Category Archives: Democracy

Here are photos from the anti-war demo this past Saturday (Sept 24) in San Diego, which was part of a US-wide anti-war protest, that drew a somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 people in Washington, DC.

Polls continue to show that the majority of the U.S public is against the war in Iraq and want an immediate withdrawal of U.S troops. After Hurricane Katrina hit, support for Bush’s policies in Iraq dropped even more.

A recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll showed that two-thirds of Americans believe Bush is spending too much money in Iraq and 42 percent favor cutting spending on the war to pay for relief efforts in the devastated Gulf Coast region. Nearly 70% of Americans disapprove of how George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq; 60% now say it was a mistake to send US troops to Iraq; and over 60% support troop withdrawals.

The San Diego demo was held in Balboa Park and included some spirited singing, representatives/speeches from folks from a wide variety of political, religious, educational, community activist, and human rights organizations.

Over 2000 people (including babies and puppets, but not the cops)—and not a few sign toting dogs—came out for a vigorous protest against the oil war in Iraq and US foreign policies that continue to criminalize poor people along the southern US border who come to the US looking for work. The Rouge Forum had a small delegation there leafleting the crowd.

Photos from the September 24th demo in Washington, DC.

From Tom Dispatch
The Mysteries of New Orleans

Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy

By Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot

We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn’t the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple “incompetence” or “failure of leadership,” locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect — the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.

In almost random order, here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.

1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans (majority Black) side and not on the Metairie (largely white) side? Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities?

2. Who owned the huge barge that was catapulted through the wall of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the Lower Ninth Ward — the most deadly hit-and-run accident in U.S. history?

3. All of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish east of the Industrial Canal were drowned, except for the Almonaster-Michoud Industrial District along Chef Menteur Highway. Why was industrial land apparently protected by stronger levees than nearby residential neighborhoods?

4. Why did Mayor Ray Nagin, in defiance of his own official disaster plan, delay twelve to twenty-four hours in ordering a mandatory evacuation of the city?

5. Why did Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff not declare Katrina an “Incident of National Significance” until August 31 — thus preventing the full deployment of urgently needed federal resources?

6. Why wasn’t the nearby U.S.S. Bataan immediately sent to the aid of New Orleans? The huge amphibious-landing ship had a state-of-the-art, 600-bed hospital, water and power plants, helicopters, food supplies, and 1,200 sailors eager to join the rescue effort.

7. Similarly, why wasn’t the Baltimore-based hospital ship USS Comfort ordered to sea until August 31, or the 82nd Airborne Division deployed in New Orleans until September 5?

8. Why does Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld balk at making public his “severe weather execution order” that established the ground rules for the military response to Katrina? Did the Pentagon, as a recent report by the Congressional Research Service suggests, fail to take initiatives within already authorized powers, then attempt to transfer the blame to state and local governments?

9. Why were the more than 350 buses of the New Orleans Regional Transportation Authority — eventually flooded where they were parked — not mobilized to evacuate infirm, poor, and car-less residents?

10. What significance attaches to the fact that the chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of crime in) the city?

11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in Dallas with the “forty thieves” — white business leaders led by Reiss — reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer Black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?

12. Everyone knows about a famous train called “the City of New Orleans.” Why was there no evacuation by rail? Was Amtrak part of the disaster planning? If not, why not?

13. Why were patients at private hospitals like Tulane evacuated by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity Hospital were left to suffer and die?

14. Was the failure to adequately stock food, water, potable toilets, cots, and medicine at the Louisiana Superdome a deliberate decision — as many believe — to force poorer residents to leave the city?

15. The French Quarter has one of the highest densities of restaurants in the nation. Once the acute shortages of food and water at the Superdome and the Convention Center were known, why didn’t officials requisition supplies from hotels and restaurants located just a few blocks away? (As it happened, vast quantities of food were simply left to spoil.)

