How to Destroy an African-American City in Thirty Three Steps – Lessons from Katrina

Step One. Delay. If there is one word that sums up the way to destroy an African-American city after a disaster, that word is DELAY. If you are in doubt about any of the following steps – just remember to delay and you will probably be doing the right thing.

Step Two. When a disaster is coming, do not arrange a public evacuation. Rely only on individual resources. People with cars and money for hotels will leave. The elderly, the disabled and the poor will not be able to leave. Most of those without cars – 25% of households of New Orleans, overwhelmingly African-Americans – will not be able to leave. Most of the working poor, overwhelmingly African-American, will not be able to leave. Many will then permanently accuse the victims who were left behind of creating their own human disaster because of their own poor planning. It is critical to start by having people blame the victims for their own problems.

Step Three. When the disaster hits make certain the national response is overseen by someone who has no experience at all handling anything on a large scale, particularly disasters. In fact, you can even inject some humor into the response – have the disaster coordinator be someone whose last job was the head of a dancing horse association.

Step Four. Make sure that the President and national leaders remain aloof and only slightly concerned. This sends an important message to the rest of the country.

Step Five. Make certain the local, state, and national governments do not respond in a coordinated effective way. This will create more chaos on the ground.

Step Six. Do not bring in food or water or communications right away. This will make everyone left behind more frantic and create incredible scenes for the media.

Step Seven. Make certain that the media focus of the disaster is not on the heroic community work of thousands of women, men and young people helping the elderly, the sick and the trapped survive, but mainly on acts of people looting. Also spread and repeat the rumors that people trapped on rooftops are shooting guns not to attract attention and get help, but AT the helicopters. This will reinforce the message that “those people” left behind are different from the rest of us and are beyond help.

Step Eight. Refuse help from other countries. If we accept help, it looks like we cannot or choose not to handle this problem ourselves. This cannot be the message. The message we want to put out over and over is that we have plenty of resources and there is plenty of help. Then if people are not receiving help, it is their own fault. This should be done quietly.

Step Nine. Once the evacuation of those left behind actually starts, make sure people do not know where they are going or have any way to know where the rest of their family has gone. In fact, make sure that African-Americans end up much farther away from home than others.

Step Ten. Make sure that when government assistance finally has to be given out, it is given out in a totally arbitrary way. People will have lost their homes, jobs, churches, doctors, schools, neighbors and friends. Give them a little bit of money, but not too much. Make people dependent. Then cut off the money. Then give it to some and not others. Refuse to assist more than one person in every household. This will create conflicts where more than one generation lived together. Make it impossible for people to get consistent answers to their questions. Long lines and busy phones will discourage people from looking for help.

Step Eleven. Insist the President suspend federal laws requiring living wages and affirmative action for contractors working on the disaster. While local workers are still displaced, import white workers from outside the city for the high-paying jobs like crane operators and bulldozers. Import Latino workers from outside the city for the low-paying dangerous jobs. Make sure to have elected officials, black and white, blame job problems on the lowest wage immigrant workers. This will create divisions between black and brown workers that can be exploited by those at the top. Because many of the brown workers do not have legal papers, those at the top will not have to worry about paying decent wages, providing health insurance, following safety laws, unemployment compensation, workers compensation, or union organizing. They become essentially disposable workers – use them, then lose them.

Step Twelve. Whatever you do, keep people away from their city for as long as possible. This is the key to long-term success in destroying the African-American city. Do not permit people to come home. Keep people guessing about what is going to happen and when it is going to happen. Set numerous deadlines and then break them.
This will discourage people and make it increasingly difficult for people to return.

Step Thirteen. When you finally have to reopen the city, make sure to reopen the African-American sections last. This will aggravate racial tensions in the city and create conflicts between those who are able to make it home and those who are not.

Step Fourteen. When the big money is given out, make sure it is all directed to homeowners and not to renters. This is particularly helpful in a town like New Orleans that was majority African-American and majority renter. Then, after you have excluded renters, mess the program for the homeowners up so that they must wait for years to get money to fix their homes.

