Dirty South Bureau

I don’t know what has gotten into me. This week, yet again, I find myself posting positive news on Dirty South Bureau.

I have an innate aversion to this. Perhaps because there is so much misery and pain that people don’t want to talk about but that needs to be learned from, I have taken it on as my personal role to work in such territory. Or maybe it is a deep revulsion to the sunny voices that dominate certain types of media, such as many shows produced by NPR affiliates. For the stories I produced for such venues when I was a radio reporter, I recall the premium placed on resolution of the crisis in the story, which contrasted with the absence of easy resolution in post-Katrina New Orleans. Either way, I tend to avoid overly cheery accounts; after all Sheila Stroup might get testy if I start to tread on her emotional market share.

And yet there is no other way to express my experience yesterday of attending a ceremony to mark progress on the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MR-GO).

For those of you not living in this region, Mr. Go, as we like to call it, is a 76-mile shipping channel leading from the Gulf of Mexico into the Intercoastal Waterway, a few miles before the Interharbor Navigational Canal (AKA the Industrial Canal), which cuts through the 9th Ward and divides New Orleans East and the Lower 9th Ward from the main part of the city. It is also the “hurricane superhighway” that, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, carried a brutal storm surge into the Intercoastal Waterway and the Industrial Canal, where it destroyed levee walls on both sides, flooding the 9th Ward, the Lower 9th Ward and large swaths of St. Bernard Parish, particularly the parts where most people live.

Of course, there were other factors: the loose barge left in the industrial canal that went through the flood wall into the Lower 9th, not to mention the poor design, construction and maintenance of levees, much of which was revealed in a forensic investigation by a UC Berkeley team in the summer of 2006. Even with these qualifications, Mr. Go is not a popular waterway for many here.

The boat launch was at 8 a.m., and, needless to say, my companion and I arrived late. This was in part due to the fact that we had never been to Yscloskey, Louisiana, before. I believe that by the time we found Yscloskey we had seen much of rural St. Bernard Parish, which is a hauntingly beautiful landscape. I was reminded of how Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s describes the bogs in Jutland – wild, desolate, utterly empty areas of grassland and swamp, broken in areas by stands of trees, many of them dead.

Our timing turned out to be good luck. Immediately upon finding the Yscloskey Marina we encountered a lost Argentinian photographer, in a very Down By Law moment. With his help we flagged down a passing motorboat, containing not one but two councilmen from St. Bernard Parish, Wayne Landry and George Cavignac, who were kind enough to give us a personal tour of the Mr. Go closure.

Mr. Go is a very impressive waterway. During the high-speed boat ride (we were advised to close our teeth) Landry and Cavignac patiently and cheerfully explained the ins and outs of the waterway, as we passed barge-loads of large rocks and earth-moving equipment. Originally built to be around 500 feet wide, Mr. Go is now between 1,000 and 2,000 feet wide, enough for many cargo vessels to pass each other, ships that now have to use the Mississippi River as they did for the first 250 years of this city, and as many did anyway afterwards.

The rock wall that we reached was not particularly impressive, despite the crane atop it. It spanned only part of the waterway, and to our disappointment it appeared that no heavy work was being done that morning. Are we being overly impatient? It should be noted that the entire industrial canal took only nine years from legislative approval (1956) to completion (1965). As a nation, we can accomplish incredible feats of engineering (particularly with the Army Corps of Engineers) when, and only when, there is the political will. How about our white flight superhighway, the 24-mile causeway spanning Lake Ponchartrain, that we built to allow middle-class and affluent whites to escape the city and still commute in the 50’s and 60’s? It is now three and a half years after Katrina. How long will it take to build a rock wall across a mere 1,500 feet of canal?

Some say that a rock wall is not enough – that Mr. Go should be filled. I am in no position to evaluate such proposals, but Cavignac and Landry indicated that a rock wall, while it won’t entirely stop a storm surge, would at least act as a brake on the speed and intensity of any storm surges traveling up the waterway.

