly entice them back if you're only willing to pay poverty level wages.

But in the wake of the disaster, President Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act that required employers to pay locally prevailing wages to construction workers on federally financed projects. The declaration applies to parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

At the same time, many contracts being given to corporations are not subjected to competitive bidding.

In essence, there's no ceiling preventing sky-high profits for these corporations and not much of a floor to ensure that wages to workers are not abysmally low.

There is an intelligent way to rebuild our city.

This, however, isn't it.

Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated: Widely reported attacks false or unsubstantiated

Monday, September 26, 2005

Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated
Widely reported attacks false or unsubstantiated

6 bodies found at Dome; 4 at Convention Center

By Brian Thevenot and Gordon Russell
Staff writers
Times Picayune


After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.


Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.

"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.

The real total was six, Beron said.

Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.

At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.

That the nation's front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

(Whole thing.)

Subprime Mortgage Industry Sandbags Katrina Victims; African-Americans Hit Hardest, Says ACORN

They are already stealing property from victims of Katrina. Surprise, surprise: there is a racial component.

At this writing, this press release (via rootwork) from ACORN is over three days old and no news media have picked it up.

Another Crisis in the Making: Subprime Mortgage Industry Sandbags Katrina Victims; African-Americans Hit Hardest, Says ACORN

9/22/2005 11:01:00 AM

To: National Desk, Business Reporter

Contact: Kevin Whelan, 985-960-1108; Jordan Ash, 651-503-4555; Mike Shea, 312-939-1611, all of ACORN, Web: http://www.acorn.org

ST. PAUL, Minn., Sept. 22 /U.S. Newswire/ -- ACORN, the nationwide community group, released findings today showing tens of thousands of homeowners who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina are not being offered the mortgage relief that has been highly publicized in recent weeks, and as a result could face foreclosure by the end of the year.

The group found that the subprime mortgage industry is offering suspended mortgage payments, late fee waivers, and suspension of credit bureau reporting for the month of September only, while the prime mortgage industry is granting these same relief measures, along with a moratorium on foreclosures, for 3 months, and in some cases for up to 12 months. Furthermore, the group found that most prime mortgage servicers are automatically granting relief to homeowners living in the FEMA designated disaster area; but much of the subprime industry is only offering relief to those displaced homeowners who call and request it.

ACORN also found that the subprime mortgage industry's inferior relief measures will have the greatest impact on African-American communities in New Orleans. In its analysis of the new mortgage data released this month by the Federal Reserve, ACORN found that in the New Orleans area subprime loans accounted for almost half, 46.2 percent, of all conventional mortgages made to African-Americans. In contrast, subprime loans made up just 15.8 percent of the conventional loans made to whites. In comparative terms, African-Americans were three times more likely than whites to receive a high cost subprime loan.

"The communities that suffered the most from Katrina and the ineffective government response are now receiving inferior and disparate treatment from our nation's financial system," said ACORN President Maude Hurd. "Equal treatment and a chance to get back on their feet is not too much to ask for the homeowners in our communities. Those that have more expensive loans to start with should certainly get the same consideration as other borrowers."

ACORN's findings are based on a report sent to lenders this week by its sister organization, ACORN Housing, which detailed lessons learned over the last two weeks in helping displaced homeowners to contact their mortgage servicers; and in a recent analysis of the 2004 Home Mortgage Displacement Data.

"ACORN Housing has been working hard to help homeowners displaced by Hurricane Katrina. And we have seen that subprime borrowers are not getting the same treatment," said Alton Bennett, the Chair of ACORN Housing's Board of Directors.

The unequal and disparate treatment of Katrina victims is perhaps best seen at Wells Fargo. Displaced homeowners with loans from Wells Fargo Mortgage, the company's prime mortgage channel, are being provided the automatic 90 day deferment. Displaced homeowners with loans from Wells Fargo Financial, the company's subprime mortgage unit, are only being offered relief on a case by case basis, and only if they contact the company. In 2004, the HMDA data shows that 35.6 percent of all home mortgage loans that Wells made to African Americans were through Wells Fargo Financial, while just 18.8 percent of the mortgage loans made to whites were through this subprime channel.

ACORN is demanding that the subprime mortgage industry, and particularly the Wall Street investment firms that securitize subprime loans, provide the same package of relief that most prime lenders are offering to homeowners displaced by Hurricane Katrina. This would include:

-- Immediate suspension of mortgage payments for 90 days for all, and up to 12 months on a case by case basis.

-- Waiver of all late fees for the duration of the payment suspension period.

-- No adverse reporting to credit agencies the duration of the payment suspension period.

-- Moratorium on foreclosure for the duration of the payment suspension period.

