Poor, black, and left behind
By Mike Davis
Sept. 24 — The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of
Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond’s version
of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs,
while the old and car-less — mainly black — were left behind
in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face
the watery wrath.
New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by
the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded
they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case
scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate
the city’s poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the
hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orleans’s daily, the Times-Picayune,
ran an alarming story about the “large group … mostly concentrated
in poorer neighborhoods” who wanted to evacuate but couldn’t.
Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did
Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools
to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees
might damage or graffiti the Superdome.
In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official callousness
toward poor black folk endures.
Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful developers
have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the population
— blamed for the city’s high crime rates — across the
Mississippi river. Historic black public-housing projects have been
razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other
housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial
as their children’s curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems
to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans — one big Garden District
— with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and
prisons outside the city limits.
But New Orleans isn’t the only the case-study in what Nixonians
once called “the politics of benign neglect.” In Los Angeles,
county supervisors have just announced the closure of the trauma center
at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital near Watts. The hospital, located
in the epicenter of LA’s gang wars, is one of the nation’s
busiest centers for the treatment of gunshot wounds. The loss of its
ER, according to paramedics, could “add as much as 30 minutes in
transport time to other facilities.”
The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of avoidable deaths. But
then again the victims will be black or brown and poor.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United
States seems to have returned to degree zero of moral concern for the
majority of descendants of slavery and segregation. Whether the black
poor live or die seems to merit only haughty disinterest and indifference.
Indeed, in terms of the life-and-death issues that matter most to African-Americans
— structural unemployment, race-based super-incarceration, police
brutality, disappearing affirmative action programs, and failing schools
— the present presidential election might as well be taking place
in the 1920s.
But not all the blame can be assigned to the current occupant of the
former slave-owners’ mansion at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
The mayor of New Orleans, for example, is a black Democrat, and Los
Angeles County is a famously Democratic bastion. No, the political invisibility
of people of color is a strictly bipartisan endeavor. On the Democratic
side, it is the culmination of the long crusade waged by the Democratic
Leadership Council (DLC) to exorcise the specter of the 1980s Rainbow
Coalition.
The DLC, of course, has long yearned to bring white guys and fat cats
back to a Nixonized Democratic Party. Arguing that race had fatally
divided Democrats, the DLC has tried to bleach the Party by marginalizing
civil rights agendas and black leadership. African-Americans, it is
cynically assumed, will remain loyal to the Democrats regardless of
the treasons committed against them. They are, in effect, hostages.
Thus the sordid spectacle — portrayed in Fahrenheit 9/11 —
of white Democratic senators refusing to raise a single hand in support
of the Black Congressional Caucus’s courageous challenge to the
stolen election of November 2000.
The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, steers a straight DLC course toward oblivion.
No Democratic presidential candidate since Eugene McCarthy’s run
in 1968 has shown such patrician disdain for the Democrats’ most
loyal and fundamental social base. While Condoleezza Rice hovers, a
tight-lipped and constant presence at Dubya’s side, the highest
ranking, self-proclaimed “African American” in the Kerry camp
is Teresa Heinz (born and raised in white-colonial privilege).
This crude joke has been compounded by Kerry’s semi-suicidal reluctance
to mobilize black voters. As Rainbow Coalition veterans like Ron Waters
have bitterly pointed out, Kerry has been absolutely churlish about
financing voter registration drives in African-American communities.
Ralph Nader, I fear, was cruelly accurate when he warned recently that
“the Democrats do not win when they do not have Jesse Jackson and
African Americans in the core of the campaign.”
In truth, Kerry, the erstwhile war hero, is running away as hard as
he can from the sound of the cannons, whether in Iraq or in America’s
equally ravaged inner cities. The urgent domestic issue, of course,
is unspeakable socio-economic inequality, newly deepened by fiscal plunder
and catastrophic plant closures. But inequality still has a predominant
color, or, rather, colors: black and brown.
Kerry’s apathetic and uncharismatic attitude toward people of color
will not be repaired by last-minute speeches or campaign staff appointments.
Nor will it be compensated for by his super-ardent efforts to woo Reagan
Democrats and white males with war stories from the ancient Mekong Delta.
A party that in every real and figurative sense refuses to shelter the
poor in a hurricane is unlikely to mobilize the moral passion necessary
to overthrow George Bush, the most hated man on earth.
Source: TomDispatch.com
History repeating: New York, 1832, and
today
By Joshua Frank
Sept. 25— Back in the 1800s New Yorkers had a modest nickname
for their corrupt metropolis. They called it the “Corporation.”
It was a telling name indeed. Although the city at the time was a filthy,
hog-infested cesspool, the Big Apple was nonetheless a vibrant template
of the New World industry to come.
The busy ports of New York were some of the most profitable in the world.
But the disparity of wealth between the city’s inhabitants was
disgustingly evident. The rich, like the affluent of today, ran the
city. New York was for the well-to-do — the business and ruling
class elite. It was certainly not the utopia so many Europeans had hoped
for as they traveled thousands of miles to these forested shores.
In 1832 the overpopulated village of New York was hit with a gruesome
epidemic of cholera. The wicked disease had journeyed from Europe to
Canada where it took its first recorded victim on Western soil. Eventually
the disease made its way down to the city, to inflict a destruction
never before seen in the white occupied state.
Health officials held back information of the looming pestilence from
most New Yorkers. The Corporation, it seemed, was more interested in
its own financial well being then the welfare of its citizens.
Needless to say, thousands perished. The rich fled the city. The poor
stayed, and most died. The city’s artists and working class had
virtually all died. The New York health board did virtually nothing
to stop the outbreak.
The pious said it was the devil’s work. God had reprimanded New
York for its sinful ways, they declared. The red light district, called
“Five Points” at the time, had been hit the worst. Living
in these dank corners of Gotham were the morally inept, the downtrodden,
the scum of the great new city. Of course the health authorities turned
a blind eye to the death. These evildoers had it coming, and many of
the elite were happy to see them go.
It is hard not to draw parallels between what happened in New York in
1832 and what took place in NYC just three years ago on Sept. 11. Has
the Corporation again withheld valuable information from the people
in order to protect its own neck? Have President Bush and his minions
held vital scientific records hostage that indicate Ground Zero and
the surrounding area may have enormous health risks for those unfortunate
enough to live or work there? It is certainly starting to appear that
way.
In a recent government study, nearly half of the 1,000 people involved
who all were in direct contact with Ground Zero following the World
Trade Center attacks have had substantial lung damage.
Suzanne Mattei, author of a recent environmental analysis titled “Air
Pollution and Deception at Ground Zero,” says, “The Bush administration
knew the health risks and ignored its own long-standing body of knowledge
about the harmful products of incineration and demolition. It should
have issued a health warning immediately on that basis.”
Other US government reports have found the highest levels of deadly
dioxins ever recorded near and around the WTC site — close to 1,500
times normal levels. They also admit that close to 400,000 people were
exposed to this dangerous debris. Indeed, more New Yorkers could die
from the Sept. 11 fallout then the attacks themselves.
“The epidemic [in New York in 1832] provoked anxiety even in those
places fortunate enough to have escaped its effects,” writes Charles
Rosenberg in an essay on the historical pandemic. “Mothers feared
for their young children ... The vicious seemed to have been hardened
in their depravity, though the spiritually minded Christian was confirmed
in his faith.”
Sound familiar? Keep the public in fear and they will never ask for
the truth. Seems as if the Corporation of 1832, unlike its citizens,
may still be alive and well today.
Source: www.dissidentvoice.org
