Katrina’s Displaced Move to Defend
New Orleans from Elite Visionaries

From the NewStandard courtesy of ZNet:

The rebuilding of New Orleans promises – and threatens – to be the most massive social engineering project in recent history. Suspecting that government and corporate interests have their own designs for a privatized, top-down urban renewal, grassroots advocates are attempting to create a political axis in place of a geographical center.

From the point of view of a growing coalition of activists, the city’s physical reemergence parallels their sojourn in exile. Before houses are razed and bricks laid, they are demanding the right of displaced residents of all backgrounds to come home. And they want something to come back to – starting with a voice in the rebuilding of their communities.

Click here for the rest.

Excellent. This is exactly what I wanted to see happen. While the news of large scale organizing is by no means the same thing as a victory over corporate forces, it does mean that New Orleans' poor African-Americans have a fighting chance, which means that the Big Easy's culture, loved by the entire nation, has a chance as well. As radical historian Howard Zinn has observed countless times, no rights or benefits have ever simply been granted to the people by elites on high: citizens have had to organize, hit the streets, and struggle to get what's rightfully theirs. It seems that the people of New Orleans are taking this lesson to heart.

Right on.

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