On July 17, Socialism and Liberation’s Ben Becker sat down with Malik Rahim, New Orleans community activist and co-founder of the Common Ground Collective, and Shakoor Aljuwani, co-coordinator of Common Ground. They discussed the condition of New Orleans one year after the hurricane, and their broader political perspective.
 Malik Rahim in front of Common Ground’s FREe clinic in the Algiers section of New Orleans, May. Photo: Haley/SIPA |
What is Common Ground up to, one year after Hurricane Katrina?
Malik Rahim: We’re launching a week of activities for our one-year anniversary, September 5. We basically want to make known that, in Louisiana, racism is still alive and well. Coming up one year after the hurricane, no one has been indicted or charged with the violation of our so-called constitutional rights. If [Mayor] Ray Nagin would have denied one white person access to New Orleans fleeing that hurricane, he would probably be in prison. Jefferson Parrish denied access to somewhere around 40,000 African Americans, and nobody is saying a thing.
Right now, we have no safeguards that, if New Orleans were flooded again the same denial wouldn’t be repeated. So that’s one of the things that we hope to project.
Two, we want to make it known that for four days there was open hunting season on young African American men.
And lastly, we want to stress to progressive organizations the importance of emergency preparedness. I’m not saying progressive people, but progressive organizations, so that no longer will we have to look for refuge in the conservative right wing.
We will demand amnesty for those still incarcerated charged with looting. We hope to address not only what transpired with Katrina, but also why we need to be prepared. We’re doing one day focused on health care, one on tenant rights, one on environmental justice and sustainable development.
I know you have been involved in the continued struggle for public housing in New Orleans. Can you speak about that?
MR: In the aftermath of Katrina, when the federal government came, there was a systematic plan to displace the poor, those who were no longer tolerated in New Orleans. They wanted to make sure that they became the nation’s problem. But nobody had to leave New Orleans. There were enough places in New Orleans that weren’t flooded that it could have accommodated everyone. If it weren’t for racism, there wouldn’t have been any displacement.
If you look at Algiers, it did not flood. Algiers could have basically accommodated everyone who was fleeing the Ninth Ward. And you have Jefferson Parrish, Gretna, Harvey, Moreno, Oswego, Gray City, Avondale, and Wayne—these seven cities could have accommodated everyone.
But you see what the federal government did. It’s not like everybody just left public housing clean. They were forcibly put out of their homes. Even though a few of the apartments flooded, they were first-floor apartments. Most people who lived on the second and third floors, they could have stayed. And most of the people on the first and second floors had already been helped out by their neighbors on the higher floors. So they didn’t have to be forced out.
As soon as that water receded, they should have been allowed to reclaim their possessions and their lives—like everyone else. But there’s a group of people that’s still not allowed to go into their homes, and those are the people who were most vulnerable and have less to rebuild their lives. Everywhere else, people are allowed to come in—except for public housing residents.
And they did say they were going to destroy those developments, right?
MR: They want to destroy them all. That’s the main reason they’re doing this. You have families that have to sit on the outside of a fence and look at their house, and that’s the saddest thing you ever want to see. They drive in from Houston, come back, and they can’t even come back in their house. The government has literally done everything it can to make sure that you cannot get your life back together. You can’t get your life together if you can’t even go back to see what’s left of what you had. You can’t move forward in those kinds of conditions.
So these are the things that are happening to those people in public housing. And as for the Ninth Ward and for other sections of the city, there’s nothing really being done. Yes, they’ve been allowed to come back, but they haven’t been given the same opportunities as the other sections to rebuild their communities.
It’s the greatest miscarriage of justice when you see individual homeowners being told that we will give you $20,000 or $35,000 to rebuild your home. Right now, $20,000 in New Orleans can’t even get you a contractor. They’re not interested in those types of contracts.
And you still have part of New Orleans that is still in darkness.
 Government neglect in New Orleans offers the left a chance to pose a real alternative. Photo: Kayte Deioma |
What can people who are not in New Orleans, do for Common Ground or the struggle in New Orleans?
MR: I want to get beyond Common Ground and the people of New Orleans. Because if it happens in New Orleans today, it can happen in New York tomorrow. One of the things that Shakoor [Aljuwani] and I were talking about here in Harlem is this: If there were a hurricane right here, would they allow this many poor Blacks to escape Harlem, or would they quarantine them? Would they allow this many Blacks to go downtown to find safety?
And this is one of the lowest points in New York.
