On the night of Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress – a rarity for any sitting president – we dragged an old tv into the waiting room to show the assembled patients and staff Obama’s speech and get their reactions. Here Robert Taylor and Sheon Slaughter, both uninsured, offered their thoughts. Highland Hospital volunteer Lucy Ogbu and Certified Nurse Assistant Amy Johnson also discuss the implications of the speech.
Highland Hospital is in Oakland, CA. For more information—and for many more video clips from the hospital—check out The Waiting Room.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 20, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Grand Casino, Biloxi, MS, five months after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi.
On August 29, 2005, the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Waveland, Mississippi, and the western side of the storm grazed New Orleans. Five months after the storm, I visited the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
According to a National Hurricane Center report on Katrina, “in many locations, most of the buildings along the coast were completely destroyed, leaving few structures within which to identify still-water marks.” The center’s researchers estimate that the hurricane produced a storm surge as high as 27 feet in some locations.
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….
The national media have covered the near-total destruction of Bay St. Louis and Waveland. Driving along Beach Boulevard in the two towns, I saw a few people who had returned and were living in trailers on their plots of land, but practically everything was deserted. All that remained were the merest remnants of homes and the things that had been inside them….
In each place I visited along the western half of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, the look of the destruction was a little different, but it was consistently total. And surprisingly, the destruction in the coastal areas of Pascagoula, at the eastern end of the state, is comparable. I remembered George W. Bush’s promise to rebuild another “fantastic house” for Trent Lott on the Pascagoula beachfront. I did not know that 95% of the city’s residential areas went underwater or that 65% of the city’s homes remain uninhabitable. Northrop Grumman Ship Systems’ facility in Pascagoula, which before Katrina employed 19,800 people, was all but obliterated.
Hurricane Katrina wiped out the entire Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. All along the coast—mile after mile—just about anything that was there is now gone.
But this is only part of the story. According to the National Hurricane Center, the surge “penetrated at least six miles inland in many portions of coastal Mississippi and up to 12 miles inland along bays and rivers. The surge crossed Interstate 10 in many locations.” Interstate 10 runs east-west, four miles or more north of coastal Highway 90.
Gayle Tart’s brother Sam and his son John died in Pass Christian during the hurricane, on John’s second birthday. Tart explained that father and son had drowned inside their own home.
“Water never came down there [before Katrina]. That’s across the track. [With Katrina] that water came in and that water went out, and the velocity was unbelievable,” Tart said. “The first boundary was the beach and the next boundary was the highway. The day after the storm, you saw neither—no beach and no highway.”
Small rental and workforce housing progress has fallen dramatically short of State predictions, and so Mississippi has asked HUD for additional funds to temporarily subsidize lower-income residents in market rate rentals….
Mississippi has allocated just over half its funds on housing, and has lowered its commitment to housing by over $800 million in the past 2 years. Louisiana has allocated over 85 percent to housing programs and increased its commitment over the same period.
Mississippi has spent just under half its funds, while Louisiana has spent almost 68 percent of its funds, widening its lead over Mississippi.
Mississippi diverted $600 million from its housing program to a port expansion, while Louisiana intends to reinvest $600 million in unused Road Home funds for housing assistance for low-income residents.
Mississippi took longer to spend less later for low-income residents than for wealthier residents.
A family photo rests on the foundation slab of a home obliterated by Hurricane Katrina in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
I emphasize Mississippi in this blog post because I know that nearly all of the fourth anniversary coverage of the ongoing Katrina aftermath, will focus myopically on New Orleans. The situation in New Orleans is still dire. The housing crisis is dire. But there will not be an adequate recovery until the interconnectedness of regions and issues becomes a fundamental insight that drives policy.
While poor and minority survivors and activists will agree (if anyone asks them) that they face multiple, interconnected disasters in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, this basic local insight goes largely unrecognized. Government failure is certainly most responsible for a “recovery” that has been arbitrary, resource-driven, and slow rather than holistic, need-driven, or effective. But no one, progressives as a group included, has adequately depicted, let alone offset, that failure. Narrowly focused aid has often segregated otherwise related issues, making one or another worse and masking the lack of an overall plan. Residents of the region feel tremendous gratitude to the tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of volunteers whose countless hours of labor, along with their financial contributions, are primarily responsible for what rebuilding has occurred. However, this individual good will is no substitute for the kind of comprehensive, coordinated, and sustained response that is needed from government at all levels.
Unfortunately, no thoughtful and coordinated response will occur without a compelling grassroots push for community visibility, multi-issue awareness, and broad social justice for Gulf Coast survivors. Our region today remains in a cultural, environmental, economic, and human rights crisis no less severe than its more frequently discussed housing crunch and extending far beyond the parishes of its famed city, New Orleans. The media, policymakers, academicians, and private funding groups repeatedly fail to recognize regional connectivity or to challenge the basic invisibility of the Gulf Coast’s multiply wounded communities and ecosystems—together, its very soul. [P]iecemeal analyses and responses … are moving social justice and equitable recovery nowhere fast.
a hybrid model to partner directly with communities in planning, overseeing and administering recovery projects to assist the survivors of these disasters, provide communities with tools to build resilience against the impact of future disasters and revitalize the region economically. The bill would create a minimum of 100,000 prevailing wage jobs and training opportunities for local and displaced workers on projects reinvesting in infrastructure and restoring the coastal environment utilizing emerging green building techniques and technologies. This program would empower residents to realize their right to return with dignity and create stronger, safer, and more equitable communities.
Southern African American community resists corporate organized rightwing protestors. Above the shouts the community tells its story and why they need health care for all to overcome historic health disparities.
(h/t Jared Storey)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 13, 2009 at 11:47 pm
My google alerts on “Hungry Blues” sometimes turn up interesting things. Steven Taylor of the Fugs has written a song that is also called Hungry Blues. It’s very much in the spirit of the original song that my blog is named after. It’s not quite as good, but it’s a tall order to be asked to measure up to Langston Hughes and James P. Johnson. May the visions of both songs come to pass.
If you’re new to this blog or just have never checked out the song on my About page, here’s the Hughes/Johnson composition. More info about it is available on the About page (scroll to the end).
Our election of Barack Obama to be President of the United States of America has been filling me with overwhelming emotions. As it has been doing for so many people.
It has been hard to put any of this into words. For me it begins with my being a child of the Civil Rights Movement. As many readers of this blog know, in the early 1960s, my father worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as Special Assistant to Martin Luther King, Jr. He worked in the SCLC NY office and fought on the front lines of the civil rights battle in Birmingham, AL. One of the youth leaders of the Birmingham movement, the late William Douthard (aka Meatball), lived with us when he first moved to Albany, NY in 1978.
