Big Business Sees A Chance For Ethnic and Class Cleansing

[AGENDA21]

"There are two types of power," said Linda Jeffers, addressing an accountability session of New Orleans mayoral candidates at the city's Trinity Episcopal church. "Organized money and organized people." Since Hurricane Katrina, the battle between those two forces has shaped the struggle to rebuild New Orleans. With mayoral elections on Saturday it is set to intensify.

The one thing both sides seem to agree on is that neither wants the city to return to the way it was before the hurricane. The people of New Orleans, most of whom are black and many of whom are poor, want schools that will educate their children, jobs that will pay a living wage, and neighborhoods where capital investment matches the large pools of social capital created by their churches and close-knit communities. Organized money has something else in mind: the destruction of many of those communities and permanent removal of those who lived in them, a city that follows the gentrification patterns of racial removal and class cleansing that have played out elsewhere in the US.

Under these circumstances, the organization of people has been impressive. Grassroots groups have done a remarkable job of gathering those scattered throughout the country into a political constituency. Jeffers spoke to an audience of more than 500 people who had been bussed in from Tennessee and elsewhere in Louisiana, as well as over 1,000 who watched the session on satellite in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Five days later Jeffers, a leader with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) who moved from New Orleans to Houston after Katrina, schlepped through the unforgiving Houston heat distributing food and signing up evacuees for their absentee ballots. Meanwhile organizations have been ferrying people from neighboring states to satellite polling stations dotted around Louisiana for early voting.

But the circumstances have been dire. Evacuees in Houston exist in a constant state of bureaucratic harassment. Last week the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in effect issued 25,000 eviction notices to evacuees in Houston. Almost half have no health insurance because they lost their jobs in the storm; more than one in eight children have been going without prescribed medication. Contrary to Barbara Bush's infamous predictions, this is not working out very well for them.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0420-21.htm

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. Amurka, trying to own the world while abandoning her own. What

a great example to the rest of the world.