When the Levees Collapsed. One year after Katrina.

Unashamed plug, but this needs to be widely seen.

Spike Lee's brilliant new documentary about Katrina should be seen as widely as possible. It is a four-part documentary, and I'm uploading Parts I & II as fast as I can, and will post further links asap. I will upload Parts III & IV this evening if possible.

A couple of quick comments. The documentary has to peel through layers of misperception by some people, and wilful misdirection by certain political figures, and the story is not straightforward. There are questions raised about the levees, and whether there were explosions, but it isn't principally about that. There is tonnes of footage from within, lots of discussions with different people, who Lee allows to tell their own stories. He's a bit too soft on Nagin so far, to be honest, but one or two relevant criticisms are raised. There is a cutting account of some of the conduct of the Bush administration and some historical discussion. The issues of race and class intersect in obvious ways: contiguous, rather than competing issues that is.

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/08/when-levees-collapsed.html
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If anything, the second half of this documentary is even more overwhelming than what preceded it. In the first half, you see the blocking of aid, the refusal to help, the police repression, the racist lies told, the planning that didn't help the poor, the shittiness of the levees that were supposed to protect people, the history of disasters striking New Orleans, the way the government dynamited the levees in 1927 and 1965, the suspicions of local residents that the government blew them up again, the hideousness of Bush, the pandering of Nagin to the local business class before anyone else, the imposition of martial law (demanded by Bush), the pretense by FEMA not to know that people were in the convention centre. Okay, this was bad enough.

http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/09/when-levees-collapsed-continued.html

anticapitalista