“COME HELL or HIGH WATER”
There appear to be fear in minister Dyson heart about calling spade a spade when it comes to confronting very politically sensitive issues with the big white men and oil companies in New York City and real spooks in Washington.
His newest book “COME HELL or HIGH WATER reveals him to be little more than a two bit corporate hustler praying on the suffering of the Black people in New Orleans and fearing a intellectual confrontation with the major oil companies and their hired intellectual guns.
Dyson new book is a poorly written essay that appears to have been outline by a some one else.
The white media, book reviewers, radio and major TV networks have hyped Dr. Dyson as the new multi-media self-appointed spokmen for the poor Black people.
The white media has created the image of Dyson as the new jack Black Robinhood who intellectually purports to gets in the face of rich Black and white people and corporations.
The new book is a collection of disconnected facts that Professor Dyson is never able to integrate into a comprehensive argument because he fears connecting the major oil companies like ExxonMobil to the poverty and lack of education in New Orleans.
Most graduate level history instructors would reject Dr. Dyson book “COME HELL or HIGH WATER” as lacking any historical foundation of context.
But Professor book is not written for intellectuals or defense of Black New Orleansians.
Professor Dyson book appears to have been rush to the streets to take some of the political heat off the ExxonMobil 36 billion dollars of profits and to co-sign President Bush attempts to deindustrialize and depopulation of the New Orleans industrial region.
Given the historic importance and social focus of the theme, one must question the political motivation of rushing such a weak manuscript to market.
According to Newhouse News Service, carried in the Trenton Time, Sunday, February 4, Dr. Eric Dyson said “It (President Bush September 15, 2006 speech in New Orleans) was a great speech---“I mean that part of it (where the President talks about “deep, persistent poverty, with root in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with both action”.
A critical reading of his newest book “COME HELL or HIGH WATER and his public statements about New Orleans reveal that Professor Dyson is a demagogue who is apparently trying to appear to champion the cause of the New Orleans poor and Black, but in fact, like President is in the de facto political service of the oil companies.
Dr. Dyson position on New Orleans recovery and the suffering Blacks, because of the national corporate white media push is increasing dangerous to the cause of protecting and rescuing the suffering people from New Orleans.
Professor Dyson in his book openly supports President Bush abusive policy toward New Orleans and Black depopulation.
According to Professor Michael Eric Dyson own public statements the book “COME HELL or HIGH WATER” was reportedly written as a political defense of the interest of the poor people of New Orleans.
The people of New Orleans need an independent national voice. With hundred of thousand are facing homelessness a voice was needed sooner than later.
The hope was Dyson would be one of those voices.
The historical window of opportunity was open for Dr. Dyson to make a real different.
Rather than take the challege of defending poor Blacks in New Orleans, Professor Dyson elected to defend the rich oil companies and the president of the United States ruthless policies toward New Orleans.
Professor Dyson completely runs away from any direct or indirect discussion of any aspect of the political economy of the role of multinational oil companies in the New Orleans economy and the after math of Katrina. Dr. Dyson fear is so great he never mentioning the names of any major oil companies like ExxonMobil in his analysis of the deepening poverty in New Orleans. Nothing is ever said by Professor Dyson about the fact that the major oil companies have been downsizing their production and investments in New Orleans the last 20 years.
This deinvestment oil policy, the North American Free Trade Agreement and massive waves of Chinese imports, not some mythical 250 years of southern rascism has served to destroy the pre-Katrina New Orleans regional economy creating record levels of Black poverty.
Professor Dyson teaches at the same university that houses the most powerful business school in the world, the Wharton School of Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. Just by his proximity to Wharton, Dr. Dyson should be one of the best-informed Black leaders in North America.
Many of Dyson followers were sure Exxon Mobil and other ruthless oil companies and President Bush would get the same type of ruthless beat down Bill Cosby got from brother Dyson. In the book, readers will be shock to see just how non-aggressive Dr. Dyson’s tone is when talking about the major oil companies.
To date Professor Dyson has been very careful to say nothing about ExxonMobil or other oil companies’ patterns of abuse from the Gulf of Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Chad or Saudi Arabia.
