I'm writing to you as I travel through places full of destroyed
homes, uprooted lives, and the stark contrasts of wealth and
poverty side by side. Usually my messages to you describe my
experiences working with the International Women's Peace Service
in the West Bank. This time, however, I'm not in Palestine, I'm
in the U.S. South. This week I'm participating in a fact
finding delegation on poverty, race, neoliberalism, and the
effects of Hurricane Katrina with a group of about 50 people
including folks from the Philadelphia Independent Media Center,
students participating in the Poverty Initiative at Union
Theological Seminary, students at Columbia Univeristy's School
of Social Work, and members of the National Poor People's
Economic Human Rights Campaign. I'm part of the media team and
mostly working and travelling with a group of nine people, some
of whom are good friends and others folks I'm just getting to
know. We're here to talk to people, do our homework, and
produce media that matters.

Golden Opportunities
More and more I feel that the rich and powerful in our country
are figuring out ways to benefit as things collapse. 9-11 was
one example of this. No matter who you think did it, or how you
think it really went down, the point is that a lot of people
benefited and it wasn't you and me. The Bush government
benefited by putting into place plans that had been in the works
for years - the Patriot act, increased control and surveillance
over massive sectors of the population, the squelching of
dissent and questioning authoirty, suspicion of anyone that
does. The owners of the military industrial complex benefited
by the propanganda about a future of continuous war,
successfully securing their piece of the pie for a long time to
come. Anyone who has a stake in control, of people, capital,
natural resources, or the national political culture, benefited
from this disaster. While we're fighting with each other over
scraps, the elite are laying in wait, playing their cards right,
and figuring out how to manipulate the chaos. I've got to hand
it to them - they know how to turn disaster into opportunity.

Writing to you from the South, I can say from my observations
that Katrina and to an extent all of the natural disasters that
happen here follow the same pattern. 'Natural disasters' aside
(but after all how natural is global warming) there are sectors
here that absolutely benefit from the suffering, the dying -
people who have come to expect and in fact rely on periodic
disasters for their very survival. Big developers, for example,
rely on the crises that are wreaked on average people, and the
destruction of their lives, to periodically make a killing on
new construction. When we wonder why politicians never moved to
remedy situations that they knew would produce disaster, we
should think about these dynamics instead of wringing our hands
at the sorry and unpredictable state of the world.

The conclusions are mind boggling but they are also real. We
all know that people are exploited every day in their jobs, and
their communities. But when we really tally up the death toll -
from stress, exploitation, and oppression, it is plain to see
that not only are the poor the first to die as victims
of circumstance, they are actually the first to be sacrificed by
those who understand what is coming, and how global economics
really works. I want to suggest that the devastation I've seen
- and I'm talking about Pensacola Florida, Ocean Springs and
Biloxi Mississippi - we haven't even gotten to New Orleans-
constitutes not an unfortunate tragedy exacerbated by inequality
- but a sacrifice on the altar of global capitalism.

Neoliberalism. The dismantling of the welfare state. Every
(poor) person fending for themselves. New markets can't last
forever. The majority doesn't have enough wealth to buy
everything that is being produced. But production has to
continue and in fact it has to grow in order to increase
profits. So how can profits increase? Use new technology to
eliminate the need for human labor. Convince people that the
state has no responsibility for human welfare and defund the
social safety net. Start wars to control resources and create
phantom enemies for people to attack when they become angrier
about the collapse. Even when you've gotten all these projects
under way, if you are rich and powerful - the Waltons, for
example, who collectively control 100 billion dollars, (that's
100,000,000,000) you've still got to realize that you have a
problem - surplus poor people. People who, for all intents and
purposes, are in the way. In the way of 'development', in the
way of the riches that the already rich are trying to secure in
the only industries still experiencing growth - finance,
insurance, real estate. What will happen to the neighborhoods
that were leveled by Katrina? They happen to be sitting on
prime real estate. How about that! A hurricane did what our
government won't yet do - eliminate an unwanted population.

Meanwhile, the backbone of the 'reconstruction' are semi-slave
day laborers recruited by companies like Labor Ready from as far
away as Texas and Los Angeles, and who originally come from
Guatemala and Mexico. There are poor native born African
Americans and whites too, who are encouraged to hate these
undocumented immigrants for 'stealing jobs'. The day laborers
are charged for food ($10 for a lunch which consists of a
baloney sandwich), showers ($5) and $300 a month to 'rent' a 5X5
square plot of mud on which they pitch a tent and the right to
shit in porta potties and wash their clothes in buckets. After
they don't get paid for weeks at a time, they hang on with
nowhere to go, praying that a paycheck will finally come. After
they do the most disgusting and dangerous work (cleaning out the
sewage and black mold) with little or no protective gear
provided, the more skilled labor is brought in for the photo
opportunities and so we can all celebrate the rebuilding
effort.

Meanwhile, contractors party in the bars of all the towns
they're working in, toasting to the business boom. Oh yea, and
of course I should mention that it isn't destroyed houses of the
poor that are being rebuilt, but casinos like the Imperial
Palace in Biloxi, MI, where crews are working around the clock
to restore the profits for the owners, while directly across the
street there is absolute destruction. Oh and I should also
mention that the FEMA office, where people have to go to deal
with trying to wrest some pennies from the government, is
located on the second floor of this casino so that folks can
forget their problems on the way down with no clocks to remind
them what time it is. Think about that for a minute. And also
think about the fact that there is a bar inside the casino that
was recently named 'Katrina bar'. I guess so that poverty pimps
of all stripes can gather and toast to the best thing that
happened to them in a while.

We've got to wake up and prepare for the long haul. The rich
know that society is collapsing. They're banking on us being
convinced that it's not. That way by the time we realize we
need to be building the leadership and making the plans to take
over, it will be too late because they will already have
orchestrated the collapse down to the last pathetic violin. The
global economic system cannot hold unless more and more of us
are completely emiserated. I don't even know if that's a word
but I think you know what I mean. We have to be looking at the
whole country here, because we're in the belly of the beast.
It's the people who are going to have to move, and by the people
I don't mean the progressive, college educated, liberal left.
So start thinking big, and strategic, because you're going to
have to put a lot of the prejudices you've been nursing, against
people who don't act right, or talk right, or think right, away.
As things collapse around us, we have to learn our lessons and
understand that these are Golden Opportunities for us as well.
Opportunities to educate. Opportunites to organize, and develop
leadership. We have to turn tragedy into triumph.

More later and much love,
Nijmie

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