But the important part to all of us is that it is there, and that it is being built. It meant something to me. As absurd as it may sound, I saw hope in that pile of rocks.

It was also a lovely day, just cool enough to be invigorating, with pelicans and hawks passing overhead and dolphins swimming in the waters. All of that is enough to make us forget, temporarily, that New Orleans and Southern Louisiana are ground zero for the impacts of global warming. Sea level rise due to the melting of polar ice adds to other factors that cause the wetlands that protect this city to increasingly disappear. And of course, there is the link between global warming and more severe hurricanes. In the end, the levee walls constructed after Katrina and severely tested during Hurricane Gustav (anyone else remember watching Geraldo Rivera narrate water splashing over the top of levee walls on a television in a distant city?), may not hold back the next major Hurricane to hit this region. We are all guinea pigs here.

I am reminded of the end of the movie Blade Runner, when the Harrison Ford character, escaping the city to the north, explains that he doesn’t know how much time he and his genetically manufactured girlfriend have before her internal clock stops ticking. “But who does?” he asks. New Orleans is in deep shit for a lot of reasons, and may not survive this century. But many of us, who choose to live here because we love this city, don’t need forever. We just need some reasonable assurances of short-to-medium term viability, including some effort by the feds to fix any infrastructure problems that threaten us with total annihilation. It’s just not too much to ask for a medium-sized American city.

Coming back in the motorboat to the safety of the launch, past the enormous piles of rock fill, I was given just enough of that assurance.

(Big thanks to St. Bernard Councilmen Wayne Landry and George Cavignac for their superb hospitality.)

I’m at the airport as I write this, looking at a line of maybe one hundred persons to get to the gate. Ordinarily this would be strange, however over the last twenty-four hours there have been several such lines. I left at 6AM to beat traffic, (hours before my flight time), and my not-so-secret route out of town, AKA the wormhole, was nearly empty. However as I approached the airport, things were very different; parking in particular was difficult to come by.

I recall watching Nash Roberts on Fox 8 news last night with a sinking feeling in my stomach. For those who don’t know, Nash is the semi-mythical meteorologist they bring out of retirement when the shit hits the fan, hurricane-wise. An ex-girlfriend admitted to me once that just seeing Nash on TV scared her. Roberts seemed to think we are likely to be OK; he predicts that the storm will head westward. I hope he’s right.

With Gustav headed towards the Gulf on the south side of Cuba as a Category 1 Hurricane as of this morning, someone, somewhere, is going to have hell to pay. I’m not sure it will be us, but no-one I know is taking any chances.

The level of general panic yesterday was high. I went to the bank in the afternoon and the ATM was out of money; inside was a line of perhaps fifty people. I recall seeing music critic and Jazz-Industrial complex darling Alison Fensterstock in that line. The look on her face was not good, (or was that her everyday scowl?). Others I spoke to reported the same thing at pharmacy counters, and other businesses; generally ATMs are out of cash. I had business at a notary public, and the experience was identical; there had been a rush on auto titles. In the grocery store, it was all canned food and bottled water in the checkout lines.

Some of you reading this may say that this is all silly and out-of-proportion. Well, fuck you.

Here’s why: the Army Corps(e) of Engineers refuses to guarantee our levees, saying at best that they have been returned to “pre-Katrina levels”. Are you kidding me?

At the end of the day, the only thing that I can say is that we should not have to live like this. It is an uncertain universe. Natural disasters happen. But in the richest country in the world, the failure to protect the citizens of a major city is totally pathetic. This would never happen in Connecticut.

And don’t give me that “they shouldn’t have built a city there” or “New Orleans is below sea level” bullshit. First off, have you heard of Port of New Orleans? Second, half the city is at or above sea level. Third, there are plenty of cities in America that are protected by levees, and plenty of large cities around the world at or below sea level. Iowa floods, anyone?

