Important Info Via Jordan Flaherty
Friends and Allies,
New Orleans filmmaker Lily Keber and I recently completed our first work as correspondents for Democracy Now, with a special report we filmed in the hours before Gustav landed in Louisiana. The report features Saket Soni from the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, Bill Quigley from Loyola Law Clinic, Carol Kolinchak from Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, and many others. We tried to highlight some of the concerns people feel around both the evacuation, and the state of New Orleans three years after Katrina.
The report aired on Democracy Now on Tuesday. Below are two links to the report, as posted on Youtube. The first was posted by Democracy Now and has higher resolution video, but the end is cut off. The
second version was posted by us, and is lower-res, but the end is intact. The third link is the link for the entire episode of Democracy Now that aired the report.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dxtoUreG-4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtfcMkdoNhk
http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2008/9/2
For more info and current updates, including info from much harder hit places in Louisiana like Houma, and also reports from the virtually unmentioned casualties in Haiti, please see the following links:
http://gustavsolidarity.org
http://gustavinfo.org/
http://www.haitiaction.net/
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080903/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/tropical_weather
Thanks to everyone for your thoughts and kind wishes.
in solidarity,
Jordan
September 8th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Naive zealots like you and Bill Quigley who out of some simplistic, paper thin idealism advocate retaining the Housing Projects pose a deadly threat to the exact people you claim to be supporting - in whose suffering you enshroud yourselves. Funny how this report doesn’t mention the poll of former Project residents in which 70% said they would prefer to never live in a Project again.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/07/katrina/main3919229.shtml?source=RSS&attr=_3919229
Of course, in the eyes of the Vanguard, this is merely a minor footnote to the BIG PICTURE ™ with the simple answer. An asterix on the great workers struggle, an issue to be swept aside, the actual people who live here don’t know what they are talking about and should be lectured by 27 year old upper middle class college kids from Portland on the true meaning of socialism and urban planning.
IMO, you make the left look ridiculous and thereby empower the Chertoffs and Cheneys of the world.
It’s very easy for people from out of town to try to sum up the complex extremely serious problems of New Orleans in simplistic sound bytes to transform them into a guilt-stick with which to flail ineffectually at the NeoCons and NeoLiberals in the media and intraweb (and give yourself a warm, fuzzy mantle of self righteousness in the process), but in fashioning this little information package for Liberal consumers you leave those of us who actually permanently live in this community that much more evicerated in facing the VERY REAL problems we face.
I lost my house in Katrina. Three people I know were murdered here in the last year and a half. If Gustav had hit at the size the National Hurricane Center originally estimated the Industrial Canal floodwall would have gone down and my currrent house would be gone now. I know it’s inconvenient, but I and many other citizens of this city would prefer more than just two dimensional platitudes when it comes to disseminating information about our city. Fox, MSNBC, and CNN already have that covered.