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Lorenzo's
Random Musings
. . . about Chaos,
Reason, and Hope

 

Has Bush planned an ethnic cleansing of New Orleans?
(Glen Ford, Counterpunch, September 2, 2005)
One of the premiere Black cities in the nation faces catastrophe. There is no doubt in my mind that New Orleans will one day rise again from its below sea level foundations. The question is, will the new New Orleans remain the two-thirds Black city it was before the levees crumbled? . . . Some would say it is unseemly to speak of politics and race in the presence of a massive calamity that has destroyed the lives and prospects of so many people from all backgrounds. But I beg to differ. As we have witnessed, over and over again, the rich and powerful are very quick to reward themselves as soon as disaster presents the opportunity. . . . Remember that within days of 9/11, the Bush regime executed a multi-billion dollar bailout for the airline industry. By the time you hear this commentary, they may have already used the New Orleans disaster to bail out the insurance industry ­ one of the richest businesses on the planet. But what of the people of New Orleans, 67 percent of whom are Black? . . . From the early days of the flood, it was clear that much of the city's housing stock would be irredeemably damaged. The insurance industry may get a windfall of federal relief, but the minority of New Orleans home owners will get very little ­ even if they are insured. The renting majority may get nothing. . . . [COMMENT by Lorenzo: Meanwhile, U.S. tax dollars are paying Jewish settlers $200,000 to $300,000, per family, to relocate from Gaza and the West Bank. But the poor black people of New Orleans will be lucky to get $2,000. Face it, the USA is no longer a great nation. It is becoming nothing more than a place where rich white people live off the sweat of the world's poor, including our own poor.] . . . Poor people cannot afford to hang around on the fringes of a city until the powers-that-be come up with a plan to accommodate them back to the jurisdiction. . . . And we all know that the prevailing model for urban development is to get rid of poor people. The disaster provides an opportunity to deploy this model in New Orleans on a citywide scale, under the guise of rebuilding the city and its infrastructure. . . . In place of the jobs that have been washed away, there could be alternative employment through a huge, federally funded rebuilding effort. But this is George Bush's federal government. Does anyone believe that the Bush men would mandate that priority employment go to the pre-flood, mostly Black population of the city. And the Black mayor of New Orleans is a Democrat in name only, a rich businessman, no friend of the poor. . . . What we may see in the coming months is a massive displacement of Black New Orleans, to the four corners of the nation. The question that we must pose, repeatedly and in the strongest terms, is: Through whose vision, and in whose interest, will New Orleans rise again.

An overheard conversation in Washington
(September 1, 2005)
This afternoon, I was having lunch at the Cosmos Club out on Massachusetts Avenue. A good friend is a member of the posh club, and while at lunch, I was privy to a very vocal conversation at one of the big round center tables in the club dining room. . . . One man was giving an overview of the situation to a group of his friends. The speaker was an undersecretary of an important department, well-liked by Bush and often in the White House to consult. The others ranged from an academic economist whose writings can be seen in a right wing paper and a number of Washington-based businessmen, all of whom are active and heavy contributors to the Bush White House. . . . The loud one had obviously had a few drinks at the bar and this is probably why he was not more discreet. The gist of his comments was horrible to contemplate and it sounded like a top Nazi discussing Jews. . . . It is well known here that the Bush family and many of the top advisers at the White House are racists but instead of detesting Jews, in this case, they all detest blacks. Their rationale, aside from their view of racial superiority, is that blacks are all "welfare queens, unwed mothers and drug dealers." It was the very firmly stated view of the host that it was better for everyone that New Orleans was under water for the time being. . . . In that way, we were told (and I was not the only person in the dining room who heard all this), this served to "chase out the niggers" and permit Bush-supporting businessmen from buying up the soon-to-be condemned sodden houses for five cents on the dollar from friendly insurance companies (which one of them was a CEO of) and put up an enlarged and very profitable combination of industrial park and office building section. The money for this would, naturally, come from government grants which a terrified Congress (Mid Term elections are coming) had just voted for and the contracts to demolish the wrecked low-income slums would go, as a no-bid contract, to another stellar Bush supporter. . . . As for the refugees, our table of proto-fascists all commented on the fact that most of them were on welfare and probably all voted Democratic so they could all be shipped to California or Chicago at the public expense and allowed to occupy less valuable public housing there. . . . This conversation went on in a similar vein for some time and it was difficult for both myself and my host to refrain from making nasty comments or, for that matter, to enjoy our meal. These people are greedy and purely evil and I am positive from the overall conversations that Bush is conversant with this attitude and has no intentions of interfering with it.

posted by LoZo 12:05 PM