Service economy and depopulation
If New Orleans is forced by lack of industrial infrastructure investments to transformed into a service economy, over 400,000 mostly Blacks already force to leave from the city of New Orleans may never again return to their former city of New Orleans.
This reality emerged during the immediate period following the forced depopulation of the city.
In the preface of his book “COME HELL or HIGH WATER” openly supports the creation of a service driven New Orleans. The conclusion was reached in a series of studies, the latest from Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University are building a case file to support the Bush plan to downsize and transform the economy of the New Orleans region from an industrial/manufacturing driven to a service driven economy.
The Black hopes, dreams and prayers of Professor Dyson's defense
Many in the African American community assumed or hoped that the much talked about Dr. Michael Eric Dyson book about the Katrina disaster in New Orleans would make a major contribution toward framing an in depth aggressive grass roots public debate and discussion of the best ways to reconstruct and modernize the industrial economy of New Orleans.
The book never even talks about the infrastructure challege of the New Orleans region either human or physical. Nothing is said about the need for computer integrated manufacturing as the only effective way of finally breaking the chains of white rascism.
If nothing else Dyson’s book could have informed and mobilized the critcal political segment young political to take action in defense of the City of New Orleans.
Building a virtual reality new industrial New Orleans on computers on TV to help Americans better understands what is necessary to rebuild New Orleans industrial base. Many African American hoped that Professor Dyson has the national support-base to help focus the debate to save in the industrial base of the region.
Such a public debate would help create the pre-condition for the orderly development and funding of a recovery plan to support the return of many of the 425,000 displaced people from New Orleans.
This debate would also serve as a primary means to finally redress the deepening poverty revealed by Katrina and the massive flooding of New Orleans.
Professor Dyson’s book “Is Bill Cosby Right?” offered the type of in-depth, critical analysis that was needed to deal with the Oil industry that controls the political economy of both New Orleans and southern Louisiana.
Given Dr. Dyson personal roots in Detroit, the most industrialized region in the world and he demonstrated understanding of the complex issues plaguing poor and working class Black Americans, his book on Katrina was hoped to give a rare critical insight into the critical tasks necessary to rebuilding a new and better New Orleans that would empower it Black and poor white masses.
Dyson with his staff and student support from Wharton would be able to really break off brothers and sisters some critical insight into framing the social factors that needed addressed to allow greater social mobility for Blacks in New Orleanains society and material culture.
Dyson say nothing about anything to do with oil.
With tens of billion of tax payers money already flowing into the economy of New Orleans, there was a political opportunity for Dyson and other hip-hop intellectuals to show young African Americans how to step correctly to the white man in New York City and the Oval Office laying out a Black action plan to save the poor and working brothers of New Orleans.
Industrial New Orleans appear to be in final phase of collapse
As of this writing the strategic situation of the Black and poor white citizens is rapidly deteriorating toward destitution and long-term homeless in term of the internally displaced from New Orleans.
Chemical firms, ship builders and energy firms have quietly gotten much of their pre-Katrina production levels back.
Most of the non-oil related the physical industrial infrastructure of the New Orleans lays in washes and is being targeted for sale, cannibalization and deindustrialization.
Most non-oil related semi skilled and skilled labor has been forced from the region.
Over 20,000 school age children from New Orleans are not enrolled in school anywhere and remain listed as missing and feared dead. Officially one out of three children is not in school anywhere. Less than one in eight children of the pre-Katrina student population are attending public school in the city of New Orleans.
Professor Dyson says nothing about the missing Black children of New Orleans in his book? Nothing is said about their risk-mental states and lack of federal money to get treatment.
Professor Dyson says nothing about the growing northern death march of hundreds of thousands of homeless Blacks from New Orleans. Federal court order FEMA grants for food, shelter and medical treatment are due to run out starting February the 7, 2006 for over 400,000 internally displaced New Orleanains.
The state of Texas is fighting the federal government for 1.4 billion of aid for hundred of thousands of New Orleans still in the state needing basic assitance.
Over 500,000 New Orleanian are on a forced death march to northern cities in the dead of winter. Former New Orleanian citizens are dying in increasing number from lack of food, shelter and medical care.