Step Fifteen. Close down all the public schools for months. This will prevent families in the public school system, overwhelmingly African-Americans, from coming home.

Step Sixteen. Fire all the public school teachers, teacher aides, cafeteria workers and bus drivers and de-certify the teachers union – the largest in the state. This will primarily hurt middle class African Americans and make them look for jobs elsewhere.

Step Seventeen. Even better, take this opportunity to flip the public school system into a charter system and push foundations and the government to extra money to the new charter schools. Give the schools with the best test scores away first. Then give the least flooded schools away next. Turn 70% of schools into charters so that the kids with good test scores or solid parental involvement will go to the charters. That way the kids with average scores, or learning disabilities, or single parent families who are still displaced are kept segregated away from the “good” kids. You will have to set up a few schools for those other kids, but make sure those schools do not get any extra money, do not have libraries, nor doors on the toilets, nor enough teachers. In fact, because of this, you better make certain there are more security guards than teachers.

Step Eighteen. Let the market do what it does best. When rent goes up 70%, say there is nothing we can do about it. This will have two great results. It will keep many former residents away from the city and it will make landlords happy. If wages go up, immediately import more outside workers and wages will settle down.

Step Nineteen. Make sure all the predominately white suburbs surrounding the African-American city make it very difficult for the people displaced from the city to return to the metro area. Have one suburb refuse to allow any new subsidized housing at all. Have the Sheriff of another threaten to stop and investigate anyone wearing dreadlocks. Throw in a little humor and have one nearly all-white suburb pass a law which makes it illegal for homeowners to rent to people other than their blood relatives! The courts may strike these down, but it will take time and the message will be clear – do not think about returning to the suburbs.

Step Twenty. Reduce public transportation by more than 80%. The people without cars will understand the message.

Step Twenty One. Keep affordable housing to a minimum. Use money instead to reopen the Superdome and create tourism campaigns. Refuse to boldly create massive homeownership opportunities for former renters. Delay re-opening apartment complexes in African American neighborhoods. As long as less than half the renters can return to affordable housing, they will not return.

Step Twenty Two. Keep all public housing closed. Since it is 100% African-American, this is a no-brainer. Make sure to have African-Americans be the people who deliver the message. This step will also help by putting more pressure on the rental market as 5000 more families will then have to compete for rental housing with low-income workers. This will provide another opportunity for hundreds of millions of government funds to be funneled to corporations when these buildings are torn down and developers can build up other less-secure buildings in their place. Make sure to tell the 5000 families evicted from public housing that you are not letting them back for their own good. Tell them you are trying to save them from living in a segregated neighborhood. This will also send a good signal – if the government can refuse to allow people back, private concerns are free to do the same or worse.

Step Twenty Three. Shut down as much public health as possible. Sick and elderly people and moms with little kids need access to public healthcare. Keep the public hospital, which hosted about 350,000 visits a year before the disaster, closed. Keep the neighborhood clinics closed. Put all the pressure on the private healthcare facilities and provoke economic and racial tensions there between the insured and uninsured.

Step Twenty Four. Close as many public mental healthcare providers as possible. The trauma of the disaster will seriously increase stress on everyone. Left untreated, medical experts tell us this will dramatically increase domestic violence, self-medication and drug and alcohol abuse, and of course crime.

Step Twenty Five. Keep the city environment unfriendly to women. Women were already widely discriminated against before the storm. Make sure that you do not reopen day care centers. This, combined with the lack of healthcare, lack of affordable housing, and lack of transportation, will keep moms with kids away. If you can keep women with kids away, the city will destroy itself.

Step Twenty Six. Create and maintain an environment where black on black crime will flourish. As long as you can keep parents out of town, keep the schools hostile to kids without parents, keep public healthcare closed, make only low-paying jobs available, not fund social workers or prosecutors or public defenders or police, and keep chaos the norm, young black men will certainly kill other young black men. To increase the visibility of the crime problem, bring in the National Guard in fatigues to patrol the streets in their camouflage hummers.

