Actualité - Reject The Failed U.S. State - Step Up the Work to Defend Katrina Survivors

Franc-Parler publie un article à propos de la lutte de la population de la Nouvelle-Orléans pour le droit d'exister. Dans les récentes élections, une large partie de l'électorat, surtout les Afros-Américains, a été privé du droit de voter par le gouvernement. Pire, des milliers de sinistrés sont exclus de toute mesure d'aide de l'État.

The government is once again launching an all-sided attack against Katrina survivors and their right to return and rebuild. The federal government is again organizing to evict Katrina survivors, both from the small trailers they forced people into and from apartments. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) claims more than 17,000 people in apartments and many thousands in trailers are now “ineligible” for government assistance. It is organizing to make Katrina survivors homeless, again.

The federal government also organized to massively disenfranchise large numbers of voters in the recent local elections. The majority of registered voters, most of them African American, are still scattered in cities nationwide. The government refused to provide satellite voting, which they provided for Iraqis for the Bush-organized election in Iraq. The government refused to bring people back for the vote and refused to guarantee absentee ballots for everyone. The large majority of voters were openly blocked from voting by the government, yet the election is considered valid.

The broad and open impunity the government is exercising, again, against people who have already been evicted, forcibly separated, often sent to fenced and guarded concentration camps and then moved, over and over again, and now evicted again, shows the complete failure of the U.S. state. This failure includes the fact that the federal government is organizing to put in place arrangements where government has no responsibility to the most vulnerable, no responsibility to national minorities, no responsibility to workers, no responsibility to society as a whole. The direction, as seen with immigrants and Katrina survivors is for the government to make everyone illegal and “ineligible” for assistance, social services, voting and more while also making everyone subject to being excluded from simply living and existing in society.

This same failure of government can be seen in the complete breakdown of relations between the local, state and federal governments. The federal government is organizing to eliminate the role of these levels of government and imposing its dictate, including securing more and more of the public treasury at the federal level. This includes using hired mercenaries like Blackwater, KKK-like terrorist groups and military troops on the Gulf Coast and all along the border with Mexico.

People across the country alongside Katrina survivors are rejecting this failure and organizing to defend the rights of all. Rebuilding is going forward, house-by-house. More and more families are returning and insisting that the New Orleans of the people, the New Orleans that is one with the millions of workers marching on May Day, with the united resistance of all to create a society that guarantees the rights of all, that that New Orleans will be.

Now is the time to step up the work to defend Katrina survivors. Volunteer for projects in New Orleans, join in actions to block evictions, organize meetings to inform people and discuss this vital work to defend rights.

(Voice of Revolution)