Black Ops in New Orleans?

[orange roughy]

a friend of mine told me that he heard Dick Gregory on Joe Madison's radio broadcast last weekend and that there was a discussion about a federal black ops group down there that used the hurricane as a cover to try to assassinate some of the NO police and officials. Supposedly these black ops guys were nto successful and wer found handing upside down from a bridge as evidence.

Did anybody hear the interview, or better yet, have it or a transcript? Or know anymore about this?

OR

[katakana]

a friend of mine told me that he heard Dick Gregory on Joe Madison's radio broadcast last weekend and that there was a discussion about a federal black ops group down there that used the hurricane as a cover to try to assassinate some of the NO police and officials. Supposedly these black ops guys were nto successful and wer found handing upside down from a bridge as evidence.

Did anybody hear the interview, or better yet, have it or a transcript? Or know anymore about this?

OR


I did a lil research....peep it







The Great New Orleans Land Grab





The 17th Street Canal levy was breeched on purpose
by
Ernesto Cienfuegos
La Voz de Aztlan

Los Angeles, Alta California - September 7, 2005 - (ACN) There were numerous incidents that occurred during and immediately after Katrina struck that point to the "unthinkable". It now appears that a sophisticated plan was implemented that utilized the "cover of a hurricane" to first destroy and than take over the City of New Orleans? As the world watched the events unfolding, one could not help think that something was terribly afoot concerning the rescue by FEMA of the city's poor and predominate Black population. It seems that a well laid out plan was put into effect to grab valuable real estate from well established but poverty stricken Black families of New Orleans? What is being implemented now is nothing less than a sophisticated scheme to purge and ethnically cleanse what Whites have termed "Black and 'welfare bloated' New Orleans".

Among the most telling anomalies pointing to something terribly afoot is the gun battle, killing 5, that occurred at the breeched levy between the New Orleans Police Department and, what have now been identified as US military agents. An Associated Press report, which has now disappeared, stated that at least five USA Defense Department personnel where shot dead by New Orleans police officers in the proximity of the breeched levy. A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said later that those killed were "federal contractors" on their way to "repair" a canal. The "contractors" were on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain, in an operation to "fix" the 17th Street Canal, according to the Army Corps of Engineers spokesman. Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley of New Orleans later reported that his policemen had shot at eight suspicious people near the breeched levy, killing five or six.

Who were these "military agents" that were killed by the police near the 17th Street Canal breeched levy and what were they doing there? Why did the New Orleans police find it necessary to shoot and kill 5 or 6 of them? No one is saying anything and it appears that the news story has now been swept under the rug. Were these US Department of Defense personnel a Special Forces group or Navy Seals with top secret orders to sabotaged the levy? There are verifiable reports that at least 100 New Orleans police officers have disappeared from the face of the earth and that two have committed suicide. Could these be policemen that died defending the levy against sabotage by "federal contractors"?
Another telling incident that points to a "nefarious plan" is what New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said at the height of the crisis. He said publicly, "I fear the CIA may take me out!" Mayor Nagin, a Black, said this twice. He told a reporter for the Associated Press: "If the CIA slips me something and next week you don't see me, you'll all know what happened." Later he told interviewers for CNN on a live broadcast that he feared the "CIA might take me out." What does Mayor Ray Nagin know and why does he fear the CIA?

In an interview by WWL TV, Mayor Nagin complained vociferously that Louisiana National Guard Blackhawk helicopters were being stopped from dropping sandbags to plug the levy soon after it breeched. There is evidence that no repairs were allowed on the levy until after New Orleans was totally flooded!

Many civilian groups who were attempting to aid people trapped in their attics, on their roofs and at the Superdome are reporting that FEMA, other federal agents and the US military essentially "stopped" them from doing so. Convoys that were organized by truckers and carrying "food and water" were blocked by agents of the federal government on the highways and roads leading to New Orleans. The American Red Cross, in addition, encountered numerous incidents and has made formal complaints.

A private ham radio network that deployed throughout the hurricane ravished region reported that the airwaves were being "jammed" making it impossible to communicate emergency information. Churches, hospitals and other essential community groups reported that the first thing that the US military did, when they arrived, was to cut their telephone lines and confiscate communications devices. We all witnessed news reports and heard statements by flood victims concerning the behavior of the US military. Many Black families complained that military vehicles did not stop to assist them but just drove by. One news report showed military personnel playing cards inside a barrack while Black citizens were dying of thirst and hunger.

Today, it is very revealing how the federal government is handling the disaster. They want every Black out of New Orleans and those who insist on staying in their homes will be removed by force. The government, through some media, is utilizing scare tactics to cleanse New Orleans of all Blacks. They want no witnesses and this will make the "land grab" a lot easier to undertake. One scare tactic is calling the flood water "a horrid toxic soup of feces a rotting flesh of corpses". The military thugs are now getting tough with Black families that have owned their old but beloved homes for many generations. Mr. Rufus Johnson, a family patriarch who lives in the French Quarter, said in an interview, "The army has given me an ultimatum to leave or suffer the consequences of a forced eviction. I do not understand . My entire family and I survived Katrina and now they want to throw me out of the home we have had for generations". Mr. Johnson lives in a neighborhood where the flood has subsided and his home is not heavily damaged yet FEMA wants him out!



The fact that Vice President Dick Cheney is heavily involved in the FEMA operations from behind the scenes is very troublesome. Cheney and his cronies at Halliburton are in line for the lucrative contracts to "reconstruct a New Orleans".



Deals are already being made with a Las Vegas business group to construct multi-million dollar casinos in the Big Easy on prime real estate that was owned by Black families. Whites throughout history have been notorious "land grabbers". In the USA they first confiscated land that belonged to American Indians. Most of the Indians ended up in worthless tracts of land called "reservations". The largest "land grab", however, was the theft of Aztlan. This occurred soon after the Mexican-American War. In Alta California , vast "Ranchos" were stolen from the Californios through a variety of scams. A favorite ploy was to impose extremely heavy land taxes on the Mexicans and then foreclosing on the properties. The land was then given or sold at very low prices to the Forty Niners who came in large hordes to Alta California during the so called "Gold Rush" of 1849

http://www.dickgregory.com/index2.html

[mrjamaica]

THE TRUTH WILL NEVER BE TOLD SOME WHITE REPORTERS WANT TO SPILL THE BEANS BUT ARE SCARED TO LOOSE THEY JOB AND POSSIBLE LIFE REPRTER LIKE ANDERSON COOPER I THINK HE WANTS TO SPILL SOMETHING BUT AFRAID TO DO SO :devil:

[katakana]

THE TRUTH WILL NEVER BE TOLD SOME WHITE REPORTERS WANT TO SPILL THE BEANS BUT ARE SCARED TO LOOSE THEY JOB AND POSSIBLE LIFE REPRTER LIKE ANDERSON COOPER I THINK HE WANTS TO SPILL SOMETHING BUT AFRAID TO DO SO :devil:


....Yes ...we are going to be living in a Police State...that is next...

[Fuckallyall]

Blah, Blah, Blah. This is such bullshit. For one, the reason the government could not fix the levees earlier is because the water pressure from the break was too high. They actually tried before it was advisable, and the 6,000 ponud sandbags got washed away. Where is that AP report. I have a Lexis account and had all NO articles flagged, and never recieved that one. Please post something more substantial than this. If they wanted to gentrify, they would.

[eewwll]

LOL.

I'm never amazed by the conspiracy theories posted here.

[QueEx]

<font size="4">LOL</font size>

[vitrifier]

For real, this goes right along with the government technology to create Hurricanes. These folks in Vegas probably paid the Japanese for the technology, picked N.O. as a perfect target, created a Hurricane and aimed it at N.O. to create a distraction so that they could blow up the levy in the perfect spot so it would flood the city and force the poor black people out.

Man, what a perfect plan....

[katakana]

LEAVE YOUR CRITICAL THINKING AT THE DOOR THEN........


