Salon Inside New Orleans

We talk to a few of the thousands of people for whom no shelter was provided. Tourists have been some of the unlucky ones. “We were kicked out of our hotel several days ago; we were thrown out onto the street with no food or supplies or anything,” says Betty Ellanson, a 60-ish woman from Sumter County, Ga. “We’re on our own. We’ve been told that by law enforcement and the National Guard.” Ellanson is camping out, sleeping on a cement pedestrian bridge that runs between the convention center and the Riverwalk shopping mall with a makeshift clan of 50 other tourists, who had been expelled from the same hotel for “liability reasons.” They have been scavenging the streets for food and water, hoarding peanuts and soft drinks among their Samsonites.
…
While chatting with some of the National Guardsmen, another guardsman approaches and informs us that a woman is in the middle of a stroke around the corner. The guardsmen shrug. There is no emergency medical tent in the downtown area, and many people in need of medicine have no way of getting what they need, even inside the shelters. On our way into the French Quarter, a wild-eyed man flags down our car, begging us for insulin or information about where some can be found. We cannot help him.
In contrast, some residents of the French Quarter appear comfortable, well-fed and relaxed. About 150 New Orleans police officers have commandeered the Royal Omni Hotel, part of the international luxury chain of Omni hotels that is housed in an elegant 19th century building, complete with crystal chandeliers and a rooftop pool. “All of the officers that are here, I can tell you in a classical sense, are gladiators,” says Capt. Kevin Anderson, commander of the Eighth District of the NOPD (French Quarter). “To be able to put your family’s concerns aside to protect the citizens of New Orleans, it’s just an awesome job,” he says.
Across the street from the Royal Omni at the Eighth District police department, several police officers keep a wary eye on the street with shotguns at the ready, while some fellow officers grill sausage links over charcoal barbecues. They are under strict orders not to communicate with the media. Capt. Anderson does confirm, however, that locations where officers were housed came under gunfire on Tuesday night. No officers were injured. “It is a very dangerous situation that we’re in,” Anderson says.
Apart from rescue operations, the police department patrols for looters, who have ransacked stores in virtually every part of the city. Looters are visible on every street corner. Every kind of business, from rundown corner markets to the Gucci storefront on South Peters Street, has been looted.
We walk half a block down Royal Street from the Eighth District headquarters and come upon Brennan’s Restaurant, one of New Orleans’ most venerable dining institutions. The Brennans are a high-profile family of restaurateurs and run several of the highest-end eateries in town. Jimmy Brennan and a crew of his relatives are holing up in the restaurant along with the chef, Lazone Randolph. They are sleeping on air mattresses, drinking Cheval Blanc, and feasting on the restaurant’s reserves of haute Creole food.

Posted by: b | Sep 2 2005 9:48 utc | 4

FEMA Dir. Mike Brown fired from prior job at Horse Assoc.
Yes, that’s right… the man responsible for directing federal relief operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sharpened his emergency management skills as the “Judges and Stewards Commissioner” for the International Arabian Horses Association… a position from which he was forced to resign in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray.
And what of that misleading White House press release?
I’m so goddamned angry I can’t even comment.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 2 2005 10:06 utc | 6

link

I have also spoken today on post here with Army pilots really pissed off that when the helicopter was shot at yesterday at the Superdome, they suspended operations. What I have been told is IT IS A MILITARY HELICOPTER AND YOU ARE PREFORMING A KIND OF MILITARY MISSION AND YOU ARE TAKING FIRE SO WHAT’S THE FUCKING PROBLEM? I heard this from pilots who have served in Iraq. They are really upset right now that it is okay to take fire to liberate Iraqis but it isn’t okay to take fire attempting to rescue and save people in your own country!
I went on Fort Rucker to take photos of the helicopters just sitting there and was told that it has nothing to do with what they want to do. They have been told to stand down by the National Guard Commander.

