pecunium

In another life I was a newspaper reporter. I wasn't willing to go where the jobs were (Topeka) and so I gave it up.

People, esp. those in the Army, mistrust the press. I try to explain to them what it was to be in that calling (and like priests and soldiers, it's a calling; one has to give up so much in the search for that piece of the transcendant, and today's triumph wraps tomorrow's fish. In all those ways of life the undertone is, "Yeah, but what have you done lately).

Teresa, at Making Light (where I sent so many of you almost a month ago), has a Story from the Times-Picayune, which I will drag out from now to my dying day, when I need to explain it.

Heroes from the Newspaper Tribe

…McCusker, Pompilio and I pulled up to the St. Claude Avenue Bridge in our truck, stinking of swamp water and the cigarettes I had been chain-smoking. The bridge over the Industrial Canal marked the dividing line between deluged and merely flooded.

I had been there the day before, Monday, with photographer Jackson. We’d found only two police boats running rescue operations for the thousands of people trapped in attics and on roofs. A rescue volunteer had offered to take us out on a third boat.

We floated through the Lower 9th Ward, past the house of the legendary Fats Domino, where a group of men yelled to our boat from a second-story balcony. We passed them and scores of others who screamed for help on our way east to St. Bernard Parish, the white working class suburb where people had fled after school integration first took hold in the 9th Ward in 1960.

Returning from St. Bernard with a deadline looming, we rode on a boat full of rescued people, a dog and a duffel bag full of cats one woman had smuggled onto the boat without the captain’s knowledge. The memory that sticks out most: We had to duck to avoid hitting stoplights that had towered over the street.

Now on Tuesday, refugees, many elderly and handicapped, hobbled and wheeled themselves across the bridge to the corner of Poland and St. Claude Avenues, the dry side of the bridge that had become a rescue boat launch. We found hundreds of people who had been rescued, then abandoned into a whole new struggle for survival. Filthy, soaked and stinking, they lined up behind three National Guard trucks that couldn’t begin to make a dent in the growing crowd. Those that did get taken out would end up in the Superdome or at the Convention Center downtown, which would become their own dark scenes of terror and suffering.

People mobbed us, competing to tell us their stories, hoping to let relatives know they were alive and authorities know they might still die without help. Pompilio and I interviewed a weeping Daniel Weber, a rotund man perched on a black barrel in the muck. I’d never seen a man so broken. He had watched his wife drown and then floated for 14 hours in polluted floodwaters on a piece of driftwood.

“I’m not going to make it,” he told us. “I know I’m not.”

When we got back in the car, Natalie said to me, “I know it may sound inappropriate, but I love my job on days like this.”

It struck me as perfectly appropriate, I told her. We were this man’s only lifeline to plead for help from the outside world. …

Read it, and weep.

So, that post I made about folks who were peaceable assembling, and trying to walk out of New Orleans being shot at... The Cheif of Police in Gretna admits it, with a touch of pride.

According to UPI
Police from surrounding jurisdictions shut down several access points to one of the only ways out of New Orleans last week, effectively trapping victims of Hurricane Katrina in the flooded and devastated city.
An eyewitness account from two San Francisco paramedics posted on an internet site for Emergency Medical Services specialists says, "Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the city on foot."
"We shut down the bridge," Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International, adding that his jurisdiction had been "a closed and secure location" since before the storm hit.
"All our people had evacuated and we locked the city down," he said.
The bridge in question -- the Crescent City Connection -- is the major artery heading west out of New Orleans across the Mississippi River.
Lawson said that once the storm itself had passed Monday, police from Gretna City, Jefferson Parrish and the Louisiana State Crescent City Connection Police Department closed to foot traffic the three access points to the bridge closest to the West Bank of the river.
He added that the small town, which he called "a bedroom community" for the city of New Orleans, would have been overwhelmed by the influx.
"There was no food, water or shelter" in Gretna City, Lawson said. "We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people.
"If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."
But -- in an example of the chaos that continued to beset survivors of the storm long after it had passed -- even as Lawson's men were closing the bridge, authorities in New Orleans were telling people that it was only way out of the city.
"The only way people can leave the city of New Orleans is to get on (the) Crescent City Connection ... authorities said," reads a Tuesday morning posting on the Web site of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, which kept reporting through the storm and the ruinous flooding that followed.

