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Solidarity with National Prison Strike

Peoples Assembly, New Orleans Workers Group Rally at OPP

By AP

On August 21 the Peoples’ Assembly and the New Orleans Workers Group called together a protest and march in solidarity with the nation-wide prison strike just a few weeks before the 41st anniversary of historic prison uprising at Attica. People gathered outside the Orleans parish criminal court to call for action against a system that only seeks to incarcerate workers in order to put them under an even more unfair system of modern day slavery: prisons. Around the corner from the courthouse is the Orleans Parish Prison where more than 1500 working class people in New Orleans are locked up.

The aim of the protest was to bring solidarity with prisoners to the public eye. Many held signs up to the streets while other passed out flyers and newspapers, ensuring that everyone who drove past or stepped out of the courthouse could see that the prisoners and their pain would never be forgotten no matter how hard the ruling class tries to drown out their cries.

As a whole procession, protestors moved down the street towards the sheriffs office and OPP, calling for the police to be jailed and the people freed. Using megaphones, calls for action were made alongside the prison so that those inside could hear the voices of support outside. Police who had followed sat and watched as demands were made on behalf of the prisoners, dealing with things like quality of food and healthcare to the treatment of prisoners by guards. It was made clear that the things that were asked for were bare essentials that every human deserves but that the prison system makes inaccessible.

The system of policing and imprisonment in New Orleans and all around the United States is not only cruel and inhumane to the humans that are shoveled into jail cells, but it is also a gross misuse of public money. While people starve and fight over the tiny crumbs they are allotted, the government uses public money to increase policing and keep the industry of prison labor going to keep their deep pockets filled. We must demand that our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters are spared from this sinister scheme! This system only benefits the wealthy and only looks to keep poor and black people down by profiting from their blood sweat and tears!

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Keep Federal Health Centers Free for All Residents

The federally qualified health center, or FQHC, is a vital component of the U.S. healthcare safety net. The FQHC model was developed, in part, here in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960’s to combat structural racism. The centers were signed into law and expanded nationally within the same decade as the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid. Today, this government designation enables community health centers to provide affordable, and, in many cases, free doctor’s visits to 28 million people every year. This is an invaluable service for the more than 59 million Americans who have inadequate health insurance coverage (both uninsured and underinsured).

Despite vicious federal cutbacks over the years since their inception, the FQHC has remained effective in reducing health disparities while also bringing jobs and economic opportunities to the country’s most structurally impoverished communities. These centers continue to serve as medical homes for 8.4 million children, 1.4 million homeless persons, and half of all people living in poverty in the US. (National Association of Community Health Centers Factsheet 2018)

Here in Louisiana, where undocumented refugee children and families do not qualify for Medicaid, FQHCs are the only option for healthcare for thousands of New Orleanians. These families are covered under FQHC’s federal mandate to “operate in a manner such that no patient shall be denied service due to an individual’s inability to pay” (HHS/HRSA Health Center Program handbook, p. 37).

Tragically, over recent months, several New Orleans’ clinics have implemented a minimum $40 fee for clinic visits, resulting in downstream effects such as parents canceling long-awaited pediatrician visits. No family should ever have to choose between putting food on the table or taking their child to the doctor. Physicians working in one particular clinic group have witnessed patients being turned away for not being able to provide proof of income. These practices are blatantly in violation of the FQHC mandate- services must be affordable, and no patient is to be turned away from health care services. Such attacks on the human right to health care fall squarely on vulnerable families such as those who have endured unimaginable trauma and risk to their lives to seek a safe haven here in the US.

In a country known for its shoddy safety net, the FQHC system is a legacy we can be proud of. As physicians and community members, we must fiercely guard the integrity of this vital institution. No center under the designation of the FQHC banner has the right to turn patients away based on income or any other criteria, and it is our duty to bring the illegal and cruel behavior of these corporations to light. To quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.”

