The Washington Informer: Opinions/Editorials

practically null and void just like the non-votes of the black Delegates who represent the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands. As far as the all-white Republican leadership seems to be concerned, their votes just don’t count, because they think all they need is 218 white Republican votes in the House and 51 white Republicans’ votes in the Senate to rule.

Republicans are living large and are in charge, controlling the House, the Senate, the White House, and they’re quickly stacking the courts with like-minded judges. It’s their world. Welcome to it.

Need proof?

Just look back at week two after Katrina the Terrorist decimated the Coast of the Gulf of Mexico, from Louisiana, to Mississippi, to Alabama. A coalition of black leadership organizations – convened by NAACP President Bruce Gordon, and including the CBC, the Nation of Islam, Rainbow-PUSH, and a variety of black professional organizations –convened at Howard University, Sept.14, to address the challenges caused and revealed by the storm and its aftermath. And yet you can count the news reports of the subsequent press conference the leaders held on the fingers of one hand.

Human rights activist and entertainer Harry Belafonte was one of the moral anchors during the private meeting. “We all hear the cry of the people for change,” Belafonte said at the close of the session. “This meeting is a major act of unity,” he continued.

The meeting was called to develop a black leadership strategy after Katrina and to insist on a meeting with Pres. George W. Bush, who has avoided all contact with all but a “hand-picked” group of blacks since he took office, even after the catastrophic storm devastated New Orleans and left the world to see the haunting images of black faces of suffering and literally dying in New Orleans right before the un-blinking eye of network television cameras.

The participants came together a day before Bush delivered a major prime-time address to the nation from historic Jackson Square in the still abandoned city of New Orleans, and they issued an eight-point “Call to Action,” and spoke with “senior White House” staff members, but Bush declined to talk with the Coalition or individually even by telephone with its members.

“We asked for a meeting with the President. But he would not meet with us,” a CBC member told this writer. That was the sanitized reaction. The CBC got “stiffed” by the President.

The Coalition called for: a commitment to the “immediate and long-term right of return” for residents displaced from the Gulf Coast region; a $100 billion “Family Reconstruction Fund” to provide unemployment training and assistance, school placement and help reconnecting families and children; ensuring local displaced residents the first opportunities to be placed in jobs rebuilding the area; physical and mental health assistance; as well as legal, economic, and voting protections; among other things.

Important economic and legal measures include a moratorium on mortgage payments so people who lost their houses and incomes do not lose their land to speculators and predatory lenders; bankruptcy protection so that any benefits victims receive are not diverted to discharge their debts; as well as the right to vote in their home districts for those who have been resettled elsewhere. And yet, you and I have yet to read a word of their courageous stand in the corporate-owned press of this country.

Many efforts at relieving the suffering of storm victims “have been confounded by the bureaucracy,” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) told this writer. “My first words to the evacuees (tens of thousands of whom were moved to Texas) was a public apology on behalf of the federal government for the complete collapse of the umbrella of safety net that we have come to believe our government can handle. We should not rest until every single question is answered: the why, and the what, and the how.”

Other CBC members were just as emphatic. “Up here in Congress we have to do everything we can to make sure that people understand, that if 76 percent of African Americans state that if those were white people down there, it would not have taken so long. We can’t take race, or poverty or class out of this,” Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) said in an interview.

“That is the reason that we’re in this situation in the first place. We’ve got to make sure that race and poverty and class is part of the equation going forward,” said Scott, criticizing (as many Coalition members did) the administration’s suspension of prevailing wage protections in the Davis-Bacon Act, and its suspension of affirmative action rules requiring black participation in rebuilding jobs and contracts.

“The great tragedy is that most of those people who died, didn’t die from Katrina, they died from government neglect. We can’t allow the attempt to dismiss this racial thing,” Scott said.

“People in small communities have found out what I’m doing, and they’ve contacted me directly,” Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fl.) told this writer Sept. 14, “They said, ‘No one has been to our community.’ No one. As I stand here today, no water, no ice, no electricity, no communications, in the richest country in the world, because they are black, they are poor, and it’s unacceptable,” Rep. Brown continued.

Meanwhile, the CBC has virtually restructured its entire Legislative Conference and banquet, scheduled through Sept. 24 at the Washington Convention Center to respond to Katrina.

“The Congressional Black Caucus has made a conscious effort to change the tone of the Legislative Weekend. To re-orient the issues forums and brain trusts, more to a discussion of poverty and some of the issues that were made so obvious as a result of Katrina,” CBC Chairman Melvin Watt (D-N.C.) told this writer, even going so far as to alter the entire tone of the CBC annual dinner, canceling some parties, and making others into fund-raisers for hurricane victims.

But most of the rest of the world has yet, has yet to see or hear that story.