Book Excerpt: Standing Up to the Madness
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One by one, more help arrived at Malik's door. Doctors came, ready to volunteer. College kids showed up, eager to distribute food and gut and rebuild homes. A movement was taking shape. But how to harness all this goodwill? One night, the assembled activists were debating on the porch about why so many social movements fail. They concluded that they "allow our petty difference to stop us from working together," recounts Rahim. Robert King Wilkerson, a former Black Panther who had recently been released from death row in Louisiana's notorious Angola Prison, told the activists, "What you need to find is common ground that you agree to work under." Thus was born Common Ground Relief.
Common Ground began with three volunteers and $50. Within days, it opened up a medical clinic in a mosque in Algiers. After receiving a $40,000 donation from filmmaker Michael Moore, Common Ground opened a distribution center to provide food, water, and supplies to the thousands of lowincome residents who were unable to evacuate. As official agencies such as FEMA and the Red Cross turned away volunteers, many veterans, peace activists, students, and ordinary citizens flocked to the grassroots aid operation of Common Ground. For the abandoned, suffering knew no bounds. Common Ground crisscrossed class and racial divides, becoming among the first to provide relief to Latino neighborhoods and to the Native American community. "We even served the families of the vigilantes," says Rahim. "Some of the politicians had to come to us for supplies, even though we can't get no help out of them." In addition to its distribution center and medical clinic, Common Ground now has a legal clinic, and volunteers have come from around the world to its headquarters in the Lower Ninth Ward to help gut and rehab flooded homes. In the spirit of their slogan—"solidarity, not charity"—Common Ground volunteers also train local residents to rebuild their own homes.
Rick Jay, a retired high school teacher from Minnesota, was taking a break one morning in the air-conditioned "chill room" where the forty volunteers share meals and use computers. He had been with Common Ground for six months. "I knew people were distressed here and I wanted to do all I could do to help," he tells us. A woman sitting next to him was a college freshman from Oregon, and another woman had come from France.We ask Malik whether he sees any irony in having white volunteers be at the center of his black self-reliance scheme. "I think history will recall this as the greatest humanitarian effort by Americans to Americans. Never before in the history of this state have you had thousands of whites come down into a black community that didn't come as exploiters or oppressors," he replies. "They have brought justice."
Profiting From Disaster
"Don't believe the hype: Gulf Coast recovery is not ‘slow'—it's a privatization scheme that takes away our homes, schools, hospitals and human rights." This T-shirt slogan captures what is happening in New Orleans, which has become a national laboratory for right-wing social and economic policies. New Orleans's disaster was transformed into a windfall for Bush's cronies, as major relief and recovery efforts were handed over to politically connected private companies.
The funeral company Kenyon, a division of Service Corporation International, a large donor to President Bush, was paid $12,500 per corpse that it retrieved. Of the $2.3 billion in contracts awarded by the federal government in the weeks following the hurricane, more than 80 percent were awarded with little or no competition, and much of the money flowed to firms with deep connections in the Bush administration. AshBritt Environmental, which won a $568 million contract with the Army Corps of Engineers for debris removal, is a client of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers, the high-powered Washington lobbying firm and namesake of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1996. AshBritt employees contributed $30,500 to federal candidates, parties, and political action committees from 1999 to 2004, nearly 90 percent of which went to Republicans.
Then there were the familiar names of Kellogg Brown and Root ($128,000 in federal electoral contributions, 1999–2004, 91 percent to Republicans), owned by Halliburton, which was run by Dick Cheney before he entered the White House. KBR received $60 million in Gulf cleanup contracts. KBR was represented by Joe Allbaugh, the ex–FEMA director who was Bush's presidential campaign manager in 2000. Allbaugh also represented Shaw Environmental ($224,824 in federal electoral contributions, 1999–2004, 46 percent to Republicans, plus $100,000 to Bush's 2005 inaugural committee), which landed $200 million in cleanup contracts.
Where money flowed, scandal followed. Congressional Democrats criticized the $575 million contract that Bechtel Corporation received to deliver and install 36,000 trailers in southern Mississippi, charging, "Despite the high cost, the delivery of trailers was much too slow and horribly inefficient." The FEMA trailers have since been found to be poisoning occupants with toxic emissions of formaldehyde. Some Hurricane Katrina contractors were just floating on money. Take Carnival Cruise Lines, which won a $236 million six-month contract for three of its ships to house hurricane evacuees. The ships sat half-empty in the Mississippi River and Mobile Bay. The government paid $1,275 per week per evacuee to stay on the ships. But if you were a vacationer, you would have paid less than half that amount: a weeklong Caribbean cruise from Texas cost $599 on Carnival.
