Tag Archives: “Breaking The Sound Barrier” column

#BreakingTheSoundBarrier Column: 20 Years Later, the Lessons of #HurricaneKatrina Go Unheeded

Posted on by toddpanther

Weekly Column

August 28, 2025

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29th, 2005, breaching New Orleans’ protective levees, unleashing unprecedented destruction. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in US history, killing over 1,800 people, mostly poor residents of New Orleans’ historic Black neighborhoods. Katrina was also the US’ costliest natural disaster, causing over $160 billion in damage. Katrina’s deadly waters long ago receded, but in their wake, with worsening climate change, the vital lessons of Katrina have gone unheeded. Indeed, President Donald Trump, by flaunting genuine risks, is aggressively courting disaster.

Take Trump’s attack on FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In a statement released by the White House in May, FEMA was lumped with a slew of federal agencies that, the statement reads, represent “the weaponized rot in our Federal Government.” Targeted agencies included the EPA, the IRS, and the NIH. The document accuses FEMA of being “wasteful and woke,” engaged in “official training to indoctrinate ‘intersectionality’ and ‘investment in diversity and inclusion efforts’ over disaster prevention and response, culminating in aid workers being directed to skip the homes of President Trump’s supporters in the wake of a disaster.”

As with most of Trump’s pronouncements, these accusations are presented without any evidence.

The bulk of FEMA’s functions, according to Trump, would be delegated to the states. Of course, hurricanes and other natural disasters don’t recognize state lines, and no state could single-handedly respond to a disaster of the scale of Hurricane Katrina. Such a response requires collective action, marshalling resources from across the country to save lives in the impacted region, to recover the dead, and to rebuild.

Indicative of Trump’s contempt for FEMA was his appointment of David Richardson, a former Marine with no experience in disaster recovery, as acting head of the agency. Upon his arrival at FEMA, Richardson reportedly shocked staffers by saying he was unaware the US has a hurricane season.

A group of current and past FEMA workers published a letter, called The Katrina Declaration, that they sent to a Trump-appointed FEMA review council and to Congress.

The letter opens, “Since January 2025, FEMA has been under the leadership of individuals lacking legal qualifications, Senate approval, and the demonstrated background required of a FEMA Administrator. Decisions made by [David Richardson and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem] hinder the swift execution of our mission, and dismiss experienced staff whose institutional knowledge and relationships are vital to ensure effective emergency management.”

Close to 200 current and former FEMA workers signed the letter. Most of the current FEMA employees signed anonymously to avoid retaliation. At least 21 of those who did sign their names have been placed on administrative leave.

Jeremy Edwards, a former FEMA spokesperson under President Biden, explained why he signed the declaration, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour:

“I would call this letter to Congress, unfortunately, a cry for help. The agency has been badly damaged by this administration. They’ve fired a third of the permanent workforce. They’ve cut trainings. They have installed a person at the top of the agency who has no experience.”

Edwards also criticized the White House’s reassignment of FEMA staff and funding to assist in Trump’s mass deportation program:

FEMA’s mission is very clear: to help people before, during and after disaster. Any single dollar that isn’t being spent to help people with that mission is a failure to the American people. That money should not be going to build immigration detention centers. They should not be sending FEMA personnel, which they are doing, to help on-board new ICE agents.”

From the denial of climate science, to the gutting of FEMA, to the militarization of American cities with Marines and the National Guard, it seems clear that those in control at the White House have chosen to ignore the devastating lessons of Hurricane Katrina.

One person who did learn hard lessons then is Malik Rahim, a longtime resident of the Algiers neighborhood in New Orleans. A co-founder of the New Orleans chapter of the Black Panthers, Rahim organized a grassroots mutual aid effort immediately after Katrina, called Common Ground Relief.

Democracy Now! recently caught up with him, inside the New Orleans Convention Center, which served as a shelter of last resort for as many as 30,000 desperate city residents during Katrina. When asked about those stranded there, the FEMA director at the time, Michael Brown, famously replied that he was unaware of the dire conditions there.

