Author: blksista

The Black Voice, out of San Bernardino, California, is part of a coalition effort to send 10 volunteers to New Orleans to recover bodies.  The effort is also being co-sponsored by entertainer Nancy Wilson and her husband, the Reverend Wiley Burton.

Mark McKay of McKay’s Family Mortuary said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sent out a call for morticians across the country to send supplies, but excluded many black mortuaries. McKay and others fear that black morticians will not be allowed to participate in the recovery and burial of bodies, many of which are African American victims. McKay believes it is important to bring dignity to the process and honor the dead.

In fact, Kenyon International Emergency Services announced Sept. 7 that it signed a contract with the state of Louisiana to recover bodies. The contract runs from Sept. 12 to Nov. 15 at the rate of $118,980 per day.

Kenyon is a subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), which runs a chain of funeral homes. They have provided services at the World Trade Center site and after the tsunami in Thailand. A longtime supporter of George W. Bush, the Houston-based company operates 1,500 funeral homes throughout North America.

In the past SCI has been accused of unethical practices, including using unlicensed embalmers and dumping bodies to clear space for new graves and additional profits.

The process of preparing the bodies for burial is being handled almost solely by the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, (DMORT) an organization supervised under FEMA. According to Don Kelly, public information officer for DMORT, the organization uses only trained and certified individuals who have been immunized and have not been accepting the services of untrained personnel in the handling of the bodies.

Led by Mark House, a probation officer, licensed mortician and owner of Windthrop Industries, which makes caskets, the team of volunteers was scheduled to leave for New Orleans October 4, after receiving permission from FEMA.  His group has ten days to brave the hazards of handling bodies along with bacteria, mold, poisons from refineries, lead dust and airborne asbestos.  Like him, many of the volunteers are already employed in law enforcement; two are licensed morticians; and others work in the funeral business.

Stay tuned for further developments on this issue.

Original posted at DailyKos.

What’s happened to Louisiana Latinos and Asians post-Katrina?

Almost the same length of the shaft as blacks.  But many of you wouldn’t know that by looking at American cable news or network news.

For example, there were at least 200,000 Latinos who lived in Louisiana.  There were 30,000 Vietnamese, and over 23,000 Filipinos.  The face of New Orleans was predominantly black, but hardly any of these other faces–and voices–are known.

It’s only ethnic media–newspapers, radio stations, websites, blogs, and TV and cable news shows–that is taking up the slack:

With passion and pride, ethnic news organizations in the United States are sending reporters, photographers and TV crews to the disaster area and covering the Hurricane Katrina story from angles not seen in many of the nation’s major metropolitan newspapers.

At times, the ethnic media have been more opinionated and outspoken, and in many cases have taken a more activist approach than mainstream news organizations and tried to help members of their ethnic groups who have suffered from the storm.

And why not?  I’m talking about a franchise of 51 million people of color.  Ethnic news media is more attuned to the needs of their audience, be it blacks, Latinos, and Asians, and when they see some shyt go down, they are more likely to call it out.  Moreover, they report on issues that the mainstream media tends to give a blind eye.  The staffs have even pitched in to help, not only with money but with walking the talk.  For when the deal goes down, it appears that people of color are always on their own.

For example, they have been reuniting families and finding housing for refugees, said Daffodil Altan, associate editor of New California Media (now New America Media), a nationwide association of more than 700 ethnic media groups.  […]  “I’d have to say the tendency to both really cover and interact with their communities seems to be one of the biggest differences,” Altan said.

And for all the horror stories that the MSM tends to focus on to whip up ratings–or animosity in some cases–some good news about relations between ethnic groups never gets told:

The Korea Times, based in Los Angeles, is dedicating much of its coverage to motivating Korean-Americans to help their own.

“There are so many Koreans who had been living in the New Orleans area … and they lost their houses and businesses and had to evacuate from where they had been living, so Koreans have their own stories, and we’re focusing on the Korean victims,” managing editor Yoon Cho said.

But reporter Euyhun Yi added: “We are also trying to help African Americans.”

Koreans and blacks were antagonists in the 1992 riots that followed the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. Now the Times is using the disaster to show they can work together. In one story, the Times cited a Korean shopkeeper in New Orleans who was trusted with $12,000 of his black neighbors’ money as they all fled the storm. He later tracked them down and returned the cash.

“I am so thankful to have been trusted in that way by my neighbors,” the Korean told the Times.

In a September 28 article on NewAmericaMedia.com, Univision, the country’s largest Spanish-language broadcaster, had difficulty getting accurate information to tell its audiences about the rights of undocumented victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Anchorwoman María Elena Salinas says the government hasn’t been straightforward about what benefits and protections such victims can and can’t receive.

“When asked over and over again by Spanish-language journalists whether or not undocumented immigrants would be excluded from aid, time and time again FEMA’s representatives said the aid is for ‘all’ of the victims,” reports Salinas. “But we later learned how relative the terms ‘aid’ and ‘all’ can be.”