I started this blog to write about my father’s history in the Movement and in the process I have had the privilege of getting involved with the broader community of Civil Rights Movement veterans. I’ve made new friends and joined hands with them in the continuing struggle for racial justice in America.
It is incredibly potent to see images of a Black man elected to be President—in a historic, landslide victory, no less. To see that, and to see America’s embrace of the Obama family, and to see Michelle and Barack’s two little Black girls who are going to grow up in the White House—is to see barriers broken that I hoped but did not expect to see broken in my lifetime.
This is not the ultimate fulfillment of the struggle imparted to me by my father and his comrades—but it is a watershed moment. America still has a long way to go. And we don’t know what kind of president Obama will turn out to be; he may well end up being a centrist Democrat in the tradition of Bill Clinton. There are also indications that his administration will promote unprecedented changes in American government and society. It is likely that the Obama administration will be a mix of these things. But Obama’s candidacy and election are more than these emotions and are more than the sum his policies and accomplishments of his administration.
One of the Civil Rights Movement veterans I’ve gotten to know is Joyce Ladner. Joyce grew up in Palmers Crossing, Hattiesburg, MS. She and her sister Dorie became leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and were involved in much of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi. Joyce has gone on to be a prominent sociologist, a pioneer in Black women’s studies, a president of Howard University, a Clinton appointee to the District of Columbia Financial Control Board and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
In January, Joyce launched her Ladner Report blog to support Barack Obama in the midst of the contentious and often ugly Democratic primary race. Before the election results were known on Tuesday night, she wrote:
Joyce Ladner and Michelle Obama
I am posting this piece before the election results are in, so I don’t know if Senator Barack Obama will become President Obama. I going out to an election returns party tonight. But the race has already been won. I don’t know if the numbers will allow us to call him “President Obama” but what I do know is this: we have turned this country around. It can not, it will not shift back to the greed, mean spiritedness, selfishness, and all the other negative adjectives I could call it.
I was reminded of a passage written by Franz Fanon:
Each generation must define its mission,
Fulfill it, or betray it.
I think Fanon’s words have a lot of relevance today because older generations worked in this campaign to restore us to our better selves, while the young stepped forth to define their missions. In time, they, too, will step up and figure out how to carry them out. They will have a great transformational leader in a President Obama.
With this in mind, I told a fellow volunteer at the Obama campaign office today that the laws of the universe helped to shift us away from the horrors that led people to rise up and clamor and work for CHANGE. Obama was a conduit for the change we citizens must have. He understands that too because he keeps telling us that the election is not about him but it’s about US.
I spent some time yesterday and today waving my Obama sign at major intersections in this beautiful Florida city that is so deeply Republican. I saw many McCain-Palin supporters taking their last breaths in their old identities. Several very old men gave me the finger sign, which shocked me because they looked like it was hard for them to raise their arms. Infirm. Old. Set in 19th century ideas, but still nasty, hostile, and in some cases racist. It’s not enough to say that these people are driven entirely by self interest. It goes deeper than that. It is about the redefinition of who we are as a nation. It taps into the better part of our selves for the negative experiences to which we have been subjected are destroying our inner spirits….
Let’s hope this two year experience many of us have had with this campaign will leave us all with a renewal of energy and optimism, that will fuel our desire to sacrifice for the changes the society needs. I have not had experiences similar to those in this campaign since I was a college student civil rights activist. I hope we who had similar experiences in the past can now feel content to bequeath to the younger generations that same sense of struggle and morality, optimism and hope, hard work and sacrifice. They are up to the task and we should be more than ready to move to the side and urge them to lead.
May God protect Senator Obama and may he guide and protect us as well, as we work for higher purposes and goals that demand that we all step outside ourselves to work for the greater good.
On Wednesday morning, I wrote an email to my friend John Due.
John was born in Indiana, where he attended Indiana University. There, in 1957, three years before the Southern sit-in movement, he helped organize a testing campaign of segregated off-campus housing, restaurants and barber shops. After several more years of activity in the NAACP and union organizing, John went to Florida A&M in Tallahassee to attend law school and get in involved in the Civil Rights Movement there. John worked for the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, which sent him to Mississippi in 1964, where he conducted a dangerous investigation of violent reprisals against Black citizens and their SNCC and CORE workers seeking the right to vote in Southwest Mississippi—the same area of Mississippi my current investigations of civil rights era racial violence focus on. John has been active in practically every civil rights organization one could name. More recently he was a leader of the successful campaign for Miami-Dade County to adopt the most comprehensive living wage ordinance in the country. John’s wife, Patricia Stephens Due, a civil rights leader in her own right in the Tallahassee movement and beyond, co-authored with one of their daughters, Tananarive Due, the book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.
My subject line to John was “Congratulations to us all.”
I’m thinking of you and your family today. I just tried to call your home to say congratulations and that the news that we have elected Barack Obama as President of the United States is more meaningful because I know you.
John replied in a vein similar to Joyce’s blog post:
Like John Lewis—as Obama has said—my wife, myself, your father and other unsung heroes are and were the Moses Generation.
Obama said he was of the Joshua Generation, like you are.
And crossing the Red Sea that was made easy by the Lord is nothing compared to the River Jordan that you and your children will have to do because the Jordan is still not crossed yet. You will soon find out the difference between McCain saying “I,” and Obama saying “You.”
So I accept your congratulations as a matter of recognition of helping to put you and your generation in place. “To Come This Far.” Now it is your turn. So I agree—”Congratulations to us all.”
Neither Joyce nor John have illusions that Obama is the silver bullet for our nation’s woes. They are ardent supporters of Obama, who see him and his candicy as having invigorated my generation and American politics with the capacity to now start moving ahead to the next stages of evolution. It will be no less of a struggle. But there is hope now that we can meet it. Yes we can.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 7, 2008 at 9:42 am
HAVANA, Cuba – Gustav has grown to a Category 4 hurricane with 145 mph winds, U.S. forecasters said Saturday, as the storm pummeled a Cuban province, threatened Havana and led to the evacuations of more than 240,000 Cubans.
…KATRINA STRENGTHENS TO CATEGORY FOUR WITH 145 MPH WINDS…
A HURRICANE WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR THE NORTH CENTRAL GULF COAST FROM MORGAN CITY LOUISIANA EASTWARD TO THE ALABAMA/FLORIDA BORDER…INCLUDING THE CITY OF NEW ORLEANS AND LAKE PONTCHARTRAIN. A HURRICANE WARNING MEANS THAT HURRICANE CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED WITHIN THE WARNING AREA WITHIN THE NEXT 24 HOURS. PREPARATIONS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD BE RUSHED TO COMPLETION.