LAUGH NOW.............CRY LATER




<font size="4">LOL</font size>





MALCOLM X:
.....



If you don't think that they [the Government and the Press]
are in cahoots -- watch! They are ALL interested, or NONE of them
are interested! It's not a staggering thing. They're not going to
say anything in advance that's being given by any Black people who
believe in functioning beyond the scope of the ground rules that are
laid down by the liberal element of the power structure. When you
begin thinking for yourself, you frighten them. And they try to
block your getting to the Public for fear that if the Public listens
to you, then the Public won't listen to them anymore.

They've got certain Negroes whom they have to keep pumping up in the
newspapers to make them look like leaders, so that the People will
keep on following them no matter how many knots they get on the head
following him. This is how "the man" does it. And if you don't wake
up and find out HOW he does it -- I tell you -- they'll be building
gas chambers and gas ovens pretty soon. I don't mean those kinds you got at home in your kitchen.



Another example, at the international level, of how skillfully they
use this trickery, was in the the Congo. In the Congo, airplanes
were dropping bombs on African villages. African villages don't have
a defense against bombs. And the pilot can't tell who the bomb is
being dropped upon. When a bomb hits the village, EVERYTHING goes.
These pilots -- flying planes filled with bombs, dropping these
bombs on African villages -- were destroying women, were destroying
children, were destroying babies. You never heard any outcry over
here about that! And it had started way back in June. They would
drop bombs on African villages that would blow that village apart,
and everything in it: man, woman child and baby.

No outcry! No sympathy! No support! No concern! Because the PRESS
didn't project it in such a way that it would be designed to GET
your sympathy. They know how to put something so that you will
sympathize with it, and they know how to put it so that you'll be
against it. I'm telling you, they are MASTERS at it. And if you
don't develop the analytical ability to read between the lines of
what they're saying -- I'm telling you again -- they'll be building
those gas ovens. And before you wake up, you'll be in one of them,
just like the Jews ended up in gas ovens over there in Germany.

You are in a society that is just as capable of building gas ovens
for Black people as Hitler's society was.
This was mass murder, in the Congo, of women and children. But there
was no outcry, not even from the White liberals -- not even from
your friends. Why? Because they made it appear that it was a
humanitarian project. They said that the planes were being flown by
American-trained, anti-Castro, Cuban pilots. This is propaganda,
too. As soon as you hear that they're American-trained, you say:
"Oh, that's alright. That's us." And of the anti-Castro Cubans, you
say: "Oh, that's alright, too, because if they're against Castro,
whoever else they're against, that's good, because Castro is a
monster."

Do you see how, step-by-step, they grab your mind?

These pilots are hired ... their salaries are paid by the United
States Government. These pilots are called "mercenaries."
A mercenary is not someone who kills you because he is patriotic.
He kills you for blood money. He is a hired killer! This is what is
meant by "a mercenary". And they are able to take these HIRED
KILLERS, put them in AMERICAN planes, with AMERICAN bombs, and drop
them on African villages, blowing to bits Black men, Black women,
Black children, Black babies. And you Black people are sitting over
here, cool, like it doesn't even involve you. You're a FOOL !!

They'll do it to them today. They'll do it to you tomorrow.






LOL.

I'm never amazed by the conspiracy theories posted here.




The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist.
—President Clinton's apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 1997
For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,”1 their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”

Using Human Beings as Laboratory Animals
The true nature of the experiment had to be kept from the subjects to ensure their cooperation. The sharecroppers' grossly disadvantaged lot in life made them easy to manipulate. Pleased at the prospect of free medical care—almost none of them had ever seen a doctor before—these unsophisticated and trusting men became the pawns in what James Jones, author of the excellent history on the subject, Bad Blood, identified as “the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history.”

The study was meant to discover how syphilis affected blacks as opposed to whites—the theory being that whites experienced more neurological complications from syphilis whereas blacks were more susceptible to cardiovascular damage. How this knowledge would have changed clinical treatment of syphilis is uncertain. Although the PHS touted the study as one of great scientific merit, from the outset its actual benefits were hazy. It took almost forty years before someone involved in the study took a hard and honest look at the end results, reporting that “nothing learned will prevent, find, or cure a single case of infectious syphilis or bring us closer to our basic mission of controlling venereal disease in the United States.” When the experiment was brought to the attention of the media in 1972, news anchor Harry Reasoner described it as an experiment that “used human beings as laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone.”

A Heavy Price in the Name of Bad Science
By the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis. How had these men been induced to endure a fatal disease in the name of science? To persuade the community to support the experiment, one of the original doctors admitted it “was necessary to carry on this study under the guise of a demonstration and provide treatment.” At first, the men were prescribed the syphilis remedies of the day—bismuth, neoarsphenamine, and mercury—but in such small amounts that only 3 percent showed any improvement. These token doses of medicine were good public relations and did not interfere with the true aims of the study. Eventually, all syphilis treatment was replaced with “pink medicine”—aspirin. To ensure that the men would show up for a painful and potentially dangerous spinal tap, the PHS doctors misled them with a letter full of promotional hype: “Last Chance for Special Free Treatment.” The fact that autopsies would eventually be required was also concealed. As a doctor explained, “If the colored population becomes aware that accepting free hospital care means a post-mortem, every darky will leave Macon County…” Even the Surgeon General of the United States participated in enticing the men to remain in the experiment, sending them certificates of appreciation after 25 years in the study.

Following Doctors' Orders
It takes little imagination to ascribe racist attitudes to the white government officials who ran the experiment, but what can one make of the numerous African Americans who collaborated with them? The experiment's name comes from the Tuskegee Institute, the black university founded by Booker T. Washington. Its affiliated hospital lent the PHS its medical facilities for the study, and other predominantly black institutions as well as local black doctors also participated. A black nurse, Eunice Rivers, was a central figure in the experiment for most of its forty years. The promise of recognition by a prestigious government agency may have obscured the troubling aspects of the study for some. A Tuskegee doctor, for example, praised “the educational advantages offered our interns and nurses as well as the added standing it will give the hospital.” Nurse Rivers explained her role as one of passive obedience: “we were taught that we never diagnosed, we never prescribed; we followed the doctor's instructions!” It is clear that the men in the experiment trusted her and that she sincerely cared about their well-being, but her unquestioning submission to authority eclipsed her moral judgment. Even after the experiment was exposed to public scrutiny, she genuinely felt nothing ethical had been amiss.

One of the most chilling aspects of the experiment was how zealously the PHS kept these men from receiving treatment. When several nationwide campaigns to eradicate venereal disease came to Macon County, the men were prevented from participating. Even when penicillin was discovered in the 1940s—the first real cure for syphilis—the Tuskegee men were deliberately denied the medication. During World War II, 250 of the men registered for the draft and were consequently ordered to get treatment for syphilis, only to have the PHS exempt them. Pleased at their success, the PHS representative announced: “So far, we are keeping the known positive patients from getting treatment.” The experiment continued in spite of the Henderson Act (1943), a public health law requiring testing and treatment for venereal disease, and in spite of the World Health Organization's Declaration of Helsinki (1964), which specified that “informed consent” was needed for experiment involving human beings.

Blowing the Whistle
The story finally broke in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972, in an article by Jean Heller of the Associated Press. Her source was Peter Buxtun, a former PHS venereal disease interviewer and one of the few whistle blowers over the years. The PHS, however, remained unrepentant, claiming the men had been “volunteers” and “were always happy to see the doctors,” and an Alabama state health officer who had been involved claimed “somebody is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.”

Under the glare of publicity, the government ended their experiment, and for the first time provided the men with effective medical treatment for syphilis. Fred Gray, a lawyer who had previously defended Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, filed a class action suit that provided a $10 million out-of-court settlement for the men and their families. Gray, however, named only whites and white organizations in the suit, portraying Tuskegee as a black and white case when it was in fact more complex than that—black doctors and institutions had been involved from beginning to end.