La Opinion offered options for those seeking assistance.  Its focus (along with being geared towards Spanish readers and speakers), however, has been on Hurricane Rita in Texas rather than Hurricane Katrina, while “Rumbo, a Spanish-language newspaper chain based in San Antonio, Texas, reports that one Texas school district gained 110 students in a single day.  “It remains unclear who will cover costs for the students,” the paper writes. “Local officials say they are not taking costs into account for the time being.”  But in an already cash-strapped community, who is going to pick up the bills, sooner if not later?

There has also been an influx of undocumented workers to help with the reconstruction of New Orleans, since Bush rescinded the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act. Homeland Security has temporarily suspended sanctioning employers who hire illegal immigrants.  And this development has now stoked up the whole illegal immigration controversy to a fever pitch.

El Tecolote in San Francisco, California reported on September 23 that

Around 300,000 people from Mexico, Central America and several South American nations were affected by the hurricane, according to Consular officials from various Latin American nations.

So far, the Mexican government estimates that more that 145,000 Mexicans may have been displaced by the hurricane. Mexican consulates say the fear of deportation may be keeping some victims from asking for help.

Native tribes are also weathering the fury of Hurricane Katrina. According to Kevin Billiot from the Intertribal Council of Louisiana, one of the hardest hit of all the native nations was the United Houma Tribe – a state-recognized tribe of 15,000 members on the coast southeast of New Orleans. Brenda Dardar Robichaux, tribal chief, said 3,500 Houma members were displaced from the hurricane.

Robichaux told Brenda Norrell, a reporter with the newspaper Indian Country Today: `’We have tribes and Indian organizations that have come to our rescue. They have been very, very supportive. That is not the case with the federal government.”

Several other tribes located in the three states hit by the hurricane were the Chitimacha Tribe, Coushatta Indian Tribe, Jena Band of Choctaw and Tunica-Biloxi Tribe in Louisiana; the Poarch Creek Band in Alabama, and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians in Mississippi.

New America Media also said:

Today, “Vietnamese are still living in churches and temples in Houston and Baton Rouge” and resources are stretched thin, said [Giao] Pham, an associate managing editor for Nguoi-Viet Daily News, a Westminster, Calif.-based paper.  Pham had previously reported about a Vietnamese mall in Houston that became a meeting place for storm survivors.  Pham says he spoke recently with Father Hung of St. Le Van Phung Catholic Church in Baton Rouge. “He told me that since the hurricane, the church has spent about $20,000 extra in utility bills and other expenses” to house about 300 Vietnamese evacuees. […]

The Vietnamese fisherman community on the Gulf coast, activist [Minh Thu] Lynagh said, “has very low education, even in Vietnamese. They didn’t even know the difference between the Red Cross and FEMA.” Many, she says, have no bank accounts.

Yet community rescuers are already strained to the breaking point.  As Earl Ofari Hutchinson said in his October 6 column, assistance in the form of money and aid is still not getting to those who really need it on the front lines.

South Asian immigrant students, many of whom are also Muslim, feel trapped and disheartened, according to another story submitted to NAM by India-West correspondent Viji Sundarum.

“We’re homeless. We cannot work off campus. We are in a bad situation. Everyone is trying to survive. We are moving from place to place.”

Tulane University student Azad, who wouldn’t give his last name lest “I get into trouble,” was not just mouthing off. He meant every word of what he said, and what he said was an echo of what a number of other immigrant students from the Indian sub-continent were saying in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast earlier this month turned Azad’s life upside down, along with everyone else’s. Only, in the case of immigrant students like Azad, especially those from predominantly Muslim countries like his, many are wondering whether to seek help from federal agencies, or just lie low and continue banking on the uncertain help of friends and acquaintances.

“The fear they are experiencing is understandable,” Artesia, Calif.,-based South Asian Network’s executive director Hamid Khan told India-West. “It’s because of how South Asians, and particularly how Muslim students have been demonized” in the wake of 9/11. “Students with Muslim names face a higher degree of scrutiny. That’s why even in times of need they are afraid to reach out so that they don’t show up on the radar screen.”

Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot pose these questions for many unknowing Americans:

We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners, artists, and neighborhood folks. Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city remains submerged in anger and frustration.

Indeed, the most toxic debris in New Orleans isn’t the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple “incompetence” or “failure of leadership,” locals are more inclined to discern deliberate design and planned neglect-the murder, not the accidental death, of a great city.  

[…]

Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction of the New Orleans region will remain impossible.

Mike Davis, by the way, is the author of a book on the cemetaries of New Orleans, City of Quartz, Dead Cities and Other Tales, and the recently published Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press). Anthony Fontenot is a New Orleans architect and community-design activist, currently working at Princeton University.

I’m not going to list them all, but this should give yall pause to reflect:

1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans (majority Black) side and not on the Metairie (largely white) side? Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities?

2. Who owned the huge barge that was catapulted through the wall of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the Lower Ninth Ward-the most deadly hit-and-run accident in U.S. history?

3. All of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish east of the Industrial Canal were drowned, except for the Almonaster-Michoud Industrial District along Chef Menteur Highway. Why was industrial land apparently protected by stronger levees than nearby residential neighborhoods?