The hurricane is still expected to hit the US Gulf coast on Monday or Tuesday, anywhere between east Texas and west Florida. Experts say the most likely area lies between Houston and Mobile, Alabama.
I saw a few people who had returned and were living in trailers on their plots of land, but practically everything was deserted. All that remained were the merest remnants of homes and the things that had been inside them….
In each place I visited along the western half of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, the look of the destruction was a little different, but it was consistently total. And surprisingly, the destruction in the coastal areas of Pascagoula, at the eastern end of the state, is comparable. I remembered George W. Bush’s promise to rebuild another “fantastic house” for Trent Lott on the Pascagoula beachfront. I did not know that 95% of the city’s residential areas went underwater or that 65% of the city’s homes remain uninhabitable. Northrop Grumman Ship Systems’ facility in Pascagoula, which before Katrina employed 19,800 people, was all but obliterated.
Hurricane Katrina wiped out the entire Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The scale of the destruction is difficult to comprehend. All along the coast—mile after mile—just about anything that was there is now gone.
But this is only part of the story. According to the National Hurricane Center, the surge “penetrated at least six miles inland in many portions of coastal Mississippi and up to 12 miles inland along bays and rivers. The surge crossed Interstate 10 in many locations.” Interstate 10 runs east-west, four miles or more north of coastal Highway 90.
Gayle Tart’s brother Sam and his son John died in Pass Christian during the hurricane, on John’s second birthday. Tart explained that father and son had drowned inside their own home.
“Water never came down there [before Katrina]. That’s across the track. [With Katrina] that water came in and that water went out, and the velocity was unbelievable,” Tart said. “The first boundary was the beach and the next boundary was the highway. The day after the storm, you saw neither—no beach and no highway.”
“I am strongly, strongly encouraging everyone in the city to evacuate,” Mayor C. Ray Nagin said in a news conference Saturday afternoon. “Start the process now. Go north if you can because the storm may continue to turn a little bit west.”
Mr. Nagin said that if the hurricane continues on its current path, a mandatory evacuation will be implented — probably about 8 a.m. Sunday.
Hotels were closing, and the sound of boards being hammered over windows could be heard. The state police on Saturday morning reported moderately heavy traffic on a principal highway north, Interstate 55, and a voluntary city-organized evacuation plan for the poor, elderly and sick — the principal victims in Hurricane Katrina — was in full swing.
Dozens waited outside for buses at 17 collection points all over the city to take them to the Union Passenger Terminal, the train station downtown. From there they will be taken by bus and train to cities in north Louisiana — Shreveport, Alexandria and Monroe — and to Memphis. They clutched duffle bags, plastic shopping sacks, small children and overstuffed suitcases, vowing to avoid at all costs the still-vivid nightmare of Katrina.
The buses arrived promptly at 8 a.m. — a sharp contrast to the chaos and disorganization of three years ago, when the only plan was to jam thousands of people without cars into the Superdome and let others fend for themselves.
“I refuse to go through that again,” said Roxanne Clayton, a photo technician at Walgreens, who was waiting in the Irish Channel neighborhood with her teenage son and 10-year-old daughter. She recalled being stuck in her attic for two days during Hurricane Katrina. “I’d rather play it safe than sorry, because I know what sorry feels like,” Ms. Clayton said.
A neighbor from the larger houses up Louisiana Avenue brought doughnuts for those patiently waiting, and many said they were simply grateful for the ride out of town.
In the Tremé neighborhood, bordering the French Quarter, large families without cars, and some who were simply homeless, waited for buses that quickly filled. “If you’ve been through Katrina, it’s time for you to go,” said Marion Colbert, a powder room attendant at a French Quarter restaurant for more than three decades. “You never know about these storms if you’ve been living in the city 80 years.”
In the Central City section, families, elderly men and the visibly infirm — people in wheelchairs and with canes — lined the sidewalk along Dryades Street for half a long block. “After going through Katrina, that ain’t no joke,” said Jody Anderson, who spent seven days in the Superdome. “It’s not worth it, trying to stay,” said Ms. Anderson, an unemployed former cashier….
State officials prepared an elaborate system of contraflow lanes on interstate and federal highways leading out of southern Louisiana, staging the plans so that those farthest south could exit first. In St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, officials ordered a mandatory evacuation beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday, warning residents that curfews would be enforced. The parish was one of the hardest hit in Hurricane Katrina, and many of its residents never returned.
Yet not everyone is rushing to leave:
Still, there were few signs of a mass exodus, though gasoline stations were crowded. With forecasters not predicting a direct hit on New Orleans, some here had made the decision to stay. “My sense from talking to citizens is that they are either in an extreme state of ‘anxious to leave,’ or they’re just tired and ‘I don’t want to be bothered,’ ” Mayor Nagin told reporters late Friday.
“If it’s like Katrina, they might not let us back,” says the 52-year-old old Wal-Mart cashier, her eyes baggy and smudged with worry. “They might put a fence around the whole parish and say, `Go away.’”In places like St. Bernard, the Lower 9th Ward, and trailer parks along the Gulf Coast, those still reeling from Katrina are now the most vulnerable to Hurricane Gustav.
I’m wondering what is being done to reassure evacuees that their return home is guaranteed. I’m also wondering why Mississippi, which may yet again be the state hit by the eye of the storm, is not already mobilizing on the same scale as Louisiana.
George Bush has declared a state of emergency in Mississippi, as requested by the state’s governor, Haley Barbour. So far mandatory evacuations are only directed at the most vulnerable Mississippi residents, who are still living in FEMA trailers, Katrina cottages and in low lying areas.
In Harrison and Hancock counties, evacuations of residents from trailers and cottages will begin Sunday morning and they will be bused north to Jackson. Because there are fewer trailers and enough shelters in Jackson County, residents of trailers and cottages there won’t be evacuated until Monday, Barbour said. Residents in low-lying areas and anyone who signed up for the state evacuation plan also will be moved out beginning Sunday morning.
These most vulnerable people should for sure be evacuated. But the people Barbour is making sure to evacuate are the same people he has been tacitly telling to go to hell while he spends CDBG money, intended to alleviate their homelessness, on other things like a $600 million port expansion expansion scheme. Barbour has realized since at least 2006, that it would be a public relations disaster for him if the world watched as another hurricane washed these same neglected Mississippi residents into the Gulf of Mexico.Even if you are not as cynical about Barbour as I am, remember: when Katrina hit Mississippi, flooding devastated communities ten miles inland. I saw the destruction with my own eyes and talked to people whose loved ones drowned inside their own houses. But Barbour and Homeland Security’s Michael Chertoff are not rushing make sure Mississippians will be safe.
