Posted on

Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19: The Wealthy Swoop in to Profit While We Suffer

Plans for tax exempt luxury housing at Charity Hospital include a swimming pool and private parking while we’re struggling with broken roads, poor schools, and low wages. Charity was the second-oldest public hospital in the United States before being sabotaged after Katrina.

New Orleanians have not forgotten how the wealthy weaponized Hurricane Katrina to dispossess tens of thousands of workers of our jobs, homes, and livelihoods. We watched (and continue to watch) giveaways to developers, business owners, and tourism executives while our community remains displaced, impoverished, and denied basic rights to jobs, healthcare, public transportation, public housing, and public education.

For reasons the wealthy would like us to forget, New Orleanians, more than most Americans, are poised to see the COVID-19 pandemic for what it is. We know that disasters are always in part human-made: when we talk about Katrina, when we speak of the Storm, we aren’t just talking about wind and water. And when we talk about COVID-19, we know this disaster is more than a virus; it’s also a scheme of the rich ruling class.

Like Katrina, COVID-19 is being weaponized against the working class in the United States. As we see corporate bail-outs shower our exploiters with money, the working class is told to be satisfied with one-time payments and unemployment checks (which many workers still don’t qualify for) while we face mounting debts, evictions, and hunger.

With COVID-19, we currently face a disaster on two fronts: there is the immediate threat of the virus itself and the imminent and ongoing threat to our lives that the ruling class, using the virus as cover, is opportunistically organizing.

We New Orleanians must position ourselves to fight both the current and coming disaster. We must organize to ensure that our city and country are not further re-made by the wicked hands of the rich. As the ruling class weaponizes this terrible virus, the working class must organize in solidarity with one another to fight the real disease: capitalism.

Posted on

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

Posted on

From Nakba to New Orleans: Coming Home is Our Right

PROTEST CONDEMNS ISRAELI GENOCIDE AGAINST PALESTINIANS

By C. T.

On May 15, Students and Workers Against Racism and Militarism (SWARM) held an action to commemorate Nakba. This action included speaking out against Zionist atrocities towards the Palestinian people, funded by U.S. tax dollar, and Trump’s decision to open the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, despite an international outcry. ‘Nakba’ in Arabic means ‘catastrophe’. It refers to the mass ethnic cleansing and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland on May 15, 1948. Similarly, Hurricane Katrina was both a “natural” catastrophe and an artificial one. Just like Palestine, New Orleans has been sold off piece by piece in the name of white supremacy and capitalism.

Palestinians have been demonized and pushed off their land for decades. Claiming it was for a safe haven for European Jews (remember the U.S. refused to allow Jewish refugees from Nazism into the U.S.) the real purpose was to set up a military outpost for Western war interests. Palestinians daily face home demolitions, Israeli terror and death. In only two days, 58 Palestinians were murdered and 2,700 injured by Zionist weapons that are bought and paid for by the US.

Similarly, post-Katrina, Black New Orleanians have been robbed of their land and right to return through the closure of public schools, public housing, and erasure of entire neighborhoods in the name of “progress” and “development”. Over 100,000 Black New Orleanians have yet to return home due to the “conservative recovery agenda”, started by George W. Bush, that makes money off of theft of land and denial of our human dignity. Palestinians and New Orleanians have a common enemy: rich white supremacists trying to profit off our misery. From Palestine to New Orleans our roots run deep and we will return!