Yep. With no declaration of Martial Law the township of Gretna's Police Dept. decided it had the right to overide the governor of Louisiana's declaration of emergency, and mandatory ecavuation of the city of New Orleans.

I wish I new a lawyer in Louisiana, because I'd love to see a big-assed lawsuit (what with the abuse of power, assault with deadly weapons, assault under color of authority, and whatever other laundry list of charges one can think of to make a civil suit out of) leveled against the chief, and the city.

Because, by their own words, this was deliberate. They sent, by way of gunfire, a host of people back to a place where their lives were in danger.

Lawson says that his officers "acted in the manner they were instructed to" and defends the order to close the bridge as "the right decision."

I happen to be a big fan of the Bill of Rights.

The Tenth, as used, is problematic. The Ninth, as ignored, is also problematic.

The Second has some contentious issues (What defines militia? What is meant by well organised? I hold it's an individual right, there are interesting; but to me, non-compelling, arguments to be made it's a collective one).

The First, on the other hand, is pretty damned clear (well, the whole debate about what constitutes political speech, and Holmes' sad use of, "fire in a crowded theater," notwithstanding) and the freedom of the press ought to be cut and dried.

Used to be it was.

Yesterday I linked to Reporters Without Borders talking about a couple of cases of photographers being abused. One had not only his images stolen but his equipment smashed and his press pass destroyed. Given that he was from a local paper, this may not have been the best tactical move those cops made, but that's not the point.

Now I find this from Rueters, which says FEMA is barring reporters from moving freely, to prevent them from taking pictures of the dead.

Brian Wilson, of MSNBC said he saw, what I can only describe as intimidation, a cop pointing a weapon at reporters, as well as being told to cross the street when an Oklahoma Guard sergeant got annoyed.

An interesting dynamic is taking shape in this city, not altogether positive: after days of rampant lawlessness (making for what I think most would agree was an impossible job for the New Orleans Police Department during those first few crucial days of rising water, pitch-black nights and looting of stores) the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won't be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.

At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.

These are not good signs.

Yes, I can hear the counterclaims... respect for the dead, and all. Well we didn't show that sort of tender feeling for the tsunami victims. Right now, painful as it is, the dead are the news. The people who were trapped in nursing homes, who couldn't break out of their homes, who were swept away. The ones who are sitting by the side of the road, waiting to be picked up. The how and the why of their demise, as well as what is being done about it, and how to prevent its like again. Those are the stories we need to hear, and read, and; yes, see.

The people who are going to get dysentery, or cholera, or God knows what from contact with the water sloshing around New Orleans (and no one can say what's going to happen to Lake Pontchartrain when the city is emptied into it, but there's no other place to put the water, and leaving it there to fester is a worse option) are the story.

Those are the stories we need to hear, and read, and; yes, see.

The people who refuse to leave, what happens to them? And who will tell the tale? The Administration isn't happy with the press right now, in part because the press has started to do it's job (the press always needs to play the role of gadfly to the occupant of the White House, by definition the president is one of the Comfortable; since he is also the employee of every single person who lives in the US, has his salary, his rent, and his [not-inconsiderable] household expenses paid for by them; while doing things which directly affect them all, he needs some oversight, and probably some afflicting).

For those who want to see what an active press corps might, and should, have been doing for the past few years, this press gaggle shows something which has been rare, of late, penetrating questions, and an unwillingness to accept pablum as caviar.

My favorite piece of it is,
Q I just want to follow up on David's questions on accountability. First, just to get you on the record, where does the buck stop in this administration?

MR. McCLELLAN: The President.

