Disaster Capitalism and the War on Equality: Tab Benoit
Tab Benoit echoes Naomi Klein's assessment in her book, Shock Doctrine, that within days of Katrina and the floods that followed it was as if private contractors had recreated Baghdad's Green Zone on the bayous.
read more | digg story
What is the Real Water Policy of the United States?
By Georgianne Nienaber
Huffington Post
What is the real water policy of the United States as Army Corps of Engineers' levees are failing in the Foods of 2008?
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Day Two NCMR: Bill Moyers Saves the Day
First Published on OEN NEWS
Day Two of the National Conference for Media Reform opened with a slam/dunk speech by Bill Moyers that reminded conference goers what, exactly, is at stake for our democracy.
"Truth" Telling vs. TRUTH Telling
There is truth telling, and then there is truth telling. Scott
McClellan's contention that Bush manipulated the American public
through discarded intelligence about Iraq's capacity to produce weapons
of mass destruction is not a revelation of truth. It might be news, and
it might be true, but it is not truth telling.
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Reports From South Africa Focus on Crime While Ignoring History
By Georgianne Nienaber for OEN NEWS
In the rural areas of Africa the people's lives and histories revolve
around their communities and connections with people, the land and
tradition. To people living in Africa, white and black alike, the land
is not exotic, wild or foreign, it is "home." And home does not always
provide safety and comfort.
read more
Sloppy Forensics Cloud Verdict in Murder of Journalist Serge Maheshe
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) supported the acquittal of two friends of Radio Okapi journalist Serge Maheshe who were accused of taking part in his murder. However, IFJ said in a press release that there were "irregularities" in the trial which precluded discovery of who, exactly, was responsible for Maheshe's murder
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The Stones of the Golden Women: A-Bombs, a Tsunami and a Hackberry Tree Define Art at P.E.N.
By Georgianne Nienaber
original content at
OEN 
On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 am the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. One kilometer from ground zero, a hackberry tree in the gardens of the Hiroshima Army Hospital was seared by radiation from the blast and half of the tree vaporized. The tree was a favorite of patients at the hospital, who would sit under its sheltering branches as they recovered from the wounds of war and life. The Hackberry miraculously survived the vaporous hell and stood as a silent witness to the horror of Hiroshima until 1984, when it suffered a direct hit from a typhoon, produced a few leaves the following spring, and finally died in 1988.
It is February 2008. My friend, Susan, and I are attending the final wrap party for a conference on Culture and Natural Disaster in Tokyo. “Screamed, Survived, Start Anew,” is the theme of the Japan P.E.N. club’s sponsored event, which has attracted writers and musicians from around the world. They have just spent five days presenting their work and discussing human responses to the fury of nature. Every participant at the conference has produced a body of work that speaks to the essence of humanity in the face of the unspeakable.
The memory is indelible. My hand is on my friend’s shoulder while I struggle to keep my knees from shaking as the remnants of the Hiroshima hackberry tree become an instrument, and the haunting notes of Amazing Grace fill the banquet room. It is a private concert, composed of an audience of two. We are both literally leaning into the tones— a sound that seems to suspend reality into a moment when all time and suffering and redemption are distilled into the purest strains of music one can imagine.
Famed Japanese musician Kurotaro Kurosaka had graciously responded to my request to please play the kokarina (flute) he carved from the hackberry that survived the A-Bomb. The sound is clear, beautiful, indescribable, but filled with power. It shreds the heart and cuts to the soul and to hear it is to never, ever, forget it. I am like a greedy lover and ask him to play it again—and he immediately obliges. Bowing, smiling, he puts the wood of the ancient hackberry to his lips again, his unruly shock of hair falling across eyes that are closed, absorbed in the beauty, the moment. Eyes filled with tears, because the release from the beauty, the power— was required.
Listen here.
The soul of Kurotaro consumed every room he entered, and certainly the concert hall, known as “Space Zero,” where the bulk of the P.E.N. presentations unfolded like beautiful, complicated origami. Kurotaro is an unassuming man, and his face will never grace the cover of a celebrity magazine, but that concept is born in American definitions of “culture” and “art” which are bastardizations of truth and beauty.