I blog about a lot of other things; education, public housing, race and class, etc. But this is the biggest issue here - that the government has totally failed to protect us. And I for one am convinced that it has everything to do with race, class and regional bias. There is no reason why New Orleans cannot have adequate storm protection starting with levees that would protect us from a category five storm except a lack of political will.

We cannot survive as a city evacuating like this every time a hurricane comes to the gulf. I don’t know what it is going to take, but in order to survive, we need a political re-alignment that will get us the basic infrastructure that we need.

Levees.org
Leveesnotwar.org

Looking back recently, I’ve realized that in all the rush to fight the impending demolition of public housing as we know it in New Orleans, that I and others have never really taken the time to explain the specifics of why we oppose the demolitions. Maybe it just seemed to obvious that the demolition of hundreds of units of livable housing was simply too absurd and too wrong to even bother to explain given the institutionalized displacement of over one hundred thousand residents of New Orleans and the severity of the housing crisis that we are experiencing.

But it is worth explaining, and the details are important.

First, let me be clear that I speak only on behalf of myself and that others in the movement to stop the demolitions may disagree with me on some or all of these points.

Some may be surprised to hear that both I and some other allies of public housing residents agree that mixed income developments are a better strategy for public housing than the old, Fordist warehousing of poor people. Yes, you heard me right— concentrating large numbers of poor people in massive developments may have seemed OK in the 1930’s- 1950’s, but I don’t believe it is a good idea today.

As a caveat, I don’t think concentration of poverty is at the root of the social ills that policymakers describe in their rush to destroy public housing. Policymakers are frequently confusing the problems of concentration of poverty with the problems of poverty itself. For instance, there is violence around the drug trade in low-income communities in many American cities. This is true if the poor are concentrated or spread out; in fact since the mixing up of returning New Orleanians post-storm there is generally more violence, reflected in our higher per-capita murder rate. No amount of moving people around in the shell game that we call our housing policy has changed that.

Why then, are we opposed to the demolition of public housing if it results in mixed-income redevelopments? First, because it doesn’t.

There is simply no reason to believe that any of the entities involved in the redevelopment of public housing— developers, the assorted opportunistic non-profits or HANO/HUD— have any intention of allowing the vast majority of the poor who lived in these developments pre-storm to return to the new developments. Developers like Columbia Residential, who has the contract for the St. Bernard Redevelopment, are corporations like any other and exist to turn a profit. It is simply more profitable to skew the numbers to create more “market-rate” units, and it is easier to sell, lease and rent these units for larger profits if there are fewer poor people living near by.

These sort of mixed-income developments could potentially work if there was stringent government oversight of the process to assure compliance with an income mix that allowed the majority of low-income residents to return. This approach appears to have worked in such cities as San Francisco, where the Valencia Gardens Development appears to be a successful HOPE VI redevelopment.

However, can anyone argue that known crooks like Alphonso Jackson- who resigned amid an FBI investigation, or the HANO bureaucrats— who had their office taken over in 2002 for massive mismanagement— are effective stewards of the public good?

More importantly, we watched this process go down in River Gardens, the St. Thomas Redevelopment. An excellent master’s thesis by Brod Bagert Jr., now an organizer with the Jeremiah Group, lays out much of what happened when the foxes guarded the hen house. In a nutshell, Pres Kabacoff of HRI, the developer, fudged the numbers and the New Orleans City Council, as now, looked the other way.

There is no reason to believe that homes in these mixed-income redevelopments will ever materialize for the vast majority of public housing residents.

(Side note- Kabacoff is now trying to redevelop his own image with the assistance of a white voodoo-priestess girlfriend and a new development on St. Claude in the 8th ward that includes a police substation and a food co-op housed in a “healing center”. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.)

Second, even given the laughable contention that any significant numbers of public housing residents might be allowed to return to the new developments, there is still the issue of time. It will be years before any of these redevelopments are rebuilt; some units may be opened as soon as 2009. So for every public housing resident who returns to a “mixed-income” redevelopment, there is first 4-6 years of unnecessary displacement.