“We have not made a decision for any sort of mass evacuations,” said Barbour….
“We’re trying not to pull the trigger too quickly on evacuations,” Chertoff said. “There may be some shifting in the direction of the storm,” and the other officials urged residents to take personal responsibility for their safety by getting together food, water, first aid kits, flashlights and radios.
Since I started writing this post earlier today, Mayor Nagin has issued a mandator evacuation order for New Orleans. As the people of New Orleans once again flee a deadly storm, they can at least feel reassured that the local, state and federal authorities they have taken measures to ensure that the city is not again destroyed by flooding—actually just to make sure that some parts of the city are not again wrecked by flooding.
[F]loodgates have been constructed at the end of city drainage canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain, the principal conduits for the fateful surge during Hurricane Katrina. Still, there is no such arrangement on the Industrial Canal, the surge from which destroyed the still-empty Lower Ninth Ward.
The KatrinaRitaVille Express national FEMA Trailer Tour is headed to Denver, Saint Paul and down the Mississippi River this August and September. Please get involved. Stay posted.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 9, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Bad government has been good business during the Bush administration. In 1999, nine companies had federal homeland security contracts. Today the total is over 33,000. “Much of what we’ve seen touted by vendors after 9/11,” says security consultant Doug Laird, “is nothing more than a sales force trying to use 9/11 as the hype to get poorly advised folks to buy their products.”
Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government …
InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm…
“We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing.
“At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.”
In other countries, for decades, cooperation between US industries and government has gone much further. In Argentina, for example, the Ford Falcon automobile is emblematic (PDF) of government terror. In the 1970s,
the Ford Falcon was the car of choice used by police, military and paramilitaries alike. Ford’s exclusive contracts with the Argentine security forces throughout the dictatorship eventually made the Falcon the single most recognizable icon of repression, one that clearly still resonates today. “Whenever a Falcon drove by or slowed down, we all knew that there would be kidnappings, disappearances, torture or murder,” reflects renowned Argentine psychologist and playwright Eduardo “Tato” Pavlovsky in a recent article. “It was the symbolic expression of terror. A death-mobile.”
The terror has continued into the present:
At noon on March 4, 2005, a green Ford Falcon pulled up next to a woman in Centenario, a municipality of Neuquén, in southern Argentina. Three men and a woman forced her into the car and then spent the next several hours threatening, torturing and mutilating her. The victim, whose name has been kept secret, was the wife of an employee at the Cerámica Zanon tile factory, one of the flagship worker-controlled enterprises that have sprung up in Argentina since the 2001 crisis. While the Zanon workers have successfully resuscitated the plant, they have also faced growing intimidation, as exemplified by this attack. The victim’s abductors released her with the message: “This is for Zanon. Tell them that the union will run with blood…. You’re all going to have to move into the factory because we’re going to kill all of you.”
In Latin America it is clear that these partnerships are part of an explicit war on organized labor and the culture that grew from developmentalist economies (PDF) in the 1950s and 60s. And a further crackdown on US labor may also be the promise of InfraGard.
FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005…. “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”
He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers.”
Outside the US, American corporations are in many ways independent entities not bound by US laws or by the laws of the countries where they operate. Increasingly, there is a class of American citizens who enjoy similar status within the US boarders.
One of the advantages of InfraGard, according to its leading members, is that the FBI gives them a heads-up on a secure portal about any threatening information related to infrastructure disruption or terrorism.
The InfraGard website advertises this. In its list of benefits of joining InfraGard, it states: “Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more.”
InfraGard members receive “almost daily updates” on threats “emanating from both domestic sources and overseas,” Hershman says.
“We get very easy access to secure information that only goes to InfraGard members,” Schneck says. “People are happy to be in the know.”
On November 1, 2001, the FBI had information about a potential threat to the bridges of California. The alert went out to the InfraGard membership. Enron was notified, and so, too, was Barry Davis, who worked for Morgan Stanley. He notified his brother Gray, the governor of California.
“He said his brother talked to him before the FBI,” recalls Steve Maviglio, who was Davis’s press secretary at the time. “And the governor got a lot of grief for releasing the information. In his defense, he said, ‘I was on the phone with my brother, who is an investment banker. And if he knows, why shouldn’t the public know?’ ”
Maviglio still sounds perturbed about this: “You’d think an elected official would be the first to know, not the last.”
Worse, there are indications that this special class of citizens may be the enforcers of martial law, with permission to shoot to kill.
One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation—and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, “Partnership for Protection.” On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.
This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.
“The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage,” he says. “From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we’d be given specific benefits.” These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out.
But that’s not all.
“Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,” he says.
Rothschild has substantial confirmation of this report from two other sources, as well.
Often using unreliable informants and guilt by association, the mid-20th century US government placed large numbers of its citizens on the Security Index, which qualified them to lose their rights and be rounded up and jailed en masse, upon declaration of martial law. Even if the FBI found that a subject did not qualify for the Security Index, it was nearly impossible to have one’s name removed from the lists of those to be imprisoned without charges—unless one agreed to inform on others.
The canceled Security Index cards on individuals taken off the Index after 1955 were retained in the field offices. This was done because they remained “potential threats and in case of an all-out emergency, their identities should be readily accessible to permit restudy of their cases.” These cards would be destroyed only if the subject agreed to become an FBI source or informant or “otherwise indicates complete defection from subversive groups.”
(Book III of the Final Report of the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities, 1976)
The odd twist of InfraGard is to recruit informants through the promise of placing them above the law rather than through threatening them with a possible loss of their rights.
At least through the mid-1960s, predominantly working class Klansmen enjoyed relative impunity as they murdered, bombed, burned, raped, shot and beat Blacks and their allies to maintain a social and economic order that kept them—the violent whites—poor as well.
Today, it seems the mantle of violence with impunity is being handed to an owning class elite.
To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation….
Curt Haugen is CEO of S’Curo Group, a company that does “strategic planning, business continuity planning and disaster recovery, physical and IT security, policy development, internal control, personnel selection, and travel safety,” according to its website. Haugen tells me he is a former FBI agent and that he has been an InfraGard member for many years. He is a huge booster. “It’s the only true organization where there is the public-private partnership,” he says. “It’s all who knows who. You know a face, you trust a face. That’s what makes it work.”