The International P.E.N. conference has reaffirmed an unexpressed feeling that Americans have been consumed by monotonous “art” that fills the galleries of uncounted seaside tourist traps, music stores, and honky-tonk strips that pollute the vast American coastline and interior lake country resorts. Art in the United States has been reduced to a concept of “Americana” that is self-serving at best and a monetary rip-off at worst. Throw some paint on a canvas, write sloppy music, find an agent or a well-heeled sponsor who thinks they can make a buck, and you are well on your way to American “celebrity” and “artistry.”
Kurotaro’s hackberry tree kokarina supported a literary presentation, “Stones of the Golden Women” at the P.E.N. forum and defined the essence of truth and beauty—the expression of which is the duty of the writer and artist. Fraud, shape shifting, celebrity narcissism, the quest for money, and deception—all have no place in art.
Novelist Khwaiyun Lukjan of Thailand narrated his description of the tsunami of December 26, 2004, when the Adaman Sea devoured the landscape of Thailand in Phang Nga Province on the island of Phuket. The tsunami surged numerous times as set after set of waves ebbed and flowed a distance of over two kilometers inland. Not a building, not a tree survived.
“When people meet with major catastrophe, we throw away the self-image that has been created to protect ourselves in our regular lives and lay bare the self essence residing in the deepest recesses of our hearts,” Lukjan narrated.
“There was only one thing on my mind at the time. To live. No matter what happened I had to overcome it without fail. To survive was the only thing I was thinking about.”
He described himself as “a small ant—drifting in a giant sea,” and from this perspective the story of the “Stones of the Golden Women” was born.
The title of the work describes a devastated Moken Village, Hin Nang Thong, and the quest of a man (Lin) to find the body of his wife and mother of his child, so that he may put her spirit to rest.
The Moken are known as the “people of the sea, or sea gypsies.” Their ancestors arrived in Thailand thousands of years ago from southeastern China, entering the ocean from Indochina. The Moken numbered only 3,000 in the American-dominated tourist areas of Thailand before the tsunami, and their history and culture was literally overrun and ignored. They were truly “an invisible people,” in the words of Lukjan.
The Stones of the Golden Women is a place name that describes a wide stretch of coastline where rocks and stones littered the beach and shellfish were once bountiful in the shallow coastal waters—shallow waters that by their very nature gave lift and power to the tsunami. Shellfish are an important food for the Moken, and Moken women inhabited the beach for this reason. No one standing there survived the 2004 tsunami.
Lin’s wife, Sonporn, whose name means “wishes come true,” left their home on the morning of December 26, 2004 to gather shellfish at the place of the Stones of the Golden Women and never returned. Lin was reduced to bitterness and alcoholism and his relationship with Sonporn’s father was destroyed—“violent waves still battering their respective hearts.”
Finally, Lin tells the narrator that his wife appeared to him in a dream.
“I went to Khao Lak and got lost, and now I can’t find my way home,” she said.
Lin says, “She was looking for me to help her. I want to look for my wife. I want to find her body. I want to bring home her bones.”
During the recitation of this story, the pure tones of the A-bomb hackberry tree filled the auditorium at Space Zero. So did the heart and soul of the musician and flute-carver Kurotaro as the narrator continued.
The narrator described how the pain of loss seared Lin’s heart as surely as radiation seared the hackberry tree. Lin lost his emotions as well as his will to live. Lin became like the shellfish clinging to the shores and stones at Stones of the Golden Women. The shellfish were dislodged and upturned during the tsunami and left to die and burn under the South Seas sun—irradiated and demolished.
I came to believe that we are all Moka. The word means “human beings.”
How many of us have stood ancient and strong in spirit through incredible challenges, only to be felled by an unexpected typhoon of physical or emotional assaults or betrayal? The challenge comes when we pick ourselves up and whittle away to find the core of our existence, shape it, reform our lives and go on to make beautiful music that originates in our core--the soul. Sometimes we can accomplish this on our own, sometimes it takes an angel or two to salvage what is left of us after we experience our personal disasters, and sometimes love is all we need and love is forever elusive.
The expression of that struggle and triumph is the true stuff of art. And true art is also elusive. Beware the individual who calls himself/herself an “artist.” At the P.E.N. conference, all contributors were known simply as “participants.”
