The Massacre of the Innocents in the US South

[RWalker]

For those who read this message, which represents my personal opinion only, and who are not citizens or residents of the US, I implore you to do your utmost to get the truth out about what is happening to our people in this country. If you can try to move your government, try to influence the AU, Caricom and similar regional agencies to intervene against this calculated aggression against a helpless people, an aggression at the hands of the federal and state officials.

If you contrast the nature of society in areas such as Cuba and Venezuela and that found here in the benighted state of the USA it is startling indeed.

Where is the refined civility and human compassion of the US administration and other official leadership claim they have for the safety and well being of its own citizens? Look at the terrible devastation caused by Katrina and the response of the officials of the US...and compare the same with the response of the Cuban and Venezuelan governments to Hurricanes Dennis and Ivan. The Cuban and Venezuelan armed forces were deeply involved in the rescue of victims and in construction of new homes in Cuba and assistance in other parts of the Caribbean. Castro for example took personal command of the efforts to deal with the climate calamities...the US leadership however were more concern with searching people as they entered the Superdome in New Orleans, preserving the image of Bush and assuring the business community that the economic impact of the disaster would be minimal. While the US can rush occupation troops to the Middle East, Colombia, Peru, Afghanistan ecetera at the cost of billions of dollars a week, there is no equivalent mass influx of resources and aid the US citizens in the Gulf and nearby areas that have been ravaged. The paltry sum, 10.8 billion, currently going through Congress is nothing compared to what they spend on occupying Iraq for example. Not to mention the fact that the preponderance of that money will not be applied to the alleviation of the suffering of our people, or indeed people in the area generally, if the traditional US pattern of disbursement is followed in this instance, and there are no reasons to doubt that they will. So what are they offering our people in areas impacted by the storm and attendant massive inundation of water?


Shoot to kill and Martial Law, this is what the people of New Orleans have "received" from the powers that run the US. In the face of thousands and thousands of dead and dying there is no emergency air lift to evacuate people; no Dunkirk like sea lift, no mass mobilization of rough terrain and other road vehicles to get people out...just bayonets, armored cars and threats of death.

And the media is doing their part to frame the mindset of the public to accept this declaration of war against the suffering people. One activist sent out a piece which compared the differential way, that is based on race, the story of peoples' desperation is being played out, specifically the trend of the mass media to depict desperate "white" citizens who are driven to expropriate food, as people who "found" the food; however, when "black" citizens take possession of food to feed their families, the media screams blacks "loot" food, he wrote:

"This is the kind of shameful bias that keeps the country divided, even during awful tragedies like this.

"PHOTO CAPTION BELOW IMAGE OF TWO WHITE RESIDENTS, WADING THROUGH WATER WITH FOOD: AFP/Getty Images - Tue Aug 30, 3:47 AM ET

"Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.(AFP/Getty Images/Chris Graythen)

"PHOTO CAPTION BELOW IMAGE A BLACK YOUTH, WADING THROUGH WATER WITH FOOD:

"AP - Tue Aug 30,11:31 AM ET

"A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Flood waters continue to rise in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina did extensive damage when it made landfall on Monday. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)

"These are the original links, on Yahoo's webpage. (Yahoo may remove them or take them down today, due to mounting protests and complaints.):

"black people loot ...

"Click Here: Yahoo! News Photo

"http://news.yahoo.com/photo/050830/480/ladm10208301530

"Click Here: Yahoo! News Photo

"http://news.yahoo.com/photo/050830/480/ladm10908301723

"... and white people find

"Click Here: Yahoo! News Photo"


What is the reason for the shoot to kill and martial law juriprudence now in effect in New Orleans? It is the protection of vested economic interest and the general macroeconomy of the US; first there is the question of the areas role in oil and gas production, note:

"Eight large refineries in the affected area will remain closed, and 20 oil platforms or drilling towers have disappeared. In the Gulf of Mexico, where more than 25% of U.S. oil and gas are processed, almost 90% of that production has been paralyzed."
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2005/sep...37katrina.html

As one sister who is a close friend of ours wrote, "Bush is an asshole. His speech about the tragedy in New Orleans was all about oil."

Second it is the immense amount of tourism and general leisure/recreation money generated by the area; the investments of the financial aristocracy in the area have to be protected.

Third it is a desperate attempt to prevent the world from finding out how thoroughly angry and enraged our people are about the mistreatment they are receiving...it is a setback in the war to win the hearts and minds of the people of the world for the powers in the US -- hence they must "intern" the people suffering in New Orleans, and they are intent on using maximum deadly force. This is a historical report of the situation in Greenville, MS in the 20's when the Mississippi River broke through, due to the negligence and corruption in the US Army Corp of Engineers who were responsible for the river and the levy system. At that time the state of MS declared an emergency situation, sent the National Guard into Greenville's African community and forced the people to work for free on the levy system. European national guardsmen raped our sisters, attacked and killed our people, for example one man was shot dead because he refused to do an extra 8 hour shift -- of non-compensated work mind you, in essence slavery -- after he had finished his assigned 8 hour period. This is why one activist of European descent wrote to me and declared

"This is a racist horror going on as the lynch mentality
of many in this country is being stoked. It's worse to
me than 9/11. I've taken to thinking we had 9-11
in New York, 9-12 in Madrid, 9-13 in London and this
is now 9-14 in New Orleans. This is a major story on
Cuban television and a substantial story in the print
media on the island. The bankruptcy of this capitalist
system is being demonstrated for all to see as these
terrible events unfold."


