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The people of Egypt have rights that are universal.
Barrack Obama, January 28th 2011.
Attention President Barrack Obama: yes, the people of Egypt have rights that are universal. What you fail to recognize is that the poor people of New Orleans have universal rights too.
That poor people who live in or want to live in public housing in New Orleans have universal rights is clearly an incovenient truth for you. Your committment to freedom of speech doesn't extend to the Iberville Development where HANO police, your police, use the threat of arrest to stop the distribution of fliers in the neighborhood that criticize your government's latest scheme to "redevelop" poor people out of the area. Your committment to universal rights is not so deep as to compell you to mention even a word of criticism when the New Orleans Police Department trampled on the freedoms of assembly and speech of public housing supporters, outside and inside New Orleans City Hall, who attempted to peacefully voice their opposition on December 20, 2007 at a "public" City Council meeting during which Council members voted to authorize the demolition of 4,500 of the city's public housing apartments. You, then a candidate for the U.S. presidency, responded to requests from the movement to condemn that brutal repression in the Crescent City with silence. And your administration continues and deepens the post-Katrina housing "redevelopment" initiatives of the Bush Administration that UN investigators and many others note effectively violate the universal right of return of low income, mostly African-American Katrina Survivors. These are but a very few of the violations of the human rights that public housing residents and supporters in this city have endured in Lousiana's largest city recently. Violations of universal rights that produce not so much as word of concern from you.
And Mr. President, you've said that the people of Egypt have a right to free and fair elections. Agreed. But what about the right of the people of the Iberville Development in New Orleans to have free and fair elections? The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations has clear guidelines regarding what constitutes fair and legal residents council election in an American public housing development. Yet, your appointed agent, Housing Authority of New Orleans Receiver David Gilmore, orchestrated a residents "election" at Iberville that clearly violated the guidelines that U.S. Code sets for residents council elections in the U.S. Only a handful of Iberville residents, instead of all of them, were given the opportunity to consider participating as candidates in last year's "residents" election. And Iberville residents were given no more than four days advance notice insteaded of the legally mandated thirty days advance notice.
How is last year's residents "elections" in the Iberville development under the direction of your government any less a rigged election than the elections held in Egypt under the direction of Hosni Mubarak's government? Poor people in the United States, including the poor people of New Orleans, have a right to free and fair elections too!
Mr. President. Have you ever consider that the use of police intimidation to prevent the distribution in Iberville of materials critical of your government's housing policies there is of one and the same spirit as the use of police intimidation to stop the distribution in Egypt of materials critical of Mubarak's government? Have you paused for even a moment to acknowledge, if only to yourself, that the tear gassing and tasering of public housing residents and supporters in New Orleans puts people here in just as much danger as the tear gassing and tasering of protesters in Egypt puts people in that country? And do you even realize that a government sponsored rigged election in Iberville is the moral and legal equivalent of a rigged election in Egypt? Are you oblivious to the reality that your government systematically violates the universal rights that thousands of displaced Crescent City public housing residents have as internally displaced persons just as the Mubarak government systematically violates the universal rights that Egypt's internally displaced have as internally displaced persons? Mr. President what blinds you to injustice in New Orleans, ignorance of hypocrisy?
The poor people of New Orleans have rights that are universal!!
Mike Howells C3/Hands Off Iberville
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