When the Levees Collapsed: continued. posted by Richard Seymour

I have parts III and IV for you uploading in segments at the moment. You'll see links to them appear at the bottom of this post.

If anything, the second half of this documentary is even more overwhelming than what preceded it. In the first half, you see the blocking of aid, the refusal to help, the police repression, the racist lies told, the planning that didn't help the poor, the shittiness of the levees that were supposed to protect people, the history of disasters striking New Orleans, the way the government dynamited the levees in 1927 and 1965, the suspicions of local residents that the government blew them up again, the hideousness of Bush, the pandering of Nagin to the local business class before anyone else, the imposition of martial law (demanded by Bush), the pretense by FEMA not to know that people were in the convention centre. Okay, this was bad enough.

Take what happens next. The families are dispersed and broken up across the country (literally, families split up among different states with no communication between mother and son, brother and sister etc), and while they're away, the local elite figures they'll bulldoze the houses of the poor and reconstruct the city as a leaner, gentrified place for largely white rich people. Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers isn't sent in to clear up the rubble for months. The FEMA trailers don't have any electricity, and you'd be lucky even to get one. The insurance companies are ripping people off, refusing to pay a penny to people who were assured they had full flood and home protection, and the city figures it will do nicely out of this since nothing will be rebuilt, so they send in the bulldozers. What's more, because of their insistence on cancelling the rights of the poor to their homes, the local residents who are still around have to mount a fight to protect their right even to the lot of land they purchased to build their house on, and spent decades working to build up and pay for. The city doesn't bother rebuilding local schools unless they can get them on a privatised contract. In townhall meetings, residents put eloquent complaints forth. Nagin looks shifty. Then tells the camera that he always intended to rebuild all of New Orleans. Te Army Corps admits that their lousy work on the levees led to the disaster, but it's all okay for them because you can't sue those guys. FEMA decides its sick of paying for the dispersed survivors to live in shitty hotel rooms, so it announces in the small hours that the funding is being stopped. People are turfed out onto the streets in the middle of the night. Those who have gone back to their houses find them marked by FEMA spray paint indicating that no bodies have been found. They enter, only to find dead relatives lying amid the toxic sludge and strewn rubble. Turns out FEMA haven't been going into buildings they've marked as checked. The debris and garbage and smelly waste still lines the streets, to this day. Bodies are still being found. There are people dying of illnesses, of depression, of what people used to call a broken heart. The most shattering aspect of the whole documentary is the raw grief, and the sense of violation. There is, of course, huge hope and anger, and a drive to return and rebuild and scupper the plans of the old bluebloods who run the city. But there are many people who see nothing to come back to, and don't fancy waiting around to see what else the city has in store for them. No matter how strong the bonds to the city, and the uniqueness of it is delved into at some length, the history, the struggles of past generations - the fact is that no matter how much people feel for all of that, because the city has been ripped off along with the entire state of Louisiana in terms of federal funding for generations, there was hardly an infrastructure to start with. Schools were dyusfunctional, poverty was widespread and the consequent crime rate was making life unliveable for many. Many people see that and think they'd rather stay in Atlanta and send their kids to school. But the trouble is, where they aren't relying on local generosity, the federal funding is extremely limited and prone to sudden cut-off because the American state doesn't give a damn. So, there is a movement to protect the city, stop it from being turned into a themed gold course with some condominiums, hotels and tourist spots. And the anger is incredible, and it affects everyone. They are particularly incensed at being called refugees when they are citizens, who have paid taxes to the government and worked and lived and held American passports. Everyone keeps saying "I thought we lived in America". They do - but not the America they thought they lived in. Chavez was more interested in helping the poor of New Orleans than Bush was: what does this tell you?

Segments: 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26.

Update: a couple of bad links have been fixed, but the segments for 20 and 24 have still not been approved by Youtube. If they can't sort it, I will find an alternative (maybe risk Video Google).