Scott Keller, assistant to Alphonso Jackson, called the post-Katrina situation an “opportunity” in 2006. I again feel the need to tactfully explain to all the big wigs and suits out there that this was not an “opportunity” for the tens of thousands of men, women and children evacuated from public housing, this was a disaster. Losing your home and having to find a new one for 4-6 years in a city where rent has more than doubled is not an “opportunity”.

If there was even a shred of consideration for the residents of public housing, redevelopment would have occurred in stages, with residents moved back in to a majority of easily cleaned-out units while the redevelopment occurred one development at a time. But there wasn’t.

The situation of Charity Hospital is very similar. If LSU Health Sciences Center had any concern for the low-income residents of the city who depended on Charity, they would have allowed the crew of military and hospital personnel to re-open Charity while they work on their “dream” hospital. But they don’t. In the case of both Charity and public housing, the people of New Orleans are pawns to be swept aside in the grandiose dreams of the powerful.

Lord knows pubic housing in New Orleans needed an overhaul; most significantly some maintenance of otherwise excellent buildings. How about keeping the developments but reintroducing the street grid, as was recommended in District 4 of the Unified New Orleans Plan?. Frankly, I would support an overhaul of public housing if it was done with real involvement of the residents and a plan to bring back those who wanted to return while redevelopment occurred in stages.

What is happening right now is not an overhaul, it is wanton destruction of not only buildings but lives. It is a totally unnecessary human rights catastrophe, and makes a mockery of the concept of mixed income.

HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson stepped down yesterday. If I am saddened by this news, it is only because he resigned after doing so much damage to the lives of so many men, women and children in the city of New Orleans, and that he was not stopped earlier.

It is ironic that Jackson’s resignation comes less than a week after the final accomplishment of his wantonly destructive tenure at HUD- the granting by the city of New Orleans of a demolition permit for the Lafitte Housing Development.

But not to fear; Jackson losing his job will likely not be a time of instability, like it would be if you or I lost our employment. I am sure Jackson’s friends at Columbia Residential, Jackson’s former employer and the company he awarded with a contract to oversee the redevelopment (read: destruction) of the St. Bernard Development, will not allow Jackson to see tough times. Like most former cabinet-level officials, Jackson will be free to return to the world of private industry which did him so well on his way to the top.

There are more than a few similarities between Jackson and another prominent Bush appointee who resigned amid scandal, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Both have lives that read like sinister versions of the Horatio Alger myth. Both are men of color who were born into poverty in large families, to fathers who labored in humble jobs. They are amazing examples of the kind of class mobility that America has prided itself on, often exaggerated in our national mythology of who were are. But Jackson and Gonzales were the real deal; hard-working, ambitious men whose rise would be unthinkable in the pre-civil rights era.

What happened to make these men forget where they came from, and to turn them into the monsters they became? They represent a curious trend in American society. Unlike the blue-bloods who run, say, the Times-Picayune, these men knew poverty and want, rose above it, and then proceeded to mercilessly sacrifice those still trapped below them to their own massive ambitions.

The administration of Bush Jr., himself a patrician and a faux-Texan, will be remembered for promoting a large number of minorities to cabinet-level positions. They appear to have made a study of finding the most ruthless, unscrupulous and spineless African-Americans and Latinos to fill these positions. It is truly a PR feat. Rove, or whoever else has been running the Bush machine, is very clever to have used these individuals to do their dirty work while still paying homage to equal opportunity employment. In this case, it reads more like equal opportunity oppression.

Ultimately, Jackson’s resignation is too late for the homeless under the interstate, and for those in semi-permanent exile in Houston. The Magnolia (C J Peete) Development has already been flattened, and demolition is underway on both parts of B W Cooper and St. Bernard. New Orleans now has a 4% homeless rate, four times that of most major US cities. Most of them, like the overwhelming majority of the poor in New Orleans, are of course black.