This amazing waste makes more sense when you learn that Carnival's employees and its PAC have contributed $994,800 to federal candidates, party committees, and PACs between 1999 and 2004, 58 percent of which went to Republicans. The plunder of New Orleans that followed Hurricane Katrina was especially brutal in the public sector. Rarely have those who rely on public institutions lost so much, so fast. The Bush administration refused to pay municipal workers' salaries with emergency funds, so three thousand city employees were fired. Schools have been especially hard hit: All public school teachers were summarily fired after the hurricane. The State of Louisiana took control of the New Orleans schools in November 2005, and quickly began privatizing them. More than 70 percent of New Orleans schools have reopened as charter schools run by for-profit or nonprofit organizations, many of which have selective admissions. Students who can't make the grade at the charter schools can attend what is called the Recovery School District, the skeletal remains of public education in New Orleans. The number of unionized teachers has dropped from 4,700 before Katrina to 1,200 today. John McDonogh Senior High School in New Orleans reopened with 35 security guards, but only 23 teachers.
Poor people have taken the hardest hit in the area of housing. Hurricane Katrina drove out more than half of the residents of New Orleans. By 2007, only two-thirds of the city's pre-Katrina population had returned. The poorest have suffered the brunt of the upheaval: Of the 5,100 families who lived in public housing, less than one-quarter of them have been able to return home. That's because many of them have no homes to return to—not because their homes were irreparably damaged, but because New Orleans doesn't want its poorest residents back. In September 2007, the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) received final permission from the Bush administration to demolish its four largest public housing developments and replace them with mixed-income housing. More than 4,600 units of public housing would be lost at a time when an acute shortage of rental housing in the city has caused rents to double. The demolitions are part of a plan pushed by U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson in the aftermath of Katrina. The demolitions coincide with the closure of all FEMA trailer camps around the city by May 2008, pushing nine hundred families out of their homes. This plan has delivered immediate results: By early 2008, the number of homeless people in New Orleans had doubled to about twelve thousand.
Tracie Washington, an attorney and president of the Louisiana Justice Institute, explained to us, "Some of these developments that are closed down took in no water. I mean, they were not damaged at all. Lafitte [housing project]? No water. C.J. Peete? No water. But the decision was made to take advantage of an opportunity. Hurricane Katrina came, [and] look what we can do: We can keep these people away from here, bring in the bulldozers, tear down this housing, cut the unit space and occupancy by two-thirds, call it mixed-income, take that one-third that's left and divide it into three. So we have a third of that space for public housing residents, and the rest we will use for market rate and a little bit below market rate. And that has always been the plan." In spite of being dispersed, distressed, and disenfranchised, public housing residents are in a fight for their lives to return. It is a battle that has grown increasingly desperate.
On August 31, 2007, two dozen public housing residents and activists from around the country took over the HANO offices in New Orleans. They demanded a meeting with housing officials to discuss returning to their apartments in the public housing projects. They were met by a massive show of armed force: When we arrived, we witnessed National Guardsmen, police SWAT teams, and dozens of New Orleans Police squad cars ringing the HANO offices, which had been closed down. After several tense hours inside, the protesters emerged, singing and chanting. Sharon Sears Jasper, a 58-year-old resident of the St. Bernard housing development, explained to reporters who had gathered outside: "Today we are here to let you know that we are not going to stop. There will be no peace until we have justice. We refuse to let you tear our homes down and continue to destroy our lives. The government, the president of the United States—you all have failed us. . . . It's two years after the storm, and we are still suffering. . . . Our people are dying of stress, depression, and broken homes. We demand that you open all public housing."
When a reporter asked her why she couldn't live somewhere else, Jasper, a large, strong-willed woman with a booming voice, shot back, "How you feel if someone tells you you can't go back to your home? It might not be fancy, but it's my home." She lectured the assembled reporters, with police hovering in the background. "We are working-class people, not animals. We are a community. We work together, play together, and pray together."
The housing protest took place against a backdrop of activism around hurricane relief. In downtown New Orleans that day, activists had gathered for the International People's Tribunal on Hurricane Katrina and Rita, to hear testimony from people affected by the hurricane and its aftermath. The five-day gathering was organized by the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, a community organization working on housing, health care, and other issues, and cosponsored by Common Ground Relief, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, and other organizations. The tribunal brought together hurricane survivors, international delegations, expert witnesses, a team of human rights and civil rights attorneys, and a panel of U.S.-based and international judges. One survivor of the hurricane, Viola Washington, said, "We are calling for an international tribunal to bring charges of racial discrimination, forced eviction of public housing residents, violations of the right to life and health, and the denial of the right to return."
Tracie Washington, who has filed a lawsuit on behalf of public housing residents seeking to get back into the St. Bernard housing project, recalled how rumors were flying that the city was planning to replace public housing with golf courses. "I'm like, ‘Okay, sure . . . They want to put golf courses right in the middle of the 'hood.' And you'd hear it, and you'd basically dismiss it." Then rumor became reality. "Just this summer, the plans were announced for what the developers plan to do with St. Bernard. And guess what? Two championship golf courses in that development." She says with a bitter smile, "Now I guess we just fight to get them on the back nine."