There were six Americans at the P.E.N. conference in Tokyo. “Music” and “art” conferences are a billion dollar business in America and attract hundreds of thousands of participants. What have we Americans contributed that is of any real value, when we are defined in the rest of the world by celebrity culture? It is an audacity, irony, and affront to the human spirit that some “art” in the United States is known as “Americana;” especially when one considers that the American A-bomb almost destroyed the essence of the hackberry tree that now fills auditoriums with the strains of Amazing Grace.
Scream. Survive. Start Anew.
Amazing.
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Talkin' New Orleans Susan Cowsill
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“I left because my life had been devastated by the storm and its aftermath. Up until that time, for 57 years I had stayed in the city I love—and I love it no matter what—I love its people and it is where the bones of my mother and father lie. It is home.”
--Cyril Neville December 13, 2007
Cyril Neville lost his home in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans in August 2005 when the levees broke and hurricane Katrina’s flood waters drowned lives, destroyed dreams, and shattered hopes for hundreds of thousands. Power lines still dangle from utility poles overgrown with vines and kudzu in Gentilly, and black and blue plastic tarps snap smartly in breezes that blow through empty neighborhoods, abandoned homes, broken windows and the mean streets of 2007.
Neville told us that he has been “informally back" and trying to fix his home since October of 2005. Like many other returning residents whom we interviewed, Neville was “ripped off” by contractors, “to the tune of $19,000” in his case, and he has had all of the copper wiring stolen—twice. It is important to Neville that people understand that he hasn’t exactly been “gone” from New Orleans for the last two years.
“I left because my life had been devastated by the storm and its aftermath. Up until that time, for 57 years I had stayed in the city I love—and I love it no matter what—I love its people and it is where the bones of my mother and father lie. It is home,” Neville wrote in an early morning email to us. “Home” was capitalized and underscored.
Cyril Neville is part of the “heartbeat” of New Orleans, but his own heart is heavy. He knows the despair and vulnerability experienced by the displaced. Neville is one of 200,000 people who have not returned full time to New Orleans, and wants to show his solidarity with those still besieged with uncertainty, indecision, and fear. Neville may have resettled in Austin, Texas, but he misses the old neighborhood, the ability to get up in the middle of the night and drive to the market for a Hubig’s Pie, and the convenience of walking a few blocks to visit family and friends. Quite simply, Cyril Neville misses the neighborhood.
Anyone who has followed New Orleans politics since Katrina understands why Neville has been hesitant to come forward about recent public housing controversies and conflicts. Comments he made in interviews and in print about the way local, state and federal governments failed to respond to the needs of the displaced drew fire from many quarters, and Neville has been reluctant to take a public stand since. However, truth prevails with time, and human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have issued statements that vindicate Neville and indict rescue and reconstruction efforts in New Orleans as being too little and too late—slow at best—and wrought with malfeasance and racism at worst.
“I think it's important that the people involved in this struggle know that I stand with them and that the song I speak of here is a rallying song for this monumental movement. After all, I am a charity hospital baby from the Calliope projects, born and bred in the bricks,” Neville said in a statement.
The song Cyril Neville wants the world to hear is called The Projects. He insisted that we link to it here. “Born and bred in the bricks…we played with toys, not guns, and there wasn’t much dope.”
The lyric reminisces about growing up in “the bricks,” watching his brothers play music, and enjoying their youth. It is the recollection of a grown man facing today’s grim realities of life in New Orleans.
I love New Orleans, I love my culture, and I love my country,” Neville told us pensively.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has underscored the “struggle” Neville speaks of with plans to demolish the four largest public housing projects in New Orleans on Saturday. If officials at (HUD) have their way, bulldozers will rumble through Lafitte, St. Bernard, C.J. Peete, and B.W. Cooper (Calliope)—drowning the sounds of bullhorns and protesters that are sure to greet them. Gentrification will destroy the heart and soul of New Orleans; Neville knows it, and wants to say so publicly.
Despite the fact that 200,000 residents, of all colors, are still displaced, HUD is authorized to spend $762 million in US taxpayer funds to tear down 4600 public housing apartments and replace then with 744 units. The math is easy. Where are the rest of the families supposed to go who occupied the 84 percent of the housing units that will not be rebuilt? Neville is convinced that the loss, through depopulation, of the “gumbo” of New Orleans will leave an empty, soul-less shell of “urban development”—a city designed and planned for the wealthy.
