E Wayne Ross

The Black Commentator is back with its usual straight-talking, hard-hitting analysis of white supremacy in the USA.

The new issue has three pieces on post-Katrina USA that cut through the BS:

Thulani Davis on the “Unbearable crime on the Mississippi:

When I woke up today, the only thought that came to mind was Reverend Jesse Jackson’s indignant cry, “This is the bottom of the slave ship we are looking at.”

I think Jesse actually put his finger on what happened to all of us this week. Those shots we’ve seen are, as he said, the bottom of the slave ships. I think that really goes to why all the rest of us watching are so traumatized. And I think it is necessary to repeat what he has said about how the people in this country have a high tolerance for viewing “black pain.” Yes, while we are asking the unheard question as to why a third of New Orleans’ population is poor and all black, everyone from the president on down is comfortable with these realities of our ongoing unemployment, overcrowding, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, neighborhood crime and despair.

…The people in charge have the capacity to tolerate scenes of suffering they know have been suffered by blacks for generations…

Tim Wise on “Blasphemy about New Orleans: A god with whom I’m not familiar”:

…And if God is even half as tired as I am of having to listen to self-righteous bastards like you blame the victims of this nightmare for their fate, then you had best eat slowly from this point forward.

Why didn’t they evacuate like they were told?

Are you serious?

There were 100,000 people in that city without cars. Folks who are too poor to own their own vehicle, and who rely on public transportation every day. I know this might shock you. They don’t have a Hummer2, or whatever gas-guzzling piece of crap you either already own or probably are saving up for.

And no, they didn’t just choose not to own a car because the buses are so gosh-darned efficient and great, as Rush Limbaugh implied, and as you likely heard, since you’re the kind of person who hangs on the every word of such bloviating hacks as these.…

Scottie Lowe on America’s pretenses washed away”:

Everyone has been affected by the news of Hurricane Katrina and it’s victims who happen to be largely of color. The media has made no attempt to hide its racist practices by portraying the economically disenfranchised Black people that live there, whose lives have been devastated and destroyed, as thugs, criminals, and lawless rouges while the fairer “victims” of Katrina are portrayed as helpless and defenseless survivors trapped in dehumanizing conditions. Down in Louisiana, with its vicious racist policies that allowed 30 percent of New Orleans’ residents of color to live below an acceptable standard of living and educational opportunity, with its governor having her lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, calling her own devastated constituents hoodlums and lawbreakers, the receding waters have revealed a frightening reality in this so-called land of opportunity…

I guess people want to save their prayers and petitions for causes all America can rally around, not just the Black people. Where was the emergency midnight session for Congress to pass illegal legislation like they did with one white woman who was already dead while thousands of living people suffered without food and water? Will America wear brown ribbons as a show of support for the flood victims of Katrina? I think not. It is with this faith that we as a nation will be able to hew out of the cesspool of despair a drop of hope.

While W and his cronies are running away from Katrina (or like Condi out there shoe shopping), Momma Bush was declaring that the conditions for hurricane refugees in Houston’s Astrodome are good enough for the poor.

In The Nation John Nichols reports

Commenting on the facilities that have been set up for the evacuees — cots crammed side-by-side in a huge stadium where the lights never go out and the sound of sobbing children never completely ceases — former First Lady Barbara Bush concluded that the poor people of New Orleans had lucked out.

“Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them,” Mrs. Bush told American Public Media’s “Marketplace” program, before returning to her multi-million dollar Houston home.

On the tape of the interview, Mrs. Bush chuckles audibly as she observes just how great things are going for families that are separated from loved ones, people who have been forced to abandon their homes and the only community where they have ever lived, and parents who are explaining to children that their pets, their toys and in some cases their friends may be lost forever. Perhaps the former first lady was amusing herself with the notion that evacuees without bread could eat cake.

Here are three recent columns from The New York Times that are worth the read.

Are we looking at the end of a the neo-con era? Lot’s of folks are asking the question. The only problem is that the Democrats in the US don’t have any idea on what an effective government might be and while it might seem oxymoronic it is quite true that Dems and Republicans are united on neo-liberalism (free-market) policies.

Frank Rich: Falluja Floods the Superdome

“As the levees cracked open and ushered hell into New Orleans on Tuesday, President Bush once again chose to fly away from Washington, not toward it, while disaster struck. We can all enumerate the many differences between a natural catastrophe and a terrorist attack. But character doesn’t change: it is immutable, and it is destiny…”

Maureen Dowd: United States of Shame

“Stuff happens.

And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens.

America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it’s happening in America…”

Bob Herbert: A Failure of Leadership

“”Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead”

Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president’s failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world.

The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see…”

Replay of Falwell/Robertson reasoning on the cause of 9/11…

The Guardian: Faith-based groups flock to disaster

“They say that this is God’s retribution for New Orleans being a sinful city,” said Jason Smith, a chaplain with the inter-denominational Victim Relief organisation, many of whose members have been deployed to the New Orleans area. “I don’t go along with that. God did not cause this; he allowed it to happen. I have had a lot of people asking me ‘why did God do this to me?’ and I tell them that God is with them today.”Ever since it became clear how much damage Hurricane Katrina had caused, there has been no shortage of people pronouncing authoritatively on talk radio across the United States and in blogs on exactly whom and what God was punishing. The choice of who is to blame ranges from abortionists to the US government for failing to support the settlers in Israel, from the drivers of SUVs who use up too much petrol to all Americans for going to war in Iraq.
Meanwhile, faith-based organisations and religious groups, preachers and chaplains have flocked to the disaster area. Some quietly offer what is necessary in terms of water or access to a mobile phone, others ponder the religious significance of Katrina.

