democracynow.org
Stories:
An Unequal Recovery in New Orleans: Racial Disparities Grow in City 10 Years After Katrina
We spend the hour today marking the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 storm that devastated the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, killing more than 1,800 people, forcing more than a million people to evacuate. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has become a different city. The population is now about 385,000—about 80 percent of its pre-Katrina population. The number of African Americans has plunged by nearly 100,000 since the storm. According to the Urban League, the income gap between black and white residents has increased 37 percent since 2005. Thousands of homes, many in African-American neighborhoods, remain abandoned. On Thursday, President Obama spoke in New Orleans, remembering what happened 10 years ago. "We came to realize that what started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster — a failure of government to look out for its own citizens,” Obama said. We speak to actor Wendell Pierce, Monique Harden of the New Orleans-based Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, and Gary Rivlin, author of "Katrina: After the Flood."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We spend the hour today marking the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 storm that devastated the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, killing more than 1,800 people, forcing more than a million people to evacuate. Ten years later, after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has become a different city. The population is now about 385,000—about 80 percent of its pre-Katrina population. The number of African Americans has plunged by nearly 100,000 since the storm. According to the Urban League, the income gap between black and white residents has increased 37 percent since 2005. Thousands of homes, many in African-American neighborhoods, remain abandoned.
On Thursday, President Obama spoke in New Orleans, remembering what happened 10 years ago.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Here in New Orleans, a city that embodies a celebration of life suddenly seemed devoid of life. A place once defined by color and sound—the second line down the street, the crawfish boils in backyards, the music always in the air—suddenly was dark and silent. And the world watched in horror. We saw those rising waters drown the iconic streets of New Orleans; families stranded on rooftops; bodies in the streets; children crying, crowded in the Superdome—an American city, dark and under water. And this was something that was supposed to never happen here—maybe someplace else, but not here, not in America.
And we came to realize that what started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster—a failure of government to look out for its own citizens. And the storm laid bare a deeper tragedy that had been brewing for decades, because we came to understand that New Orleans, like so many cities and communities across the country, had for too long been plagued by structural inequalities that left too many people, especially poor people, especially people of color, without good jobs or affordable healthcare or decent housing.
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama went on to herald the progress New Orleans has made since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city 10 years ago.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As hard as rebuilding levees is, as hard as rebuilding housing is, real change—real, lasting, structural change—that’s even harder. And it takes courage to experiment with new ideas and change the old ways of doing things. That’s hard. Getting it right and making sure that everybody is included and everybody has a fair shot at success, that takes time. That’s not unique to New Orleans. We’ve got those challenges all across the country. But I’m here to say, I’m here to hold up a mirror and say, because of you, the people of New Orleans, working together, this city is moving in the right direction. And I have never been more confident that together we will get to where we need to go.
AMY GOODMAN: Today we spend the hour looking at Hurricane Katrina and the state of New Orleans a decade after the storm. Joining us from New Orleans is Monique Harden, co-director and attorney with the New Orleans-based Advocates for Environmental Human Rights. Gary Rivlin is also in New Orleans, former New York Times reporter, investigative fellow at The Nation Institute. His latest book, Katrina: After the [Flood]. And joining us from Los Angeles, Wendell Pierce, a New Orleans native, acclaimed actor, Tony Award-winning producer and community activist. He may be best known for his roles in David Simon’s The Wire and Treme, about New Orleans and the musicians and the storm. Wendell Pierce’s new book is The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken. The story, in part, tells the story of Pierce’s great-grandfather, who came to New Orleans as a slave in the 1850s.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! We’d like to start by asking each of you your thoughts on this 10-year anniversary of New Orleans. Wendell Pierce, why don’t we begin with you, New Orleans native? Where is New Orleans today? Where does it need to be?
WENDELL PIERCE: I’ll start in the words that Dickens gave us centuries ago: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." It’s a tale of two cities. New Orleans, 10 years after Katrina, is definitely coming back. It is definitely thriving. It is definitely bringing in a new generation of entrepreneurial spirit. We’ve got new businesses, new restaurants, reformation of the schools, reformation of the levees and the water protection system and all. So there is a lot to celebrate. But we should never start a discussion about Katrina without remembering the 1,800-plus souls who lost their lives 10 years ago in that great flood of that great city. So we should always remember them.
It was the worst of times because we still are in a city that has an institutionalized system and point of view where there are those who don’t have our best interest at heart, if you live in certain parts of the city. It’s balkanized. It doesn’t give the same attention and resources that it does to other parts of the city. New Orleans is too small, and that’s the real kind of worrying part to me. It’s really too small to be so balkanized when it comes to giving resources, when it comes to best practices.
I remember I had a personal conversation with a chief of staff of the council president—this was some years ago—who literally told me, "I just don’t think the Lower Ninth Ward," which was a poor, working-class, African-American neighborhood that was at the center of the storm—"I don’t think it is viable. I don’t think we should be giving our resources to it." This is a woman who had the purse strings of the resources of the city. And I asked her, "Why?" She just said, "I just—I just don’t think so." And I said, "Well, there’s no place you’ve been to in the Lower Ninth Ward you think is viable?" And then she had to admit, "Wendell, in my 40-plus years on this Earth, I’ve never been to the Lower Ninth Ward"—a place that is only a few miles away from City Hall, where she works every day. So, it is the best of times, it’s the worst of times.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Monique Harden of the Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, these 10 years, your thoughts, looking back on the reconstruction efforts that have occurred?
