Big business sees chance for ethnic and class cleansing in NOLA

[itzamirakul]

Black and poor residents are excluded from city elections
and they are still finding dead (some half-eaten by animals) bodies but America has forgotten.

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

Big business has major plans for NOLA and it does NOT include moving African Americans back into the city. Therefore, they have chosen two white candidates to run against Nagin (who USED to be THEIR man.)

Thanks goodness Dean took a group of Democrats to NOLA. It at least gives the APPEARANCE that the Democrats CARE about all of those African American votes they could absolutely COUNT ON from the citizens of NOLA.

On edit: Harry Connick, Jr. has organized an effort with HABITAT FOR HUMANITY to replace housing for musicians who were totally wiped out. He specifically mentioned some older guys with whom he (Connick) had been allowed to play when he was much younger.

[salin]

1. No offense,

but I take issue with the emphasis on 'counting dem votes from NOLA' as the main issue.

On the voting side:

I think it is about voter disenfranchisement regardless of party. Especially voter disenfranchisement primarily of African Americans - given our country's history per obstructing the right to vote. Only forty years ago were the civil rights voting acts passed which forced states to end discriminatory practices that disenfranchised large swathes of the population. This is yet another example of serious slipping backwards - add various state-level actions that work to disenfranchise poor, often minority voters - that are being approved by Jrs DOJ, and reapportionment/redistricting efforts - again approved by the DOJ.

on the humanitarian side:

The slowness of response to the tragedy of Katrina, is now being compounded daily and not just in NOLA. The overwhelming silence from the media which tends to push the attention of the populace towards news (and sadly towards what to 'care' about) is deafening. How can it be that bodies are still, just now, being found? How can it be that so many are still without housing, when 10,000 trailers sit sinking on a field in Arkansas? How can it be that the nation as a whole seems to have decided to look away, without simultaneously hanging its' collective head in shame?

[Ready4Change]

2. A move against small business by big business as well, I think.

One of the charms of NOLA is the multitude of little Mom and Pop places of business. A whole lot of those have been washed out. Wallmart is slathering to "come to the rescue."

[ninkasi]

3. This is despicable

The reason that the cleanup and reconstruction of New Orleans has not been accomplished has been a deliberate ploy to keep the poor from returning. It's outrageous that the people who made New Orleans what it was, a city of magic, with excellent music, wonderful food, an atmosphere of blended cultures unique in this country, those people are being shut out now. To me, the treatment of the poor of New Orleans shows how uncaring the federal government is when the ones suffering are poor and mostly black.

Insatiable greed and a complete lack of conscious allows developers to gain control of valuable land, and they are determined to keep the ones who had to evacuate from returning. They are completely indifferent to how traumatized the people are, how horrible the experience of being abandoned by their government is. They lost friends and relatives to Katrina, they lost homes, and jobs, and their whole neighborhoods, they have been scattered all over the country, and nobody seems to care.

I can't begin to understand how completely demoralized they must be, not able to afford coming back when there are no jobs or homes to come back to. Not only is the government not helping them rebuild their city and then returning, the government is allowing developers and business interests to just take over. This is now the face of government, indifference to the suffering of ordinary people, while being friends with the wealthy.

If the people who lived in New Orleans are shut out of their own city, and greedy business interests are allowed to remake a white New Orleans, the city will lose it's mystery and magic. New Orleans has beautiful places in it, wonderful architecture, but it takes more than just structures to make a city what it is. If the people of New Orleans are kept out, and the government does not help them rebuild and return, there will be buildings, new houses, new people, but whatever it will be, it will no longer by New Orleans.

[Anita Garcia]

4. NOLA is already different.

You are right.
The disenfranchisement seals the deal.