– Dr. Virginia Byron

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Peoples Assembly Women’s Dinner: Black August, Solidarity With Prisoners

By Shera Phillips

I am increasingly more and more excited for each Women Dinner’s Wednesday. This past one set fire down in my soul. August is famous for solidarity with the incarcerated in the form of black august. There have been prison strikes all over the country in which the incarcerated demand to be regarded as human beings.

I learned a great deal and we had a host of dynamic speakers educate us on various topics from mass incarceration and its connection to slavery and racism, the enormous capitalistic gains of private corporations and individuals made by the prison complex, what a world could look like without prisons and a powerful testimony of how the prison industry has affected the institution of family made by Fox Rich, as well as spoken word.

The power in the room moved many to tears. We sang, we shouted and we cried. We found community, empowerment and ways to engage in this much needed work for liberation of all.

Join us in our next Women’s Dinner Wednesday where will be hosting a community sing. Singing negro spirituals fuels us, encourages us, purges us, and rejuvenates us. We are reminded of the state of being and passion of our ancestors as they endured and fought for non-negotiable progress.

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Sewerage and Water Board Continues Assault on Orleans Parish Residents

Rate-Payers Have No Voice in Board Decisions

The New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board (S&WB) continues to add insult to injury. The latest moves include granting retroactive pay raises of $20,000 – $45,000 to S&WB managers. Protest was so loud, even by the daily ruling-class papers, that the recipients of the raises were forced to resign on August 20. Mayor Cantrell had acting Executive Director Jade Brown Russel demand the resignations. Then on August 21, Russell was forced to resign and was replaced by retired US Coast Guard Rear Admiral David Callahan who will run the S&WB for two weeks until Ghassan Korban, former Milwaukee Public Works Commissioner, arrives in the first week of September.

Meanwhile the S&WB ordered the resumption of water cut-offs on August 13 despite knowing that the billing system has not been fixed. They claim that more than 7000 people are more than a year delinquent and that the S&WB desperately needs money. Yet they have money to grant raises to the big wigs and to hire legal teams to fend off lawsuits stemming from the August 5, 2017 flooding.

Mayor Cantrell is attempting to show concern and decisiveness in dismissing the latest mis-leadership team while taking no responsibility although she is the President of the Sewage and Water Board. This is same way Mayor Landrieu tried to duck responsibility. This is just for show as we know that the root of the problem is the lack of local control of the S&WB. True leadership would admit and denounce the dysfunction and refuse to cut-off anyone’s water until actual meter reading is done and exorbitant bills resolved.

Also on August 21, the S&WB refused to attend a scheduled meeting with the Public Works sub-committee of the City Council where they were to present a progress report. Since the S&WB is an independent state agency there is little the council can do but complain. Facing more public anger, it finally appeared at a Council meeting. The Council had passed a resolution (which has no teeth) against cutting anyone off. The new Board members arrogantly dismissed this demand.

The S&WB must come under popular control of the residents who struggle to pay bills, not the rich who are there to sniff out opportunities for their friends to have an inside track to lucrative S&WB contracts. It must also pay reparations to the victims of the Augusts 5, 2017 floods who suffered damages. This of course will not happen unless we organize and force these changes

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Department of Public Works Employees Walk Out!

“IF YOU WORK IN NEW ORLEANS YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO AFFORD LIVING HERE.”

On August 13, Department of Public Works employees said enough is enough. They left work and marched into City Hall and demanded a meeting with Mayor Cantrell. These workers are underpaid and overworked. No matter the weather, they are out there trying to do whatever they can with a limited workforce to patch potholes and clean drains.

The important city workers were demanding $18 an hour, hiring more workers, safety and training. They pointed out that residents suffer too with unfilled potholes and clogged drains.

Toinette Johnson, a dump truck operator for DPW, told WDSU: ““That’s why our streets are not being repaired. That’s why they constantly complain about the drains and the water. We don’t have enough manpower to (do the work).” Kennan Mitchell operates a vacuum truck for DPW. He said contractors are hired to do the same work that he does, cleaning catch basins, for more than twice the pay.

