Harry Belefonte and Danny Glover speak out :
When the hurricane struck the Gulf and the floodwaters rose and tore through New Orleans, plunging its remaining population into a carnival of misery, it did not turn the region into a Third World country - as it has been disparagingly implied in the media - it revealed one. It revealed the disaster within the disaster: grueling poverty rose to the surface like a bruise to our skin.
But the storm not only revealed the poverty of those most vulnerable, those left behind. It revealed the poverty of skewed priorities that put the shoulder of technology to the wheel of death rather than life, creating killing machines that are now called "smart" and surveillance systems that, in the words of the great Guyanese poet Martin Carter, "are watching you sleep and aiming at your dreams."
Oh yes. Living in a ghetto in the US is SO LIKE living in a third world country. It's just like living in Zimbabwe, where you have to steal across the boarder into Botswana to make some money to feed your family back home. And, it's JUST like living in the Sudan, where if you are first not killed by Islamic militants, you can exist by whoring yourself out to French UN workers for food (or be forcibly raped.) Yes. It's exactly the same.
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