The city of New Orleans population has been reduced to 65, 000 people from almost 489,000 people.
The flooding of the city of New Orleans destroyed most of the 500,000-manufacturing and support jobs in the New Orleans region forcing almost a million workers to relocate outside the region.
Bush walks away from rebuilding New Orleans
The Bush New Orleans recovery plan calls for a final 18 billion-dollar for the New Orleans industrial region and 6.2 billion in community development block grants already approved by Congress. There are no plan to request additional aid for the region in the Bush 2007 federal budget.
The Oval Office has publicly opposite the Bake bill to compensate property owners 60 of their percent of their mortgages or 20 billion-dollar. The Bush plan walks away, leaving the region and private business and investors will the task of finding the estimated 220 billion dollars of reconstruction funding from the world capital markets. That amount, 220 billion dollar is higher than the Foreign Direct Investments flowing into China.
The real challenge that no urban planners or in economist wants to publicly talk about, because of its national implications, is the cost of building a modern industrial economy in New Orleans able to complete with the emerging industrial economies in Asia in manufacturing. Professor Dyson does not want to tell the American people that US multinational manufacturing in China are directly determining the nature and type of investments necessary to redevelop New Orleans or any other North American city the should be destroyed by a Katrina like storm.
All of the above conditions were either in advanced discussion or has fully formed in New Orleans before Professor Dyson wrote the “COME HELL or HIGH WATER.
None of these critical elements of the New Orleans nightmare were never discussed anywhere in professor Dyson book on New Orleans the book.
This pattern of omission of critical issues would repeat itself throughout the body of the text of Dr. Dyson book “COME HELL or HIGH WATER”over the range of critical subjects and issues over a range of subjects and issues. The pattern of critical omission is designed to allow Professor Dyson to free the oil companies of their role in the deepening Black of poverty in New Orleans.
The sister book written in west Philly about Katrina
A major policy shift and book was written following a symposium in Washington on risk management and disaster right on the same campus while Professor Dyson was writing “COME HELL or HIGH WATER”. The book –“On Risk and Disaster” was written at Wharton, during the same time as COME HELL or HIGH WATER on the same campus. For reasons that rise serious political questions in the Black community the finding of “On Risk and Disaster” which layout the economic abandonment of the industrial sector of New Olreans were not reported or analyzed, nor critically challenged in Dr. Dyson book.
The central theme of “On Risk and Disaster” is that Katrina was the last the federal government should reimburses home owners and businesses that knowingly build in lower laying area that are a high risk of flooding. In the further, private insurance firms will handle the risk management. In the case of cities like New Orleans, companies and homeowners who can get insurance will be forced to pay much higher rates.
The federal government and taxpayers will no longer be in the flood insurance business.
A second symposium on the social and political issues of this policy change is scheduled for February in Philadelphia.
The central theme of “On Risk and Disaster” forces a whole frame of discussion of reindustrialization of New Orleans that directly impacts on Dr. Dyson main defense of keeping masses of people in New Orleans.
What Wharton said about Katrina
A series of studies, the latest from Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University are building a case file to transform the city and economic orientation of the New Orleans region from an industrial/manufacturing driven to a service driven economy. The bottom line is that companies building in low line areas of the city and region will be forced to price high rates of flood insurance.
This will directly impact on the type of manufacturing that will locate in the New Orleans area.
A major policy change to privatized flood insurance was made and a book was written following a symposium in Washington on risk management and disaster. The book –“On Risk and Disaster” was written at Wharton, during the same time as COME HELL or HIGH WATER on the same campus. The finding of the sister book University of Pennsylvania “On Risk and Disaster” were not reported, review or analyzed in Dr. Dyson book “COME HELL or HIGH WATER” that deals with the same subject matter, i.e. Katrina and the reconstruction of New Orleans.
A second symposium on the social and political issues of Katrina is scheduled for February in Philadelphia. Together these two symposium will increase the cost of manufactures locating is high flood areas like New Orleans.
