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Yellow Pages Tue May 06 2025 14:12:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time).

 

Freedom quote for 5/6/2025
I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
(Mark Twain)

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

The "looting" in New Orleans: Not insane in the least

By David B.

"Some comments on recent events in New Orleans from an anarchist perspective.

"Despite the comment from the Philadelphia tourist, I can't find this insane.


Let's review now:

Major hurricane threatens New Orleans with damage much worse than it actually got.
About 20% of the residents of that city are in households without automobiles.
Most of them are low-income and live in the shoddiest buildings in the most flood-prone neighborhood, i.e. they are the people most at risk.
Evacuation is called.
Evacuation plan is to get in your car and drive out of New Orleans.
Absolutely nothing is done to provide for the evacuation of those without cars to drive.
Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of buses (owned by school districts, transit districts, and private companies) were available throughout the metro area and could have been commandeered as evacuation vehicles.
End result: an evacuation that systematically fails to evacuate precisely those in most need of evacuating.


"Put yourself in the position of one of those survivors. Nobody's cared about rescuing you; the only people that really counted were those with more money than you have. People like the owners of the shops in your city. Shops closed and not about to reopen precisely because the owners fled town. Shops with blown-out windows that can be walked through. Shops whose merchandise is about to be ruined by the disease-ridden and polluted water streaming through levee breaks and flooding your city. Merchandise that, in many cases, you need because you're running low on necessities and relief can't easily get to you because of flooded highways.
How can it be anything but logical to help yourself to some of that merchandise in such a situation? The still photos I've seen seem very revealing; nobody looks particularly menacing or threatening. The "looters" seem to be of all ages and genders; it's not just young gang-bangers we're talking about. In fact, I've noticed numerous scenes showing mothers with their children.

"I've dragged out the TV and turned it on tonight. NBC News had two segments on the 'looting' and the most violent scene they showed was of a young man throwing a rock at a store window, trying to break it. One scene showed people walking calmly into and out of a Walgreen's, passing right by the camera, while across the street a trumpeter played 'When the Saints Go Marching In.' Put aside the fact that money hadn't been exchanged for the merchandise being taken out, and it could have been a normal street scene.

"One phrase NBC trotted out was 'every man for himself.' That seems to be directly contradicted by their own footage, which showed many examples of people helping each other (and not just to carry stuff out of stores). Looks more like the key defining behavior in the aftermath of this disaster is cooperation, not individualistic competition. If you want a real example of 'every man for himself,' look at that evacuation plan the authorities came up with.

"With all that so-called 'breakdown' of 'law and order,' there's been only one person shot (not fatally, thankfully) so far. That one shooting is tragic, but let's have some perspective here. In 2004, there were 265 murders in New Orleans. That's just the dead; it doesn't cover the non-fatal assaults with deadly weapons. Add those in and we're probably well above 1 per day on average. If it really was an outbreak of barbarism, the violence would be much worse.

"Instead, there's very little of it, Just lots of peaceful folks who have decided that those stores are, in the words of one man, 'everybody's store[s].' A breakdown, in other words, of law but not order."
Portland IndyMedia (USA)

Categories: , , , , , , , ,

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I notice he says nothing about the rapes? British people caught in New Orleans are now back, and reporting on conditions.

I'll come back with a quote and a source.

2:40 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Rapes in New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina

Although everyone remaining in New Orleans is suffering and has their own horror stories to relate -- some women and girls are finding themselves in a nightmare unrelated to a loss of food, water, and shelter. According to many news sources, women were raped in both the Super Dome and the New Orleans Convention Center.

The New York Times reported that

"We have individuals who are getting raped," the city's police superintendent, Edwin P. Compass III, said in a brief interview about the scene at the convention center. "We have individuals who are getting beaten."

Asked about the numerous accounts of rapes, Joseph H. Matthews, a deputy fire chief and the director of the city's Office of Emergency Preparedness, said some were "probably" true. "Nothing's been confirmed, but you can't discount these reports," Mr. Matthews said.

Newsday states that "the police chief said rapes were reported in the Convention Center". Inhabitants are also claiming to have seen murders, stabbing, looting, and other horrific crimes. We can only hope that they can get safely out of the city and beginning rebuilding their lives.

http://womensissues.about.com/b/a/199236.htm

"They killed a man here last night," Steve Banka, 28, told Reuters. "A young lady was being raped and stabbed. And the sounds of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of them, and he jumped up on the truck's windscreen and they shot him dead."

http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2005-09-03T225227Z_01_N03464940_RTRIDST_0_KATRINA-HELPLESS-CORRECTED-PICTURE.XML

Tourists and backpackers arriving back in the UK said the city's Superdome, initially sought out as a safe haven from Hurricane Katrina, had quickly turned into a place of fear.

They witnessed scenes of murder and looting, women were threatened with rape and racial tensions grew daily.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=361322&in_page_id=1770

3:00 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm back again, to quote this below. It was just one more of the awful things I read in the past few days:

"New Orleans Police Chief Edwin Compass broke down as he called for more boats to help him deploy his men around the city to protect its remaining residents.

He said: "We have individuals who are getting raped and getting beaten. Tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon."

With violence hampering relief efforts, the evacuation of the 30,000 refugees from the Superdome stadium also stalled yesterday, leaving nearly 5,000 still inside.

As the refugees waited in 90-degree heat, some passed out and were carried to a makeshift medical ward at a nearby shopping mall.

Arriving in New Orleans last Sunday, I have spent a week reporting the unfolding misery and ruined lives in the aftermath of the hurricane.

But nothing, in the plethora of grim tales of disaster, compares with a terrible incident recounted to me as the week drew to a close. There was a 380-pound man stranded on the seventh floor of a New Orleans hospital. Unable to get him down five flights of stairs to the second-floor exit, through which other patients were being evacuated onto rescue boats to escape the rising floodwater, a female manager took a shocking decision. She ordered that he be given euthanasia.

A bearded, middle-aged doctor, who is still wearing his green hospital garb, tells me the sad story as he and his colleagues sit at the muddy, squalid refugee-receiving post on New Orleans' I10 Highway. He does not want to give me his name and will not identify the patient out of respect.

But he wants people to know what happened in there. His lower jaw quivers as he recalls the events of Wednesday night.

"We had minutes to get out, and I asked, 'What are we going to do about this guy, because he's a big man. It was going to be tough getting him down those stairs - the elevators weren't working. That woman turned to me and said straight out, 'We're going to help him to heaven'. It makes me want to break down, how that man's life was taken away."

It is one of so many gruesome and desperate stories that have poured forth from the tens of thousands of refugees."


http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1886932005

3:34 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tiny print! Dunno if you can read it. It's hard.

What's uwmqzumu?

BTW, comments are much easier to read in the comment posting box.

3:38 am  

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