Sitting in a Portakabin outside the River Centre in Baton Rouge, where thousands of evacuees are being housed, Jason Smith, a Baptist from Dallas, Texas, said he was likely to be there for weeks. “There have been some very sad stories,” he said. “We talked to one young woman who had tucked her four-year-old into bed and after the storm had come her crib was empty.”

There are 300-400 Scientology ministers who have arrived and plan to stay for weeks, too. Larry Byrnes, who was wearing the distinctive Church of Scientology minister T-shirt, said they had mounted similar operations in New York after September 11, in Sri Lanka after the tsunami and also in Israel and Africa. “We were the first on the scene at Punto Gordo [where the hurricane struck in Florida] last year.” Did he encounter any resistance from people of other religions or none?

“There’s no religious aspect towards helping someone,” he said. “There’s no intolerance of other people’s views. People rise to the occasion. In that sense, it’s a religious experience because religion means bringing people together.”

Remember Jude Wanniski?

Neither did I, but he’s the economist/journalist who coined the term “supply-side economics” and he died last week, on the same day that the US Census Bureau reported that the poverty rate rose and the median income of Americans fell, even as the economy grew. I don’t know what to call that coincidence…except “supplying the rich.”

In a short NY Times piece yesterday, Daniel Gross reported some numbers that show that twenty years after all the propaganda about “trickle-down economics” there is still no trickle to be found. Government numbers show that for the second straight year pretax real median household income failed to grow and the official poverty rate increased in 2004 (from 12.5% to 12.7%).

Also to be found in yesterday’s Times is a report that illustrates the disappearance of the American “middle class,” particularly in New York City. The analysis conducted by a Queens College prof, Andrew A. Beveridge, showed that in Manhattan the poor make 2 cents for every dollar to the rich.

The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now make 52 times what the lower fifth make ($365,826 compared with $7,047), which is roughly the same income disparity found in Namibia.

Eighty percent of Manhattan’s richest top fifth are white and 76% of the poorest fifth are Black, Latino, or Asian.

A separate study released by the Fiscal Policy Institute this weekend says the tenuous economic recovery of the past two years has been characterized by such weak wage growth that most of New York’s working families have been left treading water.

While the overall New York economy has grown at a modest rate over the past two years, the new report concludes that workers have not been sharing fully in the fruits of this growth. At the national level, corporate profits have increased five times faster than total wages since early 2001. In New York, economic output per worker increased by 6 percent from 2001 to 2004, while average wages increased by only 1.8 percent.

Well, in spite of the evidence, or because of it, Gross reports that “conservative economists” argue that it’s just too soon to reach a definitive conclusion about supply-side economics. “Far from being over, they say, the supply-side revolution is just beginning to work its magic.” Oh boy…

Guy Dinmore’s report from NOLA for the Financial Times is a vivid description of the current conditions there, but it is also notable for a couple of other reasons. It is the first mention I’ve seen of the conditions in the eastern burb of Chalmette (outside of media in BC, which is covering the urban search and rescue teams from BC working in St. Bernard parish).

In addition, Dinmore’s article is the first I’ve read that uses the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 as a backdrop of analysis of the current situation.

Geraldine Lavy said her son protected four Australian tourists from rapists in the convention centre. “Can you imagine? Four white women on their own?”

And then she cursed her government, asking how the Australian embassy had been able to evacuate its citizens and she was still caught in hell, now separated from her son after being bussed to the airport.

Ms Lavy echoed the thoughts and words of many black Americans we spoke to over the weekend who, while often heroic or stoic in the face of the death and depravity around them, were deeply bitter and angry at the rich white people who run their country.

“They opened the levees to save the whole neighbourhood to protect their investments,” declared Larry Crawford, 34, believing, as many sincerely do, that some districts were deliberately flooded to relieve the pressure on the dykes protecting others.

Inconceivable today, yet this is what happened in 1927 with the great Mississippi flood that made a million people homeless. Not only that, as John Barry documents in his social history Rising Tide, black work gangs were held as virtual prisoners in squalid “concentration camps” while shoring up the levees to protect plantations. Many black Americans living in the north are descended from those who abandoned the Delta that year, after the landowners escaped the floods on a steamer to the music of “Bye, Bye Blackbird”.

This week almost nothing has been said in the news or by officials about the poor eastern suburb of Chalmette. Many of the houses – said by officials to number 27,000 – are totally under water. Here the death toll is thought to be greatest, possibly running well into the thousands, said police. Several hundred corpses are reported to have been gathered by locals in one school alone.

Senior officials, who have no bodies to count because there are no orders to collect any, say they have no idea how many people have died. One told a press conference on Saturday it could be one or two thousand.