In his letter to Gov. Haley Barbour, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson said that although he’s concerned about using the housing money for the port project, congressional language associated with the use of block grant funds “allows me little discretion.”
“I’m sure that you share my concern that there may still be significant unmet needs for affordable housing, and I strongly encourage you to prioritize Gulf Coast housing as you move forward,” Jackson wrote….
The plan has drawn harsh criticism from several groups working on recovery efforts in the region who say housing is too scarce not to devote all possible resources to it.
Kimberly Miller, a policy analyst for Oxfam America, said the state’s long-term recovery committees that work with displaced families have 15,000 cases on their waiting lists, and a similar number of people are in temporary housing.
The state’s plan “doesn’t make any financial sense when you look at the number of people who haven’t gotten back into homes,” Miller said.
Two-and-a-half years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast, less than a fourth of the 10,833 public rebuilding projects are completed.
Many haven’t even broken ground.
And local officials are finding it harder to work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Long Beach Mayor Billy Skellie spent much of Tuesday in a meeting with FEMA accountants arguing over whether the federal government will help pay overtime costs incurred by his fire and police departments in the days and weeks after the storm.
“They are wanting to deobligate about half of that,” he said.
In regular language, Skellie explained FEMA is hedging on paying the city’s costs of more than $350,000 because the agency’s contract accountants are not satisfied with the time sheets kept by first responders immediately after Katrina hit.
“We were just trying to survive. I mean, my God,” Skellie said. “It’s these people who worked around the clock pulling bodies out. … They don’t want to pay for any of that because a person’s name doesn’t appear on a time sheet.”…
Since the storm, about $1.3 billion has been paid out to cover the costs of rebuilding to local governments, school systems and eligible nonprofits.
But as Mississippi approaches its third hurricane season since Katrina, many of the projects have not made it out of the planning stages. In all, 22 percent of Mississippi’s 10,833 public projects have been completed.
House Democrats accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday of covering up the long-term health hazards – possibly including cancer – linked to formaldehyde in hurricane trailers.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said at a committee hearing Tuesday it is “unacceptable” FEMA did not begin testing formaldehyde levels in travel trailers and mobile homes until last month.
“Even more troubling is the recent discovery that FEMA directed the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) to not investigate, or communicate, the health effects associated with prolonged exposure to formaldehyde,” said Thompson, of Mississippi’s 2nd District.
More than 43,000 trailers and mobile homes still are on the Gulf Coast housing victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Some have been occupied for more than two years.
The House Committee on Science and Technology this week released e-mails from Christopher DeRosa, a CDC scientist analyzing test results on unoccupied trailers in 2006. The e-mails said FEMA repeatedly requested “we specify safe levels of exposure.”
“We should be very cautious about the use of the word ’safe’ in reference to formaldehyde,” De Rosa wrote. “Since it is a carcinogen, it is a matter of science policy that there is no ’safe’ level of exposure.”
My thoughts have been returning lately to Jeanne D’Arc. She retired from blogging in 2006, but her blog Body and Soul was the blog that first inspired me to start Hungry Blues. Sadly, she closed down the archives on the typepad blog she had kept from around August 03 – August 06. Her older blogger archives are still online, though, and I’ve been reading around in them tonight.
Nobody synthesizes the personal and political better than Jeanne did. In my long post about domestic surveillance, I talked a little about the abdication of government responsibilities. Jeanne came at the problem from a different angle in a post in 2002. I’m reposting most of it here. Happy New Year, Jeanne. I hope you’re well.
I’ve never sorted toy donations, but I’ve done canned food drives, and clothing donations, and at some point I always end up mumbling to myself, “Exactly when did you people come to the conclusion that the poor aren’t human?” The one donation to clothing drives that sends me round the bend is torn underwear. What kind of people think the poor are so desperate they’d wear someone else’s old underwear? And are they sitting at home basking in the warm glow of their generosity?
Sorry — charity drives bring out my most uncharitable side. And bad memories as well.
I have to admit, this is partly a personal issue. I went through a period as kid when Christmas was ruined every year by the guy from the church (not our church, some other damn church) pulling up in a station wagon loaded with food boxes. My mother was too polite to turn him away.
It started when I was eleven — just old enough to begin reading adult body language. A man with a crew cut, wearing a bright red cardigan, carried a cardboard box into the apartment and set it on the kitchen table. My mother was in her robe, her hair in curlers, getting ready for work. She worked night shift. I could tell that she was in hurry and embarrassed to be seen like that, and that she wanted the man out of the apartment fast. But he hung around, asking stupid questions and glancing at everything out of the corner of his eye. I remember realizing that my mother was trying to maneuver to get him with his back to the couch, because the couch had a spring sticking out. She had covered it with a towel, but you could still see the outline of the spring, and the towel looked ratty anyway. Every poor person fixates on one thing that makes them feel especially poor, an objective correlative of poverty, and for my mother it was that sofa. She could buy her clothes at Goodwill and go without food at least once a week, she could handle being awakened by phone calls about my father’s gambling debts, but somehow she felt less poor if she thought no one saw the sofa.
My mother was from Ireland. I once read that during the potato famine, Irish peasants who realized they were about to die would find a corner of the houses that couldn’t be seen from the window, and huddle there to wait for the end, humiliated by their starvation. And, strangely, I smiled when I read that sad detail, because it reminded me of my mother. You’re all right as long as no one sees.
The man in the red cardigan just didn’t get it. He hung around chatting, as if he were waiting for something. And eventually my mother figured out what he wanted and gave it to him. She asked if he had a lot more deliveries to make. I think she was just trying to remind him to get going, but that question turned out to be exactly what he wanted. He started rambling on and on about how many people his church helped at this time of year and how proud he was of all those fine people, and how good it made him feel to help. My mother kept looking at the door. And then he said that what he had in the car was for the people in our building, and he looked at a piece of paper and told my mother which other apartments he was spreading his Christmas cheer to.
Kids who grow up in violent homes learn to pick up the exact moment an adult becomes angry — before they do anything. When the man named the other charity cases in the building, I could see a change in my mother’s expression that I’m sure the man couldn’t see. She kept smiling, but anger was building under the surface, made worse by the fact that she had to keep smiling and playing the part of the grateful poor lady.
