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hurricane katrina
'Generation on Fire': Sunrise Movement Activists to March 400 Miles From New Orleans to Houston
"We're living in constant crisis: hurricanes, superstorms, jobs that break our bodies and could be taken away at any minute. This is an emergency, but it isn't an accident."
May 10, 2021
Following the path of thousands of families who permanently fled the lowest-lying major city in the United States in the wake of storms like Hurricane Katrina, a group of activists from the youth-led Sunrise Movement on Monday began a 400-mile march from New Orleans to Houston to demand President Joe Biden include "good jobs for all" and a Civilian Climate Corps in his $2.26 trillion infrastructure plan.
"This march symbolizes my story as a climate refugee who fled New Orleans and moved to Houston after Hurricane Katrina destroyed my city. This is me claiming agency over my future."
--Chante Davis, Sunrise Movement
Participants in the Sunrise Movement's "Generation on Fire" campaign set out from the New Orleans Superdome--the site of so much suffering and a symbol of state failure following Katrina in 2005--and walked along the Mississippi River following a delay due to flash flood warnings.
The climate campaigners are marching "to make clear that young people are unsatisfied with Biden and Congress' incremental, watered down proposals," according to a statement from the group.
With Democrats in control of both Congress and the White House, "young people expect more from their political leaders," the statement added.
\u201cDancing in New Orleans with @sunrisemvmt @smvmtgenonfire at beginning of their 400 mile trek for climate justice. \n\nTeens shouldn\u2019t have to make this kind of sacrifice for good jobs and an end to the climate crisis. \n\n#GulfSouthMarch #Project400 #GenerationOnFire #NOLAtoHOU\u201d— Elias Newman \ud83d\udd25 (@Elias Newman \ud83d\udd25) 1620678211
The activists will stop in cities and towns along the march route to stage protests, rallies, and visioning sessions with community members. They will be joined by political leaders, environmental justice advocates, and other supporters.
"As a young person in the Gulf South, we're living in constant crisis: hurricanes, superstorms, jobs that break our bodies and could be taken away at any minute," said Chante Davis, a high school senior and Sunrise Movement organizer.
"This is an emergency, but it isn't an accident," Davis continued. "We know there is money that can provide living wages, stop the climate crisis, and take us back from the edge of survival. There's always money to rebuild rich neighborhoods after storms, always money for petrochemical plants and oil wells, always money for border walls and jails."
"This march symbolizes my story as a climate refugee who fled New Orleans and moved to Houston after Hurricane Katrina destroyed my city," Davis added. "This is me claiming agency over my future."
\u201cA statement from Sunriser Chante Davis https://t.co/mtH1bpGf7D\u201d— Resist Reckless Redevelopers (@Resist Reckless Redevelopers) 1620667118
The White House has touted Biden's American Jobs Plan as "an investment in America that will create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country's infrastructure, and position the United States to out-compete China."
However, since the plan was unveiled on March 31, Sunrise Movement and other climate campaigners have said it needs to go further.
Sunrise Movement executive director Varshini Prakash said at the time that the plan "lacks a commitment to the full scale of transformation that is needed of our economy."
"We cannot miss this moment," Prakash insisted. "Congress must strengthen this plan and Biden must pass it into law as quickly as possible. If Republicans don't cooperate, do it without them. If the filibuster obstructs progress, abolish it. Money needs to go out the door and flow into communities now."
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Texas Freeze Illustrates a Failed Economic System
We need to begin changing our fundamental ethic, from "I'm getting mine. Screw you," to "We're all in this together." Because we are.
Feb 19, 2021
The Texas Freeze illustrates just some of the shortcomings of conservative economics as a basis for public good. The nation's problems will only get worse the longer we pretend private solutions are best for all situations.
"In Texas, everybody agreed that everybody needed a robust electricity grid. But nobody wanted to pay for it."
But notice something important: the mainstream media never discusses the fact that a failed economic system is at the heart of so many of our nation's woes. And they won't, either, because they are the public relations arm of the owners of that system and the owners are making out like bandits. So, we need to discuss the problems ourselves.