The PHS did not accept the media's comparison of Tuskegee with the appalling experiments performed by Nazi doctors on their Jewish victims during World War II. Yet in addition to the medical and racist parallels, the PHS offered the same morally bankrupt defense offered at the Nuremberg trials: they claimed they were just carrying out orders, mere cogs in the wheel of the PHS bureaucracy, exempt from personal responsibility.

The study's other justification—for the greater good of science—is equally spurious. Scientific protocol had been shoddy from the start. Since the men had in fact received some medication for syphilis in the beginning of the study, however inadequate, it thereby corrupted the outcome of a study of “untreated syphilis.”

In 1990, a survey found that 10 percent of African Americans believed that the U.S. government created AIDS as a plot to exterminate blacks, and another 20 percent could not rule out the possibility that this might be true. As preposterous and paranoid as this may sound, at one time the Tuskegee experiment must have seemed equally farfetched. Who could imagine the government, all the way up to the Surgeon General of the United States, deliberately allowing a group of its citizens to die from a terrible disease for the sake of an ill-conceived experiment? In light of this and many other shameful episodes in our history, African Americans' widespread mistrust of the government and white society in general should not be a surprise to anyone. —BB

1. All quotations in the article are from Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, James H. Jones, expanded edition (New York: Free Press, 1993).


Information Please® Database, © 2005 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved











For real, this goes right along with the government technology to create Hurricanes. These folks in Vegas probably paid the Japanese for the technology, picked N.O. as a perfect target, created a Hurricane and aimed it at N.O. to create a distraction so that they could blow up the levy in the perfect spot so it would flood the city and force the poor black people out.

Man, what a perfect plan....


The Nazis harassed and brutalized the Jews throughout the 1920s during the "struggle for power." Speech after speech painted the Jews as Germany's "misfortune" and prophesied a time of reckoning.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Jews were their very first target. The infamous boycott against Jewish businesses took place in April 1933 and the first laws against the Jews were enacted as early as on April 7, 1933.10 Jews were progressively erased from almost every facet of German life.11 The Nuremberg Laws, passed in 1935, further tightened the noose, depriving the Jews of almost every remaining right and freedom.12 This culminated in the bloodiest pogrom to date the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938. Over 100 Jews were murdered and a "fine" was levied against the Jews in excess of 1 billion RM.

By the outbreak of World War II, actions taken against the Jews included marking them13 and ghettoizing them.14 By the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the decision had been taken to kill the eastern European Jews






Blah, Blah, Blah. This is such bullshit. For one, the reason the government could not fix the levees earlier is because the water pressure from the break was too high. They actually tried before it was advisable, and the 6,000 ponud sandbags got washed away. Where is that AP report. I have a Lexis account and had all NO articles flagged, and never recieved that one. Please post something more substantial than this. If they wanted to gentrify, they would.











LSU storm expert rejects levee failure explanation

By MIKE DUNNE
mdunne@theadvocate.com
Advocate staff writer


Advocate staff photo by RICHARD ALAN HANNON
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers uses steel pilings Wednesday to close off the 17th Street Canal to protect it from any storm surge caused by Hurricane Rita. Floodwalls along the canal broke during Hurricane Katrina, allowing water to pour into New Orleans.
An LSU hurricane expert said floodwalls on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals in New Orleans weren't "overtopped" by Hurricane Katrina's storm surge, meaning the structures failed for other reasons.
Paul Kemp, director of the Natural Systems Modeling Group at LSU's Center for Coastal, Energy, and Environmental Resources, said researchers studying watermarks and other evidence to sharpen their future predictions saw no evidence that walls along the two canals had been overtopped. Breaches along those canals accounted for much of the flooding in New Orleans.

The findings of the LSU center, which predicts hurricane storm surges for emergency officials, clashes with the explanation that has been given by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The corps has said the floodwalls collapsed after water flowed over them, eroding the back-side levees inside which the floodwalls were erected. Once that support was eroded, the floodwalls burst, sending water pouring into the Lakeview area and all the way to downtown, the corps surmised.

But Kemp said his group's models are designed to predict levee overtopping. The predictions called for 11- to 12-foot surges in the canals, he said. Overtopping would have required about 14 feet, he said.

Observations on the ground after the storm support those predictions, he said.

"I could not find evidence of overtopping inside the canals," Kemp said.

Water cascading over the tops of the floodwalls would have eroded trenches in the levees in which the walls were built, he said. That doesn't appear to have happened, he said.

"If they are not overtopped, it means they failed at some lower elevation" of water, Kemp said.

Corps spokesman Mitch Frazier said Wednesday that the agency is focused on pumping the water out of New Orleans and preparing for problems that could spin off Hurricane Rita as it crosses the Gulf of Mexico.

The corps' headquarters will conduct an investigation into why the floodwalls broke and other issues associated with Katrina's flooding, Frazier said. Knowing what went wrong will help the agency design a solution to keep flood waters out of New Orleans during hurricanes, he said.

As of Wednesday, 90 percent of New Orleans had been pumped dry, well ahead of original projections, Frazier said.

Kemp said his researchers did see evidence of overtopping along the Industrial Canal. Breaches in the levee along that canal helped flood the 9th Ward and parts of St. Bernard Parish.

Kemp's computer models show a combination of the intersection of two shipping channels and the levee system conspired to drive water high enough to overwhelm flood protection along the Industrial Canal.

One of those shipping channels is the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a deep-draft channel cutting through St. Bernard Parish.

The other is the Gulf Intracoastal Water Way, which barges use to avoid the open water of the Gulf of Mexico. It cuts through marshlands between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne.

"The model shows that's where the largest surges in the Louisiana system built up," Kemp said.

Another large surge was around the mouth of the Mississippi at Buras, he said.

The shape of the levees works with the shipping channels to funnel water into the Industrial Canal, where it has no place to go but up, he said.

A surge coming into Lake Pontchartrain would have more space to spread out, Kemp said.

While the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet provided an easy channel for storm surge, the flooding in the St. Bernard area was almost tsunami-like, covering the whole parish, he said.

"There was a lot of momentum in the wave," Kemp said.

A pressing question is where Hurricane Rita's storm surge will go, he said. Even a small one of 3 feet could threaten the battered and weakened levee system in New Orleans, Kemp said.

On Wednesday, the corps was shoring up that system by driving sheet pilings into the mouths of the 17th Street and the London Avenue canals where they empty into Lake Pontchartrain.

The canals will remain closed until the threat of severe weather passes. More than 800 filled sandbags are on hand, and an additional 2,500 have been ordered.

[eewwll]

Katacana,

The Tuskegee experiment is documented..that does not equate to a conspiracy theory. There is a difference between possibility and plausibility.


Again man, these theories are getting out of hand in this posts

1) Japanese Mafia created Hurricane Katrina

2) Chinese government created Hurricane Katrina

3) Bush created it to wipe out black population of New Orleans

Come on. There is a difference between drawing logical connected..like the banking families behind the creation of the Federal Reserve System and speculate as to the real cause of the Great Depression that prompted its creation....This is the type of conspiracy theory that even through all the murkiness you can draw some striking conclusions based on the evidence

as opposed to some of the theories that have been posted here lately that don't even have scientific merit.

I'm saying that there needs to be a basic understanding of whatever is you are talking about and look at all these conspiracy theories with a critical eye because they typically have HUGE GAPING holes in the theory.

[katakana]

Katacana,

The Tuskegee experiment is documented..that does not equate to a conspiracy theory. There is a difference between possibility and plausibility.



as opposed to some of the theories that have been posted here lately that don't even have scientific merit.