The anger came out after the man left. My mother screamed and cried that he was going to tell half the people in the building that she couldn’t even feed her kid. And all the time she was jerking the curlers out of her hair, because priorities are priorities, and she was late for work. And anyway, she screamed, headed for the kitchen, that was a lie. A no-good lie. We always have food, except the day before payday, and we don’t need their garbage. She took cans out of the box — some dented, some labelless, others just useless. Beets, lard, hollandaise sauce. I remember looking at that little yellow can and wondering what it was. Did it come from Holland, and was it made of daisies? My mother picked up the small frozen turkey. “I don’t want this garbage,” she screamed — and she threw the turkey to the floor, and stormed out of the kitchen. She’d thrown it so hard, it dented the linoleum.
She left for work, and I put the canned charity away. There was one large box of kiddie cereal. The bottom of the box had gotten damp, and when I picked it up, it split open, and all the cereal scattered across the floor.
Whenever I hear about welfare taking away people’s dignity, I always remember crawling around on the kitchen floor, trying to pick up the sugary colored rings of private charity.
I thought of the man who sucked the air out of Christmas a few days ago, as I was reading an article about President Bush urging Americans to give more to the needy. I’d second the idea, of course. It certainly wasn’t his plea for time and money that bothered me. It was a president being photographed putting canned peaches and spinach in a bag, without thinking about the fact that there are more important and effective things he could do to help the needy. But of course that assumes that the point is to help those in need, and not to provide photo-ops for presidents, and chances for the middle class to feel good about themselves while getting rid of their garbage.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 1, 2008 at 1:32 am
By Briley Richmond
Ocean Springs, MS
Sunday, October 21, 2007
The Mississippi Press
A 6-year-old child, Blake Pendergrass, was struck and killed by an automobile in Escatawpa the other day. Escatawpa is about 20 miles from my home in Ocean Springs. I didn’t know him. I would imagine something like that happens somewhere in America every day — at least every week. But this one hurt me. Hurt me bad. You see, the little boy lived in a FEMA trailer park — a Katrina FEMA trailer park in Escatawpa. Escatawpa is — well, if you were plotting out a Monopoly board, it ain’t Boardwalk. It’s more like one of the purples right past “Go” — you know, the ones where the rent for landing on the space is $2.00.
I visited the scene where Blake was killed. The park in which he lived has no playground. Blake was killed while he was crossing the street attempting to get to his “playground.” The trailers are stacked in compactly, like sardines in a can. There is no room for a playground, just trailers. And more trailers. All identical. That’s how you identify a FEMA trailer park. The trailers have no amenities — no “identities.” Every one is just the same. Twenty-four feet long. Eight feet wide. White. Stacked right together. No thought is given to the children. No parks, no playgrounds, no sidewalks — the park just screams, “You’re just a bunch of poor kids and we don’t care.”
Immediately across the street from the trailer park sits an abandoned convenience store, complete with a parking lot — unused. The children of the trailer park have adopted the parking lot as their unofficial playground. Only to get to it they have to cross the street. The “street” is a highway. So 6-year-old Blake Pendergrass was killed while crossing the highway to get from his FEMA trailer home to his abandoned parking lot playground. And on that same day our governor, Haley Barbour, was busy taking $600 million that the people of this nation gave to my community for housing for Katrina victims, people just like little Blake, and turning it over to the business interests at the port of Gulfport, about 30 miles away — so Dole Pineapple and other multi-million dollar business entities could have that money instead of Blake. You think maybe the people of this nation expected the money given for housing following Katrina would be given to Blake, and not Dole Pineapple?
The people of this great nation gave the victims of that horrible storm $5 billion so we could provide housing for the children like Blake. But it hasn’t happened that way. Five billion dollars is enough money to buy 60,000, $80,000 homes — we lost 65,000 homes (and yes, one can still buy a home for $80,000 in Mississippi). I invite you to drive around my community and I ask you if you see anything that looks remotely like 60,000 homes. Or 30,000 homes. Or even 10,000 homes. Our governor has been so busy passing out money to his friends and cronies, he has managed to build not a single home to cover the needs of a child like Blake — and there are thousands of children in just the same situation as Blake. The governor gave a lawyer friend of his in Moss Point $1 million. Northrup-Grumman, a major defense contractor was given $250 million. The Hancock Bank, our largest, got the benefit of hundreds of millions. The business entities at the port of Gulfport, $600 million. All diverted from the funds intended to provide housing for Katrina victims.
There are flowers on the side of the road marking the spot where little Blake was killed — a tribute of sorts I guess. I started crying when I saw them. Oh the horror, the horror. I’m so sorry little fella. I’ve tried so hard. I’ve written letters to the editors of dozens of newspapers. I’ve called Congressmen, Senators. But I am an old man now — I am tired — and for the first time in my life I have to own up to it — I am beaten — I have failed. I am so sorry Blake. My governor went to Washington, D.C., and got $5 billion. But all he got for you was those damn flowers.
Final Call: There were some news reports that you had a relationship with one of the defendants, Bobby Brewster. Is this accurate?
Megan Williams: We were just friends. It was nothing like that.
FC: No dating relationship between you and defendant Bobby Brewster?
MW: No. They kicked me in the head with steel toed boots, they hit me in the head with several objects, I remember seeing a knife, and they tried to cut my foot off. They told me that is what they did to Kunta Kinte when they cut his foot off so he couldn’t run and that is what they were going to do to me.
I’ve been stewing on this moment in the Megan Williams interview ever since I posted about it. Stewing on it because I’m feeling uncomfortable with how it seems she might not be telling the truth about her past with one of the six Logan County, W. VA whites who tortured, raped and stabbed her.
That suspect, Bobby R. Brewster, one of six arrested in the torture case, had a previous relationship with the victim and was charged in July with domestic battery and assault after a dispute between them, Sheriff Eddie Hunter said.
Court documents show that on July 18, officers responded to a 911 call concerning a domestic disturbance at the mobile home, where Mr. Brewster, 24, lives with his mother in far southwestern West Virginia. The documents do not make clear who called the police, but when they arrived, the papers say, they asked Mr. Brewster about the young woman, and he said he had not seen her in several days.
Upon searching the premises, though, the officers found her behind the trailer, and she told them she was hiding from Mr. Brewster and his mother. The complaint says the police determined that he had “verbally threatened and physically hit” her.
I can only speculate that Williams’ lawyers have advised her to downplay her past with Brewster. Why? Because when people start talking about a possible past relationship, Williams’ “poor judgment” or the fact that she passed some bad checks, they also start questioning whether this was really a hate crime and whether the fullest repertoire of charges ought to be brought against the scum of the earth perpetrators. Ellle, PhD summed up the problem in her post about white liberals who are hesitant to support the Jena 6 (via Amp) because of the
unspoken implication that African Americans had to be more than human, had to prove themselves worthy of fair treatment, of justice.