MONIQUE HARDEN: Well, I think what we’ve done over the last 10 years, looking back, is it’s really sharpened the focus on the human rights issues that are really underlying New Orleans, especially in post-Katrina era that we’re now living in, where we’ve seen billions of dollars of federal tax dollars spent in the name of recovery that have actually created one of the largest racial disparities that we’ve had in the history of not just New Orleans, but the Gulf region. And so, it’s not a situation of figuring out what’s the best way to go forward. The problem that we have is that there’s tension and conflict in the recovery planning. And this tension and conflict is—you know, is shown in terms of the balkanized neighborhoods, as Wendell just described to you.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Monique Harden, Governor Jindal, Republican presidential candidate, requesting of President Obama not to raise the issue of climate change? Of course, he defied the request and said it anyway. Jindal writing a letter to the president, saying, quote, "The temptation to stray into climate change politics should be resisted. While you and others may be of the opinion that we can legislate away hurricanes with higher taxes, business regulations and EPA power grabs, that is not a view shared by many Louisianians. I would ask you to respect this important time of remembrance by not inserting the divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism"?
MONIQUE HARDEN: You know, I think Governor Bobby Jindal is a pathetic human being. I really do. And I think his letter speaks to just how controlled he is by the oil and gas industries that have taken over governance and policymaking and the resources in the state of Louisiana. I mean, just outside of the Governor’s Mansion in our state capital, you have one of the largest oil refinery complexes in the United States, and that’s owned by the, you know, ExxonMobil oil company. In the section between Baton Rouge, New Orleans and going down to the Gulf of Mexico, you’ve got over 200 petrochemical facilities in the section of—along the Mississippi River, we know as Cancer Alley, where predominantly African-American, indigenous communities bear the brunt of that pollution.
We’re living on the front lines of both the causes and effects of climate change. And because we love the places that we call home, in New Orleans and in surrounding areas, we’re fighting for changes in terms of how we can cut pollution in order to not only protect us from harmful chemicals that can cause asthma and cancer, but also, from those very same smokestacks and pipelines, we’re seeing the emission of global warming greenhouse gas emissions, that is warming the planet and creating, as a result of that, stronger hurricanes that we’re on the front lines of, as well. And so, dealing with the recovery and disaster response, these are all of one piece. And so, to talk about the recovery of New Orleans without talking about climate change would be like, you know, talking about the state of Louisiana without mentioning New Orleans.
AMY GOODMAN: This is—
MONIQUE HARDEN: So, it’s all of one piece.
AMY GOODMAN: This is what President Obama said.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Making our communities more resilient is going to be increasingly important, because we’re going to see more extreme weather events as the result of climate change—deeper droughts, deadlier wildfires, stronger storms. That’s why, in addition to things like new and better levees, we’ve also been investing in restoring wetlands and other natural systems that are just as critical for storm protection.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to ask Gary Rivlin—your new book, Katrina: After the Flood, you spent a long time with The New York Times covering the aftermath of Katrina—your thoughts now in this 10-year commemoration and some of the people that you focused on in your book?
GARY RIVLIN: Right. So, it was not an equal opportunity storm. If you were a black homeowner in New Orleans, you were more than three times more likely to have a flooded home than if you were a white homeowner. And it has not been an equal opportunity recovery. You could look at Lakeview, a prosperous white community that was completely flooded. Ten years later, it’s 100 percent back. It’s arguably better than ever. You look at New Orleans East, a black professional-class, middle-class neighborhood, 10 years after the storm, it’s maybe 80 percent back. You look at Seventh Ward, a black working-class neighborhood, 50 percent, 60 percent back.
And the great shame of it is, it’s based on many factors—a lack of wealth, perhaps, in the black community versus the white—but it’s also based on policy. There were policies put in place that got in the way of the recovery, that made for an unequal recovery. New Orleans today has the second-highest rate of—the second-highest gap between rich and poor of any city in the country but one. And it’s not accidental. The website FiveThirtyEight pointed out that in the year 2000 the average black middle-class family was making $30,000. Thirteen years later, 2013, that same family was making $25,000—making less money today.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. We’re speaking with Gary Rivlin. He is the former New York Times reporter. His new book, Katrina: After the [Flood]. Wendell Pierce also with us, the famous actor, also author. His new book, The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken. And Monique Harden, the environmental attorney who heads Advocates for Environmental Human Rights in New Orleans. This is Democracy Now! on this 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: New Orleans native, Louis Armstrong, singing "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we spend the hour on this 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina looking at New Orleans. Let’s turn back to some of the voices of New Orleans residents who sought refuge at the Superdome and Convention Center after the storm.
NEW ORLEANS RESIDENTS: Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!
SURVIVOR 1: These babies. Six and eight months. The people just walking past us.
SURVIVOR 2: We’ve got children that got asthma. They’re sick. They don’t have no kind of relief.
SURVIVOR 3: No food, no water, no nothing. Whatever we have, we’ve been taking it. That’s the only way we can survive.
