Please read what Karen posted yesterday morning. Post Gustav Ed Blakely did his best to show a strong show of force, and in some ways it would seem that Gustav was Blakely’s perfect storm. One that did little damage but emptied out the City of pesky residents. In fact one of the first times I met Dr. Blakely he was crowing about his suspending council meetings in Oakland after the fire. His assertion was that he could cut through the red tape if it just didn’t exist. Employing the same logic post Gustav he worked with the Mayor to craft an Executive Order to cut through that red tape and ultimately tread on constitutional rights.
The "emergency" period following the Gustav evacuation isn't discussed as often as it probably ought to be. During this time the Nagin administration assumed and abused extraordinary powers to
deny citizens access to their homes for days after the emergency had passed even going so far as to unilaterally design
a staged reentry program based on socio-economic caste. It maintained these extraordinary powers for weeks afterward in order
to expedite questionable property demolitions outside of the legally established review process. Recently, when Ray Nagin expressed his admiration for
the emergency management capabilities of totalitarian government, he wasn't just blowing funny cigar smoke at us. He was speaking quite deliberately and informed by the policies and experiences of his own administration.
In an August 2007 interview with Gambit, Ed Blakely described in detail his and Nagin's preference for governing by emergency dictate. I wrote a longer post about it at the time
which you can read here if you like but what I wanted most to point out was that Blakely wasn't talking about some theoretical (although I would still say debatable) need of "emergency" governmental powers to move people out of harm's way. Rather he was more interested in longer term subversion of standards for public input or procedural transparency in the distribution of things like construction contracts. While by this point it is nothing novel to state that New Orleans under Nagin and Blakely has been an exercise in classic Bush era "Disaster Capitalism", I think it is worth noting the Gustav event as a particularly symptomatic moment in this regard.
Furthermore, Nagin's candid expression of Cuba envy underscores just how profoundly anti-democratic and dangerous the means by which we are ruled have become in these times. I'm going to share some excerpts from a recent interview between Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald. Moyers and Greenwald are talking about abuses of the Constitution, of the Freedom of Information Act, and of basic human dignity perpetrated by the Bush and Obama Administrations under the now familiar excuse that such abuses are "protecting" us from one or another "emergency". The entire interview
is available to view online here. Take the time to watch it. It is instructive of the larger conceptual political context in which the Nagin-Blakely era in New Orleans has operated.
BILL MOYERS: No one wrote earlier or more powerfully about the claims, the extra legal claims that the Bush and Cheney Administration made after 9/11. Doing many of the things you just described, because they invoked national security and the fact that to fight terrorism you often have to use the terrorists own tactics.
To what extent has President Obama begun to deconstruct that extra-legal apparatus, the excessive secrecy, the use of extra-constitutional means of interrogation? To what extent is he undoing the infrastructure of excessive government claims that you wrote about during those last eight years?
GLENN GREENWALD: Very little. And not only is it the case that he is deconstructing that framework in only symbolic and inconsequential ways, but he's doing the reverse. Which is he is finding new and often more effective ways to embrace many of those same instruments, and to institutionalize them further. It's not the case that Obama is the equivalent of Bush and Cheney, in this regard--
[Exchange regarding the President's willingness to compromise principal in the pursuit of maintaining power]
BILL MOYERS: For example?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, one of the principle controversies of the Bush Administration, one of the defining aspects of their radicalism, was the idea that we can take human beings who we don't capture on a battlefield, who we simply abduct and pick up, who we suspect of engaging in terrorism and put them into cages for years or decades without having to charge them with any crime.
That — simply based on executive authority — the ability to point to someone and say, "This is a terrorist," then justifies the elimination of all due process and putting them into prison forever. Obama, several months ago, said that he not only believes in that power, but wanted Congress to enact a statute that would permanently enshrine this theory of law into Presidential power.
He gave up on that because there was going to be difficulty in terms of getting the bill that he wanted passed through the Congress. So, instead what he did was he embraced the Bush/Cheney justification as to why the President can do that, which is that the Congress implicitly authorized it.
And so, we're continuing our scheme of indefinite lawless detention, free of due process, free of any charges of any kind. Where we can pick up people anywhere around the world and put them into cages. He's actively defending that power in Afghanistan, by saying that people who we abduct far away from the battlefield, far away from Afghanistan, and then ship to Afghanistan and imprison at Bagram have no rights even to habeas corpus, which the Supreme Court said at least that Guantanamo detainees have.
And so, that's just one example where for years liberals yelled and screamed vehemently that Bush was subverting the Constitution and degrading the American culture, political culture, by asserting this power. And yet, here you have Barack Obama not just refusing or taking his time undoing it, but himself actively defending and advocating it. And there's very little outcry. And that repeats itself in terms of the state secrets privilege. And the effort to block accountability for torture victims. And a whole variety of other powers that Bush and Cheney asserted to great controversy.
Here we have seen these themes brought to bear on a local level. Sure, petty corruption and arrogant officiousness exist in other parts of Imperial America. But when the arrogant petty criminals who run this town talk about making decisions according to the direction and needs of an elite "coterie of people" with little or no public accountability, it stings more acutely. Why? Well, in part, because the abuses here have been about more than just the meting out of cash by the "coterie". Here we really have been putting people into cages or "disappearing" them or..
worse.