So it now appears that what these people did to Williams may have been retaliation for her turning Bobby Brewster in to police for committing domestic battery against her. At least, maybe that’s what instigated it. That’s what’s causing me to believe that this may not have been a hate crime.
The immediate answer to this thinking is that we are talking about gang violence by a group of six whites against a Black woman. Even if it started as a domestic dispute, it stopped being one when the other five perpertrators got involved.
Furthermore a prior relationship and a possible domestic dispute do not disqualify the whites from hate crime charges or make Williams any less deserving of the fullest measure of justice possible. If anything, these possibilities only add to the racial dimensions of the case.
Southern whites have for centuries assumed that that they can violate Black women with impunity. Furthermore, the domestic sphere has long been a point of access to Black women. Writing about the early twentieth century, historian Jacqueline Jones explains:
White men’s persistent violation of black women … served as a backdrop for periodic lynchings throughout the South… A woman or girl found herself in danger of being attacked whenever she walked down a country road—”The poorest type of white man feels at liberty to accost her and follow, and force her.” But her employer’s home remained the source of her greatest fears. (Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, 150)
But we are talking about more than accosting and forcing. What made these whites go ape shit at Megan Williams? What made them behave with such sadistic brutality? What excited their blood lust?
Jones’ history provides some possible answers. The deadly intimacy of whites with Black women is, in Jones’ analysis, part of a broader system of political control.
The races remained largely segregated in public pursuits. Yet black women constantly worked in the presence of whites of both sexes and all ages. A black newspaper in Orangeburg, South Carolina, highlighted the irony in 1889. The blackest woman, it noted, can “cook the food for prejudiced throats” and hold “the whitest, cleanest baby,” but the angry passions rise when a well-dressed, educated, refined negro pays his own fare and seats himself quietly in a public conveyance.” In the end, de jure segregation was a move designed to limit the political power of blacks as a group, rather than to curtail personal contact between members of the two races. (150)
The offense to racist whites is not so much social proximity to Blacks as it is Black assertions of political power. Segregation was not born from aversion but as a means to a political end.
West Virginia’s history illustrates the principle of segregation as a method of “limit[ing] political power of blacks as a group, rather than to curtail personal contact between members of the two races.”
West Virginia’s legal system enforced racial segregation until the start of the 1960s. Laws were passed to ban interracial marriage and the education of black children together with whites. There was even a law requiring birth, death and marriage records for blacks to be kept in separate registers.
But unlike some states, West Virginia’s government took an active role in building an alternate society of black institutions. The first publicly funded black school below the Mason-Dixon line was founded in 1866 in West Virginia, and by the start of World War II, the state also had two public colleges, a hospital for the mentally ill, vocational training schools, an orphanage and a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients.
“To tell you the truth, black people were able to do things here they weren’t always able to do in other places, particularly the deep South,” said Cicero Fain, an assistant history professor at Marshall University.
“But blacks were always aware they were supposed to be second-class citizens,” he said. “The state funded these institutions, assisted in establishing them, but never tried to integrate them into the prevailing white power structure.”
The state funded institutions for Blacks were used by the state to set pre-defined limits on Black participation in society.
If Bobby Brewster was retaliating against Megan Williams because she filed domestic battery charges against him in July, that just supports Jones’ analysis of segregationist attitudes. Part of what may have made the six Logan County whites go ape shit and act like a band of Klansmen was that Williams utilized the legal system to resist white dominance.
Selective involvement of federal government in local affairs at its finest.
HUD’s Wrecking Ball
Tightening the Noose Around New Orleans
By BILL QUIGLEY
Odessa Lewis is 62 years old. When I saw her last week, she was crying because she is being evicted. A long-time resident of the Lafitte public housing apartments, since Katrina she has been locked out of her apartment and forced to live in a 240 square foot FEMA trailer. Ms. Lewis has asked repeatedly to be allowed to return to her apartment to clean and fix it up so she can move back in. She even offered to do all the work herself and with friends at no cost. The government continually refused to allow her to return. Now she is being evicted from her trailer and fears she will become homeless because there is no place for working people, especially African American working and poor people, to live in New Orleans. Ms. Lewis is a strong woman who has worked her whole life. But the stress of being locked out of her apartment, living in a FEMA trailer and the possibility of being homeless brought out the tears. Thousands of other mothers and grandmothers are in the same situation.
Renting is so hard in part because there is a noose closing around the housing opportunities of New Orleans African American renters displaced by Katrina. They have been openly and directly targeted by public and private actions designed to keep them away. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) just added their weight to the attack by approving the demolition of 2966 apartments in New Orleans.
Despite telling a federal judge for the last year and a half that approvals of public housing demolition applications take about 100 working days to evaluate, HUD approved the plan to demolish nearly 3000 apartments one day after the complete application was filed. HUD says the 3000 apartments are scheduled to be replaced in a few years with up to 744 public housing eligible apartments and a few hundred subsidized apartments….
New Orleans had a severe affordable housing crisis before Katrina when HANO housed over 5000 families. There was a waiting list of 8000 families trying to get in. HUD and HANO together did such a poor job of administering the agency that there were about 2000 more empty apartments that had been scheduled for major repairs for years.
The continuing deceptions by HUD and HANO have been shameless. Since Katrina, HUD has continued to act out both sides of a charade that the local housing authority is making decisions and HUD is waiting on local actions. Yet, the decision to demolish was announced by the Secretary of HUD in DC over a year ago. But in the year since then, HUD has continued to tell a federal judge that any legal challenge to demolitions was premature because HANO had not even submitted an application to HUD for their careful 100 day evaluation. This is while a HUD employee runs the agency, commuting back and forth to DC each week. HANO even announced they would have 2000 apartments ready for people in August of 2006–a deadline not met even in September 2007. HANO later announced to the public that they had a list of 250 apartments ready for people to return only to admit in writing weeks later that no such list existed–nor were the phantom apartments ready.
The list of untruths goes on.
HUD would not agree to delay the demolition of the 3000 apartments until Congress finished reviewing legislation that would give residents the right to return and participate in the process of determining what kind of affordable housing should be in place in New Orleans.
You can help raise money for the Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership by sponsoring my good friend Jesse on his run in the Dublin Marathon.
Jesse Edsell-Vetter of Somerville will run the 26-mile Dublin Marathon Monday, Oct. 29, and has pledged to raise $4,000 to support Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership’s efforts to end homelessness.
Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership, a local nonprofit agency, is the state’s largest regional provider of rental assistance and housing supports, serving more than 15,000 homeless, elderly, disabled, and low- and moderate-income residents of greater Boston.
