D’Artagnan Collier is running in the November 2 election as the Socialist Equality Party candidate for state representative in Michigan’s 9th District in Detroit. Collier was placed on the ballot in late July, after the SEP submitted nominating petitions with the signatures of 1,129 Detroit voters.

Collier, 42, joined the socialist movement as a Detroit high school student in 1984 and has spent his entire adult life fighting for the working class. He was the party’s candidate for Detroit mayor in 2009 and a founding member of the Committee Against Utility Shutoffs (CAUS).

As a city worker in Detroit, he has opposed Mayor David Bing’s demands for deep wage and job cuts to be imposed on the city’s 13,000 municipal workers. He has fought to mobilize the working class to defend jobs and living standards and oppose public service cuts being demanded by the Democratic Party-controlled city and state governments. He has opposed the treachery of the city worker unions in collaborating in these attacks and fought for workers to organize independently of the union apparatus.

The following is a republication of a series on the fifth anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, originally published in three parts on August 28-31, 2010.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast of the United States. The world looked on in horror as New Orleans, Louisiana, was struck by storm surges that breached nearly every levee in the low-lying city’s dilapidated system. Tens of thousands of mostly poor, black residents who had been unable to evacuate were trapped by floodwaters without food, drinking water, or rescue.

More than 80 percent of New Orleans, a city of 500,000 people, was submerged. The storm destroyed communities across more than 95,000 square miles of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. At least 1,836 residents of the region were killed by the hurricane and its immediate aftermath, and many more were never to be found.

As staggering as these figures are, they cannot in themselves reveal the full scale of the catastrophe and its aftermath. Across the region, over one million people were displaced, many never to return, including hundreds of thousands who lost all of their possessions.

The “Rebuild America: Jobs, Justice and Peace” march held in Detroit August 28, had nothing to do with rebuilding the devastated city, creating jobs, or achieving peace.

The event, called by UAW President Bob King and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, was little more than a campaign rally for the Democratic Party, which has overseen wholesale job and wage cuts in Detroit and nationally while escalating military violence around the world.

The demonstration was carried out under entirely false pretenses. Presented by Jackson, the UAW, and their backers among middle class ex-radical groupings as a focal point for popular opposition to mass unemployment and social devastation, the march was in reality quite the opposite. It was in fact a demonstration in support of the American ruling class drive, spearheaded by the Obama administration, to put in place a permanent lowering of wages and living conditions in the US.

The relatively small turnout, perhaps 2,000, in a city where the real unemployment rate is close to 50 percent, speaks to the high degree of alienation of the working class from the Democratic Party, the trade unions and the establishment civil rights organizations.

Two Detroit-area men have died recently after being Tasered for allegedly defying police orders. Fifty-year-old Michael Ford passed away August 25, nearly ten days after being Tasered by Livonia police on August 14. Stanley Jackson, Jr., 31, died on August 20, following a confrontation with officers in the nearby town of Ypsilanti. Both victims were African-American.

The deaths take place as area officials, including Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, have increasingly called for a law-and-order crackdown to deal with high levels of unemployment and social distress.

Local news media reported that on the evening of August 13, Michael Ford, who police claim was intoxicated, approached the cops during a response to a loud-music complaint. The officers told Ford to go back into his apartment after the complainant could not be located. A few hours later the police returned after another loud-music complaint.

According to the initial police account, Ford approached the squad car yelling and wielding a knife in each hand. A police backup was ordered, and when Ford allegedly refused orders to get on the ground, he was Tasered. The police claim that Ford then fell and hit his head.

The August 28 “March for Jobs, Justice and Peace” is a fraud perpetrated against the people of Detroit. The aim of the campaign is not to create jobs, but to promote illusions in the Obama administration, which has been chiefly responsible for the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The clearest evidence of the real character of this “jobs march” comes from looking at its principal organizers: the Reverend Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow/Push Coalition; Bob King of the UAW; and the local Democratic Party elite led by Detroit’s multimillionaire mayor, David Bing. Each has played a crucial role in the devastation of Detroit.

The UAW has overseen the loss of 250,000 jobs at the Big Three and the auto parts industry since 2007. Last year Obama’s Auto Task Force shut down dozens of factories, tore up contractually-obligated benefits for auto workers and retirees, and forced new workers to hire on at $14 an hour, half what they used to be paid. Far from organizing any resistance to these attacks, the UAW worked hand-in-hand with the White House to force the measures on auto workers.

