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?
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 OrleansConvention 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 GulfCoast. 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!