4. Why did Mayor Ray Nagin, in defiance of his own official disaster plan, delay twelve to twenty-four hours in ordering a mandatory evacuation of the city?

5. Why did Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff not declare Katrina an “Incident of National Significance” until August 31 – thus preventing the full deployment of urgently needed federal resources?

[…]

8. Why does Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld balk at making public his “severe weather execution order” that established the ground rules for the military response to Katrina? Did the Pentagon, as a recent report by the Congressional Research Service suggests, fail to take initiatives within already authorized powers, then attempt to transfer the blame tostate and local governments?

[…]

10. What significance attaches to the fact that the chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of crime in) the city?

11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in Dallas with the “forty thieves”-white business leaders led by Reiss- reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer Black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?

[…]

13. Why were patients at private hospitals like Tulane evacuated by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity Hospital (where the poor go) were left to suffer and die?

[…]

15. The French Quarter has one of the highest densities of restaurants in the nation. Once the acute shortages of food and water at the Superdome and the Convention Center were known, why didn’t officials requisition supplies from hotels and restaurants located just a few blocks away? (As it happened, vast quantities of food were simply left to spoil.)

[…]

17. Why didn’t the Navy or Coast Guard immediately airdrop life preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why wasn’t such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals?

18. Why weren’t evacuee centers established in Audubon Park and other unflooded parts of Uptown, where locals could be employed as cleanup crews?

19. Is the Justice Department investigating the Jim Crow-like response of the suburban Gretna police who turned back hundreds of desperate New Orleans citizens trying to walk across the Mississippi River bridge-an image reminiscent of Selma in 1965? New Orleans, meanwhile, abounds in eyewitness accounts of police looting and illegal shootings: Will any of this ever be investigated?

20. Who is responsible for the suspicious fires that have swept the city? Why have so many fires occurred in blue-collar areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification, such as the Section 8 homes on Constance Street in the Lower Garden District or the wharfs along the river in Bywater?

[…]

22. We found a massive Red Cross presence in Baton Rouge but none in some of the smaller Louisiana towns that have mounted the most impressive relief efforts. The poor Cajun community of Ville Platte, for instance, has at one time or another fed and housed more than 5,000 evacuees; but the Red Cross, along with FEMA, has refused almost daily appeals by local volunteers to send professional personnel and aid. Why then give money to the Red Cross?

23. Why isn’t FEMA scrambling to create a central registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the city?

24. As politicians talk about “disaster czars” and elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed “new urbanism” in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive participation of the city’s ordinary citizens in their own future?

I’ve got an answer for number 15: They would rather let it spoil than let it go to poor blacks.  Or in their view, n-words. Yes, I am so blunt, but this is how some people think.

And for number 18: because the elites were given carte blanche to get Blackwater and all those other mercenaries over there at Audubon Park to protect their homes and property.  Audubon Park would have been too close for these people’s comfort for hundreds of survivors–black survivors.

As the horrors of Katrina fade into history and memory…and fade out from the news media’s lenses, we need to continue to do research and keep an eye on what happens to New Orleans and its residents.  Because what happens there could ultimately happen in any of your communities.

He was called ‘the poet laureate of comedy’:

Often called “the poet laureate of comedy,” Mr. Russell may be best known today as one of the polyester-wearing guests on TV quiz show reruns, cracking wise and rhyming couplets in the company of such B-list celebrities as Paul Lynde, Fanny Flagg and Charles Nelson Reilly. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he was a frequent guest on “To Tell the Truth,” “Match Game 73,” “Masquerade Party,” “What’s My Line?” and “Hollywood Squares.” He hosted a daytime game show called “Your Number’s Up.”

But children in past decades probably know him from a certain musical remake of The Wizard of Oz:

In addition to his numerous TV appearances, he was the Tin Man in “The Wiz,” the 1978 black-cast remake of “The Wizard of Oz.” It was a role that allowed him to showcase his versatility as a singer, dancer, actor and comedian.

Russell’s propensity for rhyming grew out of an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, when Carson sidekick Ed McMahon asked him whether he had a poem. It was such a success that thereafter, he was expected to have a rhyming poem for any occasion, on any show.  He had committed 600 of these comic rhymes to memory, working at night to perfect them.

Russell was also one of the first black comedians, along with Redd Foxx and Timmie Rogers, who refused to speak in dialect or play Stepin Fetchit roles on television, movies or on stage.

Nipsey Russell also held a BA in literature from the University of Cincinnati, in Cincinnati, OH.  He maintained a lifelong interest in classical literature and foreign languages, though he had fully expected to become a teacher upon graduation.

I first saw Nipsey Russell on television on the old Car 54, Where Are You? show, playing a nutty cop, Officer Anderson, in a precinct full of nutty cops with different ethnic origins, sort of a precursor to Barney Miller.  I also saw him on Dean Martin’s shows, and he never failed to bring down the house.

During his last years, he occasionally made guest appearances on Conan O’Brien’s late night show and on Chris Rock’s comedy show on HBO.

