Liberal, Libertario, Libertino

Estou pesquisando sobre o furacão Katrina.

O livro Unnatural Disaster: The Nation on Hurricane Katrina (2006), editado por Betsy Reed, reúne vários artigos publicados na excelente revista The Nation.

Abaixo, algumas notas:

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When Government Shrugs: Lessons of Katrina, Adolph L. Reed Jr.

Nagin speaks emphatically of his support for all displaced New Orleanians’ right to return, but that support is hollow in a context in which only property owners are seen as stakeholders. Landlords began evicting tenants without a hint of due process as soon as the water receded and rumors spread of possibilities for extracting exorbitant rents from construction workers. The state officially prohibited evictions before October 25, but that prohibition was academic for the tens of thousands of people dispersed in shelters around the region and nation. And even that minimal right was flagrantly ignored. The developers are winning, and renters have no effective voice. No plans have been seriously considered that would replace the rental housing, 90 percent of which was classified as low-income affordable, destroyed by Katrina and subsequent flooding.

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Class-ifying the Hurricane , Adolph Reed Jr.

Class will almost certainly turn out to be a better predictor than race of who was able to evacuate, who drowned, who was left to fester in the Superdome or on overpasses, who is stuck in shelters in Houston or Baton Rouge, or who is randomly dispersed to the four winds. I'm certain that class is also a better predictor than race of whose emotional attachments to place will be factored into plans for reconstructing the city.

Of course, in a case of devastation so vast as this, class position provides imperfect insulation. All my very well connected, petit-bourgeois family in New Orleans are now spread across Mississippi and south Louisiana with no hint of when they will return home or what they'll have to return to. Some may have lost their homes and all their belongings. But most of them evacuated before the storm. No one died or was in grave danger of dying; no one was left on an overpass, in the Superdome or at the convention center. They were fortunate but hardly unique among the city's black population, and class had everything to do with the terms of their survival.

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Bohemia's Last Frontier, Curtis Wilkie

Though a polyglot army of pirates and militiamen fought a famous battle a few miles down the river at the end of the War of 1812, New Orleans was not known to be bellicose like its sister cities in the South. The city surrendered without a fight at the beginning of the Civil War and endured its occupation with characteristic élan. Residents painted the visage of Union General Benjamin Butler on the bottom of their chamber pots and dumped the morning contents on the heads of Yankee soldiers from the same balconies where their descendants would fling Mardi Gras beads a century later. That was the extent of the resistance. New Orleans did not suffer from the hard-core Confederacy complex that still contributes to the South's conservatism. The city got over the war and went about the business of growing as a cosmopolitan port.

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Found in the Flood , Eric Alterman

The New Orleans flood produced a dizzying array of images both striking and shocking, but what was perhaps most unusual about them was the return to American television screens and newspaper front pages of poor people in a manner that was neither condescending nor condemnatory. A tone was set by the likes of Jason DeParle in the New York Times, who began his story like this: "The white people got out. Most of them, anyway.... it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time." Wil Haygood in the Washington Post struck a similar tone (albeit buried on page A33): "To those who wonder why so many stayed behind when push came to water's mighty shove here, those who were trapped have a simple explanation: Their nickels and dimes and dollar bills simply didn't add up to stage a quick evacuation mission."

Beyond the confines of its much beloved tourist districts, New Orleans was a far poorer, blacker and more dangerous city than most Americans imagined. According to figures posted on The Progress Report, the Lower Ninth Ward, where the flooding was worst, is more than 98 percent black, with average annual household income below $27,500, not even half the national average, with a quarter of those earning less than $10,000. As Brian Wolshon, a consultant on the state's evacuation plan, told the Times, the city's evacuation plan paid little attention to its "low-mobility" population--the old, the sick and the poor with no cars or other way to get out of town.

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Purging the Poor , Naomi Klein

New Orleans is already displaying signs of a demographic shift so dramatic that some evacuees describe it as "ethnic cleansing." Before Mayor Ray Nagin called for a second evacuation, the people streaming back into dry areas were mostly white, while those with no homes to return to are overwhelmingly black. This, we are assured, is not a conspiracy; it's simple geography--a reflection of the fact that wealth in New Orleans buys altitude. That means that the driest areas are the whitest (the French Quarter is 90 percent white; the Garden District, 89 percent; Audubon, 86 percent; neighboring Jefferson Parish, where people were also allowed to return, 65 percent). Some dry areas, like Algiers, did have large low-income African-American populations before the storm, but in all the billions for reconstruction, there is no budget for transportation back from the far-flung shelters where those residents ended up. So even when resettlement is permitted, many may not be able to return. ...