Those now running roughshod over FEMA should heed Malik Rahim’s wise words, as the US blunders through another hurricane season:

“The sad part about it, it could happen today. Déjà vu is alive and well here, because if a hurricane were to happen right now, we are ill-prepared for it, the same way we were ill-prepared 20 years ago.”

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#BreakingTheSoundBarrier Column: On The #Smithsonian and #Slavery: #PresidentTrump’s #DonaldTrump’s #POTUS’s Whitewashing of #USHistory #AmericanHistory #WorldHistory #BlackHistory

Posted on by toddpanther

Weekly Column

Thursday, August 21, 2025

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

On Tuesday, President Trump attacked the narrative long taught in US schools and documented in museums, about the abhorrent, centuries-long practice of slavery. He focused on The Smithsonian Institution, the world-renowned center of learning and culture based in Washington, DC.

Trump wrote on his social media platform, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.”

“How bad slavery was.” It is simply unbelievable that such a statement could be uttered by a president in 2025. Yes, slavery was bad, President Trump. It was evil and remains a stain on this country. We should never stop talking about it.

Lonnie G. Bunch III is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian, overseeing the entire institution. Prior to that, he was the co-founder of the Smithsonian’s internationally renowned National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Democracy Now! interviewed Bunch in February, 2020, just before the pandemic struck. Bunch described the importance of depicting slavery:

“One of the most important things for me was to talk about the slave trade…I felt that we had to find real remnants of a slave ship,” Bunch said.

“We found the São José. It was a ship that left Lisbon in 1794, went all the way to Mozambique and picked up 512 people from the Makua tribe, was on its way back to the New World when it sank off the coast of Cape Town. Half of the people were lost. The other half were rescued and sold the next day.”

Bunch recalled Trump’s visit to the African American Museum in 2017, at the beginning of his first term as president:

“The first place Donald Trump visited in an official capacity was the museum. I think he was stunned by the stories we told, and there was so much he didn’t know,” Bunch said. “What I realized is that if people who didn’t know but had political influence could come through the museum, I could help them understand, hopefully, something that would change the way they did it.”

Given Trump’s new assault on The Smithsonian, it seems his visit to the African-American Museum didn’t have Lonnie Bunch’s hoped-for uplifting impact.

In late March of this year, Trump issued an executive order targeting the museum conplex. The order alleges that “the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” The order further creates a committee to review the contents of exhibits for “improper ideology.”

Trump has set the tone, normalizing the rejection of history, of the indescribable horror of slavery in the United States. His loyalists follow suit.

In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis promoted a revision to the state’s school curriculum, to include instruction on “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their own personal benefit.” DeSantis defended the offensive guidelines, saying “I think that they’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith, into doing things later in life.”

Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently joined a growing Christian Nationalist congregation. The church’s co-founder, Doug Wilson, has written that slavery “produced in the South a genuine affection between the races.” Hegseth has ordered that previously removed statues of Confederate officers be put back, and is restoring Confederate names to military installations that had been recently removed.

The National Park Service has announced that the only outdoor statue in Washington, DC honoring a Confederate, Albert Pike, which was removed following the racial justice protests of 2020, will be restored. Pike was a Confederate general and alleged member of the Ku Klux Klan.

And as Trump has successfully defunded public broadcasting, some are advocating that PBS content be replaced with material from the rightwing media company PragerU. In one clip from Prager already being used in 10 states, an animated cartoon Christopher Columbus is shown downplaying slavery:

“Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?”

Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of history at Harvard University, president of the Organization of American Historians and Pulitzer award-winning author, said on Democracy Now!, “It’s an attempt to play down or downplay what happened in the United States with slavery…This is a whitewashing of history.”

With Trump’s all out assault on truth, learning, and the institutions that preserve and curate our collective history, places like The Smithsonian Institution are more important than ever.