I'm saying that there needs to be a basic understanding of whatever is you are talking about and look at all these conspiracy theories with a critical eye because they typically have HUGE GAPING holes in the theory
Again man, these theories are getting out of hand in this posts

.





eewll,

Do you know what a conspiracy is? here is a working definition for you:


Main Entry: con·spire
Pronunciation: k&n-'spIr
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): con·spired; con·spir·ing
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French conspirer, from Latin conspirare to be in harmony, conspire, from com- + spirare to breathe
transitive senses : PLOT, CONTRIVE
intransitive senses
1 a : to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement b : SCHEME
2 : to act in harmony toward a common end <circumstances conspired to defeat his efforts>
3 entries found for conspiracy.
To select an entry, click on it.
conspiracyconspiracy of silenceconspiracy theory

Main Entry: con·spir·a·cy
Pronunciation: k&n-'spir-&-sE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -cies
Etymology: Middle English conspiracie, from Latin conspirare
1 : the act of conspiring together
2 a : an agreement among conspirators b : a group of conspirators1)


http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/conspiring



I have never said the Tuskegee Experiment was a conspiracy theory.......the Tuskegee Experiment is more than a theory, it was actually enacted and secretly conspired by the US government ( yes, it was a Conspiracy).


Another sanctioned Conspiracy:


Do you know about the Cointelpro Program created by the FBI? "COINTELPRO" was the FBI's secret program to undermine the popular upsurge which swept the country during the 1960s. Though the name stands for "Counterintelligence Program," the targets were not enemy spies. The FBI set out to eliminate "radical" political opposition inside the US. When traditional modes of repression (exposure, blatant harassment, and prosecution for political crimes) failed to counter the growing insurgency, and even helped to fuel it, the Bureau took the law into its own hands and secretly used fraud and force to sabotage constitutionally- protected political activity. Its methods ranged far beyond surveillance, and amounted to a domestic version of the covert action for which the CIA has become infamous throughout the world.


The FBI conspired to "stop the rise of a Black Messiah," these words were actually in FBI documents released by the Freedom of Information Act of 1975. That Cointelpro program is Conspiracy at it's highest level, it's a group of people conspiring to do ill will.



The FBI secretly instructed its field offices to propose schemes to "misdirect, discredit, disrupt and otherwise neutralize "specific individuals and groups. Close coordination with local police and prosecutors was encouraged. Final authority rested with top FBI officials in Washington, who demanded assurance that "there is no possibility of embarrassment to the Bureau." More than 2000 individual actions wereofficially approved. The documents reveal three types of methods:
1. Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main function was to discredit and disrupt. Various means to this end are analyzed below.

2. Other forms of deception: The FBI and police also waged psychological warfare from the outside--through bogus publications, forged correspondence, anonymous letters and telephone calls, and similar forms of deceit.

3. Harassment, intimidation and violence: Eviction, job loss, break-ins, vandalism, grand jury subpoenas, false arrests, frame- ups, and physical violence were threatened, instigated or directly employed, in an effort to frighten activists and disrupt their movements. Government agents either concealed their involvement or fabricated a legal pretext. In the case of the Black and Native American movements, these assaults--including outright political assassinations--were so extensive and vicious that they amounted to terrorism on the part of the government.


The most intense operations were directed against the Black movement, particularly the Black Panther Party. This resulted from FBI and police racism, the Black community's lack of material resources for fighting back, and the tendency of the media--and whites in general--to ignore or tolerate attacks on Black groups. It also reflected government and corporate fear of the Black movement because of its militance, its broad domestic base and international support, and its historic role in galvanizing the entire Sixties' upsurge. Many other activists who organized against US intervention abroad or for racial, gender or class justice at home also came under covert attack. The targets were in no way limited to those who used physical force or took up arms. Martin Luther King, David Dellinger, Phillip Berrigan and other leading pacifists were high on the list, as were projects directly protected by the Bill of Rights, such as alternative newspapers.
The Black Panthers came under attack at a time when their work featured free food and health care and community control of schools and police, and when they carried guns only for deterrent and symbolic purposes. It was the terrorism of the FBI and police that eventually provoked the Panthers to retaliate with the armed actions that later were cited to justify their repression.

Ultimately the FBI disclosed six official counterintelligenceprograms: Communist Party-USA (1956-71); "Groups Seeking Independence for Puerto Rico" (1960-71); Socialist Workers Party (1961-71); "White Hate Groups" (1964-71); "Black Nationalist Hate Groups" (1967-71); and "New Left" (1968- 71).The latter operations hit anti-war, student, and feminist groups. The "Black Nationalist" caption actually encompassed Martin Luther King and most of the civil rights and Black Power movements. The "white hate" program functioned mainly as a cover for covert aid to the KKK and similar right-wing vigilantes, who were given funds and information, so long as they confined their attacks to COINTELPRO targets. FBI documents also reveal covert action against Native American, Chicano, Phillipine, Arab- American, and other activists, apparently without formal Counterintelligence programs.





On the issue of the posts getting out of hand. I have never said the following, you have the wrong guy:


"1) Japanese Mafia created Hurricane Katrina

2) Chinese government created Hurricane Katrina

3) Bush created it to wipe out black population of New Orleans

Come on. There is a difference between drawing logical connected..like the banking families behind the creation of the Federal Reserve System and speculate as to the real cause of the Great Depression that prompted its creation....This is the type of conspiracy theory that even through all the murkiness you can draw some striking conclusions based on the evidence"


In explaining an specific issue with me, you are grouping me in with others who post here in this political section. Now, that's not logical on your part: don't make the assumption I am someone, I am not. I am inclined to believe due to the evidence the levees were breached for certain economic and social intentions, however I am still researching the subject. In no way do I believe the hurricanes were created by man-made forces.


eewwll..........do you really think the US government does not conspire in any way? The evidence is overwhelming that the US government conspires on a regular basis for the purposes of control and maintaining the social order.

[mrjamaica]

lets open our eyes before its too late :angry:

[katakana]

lets open our eyes before its too late :angry:




...........yes i

[eewwll]

eewll,

Do you know what a conspiracy is? here is a working definition for you:


Main Entry: con·spire
Pronunciation: k&n-'spIr
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): con·spired; con·spir·ing
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French conspirer, from Latin conspirare to be in harmony, conspire, from com- + spirare to breathe
transitive senses : PLOT, CONTRIVE
intransitive senses
1 a : to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement b : SCHEME
2 : to act in harmony toward a common end <circumstances conspired to defeat his efforts>
3 entries found for conspiracy.
To select an entry, click on it.
conspiracyconspiracy of silenceconspiracy theory

Main Entry: con·spir·a·cy
Pronunciation: k&n-'spir-&-sE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -cies
Etymology: Middle English conspiracie, from Latin conspirare
1 : the act of conspiring together
2 a : an agreement among conspirators b : a group of conspirators1)


http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/conspiring



I have never said the Tuskegee Experiment was a conspiracy theory.......the Tuskegee Experiment is more than a theory, it was actually enacted and secretly conspired by the US government ( yes, it was a Conspiracy).


Another sanctioned Conspiracy:


Do you know about the Cointelpro Program created by the FBI? "COINTELPRO" was the FBI's secret program to undermine the popular upsurge which swept the country during the 1960s. Though the name stands for "Counterintelligence Program," the targets were not enemy spies. The FBI set out to eliminate "radical" political opposition inside the US. When traditional modes of repression (exposure, blatant harassment, and prosecution for political crimes) failed to counter the growing insurgency, and even helped to fuel it, the Bureau took the law into its own hands and secretly used fraud and force to sabotage constitutionally- protected political activity. Its methods ranged far beyond surveillance, and amounted to a domestic version of the covert action for which the CIA has become infamous throughout the world.


The FBI conspired to "stop the rise of a Black Messiah," these words were actually in FBI documents released by the Freedom of Information Act of 1975. That Cointelpro program is Conspiracy at it's highest level, it's a group of people conspiring to do ill will.



The FBI secretly instructed its field offices to propose schemes to "misdirect, discredit, disrupt and otherwise neutralize "specific individuals and groups. Close coordination with local police and prosecutors was encouraged. Final authority rested with top FBI officials in Washington, who demanded assurance that "there is no possibility of embarrassment to the Bureau." More than 2000 individual actions wereofficially approved. The documents reveal three types of methods:
1. Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main function was to discredit and disrupt. Various means to this end are analyzed below.