Q All right. So he will be held accountable as the head of the government for the federal response that he's already acknowledged was inadequate and unacceptable?

It isn't just the pleasure of seeing a pair of politicians skewered (because McClellan was run through on the way to the President) but because the people in office keep talking about accountabilty, but none of them ever seem to be held accountable for the failures they admit to happening, on their watch, by their underlings, or even by themselves.

Blacking the press out of New Orleans, intimidating them into not taking pictures; or notes, is the sort of thing which is meant to reduce accountability, because what is not seen, just isn't. If people don't know, they can't be offended. If they aren't offended, nothing will change.

And looking at the mess which was one of the prettiest, most interesting cities in America... it makes me think something has to change.

Katrina did a huge amount of damage.

In real terms (property damage, economic damage, infrastructural damage, and; probably, loss of life) it makes That Tuesday pale by comparison.

It doesn't have the gut-shot shock value, but it's a bigger catastrophe.

It also shows some of the rot in the way we run things.

The rich, they are all right. The Middle Class, they have real problems, and they may end up poor.

The poor, they're screwed.

They were screwed before Katrina came ashore.

Recall the people who were/are in the Superdome... they had to wait for hours to get in. Why? Ostensibly to be searched for weapons (which I can understand) but there was more to it than that Lew Rockwell reports,

"During coverage by Geraldo Rivera Sunday night, FOX NEWS' video cameras zoomed inside the foyer deck of the Superdome and viewers could see a national guard person going through a powder compact from of a woman's purse that was way too small to hold a liquor bottle or a gun. It was obvious that they were looking for drugs in warrantless searches. They instructed all the refugees far back in the seemingly endless lines to have their prescription-pill bottles out when approaching the security checkpoint and also a photo ID to prove that they belonged with the prescription.

There were THOUSANDS of poor, mostly black citizens of the lower Louisiana area, many of them little children and sickly elderly, being forced to stand for hours while the government violated their civil rights with forced searches that were patently unconstitutional, unjust and unreasonable under the dire circumstances. "Don't want to be searched? That's okay...now turn around, go outside and die!" Big choice."

And he's right. Do you think that would fly if the scene were rich folks from Georgetown heading into the the National's Stadium? Me neither.

And now, the people who are heading for the AstroDome, they won't be allowed in, unless they can prove they were in the Superdome. WTF?

Steve Gilliard's got a long post on The Price of Poverty

Some excerpts:When Andy Sullivan knocks Kos for saying this is worse than 9/11, he's wrong and Kos is right, because I lived through 9/11 without so much as a lost glass of water. This is a lot closer to an attack than any natural disaster we've seen. An entire city has turned into a movie set, and I mean Escape from New York. The people fleeing New Orelans are refugees, soemthing we haven't seen since the Civil War. The Astrodome is a temporary solution, and refugee camps will have to be built. There are sharks and alligators swimming in the streets, nobody will be going home for a long time.

There is still an inability to realize the scale of this. They are talking about trucking in supplies. Why not do what they did in Afghanistan and just drop food and water from C-130's? They need to act like this is a humanitarian crisis, and not just a national disaster.

The decision making here is flawed. While the Louisiana NG sits in Mosul, the mayor has to drag cops from search and rescue to looter patrol. Why? Because armed gangs are playing Baghdad, 2003. One guy shot his AK at a police station.

Why does it matter that the NG is in Iraq? Because the infantry which would be stopping looters is in Iraq. It's one thing to get water and shoes, another to rob anything which came along. Which is what some people are doing.

Of course, as the middle class runs out of class, they will start stealing and going nuts because they are just that desperate.

And the surprise: Atlanta has $5 gas. Hmmm, there's no risk of a riot there, is there.

What bothers me is the pace. When you have starving people in other countries, the AF can drop supplies to the needy. In the US, people have to wait for trucks which may not come for days. People are going to die at this pace.

How poor is NOLA?

Read, then ask yourself if you're suprised at how people are reacting.

