Friday, September 02, 2005

The House I Live In: America's Tsunami Part 2

From Alexander Cockburn at counterpunch: "Tuesday night, as water rose to 20 feet through most of New Orleans, CNN relayed an advisory that food in refrigerators would last only four hours, would have to be thrown out. The next news item from CNN was an indignant bellow about "looters" of 7/11s and a Walmart. Making no attempt to conceal the racist flavor of the coverage, the press openly describes white survivors as "getting food from a flooded store," while blacks engaged in the same struggle for survival are smeared as "looters."The reverence for property is now the underlying theme of many newscasts, with defense of The Gap being almost the first order of duty for the forces of law and order. But the citizens looking for clothes to wear and food to eat are made of tougher fiber and are more desperate than the polite demonstrators who guarded The Gap and kindred chains in Seattle in 1999. The police in New Orleans are only patrolling in large armed groups. One spoke of "meeting some resistance," as if the desperate citizens of New Orleans were Iraqi insurgents. Also on Tuesday night the newscasts were reporting that in a city whose desperate state is akin the Dacca in Bangladesh a few years ago, there were precisely seven Coast Guard helicopters in operation. Where are the National Guard helicopters? Presumably strafing Iraqi citizens on the roads outside Baghdad and Fallujah." Above is a New Orlean's "home" on the rooftop of a Supermarket. Here's another slide show of the Katrina "homes" from the Times

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