Step Twenty Seven. Strip the local elected predominately African American government of its powers. Make certain the money that is coming in to fix up the region is not under their control. Privatize as much as you can as quickly as you can – housing, healthcare, and education for starters. When in doubt, privatize. Create an appointed commission of people who have no experience in government to make all the decisions. In fact, it is better to create several such commissions, that way no one will really be sure who is in charge and there will be much more delay and conflict. Treat the local people like they are stupid, you know what is best for them much better than they do.

Step Twenty Eight. Create lots of planning processes but give them no authority. Overlap them where possible. Give people conflicting signals whether their neighborhood will be allowed to rebuild or be turned into green space. This will create confusion, conflict and aggravation. People will blame the officials closest to them – the local African-American officials, even though they do not have any authority to do anything about these plans since they do not control the rebuilding money.

Step Twenty Nine. Hold an election but make it very difficult for displaced voters to participate. In fact, do not allow any voting in any place outside the state even we do it for other countries and even though hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced. This is very important because when people are not able to vote, those who have been able to return can say “Well, they didn’t even vote, so I guess they are not interested in returning.”

Step Thirty. Get the elected officials out of the way and make room for corporations to make a profit. There are billions to be made in this process for well-connected national and international corporations. There is so much chaos that no one will be able to figure out exactly where the money went for a long time. There is no real attempt to make sure that local businesses, especially African-American businesses, get contracts – at best they get modest subcontracts from the corporations which got the big money. Make sure the authorities prosecute a couple of little people who ripped off $2000 – that will temporarily satisfy people who know they are being ripped off and divert attention from the big money rip-offs. This will also provide another opportunity to blame the victims – as critics can say “Well, we gave them lots of money, they must have wasted it, how much more can they expect from us?”

Step Thirty One. Keep people’s attention diverted from the African-American city. Pour money into Iraq instead of the Gulf Coast. Corporations have figured out how to make big bucks whether we are winning or losing the war. It is easier to convince the country to support war – support for cities is much, much tougher. When the war goes badly, you can change the focus of the message to supporting the troops. Everyone loves the troops. No one can say we all love African-Americans. Focus on terrorists – that always seems to work.

Step Thirty Two. Refuse to talk about or look seriously at race. Condemn anyone who dares to challenge the racism of what is going on – accuse them of “playing the race card” or say they are paranoid. Criticize people who challenge the exclusion of African-Americans as people who “just want to go back to the bad old days.” Repeat the message that you want something better for everyone. Use African American spokespersons where possible.

Step Thirty-Three. Repeat these steps.

Note to readers. Every fact in this list actually happened and continues to happen in New Orleans after Katrina.

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach Bill at Quigley@loyno.edu

Random Art Piece

artwork by Natasha Mayers

Summer Tunes

Tomorrow marks the first day of summer, so what better way to celebrate then with some good summer tunes.

I like to warm up with the Isley Brothers version of SUMMER BREEZE which has a rocking guitar solo and although I love the original by Seals and Crofts, this one just makes you turn the volume up a bit more.

One of my favorite summertime bands is/was LUSCIOUS JACKSON.



All their albums are delicious summer grooves:

In Search of Manny (1992)
Natural Ingredients (1994)
Fever In Fever Out (1996)
Electric Honey (1999)

I remember living in Montana playing Natural Ingredients and dreaming of escaping to the streets of NYC.
I also remember working at the Angelika when I first moved here and running into Vivian and Jill. I didnt' say anything but I remember telling all my co-workers about them. they were like "who?"

anyway I know that Gabby and Jill have new albums out: Gabby's new album is called "Gimme Splash" due out June 26 on Latchkey Recordings




and Jill's "City Beach" is out now on Militia.




Here is an interview with Jill from Gothamist:


Jill Cunniff keeps a blog (a "MamaLog") about being a mom and a musician in New York, but you probably know her best as the lead singer and bass player of early-90s band Luscious Jackson. The band broke up in 2000, but Jill is still creating and performing music - all while being a mom, a wife, and doing her part to clean up New York's beaches.

