Remember the anguish and
fury you felt a year ago, as tens of thousands of people from New Orleans suffered a prolonged agony
triggered by Hurricane Katrina?
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Things many people never
thought possible happened before our eyes. A major U.S. city destroyed. Tens of thousands
of people left for days to suffer and die in unbearable heat, with no water,
food or medical supplies. People struggling heroically through neck deep,
contaminated water to save their neighbors, families, and themselves, while no
help arrived for them. People packed for days into the unlivable hells of the
Superdome and New Orleans
Convention Center, with
the President saying his man in charge was doing a “heck of a job”. People
turned around at police gunpoint as they tried to cross a bridge into relative
safety. Dead bodies floating through the streets of the city, or covered and
left on freeway overpasses for days, or lying on the baggage carousels of the
airport.
Bush went on fundraising
trips. Condi Rice shopped. Cheney went fishing. Chertoff went to a conference. Michael
Brown, head of FEMA and in charge of the “rescue operation”, was
clueless. A force of nature hit the city of New Orleans
and the Gulf Coast. But for five agonizing days, people in New Orleans needlessly suffered and died – were heartlessly left to suffer and die by
the Bush Regime.
People separated from
their families and loved ones and shipped all over the country. Scenes from the
Superdome and the forced separations rightly reminded many of people of slavery
days. And now much of New Orleans
still looks as if the hurricane happened last week. Much of the city,
especially many of the low income parts of town, and the housing projects, are
abandoned and not being rebuilt. Louisiana Congressman Richard Baker celebrated
this, saying, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans.
We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
Hundreds of thousands of
people have been displaced and scattered throughout the country.
The people responsible for these atrocities – the
Bush Regime – must be held accountable. Their actions and inactions were not
“mistakes”. They were calculated measures, cold blooded actions that
maximized the pain and anguish the people – mostly poor and mostly Black people
– of New Orleans
suffered.
There is a way and a day to express your outrage at
these and other criminal actions of the Bush Regime. October 5 – as thousands
of the people throughout the country take massive political actions to Drive
Out The Bush Regime. Do everything you can to mobilize your friends, your
workplaces or schools, your communities and places of worship, to join with
people from coast to coast and border to border, raising the demand to BRING
ALL THIS TO A HALT!