Where will the displaced poor live? No one seems to have answered that question, but they will not be in New Orleans, since the 1000 “market rate” apartments that are slated for construction will cost $400,000 each.
Calliope was home to 1,400 working class African-American households before the floods of August 2005. Many—perhaps a majority—were headed by women. The brick project sprawls over almost 60 acres and contains 1,546 individual dwellings. Calliope is noteworthy for its status as the largest tenant run housing development in the United States. It is also infamous for violence, murder and drugs in recent years.
The story of Calliope has played out over the other projects slated for demolition and it is no wonder there is a sense among the displaced that the City of New Orleans is using the “shock doctrine” of disaster capitalism to depopulate low income housing, thereby making room for new development. After Katrina’s floods scattered the poor throughout the country as so many seeds in the wind, the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) posted paper notices saying residents were not allowed to move back. In a twist of linguistic irony, HANO hired the Las Vegas firm “Access Denied,” to install 16 gauge steel plates over windows and doors at Cooper and other projects. The excuse for this largesse was “protection” from looters and thieves. Reports in the Times-Picayune and other local publications quoted residents who said robberies occurred with key access and that thefts happened AFTER Mayor Ray Nagin urged people to return.
Jill Soffiyah Elijah, the deputy Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, went far beyond condemning gentrification. “It is our view that the US Government has committed crimes against humanity, particularly in relation to its failure to maintain functional levees that should have protected the City of New Orleans,” Elijah said in summary statements after hearing 30 hours of testimony given by hurricane survivors and experts in August 2007.
Racial discrimination, vigilantism, and violations of human rights involving the rights to adequate housing and education were the most egregious findings of the international tribunal. Among others, the ACLU of New York, the Mississippi Disaster Relief Coalition, and the National Lawyers Guild joined representatives from nine countries at the hearings.
Affordable housing, jobs that pay a living wage and quality healthcare and education are constant hot-button issues post-Katrina. Amnesty International southern regional director Jared Fuer has gone so far as to state that "To demolish affordable housing without sufficient remaining low-income housing stock is not only irresponsible, but a violation of international human rights standards."
Kali Akuno of the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund charges studies prove that flood survivors with home insurance have not received compensation or aid. Rents and utilities have increased, while wages remain the same. Rentals once priced at $600 to $700 have increased on average to about $1,600. Restoration of the infrastructure in hard-hit neighborhoods such as the Ninth Ward, Gentilly and Gretna is lagging and in some places non-existent. Many homes are facing winter without water or gas service.
Cyril Neville quotes from the book, The Second Battle of New Orleans by Liva Baker, and lists A.P. Tureaud as one of his heroes. Tureaud was a black Creole lawyer who peacefully but relentlessly fought for civil rights and integration in Louisiana. The subtext of the iconic reference to the 100 year effort to integrate Louisiana’s schools as the “Second Battle of New Orleans,” can certainly be applied to the current reconstruction crisis. The Second Battle of New Orleans is being waged this week and Cyril Neville thinks that heroes like A.P. Tureaud “are what New Orleans needs today.”
To drive the point deeper, Neville quoted James A. Colaico’s book, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July Oration, "When the happiness of some is pursued to the detriment of others, the general welfare standard of the Preamble (of the Constitution) is violated.”
On the twelfth day before Christmas the Constitution will be tested, and New Orleans will face a decidedly different future if bulldozers roll through the projects as scheduled.
Georgianne Nienaber has been an investigative environmental writer for more than thirty years and wrote a column for the Rwandan New Times. She lives in rural northern Minnesota. Recent articles have appeared in Africa Front, The United Nations Publication, A Civil Society Observer, AllAfrica.com, ZNET, SUN NEWS, TERRA GREEN, and Zimbabwe's The Daily Mirror. Her fiction exposé of insurance fraud in the horse industry, Horse Sense, was re-released in early 2006. Her biography of Dian Fossey has received critical acclaim in the Midwest and in Africa. Nienaber recently worked on the Coleen Rowley for Congress campaign, doing press and campaign events and just returned from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was in DRC as a MONUC-accredited journalist.
Minnesota Medical Association: Excellence in Medical Journalism
Northland Mental Health Center: Recipient Award Journalism on Mental Health
Minnesota Newspaper Association: Photography Awards
Minnesota Department of Natural Resources: Volunteer Recognition