Johnson further explained how while they are required to live in Orleans Parish, they don’t make enough to afford the rising rents. “I think if you want to work for the city of New Orleans, you should be able to afford to live in the city of New Orleans.”

The city spends 63% of our tax dollars on prisons and cops but is ignoring the fact that these workers and other city workers are not making enough to get by. With rents, taxes, food, utilities, and cable costs rising, studies have shown you need to make $19 an hour to get a two bedroom apartment in Orleans Parish.

The city has given out grants and tax exemptions to real estate developers and other companies while ignoring how the important people who keep everything running are making out. The city has allowed $140 million in city mandated hotel taxes to be given to big capitalist-controlled commissions. But city workers, like these Department of Public Works employees, are ignored. Salaries of the executives in this and other departments like Sewage and Water Board keep going up, while hiring and workers salaries and benefits are inadequate. The Mayor and City Council should make it a priority to immediately give living wages to all city workers, rather than outrageous salaries and perks to commissioners and executives

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Gordon Plaza Residents Demand “Fully Funded Relocation Now!”

Support Gordon Plaza Residents in their Fight

By Sanashihla

On August 23 residents of Gordon Plaza and community supporters held a press conference in front of city hall to demand a meeting with Mayor Latoya Cantrell. At the press conference the residents put on display 15 jars full of toxic soil dug up from Gordon Plaza. On each jar was the name of a Gordon Plaza resident that has died from cancer. Residents have reached out to Cantrell through multiple channels, but have yet to receive a response.

The horrific environmental racism in New Orleans by publicly elected officials, and the legal system, leads to the increased demand for a fair and just relocation for the Residents of Gordon Plaza.

In 2018, the Residents of Gordon Plaza CURRENTLY live on some of the most toxic soil in all of the United States of America. They live on land that the federal government has designated as a Superfund site, with nearly 150 toxicities, many of which are cancer causing. It is egregious and shameful that at least 4 mayors and their administrations have allowed this issue to continue, as residents of New Orleans lose their lives, get diagnosed with illness, and suffer financially due to their homes no longer being worth even what they bought them for. The “Workers Voice” asked residents to share their stories. Here is part of the struggle of one of the residents:

“My name is Jessie Perkins. I became a homeowner in a Gordon Plaza sub division on top of landfill in March 1988. I lived 7 blocks away in the Desire housing project, and I thought I had an opportunity to move my mother out of the housing project and put her in a home that she can call her own, a safe clean environment. I found out shortly after moving in, a year or two, of exactly what I got myself into and I thought to myself this was supposed to be my American dream, but like all of us, in Gordon Plaza, our American dream turned into a nightmare.

“Also, as an employee of New Orleans sewerage water broad, I had the first hand opportunity to see during the excavations, the nasty stuff that was down under the surface. It was mind blowing! I was like what is this stuff? It was stuff that you can’t even identify with bottles, broken glass, car fenders. The ground was even smoldering in some cases, and I knew it wasn’t good.

“Eventually we learned that the land fill that I used to play on as a child, when I left home my mother didn’t know where I was going. I thought it was just a landfill okay? As a kid playing on it, I had no clue whatsoever that I was playing on top of the landfill that contain over about 149 contaminants that was cancer causing, carcinogens, okay, some pretty nasty stuff.

“Me being the type of person that I am, an avid runner, I try to eat well, I take care of myself. I became very concerned about what the stuff was, the impact that it could have on not only my health, but the health of my mother, my neighbors, my family that visited often. It became a really big concern of mine. It was at that point we knew that we were in trouble, but what could we do?

“We went forward with our lawsuit, thinking that we had people that was going to act in our best interest, and maybe in the beginning that’s what supposed to have happened, but things didn’t turn out very good. We won the law suit. However, the compensation we received was literally a slap in a face. It was something you could do nothing with, so I really feel what the city did was exploitation of people of my community. Essentially what they did was they hid behind the laws so they legally knew we won this lawsuit claiming diplomatic immunity, okay, so they legally knew we won. We won this lawsuit but morally, physically, and economically, they didn’t stand up and do the right thing so here we are stuck with this thing.”

