How Corporate NOLA Murdered Charity Hospital

You remember Charity Hospital, right? The public teaching hospital in New Orleans that survived Katrina thanks to the genuine heroism of employees and volunteers who kept the lights on and the patients alive and cared for.

Charity Hospital is a living, breathing testament to the power of public investment.

Or it would be, if the rethuglican corporatists running the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana and Louisiana State University hadn't deliberately killed it in order to get a private boutique clinic for billionaires built with taxpayer dollars instead.

I've been a fan of public teaching hospitals my whole life. Friends, coworkers, family members all work, teach, learn and heal in publicly-supported university teaching hospitals. They are the foundation of any community. You wanna know if a borderline neighborhood is moving up or sliding down? Look for the public hospital. It will tell you everything.

Roberta Brandes Gratz:

Before Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, Charity Hospital was the pride of New Orleans. A 1930s Art Deco–style icon built with WPA funds, Charity was one of the oldest continually operating public hospitals in the country and was regarded as one of the most vital and successful. “Charity was one of the best teaching hospitals in the country, where students from Tulane and LSU did their training,” says Dr. James Moises, a former Charity emergency room physician, noting that it served 100,000 patients a year before the storm.

Today Charity is a skeleton of its former self, with smaller, temporary facilities. The interim coverage does not include “urgent and chronic outpatient care,” notes Moises, and reaches a vastly reduced patient population. Meanwhile, the money that has flowed from the state and federal governments to compensate for the storm’s damage to the hospital is set to be spent on a highly controversial new $1.2 billion complex on an entirely different site, separated from the downtown core by an interstate highway.

The abandonment of the old Charity Hospital stands as a potent symbol of the many disappointments and betrayals experienced by the residents of New Orleans after Katrina. The loss has been a huge blow to the poor African-American community Charity served—an outcome that is all the more tragic, critics say, because it didn’t have to happen.

Charity flooded only in the basement during Katrina. In an extraordinary act of dedication and volunteerism, a 200-person medical and military team brought in a 600-kilowatt generator, pumped out the water and prepared the hospital for service. It was cleaned (to a condition better than before the storm) and was “medical ready” within weeks, according to doctors and military personnel present at the cleanup, as well as Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, the retired Army general who was commander of the joint task force on Katrina.

Read the whole infuriating thing. Print it out and carry it around with you to shove down the throat of the rethuglican moron who starts braying about running government like a business.

Elite Panic vs. Grassroots Commitment

No, we have not, in this New Gilded Age of the rich and powerful snatching every last dime from the middle class and poor, learned the lessons of Katrina.

Not even the first lesson, which is that Katrina is not about just what we did wrong and to avoid in future, but what we did right and how to keep that light shining.

Rebeccas Solnit at The Nation:

Most ordinary people behave remarkably well when their city is ripped apart by disaster. They did in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake; in New Orleans during Hurricane Betsy in 1965; in Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake; in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11; and in most disasters in most times and places.

Those in power, on the other hand, often run amok. They did in San Francisco in 1906, when an obsessive fear that private property would be misappropriated led to the mayor's shoot-to-kill proclamation; a massive military and national guard on the streets; and the death of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of civilians. Much like New Orleans ninety-nine years later, those who claimed to be protecting society were themselves the ones who were terrorizing and shooting. Earlier this year, Haitians were subjected to a similar rampage of what the disaster sociologists Lee Clarke and Caron Chess call "elite panic." For example, 15-year-old Fabienne Cherisma was shot to death in late January in Port-au-Prince for taking some small paintings from a shop in ruins, one of many casualties of the institutional obsession with protecting property instead of rescuing the trapped, the suffering and the needy.

Surviving the new era, in which climate change is already causing more, and more intense, disasters, means being prepared—with the truth. The truth is that in a disaster, ordinary people behave well overall; your chances of surviving a major disaster depend in part on the health and strength of your society going into it. Even so, countless individuals under corrupt governments, in New Orleans, in Mexico City, in Port-au-Prince, often rise to the occasion with deeply altruistic, creative and brave responses. These are the norm. The savagery of elite panic is the exception, but one that costs lives.

