Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » katrina

The Green Footprint of Fairtrade Green Coffee Beans and the Port of New Orleans

Mariehurt — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:21:57 +0000

The Port of New Orleans in the 19th Century

New Orleans Consider these facts if you will:

From Wikipedia: As the country’s major coffee-handling port, the Port of New Orleans has 14 warehouses covering over 51 hectares of storage space and six roasting facilities.

Coffee Handled Here. New Orleans is the nation’s premier coffee-handling port, with 14 warehouses, more than 5.5 million feet of storage space and six roasting facilities in a 20 mile radius. Two of the most modern bulk processing operations are located in New Orleans: Dupuy Storage and Forwarding Corp. (first in U.S.) and Silocaf of New Orleans, Inc. (world’s largest). [Source: Port of New Orleans]

Let’s discount the fact that the Port of New Orleans is probably involved in some boosterism, but there can be little doubt that New Orleans is one of the major, if not THE, major entry points for coffee coming from Latin America. Ironically, whether in trying to buy fairtrade green coffee beans in New Orleans or trying to ship them directly from Honduras for example, we keep hearing these days of shipping routes to Newark and the Port of NY/NJ rather than on the shortest route to New Orleans from the eastern, Atlantic or Gulf Coasts of Latin America. Talking to our roasters and sources for fairtrade green beans for Fair Grinds Coffeehouse as a 100% fairtrade shop in the city, we are constantly struggling to get our beans directly through the Port of New Orleans, rather than trucked in and warehoused in the city. What’s up?!?

I heard a rumor that New York /New Jersey had offered tax incentives to divert coffee traffic after Katrina to move coffee out of New Orleans, but after spending hours on the Internet, I cannot yet confirm the truth of that information. The facts though are that Katrina did ruin a lot of coffee and tea in area warehouses, and some have not returned more than seven (7) years later.

Sadly, and perhaps ironically as well, the leading fairtrade buyers have perhaps been the slowest to return, rather than the fastest. The coffee buying cooperative composed of 22 of the biggest, leading fairtrade roasters all used to bring all of their coffee through the Port of New Orleans, but are only now debating a return. These roasters include many of the best including Just Coffee in Madison, Café Campesino in Georgia, Bongo Java in Nashville, Third Coast in Austin, and Amavida in Florida, as well as a bunch of great roasters in all across Canada.

Seems like fairtrade social justice would include making sure that there is support for the City of New Orleans and its great, deepwater river port, as it recovers from Katrina, especially among the progressive forces in the rebuilding effort that continues unabated but with grave challenges even to this day. Add to that the union jobs and living wages on the Port and in the warehouses and the arguments made by many, including COWS director, Professor Joel Rogers from the University of Wisconsin, that the Port should be the “economic driver for high road development” after the storm, and I would think this would be an easy decision rather than a lengthy debate.

We should be up to our elbows in fairtrade coffee beans in New Orleans, not on our knees begging for a bag here and a bag there. What’s missing in this story?

Maybe it’s time for us to put our coffee cups down for a minute and start an organizing campaign, which is something we do understand!

Video Series: Wade Discusses Battle for the 9th Ward

jstuart — Thu, 03 May 2012 21:27:45 +0000

What Does TV Say about Reality: Deconstructing HBO’s “Treme”

Mariehurt — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:03:01 +0000

Professor Vicki Mayer on Treme

New Orleans The HBO show, Treme, another auteur urban tour from David Simon following the wildly acclaimed Wire, may not have found mass appeal out there in viewerlandia, but in New Orleans literally everyone has an opinion, all of which made for a fascinating evening with Tulane media and communications professor Vicki Mayer as part of the Fair Grinds Dialogue series. It was fascinating to listen to the Mayer’s presentation but also to hear the discussion. People in New Orleans watch Treme for so many different and highly personal reasons that if this were an Occupy general assembly, the dialogue would never end, because quite simply “the personal is the perspective” for many here.