The first problem with conservative economics is that it wants to imagine that only private economic interactions are legitimate, and that public intervention in the economy is illegitimate.
The truth is that public goods are ones that benefit everybody, but where it is difficult to assign individual ownership for the benefits. That makes it difficult to collect individual payments for the services. The result is underinvestment in public goods.
Hurricane Karina, in New Orleans, in 2005, exposed the failure of inadequate investment in public infrastructure. In that case, it was in the levees that were supposed to protect the city, but that had not been sufficiently maintained, for years.
Adequate investment would have cost tens of millions of dollars, but would have averted tens of billions of dollars of damage. Private motivations made such allocations uneconomical. More than 1,800 people died and the city has still not fully recovered.
The coronavirus pandemic exposed the chronic underinvestment in public health infrastructure. The U.S. response to the pandemic has been one of the worst in the world, with almost half a million people dead because of it. We see its effects, still, today, in the haltering testing and vaccination programs.
The damage to the society from the pandemic and the failed response has been incalculable, though we can calculate that 2020 was the worst year of economic performance in 75 years. Tens of millions of people have been harmed, many grievously, with poor and minority communities--those with the least economic power--bearing the brunt of the costs.
A second problem with conservative economics is that it wants to maximize private profits in the short run, so fails to invest adequately in the long run.
"The Republican response is typical Republican blame-shucking: it was the Green New Deal, which doesn't exist except as a concept, and AOC, a second-term Congressperson who lives in another state."
In Texas, everybody agreed that everybody needed a robust electricity grid. But nobody wanted to pay for it. It has been known since 2011, the last crisis, that this kind of freeze would inflict this kind of damage on this many people. But rather than bear the honest costs, Republican authorities up and down the state simply kicked the can down the road.
We're now down the road and the effect is catastrophic. The Republican response is typical Republican blame-shucking: it was the Green New Deal, which doesn't exist except as a concept, and AOC, a second-term Congressperson who lives in another state. It's beyond irresponsible. It is immature, and reckless.
The deindustrialization of the U.S. economy over the past four decades is a case of issues one and two, above, coming together. Private parties dismantled the largest manufacturing base in the world in order to maximize private profits in the short run. It devastated the larger economy and society, giving rise to the seething rage that is Trumpism.
The U.S. has an unambiguous public interest in a vibrant economic foundation. But that is being undermined by leaving so many essential decisions only in private hands. The fallout--Trumpism, and its efforts to reverse a national election--threatens our democracy, a negative spillover from the economy to the constitutional basis of our society itself.
A final flaw in conservative economic thinking is that adaptation to change is resisted unless the benefits can be captured by those who already hold power and wealth.
This is why it is impossible to reform the U.S. health system. We pay twice what other industrial nations pay for health care but get inferior results. People suffer higher costs and worse outcomes, while the nation bears a burden to GDP of about 10%, making the entire economy that much less competitive in world markets.
That excess 10% of GDP--amounting to about $2 trillion a year--flows into the pockets of the very rich, who own the pharmaceutical and hospital and insurance companies. And media companies. They invest billions in politics and media to protect trillions in profits, meaning that things are all but impossible to change.
Similarly, with climate change. The science is clear: pumping carbon into the atmosphere threatens cataclysmic planetary damage. But the oil companies have a death-grip on Congress, with the result that something as beneficial as the Green New Deal is invoked only as an epithet by conservatives rather than as the godsend that it could be.
If we cannot, will not, adapt to a changing climate by changing our energy choices, we will inflict existential damage on the planet and every life form on it. And that, to protect the stratospheric profits of a few dozen oil companies and the few hundred families that own most of them.
"If we cannot, will not, adapt to a changing climate by changing our energy choices, we will inflict existential damage on the planet and every life form on it."