This weekend she'll perform at the Mermaid Parade Ball on Saturday and The Annex on Sunday.

Your latest album, City Beach, is inspired by Coney Island. Can you tell us more about the background?
I am a native New Yorker and Coney Island has always been my city beach of choice. I love the place with all its funk and flavor, what can I say? I am a big fan of all of the Coney Island USA endeavors, from the Mermaid Parade to the Coney Island Museum etc etc. Even though there is room for improvement in many ways, I would love to see Coney Island retain its character during this process. I am hoping to organize a beach cleanup with the Surfrider Foundation - stay tuned for that- or go to BarefootBeachRescue.com and vote to get Coney Island cleaned on August 18th!

What do you think of the recent developments at Coney Island?
I have been following the saga with developers Thor Equities and hear that they recently dropped their condos on the beach plan- glad to hear it. I hope they don't go too Vegas or Disney and go with a turn of the century amusement theme- that would be amazing. I love to look at pictures of the old amusements in a book I have called "Brookyn, Then and Now". It's amazing what they had going in 1904- like Luna Park, "an exotic jumble of plaster minarets, Venetian archways, pagodas and gargoyles" that became a "glittering wonderland" at night with thousands of electric lights. Or Dreamland- where visitors could travel to the four corners of the world through re-creations (like a sleighride through Switzerland, a gondola in Venice, etc).

How many times have you ridden the Cyclone?
Never- and now I won't because I am VERY sensitive to motion- not sure why. My husband goes on it regularly so I live vicariously through him.

Early on with Luscious Jackson you opened up for the Beastie Boys at the now long gone Building downtown, what were those days like?
Exciting and nerve wracking. We opened our first gig for Cypress Hill and the Beastie Boys at the Building and I remember being SO nervous. Thank god we pulled it off - or maybe our friends were just being nice.

Luscious Jackson was the first band signed to the Beastie Boys Grand Royal label, where you put out a song called CitySong. In those lyrics you called New York a " place to disappear," do you still feel that way?
I love the anonymity of New York, and I still feel that if I need to wander through the city alone I can co-exist with the human race in a way that is very comfortable for me.

Please share your strangest "only in New York" story.
As a teenager, I was on the subway with a friend and we saw a very old man in a suit slowly stop living, and I believe he passed away right there. The medics came and took him. It was very peaceful.

Given the opportunity, how would you change New York?
Slow down the development, create preservation of small business districts so they are not killed off (ie the suburbification of the West Village, Chelsea and the Atlantic Yards Project in Brooklyn which threatens to overshadow a huge area of Browstone Brooklyn).

Under what circumstance have you thought about leaving New York?
I went to college in Northern California (UC Berkeley) and CA is the main state I consider moving to. I think if NY becomes too big and commercial I will eventually call it quits. I live in Brooklyn now which is still quite charming (though moving towards possible overdevelopment as I mentioned).

Can you please recommend a good weekend hang-out that isn't unbearably mobbed?
I like Bar Toto in Park Slope for food and drinks on a nice evening. The outdoor umbrella seating is very european.

Do you have a favorite New York celebrity sighting or encounter?
I went to Big Bird's wedding when I was a kid and I haven't really topped that one.

What's your current soundtrack to the city?
The sound of my daughter's stroller wheels rolling over the sidewalk.

Best venue for music?
I like the Celebrate Brooklyn concert series in Prospect Park.

What's the best subway line?
Definitely not the F which is my train.

Favorite headlines: NY Post or Daily News?
Post.

Yankees or Mets?
Yankees- or should I say Coney Island Cyclones?


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speaking of I am going to a cyclones game this sunday!

Silverchair

I have been in love with silverchair since i was a kid like them..



they have a new album out called YOUNG MODERN. I just bought two tickets to see them in july - cost me a fortune - and just last week after seeing the fucking champs i told myself i wouldn't spend over $25 on tickets. but of course this is an exception. their first north american TOUR in years...a new album to support that again has Van Dyke Parks on a few tracks doing his magic.