Edsell-Vetter is a three-year employee at MBHP and works as a property owner liaison in the Inspections Department.
“I’ve been homeless,” said Edsell-Vetter. “I know what that’s like, and what’s needed beyond having a place to live to break that cycle. I’m running to help others the way someone helped me.”
He is no stranger to marathons. He ran the Boston Marathon twice as part of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute team, and regularly participates in races of all lengths. The fact that he is able to run at all is something of a miracle.
“I was walking with a cane four years ago,” he said. After 14 knee surgeries, his surgeon told him that he was cured. “He said, ‘Do anything you want – go run a marathon.’ I don’t think he expected me to actually do it, but I wanted to see how far I could push myself.”
When I first met Jesse, he was walking with the cane. On the bad days, short distances were a big challenge. It is so inspiring to see him doing this now. Please help if you can.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 20, 2007 at 1:31 am
Facing South reports on the latest development in Mississippi’s road to non-recovery from Hurricane Katrina.
A Mississippi agency wants to divert $600 million in federal funds from a housing program created to help low-income homeowners who suffered losses in Hurricane Katrina and use it to spruce up the State Port at Gulfport, the Associated Press reports.
The MDA claims that the housing program has more than enough money to meet demand, making the diversion possible. “This funding will be an important part of helping the State Port Authority restore and enhance port infrastructure for economic development initiatives that will create jobs and improve quality of life for the citizens of the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” Gov. Haley Barbour said in a recent statement.
The outrageousness of this proposal needs some elaboration.
Facing South has previously noted that of the $16.7 billion dollars of Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) money set aside by Congress for the Gulf Coast “only $1 billion — just 6 percent — had been spent, almost all of it in Mississippi” (emphasis added). This and other comparisons of the respective federal funds allocated to hurricane recovery efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi lead well intentioned social justice advocates to buy a false picture, of Mississippi’s recovery. The implicit logic seems to be that if Mississippi is getting so much more federal money than Louisiana, then it stands to reason that “recovery ‘is well underway’ in Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula.”
Standing inside the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino in downtown Biloxi, Mississippi, you’d never guess that you are at the epicenter of a town that lost over 5,000 homes in the flood. In the crowded lobby, guests drift past lush banks of flowers toward the retail promenade, where a store called the “Jewelry Box” displays Rolex watches, gold chains and flashy rings. Inside the gaming rooms, business is booming: Players pack the high stakes poker rooms and the aisles lined by 25 cent slot machines.
Just blocks away, the working class neighborhood of East Biloxi is still a wasteland of bare concrete slabs, where homes were washed entirely off their foundations. On many lots, front steps lead to nowhere. Local activists say that government assistance has been very slow in coming to this community, which was primarily populated by low-income African-Americans and Vietnamese.
Across the Gulf Coast, examples of the uneven recovery are everywhere. In most towns, families and businesses with private resources are rebuilding, while the poor are often still waiting for the government assistance they were promised. Nowhere is this contrast more glaring than in Biloxi, Mississippi….
The Biloxi casinos have made record profits in the past year, as contractors with money to burn spend their evenings at the new Hard Rock Casino, or the deluxe Beau Rivage. But the industry clearly thinks there’s still plenty of room in the market. In mid-August, construction workers broke ground on the new Margaritaville casino and resort, a 46-acre complex of shops, restaurants and entertainment facilities. The project, which is expected to cost upwards of $700 million, is a joint venture between pop star Jimmy Buffett, a favorite son of Mississippi and Harrah’s Entertainment. Based in Las Vegas, Harrah’s earns billions in revenues from casinos, hotels and golf courses around the country. According to the company website, the $700 million Margaritaville Casino and Resort project “is the first phase of a development that will represent an investment of more than $1 billion when completed.”
Margaritaville is going up in East Biloxi, at the foot of Oak Street, the heart of Biloxi’s Vietnamese community, and home to both its Catholic Church and its Buddhist Temple. Yet Biloxi city council members and Harrah’s officials have recently discussed the possibility of closing Oak Street to cars, in order to offset the new traffic brought in by the casino.
Bui says the small businesses along Oak Street don’t know how much energy they should put into trying to rebuild. “They want to stay, but the signals they’re getting from the government is, “We’re waiting for Harrah’s, which will be our savior. Don’t talk to us,’” he says. Bui says most small business owners are waiting nervously to see if the new, rebuilt Biloxi still has a place for them.
While some might argue for the trickle down approach that prioritizes industries and the tourist economy, neoliberal economic theories cannot justify Haley Barbour’s gross misappropriation of federal CDBG dollars. CDBG funds by definition are supposed to support low-income housing. Yet, as noted by the Mississippi Center for Justice [PDF]:
Over $3 billion of the $5.4 billion Congress gave Mississippi has been granted waivers from the requirement to serve the needs of low and moderate income residents. Only $1 billion has been devoted to programs that serve these same residents. Two years later, less than $100 million from those programs has been paid out.
With over 17,000 households (close to 50,000 persons) still in FEMA trailers and others doubled up with relatives or friends, Mississippi’s housing recovery is far from complete two years after Hurricane Katrina.
Less than $100 million has been paid out to address the needs of low and moderate income hurricane survivors in Mississippi. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities [PDF], it will require at least $700 million to restore public housing and HUD-subsidized housing damaged during Katrina. The Mississippi Center for Justice estimates over $900 million worth of needs unmet for low and moderate income residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Even if there were good reason to believe that the port expansion proposal will “improve quality of life for the citizens of the Mississippi Gulf Coast” (I am hardly convinced it will), how long will the project take and when will the supposed benefits reach the 50,000 Mississippians currently living in FEMA trailers?
This slide show from the Steps Coalition details Governor Barbour’s criminal misuse of CDBG funds.
I am critical of Facing South for using Mississippi as a foil for Louisiana’s problems post Katrina (and Rita) and thereby contributing to misconceptions about the needs of coastal Mississippians. Nonetheless, the Facing South blog provides important reporting and analysis of the post-Katrina/Rita crisis in the Gulf Coast region. Facing South’s recent two-year report profiles a diverse array of Gulf Coast activists, organizations, communities and issues and should be read.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 16, 2007 at 2:01 am
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
Jesse Edsell-Vetter of Somerville will run the 26-mile Dublin Marathon Monday, Oct. 29, and has pledged to raise $4,000 to support Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership’s efforts to end homelessness.
He is no stranger to marathons. He ran the Boston Marathon twice as part of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute team, and regularly participates in races of all lengths. The fact that he is able to run at all is something of a miracle.
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