Malik Rahim On Black Panthers And Black Resistance In NOLA

[This comes to you courtesy of Google's cache. The full version includes Ahmad Rahman who was active in Detroit and still lives there now. This conversation about the strength of the NOLA Black community in 1970 is important context for us all to understand. For those who have not caught it here or elsewhere, Malik Rahim again lives in NOLA. Since the start of Katrina, he has remained steadfast in the area called Algiers, just across the Mississippi River from the Lower Ninth Ward. He has stayed in NOLA in order to do community organizing and help whomever he can. He has established Common Ground, "a community-run organization offering temporary assistance and mutual aid to the citizens of New Orleans and the surrounding areas." --BG]

The 30th Anniversary of the Desire Shoot-out: An Interview with Malik Rahim

by Brice White

This is an interview conducted on WTUL (91.5 FM) on March 13th, 2000.

Malik Rahim is from New Orleans and is an activist in the Bay Area now and Ahmad Rahman is also an activist and he lives in the Detroit area. They were both members of the Black Panther Party.

I wanted to get you, Malik, to talk about the 30th anniversary of the shoot-out in the Desire projects right here in New Orleans...

Malik: Well, I was in the first shoot-out, and at that time, at the time when we first came together to organize a Black Panther Party chapter in New Orleans the governor of this state, McKidden, came on TV and swore he would never allow the Panthers to ever get established in Louisiana. The National Committee to Combat Fascism was the first step in organizing a Black Panther Party chapter. On September the 15th, 1970 there was the first shoot-out between members of the National Committee to Combat Fascism and the New Orleans Police Deparatment, and the second one was the week prior to Thanksgiving in 1970.

Were you from all over the city or were you from one specific area?

Malik: No that's really it, a sister named Betty Toussaint and my first wife Barbara Thomas and I, we came out of Algiers, the Fischer area. Most of the Party members came out of the Calliope projects, and at that time the African American community in New Orleans was one that was very territorial, if you came from the 9th ward you stayed in 9th ward, if came form the 15th ward you stayed in the 15th ward. This was the first time where you had individuals from all over the city coming together. But most of the members came from the Calliope projects and then the Magnolia projects, so those two brought us the most members.

The first house you had was in St Thomas?

Malik: Yes, we started establishing programs in the St. Thomas projects, our education program, our breakfast program, and at that time we were also beginning to organize the crime prevention program. Now, we had only been in existence in New Orleans for about 5 or 6 months, so then we get our eviction notice. And at every place that we would rent, as soon as we would open up our office, we'd get a notice. Our location at the time was at the St. Thomas, our group was having a meeting, and then some people from the Desire housing project came and told us about their plight with crime and asked if we'd come back and help them. With the eviction notice, we decided to move our office to Desire. Our new building was already being occupied by a community activist program called the Sons of Desire. The Sons of Desire was downstairs and we was upstairs.

This was the house on Piety Street?

Malik: Yes, this was the house on Piety. Shortly after we moved in we received an eviction notice there too.

Most people don't know anything about the shoot-out that y'all went through in Desire.

Malik: Well, there was basically 11 of us in the party office at the time, and almost a hundred police with everything from a 60 caliber machine gun and armored cars down to their revolvers. We had about 9 shotguns, and a couple of handguns, .357 revolvers. But everything we had was legally purchased and it was registered to our office. Our position was that African Americans should no longer be lynched or beaten or attacked and have their rights taken away without any form of resistance.. We believed that you had a right to defend yourself, you had a right to defend your community, you had a right to defend your family, and you had the right to defend your honor as a human being.

The reason that we survived the shoot-out was because the community stood with us, they wouldn't leave and allow the police to do their dastardly deeds. During the short period we'd been in the Desire we reduced crime to just about 0%, the Desire projects went from one of the highest crime areas in the city to one of the lowest. It was compatible to any middle class white community by the time of the shoot out. And so the community looked at what we did and they looked at what the police came in their telling them... all these contradictions about what we were gonna do and what was gonna happen, they didn't believe it. They were defiant. They not only didn't believe it, but they stood up for us in the second shoot-out.

Now when we opened our second office in the Desire, 600 police came the second time. 600 police, national guard, and state troopers. And then almost 5000 people came out of the Desire projects and stood between the police and our office and refused to move. That was the reason we survived the second shoot-out. It took them to do a deed that is about the greatest betrayal of morality that I have ever witnessed to get us. They came and raided the office the second time dressed as priests. They borrowed priest's uniforms from the priests here at Loyola who had been coming to our free breakfast program. Those priests had been telling us "We're gonna bring you some more food so you can continue to feed the kids", and then they go and give their uniforms to the police. Betty Toussaint, the sister from Algiers, was shot through the door when they raided the house.