Posted by: b | Sep 2 2005 10:30 utc | 8

Priorities: WWL TV blog

5:41 A.M. – (AP) Doctors at two desperately crippled hospitals in New Orleans called The Associated Press Thursday morning pleading for rescue, saying they were nearly out of food and power and had been forced to move patients to higher floors to escape looters. “We have been trying to call the mayor’s office, we have been trying to call the governor’s office … we have tried to use any inside pressure we can. We are turning to you. Please help us,” said Dr. Norman McSwain, chief of trauma surgery at Charity Hospital, the larger of two public hospitals.
5:37 A.M. – Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco declared war on looters as 300 National Guard troops landed in New Orleans fresh from duty in Iraq. “These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will,” she said.

Posted by: b | Sep 2 2005 10:46 utc | 10

If you have broadband watch WWL TV. The moderators have lost their houses too.
They still give too much leeway to Bush and the governour, but many informations and interviews the big media don´t carry.
The explosion east of the French Quarter tonight was some chemical factory near the Mississippi. Could become quite dangerous.

Posted by: b | Sep 2 2005 11:22 utc | 12

We shouldn’t be surprised that the helicopter shooting was a furphy. Up until I read Blumenthal and Krugman in NYT I was thinking that this fuckup was incompetence heavily leavened with complacency.
Now that it has been demonstrated that this diaster was deliberately allowed to occur despite many warning of the likelhood of exactly what came to pass occuring I am of the view that this is an act of deliberate genocide.
Apart from the racial thing the presbyterians and baptists in Washington see most Louisianans as decadent. The whitefellas down there play with snakes and they’re related to the French aren’t they? Well say no more we know about those Frencies. It would be comic if the consequences weren’t so serious and probably on the money.
As I said earlier middle amerika doesn’t appear to see much commonality between themseves and the people of New Orleans. Paris used to be the number one overseas tourist destination for the US. New Orleans is popular too but in a kind of voyeuristic and vicarious way. I mean people that wouldn’t let a mustachioed waiter carry their food back home let themselves be photographed with transgender types in NO. They always have the story about a ‘friend’ who found the packed lunch at the last moment.
I reckon the element of fascist insanity that has been powering BushCo and their wing nut mates in Congress are looking at New Orleans from the point of view of a pest exterminator.
“Get the pernicious french influence out of Amerika.” Those frogs don’t know how to keep a black man in his place and they are devil worshippers with their voodoo n such.
Like someone said upthread Florida had emergency services in place BEFORE the hurricane hit yet government is still sitting on it’s hands about Louisiana. Florida would’ve got the same treatment if the Florida now was the same as it was 30 years ago before alla the Republicans moved down there.
Just watching the way the US media is handling the story and the people in it tells us that. Newsreaders are still describing the poor of NO as people who chose to stay behind rather than people traped by poverty and circumstance.
Conspiracy theories have never made any sense to me because there is no chance of the truth about any major conspiracy being kept secret for long. This time it doesn’t matter cause by the time any rumours gain substance the culture will have been destroyed and a lot of people are likely to feel relieved that the devil worshippers got their comeuppance.
What better way to solve the problem of the poor in a democracy having the gall to imagine that what they want/need should be taken into consideration by BushCo the corporation’s friend.
This could be a trial run. If a big chunk of the poor are dead no-one will notice the