And grassroots commitment:

During the storm and its aftermath, far more people did heroic things, and these, perhaps even more than the crimes Thompson reported on, are the key missing stories of the storm. Before he was shot, Herrington was one of hundreds who got into boats and commenced rescuing people stranded in the floodwater. Some in surrounding communities sneaked past authorities to start rescuing people in the drowned city. Young gang members kept mothers of small children and babies and elderly people provisioned. People banded together in schools and other surviving structures and formed improvisational communities whose members watched out for one another.

As days turned into weeks and then months, volunteers from around the country came to feed the displaced and rebuild the city. Others took evacuees into their homes and helped them start new lives. Middle-aged Mennonites, young anarchists, musicians, members of the Rainbow Family of hippie communards, environmentalists, Baptists, Catholics, college students on spring break, ex–Black Panthers, movie stars, Habitat for Humanity carpenters, nurses and nearly every other kind of citizen showed up to save New Orleans. The outpouring of generosity and empathy was extraordinary. New Orleans was saved by love.

The plutocracy wants us to forget Katrina not just because it exposed the greed and selfishness of this nation's wealthy, but also because it revealed how we can conquer it.

Katrina is Not Over; It's Not Even Past

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, on downgrading toe a mere metaphor the reality of Katrina:

These days it is fashionable to use Katrina as a discursive tool.

In March 2009, Frank Rich wondered if AIG bonuses would become Obama's "Katrina moment." A few months later Politico reported that "Republicans hope General Motors is President Obama's Hurricane Katrina," only to be topped by the Washington Times, which asked, "Will Swine Flu Be Obama's Katrina?" By January of this year the Wall Street Journal readily declared that the Haiti earthquake was Obama's Katrina, while Arianna Huffington recently assured readers that it was jobs, not the BP oil spill, that would be Obama's Katrina.

Sometimes it feels like commentators can't wait for another Hurricane Katrina. After all, catastrophes focus public attention, reveal institutional shortcomings and evoke powerful emotional responses. Maybe it was inevitable that Hurricane Katrina would be reduced to a casual metaphor. For thirty years pundits have described political scandal involving intrigue and corruption with the handy suffix "gate." Now Katrina is shorthand for administration-crippling unresponsiveness. Mention Katrina to remind politicians that they need to look concerned and engaged when citizens are suffering. Deploy Katrina as a lesson in bureaucratic incompetence. Shake a scolding Katrina finger at leaders who seem overwhelmed by a current challenge. Katrina is unexpected disaster. Katrina is spectacular debacle. Katrina is the beginning of the end of a flawed leader.

Except that it is not. Eighty percent of the city flooded when the levees failed. More than 1,500 people were killed. Tens of thousands were permanently displaced. Billions in property was lost. The levee failure caused by Katrina wiped away entire communities, irreparably damaging homes, schools, churches and stores. It stole decades of family memories. It altered centuries of tradition in a matter of moments. It left a legacy of blight, economic devastation and personal suffering in its wake.

Each time Katrina, whose fifth anniversary is on the oil-soaked horizon, is evoked as a political metaphor, we risk a dangerous mediation of experience. These metaphors reduce catastrophe to an object lesson, implying that the effects of the disaster have been resolved, that the plot has been resolved and that the continued suffering of our fellow citizens is little more than a literary device.

Yes, New Orleans is a city whose cultural excess and eccentricity cry out for understanding through the literary, the poetic, the musical, the athletic and even the magical. But when we reduce Katrina to fiction—even really good fiction—we risk making it little more than a trope. The fifth anniversary of Katrina reminds us that to fully restore New Orleans, and to change it into a more just and equal city, we must build tangible political will based on sober assessments of the city's continuing challenges.

Katrina is still our Katrina. This story does not yet have an ending.

Read the whole thing.

Rebuild a Community by Restoring Its Books

Successful, responsible, valuable citizens are readers. Readers of books. Make the world a better place: Donate a book.