Nipsey Russell did not possess a birth certificate, said his manager, Joseph Rapp, so his age is a guesstimate.  He was probably 81 or 82 years old.

His first name was Julius. ‘Nipsey’ was a nickname his mother gave him.

He died of cancer at Lenox Hill Hospital on Saturday, October 2.

I’ll miss Nipsey.

Only thing is, they aren’t counting the bodies in the houses yet.

The search for Hurricane Katrina victims has ended in Louisiana with a death toll at 964, but more searches will be conducted if someone reports seeing a body, a state official said Monday.

State and federal agencies have finished their sweeps through the city, but Kenyon International Emergency Services, the private company hired by the state to remove the bodies, is on call if any other body is found, said Bob Johannessen, a spokesman with the state Department of Health and Hospitals.

“There might still be bodies found — for instance, if a house was locked and nobody able to go into it,” Johannessen said.

The other thing that infuriates me is that many of these victims’ relatives cannot even claim their bodies for burial and to find closure.

Unless they are freezing the remains, the longer they are allowed to decompose, the more difficult it will be to identify them.  

A month after Katrina upended the lives of hundreds of thousands, families of the dead have been traumatized again by the ordeal of trying to pry their loved ones’ bodies from a bureaucratic quagmire. They say they have spent weeks being rebuffed or ignored by state and federal officials at a massive temporary morgue that houses hundreds of decomposed corpses.

Many of those bodies don’t have names, the remains so badly damaged by floodwater that fingerprints and other methods of identification are useless. But although authorities have been provided with ample information to identify dozens of corpses, they are still holding onto them — to the dismay of family members scattered across the country.

Additionally:

Forensic specialists supervised by the Federal Emergency Management Agency are taking X-rays, fingerprints and DNA samples of the corpses, but notifying next-of-kin is being handled by state officials. Their greatest fear is misidentifying a corpse in the deluge of bodies.

Perhaps.  But it should not take this long.  Nor should survivors be kept from claiming the remains of their loved ones.

More and more, it looks like something from Jonestown in 1978.  Survivors were too poor to pay the staggering sums to bring their family member(s) home from the steaming jungles of Guyana for burial.  So the bodies were returned by the Carter Administration under dubious circumstances and eventually interred in a mass grave in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area.

This is what happen later with those bodies that cannot be identified: buried in mass graves.

Dubious circumstances, you may ask?  Here is where the connections to Jonestown coincide with those of the New Orleans fatalities:

• There was/is no thorough investigation of what occurred to the victims.
• The bodies were/are allowed to decompose for days whether in extreme heat or in muck and water.
• The government is thus able to destroy evidence of the causes of death.  (Some people did not die from drowning, contrary to death certificates.)
• The government can frustrate the efforts of family members and survivors to secure the body of their deceased family member, have an independent investigation or autopsy into the cause of death, and thus stymie any claims that could be brought against authorities.
• The Bush Administration may be counting on public apathy, racism, and time to get away with culpability.
• The bodies are being held at St. Gabriel, La., an out of the way place where government organizations like the FBI can probably conduct their own examinations in private and in secrecy.
• The government has–as author Rebecca Moore insisted in the book, In Defense of Peoples Temple and Other Essays–“abandoned civilized treatment of the dead.”  And for blacks, especially for many New Orleans blacks, this had special significance.

Among the biggest adherents of the New Orleans funeral tradition are those most affected by Hurricane Katrina: impoverished blacks whose burial processions often feature parades and jazz bands. Some scholars have traced these so-called jazz funerals back to Africa. Duke University professor Karla F.C. Holloway says slaves brought to America burial processions involving call-and-response chants and musicians beating drums and tambourine-like instruments to help the dead on their way to heaven.

“The slaves in New Orleans would always accompany the dead to the burial site with rejoicing, because the rejoice was a release into a different kind of spiritual world, an ancestral world, which mixed with the Christian idea of being released into heaven,” says Dr. Holloway.

In recent years, the tradition took a turn, when street gangs adopted the ritual to bury their murdered members. Then, the tradition gained a hip-hop quality. One of the biggest jazz funerals in recent years was for James “Soulja Slim” Tapp, an up-and-coming rapper who was fatally shot on his mother’s front lawn. Soulja Slim’s jazz funeral in 2003 sent thousands into the city’s streets.

So deeply connected are music and death in New Orleans that the Web site of the Orleans Parish Coroner features the sound of its chief, Frank Minyard, playing the jazz trumpet.

He finished his 10-decade cycle of African American life from 1900 to 2000.

August Wilson, 60, one of America’s greatest playwrights, died overnight in Seattle.

In May, he was diagnosed with liver cancer and in June his doctors determined it was inoperable. But in August he showed that he was indeed prepared, telling the Post-Gazette, “I’ve lived a blessed life. I’m ready.”

The end came overnight when Mr. Wilson died at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, surrounded by his family, said Dena Levitin, Wilson’s personal assistant.

