MY BIGGEST FEAR FOR THE BIG EASY
Dallas meeting plans reconstruction of
New Orleans without poor African Americans

From the Wayne Madsen Report courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

September 9, 2005 -- According to well-informed New Orleans sources, New Orleans' wealthiest families, including those who are direct descendants of the French who settled New Orleans (not the Acadians [Cajuns] who were poor refugees from British tyranny in Nova Scotia) are meeting in Dallas today with Bush administration officials, New Orleans city officials, wealthy Texas oilmen, and bankers to plan for the reconstruction of New Orleans. These wealthy New Orleans residents live in the gated community of Audobon Place, a section of the city near the Garden District replete with personal helipads that still has running water and sewage and was only slightly affected by hurricane Katrina. It is now reportedly being patrolled by private Israeli security forces. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal ran a piece with more details on this story.

The Dallas meeting focused on rebuilding and re-zoning New Orleans without the "criminal element," a code word for the city's poor African American community.

These New Orleans residents have been scattered across the United States and are now under the control of FEMA. There is an understanding by the wealthy New Orleans elite that the poor will never be able to return. The Journal reported that the person who chaired the Dallas meeting was Jimmy Riess, one of the wealthy New Orleans elite who also served as Mayor Ray Nagin's Chairman of the Regional Transit Authority, which is in charge of the city's buses, trolleys, and trains. New Orleans sources report that public transportation was purposely not used to evacuate the poor New Orleans residents as a means to depopulate the poorer and more flood-prone sections of the city. In fact, after the properties in New Orleans poorer communities are razed many of the deed records of the poor and middle class contained in government offices and title companies of Orleans Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish may end up being casualties of the flood. As one New Orleans source put it, "people will not have proof they ever owned anything." As for renters and residents of public housing, they will be prevented from returning to their native city, according to New Orleans sources. Louisiana's Republican House member Richard Baker, a strong Bush ally, may have tipped his hand about the future plans for New Orleans when he told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

The French-American elite of New Orleans are among the city's "rich and famous." They run the Mardi Gras "crews" (Krews) or clubs, secret hereditary societies that sponsor the annual pre-Lenten festival. Many also run large oil companies and are long time supporters of the Bush family and their associated oil and gas cartels.

Click here for overall context.

(Investigative reporter and former US security apparatus guy Wayne Madsen doesn't use permalinks for his posts, so I copied and pasted the entire article.)

In many ways, this meeting very much reflects the opportunism the right wing displayed in the wake of 9/11. That is, most Americans see only tragedy on the Mississippi Delta and hope to rebuild as quickly as possible; the wealthy elite, on the other hand, see a chance to get a few things they've wanted for years. After 9/11, it was a shopping list of "reforms" that had little to do with terrorism, and, for the most part, they got what they wanted. It remains to be seen what will happen with New Orleans, but if history is any indicator, in a couple of years the cultural element that ultimately made the Crescent City so wonderful will be gone forever.

Never mind the injustice of using this horrible event to essentially evict an enormous group of politically powerless people, this could really drive a stake through the city's heart. All the cool stuff that tourists and residents alike love about New Orleans absolutely depends on the poor African-Americans these rich white racists want to get rid of. Most of the entertainment and local color of the French Quarter bubbles up out of those blighted neighborhoods hardest hit by the flooding. Without the Big Easy's black culture, New Orleans might as well be a theme park: poor blacks, quite literally, provide the sense of authenticity that makes everything come together.

Indeed, New Orleans novelist Anne Rice wrote about exactly that point last week. From the New York Times courtesy of Common Dreams:

Do You Know What it Means to Lose New Orleans?

Through this all, black culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact, New Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to this day.

The influence of blacks on the music of the city and the nation is too immense and too well known to be described. It was black musicians coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the city "the Big Easy" because it was a place where they could always find a job. But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.

Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy.

Click here for the rest.

This elite conspiracy to destroy what made New Orleans great cannot be allowed to come to fruition. If it does, the rich will get richer, but their city will lose everything--it will become just another city, full of chain stores and Clear Channel music, a shadow, culturally, of it's former self. I have no idea how to stop this; after all, the rich and powerful usually get their way in America. But I do know that if they get away with their plans, it will be a crime worse than Bush's negligence with Katrina in the first place.

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