http://network.news.com.au/image/0,10114,5046942,00.jpg A 70% African-American city where resistance to white supremacy has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.
They were ordered NOT to use their amphibious landing craft, hospital facilities, 6 operating rooms, water trucks, MRE's etc. to benefit the people of New Orleans. They were on station Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were ordered to leave.
A New Orleans resident walks through floodwaters coated with a fine layer of oil in the flooded downtown area on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. (AP Photo/Bill Haber)
New Orleans adds a new chapter to the Bush digest of calculated bigotry. While the wealthy white families were able to beat a hasty retreat out of doomed city, the poor and black were left to sink in the toxic stew unleashed by America's greatest natural disaster.
People await aid and treatment outside the New Orleans Convention Center September 1, 2005 in New Orleans. Thousands are awaiting medical treatment and aid which has not arrived at the site. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
"It's not so much that the government is not responding ,
they are obstructing the response. They are telling us we can't bring people
the basic necessities of life because that would give them hope. It is a
question of oppression vs. mutual aid." - Jesse, an organizer with MayDay DC
volunteering in the Common Ground Wellness Center, Algiers, NOLA
S. Claiborne Avenue. Photo by Sidney Smith.
While New Orleans is undergoing a slow motion catastrophe, Bush mugs for the cameras, cuts a cake for John McCain, plays the guitar for Mark Wills, delivers an address about V-J day, and continues with his vacation. When he finally gets around to acknowledging the scope of the unfolding disaster, he delivers only a photo op on Air Force One and a flat, defensive, laundry list speech in the Rose Garden.
Military May Play Bigger Relief Role
By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer
Bush did not define the wider role he envisions for the military. But in his speech to the nation from New Orleans on Thursday, he alluded to the unmatched ability of federal troops to provide supplies, equipment, communications, transportation and other assets the military lumps under the label of ``logistics.''
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-528... "You can't start a clinic here . That would give people hope.
My job is to make their lives as hopeless as possible so they will leave." -
New Orleans Police Dept. officer berating relief workers in the 9th Ward
"The government needed to reinforce the supremacy of private property, and it did so with bullets. The government paid no attention to the people of New Orleans when all they were doing was dying, because the government could care less about a few thousand lower class black people. Once they started taking matters into their own hands and looting from private property, however, they became a major problem. Never mind that the vast majority of the looters were simply taking food and water to try and keep themselves alive."
I encourage everyone to go to this link
http://citypages.com/databank/26/1294/article13694.asp to read first hand stories from survivors.