New Orleans industrial recovery “Redline and Black ball”
Higher costs to located in New Orleans is a serious economic and risk management challenge to efforts afoot to gain investment dollars and manufacturers like Toyota who may be thinking about locating major advanced Computer Integrated manufacturing platforms and supply chain manufacturing partnerships in the New Orleans region.
These risk management policy changes will de facto “Redline and Black ball” New Orleans as a potential industrial zone.
If New Orleans is transformed into a service economy, over 400,000 mostly Blacks are at risk from New Orleans would lost the economic rational to return. Many may never again live in their own city of New Orleans. Professor Dyson or any one else developing an argument to defense reindustrialize New Orleans would to face a major challenge in the cost to insurance manufacturing plant and equipment.
To the shock of many in the Black community of the lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and around the country, Professor Dyson spares no time in making his position on industrialization clear. In the preface of his book “COME HELL or HIGH WATER” he de facto suggests and supports the creation of a service driven New Orleans economy void of its industrial based and manufacturing.
No Blueprint for Industrial for Redevelopment
To date no university, think tank or private or public group has come forward with a comprehensive industrial centric recovery plan to challege or function as a counter weight to the emerging service driven master plans for the deindustrialization and transformation of the New Orleans industrial economy.
Dr. Michael Eric Dyson book “COME HELL or HIGH WATER” at first reading appears to have again placed his figurer print on the most political important African American event of the early 21st Centaury. If you are welling to take a face value what he says is important from Black America. In his latest book, “COME HELL or HIGH WATER”, the so-called “hip hop intellectual” offers a new style Dr.Henry Kissinger type super detailed analysis of a small select group of unrelated facts about the flooding of New Orleans.
At the end of the day, Professor Dyson appears to have turned his back on the fight to return Black en la mass to New Orleans via developing a program to reindustrialize.
If it’s not an economic augment for redevelopment of the city, then what is Dr. Dyson book purpose and mission?
A second read of “COME HELL or HIGH WATER” reveals the reality that these facts, characters and events are then process through the prism of Dr. Dyson definition of the historical disenfranchisement of poor, suffering Black and white people of New Orleans, The Book read like a moral statement or manifesto disenfranchisement of Blacks in New Orleans and the role Professor Dyson feels racism played in the human drama of Orleans.
Is Dyson the Black Kissinger
Like Dr. Kissinger before him, Dr. Dyson is forced to over detail the most unimportant and unrelated aspects of the New Orleans tragedy in order to support his central theme and keep the reader from asking more basic questions about his assumptions. The real political economy of New Orleans is either blackout, omitted or obfuscated. The most critical elements of the story of New Orleans are reinterpreted by Professor Dyson to try to make them fix his story line in order to make his point.
Problemic issues and subjects like the multinational oil and chemical companies are blackout of the Dyson line of argument. Or left to the last pages of the book. For example, out of 115, 000 words and 250 pages and quotes, Dr. Dyson could force himself to only used five words on 210 about the most powerful lobby in Americans history, i.e. the oil lobby.
Beyond the ebonics and obfuscation
Without the need to offer the reader a detailed analysis of the interrelation of oil/chemical production and poverty in New Orleans, Dr. Dyson definition of white racism is free of the political economy and intellectual necessity to examine ExxonMobil, other oil companies. Professor hides, like most Republican and conservatives historians, it generalizes racism, and not the specific interest groups that is the American social problem.
The impact of Wel-Mart and other US slave labor multi nationals operating from China and other Asian platforms are flooding New Orleans and other market with cheap Chinese imports are also left out the Dyson analytical model. This type selective obfuscation, made famous by Dr. Kissinger, allows Dr. Dyson to maintain the compartmentalized single focus nature of the type of racial discrimination President Bush, Dyson and other hip hop political analysts like to employ to explain white racism. The problem is New Orleans is compartmentalized to “deep, persistent poverty,” with “roots in a history of racial discrimination”, not 200 billion dollars of cheap US multi national reexporting from Chinese slave labor imports to US home markets.
Also, Dyson notion of white racism, by omission of the central role played by oil companies and oil production, is free of linkage to other oil multinational nightmare in South American and the mother that have force Black people to live on less than a dollar a day. This ruthless oil policy has leads to even worse levels poverty commonly known as so-called oil curse. After Dr. Dyson has sanitized his use white racism to a very vague ahistorical level, then the reader is led to the Dysonian conclusion for the tragedy of New Orleans.