And here in New Orleans, like many places in the country, this was the first time that there was an act of armed defiance against the white power structure where the blacks that participated in it had survived. And they were hell-bent on making sure that since we had survived that we would spend the rest of our lives in Angola. This is our 30th year since then, and this is a part of history that our youth and the youth of this nation need to know about. Not only what we did and accomplished, but what caused the condition for the emergence of the Black Panther Party. It has to be known, it cannot be a part of history that is just kicked on the side.

Maybe you could talk more specifically about some of your programs.

Malik: Well, by the time of the shoot-outs we were feeding somewhere in the neighborhood of about 300 - 400 kids every morning, Monday through Saturday. We did this six days a week....

And in most cities around the country the first sickle cell awareness and sickle cell associations was established by members of the Black Panther Party....

How did you all fund these kind of programs?

[ . . . ]

Malik: We went out and asked for donations from within the community, we had supporters that worked who consistently gave donations, we sold papers, buttons, we raised the funds to make things happen.

I know there was a national Black Panther paper, were there also local ones?

Malik: No, but there was always room for local sections. All chapters submitted articles to the Panther Party Newspaper. In that same period of time [as the shoot-out], I believe it was in 1970, you can correct me if I'm wrong, J. Edgar Hoover had declared the Black Panther Party to be the greatest threat against national security. After that statement it was all out war against the Black Panther Party, I believe that almost 300 party members around the country were assassinated and countless others was incarcerated. I believe at one time almost 60- 70 % of our fundraising effort went to political prisoners. The money went to supporting, to making sure that we were kept aware of their conditions....

It seems like now is a time where a lot of people are starting to get organized and get politically active around the country. I was wondering if you guys could talk about that or why you became politically active in the first place?

[ . . . ]

Malik: I would just like to add that conditions like we have now, they bring about a contradiction. By that I mean in California, on Mardi Gras day, proposition 21 was passed. This proposition means that now in California they can try 14 year olds as adults. Now they gonna send 14 year old boys to prison. The authorities think that this 14 year old person is rational enough to pay the ultimate consequences of being executed or being sentenced to life, but is not rational enough to vote, or drive, or drink, or buy cigarettes. I believe that when any injustice is allowed to exist, that that is an injustice to everyone in that community or society. The injustice that is happening to Leonard [Peltier], the botched surgery, where they have basically fused this man's jaws shut, where this man has got to smash his food and suck it into his mouth. Some may say it was just an accident, but one of the FBI agents that Leonard was charged with killing, was shot in the mouth. This is the kind of thing that is going on...

You have issues, like MOVE, in Philadelphia in the early 1980s, where they literally dropped a bomb on the MOVE house, which is just like in Tulsa Oklahoma in the 1920s. African Americans veterans who had just come home from the war stopped a lynching of an African American man, and it caused a whole town to be destroyed. The white power structure flew over this town and actually dropped kerosene and burnt Tulsa down. You have these type of conditions that are in existence, you have people like Mumia who, because he took the stand and because he was a reporter that spoke the truth he was targeted...you have men here in Louisiana who are political prisoners in Angola, who have spent he last 28 years in solitary confinement. That's 28 years locked down, 23 hours a day, Monday through Friday. Weekends 24 hours. They have took beatings, they have suffered some of the worst conditions that a man can suffer and survive. They have withstood this for 28 years.

Something is drastically wrong when the priorities of a nation are not to serve its citizens but to incarcerate them. The entire HUD budget for 2000 is 23 and a half billion for this entire nation, this nation on the other hand will spend almost 36 billion dollars on prison. Their is a mentality that part of our society is disposable and that is what we are seeing with the current increase in incarceration. And we have two million people incarcerated, two million people! And something like 800,000 of those come out of HUD and subsidized housing.

These kids from the projects have a lot of knowledge, not necessarily the ABCs, but how to survive, how to defend themselves, what to do in case their is a shooting. Most kids in this society have never seen someone killed, but if you go to any public housing development in this city and as soon as a child can form some kind of concept of death they can say they have actually seen someone getting murdered. There's no form of psychologists that are sent to these projects to help these kids deal with what they've seen, no one is there to help them like in Columbine, those kids just have to survive.

And even though this country is experiencing it's most prosperous economic boom in its history, in public housing we are still dealing with unemployment that can run up to 70 And 90 percent. So you still have this. Here you have a direct relationship with poverty and crime, it's not based on race because in poor white areas and during the depression you can draw the same conclusions. And right now we possess the tools to cure this problem and that's what has to be done, we have to find solutions. We are making the appeal process shorter and the execution process quicker. Now we even have a Republican governor in Illinois who has put a moratorium on capital punishment. People need to come out and get involved, regardless of who you are, because this is something we must stop. I am a member of the International Action Center and I am the executive director of Prison Rights Union. And people can contact these groups if they want to get more involved.

Both Malik Rahim and Ahmad Rahman are working on Black Panther Party local and national histories.