Daniel Johns is a musical genius. He is finally happy, in love and the music shows it.




I am gonna start reviewing cd's because word of mouf is a good thang.

Behind Bars

Should I care that Paris Hilton is in jail? yes she broke the law but will anything change because of the media coverage on her going to jail? Will laws be changed?
or are we all just waiting to see who gets the first interview once her sentence is over?

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Published on Tuesday, June 12, 2007 by The Rocky Mountain News (Colorado)
And Justice For All?
by Paul Campos







The absurd media frenzy over the perils of Paris Hilton shouldn’t obscure the serious issue this made-for-TV pseudo- event raises. That issue is the astonishing number of Americans who are in prisons and jails on any particular day.

At present there are about 2.4 million people behind bars at any one time. We put people in prison at rates that range from about 300 percent to 800 percent higher than other developed nations. While some of these people clearly ought to be behind bars, we also imprison hundreds of thousands of Americans for nonviolent drug offenses, and other largely victimless crimes, at an immense social and economic cost.

One reason so many Americans are behind bars is that being in prison, like serving in the military, or not being able to see a doctor if you’re sick, is one of those things that rarely happen to the people who decide issues such as how many people ought to be in prison, or if we should go to war, or if we should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.

A nice example of this mentality is provided by a column in The Washington Post, in which a fancy Washington lawyer argues that Lewis “Scooter” Libby shouldn’t go to jail, despite being convicted of lying to a grand jury about his role in a series of events that has plunged the nation into a disastrous war.

According to William Otis, who among other things has been involved in crafting the federal sentencing guidelines that have condemned so many nonviolent drug offenders to serve barbarically long sentences, sending Libby to prison at all “would be an injustice to a person who, though guilty in this instance, is not what most people would, or should, think of as a criminal.”

With all due respect to William Otis, Esq., you really can’t make this stuff up. Otis doesn’t even bother to deny that Libby lied under oath to a federal grand jury about matters involving the gravest issues of national security. But to Otis and - to judge from the pleas now issuing from various corners of the Washington establishment - many others among the Georgetown cocktail party circuit, this isn’t the kind of thing they think of as being worthy of even a single day in jail.

After all, Libby comes from such a good family, and he went to all the best schools (Philips Andover, Yale and Columbia Law, for heaven’s sake!). If he committed perjury and obstruction of justice, he must have had an excellent - one might even venture to guess a genuinely noble and self-sacrificing - reason for doing so.

I mean it isn’t as if he sold someone a few hundred dollars of marijuana (a crime that, because of the sentencing guidelines Otis helped draft, recently sent Weldon Angelos, a man with no criminal record, to federal prison for the next 55 years).

Nor did he, at the age of 17, receive consensual oral sex from a 15-year-old girl, while residing in great state of Georgia (a crime that has garnered high school honors student Genarlow Wilson a 10-year prison sentence.)***

No, all Libby did was lie under oath about some details of a campaign to smear opponents of the Iraq war. To such media luminaries as Time’s Joe Klein, the whole idea of imprisoning Libby is offensive: “Do we really want to spend our tax dollars keeping Scooter Libby behind bars?” Klein asks.

This question, again, is being asked in a nation that has nearly 2 1/2 million people behind bars - a large proportion of whom committed crimes that were less morally reprehensible, and almost infinitely less damaging to the nation, than Libby’s lies.

But to Joe Klein, Libby just doesn’t “look” like a criminal. Somebody - perhaps Paris Hilton - should remind Klein that looks aren’t everything.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

© 2007 The Rocky Mountain News

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***I couldn't sleep this morning and turned on the news to see Genarlow Wilson and his lawyer celebrating. A judge ordered his release then an hour later Georgia's attorney general denied his release. more to come.