Blacks who are displaced and homeless feel that the intent of the policy is unmistakable. "This is just part of that whole gentrification program and the changing of the demographics of the city," charges Malcolm Suber, national organizing coordinator for People's Hurricane Relief Fund, which is fighting to obtain rebuilding funds that were promised to residents from the state and the Red Cross. More than half of the applicants for federal "Road Home" money that was earmarked for people to rebuild their homes had not received any assistance as of late 2007.
Suber says, "The local white ruling class wants to regain its political control, and so they have used this storm and the flooding as a convenient excuse to get rid of black folk, especially poor black people. And basically their mentality is, ‘You can only come back to this plantation if you've got a job. If you don't have a job, we don't want to provide any social services.' " Suber's view was confirmed early on by Republican Congressman Richard Baker from Baton Rouge, who was overheard telling lobbyists just days after Katrina devastated the city: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Any lingering doubt about the drive to gentrify and whiten New Orleans was erased after local elections in November 2007. For the first time in twenty years, whites won a majority of seats on the City Council. White candidates also took a judgeship and two New Orleans seats in the Louisiana legislature that had long been held by blacks. Less than half the number of people voted in 2007 as voted in the New Orleans mayoral election in May 2006. Reporting on the 2007 election, the New York Times observed, "New Orleans became almost overnight a smaller, whiter city with a much reduced black majority."
In December 2007, protesters gathered at a New Orleans City Council meeting to demand that the city intervene to halt the imminent demolition of public housing. The City Council president stopped the meeting after protesters began chanting and shouting. Police then grabbed civil rights attorney Bill Quigley, a leader of the legal fight against the demolitions, and shoved him up against the wall. He was handcuffed and charged with disturbing the peace. Quigley declared after being released, "We live in a system where if you cheer or chant in the City Council you get arrested, but you can demolish 4,500 people's apartments and everybody's supposed to go along with that? That's not going to happen. There's going to be a lot more disturbing the peace before this is all over." Five-year-old Nigel, his hair braided tightly against his scalp, tells us, "I wanna go home." Clinging to the leg of his grandmother, Stephanie Mingo, a resident of St. Bernard, he says plaintively, "I wanna go back to St. Bernard. I miss my home." We ask him what he will do when he returns. "The first thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna have a party." "For real?" we ask. "Yeah, for real, for real!" he says, breaking into a wide smile.
On December 20, 2007, the New Orleans City Council voted unanimously to move ahead with the demolition of 4,500 units of public housing. Protesters were shot with pepper spray and Tasered inside the City Council chambers. Malik Rahim walks along an empty sidewalk in the Lower Ninth Ward and pauses at a plastic bucket where a small sapling is sitting in water. "We growin' trees to stop the erosion of our wetlands," he explains. Common Ground has already planted fifteen thousand indigenous trees as part of this effort. He strolls over to a large garden plot and notes that they are spraying bacteria and growing sunflowers and mustard grass, all of which detoxify the soils, which have high concentrations of lead and arsenic. He points with pride to the food that volunteers are growing nearby. "That shows we know what we doin' with our soil remediation."
The sweat now running off his brow and soaking his T-shirt, Malik keeps going. He is on a mission—but his sights are set far beyond the bayous of New Orleans. He shows us a large two-story house that volunteers have gutted and repaired. Inside are boxes of clothes. "We are keeping these to send to Haiti. There are those that are even less fortunate than us." There are also stacks of cots, and outside, there is a refrigerator truck.
"I want Common Ground to become a global organization," he declares as we stand in a barren lot where vegetables are now growing. "We had volunteers from twenty nations. I would like to go back and extend support to those individuals and nations who helped us. Right now, we could serve five-thousand people from any disaster with meals, sanitation, communications, a health clinic, and we could help provide for children."And Common Ground did just that. When huge fires broke out around San Diego in October 2007 that forced the evacuation of a half million people, Malik and eight Common Ground volunteers were there assisting displaced Latinos, many of them undocumented workers. "We went to help those that our country refused to help," he says.
It is an audacious proposition, that people with so many needs can reach out and help others in greater need. It's a sign that in the Lower Ninth and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast, the storms can never vanquish the hope and determination of long suffering people to reclaim their common ground.
UPDATE: On April 9, 2008, over the objections of scores of protesters, bulldozers began tearing into the LaFitte public housing project, home to thousands of low income residents of New Orleans. The demolition of public housing that activists have been furiously fighting commenced in February, and now appears to be unstoppable. Meanwhile, Malik Rahim and Common Ground Relief and other community groups have teamed up with actor Brad Pitt and his Make It Right Project to build 150 units of affordable housing in the devastated and abandoned Lower Ninth Ward.