MR: Right, so where are you going to put them? What’s going to happen to them? How long would they have to stay in Harlem? How many kids would have to die? So again, just the way we plan for demonstrations, we need to also plan for emergency situations. What the government and others will not do, we need to do.
We have to be prepared. We have got to become that nucleus and to be that nucleus, we have to be prepared. I’m not saying that we have to do everything, but we have to have the basics. One of things that I realized real early after Katrina is when I looked around and asked, “Where are the progressives in New Orleans?” Everybody had left. It was just the poor. There was no progressive group that was prepared to provide any aid, which caused us to have to create one. And it’s sad when you have to create it under fire.
We’ll be prepared if no one else is prepared. We will be that alternative. We’ve always been that alternative group.
Even during the Civil War, and prior to the Civil War, it was communists of old that stood out and stood up and said, “Yeah, I’m white, but what you’re doing to those people is wrong.” They stood up, they fought in the Civil War, and afterwards, they stayed active creating that alternative. That’s what we have to become—the complete alternative to capitalism.
We need to understand some of the survival techniques: sanitation, compost toilets, energy, soil, having a generator, having a means to put that together, how to create a first aid station and health clinics, to be able to operate in some of the most adverse conditions. These are some of things we had to learn under pressure, but hey, it was kind of easy for me because of my life experience.
I understood the need of a health clinic from day one, when I saw after the hurricane that the government wasn’t going to provide health care.
How did I know we could do it? Because of my time in the [Black] Panther Party, which is one of the things we did—we provided health care. Food distribution centers—this is what we did then. We even did pest control.
As for organizing activities for the largest amount of people, I had never seen that until I went to San Francisco. I saw ANSWER—Act Now to Stop War and End Racism organize activities of tens of thousands, sometimes 100,000 people. We covered from the Embarcadero to the Civic Center—that’s four BART stops.
I’m sitting up there, and I could see a sea of people. It wasn’t astonishing that so many people would come out, but that a much smaller number of people brought it about. I watched them do this from their little office on Mission [Street], and back then it was just two little rooms, not as big as these two here [in New York], but they were able to do it.
So I learned those organizing skills. I knew that those skills existed, and I knew where they existed. It was just a matter of bringing those skills together, and understanding how we’re going to make it work, what it’s going to take to survive.
It was that left wing, those “subversives” as they are called, that has allowed us to assist 80,000 in direct services, and 300,000 in indirect services. And by “indirect,” I mean a mother who has come to get food for her family, a school that we hoped to reorganize, or a faith-based institution that is now once again able to hold services.
But we’ve done this under fire. If we had time to prepare for it, it wouldn’t be that we had served thousands of people; we would have been able to serve everyone.
What does that do? It shows people: one, capitalism can be defeated, because you cannot do it under a capitalist system. You can’t give away anything and call it capitalism—because it’s not about giving away anything. They just don’t go together. Two, it makes people recognize the power that they have. When we were in the Panthers, we were always chanting “Power to the People!”
The first people that came down to help us were classified as anarchists. Our clinic, our health care, was put together by anarchists who had just come from Seattle and the WTO protests.
Our communication system that we put together was put together by “Dirty hippies,” as they used to be called. Those “dirty hippies” they were laughing about came to my backyard, and set up a communication system that was second to none in the state of Louisiana, and they did it in two days.
We were the only group, the only entity in New Orleans, able to send messages anywhere globally. We had a system second to none, and that’s how it was put together. And if we had the time now to really do the proper planning. We used to call it the five P’s: “Proper planning prevents poor performance.” That was drilled in us, to always have a backup plan.
When things happen, people will run to those people who have forewarned them. If you’re the one that has forewarned them that this day is coming, on that day you’ll find them right at your doorstep.
We had five hospitals pre-Katrina, but after Katrina, we had none. For three weeks, we operated the only health clinic in Algiers, which meant the only health clinic in all of New Orleans. I mean they had a little clinic for the rich, but besides the rich, the only place people could go to was to us.
 Under capitalism, building and rebuilding are opportunities for corruption and profit. Here, the July 10 collapse at Boston’s ‘Big Dig’ that killed one. Photo: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi |
Can you talk about the $10 billion relief package recently announced by the government?
Shakoor Aljuwani: Well for this Road Home project, Gov. Blanco’s thing, it seems like a lot, $10 billion. But each homeowner would only get $150,000 and they have to subtract any aid they’ve received this far. So if they’ve received FEMA monies during evacuation, or insurance money, that has to be deducted. So you might come away with $50,000 or $60,000 for everything you own. And then they deduct administrative costs—which could be up to a third of that grant.