SURVIVOR 4: They got the food right here. Let me show you, right here. This is where they got the food at. All of it, look. Right here, look. City won’t give us nothing! Nothing!
SURVIVOR 5: Gotta help ourselves, right? Open the gate right there.
SURVIVOR 4: Look, look, look! Look, they won’t give us nothing! We ain’t drinking no ice water! Nothing! Because we can’t get it.
SURVIVOR 6: There’s nobody in charge—the National Guard. There’s the police. There is nobody. Somebody needs to come take charge and put organization and get these people to safety, to get them clothes, the basic things that they need to live from day to day.
SURVIVOR 7: This is not about low income. It’s not about rich people, poor people. It’s about people! Nobody wants to hurt anybody in this city! Nobody wants to hurt these people who have these businesses! We want a little air and a little food and water, for God’s sake! That’s it!
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Those were some of the voices of New Orleans residents in the days after the storm 10 years ago.
Shock Doctrine: A Look at the Mass Privatization of NOLA Schools in Storm's Wake & Its Effects Today
Just two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the city fired 7,500 public school teachers, launching a new push to privatize the school system and build a network of charter schools. Many accused lawmakers of trying to break the powerful United Teachers of New Orleans union. Today former President George W. Bush will return to the city to speak at the Warren Easton Charter High School. We speak to the New Orleans actor and activist Wendell Pierce, whose mother was a teacher and union member for 40 years, as well Gary Rivlin, author of "Katrina: After the Flood." He recently wrote a piece for The New York Times titled "Why New Orleans’s Black Residents Are Still Underwater After Katrina."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And we are joined by three guests here: Monique Harden of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights; Gary Rivlin, author of Katrina: After the [Flood]; and Wendell Pierce, the actor and also author of The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken.
Gary Rivlin, I’d like to start with you on this segment, the issue on education. One of the most astonishing things that occurred in the weeks after the storm was a decision of the then-governor, Kathleen Blanco, to close the entire public school system and reopen a recovery authority school system. Could you talk about what happened to the schools, the privatization and the creation of all these charter schools in New Orleans, and what’s been the result 10 years later?
GARY RIVLIN: It makes me think of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, the opportunity that a disaster presents. The governor had wanted to take over many of the local schools in New Orleans prior to Katrina, and she had taken over a few of the worst-performing schools. Katrina happens, and within two months the state had taken over virtually every public school in New Orleans.
And, you know, the real problem is that for years, for six, seven years, it just was chaos. Here are people who were displaced. You know, they’re struggling to come home, and they just want a sense of place, a sense of home. There are no neighborhood schools anymore. People would sign up for one school, a charter school, and it would be closed a year or two later, and they have to go find another. Parent after parent told me the story of their child at a bus stop at 6:00 a.m. in the dark to, you know, take two buses to get to their school every day. It just—it was chaos.
There was cherry picking. You know, I mean, nowadays we all know that schools are measured by how high their scores are. And so, especially early on—it’s gotten a little bit better, but especially early on, they would just refuse some students. The highest expulsion rate in the country was in Orleans Parish schools. Why? Because they wanted to improve their numbers. You know, there was a lawsuit that the schools were not doing their duty of taking care of the special needs students. It was settled a year or two ago, and seemingly it’s gotten better.
But, you know, it’s just like a generation of kids who it had endured. You know, they’re eight, 10, 12 years old at the time of Katrina. They see that the government doesn’t care about them. They’re scattered to the wind, some of them, you know, under gunpoint. I mean, remember, people were being brought on planes, on buses, with armed soldiers as if they were prisoners, sent somewhere off without being told where they’re going. You know, they’re living disembodied for several months, for a couple years. And, you know, they come back to chaos. There’s traumatized kids in this traumatized system.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to put this question to Wendell Pierce. It was a piece that appeared in Chicago by an editorial board member of the Chicago Tribune. Her name was—is Kristen McQueary. She wrote a piece about Chicago’s financial crisis, titled "In Chicago, Wishing for a Hurricane Katrina." She wrote, quote, "I find [myself] wishing for a storm in Chicago—an unpredictable, haughty, devastating swirl of fury. A dramatic levee break. Geysers bursting through manhole covers. A sleeping city, forced onto [the] rooftops." She later apologized for offending the city of New Orleans. Wendell Pierce, you’re a New Orleans native. Your parents are from New Orleans. Your grandparents are from New Orleans. Can you respond to this? And also talk about the struggle for who has made it in the last 10 years in New Orleans and who hasn’t, what communities have thrived, and the fact that 100,000 African-American New Orleanians are no longer in New Orleans.
WENDELL PIERCE: First of all, I found that editorial so offensive. I called it "blasphemously evil" for someone to wish for a disaster that killed over 1,800 people as a way to cleanse their city of some sort of political policies that she disagreed with. Not only was the writer offensive and owed the city and all of those who lost relatives 10 years ago an apology, but I can’t believe that the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board allowed it to go into print. So that was the thing that was really offensive.
And just doubling back on what Gary was saying about the education system, I want you to remember that the United Teachers of New Orleans, the union that my mother was a part of all of her life, her 40 years of teaching in the school system, was one of the largest unions and most powerful unions in the state of Louisiana. It was predominantly African-American and women. And when the floodwaters were still rising in New Orleans, the first official—one of the first official acts that the governor did was to fire all the teachers. It wasn’t by happenstance, it was by design. You saw the political manipulations and taking advantage of the crisis, as it were.
