Government committed crimes against humanity in New Orleans
BY TED QUANT
Editor's note: Ted Quant is director of the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice at Loyola University. He was, until the hurricane, a resident of New Orleans. This was written about a week after the hurricane struck.
NEW ORLEANS - The crisis of this city is not the result of a natural disaster, but of government.
We need the United Nations to create a truth commission to investigate the human rights violations and crimes against humanity inflicted on the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
Some examples: Sheriff Harry Lee ordered his police officers to stop New Orleans residents who were trying to escape New Orleans from crossing the bridge into Jefferson Parish. They stopped hundreds of starving, thirsty, desperately poor Black citizens at gunpoint and ordered them back into New Orleans. This same racist sheriff's department had recently fired 120 bullets into a stolen car occupied by two Black teenagers. This same sheriff built a barrier on a street in the Black community connecting Orleans Parish to Jefferson Parish to block the access of Black citizens from Orleans Parish to Jefferson Parish. Lee stated his officers had orders to stop any Black person driving a "rinky-dink" car in a white neighborhood. He bought Louisiana Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke's mailing list to campaign for re-election.
People have been arrested for taking cars, trucks, or buses and picking up people and driving them to safety.
Computerized studies of what would happen if a hurricane made a direct hit on New Orleans predicted catastrophic destruction, flooding and a tremendous loss of life for those who could not get out. It is also well known that of the 430,000 to 450,000 residents of New Orleans before the hurricane made landfall, 40 percent lived in poverty, and 67 percent were Black. Do the math. Forty percent of 450,000 is 180,000 people who couldn't get out. So, given those facts, what was the plan to deal with such an inevitable hurricane?
The plan was to tell the citizens to get out the best way they could. I call it the "60 percent plan." The 60 percent of the population with cars, money, and credit cards can pack up and leave. The 40 percent who simply can't get out can drown or get sent to the Superdome. There, they would be protected from the wind and then be trapped by a moat of poisonous floodwater, like rats - with no resources, food, water, or sanitation. Further, many people who wanted to get to the Superdome had no way to get there (other than walking). At the last minute, without notification, some buses picked up people in poor communities, but most poor people never knew about it.
In the evacuation from Hurricane George, planners learned they could not even effectively evacuate those with money and cars because of the traffic. (I spent 24 hours going to Opelousas in bumper-to-bumper traffic.) From that, they learned that the poor would drown and the middle class would also drown in their cars escaping. So, they came up with the "contra-flow plan" making interstate highways one-way going out. This was a great plan for those with cars, but did nothing for the poor.
Why send people to the Superdome? Why not organize an exodus for the whole population to the safety of rest stops, if necessary, 100 miles away? RTA buses, school buses, trucks, etc. could have been mobilized to save the population, but this was not considered - or it was considered, but the planners rejected it in flavor of the 60 percent.
Why is it that Cuba - a small, poor country that is hit by just about every hurricane that comes into the Gulf of Mexico - did not suffer the loss of life that the United States suffered? Cuba has a 100 percent plan for its citizens.
The racist character of the response to what happened in New Orleans and of the news coverage is a factor. The captions of newspaper photographs showing Blacks taking food, water, and clothing from stores refer to "looting;" the captions of pictures of whites doing the same thing refer to "doing what is necessary to survive."
The evacuation was halted due to gunfire; rescuers were afraid to go in. Buses sit on the side of the road, while babies die of thirst in their mothers' arms. This is a crime against humanity. National Guard troops come in and use parade barriers to crowd victims of the hurricane into pens which the Guard troops stand over with guns. When did these victims become the enemies of America? By what alchemy did this take place? Racism and contempt for the poor transformed these wretched masses from victims of a hurricane into victims of the city, state, and federal government.
Among other issues: FEMA came in and set up a headquarters in a hotel, but first had the victims of the hurricane kicked out of the hotel and into the streets. FEMA is supposed to help, but that is what it did to people who had already found shelter.
FEMA is telling people who have insurance that it won't help them with emergency funds, but the insurance company is telling people they won't pay until they assess the damages. So, once again, victims are re-victimized.
Someone I know is a security guard at a hospital. The hospital is empty, but the guards are told to stay to guard the empty hospital. This person must stay or lose his job if he leaves to be with his family in this crisis.
What are the economic consequences of this?
The state of Louisiana will be facing an economic crisis of staggering proportions with no property tax, sales tax, and no revenue of any kind from the city of New Orleans for the foreseeable future. One-third of property tax revenue was generated by New Orleans. And yet New Orleans had no autonomy over how those taxes were spent.
Assurances must be made that guarantee the levee protection will be rebuilt to the new standards needed to withstand a Category Five hurricane if people are to return. Also, the city needs an evacuation plan for all citizens.
The economic impact will not be just to Louisiana, but to the United States. Any plan to rebuild New Orleans must include a plan to end poverty in the city. The city passed a living wage law and the state created a law making it illegal. The earnings tax was declared illegal. The hotels are anti-union with the support of the state. The economy is based on temporary, cyclical employment that is often at the minimum wage and involves rotating shifts that destabilize families and prohibit advancement through education.
The forces that want to rebuild New Orleans (Marriot, Sheraton, etc.) are making millions of dollars on tourism, dollars that fly out of the community while they are paying poverty wages to people working there. It is exploiting the very grace of the people.
Poverty lurks behind every affluent corner, just as in any Third World country. We are at the beginning of a crisis that will have political and economic implications for the future of the United States.
Hurricane Katrina has resulted in a gigantic cultural loss. There is no way to estimate the loss in terms of a community with its rich culture and traditions, and families scattered to the winds. There has also been a gigantic spiritual loss: the music, etc. The comfort of familiarity is lost. The comfort of people knowing you at the coffee shop, etc.
At least 400,000 jobs have been lost due to Katrina. The Today show estimated that the cost of the disaster will be $150 billion.