New breed hip-hop hustler a.k.a demagogue
Dr. Dyson is the only “new breed” historian who can openly talk about the deepening concentrations of black poverty in New Orleans and not connect it to the systemic loot of the Gulf region but the oil and chemical companies.
The unsavory truth of the exposure of the extremes richness of the oil companies exist side by side with the extreme poverty of the Black people of New Orleans is ruthlessly clear to every one but the readers of Dyson book on New Orleans and Katrina. The fact that Exxon Mobil has profit of 36 billion dollars for 2005 up from 25 billion in 2004 has no reliance to the Dyson analysis of poverty in New Orleans.
None of this money was set aside any money for Katrina related personal or business claims against ExxonMobil and other oil company’s massive spills and linkages in New Orleans city water system.
The African American community is left to question why Professor Dyson did not raised or politically connected the deadly economic link between ExxonMobil and poor Black people of New Orleans and southern Louisiana in his massive analytical model.
Louisiana, ranked 45th among the states with per captia personal income of $24,535. Compared with $ 30,472 for the national (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economics Analysis). According to the US Census Bureau per captia personal income in 1999 (dollar) for New Orleans City was $17,258.
Is Dr. Dyson a ExxonMobil made man
Dr. Dyson is the only “new breed” Black historian who can talk and write critical analysis about the deepening concentrations of black poverty in New Orleans but not politically connect the poverty to the systemic looting of the Gulf region by the multinational oil and chemical companies and not be called a Exxon Mobil made man.
ExxonMobil has a board of 36 billion in low yielding cash, even after paying 7 billion dollars in dividends and buying back 16 billion of shares last year. Many of ExxonMobil shareholders know the company has a moral obligation to come to the aid of New Orleans in a real way.
Professor Dyson has the kind of voice that would make ExxonMobil listen. The notion of what is necessary for a modern industry economy in New Orleans is will known. For Dr. Dyson to focus on the basic outline of an industrial development plan would allow ExxonMobil and other oil companies to try and find a fix. New Orleans is a test case model for other places around the world. While ExxonMobil has no good history of develop business models outside oil, they have the money and the public relations imperative to do so. ExxonMobil can take a long-term look at seed capital for mix housing solutions to replace public housing for low income and working class people.
The fact that Professor Dyson can write a book about the nightmare of New Orleans not attacking the forced depopulation of 400,000 African Americans from their city of 500 years or the oil industrial and not be accrued of being a corporate House Nigger, reflect a learned fear of large multinational and a basic weaken in the African political culture.
It is a public fact that ExxonMobil is a major donor to both the University of Pennsyliva and the Wharton School of Business.
ExxonMobil is listed as a donor of the Avalon Foundation in the Humanities and African Studies, of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Dyson not taking about the relationship of oil and Black poverty in New Orleans is like trying to talk about economic development in Nigeria, Venezuela or Sudan. His failure to develop any analysis leave the subject open oil and Blacks in New Orleans open to multi misinformation. One in every four workers in pre-Katrina New Orleans manufacture was involved in oil-related production. How can Professor argument maintain relevance with stating and trying to understand this interdependent relationship?
Oil and chemical production is over 50 per cent of the GDP of New Orleans region economy. Discussion of the political economy of Black New Orleanains poverty outside of the matrix of oil pass a point is meaningless. Dr. Dyson book never developed an outline, much an understanding of the political economy of oil. As stated above in the preface of his book “COME HELL or HIGH WATER” openly supports the creation of a service driven New Orleans. Dyson sys—“New Orleans will be rebuilt…Las Vegas in Louisiana”…page xi.
Moral contract ExxonMobil
Professor Dyson need to define the moral contract ExxonMobil and other oil companies should have with the Black people of New Orleans. He should define the areas of industrial investments ExxonMobil should make in the post-Katrina. This critcal task was omitted in the first edition of “COME HELL or HIGH WATER”.
Not to do so is tantamount to being an ExxonMobil made man.