And we should not let the education reform that is happening in New Orleans go unchallenged, because just in October of last year, the Cowen Institute at Tulane, that put out a study and released data on the progress of the charter school system now, actually had to admit that they cooked the books, that they changed the data to make sure that it looked better, because what’s happening is a raid, a raid of the treasury, of the money set aside for public education to be given to private companies, private companies in education. And then they’re changing—they’re changing the status quo to make sure that they keep their charters, to make sure that they keep the flow of money coming into the corporation. Remember, the first rule of law when it works—in a business or in a corporation, is to make a profit. And the only way you make a profit if you’re a charter school is to keep that charter. And the only way you keep that charter is to make sure that you give the appearance that you are not failing.
And they’re leaving a lot of people and a lot of kids on the way—on the side. And they’re leaving them in a worse position than they were before. If you don’t go to the most needy children in your society and help them—as Gary was saying before, the disabled and special needs and special education kids were not having any of their needs met, because it is not required in so many of the charters to even have that sort of part in your education system. So, a lot of people are being left behind.
I have, in Pontchartrain Park, a community development corporation, where we, residents, initiated our own reconstruction, but—as we got the properties that were sold back in the Road Home program in our community of Pontchartrain Park, so that we can put them back into commerce. But we are restricted to only selling to low-income, 80 percent average median income and below. I have no problem with bringing in low-income people to the community. That’s how my parents got a chance at first getting their first home in the 1950s. But what’s happening is to make sure that you displace people who have been forced out of public housing and have only certain areas that they can have access to homes, because then public housing is only one-third public housing anymore, the other two-thirds is now market rate.
And it’s taken all 10 years to rebuild those public housings. I call it displacement by delay. You know, it took so long for us to even reconstitute public housing in New Orleans, that 10 years, if somebody hasn’t, you know, placed roots in Atlanta or Texas or wherever they were displaced to, the likelihood of them coming back is very small. So, it’s by design, it’s by policy. You know, I say in my book, my grandparents always taught us there are those who don’t have your best interest at heart, and there are people in positions of power and policymakers who don’t have all the city’s best interests at heart. And they’re constituting policy and taking actions to make sure that only certain communities are coming back and other communities are suffering.
New Orleans Actor & Activist Wendell Pierce on the "Greatest Crime" in Wake of Hurricane Katrina
New Orleans actor and activist Wendell Pierce looks at how insurance companies discouraged poor and black families from returning to New Orleans after Katrina by refusing to honor homeowner policies. Pierce, whose great-grandfather came to New Orleans as a slave in the 1850s, talks about how Allstate gave his parents just $400 after they paid premiums for 50 years. Pierce writes about his family in his new book, "The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Wendell, I want to follow up on that in terms of your family, in particular, your parents, the struggles that they had to get some kind of assistance with the insurance companies or with the federal government.
WENDELL PIERCE: Right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you bring it home to your own family?
WENDELL PIERCE: I remember the greatest crime that ever happened, I think, was 10 years ago, when none of the large insurance companies honored the homeowner policies. My parents paid Allstate for 50 years, when they moved into Pontchartrain Park in 1955 up to the day we evacuated, and we’re still paying after the flood, because my mother said it can burn down at any time. And for those 50 years of premiums, they received $400. They said, "That’s all we’re going to pay." There was a lawsuit, a class-action lawsuit, years later that everyone participated in to try to get some sort of mediation, and we lost the class-action suit. So, all of those insurance companies that sold insurance to my parents for years, saying that "You will be made whole. Have some flood insurance, and along with your homeowners’ insurance, when you put them together, you will be made whole," they only gave them $400 after 50 years of paying premiums.
AMY GOODMAN: What insurance company, Wendell?
WENDELL PIERCE: It’s that sort of crime.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Allstate.
WENDELL PIERCE: Allstate. Allstate. Yeah, we were in good hands, all right. It’s just those hands were squeezing around my parents’ neck.
AMY GOODMAN: Monique Harden—
GARY RIVLIN: Could I add something on the insurance?
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, yes, go ahead, Gary Rivlin.
GARY RIVLIN: You know, it was interesting. In 2005, Katrina, the most expensive disaster in U.S. history. According to the Bloomberg wire service, record profits for the insurance companies that year. I think Mr. Pierce just told us why.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Monique Harden, your own story? Where were you 10 years ago? And talk about the stories of those who were least able to fend for themselves.
MONIQUE HARDEN: Well, my family and I, we evacuated for what we thought would be three days in Birmingham, Alabama, was the nearest place on early Saturday morning that had hotel rooms available, because between New Orleans, Jackson and other parts, all the hotels, there were no vacancies. So we drove to Birmingham and wound up living there for a couple months after the storm.