2. Other forms of deception: The FBI and police also waged psychological warfare from the outside--through bogus publications, forged correspondence, anonymous letters and telephone calls, and similar forms of deceit.

3. Harassment, intimidation and violence: Eviction, job loss, break-ins, vandalism, grand jury subpoenas, false arrests, frame- ups, and physical violence were threatened, instigated or directly employed, in an effort to frighten activists and disrupt their movements. Government agents either concealed their involvement or fabricated a legal pretext. In the case of the Black and Native American movements, these assaults--including outright political assassinations--were so extensive and vicious that they amounted to terrorism on the part of the government.


The most intense operations were directed against the Black movement, particularly the Black Panther Party. This resulted from FBI and police racism, the Black community's lack of material resources for fighting back, and the tendency of the media--and whites in general--to ignore or tolerate attacks on Black groups. It also reflected government and corporate fear of the Black movement because of its militance, its broad domestic base and international support, and its historic role in galvanizing the entire Sixties' upsurge. Many other activists who organized against US intervention abroad or for racial, gender or class justice at home also came under covert attack. The targets were in no way limited to those who used physical force or took up arms. Martin Luther King, David Dellinger, Phillip Berrigan and other leading pacifists were high on the list, as were projects directly protected by the Bill of Rights, such as alternative newspapers.
The Black Panthers came under attack at a time when their work featured free food and health care and community control of schools and police, and when they carried guns only for deterrent and symbolic purposes. It was the terrorism of the FBI and police that eventually provoked the Panthers to retaliate with the armed actions that later were cited to justify their repression.

Ultimately the FBI disclosed six official counterintelligenceprograms: Communist Party-USA (1956-71); "Groups Seeking Independence for Puerto Rico" (1960-71); Socialist Workers Party (1961-71); "White Hate Groups" (1964-71); "Black Nationalist Hate Groups" (1967-71); and "New Left" (1968- 71).The latter operations hit anti-war, student, and feminist groups. The "Black Nationalist" caption actually encompassed Martin Luther King and most of the civil rights and Black Power movements. The "white hate" program functioned mainly as a cover for covert aid to the KKK and similar right-wing vigilantes, who were given funds and information, so long as they confined their attacks to COINTELPRO targets. FBI documents also reveal covert action against Native American, Chicano, Phillipine, Arab- American, and other activists, apparently without formal Counterintelligence programs.





On the issue of the posts getting out of hand. I have never said the following, you have the wrong guy:


"1) Japanese Mafia created Hurricane Katrina

2) Chinese government created Hurricane Katrina

3) Bush created it to wipe out black population of New Orleans

Come on. There is a difference between drawing logical connected..like the banking families behind the creation of the Federal Reserve System and speculate as to the real cause of the Great Depression that prompted its creation....This is the type of conspiracy theory that even through all the murkiness you can draw some striking conclusions based on the evidence"


In explaining an specific issue with me, you are grouping me in with others who post here in this political section. Now, that's not logical on your part: don't make the assumption I am someone, I am not. I am inclined to believe due to the evidence the levees were breached for certain economic and social intentions, however I am still researching the subject. In no way do I believe the hurricanes were created by man-made forces.


eewwll..........do you really think the US government does not conspire in any way? The evidence is overwhelming that the US government conspires on a regular basis for the purposes of control and maintaining the social order.




Katakana,

Your replies are continual uses of a "smokescreen". The examples used don't equate with your premise. The basic action" the guise of a hurricane" is beyond the avenue of conspiracy theory. By your very defination it can't be contrived. I know what conspiracy "theory" is and it's often gets very illogical. The other examples on this board have been ridiculous. However, for you to group this Hurrican situation with conspiracy theory linked with the deaths of black leaders like MLK or political leaders like JFK is ill advised and misplaced. You are grouping well thought out plans of manipulate that were plotted for years with an unexpected natural disaster that occured within several days time. I already stated a legimate example of conspiracy theory and can added several others that have legitimate evidence to support...so again..your smokescreen of "eewwwl, do you think that government doesn't contrive to manipulate" is a smokescreen argument. I already know that it does. My point is that your example lacks any evidence.

Again, you are going and listing all types of theories that don't support YOUR claim. I already know about the mentioned one. I can probably go right off the top of my head and name more than you can list with doing searches..and not just with the U.S. government. You do know that actions of this nature of "mutually exclusive". Again, understand the difference between plausibility and possibility.

You need to provide evidence to support YOUR CLAIM. Not go back in the past to show that conspiracies have occured. Your attempt to convince me of your argument is the equivalent of saying that we have landed a man on Pluto...and then proceeding to list that we discovered antarctica, put satellites in space and put a man on the moon(know about the conspiracy theory too)....without providing any evidence for your specific claim of a man on pluto. Past evidence of theories doesn't help you at all. Provide specific evidence for your claim as opposed to citing hearsay.

Furthmore, the Tuskegee Experiment ceases to operate in the realm of conspiracy theory. It is the main stream accepted course of events that occured. The Tuskegee Experiment is mainstream...is founded, evil but rational, etc. There is a difference between WAS and IS. A butterfly is just that, a butterfly, it ceases to be a catepillar though it was one in the past. The see a butterfly and label it a catepilliar is false. This is one of the major axioms of philosophy. The law of identity...that A is A. So did you really take the time to think about all the info before you posted it. Because, literally, it supports my claim not yours. And it is very logical to group you with the other posters because you share the common flaw of making a very provocative claim WITHOUT providing any substantial evidence to support your claim except hearsay. That is my point.


"Colloquially, a "conspiracy theory" is any non-mainstream theory about current or historical events, often with the connotation that the theory is unfounded, outlandish, irrational or in some way unworthy of serious consideration"

And you do know that their is an implicit difference between posting a definite for a base term like "conspire" or "conspiracy" instead of posting an explicit definition of "conspiracy theory"...which has its own set of implications, theories, and realm of connotation.

According to what you posted...a basketball teams commits a conspricy because it " commits an act of agreement between 2 or more people..it conspires".

Again, this is another flaw..a flaw of generalization. Let's be specific and explicit.

Provide the evidence to support your claim. Be very specific. I don't want to post past cases of conspiracy theory as if it supports your case.

Post specifically,

1.Facts, evidence, analysis, that would logically lead an invididual to conclude that breach in N.O. was planned and conspired and done for the reason of eliminated black leadership.

Don't think that by going against the grain you have doing something smart. Copernicus and Darwin went against the grain but provides facts and used science to prove their thoughts or came to a conclusion after experimentation. Icke often goes against the grain, and because you are so versed in conspiracy theory you know who that his...and he provides no facts to support his plans. Conspiracy theory by its very natures often enters into the dilussional. Don't fall victim to counter theory just because it's counter. Alot of times, if people actually knew anything about what they were talking about alot of these conspiracy theories wouldn't be spouted.

My question for you is can you do your own thinking..draw some conclusions on your own except for copying and pasting long articles.

[QueEx]

Among the most telling anomalies pointing to something terribly afoot is the gun battle, killing 5, that occurred at the breeched levy between the New Orleans Police Department and, what have now been identified as US military agents. An Associated Press report, which has now disappeared, stated that at least five USA Defense Department personnel where shot dead by New Orleans police officers in the proximity of the breeched levy. A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said later that those killed were "federal contractors" on their way to "repair" a canal. The "contractors" were on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain, in an operation to "fix" the 17th Street Canal, according to the Army Corps of Engineers spokesman. Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley of New Orleans later reported that his policemen had shot at eight suspicious people near the breeched levy, killing five or six.