Maybe Horatio Alger wouldn’t be the best person to write Jackson’s story. It’s a pity Theodore Dreiser isn’t still around.

Driving by work today I drove past the ruins of what was formerly the St. Bernard Housing Development. Block after block is now rubble; cranes smash what was formerly livable, if not particularly well maintained, housing. Rumor has it that the development will be replaced with a private golf course.

This is what “free-market” restructuring looks like on the ground: the wanton destruction of sound homes in the interests of lining the pockets of developers and politicians. Today, housing, tomorrow, golf courses.

Meanwhile, go under the I-10 on Claiborne, or go to the streets of any major city, and you will see what happens when we as a society don’t ensure the human right to housing.

Alphonso Jackson, George Bush, Mayor Ray Nagin, and every member of the New Orleans City Council will be remembered by future generations as criminals and the restructuring of Katrina which they oversaw as a human rights catastrophe. Already the UN Commission on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has condemned these actions.

Full report

But all of this is too late for the people living under the overpass. As for me, I’m just sick.

So the DSB is back after a lengthy hiatus… actually in the interests of full disclosure I got a new job working for the teachers union. And let me also say that anything that I say here on this blog is my own personal opinion and should in no way be connected to the union.

And what’s new on the horizon (drumroll please…) Alphonso Jackson send us bulldozers for Christmas! And the City Council lacks the guts to do anything about it! Maybe this is because in our electoral apathy we allowed a devout gentrificationist and a woman who epitomizes hatred of poor people to be elected?

Where to start? Alphonso Jackson’s compromising relationship with Columbia Residential?

12,000 homeless people on the streets of New Orleans?

Blatantly biased reporting from that paragon of journalism that we know as our daily paper? (Love those 64-word lead sentences with no clear connection between clauses, guys.)

All I know is that I have sent my letters to Midura and Fielkow, and I am going to be at the City Council Meeting tomorrow morning, Thursday, December 20.

My letter to Shelly Midura:

Dear Councilwoman Midura,

I live in your district in the Bayou St. John neighborhood and I am asking you to vote not to allow HUD to demolish the CJ Peete, Lafitte and St. Bernard Developments.

Though I lived in District C at the time, I was glad when you defeated Jay Batt. You seemed like a person of compassion and integrity. This vote will be a test of those qualities.

We all agree that public housing in this city needs to be improved. But HUD’s plan is privatization, not improvement. It will waste hundreds of millions of dollars in senseless destruction and will not provide enough low-income housing for New Orleanians who want to come home.

There are other plans that have been approved by the city government, including your office, such as the Unified New Orleans Plan, which provide for some demolition but also renovating and improving much of the city’s public housing instead of wantonly destroying it. This plan was arrived at in a democratic and inclusive manner and is supposed to be the official plan for rebuilding the city. I implore you to follow our city’s plan instead of arbitrary and destructive measures put forth by a federal government which has repeatedly shown a lack of care for this city and our people.

There is an article in the art and design section of the New York Times which describes better than I can what a waste destroying these buildings is. Before you vote you should read it— the historical and architectural value of these projects, especially Lafitte, is immense.

But it is the people, not the buildings, who are the real issue. There is a housing crisis in this city of epic proportions, and tearing down thousands of units will make it worse. It will take at least three years to rebuild any of these developments, which will only contain a fraction of the affordable housing. Many poor people simply cannot afford to move back to this city. The failure of the federal and state government to provide for a way for these internally displaced citizens to come home is a violation of international human rights law. If you vote for demolition, you will be a party to that crime.

Please make the right choice, the humane choice, the compassionate choice. Do not allow these demolitions.

Christian Roselund

I went out to Lafayette on Saturday for the Festival International. I got a little carried away, stayed too long, skipped out on my ride back, drank too much, spent too much money, said the wrong things and spent the next morning hung over wandering the streets of Lafayette, feeling like Johnny Cash’s Sunday Morning Coming Down. Lafayette is a pretty town, and feels affluent; everywhere I saw happy, well-fed Cajuns. Of course, every American city I’ve gone to looks affluent after New Orleans.

