Re: [Marxism] FW: New Orleans: Making of an Urban Catastrophe

["acpollack2@xxxxxxxx" <acpollack2@xxxxxxxx>]

Dear Brother Caldwell,
I read you article on the marxism list. It's great and hope it's
widely circulated.

I just wanted to say that the demands you raise at the end are
crucial, and the participatory councils you call for can have their
beginning in the residents' and refugees' committees which so
urgently need to be formed now. The residents of the Gulf area have
not only been abandoned by capital and its state but pushed around
on a daily basis by the Guard, cops and military. You have the right
and the urgent need to organize to decide for yourselves on the kind,
amount, and manner of delivery and distribution of relief,
reconstruction and reparations.

Of course the responsibility of those of us outside the region is
to support the demands you make and mobilize to make sure it
happens -- including by raising demands on a national level against
the oil companies, Halliburton and all the other thieves who will
try to profit from this capital-made catastrophe.

In solidarity,
Andrew Pollack

[from your article:)
Eventually public money will begin to trickle into the state. Hotels,
casinos, chain stores and "Disneyfied" developments will compete for
the sorely needed money and serve to reinforce a system that was unable
 to respond to peoples' needs before, during, and immediately after the
hurricane.

But New Orleans can be rebuilt with a different ethos, one with
environmentally sustainable planning, a vast transportation
infrastructure upgrade, including public evacuation plans, a bolstered
public works system, creation of stable union jobs, new public schools,
a renewed investment in the public healthcare system, and cultivation
of participatory neighborhood councils as incubators for a new,
participatory, and radical democracy among the working class, poor, and
oppressed.

Robert Caldwell Jr is a resident of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans.

  You can contact him at jamais.vu@xxxxxxxxx
  Feel free to forward this article or edit for length.



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