[News] The Age of Katrina - Not Obama

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Age of Katrina - Not Obama

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18591
August 28, 2008
By Glen Ford
Source: 
<http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=755&Itemid=1>BAR 


Barack Obama supporters would have you believe that their candidate's 
presidential nomination is the glorious, straight-line culmination of 
the Black Freedom Struggle whose previous high-water mark, they 
believe, was the 1963 March on Washington, the 45th anniversary of 
which coincides with this week's Democratic National Convention. 
Obama's public relations agents attempt to bracket the history of 
modern U.S. race relations within a marketable 45-year period that 
begins with a snippet from Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" 
speech and ends - for the time being -  with the grand peroration of 
Obama's acceptance speech before the cheering multitudes, in Denver. 
These dates are presented as the bookends of Black struggle - to be 
amended and extended when President Obama delivers his State of the 
Union Address, in January.

To the most hopelessly besotted Obamites, their candidate's speech on 
Thursday will herald a crack in time, after which posterity will 
speak of Before-Obama (BO) and After-Obama (AO) eras, and the 
transcendental Age of Obama.

Having conjured up a nonexistent "mass movement" to describe what is 
actually a corporate financed and directed electoral campaign that 
has not championed a single issue worthy of historical note (don't 
dare cite partial Iraq withdrawal and for-profit health care 
schemes), the Democrats now patch Dr. King's speech into the prologue 
to the Book of Obama for the purpose of consigning real mass 
agitation strategies to the past, for all time.

Yet, the unedited version of history - the real deal - commemorates 
another imminent anniversary, one that starkly illuminates the true 
political character of the age: Katrina. The events that followed the 
hurricane's arrival in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, would reveal 
the diabolical intentions of U.S. rulers towards African Americans: 
to methodically remove Blacks from the central cities of the nation. 
The ongoing, orchestrated catastrophe also demonstrated beyond doubt 
the moral bankruptcy and political impotence of Black national 
"leadership." As I wrote in 
<http://www.blackcommentator.com/156/156_cover_battle_for_no.html>October, 
2005:

"If Black America fails to configure its human, organizational and 
material resources to effectively resist the theft and ultimate 
disfigurement of New Orleans, then we will be forced to confront the 
existence of fundamental, crippling flaws in the African American polity."

The "the man-made disaster in the Gulf" provided what may have been 
"the last chance to build a real Movement, encompassing the broadest 
sectors of Black America." Certainly, a critical mass of "the people" 
were eager to intervene. Hardly a Black church was without some 
Katrina-aid project, thousands of students journeyed to New Orleans 
as soon as logistics were made available, and popular awareness of 
the raw injustice of government policy was universal. But pure rot 
pervaded national Black political circles - as was clearly evident 
within six months.

"The Congressional Black Caucus, which claims to be the 'conscience 
of the congress,' has shown itself to be an appendage of the white 
House leadership," I wrote in 
<http://www.blackcommentator.com/172/172_cover_katrina_shock.html>February, 
2006. "They slavishly followed Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's command 
to make the Democratic Party look good - as opposed to the 
Republicans - rather than directly address the crisis that was 
affecting their own people.

"Forty-one of the forty-two Black members of congress obeyed Pelosi's 
edict, that the House Committee on Katrina be boycotted. They 
accepted the order that Democratic legislators would not attend the 
meetings of the Katrina committee, because it was stacked against the 
Democratic Party."

Only Cynthia McKinney, who was soon to lose her House seat from 
suburban Atlanta, bucked Pelosi's edict to boycott the Katrina 
hearings. Pelosi's unspoken, but transparent, motive was to distance 
the Democratic Party from issues considered too "Black" in the run-up 
to congressional elections in November, 2006. The CBC, as a body, 
weighed compliance with their party leader versus rescue of Black New 
Orleans, and chose Pelosi - who would continue to smother the Katrina 
issue after Democrats gained control of the House.

Katrina, that horrific assault on Black humanity, dignity and 
civilizational rights - the Right to Return and participate in the 
reconstruction of their city - was (and remains) the greatest test of 
Black leadership since the days of generalized White Terror in the 
South, following the collapse of Reconstruction. As the world 
watched, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were 
<http://www.ameripundit.com/bc1.php>effectively evicted from their 
city and have since been prevented by every foul and evil means 
possible from returning.