In
Zeitoun, Dave Eggers relays the story of local painter and contractor Abdulrahman Zeitoun who stayed behind during the Federal Flood to watch over his home and some of the properties he owned around town. Zeitoun spent the first few days after the storm traveling the city in a canoe, rescuing people from flooded buildings, and feeding abandoned animals until he (along with three other men) was abducted from his own building by armed security personnel and locked up at the "Camp Greyhound" temporary prison constructed in the Union Passenger Terminal.
When I read
Zeitoun this summer,
it made me very angry. But,
like Clio, I was grateful to see this story told so well by Eggers.
Zetioun stands among a very small number of "Katrina" books that manage to tell a real story about real people without falling back on ornamental cliches or guilt-driven defensive rationalizations about "Why New Orleans Matters". Instead,
Zeitoun simply assumes the reader will understand that the people here "matter" because they are people. The fact that the events reported upon constitute a violation of that assumption makes the horror of it all that much more poignant. This week,
Gambit's David Winkler-Schmit interviewed the author. Here's a quick bit of that.
When Zeitoun is arrested, he's brought to Camp Greyhound. The jail was constructed after the storm and was a fairly extensive project. What does this tell you about the government's priorities after the levee failures?
I started doing a lot of research into [Camp Greyhound] and it had been fairly well documented in those weeks after the hurricane, but it wasn't widely known outside of New Orleans. (Zeitoun) had figured out some math when he was locked up there about just how quickly they had assembled this outdoor prison in the wake of the storm. It has been confirmed that while people were dying in attics, struggling to eat or find water, yearning for help on rooftops and the government couldn't get anything right on a national level and was still bungling in so many ways, at the same time, there was a very efficient operation happening at the Greyhound Station. [Prisoners from Dixon Correctional Institute] and trustees from Angola were bused down along with a vast amount of materials to erect a very shiny and well-built prison. That contrast struck me and it felt very emblematic of Bush-era priorities, where it's command and control over any sort of humanitarian concerns.
What prompted this collapse of the criminal justice system, where people were arrested with little or no provocation, no investigations were made and then suspects weren't allowed to contact anyone on the outside?
It was very hard to have land lines working at Greyhound, or so they say — and if we grant them that it would be very difficult to make calls, but in lieu of that, there has to be other systems in place. It also doesn't excuse the fact that after they evacuated from Greyhound (to) Hunt (Correctional Facility in St. Gabriel, La.), they were still not given phone calls. But there was a lot of that left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, because once a prisoner was processed through Greyhound and sent to one of the many longer-term prisons throughout the state, they were lost in the system for weeks, if not months, when no one really knew where they were. Records weren't being kept. Lawyers and human rights advocates think that what was done was an evacuation via incarceration — where they wanted to clear out the city, so anybody found within it was accused of looting or some other trumped-up charge and thrown in prison.
I was also struck by the efficiency with which "Camp Greyhound" had been constructed compared to the numerous other failures of emergency response happening concurrently. It's a fact that moves one off the point of criticizing the competence of the government in these situations and on to its priorities.
One of the most insulting things Blakely did in his Berkley interview was to lay blame for his ineffectual tenure in New Orleans at the feet of a "lazy" and "illiterate" population. It is remarkable that a man who spends as much time as he does seeking ways to belittle and subvert citizen involvement in civic affairs would be so disapproving of a supposedly disengaged citizenry. But Blakely is a two-bit carpetbagger so it's folly to take much of what he says at face value.
On the other hand, something must explain why a supposedly free people allow themselves to be ruled and misused this way; why we arrive at a government that can't deliver water to stranded citizens but can build a mini-GITMO in less than five days. Moyers asked Greenwald to speculate on it and I think he came close to hitting on something here.
GLENN GREENWALD: I think there's several aspects to it. But I think the principle one is — and interestingly, Barack Obama actually talked about this in his Presidential campaign, quite eloquently and insightfully — that there gets to be a point where citizens look at the government, and they look at both political parties, and they conclude that the system itself is so radically corrupt and the political parties are so fundamentally nonresponsive that no matter what it is that they do, they aren't going to be able to achieve any change. They feel a sense of learned helplessness. And they essentially accept whatever it is that's done to them and simply hope that it's not too bad. And I think that's the population. It's not that they're apathetic. It's that they've come to believe in their own impotence. And I think that's actually sadder and-- and more dangerous.
Like I said, I think he's close. I think there actually are a lot of justifiably angry people out there. But so many of them are so misled or so misinformed that
their anger manifests in such ways as to further discourage the rest of us. I'm not sure I understand it fully but I do know it creates the sort of environment where Nagins and Blakelys of the world can flourish at our expense. But now, Blakely is gone and Nagin is on the way out. Given that Obama hasn't been much of an improvement over Bush I suppose the best we can do about the upcoming municipal elections is continue to hope that whatever comes next isn't too bad.
Note: Dave Eggers will be discussing his book at the NOCCA institute (2800 Chartres St.) on Friday at 8:00 PM. Tickets are $10.00
Click here for more information.