16. City Hall’s emergency command center had to be abandoned early in the crisis because its generator supposedly ran out of diesel fuel. Likewise many critical-care patients died from heat or equipment failure after hospital backup generators failed. Why were supplies of diesel fuel so inadequate? Why were so many hospital generators located in basements that would obviously flood?

17. Why didn’t the Navy or Coast Guard immediately airdrop life preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why wasn’t such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals?

18. Why weren’t evacuee centers established in Audubon Park and other unflooded parts of Uptown, where locals could be employed as cleanup crews?

19. Is the Justice Department investigating the Jim Crow-like response of the suburban Gretna police who turned back hundreds of desperate New Orleans citizens trying to walk across the Mississippi River bridge — an image reminiscent of Selma in 1965? New Orleans, meanwhile, abounds in eyewitness accounts of police looting and illegal shootings: Will any of this ever be investigated?

20. Who is responsible for the suspicious fires that have swept the city? Why have so many fires occurred in blue-collar areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification, such as the Section 8 homes on Constance Street in the Lower Garden District or the wharfs along the river in Bywater?

21. Where were FEMA’s several dozen vaunted urban search-and-rescue teams? Aside from some courageous work by Coast Guard helicopter crews, the early rescue effort was largely mounted by volunteers who towed their own boats into the city after hearing an appeal on television.

22. We found a massive Red Cross presence in Baton Rouge but none in some of the smaller Louisiana towns that have mounted the most impressive relief efforts. The poor Cajun community of Ville Platte, for instance, has at one time or another fed and housed more than 5,000 evacuees; but the Red Cross, along with FEMA, has refused almost daily appeals by local volunteers to send professional personnel and aid. Why then give money to the Red Cross?

23. Why isn’t FEMA scrambling to create a central registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the city?

24. As politicians talk about “disaster czars” and elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed “new urbanism” in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive participation of the city’s ordinary citizens in their own future?

25. Indeed, on the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, what has happened to democracy?

Robert Fisk is one of a few truly independent journalist covering the war in Iraq. His column in today’s edition of The Independent is a powerful illustration of the obsentity that is the U.S. occupation in Iraq.

Of course the answer to Fisk’s rhetorical question is, “they cannot and they will not.”

Go to original

How Can the US Ever Win, When Iraqi Children Die like This?
By Robert Fisk
The Independent UK

Saturday 13 August 2005

There’s the wreckage of a car bomb that killed seven Americans on the corner of a neighbouring street. Close by stands the shuttered shop of a phone supplier who put pictures of Saddam on a donkey on his mobiles. He was shot three days ago, along with two other men who had committed the same sin. In the al-Jamia neighbourhood, a US Humvee was purring up the road so we gingerly backed off and took a side street. In this part of Baghdad, you avoid both the insurgents and the Americans – if you are lucky.

Yassin al-Sammerai was not. On 14 July, the second grade schoolboy had gone to spend the night with two college friends and – this being a city without electricity in the hottest month of the year – they decided to spend the night sleeping in the front garden. Let his broken 65 year-old father Selim take up the story, for he’s the one who still cannot believe his son is dead – or what the Americans told him afterwards.

“It was three-thirty in the morning and they were all asleep, Yassin and his friends Fahed and Walid Khaled. There was an American patrol outside and then suddenly, a Bradley armoured vehicle burst through the gate and wall and drove over Yassin. You know how heavy these things are. He died instantly. But the Americans didn’t know what they’d done. He was lying crushed under the vehicle for 17 minutes. Um Khaled, his friends’ mother, kept shouting in Arabic: “There is a boy under this vehicle.” According to Selim al-Sammerai, the Americans’ first reaction was to put handcuffs on the two other boys. But a Lebanese Arabic interpreter working for the Americans arrived to explain that it was all a mistake. “We don’t have anything against you,” she said. The Americans produced a laminated paper in English and Arabic entitled “Iraqi Claims Pocket Card” which tells them how to claim compensation.