"Reconstruction," whether in Baghdad or New Orleans, has become shorthand for a massive uninterrupted transfer of wealth from public to private hands, whether in the form of direct "cost plus" government contracts or by auctioning off new sectors of the state to corporations.

This vision was laid out in uniquely undisguised form during a meeting at the Heritage Foundation's Washington headquarters on September 13. Present were members of the House Republican Study Committee, a caucus of more than 100 conservative lawmakers headed by Indiana Congressman Mike Pence. The group compiled a list of thirty-two "Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices," including school vouchers, repealing environmental regulations and "drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." Admittedly, it seems farfetched that these would be adopted as relief for the needy victims of an eviscerated public sector. Until you read the first three items: "Automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas"; "Make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone"; and "Make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations)." All are poised to become law or have already been adopted by presidential decree.

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Corporations of the Whirlwind The Reconstruction of New Oraq, Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse

George Bush's version of capitalism is of a predatory, parasitical kind. It feeds on death, eats money, goes home when the cash stops flowing, and leaves further devastation in its wake. New Orleans, like a rotting corpse, naturally attracts all sorts of flies. Reports have been trickling in that the private security firms -- call them mercenary corporations like Blackwater USA -- which have flooded Iraq with an estimated twenty to twenty-five thousand hired guns (some paid up to $1,000 a day), have been taking the same route back to New Orleans and the Mississippi coast as KBR, Bechtel, and the Shaw Group. ...

Today, New Orleans' streets are under military occupation; its property is guarded by hired guns; and the corporations of the whirlwind are pouring into town. All that's missing is the insurgency.

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Hurricane Gumbo, Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot

Mark's preferred solution is secession: "Let us keep our oil and gas revenues and we can preserve our way of life as well. We don't really belong to the same cultural system anyway. You prize money, competition and individual success; we value family, community and celebration. Give us independence and we'll restore the wetlands, rebuild the Ninth Ward and move the capital to Evangeline Parish. If you wish, you can ship the Statue of Liberty to Ville Platte and we'll add a new inscription: Send us your tired and huddled masses and we'll feed them hurricane gumbo."

We all laugh, but everyone understands it is gallows humor. Ordinary people across Louisiana and the Gulf Coast are beginning to understand what it's like to be Palestinians or Iraqis at the receiving end of Washington's hypocritical promises and disastrous governmental and military actions.

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A Second-Line Revival , Billy Sothern

The parade wrapped up its tour of the Tremé in front of the Back Street Museum, a museum of New Orleans' black cultural history in the shadow of the old Saint Augustine Church, where generations of Tremé musicians were baptized. The staff had made red beans and rice, which they gave to the dancers and musicians, and then to everyone else. Some activists circulated a petition for Category Five hurricane levee protection, and others informed the crowd of a march the following week to protest the city's lack of commitment to rebuild poor neighborhoods. They passed out fliers with the South African antiapartheid anthem "Nothing Without Us Is for Us" providing the details. Everyone seemed optimistic and at home, and unlike almost any other place where New Orleanians congregate, no one talked at all about moving away.

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New Orleans: Raze or Rebuild? , Christian Parenti

At Kajun's, one of only two bars open at the end of last week, a bacchanalian, slap-happy air prevails among the handful of drunk and adrenaline-pumped patrons. A big man with a ponytail is weeping--he just put down his dog because it was biting everyone. A wide-eyed young woman named Caroline is changing the bandage on a dog-bite victim and talking a mile a minute. "I am a massage therapist, but I am not licensed. I am giving garlic and herbs to everyone, even the soldiers."

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Killed by Contempt, Paul Krugman

But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn't forthcoming?

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Katrina Lives, Susan Straight

I met two Louisianans recently who described New Orleans with a kind of shock and awe -- they were shocked themselves, and they'd grown up in the swamps. "In the city you can go buy a refrigerator," one said. "But you can't get delivery until January, maybe February. So you'll see some woman toting a handcart, pulling a refrigerator over the bridge into the city. Huffing and puffing. Like Mad Max or something." ...

Years from now, when someone says to a man, "What happened to that '56 Chevy you used to have?" he'll say the one word. When someone says to a teenager, "You were born in New Orleans but you graduated from high school here in Minnesota?" the girl will think the one word.

When someone says, "Your grandfather died in 2005?" there will be the unspoken lament. When someone says to a whole generation of Louisianans, "What happened?" there will be the one-word answer.

Katrina.

In that way, her name will be added to the list that every black American knows, from both handed-down and newly created stories, told by grandparents or children. The names that call up shared knowledge and define moments in hurt and rage -- Tuskegee, Tulsa, Rodney King and before him Eula Love, Scottsboro, Jonestown and MOVE and SLA.

Katrina.

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