Tag Archives: newspaper 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.”

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.

Column: This #Thanksgiving, #PresidentBiden Should Grant Clemency to #LeonardPeltier

Posted on by toddpanther

As posted from here: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/11/27/this_thanksgiving_biden_should_grant_clemency

Column

November 27, 2024

Political prisoner Leonard Peltier is the author of the memoir Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

While many brace for the return of Donald Trump to the White House, let’s remember that until Monday, January 20th, #JoeBiden is still president, with all the power that confers. The Constitution grants the president the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States,” to remedy a criminal justice system riddled with faults. One strong candidate for presidential clemency, as recently called for by Amnesty International USA, is 80-year-old Anishinabe-Lakota elder #LeonardPeltier, who has been incarcerated for close to half a century for a crime he maintains he did not commit. This Thanksgiving weekend, when people across the US enjoy a holiday based on the myth of a shared meal between native people of Massachusetts and the English settler-colonists who would later violently displace them, #PresidentBiden should free Leonard Peltier.

The case of Leonard Peltier encapsulates the modern era of indigenous resistance. After centuries of #genocide launched by #ChristopherColumbus and expanded by successive waves of European settlers, by the 1950s most of the surviving indigenous nations in North America had been contained in isolated and impoverished reservations. Hollywood appropriated, caricatured and monetized the vibrant mosaic of indigenous cultures. Many Native people moved to cities seeking economic opportunity but still faced racism and discrimination. Out of this, and amidst the civil rights and other social movements of the 1960s, the #AmericanIndianMovement, or #AIM, was born.

In 1973, AIM went to the #PineRidgeReservation in South Dakota, where a corrupt tribal government was working in league with federal and local authorities to violently suppress a growing movement to restore traditional practices – and to block extractive industries from exploiting traditional lands. More than 50 Lakota people and their allies were murdered there over a three-year period.

On June 26, 1975, Leonard Peltier was present at an AIM camp on the property of a targeted family. The camp was fired upon by unknown assailants, and the AIM members returned fire. In the ensuing minutes, two FBI agents and one young AIM activist were killed.

Two AIM members were later arrested for killing the agents. At trial, the jury agreed that they had fired in self-defense and acquitted them. Leonard Peltier, arrested later, was tried separately and convicted. Peltier’s trial was marked by gross FBI and federal prosecutorial misconduct, with the coercion of witnesses, fabricated testimony, and suppressed exculpatory evidence.

When Peltier was on trial in 1976, Joe Biden, then a young US Senator, was a founding member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee was created after the explosive Church Committee hearings that investigated the unconstitutional and criminal conduct of the FBI and its “ #COINTELPRO ” operations against civil rights leaders and organizations, including AIM.

A global movement grew, demanding justice for Leonard Peltier. Human rights icons like South African #PresidentNelsonMandela and #ArchbishopDesmondTutu called for his release, as did one of the federal judges involved, and, years later, one of the prosecutors who tried the case.

#AmnestyInternational has campaigned for Peltier’s release for decades. The group recently sent a letter to President Biden, reiterating their demand.

“Over the decades at Amnesty, we have been calling on administration after administration to do the right thing by Leonard. He was in hospital in June, he was in hospital again in October. It’s time to give him a chance to spend his last days with his family and with his community,” Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of #AmnestyInternationalUSA, said on the Democracy Now! news hour.

In late October, President Biden traveled to the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona to formally apologize for the US government’s treatment of Indigenous children forced into boarding schools.

“All told, hundreds and hundreds of Federal Indian Boarding Schools across the country. Tens of thousands of Native children entered the system. Nearly 1,000 documented Native child deaths, though the real number is likely to be much, much higher; lost generations, culture, and language; lost trust. It’s horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a sin on our soul,” Biden said.

Nick Tilsen, executive director of the Indigenous-led NDN Collective, responded on #DemocracyNow!, saying,

“What this means for Indian Country is that we hope that this is the beginning of an era of repair between the United States government and the Indigenous people, the First People of this land…He [Peltier] was in the Sisseton Wahpeton boarding school, in South Dakota. Leonard Peltier and many people who became leaders in the American Indian Movement were boarding school survivors. They came out of that era, and then they resisted.”

If President Biden’s apology at Gila River was genuine, he could demonstrate it by commuting the sentence of Leonard Peltier. It would be a long-overdue gesture to Indigenous people across the US, for which we could all give thanks.

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.