Mayer was able to color in parts of the picture that locals couldn’t imagine especially the enthusiasm and interest by scholars around the world. After an astute opening comment on the way the film industry in New Orleans is “colonizing” the city and contributing to the “privatization of public space” (amen!), Mayer said there were three main points to the scholarly interest in Treme:

As multiply layered art with various tropes and themes of such significant interest to film auteurs that HBO could afford to run the show to advance its partnership with Simon as a “loss leader” despite slimmer ratings because the later box sets and long term sales would be good.
Scholars see the show as one of a smaller group of television offerings that tries to “speak about social ills in society, especially the post-Katrina, post-crisis society.” My own view is that the show does this very poorly, but that doesn’t take away from Professor Mayer’s point that there are damn few that even bother, so it’s worth a good look. The concept of “private mobilization” that emerged as part of this story was interesting. There is agreement between those at the dialogue and scholars that the occasional intersections with New Orleans culture are important and interesting, regardless of whether or not the show makes this a tourist film and musical minstrel show of “Disneyland on the Mississippi.”
Perhaps most interestingly, Professor Mayer shared that many looked at the show as an allegory for the “prototypical neoliberal city” where “citizens take care of the city” develop as local entrepreneurs who are in “training for how to be a good citizen.” The subliminal message of the show in some ways, Mayer said, is that citizens “can’t count on the city to do anything.” Wow – right on! I knew I resented this part of the show, but was grateful to Mayer for putting a name to it!

This being New Orleans, there was a lot of discussion about how poorly the show dealt with women, power, and race and how they worked in reality as opposed to in Simon’s Treme. One dialogue participant told a story of being an extra in a Treme neighborhood joint she frequented and being asked along with others to leave during the filming, because the club scene wasn’t “black enough.” At the same time person after person at Fair Grinds told how the show “spoke” to them because of a street here or a restaurant there or something that was still a “marker” of home, particularly for many now recently returning from the New Orleans diaspora after Katrina.

There was also a hearty discussion not often heard in New Orleans about whether the burgeoning film industry is “paying back” to the city. The huge tax credits that are writing off 1/3 or more of film costs are the most lucrative for the industry in the US now, but here there was criticism and mourning about how little was being done to train and develop long term jobs in the industry and deepen the skills and connections for a film industry in the Crescent City for the future.

Perhaps that point deepens the theme of the neo-liberal, global city. Industry comes here in a race to the bottom for wages and work, and never sets root so they can easily flee to the next place in the future without leaving any skills or infrastructure. Best that Treme not talk about power, because there should be popular and political accountability at the city and state level in Louisiana about who could have allowed the city and its citizens to be exploited once again as if we are little more than a third world Jamaica without a beach and a China of little labor standards and migrant, transient workers.

Padding the Numbers: Seedco in NYC and Gutters in New Orleans

Mariehurt — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 16:21:04 +0000

Federal agents carry out records from New Orleans Affordable Homeowners Corp. & indictments followed.

New Orleans Sometimes it comes down to who you know, not what you can do, and in those circumstances when the screws start turning from the City paymasters, the favored few sometimes just start making up shit to save themselves rather than the families they are meant to serve. This week I’ve had to read about companies in New Orleans who were supposed to be gutting houses for Katrina victims being indicted for fabricating addresses where they had supposedly done the work, often taking credit for work in fact that the ACORN gutting program had done, and about Seedco in New York City in a similar scandal fictionalizing 1400 job placements where either folks got jobs on their own or didn’t get work, but Seedco claimed success for their efforts or lack of them.

In New Orleans where ACORN financed a giant multi-million dollar effort using a combination of skilled crews and thousands of volunteers to gut more than 5000 homes, leading the recovery effort after Katrina (see The Battle for the Ninth Ward: ACORN, Rebuilding New Orleans, and the Lessons of Disaster), we collected promises of funding and reimbursement from the City of New Orleans from the Mayor to all of the City Council, but never collected a dime. We were silent, but not surprised when investigators examined our records and found that sometimes several City Hall chummy contractors had claimed ACORN gutted houses many times over. We were not comfortable surrendering our records, so stayed clear of the mess.

We had been a subcontractor with the non-profit Seedco in Baltimore with our ACORN Service Centers in providing tax preparation and benefit access services, and found the relationship beneficial enough there that it was an outlier for the national organization. We came to rue some of this when Baltimore went off the rails on housing counseling and were scammed by O’Keefe in a related program. Seedco is in New Orleans as well. We met with them after the hurricane, but nothing came of it. Their housing counseling program is partnered with the credit union that is now our landlord, and we share an address. I think they mean well and often do good work.