This is a horrific case of environmental racism in New Orleans! So here is what YOU can do to support the Residents of Gordon Plaza in their demand for a fair and just relocation:

  • Join the FIGHT for a fair and just relocation for the residents of Gordon Plaza. Call Mayor LaToya Cantrell at (504) 658-4900 OR (504) 658-4945 to demand a fair and just relocation for the residents of Gordon Plaza E-mail Mayor LaToya Cantrell at mayor@nola.gov to demand a fair and just relocation for the residents of Gordon Plaza.
  • Follow The New Orleans Peoples Assembly Phase 2 on social media to stay up to date on actions pertaining to this issue.
  • Join the Residents of Gordon Plaza on Sunday, September 9th at 3:00pm for a Healing Circle in Congo Square to do at least three things: honor the lives lost due to toxicity at Gordon Plaza, support the residents in their demand for a fair and just relocation, and learn about the organizing efforts to fight for this issue to be resolved. Get actively involved!

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Katrina Anniversary: “If I Knew Then What I Know Now”

By Sally Jane Black

If I knew then what I know now…

Hurricane Katrina, the failure of the levees, the subsequent violence, negligence, and opportunism, all look different through class conscious eyes. What once looked like incompetence now looks like predation. What once looked like mistakes now look like intentional actions. What once looked like a lack of resources now is understood to have been an intentional allocation because of callous disregard for working class people. What once looked like racist bias now looks like white supremacist propaganda.

Seeing history repeat itself in Puerto Rico (most notably) only verifies the intentional nature of the “disaster capitalism” that comes after these storms. It’s a misleading phrase–this is just normal capitalism. It’s white supremacist. It’s patriarchal. the vast majority of the people affected by the storm were black, but the recovery money mostly came back to white neighborhoods. The media called black people looters and white people concerned parents. The police murdered and covered up the deaths of black residents. The disproportionate denial of resources to cis women, queer, and trans people led to disproportionate obstacles for us after the storm–many of them fatal. It’s capitalist. The working class bears the brunt of the exploitation and negligence.

Since the storm, everything has changed. The landlords and other parasites have raised housing prices alarmingly. The jobs are paying the same or barely more than they were 13 years ago. There are still people who yearn to come home but can’t; there are still 800 people without names, buried anonymously. Stories like the charity hospital being abandoned, despite being perfectly functional, in favor of an expensive new hospital that displaced hundreds of black residents are not uncommon. This has happened many times over.

13 years ago today, the vultures began circling. They have taken away everything they can from the working class people of New Orleans. They are attempting to make a playground for rich tourists, ignoring the fact that as they price the working class out, there will be no one to serve them. They have changed the landscape of the city, and while they would have been trying some version of this anyway, their callous disregard for the working class opened the door to this.

Meanwhile, the united states continues to fight wars around the world and spend trillions on weapons while levees, schools, and hospitals remain underfunded. The united states was at war in Afghanistan 13 years ago, too. The united states was occupying Iraq back then, too. In New Orleans, we’re still holding our breath every time a storm enters the Gulf.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have somehow been angrier, but I would have understood who was responsible, why no one was helping, why the pumps didn’t work and the levees failed, why the police committed murder instead of rescues, why charity was closed, why Gretna barred its doors, why the media seemed to demonize working class (especially black) New Orleanians, why it happened the way it happened. If I knew then what I know now, I would have known about who was fighting it, too. If I had known then what I know now, I would have still felt lost, trapped, grief-stricken, confused, but I would have known, too, that the source of our pain was not incompetence. I would have known who the enemy was, and I would have known I could fight. We can fight

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Support the Nationwide Prison Strike Set for August 21


Attica Prison Uprising, September 9, 1971

On April 15 at Lee correctional facility in South Carolina, seven incarcerated people lost their lives in the deadliest prison uprising of the last 25 years. In response, a nationwide strike has been called for August 21 to September 9. August 21 commemorates the state assassination of revolutionary freedom fighter George Jackson and September 9 marks the anniversary of the historic rebellion at Attica prison that occurred less than three weeks later. The following list of demands has been issued by Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a national collective of incarcerated people fighting for human rights in US prisons:

1. Immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons and prison policies that recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women.