Made my way down to the Greyhound station and borrowing a cell phone I met two other New Orleanians, a girl going to school at Loyola and Eddie the Cake Man.

Eddie lived in the seventh ward before the storm, in an apartment building on Claiborne next to the freeway painted purple and yellow. When I met him he had a small bag at his feet with his rolling skates; he was headed fifty miles away to Baton Rouge to go skating and would come back tonight on the Grey Dog. Ed is fifty-seven and a veteran. He is soft-spoken, and gentle, and looks you straight in the eye when he talks.

Eddie’s story came spilling out of him like an open bag of rice falling over.

Ed’s mother died during evacuation in Michigan. He showed us pictures of his mother on his camera phone; kind of like a digital version of the photos of my ex-girlfriend and little sister that I have in my wallet. He had several pictures of her in there, and scrolled through them for us. Another Katrina casualty; an eighty-year old woman in poor health who had to take a road trip that lasted more than twelve hours. He says her house was almost fixed up when she passed in Michigan.

Ed’s father died a year before, and his sister a year before that. A friend of Eddie’s and his whole family died in their house in the rapid flooding in the lower 9th. Eddie tried to move back to New Orleans and live in a FEMA trailer, but the formaldehyde off-gassing made him sick (like most people he didn’t know that you are supposed to run the air conditioning all the time to help deal with the toxic gas chamber that FEMA trailers are). He says the city was just too much of a mess, so he came out to Lafayette to live with his daughter.

Eddie got a job with a baker here, he says he just called him up and he hired him. His specialty is cake decorating, he says he can do everything including comic book figures for kid’s cakes. Never went to school just taught himself. He says his website is on the way.

Eddie says that the Prozac helps, that before he started taking it he would just ball of on the sofa. He can’t afford individual therapy but is going to group therapy. He speaks slowly and with no shame. The thing that really helps him, though, is skating; before the storm he would go to the lanes on Terry Parkway in the West Bank. And now he waits for the Greyhound to go to Baton Rouge.

Someday he says he wants to move back to New Orleans but he doesn’t know when.

I wonder how many people there waiting at Greyhound stations like Ed. And it matters, because it’s more significant when two people suffer than one. On the other hand the mathematics of suffering can be misleading; the other people aren’t Ed and they aren’t standing in front of me with their soft voices, steady brown eyes and roller skate bags. There is aggregate of human misery, the numbers and statistics, and then there is Ed the Cake Man.

Ed tells us that a doctor he saw in Lafayette told him that the Hurricane was two years ago and that he should get over it.

“What a bunch of bullshit”, I respond.

“Thank you”, he says quietly. And he goes on to explain the thing that everyone down here knows and that for some reason people in the rest of the country seem to have a hard time grasping. The hurricane is not over for Ed the Cake Man. And it won’t be any time soon.

On February 28th the US House of Representatives Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing on the insurance crisis in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina.

My mother once pointed out to me that insurance companies make their money on collecting premiums, not on paying claims. That, and investing the money that they get from us. Upon this logic they seem to be cutting their losses in the Gulf Coast quite effectively.

The Hearing was presided over by rep. Melvin Watt (D-NC). It featured testimony by reps Bobby Jindal (R-La), Gene Taylor (D-Miss) and William Jefferson (D-La), David Maurstad, Federal Insurance Administrator for FEMA, Jim Hood, Attorney General for the State of Mississippi and Dr. Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, who was revealed at the end of the hearing to be representing Allstate Insurance as well, which was hardly shocking given his defense of the insurance industry.

