What a day this was
So it seems like some of the news is contradicting previous news. Were shots really fired at aid workers in New Orleans? Is there martial law or not? (No) The governor did say that people would be shot, but this new National Guard commander dude told people to point their guns down as soon as he landed. Is it true that there is
cannibalism?Mike Ruppert has some rad coverage of how
FEMA and the US governments dropped the ball on relief. He also says, "Bottom line: my assessment is that New Orleans is never going to be rebuilt and that US domestic oil production will never again reach pre-Katrina levels." We'll see. My sweetie is a total peak oil/crisis skeptic. It is pretty funny to hear him talk about the news but not have the analysis that there is a problem.
Dr. Mess told me today that either on From the Wilderness or from Greg Palast (no, I think not him), or from Prison Planet or somewhere, he heard that it was weather engineering that brought Hurricane Katrina and its destruction to NOLA and the other areas.
There is also a widely circulated opinion that in addition
officials not being ready for this disaster, it is possible that the poor folks in the South were sacrificed. Why did it take Bush two days to respond to the disaster and 4 days to even fly over the affected areas? And five days to visit? He looked so insincere with those women in his press opportunity.
Did Dick Cheney come back from vacation yet?
Check out these
Whiteys with gunsIt would be interesting to compare how Giuliani and the mayor of New Orleans have reacted to the crises in their cities. I think that the NOLA guy could get re-elected, just cuz he has
shown chutzpah, or balls, or cojones, or whatever.
Btw, check out
Urban Survival: Replaying 1929 Nice title, huh?
Ah, speaking of economic crises, everyone has made a big deal about SF MUNI fares going from $1.00 to $1.25, and labor problems there. Well, AC Transit (in the East Bay, SF's best suburbs) is going from $1.50 to $1.75. Come on! And we'll still have to pay for transfers. and don't think AC Transit doesn't have labor problems! Maybe AC Transit covers too wide an area (in spite of all the cut and decreased lines in the last few years) for people to organize effective resistance. But is the Muni Social Strike/Fare Strike going to be effective? It's hardly gotten any media coverage, so it's really hard to know.
I'm starting to wonder if anyone is reading this blog
because i had a bad link to Noel's blog on myspace.
Anyhow, what was I going to say?
Oh, so the
October 22nd Coalition in Houston posted to New Orleans Indymedia that they will take people in. They also posted info about their demo they are planning for the National Day of Protest:
"In the wake of Katrina; members involved with the New Orleans chapter of the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality who have fled to higher ground in the Houston Metro area are welcomed with open arms....The Halliburton Shareholders Meeting Demonstration. Demonstrating outside the Tomball, TX Community Center where the Ku Klux Klan shows up. The overall malfeasence within the Houston Police Crime Lab and evidence room. Harris County as the death penalty capital in Texas. Rampant police abuse in Galveston, Texas southwest of Broadway and 25th Street. Arrival of the Minutemen. Where will this epidemic end?"
Some of those things are off the topic of police brutality, repression, and the criminalization. They must really have it together to have written their own local call.
The national O22 website is still down, but Houston O22 linked to it in their post. Ha!
Is it anarchy or chaos that the media is referring to?
I wrote this in response to this ignorant post on this
NO metroblog site, but I am getting an error when I try to publish it.
The blogger said, "At some point, people in charge have got to come to their senses and realize that anarchy has reached the point beyond which order can be restored through civilized means and now must be restored at the point of gun by people willing to pull the trigger."
This is not anarchy. Of course people raping and killing each other is not cool, but it needs to be said that anarchy is not uncool, and raping and killing does not equal anarchy.
I am getting really upset about people saying that what is going on in New Orleans is "anarchy." Even the definition on dictionary.com is better than what people are hinting at. Dictionary.com says:
"1. Absence of any form of political authority.
2. Political disorder and confusion.
3. Absence of any cohesive principle, such as a common standard or purpose."
It defines chaos in the following way:
"1. A condition or place of great disorder or confusion.
