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02/22/2006:

"New Orleans Locals Think Katrina's Toll Is Still Rising"

NEW ORLEANS -- The official death toll of Hurricane Katrina is more than 1,300. The unofficial toll of the storm may take that a lot higher.

Though not quantifiable in the orthodox fashion, because so many area health agencies are still in disarray, a belief exists among many here that the natural mortality rate of New Orleanians -- whether still in the city or relocated -- has increased dramatically since, and perhaps because of, Katrina.

The daily newspaper has seen a rise in reported deaths. Local funeral homes are burying just as many people as they did last year, though the population has decreased. Families say that their kin who had been in good health are dying, and attribute that to the stress brought on by the hurricane, flooding and relocations.

It is too early for state officials to have statistics for last year, said Bob Johannessen of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. And epidemiologists are reluctant to draw conclusions based on anecdotal information.

Still, stress here is palpable, and it is overwhelming people of all ages, said psychiatrist James Barbee, director of an anxiety clinic at Louisiana State University. "People are struggling terribly."

Barbee said he has seen many more patients with serious problems -- hypertension, diabetes out of control, suicidal tendencies -- than before the storm. "Katrina took all order away from lives," he said, and the effect can be extremely deleterious.

The increase in deaths is seen the pages of the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, where the number of deaths reported in January was up 25 percent from the same month in 2005, according to publisher Ashton Phelps Jr.

New Orleans Parish Coroner Frank Minyard said he doesn't keep records on natural deaths, but that he believes "stress causes an increase in the rise of natural-death rates."

Louis Charbonnet, 67, president of Charbonnet-Labat Funeral Home on St. Philip Street in the Tremé neighborhood, said, "It's an absolute fact." New Orleanians are "dying away," he said. "They are distressed by being displaced."
washingtonpost.com


Six Months After Katrina: Who Was Left Behind - Then and Now
The Katrina evacuation was totally self-help. If you had the resources, a car, money and a place to go, you left. Over one million people evacuated - 80 to 90% of the population. No provisions were made for those who could not evacuate themselves. To this day no one has a reliable estimate of how many people were left behind in Katrina - that in itself says quite a bit about what happened.

Who was left behind in the self-help evacuation?

In the hospital, we could not see who was left behind because we did not have electricity or TV. We certainly knew the 2000 of us were left behind, and from the hospital we could see others. Some were floating in the street - face down. Some were paddling down the street - helping older folks get to high ground. Some were swimming down the streets. We could hear people left behind screaming for help from rooftops. We routinely heard gunshots as people trapped on rooftops tried to get the attention of helicopters crisscrossing the skies above. We could see the people trapped in the Salvation Army home a block away. We could hear breaking glass as people scrambled to get away from flooded one story homes and into the higher ground of several story office buildings. We saw people swimming to the local drugstore and swimming out with provisions. But we had no idea how many were actually left behind. The poor, especially those without cars, were left behind. Twenty-seven percent of the people of New Orleans did not have access to a car. Government authorities knew in advance that ".100,000 citizens of New Orleans did not have means of personal transportation." Greyhound and Amtrak stopped service on the Saturday before the hurricane. These are people who did not have cars because they were poor - over 125,000 people, 27% of the people of New Orleans, lived below the very low federal poverty level before Katrina.


Capitalism is Racism: An Update on the New Orleans Tragedy
...The September article opened with the statement, “The late Malcolm X said that: ‘You cannot have capitalism without racism’....” This claim can be understood when considered in the historical context of the fact that the early (white) capitalists in America were, among other things, slave holders while the early African Americans were brought here by force and violence in order to be slaves for the purpose of maximizing profits for the rich land owners by reducing labor costs. As a result of this vicious practice, the African American people were brought to America in such a circumstance that they were actually considered to be material resources, or property, rather than being economic earners, or humans. Later, after the slaves gained their freedom, these good people continued to be held at the very bottom of the economic ladder without any real means of climbing above whatever rung of that ladder its builder, the white “master class” of capitalist ownership, made available to them. Since it is a basic tenet of capitalist economics that those at the top will always rise at a more rapid and greater rate than those at the bottom, those at the bottom will inevitably always remain there.