Selected audio from the hearing follows, starting with the testimony by rep. Jindal. audio

Testimony by William Jefferson. audio

Testimony by Rep. Gene Taylor. audio

The hearing got good when Maxine Waters came on board to blast insurance company shill Hartwig. audio

But perhaps the best was rep. Taylor of Mississippi tearing into Marstaud for the incompetence of FEMA. audio

My apologies to my readers about the lateness of this audio, and thanks to FSRN reporter Mayaba Liebenthal for her willingness to share this.

Following is audio from the January 29th hearing in New Orleans called by United States Senators Mary Landrieu, Barack Obama and Joseph Lieberman. Please note that due to a technical failure at the site (go feds!) the audio is not of as high of quality as we might have hoped.

–

The audio begins with presentations by Joe Lieberman, Barack Obama and Donald Powell, Federal Coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding.

audio

Presentation by Donald Powell audio

Senator Mary Landrieu confronting Donald Powell on the disparities in CBDG funding audio

Senator Lieberman confronting Powell on the CBDG disparities audio

I personally think the best piece of audio is the last one, which is Lieberman asking Walter Leger of the LRA what the hell is going on with the delivery of federal monies. Walter Leger squirms a bit, blaming things first on Katrina and then on federal red tape.

Is this a partial explanation or merely the latest in disingenuous excuses from Baton Rouge? I’m guessing both.

audio

The Dirty South Bureau has been quiet a bit lately, as the heat, the humidity, and the constant complications of the first post-Katrina summer in New Orleans have impaired my abilities to do much beyond mere survival. Of course, I am far from alone in this.

Things just often don’t work in New Orleans. It’s something that outsiders, like myself, have to either get used to or leave. You may have a very clear idea in your mind of what you want to get done, and in what timeframe, and those ideas may even be realistic given your experience in other cities, but that does not matter. Things happen here on their own time, which sometimes means not at all. And the ability to handle this with grace is another invisible marking of the natives and the successfully adapted here.

Right now, the primary reason is the heat. I was having a conversation with Sean Benjamin of the Iron Rail library today, and we agreed that it is essentially foolish to try to get anything done between the hours of 11AM to 3PM. In the summer, it is wise to plan your day around the three to four hours of scorching heat alternating with thundershowers which will make up a usual New Orleans summer afternoon. So you stay inside, you sleep, you talk, you make love- whatever keeps you in the air conditioning and out of the oppressive conditions on the street.

Regardless, the rest of the world does not run on our schedule, for instance the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and occupation of Gaza. And while outsiders might think that New Orleanians are content to sit on their porches and drink either their 1. beer or 2. mint julips (depending on the socio-economic status of your ‘hood) over one hundred New Orleanians showed up at the federal building this Friday to protest the invasion and occupation. One thing that did not show up in the picture the Times-Picayune ran on the back page is that the demonstration was roughly half Arab-americans, of which the New Orleans metro area has a significant and beloved community. Of course the DSB, which is very critical of the Israeli government, was there, and I bring you an audio recording of the event, which included speakers from the Muslim American Society, local Palestinian rights activists, INCITE women of color against violence, and other groups. The first speaker is Dana Kaplan a young Jewish-American woman, whose organizational affiliation I have forgotten.

Pro-Lebanon/Palestinian rally at City Hall 1

I also interviewed Al Judah 1 2, a local Palestinian-American restaurant owner who came out for the event

Abdul 1 , a young Palestinian-American man

And Amr Achmed 1 of the Musim American Society

Last week HUD unveiled its largest plans to date to restructure the city of New Orleans by eliminating four of the city’s ten housing projects, St. Bernard, BW Cooper, CJ Pete and Laffite. For the tens of thousands of you folks who used to live there and are trying to come back to New Orleans, sorry, but the feds have decided in their wisdom that the places that you lived for decades need to be redesigned so as to serve you (and, more importantly, some prominent developers and property owners) better. Sorry if this causes any inconvenience, such as being homeless for the next five or six years while we rebuild.

