#KatrinaAnniversary: "Katrina Victims Were Forced Into Exile"

Victims of Hurricane Katrina argue with National Guard troops as they try to get on buses headed to Houston on Sept. 1, 2005. Willie Allen Jr./St. Petersburg Times/ZUMA

President Obama celebrated the 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by traveling to the scene of the crime, making a nice speech, taking some nice pictures, singing a little song, then boarding Air Force One and flying back to Washington, D.C. 

 Photo Op complete.

It's like DejaVoodoo

All Over Again 

The more things change

Ten years later, it looks like the same people in New Orleans have been left behind again. The population of New Orleans is noticeably smaller and noticeably whiter. While tens of billions of dollars poured into Louisiana, the impact on poor and working people in New Orleans has been minimal. Many of the elderly and the poor, especially poor families with children, never made it back to New Orleans. The poverty rate for children who did made it back remains at disturbingly high pre-Katrina levels, especially for Black children.

The more they don't change

Well you know, black people have been going around the country looking for good neighborhoods, trying to settle down there if they were allowed to. That is the history of black folks. And part of that history is also that white people constantly run away from those neighborhoods. And that's why those neighborhoods then become concentrations of black people and poor people. The poor part usually comes later. Because when there are no more white people there then capital is withdrawn, the employers leave, the public sector ceases to serve that community, and the police are brought in to prey on that community, which diminishes further upward mobility and causes downward mobility.

Shock 

Just two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the city fired 7,500 public school teachers, launching a new push to privatize the school system and build a network of charter schools. Many accused lawmakers of trying to break the powerful United Teachers of New Orleans union. Today former President George W. Bush will return to the city to speak at the Warren Easton Charter High School. We speak to the New Orleans actor and activist Wendell Pierce, whose mother was a teacher and union member for 40 years, as well Gary Rivlin, author of "Katrina: After the Flood." He recently wrote a piece for The New York Times titled "Why New Orleans’s Black Residents Are Still Underwater After Katrina."

And Shame 

New Orleans actor and activist Wendell Pierce looks at how insurance companies discouraged poor and black families from returning to New Orleans after Katrina by refusing to honor homeowner policies. Pierce, whose great-grandfather came to New Orleans as a slave in the 1850s, talks about how Allstate gave his parents just $400 after they paid premiums for 50 year

The Obama surge in black optimism is over.

 Now, black Americans are back to their post-Katrina consensus; a deep sense that America is indifferent to their lives and livelihoods. Indeed, when read in that light, a movement like Black Lives Matter seems inevitable. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina, and its impact on the collective experience of black America, sowed the ground for a reckoning. Yes, Obama's election postponed it for a time, but the recent eruption of black death—at the hands of the state—gave it new urgency. And now, as we can all see, it's here.

Still waiting for HOPE and CHANGE we can BELIEVE in...

Katrina 5 Years Later

Does America care about black and poor people? That's the question I pose on the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The mainstream media narrative proclaims New Orleans is rising from the waters of despair and making a comeback, bigger and better than before. The New Orleans Saints won the Superbowl, all is right in The Big Easy. Nothing to see here, move along.

Well, that's the wrong narrative. Five years later, New Orleans is still drowning for the black and poor folks who cannot return to New Orleans.
Malik Rahms the director of Common Ground says;

"They don't want no poor n*****s back in - that's the bottom line."

Poor blacks can't come back because they have no homes to come back too.

People have not returned because the projects they were living in were knocked down. People didn't return because there are no jobs. People didn't return because [their] rents have quadrupled. Other people have not returned because they've found a higher standard of living in Houston, San Antonio, and Atlanta. We have people laying it out in the film more eloquently than I can. They have better-paying jobs in their new cities; the education systems are better. Those are the main reasons why people have not returned.

Poor black people haven't returned because they have no schools

There is an old saying: A white man’s heaven is a Black man’s hell. Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education and President Obama’s basketball buddy, is one of those white men – a disaster capitalist who sees a silver lining in the Katrina catastrophe that swept away much of Black New Orleans, four and a half years ago. Duncan’s ghoulish statement, that “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina,” is identical to the sentiments expressed by racist Louisiana whites and the Bush Administration, when they gushed unashamedly over the opportunities Katrina created to build a new order in the city, even as bloated Black bodies still floated in the streets.

Poor black people haven't returned because it's not safe;

In the chaos of Hurricane Katrina, thousands were left with little protection. And as the flood waters rose, many were left to grab on to each other to survive. Watch The Untold Race War during Hurricane Katrina.

In that desperate time, according to court documents, Roland Bourgeois grabbed a shotgun.

The 47-year-old man pleaded not guilty in a Louisiana federal courtroom Thursday afternoon to charges that he shot at three black men and issued an ominous warning that "anything coming up this street darker than a brown paper bag is getting shot."

It is time to heed the lessons of Katrina.

We are one country and all of our citizens are important, rich and poor, black and white. When a government gives an every man for himself attitude towards disease and natural disasters, it reflects badly on our country. It is the duty of our country to, not only protect its citizens against terrorist attacks, but against natural disasters and diseases as well. If America is serious about being the world’s police man, they should also think about being the world’s fireman too. The money that was supposed to be used to fix the levees in New Orleans was used to drop bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine if our tax payer money was used for disaster relief rather than to create more disasters.
The lessons of Hurricane Katrina is that a military cannot save its people from disasters if they are only trained to kill. America has not been invaded in 300 years yet we invest more money into our military than we do anything else. Rather than being a destroyer, American needs to be a savior, of both its own people and its fellow citizens of the world.

This is what I wrote on the fourth anniversary of Katrina;

It's not about a Hurricane, it's about America. Three years after Katrina, much of the lower ninth ward is still in ruins. Three years after Katrina 40% of the displaced citizens still can't return home. Trouble the Water is a film that is about to be released about Katrina and the failure of our government to help it's citizens. It's not about flooded school buses. It's not about people not evacuating. It's not about Ray Nagin and "Chocolate City", it's about America.

Here is what I wrote August 31, 2008 about the aftermath of Katrina;

Here is a sample of what New Orleans looks like three years later.

36. Percent fewer tons of cargo that move through Port of New Orleans since Katrina.

38. Percent fewer hospital beds in New Orleans since Katrina.

40. Percentage fewer special education students attending publicly funded, privately run charter schools than traditional public schools.

41. Number of publicly funded, privately run public charter schools in New Orleans out of total of 79 public schools in the city.

43. Percentage of child care available in New Orleans compared to before Katrina.

46. Percentage increase in rents in New Orleans since Katrina.

56. Percentage fewer inpatient psychiatric beds compared to before Katrina.

Fast forward five years later the lower ninth ward is still being asked to pull itself up by it's bootstrap and thousands of poor black Americas want to return home but can't.

The American media was all in a tizzy when former Mayor Ray Nagin said New Orleans would be Chocolate City again and when Kanye West said "George Bush doesn't care about black people". They twisted it as examples of so called black racism (Shirley Sherrod) to distract from the FACT the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina displaced (for lack of a better word) poor black people out of New Orleans and made the political landscape whiter. People got wrapped up in who was telling the truth and ignored the truth.

Five years later it's still not about a Hurricane.