Underinvestment in public goods. Short term profit maximization. And resolute resistance to essential change. These limitations of our conservative economic ideology inflict trillions of dollars a year of costs on the American economy and all of its members. Unless they are changed, they will continue to enervate, to weaken and drain, the economy, the constitutional order, the society, and, ultimately, the planet.
The mainstream media are not going to inform us of these failings because the system is working like a charm for its owners. They have been glutted with the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. That is the economic news the media should be talking about.
Don't hold your breath. We need to begin changing our fundamental ethic, from "I'm getting mine. Screw you," to "We're all in this together." Because we are. Pretending we're not, in order to satisfy a destructive ideology, doesn't change the outcomes, or reduce the temperature. Just ask the people freezing in Texas.
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15 Years After Hurricane Katrina, It's Time to Demilitarize Disaster Relief
Instead of funneling hundreds of billions of dollars each year into militarism, we can invest in the infrastructure of care we need to keep each other safe.
Sep 03, 2020
Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, it remains a cautionary tale for how distorted budget priorities can result in militaristic, rather than humanitarian, disaster response.
After broken levees left 80% of New Orleans submerged and tens-of-thousands stranded, news reels fixated on scenes of "looting" and lawlessness. Rich with racist overtones echoed in coverage of Black-led movements today, media narratives described the city as "under siege," as more of a war zone than a humanitarian crisis. The thinly-coded language depicted the predominantly poor and Black population--struggling to survive one the deadliest storms in U.S. history--as aggressors. Amidst such rhetoric there was another violent reality: white vigilante violence and police brutality that terrorized the stranded population.
And then there were the private contractors. While some were hired by businesses and wealthy individuals to protect property, the notorious private security firm Blackwater arrived in New Orleans 36 hours after the levees broke on a federal contract. As police seized weapons from civilians, heavily armed private security patrolled the city in SUVs and unmarked vehicles.
Alongside private security forces, 58,000 troops were deployed to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Ten days after the storm hit, reports described the city as an "armed camp" patrolled by local, state, and federal law enforcement officers, National Guard troops, and active-duty soldiers. Post-Katrina New Orleans quickly became a highly militarized federal relief effort.
While Blackwater operators described their mission as "securing neighborhoods," Louisiana National Guard's Joint Task Force Commander declared, "This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We're going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control." Even community groups offering mutual aid felt treated as threats.
The role of active-duty troops in any domestic disaster is limited under the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits use of federal troops in domestic law enforcement. Active-duty troops are frequently called upon to help in a disaster, but they take support roles such as search and rescue. Federal troops assisting in a disaster leave law enforcement to the National Guard troops, who are subject to the dual authority of states and the federal government. As the recent violent repression of Black-led uprisings against police brutality and systemic racism have demonstrated, the massive U.S. military budget adds military might to policing in spite of federal regulations limiting the role of federal troops in law enforcement.
After Hurricane Katrina, President Bush suggested that the role of the military in disasters should be expanded. The spread of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year renewed calls for the creation of a disaster response command within the military to respond to threats including future pandemics and climate-linked natural disasters. We only need to look as far as Hurricane Laura, which made landfall last week as a Category 5, to recognize that climate change brings stronger storms that put a growing number of people at risk. That's not to mention the summer of oppressive heat waves and extreme wildfires setting pollution records. Each crisis compounds the next.
And yet--just like the U.S. military is not a public health organization and should not be in charge of a public health crisis, the U.S. military is far from a humanitarian organization and should not manage disaster response. It's clear that in a climate-changed future, we need more resources to meet the greater-humanitarian needs that more ecological disasters will bring. We can't meet humanitarian ends with militarized means, but when the only robustly funded agencies are militarized, how can we expect our responses to crises not to be?
For the Pentagon, climate change is yet another security issue requiring more militarism. For defense contractors, its a business opportunity: there's a lucrative industry that revolves around a militarized, security-led, and for-profit approach to climate adaptation and disaster response.
But there's another way. Instead of funneling hundreds of billions of dollars each year into militarism, we can invest in the infrastructure of care we need to keep each other safe. Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina, the need to demilitarize disaster relief is clearer than ever.
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