Last week Scott Keller of HUD graced the city of New Orleans with his presence (Alphonse Jackson was apparently too busy) at a particularly high-spiritied city council meeting, which the Dirty South Bureau caught the second half of. Props to City Council newcomer Arnie Feilkow for challenging the arrogance of the federal government’s unilateral decision making process.

meeting 1 2
Scott Keller, Chief of Staff for HUD interview

Of course HUD has everyone’s best interests in mind. But for those of you who are still skeptical, we need only look at the success that River Gardens, the former St. Thomas development, has been- such a success that Alphonse Jackson said in November that River Gardens would be the model for the future of public housing in New Orleans.

Perhaps the best available study of what is really going on with these redevelopments is New Orleanian Brod Bagert jr.’s 2002 master’s thesis on the St. Thomas redevelopment.

That’s right. We don’t warehouse the poor any more- not when we find that those warehouses are sitting on prime real estate. And these “icons of failed federal policy” in Keller’s words, will be going to the wrecking ball to make way for the a newer, whiter, more affluent New Orleans- oh, and one with more big-box superstores.

Meanwhile, a group of former public housing residents is camping on the middle of St. Bernard avenue. DSB had a chance to speak with former St. Bernard resident Pamela Mahogany.

Pamela Mahogany interview

Portions of these interviews were played on Brian Denzer’s Community Gumbo on WTUL- New Orleans Saturday, June 17th, and some of this audio is also available on bayoubuzz.com

So, pardon the lack of communication for the last few weeks. Among other projects I’ve had to move shop. I’m still in the Bywater, but fighting the gross housing market down here right now. (see earlier post, Gentrification Gets Personal for the DSB)

The good news: the first demo of New Orleans AK (after Katrina) a weekly radio show on current events and social justice issues in the Crescent City, has come out, and was snatched up by radio station KPFT in Houston, where it will be playing tonight at 7 PM.

New Orleans AK is a collective creation of Public Digital Urban Broadcasters (P-DUB) members Krystal Muhammud, Mayaba Leibenthal, Mikkel Allen-Loper, Christian Roselund and Corlita Mahr. So far this is the first creation of P-DUB, a radical, largely african american (except yours truly) media group.

Contact me at c.roselund@gmail to com to obtain a 128 KBPS copy, or to rebroadcast on your local radio station. Enjoy.

New Orleans AK Part 1 2 3

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

More information is available on publicdub.com

In case you didn’t read this in the BBC or T-P: A group of forensic experts led by UC Berkeley put out a 738-page report about the failure of the levees during hurricane Katrina, explaining that “gross negligence” on all levels of the system has left us with a mostly useless levee system.

What was and still is missing from us having any sort of real protection, in the words of professor Raymond Seed, UC Berkeley, the head of the investigation team: lack of political will.

The second part of the presentation was done by a Robert Bea, but he was too boring a speaker for me to include his audio. Besides, his part of the report on the failure of the social and political systems involved ended up being flaccid, I suspect due to his long involvement with the various parties including the army corps of engineers and his age. They need to retire the guy. So he basically apologized profusely and told us with a lot of pictures what we already know- that the government on all levels has failed us.

Audio of professor Raymond Seed, UC Berkeley 1 2 3 conclusion

Read the full report (a 738-page .pdf)

It’s always amusing to me to hear the US crying foul about rigged elections in other nations (Ukraine comes to mind) when we do it so well, and these days so blatantly, right here at home. Unfortunately, this is still particularly true in the south.

The numbers for the April 22nd New Orleans municipal primary, which have been recently released, are not pretty. And from the answers that I got from the Secretary of State’s office yesterday, it seems like the runoff tomorrow will be the same. In the primary, only 31% of registered black voters actually cast a ballot, compared to 45% in the 2002 election (statistics courtesy of the LA secretary of state’s office). The joke here is that the Secretary of State seems to think there is nothing wrong with this election, though the blame must really go more on the feds.

Following is a conversation that I had with Damon Hewitt of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund yesterday about these issues for a radio show that we are about to launch locally.

Damon Hewitt 1 2