New Orleans will not be forgiven. It is a turning point in history. Today tens of millions of Americans hate George Bush with an endless, ragged, bleeding rage. I am one of them.
"Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve?" historian Mark Naison asked as Katrina presented the world with images of a desperate, impoverished US seldom seen in the media, "a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws?"
Imagining 20th century music without New Orleans is like imagining painting without Picasso. The city has a rich and varied musical tradition, but it is above all the birthplace of jazz.
The hurricane that hit New Orleans was a natural disaster. But what followed was pure criminality on the part of George Bush and his administration.
With hurricane Katrina, class and race divisions have surfaced in the US for everyone to see. Socialists have known about these for some time, but for many others it was a clear expression of what US capitalism has done to black people and the poor.
I’m surprised that in all of the press coverage of Hurricane Katrina there is no mention of Hurricane Ivan, which hit New Orleans, Louisiana, about a year ago.
The scenes from the stricken city almost defy belief. Many, many thousands of people left to die in what is the richest, most powerful country on earth.
The population of New Orleans is 67 percent black. 35 percent of black households do not own a motor vehicle, compared to 15 percent of white households.The city has the second highest rate of child poverty in the US. It is the tenth poorest city in the US. The population of the devastated Lower 9th ward has an average household income of £14,600. A quarter of the households there survive on less than £5,400 a year.Across the state of Louisiana, where New Orleans is located, the equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of education every day. Many young black men from New Orleans end up in Angola prison, a former slave pla
Halliburton poised to profit Earlier this year US multinational Halliburton confirmed that it had hired the former head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), Joseph Allbaugh, as a consultant on issues including disaster relief and homeland security.
In November 1999 the anti-capitalist movement became known to millions through the protests at the World Trade Organisation in Seattle in the US.
In order for ideas to gain popular acceptance, Antonio Gramsci argued, those ideas have to be carried down into society by layers of individuals.