There was method to this madness. The hurricane had simply provided 
"disaster capitalism" with an instant route to gentrification, a goal 
that takes years to accomplish by the usual methods of public and 
private urban coercion. As I wrote in 
<http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=210&Itemid=33>May, 
2007, corporate Power had shown its hand:

"Corporate planners and developers believed they had been blessed by 
nature when Katrina drowned New Orleans, washing away in days the 
problem-people and neighborhoods that would ordinarily require years 
to remove in order to clear the way for 'renaissance.'  Greed led to 
unseemly speed, revealing in a flash the outlines of the urban vision 
that would be imposed on the wreckage of New Orleans. As in a film on 
fast-forward, the 'plot' (in both meanings of the word) unfolded in a 
rush before our eyes: Once the Black and poor were removed, an urban 
environment would be created implacably hostile to their return. The 
public sector - except that which serves business, directly or 
indirectly - would under no circumstances be resurrected, so as to 
leave little 'space' for the re-implantation of unwanted populations 
(schools, utility infrastructure, public and affordable private 
housing, public safety, health care)."

Human rights lawyer Bill Quigley, who has documented the river of 
crimes perpetrated against the people of New Orleans since August 29, 
2005, has compiled a 
"<http://www.opednews.com/articles/Katrina-Pain-Index--Three-by-Bill-Quigley-080824-346.html>Katrina 
Pain Index - New Orleans Three Years Later."  It shows a city in 
which even the size of population is in dispute. The City Council 
claims 321,000 residents, the U.S. Census Bureau says only 239,000 
remain - a loss of 132,000 or 214,000, depending on who you believe, 
from a pre-Katrina population of 453,000, 67 percent Black. No one 
can agree on the current racial breakdown.

Local, state and national forces, public and private, have conspired 
relentlessly to keep New Orleans unlivable to the unwanted classes. 
Public transportation is down 80 percent. A majority of Black 
residents were renters, yet no renters have gotten anything from the 
$10 billion Road Home Community Block Grant. Rents are up 46 percent, 
most public housing demolished or marked for destruction, while 
71,657 "vacant, ruined unoccupied houses" anchor metropolitan New 
Orleans in social death. The city is number one in physical death by 
murder, while psychiatric hospital beds are down 56 percent. Three 
hundred Louisiana National Guardsmen patrol the streets, in lieu of cops.

Is it any wonder that only 11 percent of families have returned to 
the Lower Ninth Ward? The Katrina crisis continues because Power is 
determined that the Black and poor will not be permitted re-entry.

Barack Obama denies that racism plays any role in this. "There's been 
much attention in the press about the fact that those who were left 
behind in New Orleans were disproportionately poor and African 
American. I've said publicly that I do not subscribe to the notion 
that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the Department of 
Homeland Security was racially-based. The ineptitude was colorblind," 
said Obama on his web site, September 6, 2005. He still says so.

For three years, Power has ensured that the New Orleans Black 
Diaspora remains scattered. For the forces of organized racism, it is 
a success story; there's nothing inept about it. Barack Obama will do 
nothing to facilitate the return of Black New Orleans, since no 
"malice" was intended. "...I see no evidence of active malice, but I 
see a continuation of passive indifference on the part of our 
government towards the least of these."  But Obama is worse than 
"passively indifferent." By denying the reality of racism, he 
transforms the monumental injustices of Katrina into motiveless 
mistakes that somehow continue to replicate themselves to the 
disadvantage of the same group of people.

There is no reason for the Black New Orleans Diaspora to expect any 
relief from an Obama presidency. In fact, there is no reason to 
expect anything historically unusual or unique from a President Obama 
other than his physical Blackness.

Katrina, on the other hand, is the most dramatic manifestation of an 
implacable racism coiled deeply in the ruling structures of American 
society, primed to remove concentrations of Blacks from places of 
value. This overarching imperative to "Negro removal" can become 
aggressively active in an instant - as we learned in the days 
following August 29, 2005 - or proceed about its work block by block 
over years, until the offending population is eliminated. Fast or 
slow, the end results are the same: seven of the top 12 cities in 
Black population saw a loss in African Americans as a percentage of 
total residents between 1990 and 2000. (See BAR 
"<http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=210&Itemid=33>No 
Black Plan for the Cities, Despite Lessons of Katrina," May 9, 2007.)

The pattern becomes clear. As we reported:

"...the seven cities that became less Black in the Nineties [New 
York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Washington, Dallas, Atlanta] are 
all concentrated corporate headquarters locations or, in the case of 
Washington, DC, the headquarters of the federal government. These are 
places that corporate and finance capital are most keen to 'make 
over' in order to provide the urban 'ambience' believed most amenable 
to their employees, management and clients, and for the general sake 
of corporate prestige."

Slow-acting Katrinas in the form of gentrification are what Black 
folks can expect - and must find ways to resist and defeat - from the 
ruling Lords of Capital for the foreseeable future, Obama or no 
Obama. There will be no "age" named after the handsome, articulate 
and oh-so-slick, but otherwise ordinary corporate candidate for 
president who used to call himself Barry. This is the Age of Katrina, 
and Barry is part of the problem.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at 
<mailto:Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com>Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.comThis 
e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript 
enabled to view it .





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