Jeezus.  I saw him for the first, and last time at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003.  What a loss.
This is what Wikipedia has to say about Wilson:

Born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, one of six children of Frederick Kittel, an immigrant German, and Daisy Wilson, an African-American. He changed his name, to honor his mother, when his father died in 1965. August dropped out of high school, but he made such extensive use of the Carnegie Libray that they later awarded him a degree, the only such one they have awarded. He joined the Army, but left after one year and went on to work odd jobs for a time. Though he left Pittsburgh as a young man, he went on to immortalize the neighborhood in many of his plays.

His most famous plays are Fences (1985) (which won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award), The Piano Lesson (1990) (a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

The New York Times obituary said,

Each of the plays in the cycle was set in a different decade of the 20th century, and all but “Ma Rainey” took place in the impoverished but vibrant African-American Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Mr. Wilson was born. In 1978, before he had become a successful writer, Mr. Wilson moved to St. Paul, and in 1994 he settled in Seattle, where he died. But his spiritual home remained the rough streets of the Hill District, where as a young man he sat in thrall to the voices of African-American working men and women. Years later, he would discern in their stories, their jokes and their squabbles the raw material for an art that would celebrate the sustaining richness of the black American experience, bruising as it often was.

In his work, Mr. Wilson depicted the struggles of black Americans with uncommon lyrical richness, theatrical density and emotional heft, in plays that gave vivid voices to people on the frayed margins of life: cabdrivers and maids, garbagemen and side men and petty criminals. In bringing to the popular American stage the gritty specifics of the lives of his poor, trouble-plagued and sometimes powerfully embittered black characters, Mr. Wilson also described universal truths about the struggle for dignity, love, security and happiness in the face of often overwhelming obstacles.

The last in his famous cycle was Radio Golf,  a play about upper middle-class blacks in the 1990s.

It wasn’t time for him to go yet.  It wasn’t.  However, Wilson thought that it was:

He also noted that when his long-time friend and producer, Benjamin Mordecai, the only person to work with him on all 10 of his major plays, died this spring, the New York Times obituary included a picture of him and Mordecai together. “That’s what gave God this idea,” he said.

[…]

Even while suffering from cancer and recovering from a small stroke, Mr. Wilson kept re-writing for the play’s second production at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, July 31-Sept. 18.

[promoted by BooMan]

RAW STORY reported this through The Washington Times.  I guess if the lawn jockey says it, it’s straight from his bosses’ lips:

 Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development, during a visit with hurricane victims in Houston, said New Orleans would not reach its pre-Katrina population of “500,000 people for a long time,” and “it’s not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.”

    Rep. Danny K. Davis, Illinois Democrat and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, quickly took issue.

    “Anybody who can make that kind of projection with some degree of certainty or accuracy must have a crystal ball that I can’t see or maybe they are more prophetic than any of us can imagine,” he said.

    Other members of the caucus said the comments by Mr. Jackson, who is black, could be misconstrued as a goal, particularly considering his position of responsibility in the administration.

Hell, they are COUNTING ON THAT GOAL.

And Nagin won’t have to worry about being turned out of office for his part in the Katrina debacle if he plays his cards right.

Furthermore, Jackson (no relation to Jesse) is a former housing developer with ties to the industry.  He cannot be blind to the windfall to speculators and developers because of Katrina. No doubt, as a black Republican, he and Nagin are in cahoots.

Some of you might remember one of my diaries, one taken from a Salon article on DailyKos that showed the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Representative Maxine Waters trying to get evacuees to safety closer to home, preferably to nearby England Air Force Base in Alexandria.  But that didn’t happen.  Now,

Rep. Bobby L. Rush, Illinois Democrat, said Alphonso Jackson’s remarks and the prospects of real-estate speculators and developers in New Orleans are “foreboding.”

    “Gentrification is a demon that is looming on the landscape, and we have to be aware of it and vigilant. … Right now, I don’t know if the resistance to it is strong enough,” Mr. Rush said.

    He said a history of forced removal of blacks from their homes and property cannot be ignored as the reconstruction moves forward.

    Two weeks after Katrina, the Congressional Black Caucus issued an eight-point action plan that calls for residents to get the first right of return to the area, that New Orleans residents get first choice of construction jobs and rebuilding contracts and that voting rights be protected.

    Many evacuees from the Ninth Ward will likely never be able to return, Mr. Jackson said. He told Mayor C. Ray Nagin that it would be a mistake to rebuild that part of town, the lowest-lying section and prone to flooding.

Not with earthenwork, concrete and metal levees, you mean.  Why not create a series of levees whereby people can live in relative safety as do the Dutch?  But I guess, that is too expensive for black people who have traditionally voted Democrat.

Information is beginning to filter in:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WOMENSE-NEWS)–Accounts of rapes in the Louisiana Superdome and other evacuee sites are beginning to trickle in to counselors and the clergy more than three weeks after Katrina hit New Orleans.

Police in major evacuation sites such as the Houston Astrodome are now accepting reports as well.

On Sept. 13–the same day that Women’s e-News reported that the Houston Police Department was not taking courtesy reports of rapes that happened in other jurisdictions–Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt sent out a circular to personnel, instructing them to take reports and hold them for safekeeping until other police jurisdiction are prepared to deal with them, spokesperson Johanna Abad said.