I guess the thing for me that I will never forget as long as I live is what it feels like to be displaced, what it feels like to not know whether or not you can come back home again, and how infuriating it is to know that the decision on whether or not you can go back to the place that you call home, the place that’s a part of who you are—we don’t live in New Orleans, we are New Orleans—can be decided at the whim of someone who you don’t know, who has all of this power as a result of our federal disaster law called the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. I think the reason why things are as bad as they are New Orleans and why there hasn’t been—why the right to return for many people, why the right to recover has been—have both been denied is because there’s nothing in the law that protects those rights. And human rights very much are inherent in the right to be able to find your place, live and raise families or make connections and build community. That’s all tied to what it means to live with dignity, human dignity. And not having that and being able to have that, in a situation where you need help the most—and you’re at your most neediest when there’s so much devastation all around you, you’re in a situation where you’re not with people that you know, and you’re away from your home—is really—you know, we’re seeing the repercussions of that 10 years later with over 100,000 people who are still not back, and for those who are, still living in conditions of displacement.
I guess, you know, the thing that is really galling is that the plan—you know, with this discretionary authority under the Stafford Act, you can do a really wonderful thing in terms of rebuilding a community after a disaster and ensuring that people have the ability to return and recover and are part of that decision-making and rebuilding process. You can also make really horrific, unjust decisions. And we’re living with that right now. And the decision was to make New Orleans whiter and less poor. And what does that look like for a majority-African-American city, where African-American culture and arts and heritage is very much—is very present, and it has made the city very vibrant, you know, since there was a New Orleans? And having that taken away is—it creates this really serious human rights crisis that needs a correction.
If we continue to send this message of recovery and rebuilding to the world and to the rest of the nation, we’re dooming people to live with this kind of scenario after a disaster. And so, there’s a need for corrective action in terms of ensuring that people are able to recover. As we move forward and out of this 10-year cycle and into the years ahead, that needs to be the focus, that recovery hasn’t happened, that the right to recovery needs to happen. And we should not be spending billions of dollars and giving it to people who want to make a city that’s majority-African-American to be a city that’s less—would have fewer African Americans and fewer poor people.
AMY GOODMAN: Monique Harden—
MONIQUE HARDEN: It also means that—yes.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, and we’re going to come back to this discussion. Monique Harden is with Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, a New Orleans-based attorney. Gary Rivlin is author of Katrina: After the [Flood]. And actor Wendell Pierce is also an author; his new book, The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken. We’ll be back with all of them after break.
"George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People": Reflections on Kanye West's Criticism 10 Years After
On Sept. 2, 2005, during a nationally televised telethon benefit for victims of Hurricane Katrina, hip-hop legend Kanye West went off script to directly criticize the media and the White House’s handling of the storm. "I hate the way they portray us in the media," he said. "If you see a black family, it says they’re looting. If you see a white family, it says they’re searching for food." West went on to say, "George Bush doesn’t care about black people." Bush later wrote in his memoir that this moment was an all-time low of his presidency.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guests are Monique Harden, environmental and human rights lawyer in New Orleans; Gary Rivlin, author of Katrina: After the Flood; and author and actor Wendell Pierce, The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken. Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I want to go back to an infamous moment shortly after Hurricane Katrina when the hip-hop star Kanye West spoke out against President Bush on NBC’s nationally televised concert for hurricane relief. He was appearing alongside actor Mike Myers. This is Kanye West.
MIKE MYERS: With the breach of three levees protecting New Orleans, the landscape of the city has changed dramatically, tragically, and perhaps irreversibly. There’s now over 25 feet of water where there was once city streets and thriving neighborhoods.
KANYE WEST: I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family, it says they’re looting. See a white family, it says they’re looking for food. And you know that it’s been five days, because most of the people are black. And even for me to complain about it, I would be a hypocrite because I’ve tried to turn away from the TV, because it’s too hard to watch. I’ve even been shopping before even giving a donation. So now I’m calling my business manager right now to see what is the biggest amount I can give. And just to imagine if I was—if I was down there and those are my people down there. So anybody out there that wants to do anything that we can help with the set-up, the way America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible, I mean, this is—Red Cross is doing everything they can. We already realize a lot of the people that could help are at war right now, fighting another way, and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us.
MIKE MYERS: And subtle, but in even many ways more profoundly devastating is the lasting damage to the survivors’ will to rebuild and remain in the area. The destruction of the spirit of the people of southern Louisiana and Mississippi may end up being the more tragic loss of all.
KANYE WEST: George Bush doesn’t care about black people.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Kanye West. And this is President Bush later—who later wrote in his memoir that this moment was an "all-time low" of his presidency. He spoke about it in a 2010 interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer.
GEORGE W. BUSH: I didn’t appreciate it then, I don’t appreciate it now. It’s one thing to say, you know, "I don’t appreciate the way he’s handled his business." It’s another thing to say, "This man’s a racist." I resent it. It’s not true. And it was one of the most disgusting moments of my presidency.
MATT LAUER: This from the book: "I faced a lot of criticism as president. I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low."
GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah, still feel that way as you read those words. Felt them when I heard them. Felt them when I wrote them. And I felt them when I’m listening to them.
MATT LAUER: You say you told Laura at the time it was the worst moment of your presidency.
GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes.
MATT LAUER: I wonder if some people are going to read that, and they might give you some heat for that. And the reason is this.
GEORGE W. BUSH: I don’t care.
MATT LAUER: Well, here’s the reason. You’re not saying that the worst moment in your presidency was watching the misery in Louisiana. You’re saying it was when someone insulted you because of that.