FIRE!

so nyki and i netflix'd this movie called "FIRE"



you must do the same.

this film caused riots in Bombay!

but its not about being a lesbian... its about the traditional roles set upon womyn in India, or anywhere else for that matter.
but i think it also shows that lesbianism is always a sure fall back. Failed female/male relationships led these two to become lesbians. when most of the time that is NOT the case. so that was one of my issues with this.

Here are some articles:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/213417.stm


http://www.sawnet.org/news/fire.html

one particular point in the extras is that one Hindu Leader said that if
this movie had Muslim womyn and NOT Hindu womyn than all would be fine!!
(well not fine if you are a muslim, I think there would have been a bigger outrage!)

RING THE ALARM

NOT A GREAT PHOTO BUT A CLASSIC ONE.


I told Nyki yesterday "If Guiliani becomes the next president, we are moving out of this country." (Negative thinking is not a good thing, please don't try it at home)
Although because he was PRO GAY and PRO CHOICE for a mere 15 minutes-
the Christian Right would never have him be the runner for the Republican party.


Here is part of the article from Matt Taibbi that I read today and just made me post something, anything, just to write get the emotion out.


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Giuliani: Worse Than Bush
He’s Cashing in on 9/11, Working with Karl Rove’s Henchmen and in Cahoots With a Swift Boat-Style Attack on Hillary. Will Rudy Giuliani Be Bush III?
by Matt Taibbi

–

Rudy giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days — like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a “stuck pig,” and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn’t even bother to conceal the fact that he’s had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can’t have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who’ll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That’s Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength — and he knows it — comes from America’s unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they’re probably traitors, and Rudy, well, he’ll keep an eye on ‘em for you. Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully’s disposal....
...But there’s no question that Giuliani has made the continuation of Swift-Boating politics a linchpin of his candidacy. His political hires speak deeply to that tendency. Chris Henick, formerly Karl Rove’s most trusted deputy, is now a key aide at Giuliani Partners, the security firm set up by the mayor to cash in on his 9/11 image. One of his top donors, Richard Collins, is a longtime Bush supporter who was instrumental in setting up “Stop Her Now,” a 527 group modeled on Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that will be used to attack Hillary Clinton. And the money for the smear campaign comes from the same Texas sources behind the Swift Boaters, including oilman T. Boone Pickens and Houston home builder Bob Perry.

To further emulate the Bush-Rove model, Giuliani has recruited some thirty Bush “Pioneers,” the key fund-raisers who served as the president’s $100,000 bagmen. In addition, he hired the woman who spearheaded the Pioneer program to be his chief fund-raiser. “Rudy definitely got some of Bush’s heavier hitters, including all the Swift Boater types,” says Alex Cohen, a senior researcher at Public Citizen, who tracks the president’s top donors.

–

Rudy’s stump speech on the trail these days is short and sweet. He talks about two things — national security and free-market capitalism — and his catchphrase for both is “going on offense.” When he talks about “economic offense,” Giuliani is ostensibly communicating the usual conservative contempt for taxes and big government. But he means more than that. Like the Bush-Cheney crew, Rudy believes everything should be for sale, even public policy — particularly when he’s in a position to do the selling.

In his years as mayor — and his subsequent career as a lobbyist — Rudy jumped into bed with anyone who could afford a rubber. Saudi Arabia, Rupert Murdoch, tobacco interests, pharmaceutical companies, private prisons, Bechtel, ChevronTexaco — Giuliani took money from them all. You could change Rudy’s mind literally in the time it took to write a check. A former prosecutor, Giuliani used to call drug dealers “murderers.” But as a lobbyist he agreed to represent Seisint, a security firm run by former cocaine smuggler Hank Asher. “I have a great admiration for what he’s doing,” Rudy gushed after taking $2 million of Asher’s money.

As mayor, Rudy had a history of asking financially interested parties to help shape important government policies. At one point, he allowed a deputy mayor who was on the payroll of Major League Baseball to work on deals for the Yankees and Mets; at another point he commissioned a $600,000 report on privatizing JFK and LaGuardia from a consultant with ties to the British Airport Authority, Rudy’s handpicked choice to manage the airports.