Additionally

Reports by people who said they witnessed rapes are starting to filter in to rape counselors, said Judy Benitez, executive director of the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault in Hammond. The foundation is beginning to compile a database of reports without specifically naming victims but including enough details about incidents in an attempt to rule out duplicates and get a better count, she said. The reports are being taken from victims as well as witnesses, Benitez said, but she did not know how many reports had been gathered by press time.

There is, however, a definite, responsible-sounding witness:

New Orleans singer-songwriter Charmaine Neville, in a Sept. 2 video aired by WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge, La., said she had reported to New Orleans police that “a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys who had come . . . into the neighborhood where we were that were helping us to save people, but other men . . . they came and they started raping women . . . and then they started killing.”

Despite what some people have reported about no multiple deaths and no multiple rapes in the Super Dome and in the Convention Center, I believe that it is only a matter of time–and possibly for some women impregnated against their will–before the full story is known.

Think things are getting back to normal in New Orleans?  Guess again, from the Christian Science Monitor:

Now, as hurricane Rita steams toward Texas, it isn’t hurricane-force winds that scare this city so much as the prospect of buckets of rain.

The Army Corps of Engineers say the levees can handle just 6 inches of rain and a storm surge of 10 to 12 feet.

“If the storm surges come up, this will all wash right into the neighborhood,” says Capt. Ron Beaulieu of the New Orleans Fire Department, as he stands on the sand walls of the Industrial Canal patch. He points to the deep trench that formed in the mud along the still-standing levee walls. “All the levees are like this. They’re really weakened.”

I guess protecting the petrochemical industry is a lot more important…
New Orleans residents who braved the flooding with little food and water have decided to leave in Rita’s wake.  People who were returning home by automobile after Mayor Nagin’s precipitous ‘all-clear’ announcement decided to turn around.  This time, Nagin has 500 buses ready for others who want to evacuate.  So where is everyone going?

“Everyone’s going to Alexandria [La.] to ride out the storm,” says Col. Ken Lull of the Colorado National Guard’s169th field artillery brigade. Col. Lull got married Sept. 3 and jokes that he’s spending his honeymoon in New Orleans. He’s in charge of the task force for the hard-hit St. Bernard Parish. “With this levee out here, we can’t be here [if it breaks] – then we become casualties.”

Military units across the region repositioned themselves with Rita in mind. Marines who’ve spent the last few weeks setting up food distribution and cleaning out schools in Mississippi and Louisiana boarded the Iwo Jima ship in downtown New Orleans to ride out the storm and go wherever they might be most needed.

And most of the 1,850 soldiers with the Oregon National Guard, part of a task force responsible for Lakeview, the Ninth Ward, and other severely damaged New Orleans neighborhoods, loaded onto contracted buses to wait out the storm in Alexandria, northwest of the Big Easy.

Governor Blanco has ordered that everyone try Northern Louisiana cities other than overcrowded Baton Rouge. Mandatory evacuations include Cameron, Calcasieu (south of I-10) and Vermillion Parishes, link here of Louisiana parishes.  These parishes, however, are closest to Texas and the path of the hurricane.

Yesterday

[t]he Army Corps of Engineers has begun closing two damaged canals at noon today in preparation for storm surges associated with Hurricane Rita.

The 17th Street canal and the London Street canals will be closed with steel sheet piling by 8 p.m. tonight and will remain closed until the threat of severe weather passes.

Steel sheets will be driven deep into the canal beds near Lake Pontchartrain, providing protection from possible storm surges from the lake rushing into
the damaged canals.

The move to close the canals is part of the Corps continuing effort to provide an interim level of protection for the area that was damaged during
Hurricane Katrina.

More than 800 filled sandbags are on hand, and an additional 2,500 have been ordered. Work continues around the clock to make emergency repairs to
damaged canal walls and levees.

Working with local levee districts and drainage authorities, the Corps has begun re-distributing pumps, construction equipment and materials to municipalities for emergency response. Efforts continue to evaluate flood control structures in the region to determine what preventive measures can be implemented.

“In addition to materials, we have also pre-positioned contractors throughout the region to rapidly respond after severe weather,” said Col. Richard
Wagenaar, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District.

A team of Corps experts has also been established both in New Orleans and at the regional office in Vicksburg, Miss.

Over 500,000 people are leaving/have left New Orleans.  The rain arrived this morning.

Update [2005-9-22 18:17:25 by blksista]:: Gov. Blanco has warned NO residents still holding out to write their Social Security numbers on their arms “in indelible ink” just in case. That’s how bad it’s going to get.

Update [2005-9-22 18:53:20 by blksista]:: Jefferson Parish may not have the resources to evacuate its residents should its levees break:

[A]n official said a storm could push a tidal surge of 3 to 5 feet into Barataria Bay and threaten a weak point in the parish’s storm defenses: the Harvey Canal levee. Anything over 5 feet could top the levee and cause widespread flooding, emergency management director Walter Maestri said.