2. A disorderly mass; a jumble: The desk was a chaos of papers and unopened letters.
3. often Chaos The disordered state of unformed matter and infinite space supposed in some cosmogonic views to have existed before the ordered universe.
4. Mathematics. A dynamical system that has a sensitive dependence on its initial conditions.
5. Obsolete. An abyss; a chasm."
Read more about
what anarchy is, and "
What could the social structure of anarchy look like?" - "This empowerment of ordinary citizens through decentralisation and direct democracy will eliminate the alienation and apathy that are now rampant in the modern city and town, and (as always happens when people are free) unleash a flood of innovation in dealing with the social breakdown now afflicting our urban wastelands."
Unfortunately, the relief organizations and governments in the US have rescue and relief operations "organized" to be so top-down as to be ineffective. The Red Cross can have all its oneneighborhoodpermajorcitybeingpreparedfordisaster programs that it wants, but we will still not be prepared for the next major disaster.
Going in and shooting the people who have guns or are helping themselves to the remaining goods in stores in a destroyed city is not going to change the confusion, sadness, homelessness, disease, hunger, and thirst that these people are facing. Getting them out of New Orleans, out of harm's way, and into stable housing will help a lot. Giving them a sense of empowerment would also be a nice idea. Right now they can't do anything for themselves except wait and die. That's not right.
So y'all should read this blog regularly:
The Interdictor. Updates from New Orleans.
I have hardly watched the news about this situation all week, because it is just so unbearably awful. I mean, so many people are homeless, jobless, etc. now. Yesterday on Talk of the Nation I heard them say that some people are posting to
New Orleans Craig's List from several states away to say that they will take people in. Isn't that sweet? Esp. when they write from states that don't have a lot of people of color. Heh. Much better than the demonization of people looting in N.O. I mean, hello, most people only have emergency rations for a day or two, if they have any. So they need to loot so they have water and food! And batteries for their radios.
Something that makes me mad about all this is our focus on New Orleans- I think it's because it's the city that white folks have heard of. What will become of Mardi Gras? Maybe
Berkeley Mardi Gras will become a more important celebration now...ah, the wingnuttiness. Or maybe it will be way different next year.
But anyhow, that whole region is really poor, right? Who is going to get those people's stories out? I want to go interview people and take pictures!!! Oh, btw,
New Orleans Indymedia is being updated more now.
Anyhow, I have to go clean the house of an insurance adjustor lawyer guy. I guess he will be out of town all fall after this, as soon as he can go assess the monetary damages.
Down with the Bobetariat!
Ok, I have had it. Rita called me tonight and told me that she has decided to pay someone to work on the O22 website.
i am learning how to use drupal in my free time, but for now the local October 22nd website looks pretty bad. Well, it is coming along. Rita has decided to pay a guy to work on it. i don't know anything about css, so if he is a professional web designer and can deal with the drupal shit or just redesign it from scratch, whatever. Why didn't she have him do it from the beginning? I often serve in this role of getting things started, and then the people who should have been doing them from the beginning cuz they are good at them take over and things look better. Sounds good, right?
She is going to pay him one day's salary from her job, with her own money. He will work on our local site and the national site, which is down in part because it was hacked. Ha!
Anyhow, he is a refuse and resist and rcp person, so again everything stays in the hands of the party. FUCK THAT.
My other problem with her decision is: If only we could all get paid to do activism. I don't even make enough most months to pay my rent. And I spend so much of my free time on this shit...anyhow...
How do you disassociate yourself from a group, but not from the work that you do?