Who were these "military agents" that were killed by the police near the 17th Street Canal breeched levy and what were they doing there? Why did the New Orleans police find it necessary to shoot and kill 5 or 6 of them? No one is saying anything and it appears that the news story has now been swept under the rug. Were these US Department of Defense personnel a Special Forces group or Navy Seals with top secret orders to sabotaged the levy? There are verifiable reports that at least 100 New Orleans police officers have disappeared from the face of the earth and that two have committed suicide. Could these be policemen that died defending the levy against sabotage by "federal contractors"?
The original AP article has not disappeared, it, along with a corresponding original article by MSNBC are on this board at: http://64.255.174.200/board/showthread.php?t=57892

There are several incongruities in the article, but the quote above is interesting, especially since the author notes that the occurrences there mentioned are "Among the most telling anomalies ..."

1. The article describes those involved in the shooting on the bridge near the levee as "Military Agents". The actual articles described them as "Federal Contractors" -- that is, personnel/companies contracted by the federal government -- because the levees are under the auspices of the Corps of Engineers, a federal agency. Of course, Federal Contractors sounds suspicious enough for the conspiracy inclined, but the article takes a quantum leap to call them "Military Agents" which apparently sounds even more vile for those needing a sinister boost.

2. "Were these US Department of Defense personnel a Special Forces group or Navy Seals with top secret orders to sabotaged the levy? Please be reminded that the shootiing incident took place on SEPTEMBER 4, 2005. The levee had broken four days earlier on AUGUST 30, 2005 and by August 31, 2005, NOLA was inuandate with flood water.
http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2005/WEATHER/08/30/katrina.neworleans/story.new.orleans.3.ap.jpg
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/30/katrina.neworleans/index.html

So, on September 4, 2005 with N.O. and surrounding area under water, what was there to sabotage ??? The levee had given way 5 days before (whether by nature or man). Maybe those "Military Agents" were there to cause "New Breaks" or "Sabotage the Repairs" ??? Even if that were so (and there is abolutely NO evidence to suggest it), didn't the near complete flooding of N.O. from the initial levee breaks do all the damage necessary for the so called "Great Land Grab" ???

3. While there are reports of a large defection in the N.O.P.D., isn't it strange that the N.O.P.D. has never suggested they were lost in a gun battle with saboteurs ??? Of course, the Black mayor and Black police chief could be complicit in the Great Land Grab. Hell, most of Black America could be just as involved. In fact, all comments to the contrary in this thread are part of a grand coverup.

QueEx

[QueEx]

<font size="4">But, hold up. Maybe those Black Ops "Military Agents" are still in the area and the first flooding of the 9th Ward was just not enough to utterly ruin the poor Black neighborhoods to complete the Great Land Grab.</font size>

.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/23/nola.levees/index.html

[QueEx]

LSU storm expert rejects levee failure explanation

By MIKE DUNNE
mdunne@theadvocate.com
Advocate staff writer


Advocate staff photo by RICHARD ALAN HANNON
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers uses steel pilings Wednesday to close off the 17th Street Canal to protect it from any storm surge caused by Hurricane Rita. Floodwalls along the canal broke during Hurricane Katrina, allowing water to pour into New Orleans.
An LSU hurricane expert said floodwalls on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals in New Orleans weren't "overtopped" by Hurricane Katrina's storm surge, meaning the structures failed for other reasons.
Paul Kemp, director of the Natural Systems Modeling Group at LSU's Center for Coastal, Energy, and Environmental Resources, said researchers studying watermarks and other evidence to sharpen their future predictions saw no evidence that walls along the two canals had been overtopped. Breaches along those canals accounted for much of the flooding in New Orleans.

The findings of the LSU center, which predicts hurricane storm surges for emergency officials, clashes with the explanation that has been given by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The corps has said the floodwalls collapsed after water flowed over them, eroding the back-side levees inside which the floodwalls were erected. Once that support was eroded, the floodwalls burst, sending water pouring into the Lakeview area and all the way to downtown, the corps surmised.

But Kemp said his group's models are designed to predict levee overtopping. The predictions called for 11- to 12-foot surges in the canals, he said. Overtopping would have required about 14 feet, he said.

Observations on the ground after the storm support those predictions, he said.

"I could not find evidence of overtopping inside the canals," Kemp said.

Water cascading over the tops of the floodwalls would have eroded trenches in the levees in which the walls were built, he said. That doesn't appear to have happened, he said.

"If they are not overtopped, it means they failed at some lower elevation" of water, Kemp said.

Corps spokesman Mitch Frazier said Wednesday that the agency is focused on pumping the water out of New Orleans and preparing for problems that could spin off Hurricane Rita as it crosses the Gulf of Mexico.

The corps' headquarters will conduct an investigation into why the floodwalls broke and other issues associated with Katrina's flooding, Frazier said. Knowing what went wrong will help the agency design a solution to keep flood waters out of New Orleans during hurricanes, he said.

As of Wednesday, 90 percent of New Orleans had been pumped dry, well ahead of original projections, Frazier said.

Kemp said his researchers did see evidence of overtopping along the Industrial Canal. Breaches in the levee along that canal helped flood the 9th Ward and parts of St. Bernard Parish.

Kemp's computer models show a combination of the intersection of two shipping channels and the levee system conspired to drive water high enough to overwhelm flood protection along the Industrial Canal.

One of those shipping channels is the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a deep-draft channel cutting through St. Bernard Parish.

The other is the Gulf Intracoastal Water Way, which barges use to avoid the open water of the Gulf of Mexico. It cuts through marshlands between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne.

"The model shows that's where the largest surges in the Louisiana system built up," Kemp said.

Another large surge was around the mouth of the Mississippi at Buras, he said.

The shape of the levees works with the shipping channels to funnel water into the Industrial Canal, where it has no place to go but up, he said.

A surge coming into Lake Pontchartrain would have more space to spread out, Kemp said.

While the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet provided an easy channel for storm surge, the flooding in the St. Bernard area was almost tsunami-like, covering the whole parish, he said.

"There was a lot of momentum in the wave," Kemp said.

A pressing question is where Hurricane Rita's storm surge will go, he said. Even a small one of 3 feet could threaten the battered and weakened levee system in New Orleans, Kemp said.

On Wednesday, the corps was shoring up that system by driving sheet pilings into the mouths of the 17th Street and the London Avenue canals where they empty into Lake Pontchartrain.

The canals will remain closed until the threat of severe weather passes. More than 800 filled sandbags are on hand, and an additional 2,500 have been ordered.
How about clicking on the video in the CNN article above: LSU scientists: New Orleans levees were faulty and failed for a more complete explanation of LSU's findings. It probably won't support the "Great Land Grab" conspiracy theory, but it might help explain what actually happened.

QueEx

[QueEx]

lets open our eyes before its too late :angry:
<font size="3">
And, make sure we open our minds and use our brains at the same time. Otherwise, we may miss the Real Conspiracy -- having become too accustomed to calls that the sky is falling when plainly it wasn't.

QueEx

[vitrifier]

Seriously, there doesn't need to be a conspiracy for this land grab to occur.

As it is, people will effectively be able to snatch up property that people don't come back to claim, or sell at low prices because they no longer have any property there, or people who default to the bank because they have no job, and no insurance money to pay for the house.

What's going to happen is rapid gentrification, because people that moved away, if they find it easier to get on their feet where they are now, will likely stay. A lot of people died, and a lot of people have nothing to return to. Everything will have to be rebuilt, and thus more expensive to live in, which will financially drive people out, and with all new buildings, I'm sure a bunch of luxury condos, there will be an influx of affluent people who want to live in N.O. now that it's new and clean.

Same thing that would happen in any city if all of a sudden, the broke neighborhood was demolished. This is probably why the Mayor wants people to return as quickly as possible, the longer they stay away, the less likely they will return.

[Fuckallyall]

How about clicking on the video in the CNN article above: LSU scientists: New Orleans levees were faulty and failed for a more complete explanation of LSU's findings. It probably won't support the "Great Land Grab" conspiracy theory, but it might help explain what actually happened.

