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by Radio Raheem
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G21 #426: COMMON VALOR AMERICAN DREAMS DAY ONE G21 AFRICA JOIN OUR MAILING LIST. It contains more jokes than not. G21 E-MAIL NEWSLETTER GLOBAL*BEAT IRISH EYES NEW YORK STATE RADIOACTIVE RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT RECOMMENDED DAILY REQUIREMENT ARCHIVES SMOKE & MIRRORS VOX POPULI LAST WEEK's EDITION MEET THE G-CREW! These are the people behind this jam-band every week. HOME TABLE OF CONTENTS & BACK ISSUES BECOME A SPONSOR OF THE WORLD'S MAGAZINE. WHY should you advertise here? We'll tell you. We know you're lazy. Here's a button for a quick translation of this page. Just click on the flag for your country. You're welcome! OR TRY THIS GOOGLE TRANSLATION SERVICE.

Oakland, CA, USA - That television coverage of Hurricane Katrina and all those folks stranded and all the political posturing was pretty damned bad, unsettling, but now everything's All Good again, isn't it? Every local newspaper in America, from Nome, Alaska to Atlanta, Georgia, from Portland, Maine to San Diego, California carried a truly heart-warming story about a local church group that had taken in its share of evacuated folks from the storm or had a big old bake sale to send money to the Red Cross. We all felt warm and fuzzy about what wonderful people we really are and that was enough to help us forget about all those scary pictures from the Superdome and Convention Center in New Orleans. The President stood in Jackson Square and told us that, yes, he had seen the television coverage, too, and he had a plan to deal with the issues of poverty and prejudice, race and class, that those pictures brought to our attention - for all of two weeks.

That's all we needed to hear to be believe that it was going to be All Good for poor folks and for Black folks from now on. Yes, indeed, as those New Orleans folks used to say.

Then we told the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) the idea of putting up 200 unit trailer parks that everybody knew would be called "Bushville"s for those evacuated folks from the affected Gulf coast states would be a bad idea. Nobody wanted a new trailer park of those crackers and Yats near their town, that was for sure. You find somewhere else to put those folks - Gee, sorry they got devastated out of house and home, but hey, we heard a whole lot of them don't even have cars and we surely don't want their kind around here.

Rod Amis wrote in these pages, in his series about the immediate results of Hurricane Katrina around New Orleans, that he thought it would be a defining moment for the Bush Administration and America. Well, from this seat, over a month down the line, I see a definition all right: Leave me alone. You're on your own.

Not much I'm watching, hearing or reading tells me that race and poverty are now on anybody's national agenda. What I'm hearing is government mandated lower wages in the affected areas and for the affected folks and keeping as many of the niggers from returning to New Orleans as possible. Certainly there's no way these Black folks can expect to come back Down South and earn a living wage for a change.

Let's drop them off wherever we can in other parts of the country, where they won't be so concentrated and visible - let alone have a shot at political clout - and move on. That's what I'm hearing and seeing.

In other words, Black folks are going to take it on the chin, after being beaten down by the storm, yet again.

Even the White folks who supposedly care, the ones who are supposedly on our side, have bought into the idea - promulgated by the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh parrots - that anything coming out of the mouth of a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton is open game for ridicule, no matter how valid what these reverends have to say about the plight of Black folk. Having marginalized those two highly visible spokesmen for the brothers and sisters, there's little worry about having people ignore the Congressional Black Caucus or the National Association for the Advanced of Colored People (NAACP.)

So who is supposed to speak for the displaced folks of the now-famous Ninth Ward of New Orleans, where this magazine's publisher lived for years, or Black people from anywhere in Mississippi and Alabama? Newsweek magazine?

If you're a Black person in the Caribbean, Central or South America, Europe, Africa or Australia, I'm sure you have to get the subtext of all this: same shit, different day.

Those folks from New Orleans might just be better off moving to Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. He'd at least give them cheap gasoline and free eye glasses.

I mean, what was that all about? Chavez offers the evacuees gasoline for FIFTEEN CENTS a gallon and to send up a few thousand doctors and nurses, and the United States government tells him, "Thanks but no thanks." I didn't see no FEMA folks bringin' in doctors and nurses --- let alone cheap gas! Pride cometh before a fall.

Meanwhile, what I'm reading in my local paper and seeing on TV is that about half a million folks, most of them Black, are waiting around to find a real place to live a month after it all went down. Only a couple cities in Texas have been able to pony up the cash to give them vouchers for getting actual apartments for themselves and their kids. This whole operation has been a monument to POOR PLANNING.

I think we should throw up a damned statue for former FEMA head Michael ("You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie!" ) Brown, not to mention Dubya himself. It's only right.

All sarcasm aside, the issues that this situation has brought up go right to the heart of those I have written about in this column for years. It would take a total suspension of disbelief to expect that the Rove-Cheney-Chertoff-Bush coterie now suddenly consider the poor and minorities as members of their base and part of their priority list rather than believing that all they have and are doing is simply window-dressing to keep next year's elections from being a hemorrhage for the Republican majority now running the American government.

Their motives, though, don't change the important fact that not only New Orleans, not just Louisiana and the Deep South, but also all of America has to look at the issues of race and class. The infant mortality rate among Blacks and Latinos is shamefully high in America. The number of people being exploited by predatory employers, especially Brown people, is criminal - not to mention illegal. Everybody looks the other way.

Millions, millions of Americans are in the same position as those folks from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans --- not making enough money to bother filing taxes or expecting a tax refund, let alone the tax relief that Bush has insured millionaires, and not being able to take themselves or their kids anywhere except the Emergency Rooms of local public hospitals when they need healthcare. If something really bad like a stroke or a heart attack or a diabetic coma happens for these folks - all things that the poor and uninsured are documented to be prone to, we know this! - they are just SOL because there is no way on God's green Earth they or their families can ever afford to pay for the hospital care they need.

Who is speaking for the poor?

America is only part of the First World if you are not poor or Black or Brown. If you are poor or Black or Brown, you are still living a Third World existence. Let's be honest about that and let's make the commitment to do something about it.

It's not All Good. Let's start caring about born babies that need a right to life. Let's start caring about poor people before they need to move their families into a shelter or they lose their homes and have to sleep in their cars - if they got one - or on the street.

It's not All Good. We shouldn't have needed a Hurricane Katrina disaster to tell us that. All we had to do was open our eyes and look around in most cities in America to know about that.

Peace Out.