2. An immediate end to prison slavery. All persons imprisoned in any place of detention under United States jurisdiction must be paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.

3. The Prison Litigation Reform Act must be rescinded, allowing imprisoned humans a proper channel to address grievances and violations of their rights.

4. The Truth in Sentencing Act and the Sentencing Reform Act must be rescinded so that imprisoned humans have a possibility of rehabilitation and parole. No human shall be sentenced to Death by Incarceration or serve any sentence without the possibility of parole.

5. An immediate end to the racial overcharging, over-sentencing, and parole denials of Black and brown humans. Black humans shall no longer be denied parole because the victim of the crime was white, which is a particular problem in southern states.

6. An immediate end to racist gang enhancement laws targeting Black and brown humans. No imprisoned human shall be denied access to rehabilitation programs at their place of detention because of their label as a violent offender.

7. State prisons must be funded specifically to offer more rehabilitation services.

8. Pell grants must be reinstated in all US states and territories.

9. The voting rights of all confined citizens serving prison sentences, pretrial detainees, and so-called “ex-felons” must be counted. Representation is demanded. All voices count.

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Convention Center Hotel: $329.5 Million Rip-off of Taxpayers’ Funds

By Gavrielle Gemma

$140 million in taxes on hotels bypasses the general budget and gets handed over to various business commissions. The Convention Center gets $63 million every year! The Board of the Center, appointed by the Governor and Mayor is not elected and is made up of representatives of the richest capitalists. The City’s Office of Family and Youth only gets 3% of the city budget or $19 million a year. Our kids could really use that $63 million.

A tiny slice of the ultra-rich in New Orleans basically tells the Mayor and Council what to do so they are going along with a new rip-off by the Convention Center.

According to the Bureau of Government Research (BGR), the Convention Center has raked in $738.8 million of public money over 40 years. Their plan is to build a 1,200 room hotel attached to the Convention center with public contributions amounting to $329.5 million dollars. It gets 40 years of hotel and sales tax rebates, 100% property tax exemption and a free land lease.

Not one cent of this money is earmarked for local hiring or for guaranteed decent wages and benefits for the hospitality workers hired there. While only 2% of tourist revenue goes to local Black businesses, the city’s white elite rulers are stealing more for themselves.

BGR also reports “Negotiations are on a fast track. The Convention Center plans to present a tentative deal for its board to approve on August 22, possibly just a matter of days after the terms become public.” It’s time we had some city council people who don’t take money from these companies that fund their campaigns and wine and dine them. We need independent representatives who stand up for the needs of the working class and oppressed of our city.

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Criminal Negligence Continues at Sewerage & Water Board

NO MORE WATER SHUT-OFFS!

With no resolution to the problem of unjustly high water bills, New Orleans’ working class is threatened with a resumption of cut-offs beginning August 1st. It’s been one year since the flood that exposed the criminal negligence of the S&WB and resulted in the loss of many of our fellow workers’ automobiles or damage to their homes. We also found out that the S&WB was sending out gigantic water bills even though no one had read the meters. They announced that they were accepting small claims, yet nobody that we know has received acknowledgement, let alone compensation for their losses. The NOWG continues to demand full reparations for those who suffered damages. We also demand forbearance on those huge water bills and a continuation of the moratorium on cut-offs. We also continue to support the efforts of the New Orleans Peoples Assembly to file a class action suit to force the S&WB to pay damages for their apparent attempt to run our drainage and water delivery system into the ground. Despite having a new administration, the dysfunction continues. If we want the problems at the S&WB to be fixed, we have to step up our organized fight and force them to properly carry out their sewer, drainage and water responsibilities. We must demand that the S&WB come under popular control of New Orleans residents, with a majority of Board members coming from amongst representatives of the working class who know what it feels like to struggle to pay their bills.