GEORGE W. BUSH: No. And I also make it clear that the misery in Louisiana affected me deeply, as well. There’s a lot of tough moments in the book, and it is a disgusting moment, pure and simple.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was President George W. Bush in 2010. Monique Harden, your thoughts as you hear those clips?
MONIQUE HARDEN: You know, I think one of—for me, I think it’s important people understand that this is the same president that adopted within the State Department a policy for protecting human rights when people are displaced by a disaster in foreign countries, and with the understanding that if you don’t ensure that they have the right to return, the right to recover, that destabilizing effect of displacement can create serious setbacks that could last several generations into the future. And you can go from destabilized people and families to destabilized communities and areas and regions where the disaster and the displacement occurs. And so, to do that in the year before Hurricane Katrina and then to turn around and do the complete opposite—ignore the need for evacuation, ignore the need for preparation, ignore the tremendous need for recovery that’s equitable and just and protects human rights—is part of his legacy, and it’s something that he created.
I mean, when you look at the federal law, all of the decisions come from the president. Once something is declared as a national disaster, this law says all decisions, and the decision to act or not to act, are entirely discretionary and immune from lawsuit. And this is how he chose to exercise that power—to let people wait and suffer in flooded cities on rooftops and convention centers and the Superdome without adequate support and services; to evacuate families without—parents without children in a really inhumane and harsh condition; and to set about this conservative recovery agenda [inaudible] caused displacement of so many people, African Americans, in particular, from New Orleans and the Gulf region, and put money in the hands of folks who are not in need of any recovery but are just profiting from the disaster. He did all of that.
AMY GOODMAN: Wendell Pierce, if you could respond? Where were you when you heard what Kanye West said? And then, you talked about your parents among the first to live in Pontchartrain, an African-American suburb in New Orleans, but your history goes way back—grandparents, great-grandparents. A brief biography of your family and its connections to New Orleans?
WENDELL PIERCE: Yeah, I was in the middle of St. James Parish, where we were—where we rode out the storm. We were without power. We were in the middle of the storm at an uncle’s home. And I didn’t see Kanye’s expression on television until later on.
But getting back to what the president, President Bush, said, that he was disgusted, I was truly disgusted. You know, the 82nd Airborne can be anywhere in the world in 48 hours, and they’re in Georgia, just a couple of states away, a couple of miles away from New Orleans. I was disgusted when I watched the president of the United States fly over the disaster that was happening in New Orleans rather than come there. You know, in 1965 during Betsy, when I was a little boy, another devastating hurricane, LBJ came down to the Lower Ninth Ward with a flashlight, wading through the water, saying, "I am your president. I am here. Come out. We are here to do something for you." And it was just this stark contrast of a president who just was—just showed neglect.
And to say that it wasn’t about race, I’m sure that—I kept saying to people who finally got in touch with me in the middle of the night, and I would tell them, "We are in great need down here." And they kept telling me, "Wendell, we’re watching it on television." And I said, "You can’t be telling me that you’re watching it on television, because there would be some response." And to find out later, once I got out of Louisiana, to see that it was something that was broadcast around the world live—and those same people we saw at the Convention Center tried to walk out of the city, met on the other side of the bridge by racist cops who shot into the crowd, over their heads, saying, "Go back. We don’t want you to come into our community of Gretna," which is a white suburban neighborhood and city just across the bridge—I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget how people responded to people of color. If those had been white American citizens, you would have seen a more immediate response. I doubt that if in the Marina section of San Francisco after the earthquake in the late ’80s, that people would have sat back and done nothing. They knew that was one of the most cherished neighborhoods in America and one of the most cherished and profitable cities in America, and so they responded. It was all about race—the lack of attention, the fact that you saw these images of people in need.
And so, I think back to how my parents’ generation created Pontchartrain Park, the neighborhood that I grew up in. It came out of that same sort of racist neglect during Jim Crow. You could only go to the park only one day of the week if you were black, and that was Wednesdays, Negroes’ day, Negro day. And Pontchartrain Park was in response to that, of the advocacy of the civil rights movement, so that we could have access to this post-World War II suburbia that was happening after the war. My father, who fought in World War II, came back, took advantage of the G.I. Bill and created Pontchartrain Park—a golf course, a thousand homes around it, where they would have access to what was that Levittown sort of suburbia that was happening in America.
We were in some of the deepest part of the flooding, and we took it upon ourselves to initiate our own redevelopment, resident-initiated, the Pontchartrain Park Community Development Corporation. So now we have these homes and are trying to bring people back. We’re restricted by those who don’t have our best interest at heart, because we’ve turned away people with cash, saying, "Here we are and want to buy a home in your community, come back. Just like you, Wendell, I heard the call." This Joshua generation, honoring that Moses generation that gave us a great foundation, a great place to grow up in, and we have to turn away people with cash because of these policies that are restricting us from selling to any sort of middle-class or working-class person who wants to come, because they’re using our redevelopment to displace all of those from public housing. So we’re restricted to only take in those who are in need from public housing, as they take back and reclaim the center of the city and other parts of the city that had public housing that they want. I call it the new blight, because two-thirds of it sits empty at market rate, where you have only one-third that is public housing. So you see, over the course of generation and generation and generation, racist policies that are not in the best interests of communities that are doing everything possible to thrive on their own. And so, you have to be ever vigilant, from my grandparents’ generation, where people were coming—night riders coming and burning cars in the black community in Assumption Parish, to my mother’s generation and my parents’ generation, who brought us up in Pontchartrain Park.