Despite that disclosure, they are a New York City centric operation that funders have sought to expand, and from the leadership of Seedco down there is a “NY” implicit on their caps even to a major board member being the Ford guy who helped them get started and funded them in the beginning and their new president who was a long time New York government fixture. All of which may explain why some of their job counselors felt pressured to fabricate results to keep their jobs and protect their $7 million contract with the City of New York. It also may explain why their original internal investigation after the Times broke the story from whistleblowers inside, still turned up no evidence of fabrication in the numbers. This week it comes out that the City is transferring the whole contract to another nonprofit, so their efforts to claim they had fired or pushed out those involved or responsible comes to naught.

It is interesting to read their statement published currently on their website about the New York City scandal as a classic, new school textbook listing of how institutions are supposed to respond to these kinds of operational problems. I hate to think how much they and their funders paid to some so-called crisis-management team for that concoction. It starts with “blaming the victims” – those down the chain of command at lower levels who couldn’t resist the city pressure and internal culture, so had to go; setting “new” standards; hiring someone internally to police the new standards; investigating internally though they admit, ineffectively; and whatever else might postpone the reckoning. There was no mention of making the numbers good by finding the missing 1400 jobs. There was no mention of the perhaps impossibility of the task in this economy and the need for more social service support to bridge the gap or the impossibility of making gold through some mysterious alchemy out of iron.

In both situations unfortunately sometimes the subcontractors are just too close to the paymasters to make the programs work. Cronies are not always crooks, but they are always dependents. The push to subcontract and privatize can cause lots of problems and the cities themselves should bear their responsibilities here, even though it’s always the weakest links in the chain that pay the price. And, frequently, they meant well, too.

Short Takes on the 1% and Other Weirdness in the Small World

Mariehurt — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:53:13 +0000

New Orleans As we fight to regain population in the wake of Katrina and so many other demographic struggles over the last half-century, New Orleans in the NBA/NFL world is a “small market city,” which means we often find that we are living in a very small world.

I thought of this recently while hanging around some Regional Transit Authority employees that our union represents and over hearing folks talking in the hallway about how the 1% and old money and prerogatives really work in the Crescent City still. The RTA has been installing automatic ticket machines in several high bus traffic locations in the city, which is a good idea. One location right downtown is at the corner of Canal Street and Carondelet. 2000 people a day catch buses or streetcars at that location, so it was an ideal location for the City to locate a standup shelter with a ticket machine and route maps obviously. RTA went through all of the formalities and won approvals from the Vieux Carre Commission, Downtown Development, Historic Landmarks, etc. They dug the hole, spent the money (about $40,000), and were ready to put up the shelter, but…

This location was in front of Adler’s Jewelers, the long time, iconic location for uptowners, the Carnival Club crowd, members of the Pickwick Club nearby, and others to buy their jewelry and get their watches fixed. Late in the construction process, the senior member of the Adler family started coming out from time to time to observe the work. He didn’t say much, just looked from time to time. Suddenly, a call came to RTA from the Mayor’s office cancelling the entire project! Adler claimed they hadn’t realized what was happening in front of their store, despite all of the hearings and notices. Turns out, if you serve the 1% in New Orleans, it’s not what you know, but still “who you know.” RTA covered the hole and pulled away the trucks leaving working people stuck like chuck.

Quelle shock! That’s how “we roll,” I guess?

Ps. One person who heard the story said, “at least they haven’t moved all of their stores to the suburbs.” We’re even abused as consumers, much less citizens, it seems.

Springfield Story: Do We Learn from Disasters?

jstuart — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:55:11 +0000

New Orleans There’s a t-shirt coming: global warming gonna get your mamma! The spate of disasters from Japan to Joplin, Birmingham, Alabama to Springfield, Mass brings all the horror home again. Living in New Orleans and still in recovery from Katrina and weaker and wiser from the experience, I keep an eye on these things, and in the case of Springfield I have been connected to some of the scrappy organizations, organizers, and activists trying to contend with the both the learning curve and the vast unmet and crying needs of victims and the community itself.

Springfield is at the top of the list for foreclosures in Massachusetts and sitting with the redoubtable Congressman Barney Frank, banking expert and one-man accountability squad, but people are still demanding a moratorium during the crises for foreclosures and have yet to win it, despite the Springfield City Council joining the call and FHA saying they are ready. A federal disaster has been declared. Occupancy for housing units was frightfully low (about 6%) before the tornado, yet no action. Why after Katrina is this not automatic? Why do families and their organizations have to start from scratch here?

Housing can’t be found. There is still no moratorium stopping evictions for families still living in houses that have been foreclosed during this crisis. What the frick?!?

This morning I have been listening to a video of interviews with survivors. I did not need to watch. I’ve heard all the stories before from different faces. We are almost 30 days out from the disaster and people have their famous FEMA letters, but no money yet. It seems that the emergency payments that helped us survive post-Katrina have not been issued. The Red Cross has announced that it is closing shelters today and some of the survivors who were interviewed talked about the crushing indignity of having their cots and gear moved out yesterday as they got the notice. Why do we still let the Red Cross muddle through the mess? They are good at giving out water and food, waving their flag and raising money, but they don’t know how to handle housing or survivors once the first punch has been taken and the long sloughing fight to rebuild sets in. Why are we still not being better? This is a congressionally authorized corporation with virtually no accountability in Washington that preys on disorganized and panic victims thankful for any help. Listening to one woman talk about how she felt Puerto Ricans and African-Americans faced discrimination at the hands of the Red Cross was just flat over the line for me!

Hotel rooms are going begging for guests in Springfield now, and there is word that survivors unable to locate housing may be relocated to some, but in a typical disaster catch-22, FEMA says it will reimburse the survivors for their lodging which means these poor, working families would have to come up with the money now on the front end and get reimbursed who knows when?

And, working, forget about that even though protecting livelihoods is lifeblood for families and for the community. One woman talked about having lost her car and having no way to replace the transportation so knowing that her job was going to be the next thing she would lose and then she would have to “start all over.”

In New Orleans we had to learn how to organize to win on all of these fronts after Katrina and we’re still paying the price. Now almost six years after Katrina where are new communities and new victims and survivors of disaster still facing the same maze of obstacles and obstinacy in the face of tragedy when our national and local policy should be an open and helping hand?

Treme for Tourists: The Shell of the City Set to Music

jstuart — Mon, 30 May 2011 15:23:58 +0000

New Orleans Henry Butler, the well known New Orleans piano player, and his music were featured on the Treme episode in the regular HBO Sunday slot. Early in the show, he said it was “good to be home.” In the real world of post-Katrina, Butler had showed up with thousands of others on the porch of the ACORN building at the time on Elysian Fields near the corner of St. Claude. He had waited his turn. ACORN was one of the few places open and able with crews of workers and volunteers and running a home “gutting” program that ended up handling close to 6000 houses before all was said and done. There was no FEMA money, city money, federal money, or anything but what people put forward or what ACORN had raised. Butler got all of this. He didn’t mince words. He wanted ACORN to do the gutting, he knew his place on the list, but was desperate to get home and be sure that his house was declared more than 50% damaged and therefore ineligible for recovery monies from the state Road Home disaster. The real cost of gutting each house down to the studs so it could dry out and be prepped for rebuilding was $2500. Butler paid it gladly and the day the work was finished came by and gave CD’s of his music to all of the workers and staff around the building. He has been quoted frequently by reporters and others speaking about how much ACORN, the gutting, and its work fighting to rebuild the city meant to him. This will never be a part of the story in the tourist version of Treme.

I loved David Simon’s The Wire, set in Baltimore. I was never confused that it was “real” or some kind of docudrama about Baltimore. It was good drama in an urban setting that was filled with straight talk, bent angles, and people from unions, politics, crime, and throughout the city that were multi-dimensional, complex, and felt real. ACORN organizers and some other commentators in Baltimore felt slighted by the show because it didn’t depict the part of the world that included community organizing. I got that, but I was a fan.

I’m having a harder time with Treme. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the show is on the air, and I’m delighted to see it set in New Orleans. When they film in front of my house at Fredrick Douglass High School or elsewhere in the Bywater neighborhood where I live, I’m happy to move my truck out of the way. I’m friendly to the caterers, truck drivers, security and duty cops. I shake hands and give the thumbs up at local bars and restaurants featured as background for the action. On that score it’s all good and thanks, Mr. Simon.

With The Wire I knew it was all just made up stuff, but I liked the gritty slices of the Baltimore we knew being part of the action. Simon doesn’t know New Orleans, but in Treme he tries to compensate with more “historical” and “contemporary” references to substitute for the real New Orleans, the city he seems to like, but can’t quite grip, except from a tourist perspective, which just grates on me. Even as great as New Orleans music is and as much as I like the exposure given to some of the local players as a stalwart citizen of the hometown, I often have trouble with the one-dimensional minstrel show aspects of all of this, which sometimes are just painful to watch.

One of the things that worked in The Wire was the nuanced and complex way that Simon, a former police and beat reporter up there, handled the bad guys. They were real people. He drew you in. You rooted for some of the guys and against other guys. There is no day in the streets of any city where I wouldn’t want to make sure that Omar had my back and was a block or two behind me.

New Orleans is a violent city, even more so that Baltimore, but after a year a half it is amateurish how Treme deals with this intrinsic part of the patter n of the city. One of the main characters is the Indian chief whose struggle and cultural rectitude is supposed to attract some of our sympathy despite the fact that he is invariably a cranky son-of-a-bitch. In the first season we watched him lay in wait and then beat up a young fellow within an inch of his life, and possibly to his death, who had stolen his tools. Nothing more on that…it was all just left hanging and random. In Treme the cops are plastic, tinny, and nothing more than crooks with a badge, save for one hero, who seems largely our hero because he gets along with the sniveling, heart on her sleeve lawyer, who is so committed to the truth that she can’t tell her teenage daughter about her father’s suicide.

The violence this season was a grisly rape and general beatdown of one of the main characters, a woman bartender, as she moved to close up. Where was Simon on this story? None of this was real. Watching the “tourist” Treme, we’re supposed to believe that there is a bar in the hood in our fair city that doesn’t have a shotgun or some kind of firearm behind the counter. We’re supposed to believe that our woman bartender wasn’t packing heat, mace and more. We’re supposed to believe that there’s a woman or man barkeep in the City of New Orleans that blithely packs the day’s money in their purse or pocket and stands in the dark to lock the door. Maybe all of that happens in Disneyland, some college town or Toronto or perhaps even Baltimore, but that’s not New Orleans, friend!

I don’t want to seem unkind about Treme, but the tourism tinge of everything also pulls everything about race out of kilter from the real city. In a service industry where more than 50,000 people were employed in the hospitality industry before the storm and restaurants were unable to open for years because public housing was closed and affordable housing was out of reach for the largely African-American service workers trying to return to their jobs. Despite the fact that this is the New Orleans industry, it is a afterthought seen through a story of white woman chef whose black sous-chef has a French accent? I don’t even want to touch the character that is a white former DJ, trying to be a rapper in our city which is famous for our hip hop and rappers. One of the truest notes in the show slipped out this season when he admitted he had gone to Newman, an exclusive, uptown prep school, which to hometown folks just about said everything about this dude! It also says yet more about Treme’s losing struggle to come to grips with the reality of race in the real city which can only be ignored in the tourist’s ghetto of New Orleans, where Simon and his team seem lost.

Using Wendell Pierce, a New Orleans native from Press Park, the first African-American suburban development in the city, as perhaps the key character doesn’t give Treme the cover it needs in Treme. He’s a trombone playing, good times, skirt chasing scamp, and he plays it to the hilt, but that’s simply a caricature. For some reason Simon chose a cartoon figure rather than a someone who felt like a real working musician from the city. You want to be a serious musician in tourist-Treme, then you need to be based in New York, speak Dutch, play the violin, or something. Phyllis Montana, the real daughter of a former Indian chief, is one of the few touches of reality anywhere near all of this, and her line about Pierce getting a “job job” rather than all of these gigs was a lightening shot of reality in the show. I can still remember having organized carriage drivers in the French Quarter and their endless arguments about whether there work was a “job” or a “hustle,” and all that went with that including unionization, benefits, respect and dignity. This is real!

Speaking of caricatures, all New Orleans politicians are corrupt and incompetent. Yawn. This is the rap, not the reality. It’s the uptown club view and the outsider’s assumption. The Simon of The Wire knew better. It’s time for that Simon to come back to work on Treme.

The references to Katrina are too painful in a tourist-Treme. I know someone who couldn’t watch a show the first season without crying. The show does pull some heartstrings for locals, although in my view Katrina is just a docudrama reference and little more. The real life drama in every family of return, rebuilding, rejection, or recovery just doesn’t make it into Treme. In real life the resilience of the city and its population to come back and remake the city is one of the great and lasting dramas of heroism of low and moderate income working people of all races and backgrounds. It hurts me and is painful for me to have to watch every show and think about how much is missed.

Working with ACORN in New Orleans, we had a front row, frontline seat in that struggle, but like everything that has to do with real people in the city, working and lower income people that have been and will be the majority of the city, those fights and victories that prevented the hijacking of New Orleans, its neighborhoods, and people will simply stay another story for the real citizens rather than tourist-Treme.

I was driving to the gym yesterday in my truck. I still have a “Call ACORN – Hurricane Recovery” sign on the back. I will always ride for the brand. A car came up Rampart as I drove up the Treme neighborhood boundary line and started honking. The passenger window was down, so that when he caught up to me, I looked over. A guy was grinning with his thumb up, and I could see him mouthing the words, “Yeah, ACORN!” as he signaled and turned right on Esplanade.

Treme is better than nothing about New Orleans, but there’s a great show about the real city and its people that is still waiting to be made. Sadly, Treme is not that show. At least not yet.

For Sale: Used Nuke Plants, Cheap, Going Now!

dine — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 20:10:36 +0000

New Orleans The Japanese can’t catch a break. Hundreds of bodies are still washing up on the shore. Towns were the body counts are unknown and frightening because after days of work only one-fourth or one-third of the ground has been covered. But, the big headlines here are not about the week old tragedy but the fear of more to come for Japan – and the rest of us – from the future and the nuclear meltdowns around us. OMG!

It is interesting to see what is learned in different countries from this impending catastrophe.

Germany moves to shut down all of their nuclear plants to make sure they are ready and able to deal with the kinds of problems being seen in Japan. I’ve never heard of an earthquake in Germany, and they are on ready alert.

In the United States where we haven’t licensed a new nuclear plant since 1978, so all of our stuff is 30 years old and counting, but we just merrily dance along even with plants built on seismic fault lines like Diablo Canyon in California, content to read a press release from the Atomic Energy Commission that “they’re on it!” and a statement from President Obama in the White House that essentially says, “What me worry?” And, yet, from the press spin we are all over the Japanese situation, chiding them for their efforts, and in an exercise of unmitigated gall without even the hint of irony, our nuke experts and media mavens are pissing all over the Japanese for not being transparent.

Wow! Why have we not shutdown any plants with similar design structures as the endangered plants in Japan?

Why have we not shutdown any plants with spent rod storage systems like those in Japan?

Given what we have learned from Katrina alone, much less Japan, why are we not making backup power systems redundant and more secure?

And, I don’t know squat about it!

The New York Times ran an article today about the reset of the anti-nuclear movement and of all did so with a picture of politicians and interviews with musicians like Jackson Browne. God love all of them, but those are the come-late folks and the hangers on after the organizers and activists do the real work of movement building (with hearty thanks to all). Let’s hear some love and support for the people who need to fire up the movements, organize, and win us some real protection!

If Not Japan, Then Nobody is Ready

jstuart — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:41:15 +0000

New Orleans After Katrina a group of us who were community organizers with ACORN in New Orleans were given tickets to go to Japan to see what lessons had been learned from the Kobe earthquake a little more than 10 years before Katrina in 1995 and their recovery as well as precautions Tokyo had taken to protect the parts of that city that were as much as 15 feet below sea level. Looking particularly at Kobe which in the almost dozen years between the disaster and its fires killing more than 6000, had recovered its population and rebuilt, we could not help but be impressed. Walking on the super-levees of Tokyo that dwarfed anything in the American imagination for prevention and protection was also encouraging. Talking to professors, community organizers, and others, it was clear that if anyone had learned something and was prepared to get it right, Japan was the place.

All of which makes the scenes from the one-two punch caused by the 8.9 level earthquake and tsunami in the prefectures of northern Japan, even more disturbing to me. In Kobe the Japanese government had responded with billions for relief within a month of the earthquake and the priorities were first the poor and elderly and their return, all of which was opposite the USA response to Katrina, always too late, and usually too little, and never the poor first, regardless of the images embedded forever in our minds from scores of camera angles. Even with such rapid response, Kobe officials were frank with us that once the elderly and poor were relocated, even though population had returned in absolute terms to the city, a huge percentage of those populations had not been able to come back.

As always, we fool ourselves it seems. The early CNN reports mentioned the rapid response, the preparation, and the improved building standards post-Kobe, which would keep the death toll and damage estimates down. Now only days later the speculation on deaths dwarfs Kobe and is estimated between 10,000 and 20,000, which we can only pray is an exaggeration. And, though building standards may have been improved, there is no way to read about the nuclear plant generations being set at ground level on the assumption that the seawalls were adequate protection, and not feel that our hubris continually tempts fate and returns disaster.

The government in Japan still seems to be doing the right thing time after time, but the Cassandra warning here once again is that we have to have vital and robust governments willing and citizens willing to pay the prices to support adequate infrastructure protection if any of us can ever really feel safe for our families and future.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury – It’s Katrina Time

jstuart — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:25:38 +0000

New Orleans Judge Terry Alacorn of Section L, Criminal District Court for the Parish of Orleans, told all of us in the jury pool that participating in citizen service as a juror was second only to military service in making the country work. Maybe? Definitely there were many in the pool with me who felt like they had been drafted and wished they were anywhere else!

There was a time in New Orleans where at the end of your service as a juror you received a certificate signed by a judge that was your “get out of jury duty” pass forever. Then we were told that it was “one and done.” When called again some years ago, I marched down with my certificate to be told the obvious: there were less people in the city and more crime, so expect to be called whenever and wherever.

Everyone becomes an expert in how it should all be changed, but it’s something you soldier through. The best way to go in my book is with a spirit of doing your time and getting to know your fellow citizens better. My view of justice and a system that can mete it out and the approach my fellow citizens take to the same question, often scares and scars me for years. I’ll try to spare you, but it won’t be easy.

Did you know that the lawyers like to ask jury panels what radio station they listen to in order to given them insight? Bizarre. One woman said a number and then later asked the judge to make sure a note was affixed by the lawyers that the station was “gospel.” She clearly didn’t want her other jurors to know she was listening to devil music or something. My seat mates were a UAW worker on the Saturn booster rockets at Michoud where we could both complain about bargaining with Jacobs Technology now, an adult bakery owner from the Quarter (the stenographer had to ask for two repeats on that one), a Honduran woman who now translates for courts on the West Bank who gave me advice on opening an office there, and a doctor I have known for decades.

The case we were impaneled to hear was a 4 year plus piece of mayhem from the day after Katrina. I had to admit that I have trouble believing almost anything from the “fog of war” chaos and anarchy where the police would be the ONLY witnesses to multiple charges of attempted murder supposedly involving looting. Oh, Lord! I warned the lawyers for both sides and the judge, so rest assured I wasn’t picked, and neither were my other buddies except for the translator. I told them I could be fair, but I think in all truth this was not the case for me.

I pulled the story from the Times-Picayune. It was on a PDF page from those days since there was no print edition the day after the storm and only an internet offering of sorts. The lead article on the page was about looting by residents AND police in stores all over the city. At the bottom was this piece giving a thumbnail of the case.

Looter shoots N.O. officer in the head

by Matt Brown, New Orleans Times-Picayune West Bank Bureau 8/31/05

A New Orleans police officer was shot in the head Tuesday after confronting looters on the West Bank, officials said.

Details were scarce, but officials said the officer and another officer confronted several looters stealing merchandise from the Chevron station at the corner of Shirley and Gen. DeGaulle drives. One of the officers went inside the store, while

the other remained outside and confronted a man he saw looting the store. When he did, another looter came from behind and shot the officer in the head, a police officer told a reporter for The Times-Picayune.

The officer who was shot was rushed to West Jefferson Medical Center, where he underwent surgery. Other officers told a reporter that reports from the hospital said the wounded officer was expected to survive. Jefferson Parish deputies arrested four people on the scene, and police said one of those arrested was wounded in the arm after exchanging gunfire with another officer.

I almost wrote more, but despite the fact that of 60 people interviewed, and only one or two had any knowledge of this incident from that time, I would hate to speculate and somehow imbalance the delicate scales of citizen justice.

It’s going to be a long month for this citizen!