MR: Most of that money is going to disappear into administrative costs. How can I say that without a shadow of a doubt? I’ve seen the corruption.
In the aftermath of Katrina, you saw a sea of blue roofs, because of the blue tarps they used to cover the roofs. There were contractors awarded these no-bid contracts to nail blue tarps on the roofs, and they received $175 per square foot. Now the subcontractor that was actually putting the tarp on the roof, he was receiving $2 a square foot. So there’s $173 dollars missing, and no one said anything. So you can’t tell me that in this new plan, that type of corruption wouldn’t emerge again.
Who can see giving a poor family $50,000, or even $10,000? I mean look at what we have done. We have paid more per family putting them up in a hotel than it would take to get their lives together. We were paying up to $4,000 a month to keep a family in a room. If you would have given any of those families just half of that, they would be on their feet. Look at how much was wasted.
That’s why I was saying from the very beginning that we people of conscience understand that capitalism cannot meet the needs of people in a time of great demand—because it’s not in that system. We made a call and received 2,800 volunteers just in the month of March.
Now why won’t the government ask for that many volunteers? Because that’s not what capitalism is about. It’s not about asking for volunteers. It’s about asking for businesses, and paying them to do it, and they’ll never be able to meet the needs because of greed, because of capital, and because of profit. There’s no profit in feeding the poor.
That’s why I’m against all these service providers. There’s an old saying: “They come to do good, but stay to do well.” Next thing you know, the only one you see doing well is the executive director of whatever poverty program he’s operating.
Look at the distinction between him and the members of the community. He’s got the highest paid salary in the neighborhood. The only people with a better car than the executive director are the pimp and the drug dealer.
You go in any poor community and that’s the equation. You see one guy in a Jag—oh, that’s a pimp—you see the second one, that’s a drug dealer, and you see the third one—oh, he’s a service provider, he runs that program over there, the poverty program. All three of them got diamonds on—ain’t no difference. Almost 97 percent of what we receive at Common Ground goes into direct services.
You have the ability to better provide for people than any faith-based institution or any college, because for them it’s still going to be based on capital. It’s not going to be based on the service. If you give any of them a dollar, they’ll immediately carve out whatever they need first. Other than that, if there’s no profit, they’re not going to do it.
You have to look at how many people you can reach. With that 20 people, you can probably influence 100,000.
That’s what I was saying about the ANSWER office in San Francisco. I’ve seen what they’re able to do. I’ve seen them get 100,000 out for a demonstration. I understand the data, the contacts they have, the number of people they can reach. That’s what it takes to bring people together. Civic responsibility is nothing that’s taught in capitalism, because it’s not based on civil responsibility. We have to teach this.
I’ve seen people come down to New Orleans and say, “I understand, but I can’t volunteer to do nothing—I got to get paid.” And I understand that, but I understand those who have come down and have volunteered.
And one thing I’ve seen in nine out of every 10 is that they understand that capitalism is the direct cause of the poverty these people are in. Capitalism is what created that racism and that corruption.
Those levies didn’t break because of an explosion. Those levies were breached by an implosion—an implosion of racism, greed and corruption. And each one of them led to the other. They couldn’t get enough money, even with a salary. It wasn’t enough. The greed was too great.
How do we get past that greed? I haven’t seen a way that you can get past greed and still live in a capitalist society. It just doesn’t work. Greed is too entrenched.
Just look at those who are millionaires striving to be billionaires, and billionaires striving to be trillionaires. When’s enough capital?
The reason we have so much starvation on this planet, isn’t because of some natural disaster, but a man-made disaster. Global warming isn’t anything natural. The pollution of our planet is because of nothing other than greed, and now we’ve made it our way of life.
Look at what Israel is doing right now in Palestine. What is that but greed? Something has to bring about that change. Right now, if it’s not those who bring about peace and justice, whether based on socialism, communism, or just communalism, we have to find something other than we have now. Because it isn’t working. Until we develop an alternative, we’re a walking time bomb.
When I was young, it used to be a joke that one day people would be buying water. I’m afraid that by the time you’re older, you’ll have to be walking around with a container of oxygen. We have the means and technology to heal our planet, but we won’t heal it because there’s no profit in it. There’s definitely no profit in feeding the poor, or healing the sick if they don’t have insurance. If there’s no profit in it, they’re not going to do it.