But as of Wednesday, there were no plans to evacuate the estimated 200,000 Jefferson Parish residents who have returned since Hurricane Katrina. Maestri said that with relatively few gas stations or grocery stores re-opened, evacuees would not be able to stock up on needed supplies before they hit the road.

“People are not ready to move again, and our infrastructure is such that we can’t move again,” he said.

Update [2005-9-22 21:34:38 by blksista]:: Texans still unprepared for Rita’s fury:

“This is the worst planning I’ve ever seen,” said Judie Anderson, who covered just 45 miles in 12 hours after setting out from her home in the Houston suburb of LaPorte. “They say we’ve learned a lot from Hurricane Katrina. Well, you couldn’t prove it by me.”

In all, nearly 2 million people along the Texas and Louisiana coasts were urged to get out of the way of Rita, a 400-mile-wide storm that weakened Thursday from a top-of-the-scale Category 5 hurricane to a Category 4 as it swirled across the Gulf of Mexico.

The storm’s course change could send it away from Houston and Galveston and instead draw the hurricane toward Port Arthur, Texas, or Lake Charles, La., at least 60 miles up the coast, by late Friday or early Saturday.

Update [2005-9-22 21:48:2 by blksista]:: Here is some AP news from other Louisiana and Texas emergency organizations:

Louisiana State Police are telling motorists to travel north on LA 27, US 171, and US 165. Traffic flow on Interstate 10 in the Troop D area and all other evacuation routes is heavy at this time both east and west bound. Interstate 10 travel west is discouraged due to Texas evacuation traffic. Interstate 10 travel east is discouraged due to eastern parishes having to evacuate toward Interstate 49. Conditions on all evacuation routes are congested, so expect delays. We want to remind the public to please drive carefully and pay strict attention to the roadway. If motorists are involved in a minor crash, move off of the roadway and call the police. We want to try to keep the roadways open to prevent any other crashes or traffic backup. Motorists evacuating the area and searching for an evacuation shelter are encouraged to travel north on the main evacuation routes: Jefferson Davis Parish residents are encouraged to go north on US 165 (Exit 44) to a shelter checkpoint just north of Oakdale at the Mowad Civic Center, and Calcasieu Parish residents can go north on US 171(Exit 33) to the Pickering High School gym. There are no plans for any type of Contra-Flow in Southwest Louisiana.

If you need assistance on road conditions please call the Louisiana State Police Hotline at 1-800-469-4828. If you need assistance please call *LSP (*577) on your cell phone.