Posted by: Debs is dead | Sep 2 2005 11:55 utc | 14

I mean this is just beyond belief. This is clearly a deliberate genocide being perpetrated upon our own people, before our own eyes, that we are witnessing. And the media is wholly complicit in the SPECTACLE: Engaging in sanitizing the racism and the violence; blaming and condemning the victims and emotionalizing the survivors, then trivializing the whole experience. And we are meant to sit back and watch the spectacle, like some sort of Roman gladiator event, on our TV.
After New York and New Orleans, San Francisco is next, then maybe LA and Seattle. Sit back folks, we have a busy fall season planned for our viewers. After all, this is September and we are watching the new product being rolled out before our eyes, and yes, members of this community, it is meant for us.
Why are they so concerned with shooting “looters”, and not just getting people out of there. Every fucking reporter who is crusing in and out of there daily in their big SUV’s and, like that shit on News Hour from the Washington Post, hanging around the French Quarter watching the corrupt police who are holed up there grilling sausages, and not evacuating people, is a war criminal as far as I am concerned.
It seems to me that people are deliberately being confined within the city. They walk for three days over a bridge only to be turned back. We have with the resources to film them, but not help them. Shouldn’t the reporter’s big SUV’s at least be filled with water when they enter the city every morning? Anyone with normal priorities would recognize that we need to get people out of there.
Does anyone really believe that we don’t have 5000 school buses located within 24 hours of New Orleans, and that there aren’t 1000 communities that could temprarily put up 100 people within 24 hours of New Orleans, and that the mayors of those communities would publicly refuse those requests, and that 100 FEMA secretaries couldn’t have arranged all of this in 4 hours. Do the math, folks. This is not rocket science. This is murder. And FEMA is billing us $500,000,000 for the effort. Old Nazis would have been cheaper.
Beware: The situation is always framed as: “We have a problem with looters”, not “We had an unprecedented crisis, and the government, whose responsibility it is to protect it’s citizen’s and maintain order, was M.I.A.” Absolutely and completely, not there. And now they are using this willful dereliction as an excuse for martial law. Get used to this technique–it is coming to a theatre (of war) near you!
This is all being treated as a SPECTACLE for our morbid fascination and entertainment. The lesson is: folks, you are helpless, we control whether you live or die. Just be glad it’s not you this time.
Tourists are being kicked out of their hotels and turned onto the streets? If anyone in America ever patronizes those hotel chains again, they are complicit in this. Hospitals are not evacuated yet, and people are dying. Dying slow, cruel, torturous deaths that one wouldn’t wish on, or be legal to inflict upon, an enemy combatant. Meanwhile, you have paramilitary flyboys holed up in highrises receiving aid and being treated as if they are heros.
As the Democrats have not used this event, with the long public record of defunding, cronyism, willful neglect–setting everything up just so, so it was only a matter of time until this happened, the “government” just had to sit back and wait until their “trifecta” came in again–as the Democrats have not yet arisen en masse and called for, no, DEMANDED the resignation of this President for unprecedented crimes committed against his own people, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that they are complicit in this too. And anyone who ever supports another Democrat who is playing this murderous game, is also complicit.
The use of the word SPECTACLE is deliberate. Spectacle implies that we are there to watch, helpless, like in a nightmare where you see the threat coming, but cannot move or cry out. Spectacle implies that agency is removed from the human level, from individual responsibility, to a meta-level of collectivism: The brutality has now become systemized.Spectacle implies that this is meant for us: for our entertainment and edification, as all art is. But Spectacle cannot exist without us, the spectators. And therefore, by viewing the spectacle, we are all complicit in its perpertuation. We have now become like “Made Men” in the mafia: forever complicit, forever guilty, in the subjugation of other human beings–human beings that we define as part of our own tribe. We are all guilty of killing a part of “us.” We are all guilty of setting into process our own eventual murders by the system, by “just following orders”, by the SPECTACLE.

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 2 2005 13:53 utc | 16

Malooga, yes. Television is a debauch, and corrupts the viewer.

Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 2 2005 18:02 utc | 18

Thanks for that Uncle $cam. Unfortunately it could get worse. Neuter Gingrich is calling for Guliani to be put in.
Since you’re great on digging up dirt, could you find the info. on how he was paid off by Motorola – I think – to force NYC’s first responders in Fire & Police to get radio equipment that wouldn’t allow them to communicate w/each other?

Posted by: jj | Sep 2 2005 20:20 utc | 20

well, Wolf just asked Black guy – name not posted – if this would have been allowed to happen, if the citizens were white.

Posted by: jj | Sep 2 2005 20:27 utc | 22

While Hastert was in Indiana for a fundraiser, he stopped off at an Auto Show to Auction off a car of his. (He’ll donate the money to the Relief Fund. Touching. How ’bout throwing in some of the suitcases of cash you got for your votes, son? Huh? Just asking?)

Posted by: jj | Sep 2 2005 20:33 utc | 24

any chance that the toxic waste water, which clearly has a film of oil/gas in many spots, would catch fire? what a nightmare that would escalate the situation to.

Posted by: b real | Sep 2 2005 21:48 utc | 26

Krugman without login

Posted by: gmac | Sep 3 2005 1:18 utc | 28