Katha Pollitt in The Nation:

St. Bernard Parish, three miles from downtown New Orleans, was hard hit by Hurricane Katrina. All its buildings were damaged, and all its schools were destroyed. Amazingly, little by little, the district is coming back, and on August 11, the last of its public schools, Andrew Jackson Middle School, will reopen with 350 students. Just in time for the BP oil disaster, you may be thinking. Yes. This is indeed a community that has been hit by catastrophe. And that’s where you come in.

ReadThis is a volunteer organization of people who love books and want to spread the joy of reading. (Truth in advertising: I’m on the board.) We collect new and gently used books for public schools and other underbooked places; we’ve sent books to a pediatric AIDS center, a homeless shelter and to troops in Iraq. This summer, we’ve taken on a big task: gathering 1400 books for the Andrew Jackson Middle School’s library, which was ruined along with everything else. Imagine a school library with no books and no money to buy books! Can you chip in by buying a book or two from the excellent and varied wishlist prepared by the school librarian? It has lots of terrific choices, from Harry Potter to Walter Dean Myers. As a bonus good deed, you’ll be helping the Garden District Book Shop, an independent book store.

Find out more about ReadThis here. If you’d like to get involved—collecting books and mailing them to the school, helping out at our table at the Brooklyn Flea on July 24 , or, if by some miracle you happen to be a publisher, donating a box or two shiny new age-appropriate books -- email us at readthisorg@gmail.com. For latest updates, join us on Facebook.

Here in Kentucky, Jake at Page One is launching his own Book Donation Project. Check it out.

Oil Spill and Katrina: Both Conservative Policy Disasters

The Gulf oil gusher catastrophe is both the twin and the opposite of the Katrina disaster, but not in the ways repugs want you to think:

Kevin Drum explains:

Katrina was an example of the type of disaster that the federal government is specifically tasked with handling. And for most of the 90s, it was very good at handling them. But when George Bush became president and Joe Allbaugh became director of FEMA, everything changed. Allbaugh neither knew nor cared about disaster preparedness. For ideological reasons, FEMA was downsized and much of its work outsourced. When Allbaugh left after less than two years on the job, he was replaced by the hapless Michael Brown and the agency was downgraded and broken up yet again. By the time Katrina hit, the upper levels of FEMA were populated largely with political appointees with no disaster preparedness experience and the agency was simply not up to the job of dealing with a huge storm anymore.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion is almost the exact opposite. There is no federal expertise in capping oil blowouts. There is no federal agency tasked specifically with repairing broken well pipes. There is no expectation that the federal government should be able to respond instantly to a disaster like this. There never has been. For better or worse, it's simply not something that's ever been considered the responsibility of the federal government.1

In the case of Katrina, you have the kind of disaster that, contra Levin, can be addressed by the federal government. In the case of the BP spill, we're faced with a technological challenge that can't be. They could hardly be more different.

But there is one way in which they're similar. As Levin says, Katrina would have been an immense disaster no matter what. But it was far worse than it had to be because a conservative administration, one that fundamentally disdained the mechanics of government for ideological reasons, decided that FEMA wasn't very important. Likewise, the BP blowout was made more likely because that same administration decided that government regulation of private industry wasn't very important and turned the relevant agency into a joke. If you believe that government is the problem, not the solution, and if you actually run the country that way for eight years, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But we shouldn't pretend it's inevitable.

1Just to be clear: I'm talking here only about capping the leak itself. As T.R. Donoghue points out, the feds do have an overall plan for responding to and cleaning up spills.

The Real Katrina Criminals: Vigilantes

A.C. Thompson and The Nation document yet another ignored post-Katrina outrage.

There was criminal violence in New Orleans after Katrina, all right, but it wasn't perpetrated by gang members, looters or the black underclass blamed by even Mayor Ray Nagin.

No, the worst violence, including cold-blooded murder, was committed by white vigilantes, who used the evacuation of poor blacks from flooded areas as an opportunity for some ethnic cleansing.

Over the course of an eighteen-month investigation, I tracked down figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of Algiers Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the bloodshed. I interviewed police officers, forensic pathologists, firefighters, historians, medical doctors and private citizens, and studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of state death records. What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the days after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as its government collapsed.

Herrington, Collins and Alexander's experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs--Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins--in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

SNIP

Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all--white against black--that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful"--her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.