With Hurricane Rita posing a more serious threat to Louisiana, Governor Kathleen Blanco is asking for 15-thousand more federal troops to be on standby. At the same time, the National Guard in Louisiana has asked for an additional 15-thousand National Guard troops from other states to help. Blanco says at least a half (m) million people are being asked to evacuate coastal areas. In an ominous warning, she suggests that those refusing to leave should write their Social Security numbers with indelible ink on their arms.
(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Fuel trucks are being dispatched along Texas evacuation routes to help motorists who are fleeing Hurricane Rita. Some drivers have run out of gas due to the slow traffic flow. Governor Rick Perry spoke to President Bush today and asked that ten-thousand federal troops be pre-positioned to help Texas before and after Rita makes landfall. Galveston City Manager Steve LeBlanc says about 90 percent of the island’s residents have been evacuated. He says the city has moved more than three-thousand people off the island — using buses. Also, Texas authorities have begun airlifting special needs and other people from the Beaumont and Houston areas — about nine-thousand folks. Those evacuees will be transported to San Antonio, Amarillo, El Paso, Dallas, Fort Worth and Lubbock.
(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Traffic came to a standstill and gas shortages were reported Thursday as hundreds of thousands of people in the Houston metropolitan area rushed to get out of the path of Hurricane Rita, a monster storm with 165 mph winds. More than 1.3 million residents in Texas and Louisiana were under orders to evacuate to avoid a deadly repeat of Katrina. The Category 5 storm weakened slightly Thursday morning as it swirled across the Gulf of Mexico, and forecasters said it could lose more steam by the time it comes ashore late Friday or early Saturday. But it could still be an extremely dangerous hurricane – one aimed straight at a section of coastline with the nation’s biggest concentration of oil refineries. “Don’t follow the example of Katrina and wait. No one will come and get you during the storm,” Harris County Judge Robert Eckels said in Houston. In New Orleans, meanwhile, Rita’s outer bands brought the first measurable rain to the city since Katrina, raising fears that the patched-up levees could give way and cause a new round of flooding. Highways leading inland out of Houston, a metropolitan area of 4 million people, were clogged with bumper-to-bumper traffic for up to 100 miles north of the city. Gas stations were reported to be running out of gas. Shoppers emptied grocery store shelves of spaghetti, tuna and other nonperishable items. Hotels hundreds of miles inland filled up. Police officers along the highways carried gasoline to help motorists who ran out. To speed the evacuation out of the nation’s fourth-largest city, Gov. Rick Perry ordered a halt to all southbound traffic into Houston along Interstate 45 and took the unprecedented step of directing the opening all eight lanes to northbound traffic out of the city for 125 miles. I-45 is the primary evacuation route north from Houston and Galveston. At 11 a.m. EDT, Rita was centered about 460 miles southeast of Galveston and was moving at near 9 mph. It winds were 165 mph, down slightly from 175 mph earlier in the day. Forecasters predicted it would come ashore somewhere between the Houston-Galveston area and western Louisiana. Hurricane-force winds extended 85 miles from the center of the storm, and even a slight rightward turn could prove devastating to the Katrina-fractured levees protecting New Orleans, where engineers rushed to fix the pumps and fortify the walls. Forecasters said Rita could be the strongest hurricane on record ever to hit Texas. Only three Category 5 hurricanes, the highest on the scale, are known to have hit the U.S. mainland – most recently, Andrew, which smashed South Florida in 1992. The U.S. mainland has never been hit by both a Category 4 and a Category 5 in the same season. Katrina came ashore Aug. 29 as a Category 4 hurricane. Galveston, Corpus Christi and surrounding Nueces County, low-lying parts of Houston, and mostly emptied-out New Orleans were under mandatory evacuation orders as Rita swirled across the Gulf of Mexico. Oil refineries and chemical plants in and around Houston began shutting down, and hundreds of workers were evacuated from offshore oil rigs. Environmentalists warned that the stretch of coast threatened by Rita is home to 87 chemical plants, refineries and petroleum storage installations, raising the possibility that the storm could cause a major oil spill or toxic release. Southeastern Texas is also home to more than a dozen active Superfund sites. NASA evacuated Johnson Space Center and transferred control of the international space station to the Russians. Storm surge projections put most of the NASA space center, situated about 20 miles southeast of downtown Houston, underwater in the event of a hurricane above Category 2. Although Houston is 60 miles inland, it is a low-lying, flat, sprawling city whose vast stretches of concrete cover clay soil that does not easily soak up water. The city is beribboned with seven bayous that overflow their banks even in a strong thunderstorm. Those bayous feed into the Ship Channel, Clear Lake and Galveston Bay. Scientists have warned that the storm surge from a hurricane could cause the bayous’ currents to reverse, actually pushing more water back into the city. Along the Gulf Coast, federal, state and local officials heeded the bitter lessons of Katrina: Hundreds of buses were dispatched to evacuate the poor. Hospital and nursing home patients were cleared out. And truckloads of water, ice and ready-made meals, and rescue and medical teams were put on standby.
(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Jimmy Guidry, Louisiana’s state health officer, says hospital evacuations continue today in southwest Louisiana ahead of Hurricane Rita. Patients from South Cameron Memorial Hospital were evacuated yesterday and patients transported to Oklahoma. West Calcasieu Cameron Hospital also was evacuated. Christus Saint Patrick Hospital in Lake Charles is being evacuated, Lake Charles Memorial Hospital is evacuating premature babies. Patients from the state’s charity hospital in Lake Charles are being moved to the state’s charity hospital in Alexandria. (Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Texas officials will begin airlifting at least nine-thousand people from Beaumont and Houston today. Those include nursing home residents, those without transportation and the homeless. They’ll be taken to inland Texas cities as part of the massive coastal evacuations ahead of Hurricane Rita. Steve McCraw is the state’s director of homeland security. He says at least some of the flights will take off from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. The evacuees will be taken to San Antonio, Amarillo, El Paso, Dallas, Fort Worth and Lubbock. (Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

CANCELLATIONS AND DATE CHANGES:

Texas-based airlines are suspending flights to cities being threatened by Hurricane Rita. Flights are expected to resume on Sunday — weather permitting.

Here’s a look:

— Continental Airlines tomorrow morning begins operating a reduced schedule from Houston, where it’s based. Continental plans to cancel all of its George Bush Intercontinental Airport flights starting at noon tomorrow. All Continental Express flights from Houston are canceled tomorrow and Saturday.

— Dallas-based Southwest Airlines will discontinue scheduled flight service at Corpus Christi, Houston’s Hobby Airport and New Orleans at noon tomorrow.

— Fort Worth-based American Airlines has canceled its flights in and out of Houston’s Hobby Airport. American’s service at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport was scheduled to continue through 7:09 p-m tonight. All flights after that time have been canceled.

While the Times-Picayune still publishes up river in Baton Rouge, what has happened to New Orleans’ black paper, The Louisiana Weekly?

It is still valiantly publishing, too, living up to its 80-year-old commitment.  This is the September 19 issue on PDF.
Get it straight from the folks.  This and past articles (including just after the hurricane) include important information on how to receive benefit checks, who will suspend house, car and credit card payments, where Xavier and Dillard students have been sent to continue their educations,  opinion pages that gauge the mood of the community there and across the country, and who managed to get married despite the flooding and displacement.

Today’s issue talks about Mayor Nagin backing down from  his earlier announcement to allow people back to their homes, and when Jefferson and St. Bernard Parishes can expect residents back.

Oh, (smile) I was once a Student of the Week, too.