QueEx


Dammit, you beat me to it. I want to add that when the LSU prof. did not suggest that sabotage was even considered. Just like I said, conspiricy theorists use part of a truth to justify a wild proposition.

Also, COINTELPRO was exposed while still operational.

[katakana]

Eewwll,



Why should I even have to answer your wayward statements and questions dotted with misspellings, haplessly pretending to be an expert on logic? You may have taken one course on logic at a community college, now you are the René Descartes or even the Jean-Paul Sartre of BGOL. I don’t think so. You accuse me of unable to form an argument, yet you cannot form a sentence and have a wealth of run-on and fragmented sentences. Does this make sense? You position yourself as all-knowing when you are grammatically challenged. No, it does not make sense.

Let’s go back to the very beginning, BGOL poster Orange Roughly asked few questions to the political board:


a friend of mine told me that he heard Dick Gregory on Joe Madison's radio broadcast last weekend and that there was a discussion about a federal black ops group down there that used the hurricane as a cover to try to assassinate some of the NO police and officials. Supposedly these black ops guys were nto successful and wer found handing upside down from a bridge as evidence.

Did anybody hear the interview, or better yet, have it or a transcript? Or know anymore about this?


I simply posted the article he was possibly interested in coupled with the linkage to Dick Gregory’s web site so Orange Roughy could gather more information. I highlighted in red the parts Orange Roughy had specifically asked about and that was the end of my post. Then like a person butting into a conversation, we have you chiming in: “LOL..I'm never amazed by the conspiracy theories posted here.” Instead of exploring the article and opening your mind to other possibilities concerning the breaching of the levee in New Orleans, you immediately discount the article. At this point I did not say anything about my point of view. Instead, I posted articles in response to various “LOL”statements with the moniker “LEAVE YOUR CRITICAL THINKING AT THE DOOR THEN........LAUGH NOW.............CRY LATER.” My point was to tell everyone lets explore this issue by using our critical thinking skills instead of instantly doubting the article. Also, if we do not use our critical thinking skills, we as black people might find ourselves in a position the Jewish people in Germany were in the 1930’s and 40’s, being ostracized and scapegoated mercilessly with the ultimate conclusion being the gas ovens.



Like Malcolm X said in the partial speech I posted “when you begin thinking for yourself, you frighten them.” Who is the “them” Malcolm X is talking about? Them is the corporate controlling power elites who control the mainstream media that adheres to the official story closely, wedded to the political administration in power. By not exploring other avenues for information, the same information from the same sources are parroted. Just relying on the mainstream media does not get the heart of the truth, other sources must be mined to receive a fuller understanding of an idea or event. Obviously, Eewwll, you rely on mainstream media for all of your sources for news or you would not make the following statement:

the Tuskegee Experiment ceases to operate in the realm of conspiracy theory. It is the main stream accepted course of events that occurred. The Tuskegee Experiment is mainstream...is founded, evil but rational, etc

I can surmise when the mainstream media reports on a subject, Eewwl, you instantly believe their point of view, their story, their logic without questioning it for yourself. Obviously you do, because if it is the “main stream accepted” course of events it is “founded.” On top of that you say “The Tuskegee Experiment is mainstream...is founded, evil but rational, etc.” This is most disturbing statement of your diatribe. In a book review of Unmasking Administrative Evil by Guy B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour, the reviewer, Charles Perrow states:

“The authors mention the Tuskegee experiments on Afro-American prisoners, internment of Japanese Americans in World War II and other cases to remind us that ‘American public administration also possesses a well-developed capacity for administrative evil’ (xxviii). But most of these are easily rationalized in terms of some ‘higher good’ (the Tuskegee case could have been so rationalized initially, but not later on; the cruel experiments continued even after a cure for syphilis had been found).”1

The Tuskegee Experiment started in 1932 in Macon County, Alabama with 400 African-American men and injected them with syphilis:

“The only medication the men received was aspirin. Spinal tabs (lumbar punctures) were done on the men to test their fluids in their spinal cord area. This is a very painful procedure. Men were told that this was part of the treatment. By 1943, penicillin was widely used to treat syphilis, except among the men in the Tuskegee study.”

Is this your idea of rationality? Continuing the experiment until 1972, 29 years after a cure was found? If the mainstream press told you the sky was pink with purple polka dots would you believe them too? Think for yourself, Eewll. I know you did not believe the experiment was rational even after a cure was found, I hope not. Eewwll, know what you are talking about before you spew your verbose and vile opinions. Eewll, your comments have a tone of arrogance like this one:

“Again, you are going and listing all types of theories that don't support YOUR claim. I already know about the mentioned one. I can probably go right off the top of my head and name more than you can list with doing searches..and not just with the U.S. government.”

I did not state one theory about the research I’ve done. Is the Malcolm X excerpt from a speech a theory? Is an article concerning the Tuskegee Experiment a theory? Is the CointelPro information a theory? Eewwll, do you know what a theory is? It’s apparent you are overreaching in areas you did not fully understand in trying to besmirch me. What claims did I make? This is the only thing I have said:

“I am inclined to believe due to the evidence the levees were breached for certain economic and social intentions, however I am still researching the subject.”

Personally, I did say I am still researching the subject. I’ve not come to any firm conclusions, I am still on the path of getting to truth of the matter. As quiet as it’s kept Eewwll, I don’t have to prove anything to you and I was not trying to prove anything to you in this thread. Again, I just posted an article for Orange Roughy. Then I added the other article pieces and excerpts to just say: OPEN YOUR CLOSED MIND.

In conclusion, your writing speaks for itself, the words in bold are some of your misspellings:


1 By your very defination it can't be contrived.
2 However, for you to group this Hurrican situation
3 However, for you to group this Hurrican situation
4 natural disaster that occured within several days time.
5 I already stated a legimate example of conspiracy theory
6 we discovered antarctica, put satellites in space (capitalize)
7 A butterfly is just that, a butterfly, it ceases to be a caterpillar
8 a basketball teams commits a conspricy because it
9 Facts, evidence, analysis, that would logically lead an invididual
to conclude
10 by its very natures often enters into the dilussional
11 Alot of times, if people actually knew anything about
what they were talking about alot of these conspiracy theories
wouldn't be spouted.
12Furthmore, the Tuskegee Experiment ceases to operate


I don’t have time to list your grammatical mistakes, there are too many to list, however if anyone insists I do I will begrudgingly. I don’t get paid to be Eewwll’s english teacher. Eewwll, your writing is anemic, improve your writing and then respond to me.

[Jackdarippa]

Smells like.......A CROCK OF SHIT

[eewwll]

TO KATAKANA: who continues to avoid providing evidence, continues to blow smoke, and won't admit to the very obvious flaws in his logic.

Are you still going to avoid giving any evidence? I'm writing code for software programs while I'm checking on stuff here. I don't have the time to go back and do spell checks. This isn't going to be published..this isn't journalism. The points are clear..despite any spelling errors. Don't use that as an excuse not to provide any evidence. That was quite a WEAK response Katakana. Again..your use of a smokescreen to cloud the fact that you have no evidence to support your claim. By the way, I went to one of the best schools in the country..definately not a community college but I've never misconstrued having a college degree as equating with intelligence. Furthermore, all the things I have learned of importance have been self taught anyway. Don't profess to be a no it all. However, it is clear to me with someone is blowing smoke and making bullshit assertions. You clearly qualify as making those types of claims. Now if you want to nit pick on spelling as opposed to providing some evidence that is fine. But be careful of trying to be a smart ass if you aren't qualified. I didn't take the time to type you some dissertation because your theories are so unfounded that your fallacies should be evident to anyone with a discerning eye. And you have the nerve to say I was being arrogant, you yet were the one citing definitions yet seem to not be able to deduce the meanings..as if you are semantically challenged. I'm not the one attemping to pass subjectivity as objectivity. I think you need to use the dictionary much more than I do at this point. However, if we want to do some challenging of wits..i would be more than willing to take a little bit more time to do a spell check, format check, and really get into the heart of how uninformed a mentality like your is...who starts his post with "OPEN YOUR EYES" and then goes to list a bunch of bullshit that contradicts his initial assertion and then goes on to prove that not only is he blind and is in complete opposition to his slogan(open your eyes)..that he is suffering from a mild form of dimentia if he thinks that illogical assertions, baseless opinions, and unfounded opinions can be passed as facts in an objective world.