...
http://www.realestatejournal.com/cityprofiles/neworleans_la.html
Business

Unemployment rate -- June 2003(for New Orleans): 6.6%

Unemployment rate -- June 2002 (for New Orleans): 6.1%

Unemployment rate -- June 2003 (Louisiana): 7.6%

Unemployment rate -- June 2002 (Louisiana): 7.0%

Civilians employed: 562,100

Civilians unemployed: 32,000

Projected job growth, by state: 4.6%

Projected income growth, by state (projected per-capita income change: 1988 through 2020):
39.8% (for Louisiana)

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2003-10-07/news_scut.html
Once again, the government is telling you what most people know by walking down their street -- people are hurting, financially.

Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the nation's official poverty rate rose from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.1 percent in 2002. Four out of 10 of those poor people live in the South, the poorest part of the nation. In Louisiana, the poverty rate is a third higher than the United States as a whole. Over the past three years, 17.9 percent -- nearly one in five people -- have been poor in this state. That's basically a tie for highest poverty rate in the nation with Arkansas, where the poverty rate officially stands at 18 percent.

http://bizneworleans.com/70+M56d76a2d7b6.html
The underserved
As the 40-year-old DeSalvo sees it, New Orleans represents a gold mine for her research. For one thing, more than a quarter of the city’s population lives below the poverty line. Low-income patients, she says, are more likely than others to suffer from more than one chronic condition, such as obesity, heart disease or diabetes. In addition, more than two-thirds of the local populace is black, constituting what DeSalvo says is an understudied minority group.

And what are we seeing in reaction to the calamaty the citizens there are facing?

A mix. Lots of people are pitching in to help. Some of them from compassion, and some from compassion and anger. annafddd said I just made a donation to the American Red Cross and I'm posting about it here for purely selfish and vile reasons. I'm pissing mad at people who are whining about stopping foreign aid and who ask belligerently where is the rest of the world now that the USA needs it?

Well, here's my 25 $, fuck it.

Though I think the richest country on Earth should take care of its own and could very well afford to do it if it weren't pissing money out in foreign parts that never asked for aid in the shape of military intervention in the first place, those poor bastards in the Gulf Coast shouldn't suffer for the fact that a) their government doesn't give a damn about them and b) I'm mad at it for this.

I don't blame her. I'm angry too, and a little ashamed, because she's right, we have enough money that we ought to be able to prevent, both the poverty,and the inadequate response we are going to see.

Some people, Jonah Goldberg for example, are just mad. They are frothing that the folks there are suffering, and that other people care. "Several readers complain that it's in fact true that the hurricane will disproportionately affect poor people. I don't really dispute that in the sense most mean it. Yes, the poor will have special hardships. Obviously so. But what I objected to, and still object to, is the reflexive playing of the class card. Is it really true that some middle class retirees who heeded the advice of the government to leave town, only to watch their homes be looted after a lifetime of hardwork for a better life are suffering less than a poor person who lost his rented apartment? What's the metric for measuring this sort of suffering? What about the small businessman who worked his entire life to build something he's proud of? What about the families who lost loved ones, but had the poor taste to make more money than the poverty line?

Whatever happened to the idea that unity in the face of a calamity is an important value? We're all in it together, I guess, except for the poor who are extra-special.

So there you have it, the poor, it's too bad for them, but hey, he's in it with them (the same way his chickenhawk-ass is fighting the good fight for the freedom of Iraq and the destruction of terrorism, safe behind his keyboard).


Jesus said we should always have the poor with us. There are those who see this as absolution, since Jesus said there would always be poor, we don't really have to go all out to help them. They conveniently forget what else he said, to the young man who was obedient to all the commandments, "Then sell all you have and give it to the poor."

I don't think we need to go so far as to make everyone give up all they have (though I don't think that levelling the field some would be a bad idea, if not because it's right and fitting, then because the example of 1798 is horrid, and can be repeated), but we can do a lot to make it better.

I close with this.

Matt: 25 41-46

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.