Although the following New York Time's article does not really dissect the topic in any thoroughness it is at least a small echo from the establishment media, which in and of itself should tell you how bad things really are:

From Margins of Society to Center of the Tragedy

By DAVID GONZALEZ, The New York Times

(Sept. 2) - The scenes of floating corpses, scavengers fighting for food and desperate throngs seeking any way out of New Orleans have been tragic enough. But for many African-American leaders, there is a growing outrage that many of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy were people who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society.

The victims, they note, were largely black and poor, those who toiled in the background of the tourist havens, living in tumbledown neighborhoods that were long known to be vulnerable to disaster if the levees failed. Without so much as a car or bus fare to escape ahead of time, they found themselves left behind by a failure to plan for their rescue should the dreaded day ever arrive.

"If you know that terror is approaching in terms of hurricanes, and you've already seen the damage they've done in Florida and elsewhere, what in God's name were you thinking?" said the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. "I think a lot of it has to do with race and class. The people affected were largely poor people. Poor, black people."

In the days since neighborhoods and towns along the Gulf Coast were wiped out by the winds and water, there has been a growing sense that race and class are the unspoken markers of who got out and who got stuck. Just as in developing countries where the failures of rural development policies become glaringly clear at times of natural disasters like floods or drought, many national leaders said, some of the United States' poorest cities have been left vulnerable by federal policies.

"No one would have checked on a lot of the black people in these parishes while the sun shined," said Mayor Milton D. Tutwiler of Winstonville, Miss. "So am I surprised that no one has come to help us now? No."

The subject is roiling black-oriented Web sites and message boards, and many black officials say it is a prime subject of conversation around the country. Some African-Americans have described the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina as "our tsunami," while noting that there has yet to be a response equal to that which followed the Asian tragedy.

Roosevelt F. Dorn, the mayor of Inglewood, Calif., and the president of the National Association of Black Mayors, said relief and rescue officials needed to act faster.
"I have a list of black mayors in Mississippi and Alabama who are crying out for help," Mr. Dorn said. "Their cities are gone and they are in despair. And no one has answered their cries."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said cities had been dismissed by the Bush administration because Mr. Bush received few urban votes.

"Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response," Mr. Jackson said, after meeting with Louisiana officials yesterday. "I'm not saying that myself, but what's self-evident is that you have many poor people without a way out."

In New Orleans, the disaster's impact underscores the intersection of race and class in a city where fully two-thirds of its residents are black and more than a quarter of the city lives in poverty. In the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, which was inundated by the floodwaters, more than 98 percent of the residents are black and more than a third live in poverty.

Spencer R. Crew, president and chief executive officer of the national Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, said the aftermath of the hurricane would force people to confront inequality.

"Most cities have a hidden or not always talked about poor population, black and white, and most of the time we look past them," Dr. Crew said. "This is a moment in time when we can't look past them. Their plight is coming to the forefront now. They were the ones less able to hop in a car and less able to drive off."

That disparity has been criticized as a "disgrace" by Charles B. Rangel, the senior Democratic congressman from New York City, who said it was made all the worse by the failure of government officials to have planned.

"I assume the president's going to say he got bad intelligence, Mr. Rangel said, adding that the danger to the levees was clear.

"I think that wherever you see poverty, whether it's in the white rural community or the black urban community, you see that the resources have been sucked up into the war and tax cuts for the rich," he said.

Outside Brooklyn Law School yesterday, a man selling recordings of famous African-Americans was upset at the failure to have prepared for the worst. The man, who said his name was Muhammad Ali, drew a damning conclusion about the failure to protect New Orleans.

"Blacks ain't worth it," he said. "New Orleans is a hopeless case."

Among the messages and essays circulating in cyberspace that lament the lost lives and missed opportunities is one by Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx.

"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?" Mr. Naison wrote. "If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions."

That sentiment was shared by members of other minority groups who understand the bizarre equality of poverty.

"We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-handed, as somehow random," said MartÃ*n Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts and poet of a decidedly leftist political bent who is Puerto Rican.

"Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It's dangerous to be poor. It's dangerous to be black. It's dangerous to be Latino."

This Sunday there will be prayers. In pews from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast, the faithful will come together and pray for those who lived and those who died. They will seek to understand something that has yet to be fully comprehended.
Some may talk of a divine hand behind all of this. But others have already noted the absence of a human one.

"Everything is God's will," said Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. "But there's a certain amount of common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare for certain things."

That means, Mr. Steele said, not waiting until the eve of crisis.

"Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor," he said. "So it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It's as simple as that."

Contributing reporting from New York for this article were Andy Newman, William Yardley, Jonathan P. Hicks, Patrick D. Healy, Diane Cardwell, Anemona Hartocollis, Ronald Smothers, Jeff Leeds, Manny Fernandez and Colin Moynihan. Also contributing were Michael Cooper in Albany, Gretchen Ruethling in Chicago, Brenda Goodman in Atlanta and Carolyn Marshall in San Francisco.


09-02-05 07:59 EDT
Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company.