And let’s not forget Bernie Kerik, Rudy’s very own hairy-assed Sancho Panza, who was nixed as director of Homeland Security after investigators uncovered a gift he received from a construction firm with alleged mob ties that wanted to do business with Giuliani’s administration. It is a testament to the monstrous breadth of Rudy’s chutzpah that he used his post-9/11 celebrity to push his personal bagman for a post that milks the world’s hugest security-contracts tit — at the very moment when he himself was creating a security-services company.

Then there’s 9/11. Like Bush’s, Rudy’s career before the bombing was in the toilet; New Yorkers had come to think of him as an ambition-sick meanie whose personal scandals were truly wearying to think about. But on the day of the attack, it must be admitted, Rudy hit the perfect note; he displayed all the strength and reassuring calm that Bush did not, and for one day at least, he was everything you’d want in a leader. Then he woke up the next day and the opportunist in him saw that there was money to be made in an America high on fear.

For starters, Rudy tried to use the tragedy to shred election rules, pushing to postpone the inauguration of his successor so he could hog the limelight for a few more months. Then, with the dust from the World Trade Center barely settled, he went on the road as the Man With the Bullhorn, pocketing as much as $200,000 for a single speaking engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He’s traveled in style, at one stop last year requesting a $47,000 flight on a private jet, five hotel rooms and a private suite with a balcony view and a king-size bed.

While the mayor himself flew out of New York on a magic carpet, thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments like the “WTC cough.” This is the dirty little secret lurking underneath Rudy’s 9/11 hero image — the most egregious example of his willingness to shape public policy to suit his donors. While the cleanup effort at the Pentagon was turned over to federal agencies like OSHA, which quickly sealed off the site and required relief workers to wear hazmat suits, the World Trade Center cleanup was handed over to Giuliani. The city’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC) promptly farmed out the waste-clearing effort to a smattering of politically connected companies, including Bechtel, Bovis and AMEC construction.

The mayor pledged to reopen downtown in no time, and internal DDC memos indicate that the cleanup was directed at a breakneck pace. One memo to DDC chief Michael Burton warned, “Project management appears to only address safety issues when convenient for the schedule of the project.” Burton, however, had his own priorities: He threatened to fire contractors if “the highest level of efficiency is not maintained.”

Although respiratory-mask use was mandatory, the city allowed a macho culture to develop on the site: Even the mayor himself showed up without a mask. By October, it was estimated, masks were being worn on site as little as twenty-nine percent of the time. Rudy proclaimed that there were “no significant problems” with the air at the World Trade Center. But there was something wrong with the air: It was one of the most dangerous toxic-waste sites in human history, full of everything from benzene to asbestos and PCBs to dioxin (the active ingredient in Agent Orange). Since the cleanup ended, police and firefighters have reported a host of serious illnesses — respiratory ailments like sarcoidosis; leukemia and lymphoma and other cancers; and immune-system problems.

“The likelihood is that more people will eventually die from the cleanup than from the original accident,” says David Worby, an attorney representing thousands of cleanup workers in a class-action lawsuit against the city. “Giuliani wears 9/11 like a badge of honor, but he screwed up so badly.”

When I first spoke to Worby, he was on his way home from the funeral of a cop. “One thing about Giuliani,” he told me. “He’s never been to a funeral of a cleanup worker.”

Indeed, Rudy has had little at all to say about the issue. About the only move he’s made to address the problem was to write a letter urging Congress to pass a law capping the city’s liability at $350 million.

Did Giuliani know the air at the World Trade Center was poison? Who knows — but we do know he took over the cleanup, refusing to let more experienced federal agencies run the show. He stood on a few brick piles on the day of the bombing, then spent the next ten months making damn sure everyone worked the night shift on-site while he bonked his mistress and negotiated his gazillion-dollar move to the private sector. Meanwhile, the people who actually cleaned up the rubble got used to checking their stool for blood every morning.