“In the era of Donald Trump,” Bunch concluded in 2020, “the museum has become a pilgrimage site, a site of resistance, a site of remembering what America could be, and a site to engage new generations to recognize they have an obligation to make a country live up to its stated ideals.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

#DemocracyNow! “Breaking The Sound Barrier” Weekly Column: The Ominous ICE Arrest of #NewarkMayorRasBaraka #RasBaraka

Posted on by toddpanther

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The march to authoritarianism in the US accelerated on May 9th with another arrest of an elected official by the Trump administration. Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, the largest city in New Jersey, had accompanied a Congressional delegation to Delaney Hall, a private prison run by GEO Corporation under contract to ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The delegation included Congressmembers Bonnie Watson Coleman, LaMonica McIver and Rob Menendez, Jr., all Democrats representing districts that include or are near Newark. They went to the East coast’s largest migrant jail to conduct oversight as authorized by law.

They were allowed to pass through the gate, along with Mayor Baraka. There they waited for over an hour. Baraka was told to leave, which he did, moving outside the gate to public property. His subsequent unprovoked arrest was a shocking abuse of federal police power, another clear instance of President Donald Trump and his enablers trying to seize power and crush dissent.

Mayor Baraka was held by ICE for five hours then released, charged with trespass. He is no stranger at the gates of Delaney Hall, as he explained days after his arrest on the Democracy Now! news hour:

“I actually go there every day…I go at 7 a.m. with fire code officials, UCC [Uniform Construction Code] officials, health inspectors, to get in, as it is our right to inspect the facility for them to apply for a certificate of occupancy. We’re in court with GEO right now, because they’re defying city ordinances.”

GEO rapidly ramped up operations at the 1,000-bed jail in order to serve as a major hub for Trump’s mass deportations. Newark sued GEO on April 1st, alleging it “blatantly continues to violate City ordinances and regulations.”

Baraka recounted his arrest:

“When the special agent in charge, Patel [Ricky Patel, Special Agent in Charge of Homeland Security Investigations, Newark] showed up, he escalated the situation. The Congresspeople tried to reason with him, surrounded me inside, and finally got him to agree for me to leave. I left, on the other side of the fence…They arrested me, and the congresspeople and other bystanders tried to shield me from being arrested.”

Homeland Security later issued a press release falsely claiming that “a group of protestors, including two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility. Representatives Robert Menendez, Jr. and Bonnie Watson Coleman and multiple protestors are holed up in a guard shack.” Acting US Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba, one of Trump’s former personal lawyers, falsely claimed on X that Mayor Baraka “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark…NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin expanded on the lies, telling CNN Saturday, “There will likely be more arrests coming. We actually have body-camera footage of some of these members of Congress assaulting our ICE enforcement officers, including body-slamming a female ICE officer.”

Congressmember Bonnie Watson-Coleman, who is an 80-year-old cancer survivor, rejected the government’s allegations, saying on Democracy Now!,

“There was no body-slamming. The Department of Homeland Security or the representatives from the administration are doing what they do consistently, and that is to lie and to deflect and to try to create legitimacy for illegitimate things that they are doing.”

So, in addition to arresting an elected city mayor, the Trump administration is now threatening to arrest sitting members of Congress. This makes even more alarming a pronouncement by Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, hours before Baraka’s arrest:

“The Constitution is clear…that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. It’s an option we’re actively looking at.”

Habeas corpus is the right of those detained to demand the government justify their imprisonment in court or be freed.

Mayor Baraka, who is running for governor and is campaigning for the June 10th Democratic primary, appeared in federal court on Thursday, pleading not guilty to trespass. Alina Habba demanded a full trial, despite the mountain of exculpatory evidence.

The prosecution of Mayor Ras Baraka, like the prosecution of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan in Wisconsin, accused of helping an immigrant avoid arrest by ICE agents, and the threatened arrest of members of Congress – all portend a frightening escalation in Trump’s drive to authoritarianism.

Several blocks from the Newark courthouse is Harriet Tubman Square, where in 2023 Mayor Baraka unveiled a memorial to the great Underground Railroad conductor and abolitionist, who escaped slavery and returned again and again to lead others to freedom. Newark has a long history of resistance to oppression, as President Trump and his enablers are about to find out.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.