Members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) performed a free public concert Thursday at Campus Martius Park in downtown Detroit to reach out for community support as they resist massive and unprecedented concession demands by management.

Talks between DSO musicians and management broke off Friday without an agreement. No further talks are scheduled. In a statement to the press the players spokesman, cellist Haden McKay, said, “I don’t feel any closer to a settlement. I think we’ve gone about as far as we can go.” Orchestra members will meet Saturday to discuss the next step.

The 84 current players are being asked to accept a three-year agreement containing a 28 percent pay cut, a reduction in health care benefits, a permanent reduction in the size of the orchestra and other takeaways. The musicians gave up significant concessions in the previous agreement and many positions remain unfilled.

If no settlement is reached by the August 29 contract deadline, DSO management is threatening to implement a so-called Proposal B containing even more drastic concessions.

Since June of this year, 2,000 teachers and staff in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have been laid off. The mass firings are part of an effort to use the state’s education budget shortfall, estimated at $370 million, to privatize the public schools.

WSWS reporters attended a job fair held on August 24, one of two this year open only to Chicago Public Schools teachers laid off in 2010. The fair was described by several teachers who attended as little more than a stunt and a show for the media. Teachers expressed dissatisfaction with the organization of the job fair and the meager offerings. Many of those who left the fair’s morning session early told WSWS reporters that very few schools even participated. Furthermore, no one they had spoken with had been offered an afternoon interview.

Most of the teachers at the fair were tenured employees who had been laid off. They had not been reassigned to work at other schools and had even been denied the right to enter into the city’s pool of substitute teachers. On August 13, lawyers for the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) filed suit in federal court, citing the layoffs without reassignment as illegal and requesting an injunction to restore 1,400 positions immediately.

Thousands of unemployed workers attended a job fair August 25 in Southfield, Michigan that was sponsored by employmentguide.com, a job search web site, and the American Association for Retired People (AARP).

The event, billed as an “over 50” job fair, attracted a wide cross-section of people, testifying to the depth of the employment crisis in Michigan. The state suffers the second highest unemployment rate in the US. Some 5,000 people are estimated to have attended.

According to the AARP, unemployment among those over age 50 is higher than at any time in the past 60 years. The number of workers over age 50 who have been unemployed for 12 months or more is 50 percent higher now than in 2009. This marks the largest annual increase for any age group.

Wednesday’s event featured AARP workshops teaching job-seekers how to “brand themselves.” However, there were only a handful of employers with job openings, and most of those required advanced training and experience. From the private sector, a few companies were looking for telemarketers. These were mostly debt collection agencies, especially consumer debt collectors.

On August 24, at approximately 1:30 p.m., veteran utility worker Michael Eugene Parks was electrocuted and killed while repairing a power line in northwest Detroit. Parks worked for Energy Clearance Corporation, a company contracted by DTE Energy.

Park’s death is the second involving a utility worker in the city over the last four months. On April 16 an AT&T worker was struck by a DTE line and killed while working on a utility pole sharing telephone and electrical lines. Working alone, his body hung motionless until a resident discovered it.

Although the circumstances of Park’s death have not been fully investigated, a spokeswoman for DTE said the accident took place after the worker came into contact with an overhead line.

“He was injured while changing out a cross arm on a utility pole,” DTE spokesperson Eileen Dixon told the Detroit News. “We have no details yet on exactly how it happened. He was taken to Sinai (Grace) Hospital where he died.”

A joint hearing into the Gulf oil spill held by the US Coast Guard and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement continued in Houston, Texas, on Tuesday. The aim of the hearings is to discover the cause of the April 20 blowout on the Deepwater Horizon rig that claimed the lives of 11 workers and began the worst environmental disaster in US history.

Testimony given at the hearing has pointed to a situation on the Deepwater Horizon rig in which there was no clear authority on the rig itself, and confusion prevailed in both the run-up to the disaster and its aftermath. Contributing to the confusion aboard the rig was its dual command structure. When the rig was in motion, or in the event of an emergency, it was under the leadership of its captain. While stationary and drilling, the rig was under the command of a Transocean manager. The rig was owned and operated by Transocean, but was leased to BP who owned the Macondo well itself.