And now, as we mark this 10-year anniversary of Katrina, the most profound thing about this commemoration is the fact that we have another window of opportunity to get it right. And while some people have said that I am a voice of cynicism, that I am not being as celebratory as everyone else, you’re absolutely right, because I choose to look at what is going wrong and saying we have an opportunity now to attack those issues and those policies that are going to have a negative impact, and let’s try to bring back those people who want to come home, that 100,000 displaced New Orleanians who love New Orleans. And being a culture matron, as an actor, to know that most of the culture you’re familiar with in New Orleans comes from that history of oppression and is known around the world. Second lines were because black communities were redlined by insurance companies, so we put together own social aid and pleasure clubs. You understand the pleasure part. The social aid was to make sure that we pooled our monies—
AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.
WENDELL PIERCE: —so that we can take care of ourselves. So, that’s the thing that I want to remember the most—the legacy of the culture that came before, the fighting those that don’t have our best interest at heart—
AMY GOODMAN: Wendell Pierce, I want to thank—
WENDELL PIERCE: —and looking forward to the future.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us. The book, The Wind in the Reeds. Also Gary Rivlin; his book, Katrina: After the [Flood]. And Monique Harden, thanks so much for being with us.
Headlines:
Hundreds More People Die at Sea in Efforts to Reach Europe
Hundreds more people fleeing violence in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, sub-Saharan Africa and other regions have reportedly died en route to Europe as the world grapples with what’s being described the worst migration crisis since World War II. As many as 200 people may have drowned when a boat headed to Southern Europe sank off the Libyan coast Thursday. Another boat with 50 people on board also reportedly capsized Thursday. Swedish officials say they also found the bodies of more than 50 people who died from breathing toxic fumes in the hold of another ship. The Mediterranean Sea has become one of the world’s deadliest borders, as more than 300,000 people displaced by war and violence have attempted to reach Europe this year.
Austria: Residents Call for Open Borders at Vigil Marking Death of 70
On Thursday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel attended a summit with leaders from the Western Balkans about the migration crisis. Meanwhile, less than 30 miles away, residents held a vigil to commemorate the deaths of more than 70 people who apparently suffocated in a truck earlier this week while attempting to reach Northern European countries. One of the vigil-goers called for people to receive safe passage throughout Europe.
Dagmar Schindler: "Building up our borders or fighting even more against people smuggling cannot be the solution. We need safe passages for these people. These people have nothing to lose. Their choice is between taking the chance and coming to Europe or dying at home."
New Orleans: Obama Speaks on 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina
On Thursday, President Obama spoke in New Orleans on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 storm that devastated the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, killing more than 1,800 people, forcing more than a million people to evacuate.
President Obama: "The storm laid bare a deeper tragedy that had been brewing for decades, because we came to understand that New Orleans, like so many cities and communities across the country, had for too long been plagued by structural inequalities that left too many people, especially poor people, especially people of color, without good jobs or affordable healthcare or decent housing."
We’ll have more on Hurricane Katrina after headlines.
Guatemala: Tens of Thousands March to Demand President’s Resignation
In Guatemala, tens of thousands of people marched through the streets Thursday to demand the resignation of President Otto Pérez Molina. It is the latest in months of massive demonstrations over a corruption scandal that has led to the resignation of the majority of the president’s Cabinet and the arrest of top officials. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court lifted the president’s immunity from prosecution, clearing the way for his impeachment, and passing the impeachment recommendation along to Congress. For our full coverage of the ongoing uprising in Guatemala, go to democracynow.org.
Mexico: Parents of 43 Disappeared Students Seek Meeting with Pope
In news from Mexico, the parents of the 43 students who disappeared after being attacked and detained by local police last year are preparing to send a delegation to Philadelphia in efforts to meet with Pope Francis in September. The disappearance of the 43 young men, who were training at the rural teachers’ college of Ayotzinapa in the southern state of Guerrero, has sparked international outcry and prompted calls for President Enrique Peña Nieto’s resignation. On Wednesday, family members and residents marked the 11-month anniversary of the students’ disappearance. Felipe de la Cruz Sandoval, spokesperson for the families of the disappeared students, denounced the Mexican authorities’ handling of the case, including the alleged destruction of surveillance footage that may have captured the students’ kidnapping.
Felipe de la Cruz Sandoval: "First off, the fact that they made a [surveillance] video disappear from the Tribunal for Justice in Iguala. This evidence is the most important, because it is the moment when they stop the bus and take away some of the young people, the normalista students. By disappearing them, we see the protection and complicity that they want to give to the criminals of that night. We already knew we couldn’t confide in the Mexican government, and now, with these results, we can confide even less."
Officials: U.S. Drones Kill British Hacker in Syria and 5 in Yemen
American officials say a U.S. drone strike has killed a 21-year-old British citizen who was a member of the self-proclaimed Islamic State’s hacking team. Officials say Junaid Hussain, from Birmingham, England, was killed in Raqqa, Syria, on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Yemeni officials say U.S. drone strikes killed five people in the southeastern sea port of Mukalla on Wednesday. The dead are being described as suspected members of al-Qaeda.