The unit whose Bradley drove over Yassin is listed as “256 BCT A/156 AR, Mortars”. Under “Type of Incident”, an American had written: “Raid destroyed gate and doors.” No one told the family there had been a raid. And nowhere – but nowhere – on the form does it suggest that the “raid” destroyed the life of the football-loving Yassin al-Sammerai.

Inside Yassin’s father’s home yesterday, Selim shakes with anger and then weeps softly, wiping his eyes. “He is surely in heaven,” one of his surviving seven sons replies. And the old man looks at me and says: “He liked swimming too. ”

A former technical manager at the Baghdad University college of arts, Selim is now just a shadow. He is half bent over on his seat, his face sallow and his cheeks drawn in. This is a Sunni household in a Sunni area. This is “insurgent country” for the Americans, which is why they crash into these narrow streets at night. Several days ago, a collaborator gave away the location of a group of Sunni guerrillas and US troops surrounded the house. A two-hour gun-battle followed until an Apache helicopter came barrelling out of the darkness and dropped a bomb on the building, killing all inside.

There is much muttering around the room about the Americans and the West and I pick up on this quickly and say how grateful I am that they have let a Westerner come to their home after what has happened. Selim turns and shakes me by the hand. “You are welcome here,” he says. “Please tell people what happened to us.” Outside, my driver is watching the road; it’s the usual story. Any car with three men inside or a man with a mobile phone means “get out”. The sun bakes down. It is a Friday. “These guys take Fridays off,” the driver offers by way of confidence.

“The Americans came back with an officer two days later,” Selim al-Sammerai continues. “They offered us compensation. I refused. I lost my son, I told the officer. ‘I don’t want the money – I don’t think the money will bring back my son.’ That’s what I told the American.” There is a long silence in the room. But Selim, who is still crying, insists on speaking again.

“I told the American officer: ‘You have killed the innocent and such things will lead the people to destroy you and the people will make a revolution against you. You said you had come to liberate us from the previous regime. But you are destroying our walls and doors.'”

I suddenly realise that Selim al-Sammerai has straightened up on his seat and his voice is rising in strength. “Do you know what the American said to me? He said, ‘This is fate.’ I looked at him and I said, ‘I am very faithful in the fate of God – but not in the fate of which you speak.'”

Then one of Yassin’s brothers says that he took a photograph of the dead boy as he lay on the ground, a picture taken on his mobile phone, and he printed a picture of it and when the Americans returned on the second day they asked to see it. “They asked me why I had taken the picture and I said it was so people here could see what the Americans had done to my brother. They asked if they could borrow it and bring it back. I gave it to them but they didn’t bring it back. But I still kept the image on my mobile and I was able to print another.” And suddenly it is in my hands, an obscene and terrible snapshot of Yassin’s head crushed flat as if an elephant had stood upon it, blood pouring from what had been the back of his brains. “So now, you see,” the brother explains, “the people can still see what the Americans have done.”

In the heat, we slunk out of al-Jamia yesterday, the place of insurgents and Americans and grief and revenge. “When the car bomb blew up over there,” my driver says, “the US Humvees went on burning for three hours and the bodies were still there. The Americans took three hours to reach them. Al the people gathered round and watched.” And I look at the carbonised car that still lies on the road and realise it has now become a little icon of resistance. How, I ask myself again, can the Americans ever win?

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both published series on
issues of class and mobility.

From Class Action: Class in America: Two Elite Newspapers Tackle the Big Taboo

From The New York Times: Class Matters

From theWall Street Journal: As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls

See other Class Action news, upcoming workshops and resources at Class Action

Via MediaSavvy–BRITISH COLUMBIA: A CITIZEN’S GUIDE TO FOI
Unless you’re a specialist, it can be tough (and expensive) to pry what you want out of the hands of the bureaucrats. But fear not. Galloping to rescue are the students from UVic’s Environmental Law Centre, who have written a layperson’s guide to British Columbia’s Freedom of Information legistlation, designed to make it much easier, and talk you through the process, step by step.
(UVIC, tip from PEJ News)