Now Giuliani is running for president — as the hero of 9/11. George Bush has balls, too, but even he has to bow to this motherfucker.

IF YOU WANT THE WHOLE ARTICLE:

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/02/1622/


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random jesus site

"I'd love to turn you on..."

A Day in the Life: Sgt. Pepper Turns 40
by Jon Wiener

It was forty years ago today: the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “It’s certainly a thrill,” the Beatles sang; but listening today, much of the thrill is gone–except for one song. Still, it’s easy to remember that day–June 1, 1967–when the first thing we saw was the cover: a collage featuring the Beatles surrounded by cut-out figures of their heroes and other celebrities, including wax figures of themselves two years earlier, when they were the lovable moptops. Rock had never been so smart.

As for the music, rock had never been so big, so free, with so many ideas and feelings and so many different sounds. The lads from Liverpool wanted to “raise a smile” with the irresistible whimsy of Paul McCartney’s “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “Lovely Rita, Meter Maid.” But they also told vivid and true stories like “She’s Leaving Home,” a song about the parents of a runaway girl.

Critics quickly ran out of superlatives: Geoffrey Stokes wrote in the Village Voice that “listening to the Sgt. Pepper album one thinks not simply of the history of popular music but the history of this century.” In the Times of London, no less than Kenneth Tynan described Sgt. Pepper as “a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization.” He didn’t seem to be kidding.

Listening to the CD forty years later, the concept behind this concept album now seems a bit lame: The lads take on the identity of old-time music hall entertainers for a kaleidoscopic tour of popular styles of the century–marching bands, circus music, folk songs, jazz hits. Some of the cuts are pretty bad, particularly John Lennon’s “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” with elaborate circus sound effects and not much else. Lennon’s song about the world of LSD, “where rockinghorse people eat marshmallow pies,” is cloying.

But one song today seems stronger than ever: Lennon’s “A Day in the Life.” As the cut begins, “the curtain falls on Pepperland,” Tim Riley wrote, “just as another is raised on the sobering stage of the real world.” The opening line, “I read the news today, oh boy,” is dense with meaning now, especially the way Lennon sings “oh boy,” which sounds sad, vulnerable and puzzled. It makes me remember hearing the news of his murder on December 8, 1980, and also reading the news from Saigon the summer the album came out, and seeing the news from Baghdad today.

The singer is reading the newspaper, about a man killed in a car accident, while “a crowd of people stood and stared.” One death, in a summer when thousands were dying in Vietnam. In place of the big rich sound of the rest of the album, the instrumentation here is stark and simple: guitar, bass, piano and percussion.

Then we hear a dissonant orchestral cacaphony, and then an alarm clock goes off, and the bewildered and subdued John is replaced by the perky Paul, waking up and heading out, blissfully ignorant of the world’s terrors.

Then we’re back with Lennon–is this just a nightmare? The next news story is about the puzzle of “four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.” Lennon tosses in a joke–”now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall”–but it’s hard to laugh after the news about the man who was killed.

Lennon’s last line is “I’d love to turn you on. ” But this isn’t the happy turn-on of Ringo’s “I get high with a little help from my friends”–it’s more like turning on to escape a hopeless world, to get away from the nightmare of “a day in the life.”

Then comes that concluding orchestral crescendo, one of the most dissonant and most famous in popular music, followed by a crashing fortissimo piano chord in E major, followed by a long, slow fade–forty-three seconds of utter finality.

“A Day in the Life,” with its confusion and quiet horror, follows the youthful fun of the rest of Sgt. Pepper. Together they express so much of what we call the ’60s: As one speaker in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties put it, “so much life, so much death; so much possibility, so much impossibility.”

Jon Wiener, a contributing editor of The Nation and a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of several books, including Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files, Professors, Politics and Pop and Historians in Trouble. He lives in Los Angeles.


In my mailbox from Netflix: THE U.S vs John Lennon
Should be in good timing with the 40th anniversary.




Anyone seen it?
Your thoughts on Sgt. Pepper?