N.D. Legalizes Police Use of Drones Armed with Tear Gas, Tasers
In the United States, North Dakota has legalized the police’s use of drones armed with pepper spray, tear gas, sound cannons and tasers. The legislation, signed by the governor in April, also permits the police to use drones to collect real-time intelligence video after obtaining a search warrant.
Father of WDBJ Journalist Shot on Air Speaks Out for Gun Control
The father of 24-year-old journalist Alison Parker, who was killed along with 27-year-old cameraman Adam Ward during Wednesday’s fatal shooting in Roanoke, Virginia, has demanded action on gun control. The two died after suspected gunman Vester Flanagan opened fire during the morning broadcast of local news station WDBJ. Flanagan was a former journalist at the station who was fired two years ago. He was African-American and had spoken out about racial grievance at WDBJ and other stations where he’d worked. Police say Vester Flanagan shot himself later Wednesday and died in the hospital. Alison Parker’s father, Andy, spoke out for gun control during an interview on Fox News.
Andy Parker: "Mark my words, my mission in life — and I talked to the governor today. He called me, and he said — and I told him, I said, ’I’m going to do something, whatever it takes, to get gun legislation, to shame people, to shame legislators into doing something about closing loopholes in background checks and making sure crazy people don’t get guns.’"
NLRB Ruling Clears Way for Fast-Food Workers to Collectively Bargain
The National Labor Relations Board has issued a ruling that could clear the way for fast-food workers and other employees to collectively bargain with large corporations, such as McDonald’s, rather than with the individual franchises or subcontracting companies. The decision held that a California company called Browning-Ferris Industries was a joint employer of the subcontracted workers who had been hired to staff its recycling center. The ruling means that a union representing those subcontracted workers now have the right to collectively bargain with the top company. Labor lawyers are saying it could be one of the most significant rulings in the last 35 years.
NASA Imaging Show "Dramatic" Rise in Sea Levels from Climate Change
NASA says that satellite imaging has already shown a dramatic rise in sea levels due to climate change and that more dramatic rises are in store. The panel announced that the worldwide sea level has risen an average of nearly three inches since 1992. Scientist Josh Willis explained that some predictions say sea level could rise as high as six feet by 2100.
Josh Willis: "Most scientists believe that about three feet by 2100 is probably the most likely amount of sea level rise we’ll have. But there are estimates as low as one foot and as high as six feet by 2100, which would be really devastating."
Chicago Marks 60th Anniversary of Emmett Till’s Death
In Chicago, relatives and community members held church services to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the death of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was abducted, beaten and shot after he allegedly wolf-whistled at a white female store clerk named Carolyn Bryant while Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi. Till was a stutterer, and his mother had taught him to whistle any time he felt a stutter coming on. He was kidnapped from his uncle’s farm on August 28, 1955. His corpse was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River with a bullet hole in his head, barbed wire wrapped around his neck and a cotton-gin fan weighing down his body. Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, held an open-casket funeral for her son in Chicago, and the published images of his brutalized body galvanized the civil rights movement. Store clerk Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were tried and acquitted for Till’s murder by an all-white, all-male jury that fall. The two later confessed to the murder but have since died.
FBI Probe Death 1 Year Ago of Lennon Lacy, Found Hanging in NC
Meanwhile, Saturday is the first anniversary of the death of 17-year-old Lennon Lacy, who was found hanging from a swing set in a majority-white trailer park in the tiny town of Bladenboro, North Carolina, one year ago. Local authorities quickly ruled his death a suicide, a claim his family disputed. Lacy had been in a relationship with an older white woman, who has said that they often faced harassment for their interracial relationship. His death is being investigated by the FBI as a possible lynching.
U.S. Attorney’s Office Joins Investigation into Death of Samuel Harrell
And the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York has announced it is joining the investigation into the death of Samuel Harrell, a 30-year-old African-American man who died in April after as many as 20 corrections officers kicked, punched and dragged him down a flight of stairs while he was incarcerated at the Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York. Harrell was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The group of the officers who assaulted Harrell are known as the "Beat Up Squad." In Poughkeepsie, New York, residents staged a protest Thursday to demand criminal charges be brought against the officers. Margaret Kwateng of the Hudson Valley Black Lives Matter Coalition spoke out.
Margaret Kwateng: "We’re here today to get justice for Samuel Harrell’s family. We’re here to demand that DA William Grady of Dutchess County press charges on all of the officers involved in his fatal beating. The officers continue to work in the facility, and they continue to harass and dehumanize the prisoners that are there. This is for Samuel Harrell and to make sure that his life matters and to make sure that he is brought into this Black Lives atter movement as a prisoner whose life often doesn’t seem to be counted in the same way."
Samuel Harrell died in the hospital after the guard beating.
Donate today:Follow:
WEB EXCLUSIVE
Extended Boots Riley Interview on Hip-Hop, Radical Politics, Movement Building & Palestine
FEATURED TOPIC
Hurricane Katrina: 10 Years Later
COLUMN
The Iran Nuclear Deal: Give Diplomacy a Chance
207 West 25th Street, 11th Floor
New York, New York 10001 United States
____________________________
____________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment