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Community Organizer vs. Corrupt
Politician
The December 6
New Orleans Congressional Election
By Bruce A. Dixon
The congressional
election in Louisiana's 2nd district was delayed due to
Hurricane Gustav, and will take place on December 6,
2008. What was once an overwhelmingly black district
containing most of New Orleans and a sliver of
neighboring Jefferson Parish is probably still majority
black, but with a much thinner margin.
The Republican is a
Vietnamese American who almost never mentions his party
affiliation when campaigning inside New Orleans. The
Democrat is disgraced nine-term incumbent William
“Dollar Bill” Jefferson, under indictment for bribery
after the FBI discovered
$90,000 stashed in the plastic containers of his
home freezer. The Green Party candidate is longtime
community organizer Malik Rahim, a co-founder of Common
Ground Relief Network, a grassroots organization brought
together in the wake of Katrina to open medical clinics,
distribute flood relief supplies and repair and rebuild
homes damaged by the flood. With a projected low
turnout, it's shaping up as a three way race that could
go in a surprising direction. “We are shooting for
30,000 votes here,” a Rahim campaign spokesperson told
BAR, “and we think we can win.”
Hurricane Katrina
along with the series of man-made disasters,
ethnic cleansing, and wholesale privatizations of the
city's school and health care systems in its wake have
changed the face of New Orleans, and determine the fault
lines for its politics even today. Accordingly, their
responses to the Katrina disaster provide us with a
useful and telling contrast between Rep. Dollar Bill
Jefferson and Malik Rahim.
On the second day
after the levees broke, hundreds of starving, dehydrated
New Orleans residents (and some tourists) attempted to
walk out of their drowned city toward the lights of
neighboring Gretna. Their paths were blocked by lines of
local law enforcement officers who menaced them with
shotgun fire, cursed them, buzzed them with helicopters
and drove them back into New Orleans. If ever there was
a time when the relative wealth, the connections, the
prestige and authority of a congressman might have done
his constituents some good, this was it. But Dollar Bill
Jefferson was not that kind of congressman.
Malik Rahim lived
in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans, one of the
few places that wasn't flooded, and where water supplies
were not compromised. Ignoring orders to evacuate, Rahim
was one of many local residents who remained in New
Orleans to save lives and
assist his neighbors, since the authorities would
not. He helped other families evacuate, tried to get
white vigilantes to stop shooting random black people
and began organizing shelter and assistance to the
victims of the flood.
While thousands of
his constituents were swimming for their lives, trapped
in attics, on rooftops and expressway overpasses, or
penned up in the Louisiana Superdome, congressman
Jefferson commandeered six Louisiana National Guard MPs
and a five ton truck to drive to his home in the flood
zone and linger there for an hour or more while he
removed personal belongings including a laptop computer,
suitcases and several boxes. According to ABC News:
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The Louisiana
National Guard tells ABC News the truck became stuck as
it waited for Jefferson to retrieve his belongings.
Two weeks later,
the vehicle's tire tracks were still visible on the
lawn.
The soldiers
signaled to helicopters in the air for aid. Military
sources say a Coast Guard helicopter pilot saw the
signal and flew to Jefferson's home. The chopper was
already carrying four rescued New Orleans residents at
the time.
A rescue diver
descended from the helicopter, but the congressman
decided against going up in the helicopter, sources say.
The pilot sent the diver down again, but Jefferson again
declined to go up the helicopter.
After spending
approximately 45 minutes with Jefferson, the helicopter
went on to rescue three additional New Orleans residents
before it ran low on fuel and was forced to end its
mission.
"Forty-five minutes
can be an eternity to somebody that is drowning, to
somebody that is sitting in a roof, and it needs to be
used its primary purpose during an emergency," said (ABC
News consultant) Hauer.
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The contrast
between the personal bahavior of Malik Rahim and Dollar
Bill Jefferson could not be clearer.
In Katrina's
aftermath of homicidal government indifference and
incompetence Republicans saw vast opportunities.
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Richard Baker,
a prominent Republican Congressman from this city, had
told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public
housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God
did." Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans' wealthiest
developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: "I
think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with
that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities."
All that week the Louisiana State
Legislature in Baton Rouge had been crawling
with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in
those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer
regulations, cheaper workers and a "smaller,
safer city"—which
in practice meant plans to level the public
housing projects and replace them with
condos. |
If Republicans saw
opportunities in Katrina's wake Nancy Pelosi, the leader
of Dollar Bill Jefferson's Democratic party in Congress,
saw a trap. She wanted to blame Republicans, but she
feared holding hearings to expose the homicidal
incompetence and indifference of government would tie
congressional Democrats to the cause of black New
Orleans in the minds of voters nationwide. Better, from
her point of view, to leave that alone. So Nancy Pelosi,
the leader of Democrats in Congress, forbade even members
of the Congressional Black Caucus from speaking up
publicly on the unfolding spectacle of racially
selective displacement on the Gulf Coast. Amazingly, the
entire Congressional Black Caucus silenced themselves on
Katrina and refused to call for congressional hearings,
with the exception of Georgia's Rep. Cynthia McKinney.
A fifth term
representative, McKinney had just returned to Congress
after a two year absence. Instead of restoring her
seniority and committee assignments as is the rule in
such cases, Pelosi unceremoniously stripped McKinney of
her seniority, leaving Rep. McKinney freer than usual to
reach across the aisle and do what not a single one of
more than three dozen of her black congressional
colleagues would do—hold hearings on Katrina.
In the days
following the Katrina disaster, Malik Rahim did what
experienced community organizers do—he talked to his
neighbors, he helped bring like-minded local residents
together with volunteers from around the country and funders to create the Common Ground Relief Network.
Common Ground distributed relief supplies, generators,
food, fuel and tools to begin gutting houses and
rebuilding. Malik Rahim and Common Ground solicited
medical supplies and qualified personnel and opened up
free medical centers in devastated New Orleans. He
rallied volunteers and raised money for grassroots
efforts with churches and others to get done on the
ground what government officials like Jefferson could
not or would not do. Under the leadership of Common
Ground and Malik Rahim, some 13,000 volunteers have
gutted roughly 3,000 homes to prepare them for occupancy
in New Orleans.
That's community.
That's organizing. That's leadership. That's Malik Rahim,
and that's the choice before the voters of New Orleans
on December 6. They can reward Republicans and Democrats
for engaging in the same old politics of cronyism,
privatization and avoidance of responsibility. Or they
can send a community organizer to Congress.
This is a choice
between a deceitful "minority" Republican, a brazenly
corrupt Democrat, and an honest to goodness community
organizer with a history that stretches back to his
co-founding of the New Orleans branch of the Black
Panther Party back in 1970.
In the wired and
interconnected environment of the early 21st century
it's no longer the exclusive choice of voters and
activists in New Orleans. In some measure, this choice
up to all of us who want a piece of it. This will be a
three way race, and an extremely low turnout election,
so it's anybody's game. There's even a chance, if the
turnout is low enough, that the Republican can win.
It's not a chance we chose. It's a chance that leaders
of the Democratic party, nationally and in Louisiana
forced upon us, secure in their belief that black and
progressive voters in New Orleans would have no place
else to go. But they do.
Here's what you can
do.
You can
click here to donate to Malik Rahim's media fund
THIS WEEK to ensure that he can air radio commercials in
the final days before the election.
You can
click here to volunteer your energy and phone
minutes phone banking to New Orleans voters. You'll be
guided through a polite, well thought-out online script
that informs undecided voters of the clear choice before
them. You don't need to live in Louisiana to phone bank
for Malik Rahim.
Is there a chance
that supporting the Green candidate could lead to a
Republican temporarily assuming the seat in New Orleans?
Honestly yes, there is that chance. It would not be
possible of Louisiana's lazy and hollow Democratic party
had bothered to come up with an honest and viable
Democrat to represent hundreds of thousands of New
Orleans voters. But they didn't. And they won't. There
is also a chance of sending a real community organizer
to congress. One choice was forced upon us. The other
is ours to make, and to take.
It's anybody's
contest in New Orleans December 6. We hope that our
readers will do the right thing. Forward the link to
this page, and to
Malik Rahim's web site to all your friends, family
and associates. Give generously to put Malik Rahim's
radio commercials in play, to get him parity with the
fat cats who contribute to his Republican and Democratic
opponents. And participate in the phone bank that
reminds New Orleans voters of the December 6 election.
In a low turnout
environment like this a few votes, a modest contribution
of money or time can make a big difference. If you want
a change, be that change.
Atlanta-based
Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report.
He can be reached at
bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com
Source:
BlackAgendaReport
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. — WashingtonPost
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
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posted 2 December 2008
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