I told ibm my predicament and he said, "there are other organizations in the bay area doing anti-police brutality work." I think the answer to this is to stop doing what I was doing. nobody does quite what i was doing, in terms of pulling together all this stolen lives stuff, but junya or someone can jump in, i guess...i suppose i will wrap some things up and tell her in person sometime soon. i have to give her back some things. so i guess i should wait to tell her in person? maybe i should just get thru what i can tomorrow and just stop.
i do like to (do outreach) table(s), but not by myself and all that like yesterday. i miss organizing, but lately i have been wondering if i am not good at it, or if i am out of the habit, or what. i want to work with people plural, not work for fucking rita. i complained to stephanie yesterday. she is the head of the rcp in sf- afaik, cuz she was. she brushed me off. she said something like, "we have different priorities at different times." if i could start the coalition over without the rcp...but no.
Did I mention that yesterday when rita was on stage talking about the coalition's work, she had a big roll of world can't wait stickers and she said something at the end of her speech about world can't wait? ARGH!
So I made a new friend this week, Tami the
Cosmic Gardener. She is a rad activist in Vancouver, BC. I just finished reading a book that was based in BC, called Diary of a Compost Hotline Operator.
Today I tabled for October 22nd at the Chicano (Xican@) Moratorium observation in SF. During the October 22nd speakers (I think it was the Ayala family, Mesha from the Idriss Stelley Foundation, and Rita from October 22nd (who also represented the annoying "world can't wait until the rcp's november 2nd demonstration"), I was having an in-person chat with ibm from
THE OTHER SITE. It was a nice talk.
We didn't have any info about the local coalition that people could take home with them. What the fuck?! And I couldn't get ahold of Rita for HOURS, even though she had said she would be at the park all day. Then she wouldn't go to the office to get the frickin flyers. I was trapped at the table because there was noone who could take my place. Noone! I asked Rita's husband (who was at the world can't wait to increase the boredom table) to keep an eye on the table while I went to the Barrio Defense Cmte/Justice for Julio Ayala table to see if they had flyers about October 22nd, and when I came back he didn't have his eye on the table at all. Hello, the books and t-shirts, and even the buttons, cost money! I brought it just enough money to pay the vendor fee.
Anyhow, early on in the afternoon, this older black guy comes up to the table and says he wants a
Stolen Lives book, but doesn't have the money with him. I have him write down his contact info. And guess what name he writes?
Bobby Seale. No Fucking Way! I had never seen him up close- I guess that's why I didn't recognize him. So I like begged him to shake my hand.
Sometimes I think I should leave the coalition or we should disband it. I could tell her we are disbanding it and forming a new group that is not under the leadership of the RCP. We could try to keep the same phone number and office, and call it the "Bay Area Coalition to Stop Police Brutality," or some acronym that spells out BayCop. But I am hesitant to do it. It would require a lot of work, a lot of organizing with people I haven't worked with before, a lot of long meetings...
Another idea I have is to set up a coalition to stop police, or a coalition against police, or a coalition against law enforcement. Or something like that. An explicitly anti-police network. It could be a place where people share ideas and ask for help on projects that are about living without police- Copwatch, security organizations, etc. And talk about or do things related to resisting the police state. Somehow or other. I just would want the right people to do it with.
The other thing that happened today was that when I was leaving Rainbow Grocery with my housecleaning supplies, Jess from the garden called. She said that they had talked about getting a rooster from Spiral Gardens, and that there was one available that very minute, and was I opposed to getting one? Well, why the hell not? Everything is a learning experience, right? So I got to the garden a Sunday evening's BART trip and lots of walking later (an hour and a half?) and there is a
rooster in the garden!! Apparently he had already raped all 6 chickens. He took forever to calm down at bedtime. In fact, he got up on the roof of the coops and... flew over the fence. He went into the little hothouse and from the outside it looked like he was bouncing off the walls. Poor okra plants. James showed him who the man around the garden is and locked him in the coop (where he tried to rape chickens who were roosting). So for an hour as the sun went down (and after), we added about 30 inches of fence (vertically) all the way around the chickens' enclosure. Sigh.
I can't wait to go see him tomorrow! do roosters eat something other than laying formula?
PS- when we left the garden, we locked our new combination lock for the very first time. what will the community's response be? stay tuned!