Don't pretend. It's obvious to people who aren't. That is like the people on here who are making wild assertions about "Weather Control" yet with every statement illustrate that they are scientifically bankrupt...lacking any knowledge of earth science and physics...and are logically challenged. They lack of the basic understanding of the founding principles of the very subjects in which they are speaking

For you. Instead of making a claim..Just provide the proof. If you provide the proof...the claim speaks for itself and will be your last sentence..as opposed to starting off with some loud statement and the proceeding to follow up with flawed jibberish.

Now being that we have spelling and grammatics out of the way.

Please proceed to providing your facts or are you going to come up with another reason to dodge.

You wrote:

"As quiet as it’s kept Eewwll, I don’t have to prove anything to you and I was not trying to prove anything to you in this thread"

You make strong assertions and provided weak proof that was irrelevant and exclusive from the topic at hand. I'm not asking for you to prove anything to me. I'm asking you to adequately support your claims. This is repeatedy a problem. People make claims without the proof..or their data set is corrupt or obviously biased..or developing their argument using strawmen tactics...but however are quick to tell the rest of us to "open our eyes or open our minds". Like QueEx said..make sure you are using your mind at the same time and analyzing the data.

See, here is how you contradict yourself as opposed to admitting the flaws..in your previous response you wrote:

In your last reply you wrote: I did make any claims; What claims did I make??

KATAKANA WROTE:

Some of your claims:


....Yes ...we are going to be living in a Police State...that is next...

This was the subject of your supporting article:

The Great New Orleans Land Grab

The 17th Street Canal levy was breeched on purpose

Then you highlighted this from your articles:

I tell you -- they'll be building
gas chambers and gas ovens pretty soon
I'm telling you again -- they'll be building
those gas ovens. And before you wake up, you'll be in one of them,
just like the Jews ended up in gas ovens over there in Germany.

You are in a society that is just as capable of building gas ovens
for Black people as Hitler's society was.


Then you posted some weak articles and then the Tuskegee Experiment as if anything that happened with that experiment could provide evidence of Levee tampering. They can't be objectively linked.



Now are you beginning to see that you DID MAKE CLAIMS and you went about supporting them in a foulish manner.?


Obviously, Eewwll, you rely on mainstream media for all of your sources for news or you would not make the following statement:

Quote:
Originally Posted by eewwll
the Tuskegee Experiment ceases to operate in the realm of conspiracy theory. It is the main stream accepted course of events that occurred. The Tuskegee Experiment is mainstream...is founded, evil but rational, etc

But see again, you are displaying two qualities over and over again. One..is attempting to pass subjectivity as objectivity..as if you are sitting on my shoulders watching what I read I've mentioned this before in others threads that I speak Arabic and Portuguese(read my brazil 101 thread) proficiently. Sir, I read non english written publications as well. If you think I'm making the language claim specifically for you..do a search on old threads) So I can "read media sources" well beyond what you can probably imagine and not only be out of the "mainstream" but out of geo/english American culture constraints. Can you say the same? Again Katakana, you are making a claim with no means of supporting. That will usually lead to you being wrong.I don't claim to know what the fuck you're reading..but based on what you put in this thread...by that fact, I do know whatever you are reading is suspect when it comes to journalistic integrity as was shown repeatedy by multiple posters explicitly.

Two..the inability to deduce. "Rational" being that making the Tuskegee claim is based on established science. The claim within itself is in a minimal form possible. You missed the context because we were referring to the Weather Manipulation claim. Rational.based on reason..it is reasonable that the Tuskegee experiment could exist even without the evidence. This goes back to my "plausible vs. possible" example. However, a claim of Weather manipulation(Hurricane Creation) is irrational because any reasonable person who understands the science behind it would know that the claim is scientifically absurd. So that what was meant by Evil, yet rational. Maybe that was over your head? Thought it was very simple to understand.



By the way..i'm not "pretending to be an expert in logic". I didn't even attempt to go as deeply as I could because this type of discussion didn't call for it. FYI..I'm writing a program that extracts relevant knowledge out of unstructured data using semantic frameworks. All I deal with on a daily basis is logic and algorithms. I'm not an expert, but I'm definately quite versed to speak on logic. And it's very obvious to me when something is lacking in logic. I can notice a illogical inference in advanced neural systems so I can definately see it in an argument like this Katakana. If I was arrogant I would have said that in the first place.

Not trying to shoot you down. I come to this forum because I learn something new with all the articles that are posted. However, there is a difference between just posting articles for unbaised purposes or making some sound judgements like posters often do here...and then Making wild assertions and then using biased, tainted info to support an already shaky claim.





[QUOTE=katakana]Eewwll,



Why should I even have to answer your wayward statements and questions dotted with misspellings, haplessly pretending to be an expert on logic? You may have taken one course on logic at a community college, now you are the René Descartes or even the Jean-Paul Sartre of BGOL. I don’t think so. You accuse me of unable to form an argument, yet you cannot form a sentence and have a wealth of run-on and fragmented sentences. Does this make sense? You position yourself as all-knowing when you are grammatically challenged. No, it does not make sense.

Let’s go back to the very beginning, BGOL poster Orange Roughly asked few questions to the political board:




I simply posted the article he was possibly interested in coupled with the linkage to Dick Gregory’s web site so Orange Roughy could gather more information. I highlighted in red the parts Orange Roughy had specifically asked about and that was the end of my post. Then like a person butting into a conversation, we have you chiming in: “LOL..I'm never amazed by the conspiracy theories posted here.” Instead of exploring the article and opening your mind to other possibilities concerning the breaching of the levee in New Orleans, you immediately discount the article. At this point I did not say anything about my point of view. Instead, I posted articles in response to various “LOL”statements with the moniker “LEAVE YOUR CRITICAL THINKING AT THE DOOR THEN........LAUGH NOW.............CRY LATER.” My point was to tell everyone lets explore this issue by using our critical thinking skills instead of instantly doubting the article. Also, if we do not use our critical thinking skills, we as black people might find ourselves in a position the Jewish people in Germany were in the 1930’s and 40’s, being ostracized and scapegoated mercilessly with the ultimate conclusion being the gas ovens.



Like Malcolm X said in the partial speech I posted “when you begin thinking for yourself, you frighten them.” Who is the “them” Malcolm X is talking about? Them is the corporate controlling power elites who control the mainstream media that adheres to the official story closely, wedded to the political administration in power. By not exploring other avenues for information, the same information from the same sources are parroted. Just relying on the mainstream media does not get the heart of the truth, other sources must be mined to receive a fuller understanding of an idea or event. Obviously, Eewwll, you rely on mainstream media for all of your sources for news or you would not make the following statement:



I can surmise when the mainstream media reports on a subject, Eewwl, you instantly believe their point of view, their story, their logic without questioning it for yourself. Obviously you do, because if it is the “main stream accepted” course of events it is “founded.” On top of that you say “The Tuskegee Experiment is mainstream...is founded, evil but rational, etc.” This is most disturbing statement of your diatribe. In a book review of Unmasking Administrative Evil by Guy B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour, the reviewer, Charles Perrow states:

“The authors mention the Tuskegee experiments on Afro-American prisoners, internment of Japanese Americans in World War II and other cases to remind us that ‘American public administration also possesses a well-developed capacity for administrative evil’ (xxviii). But most of these are easily rationalized in terms of some ‘higher good’ (the Tuskegee case could have been so rationalized initially, but not later on; the cruel experiments continued even after a cure for syphilis had been found).”1

The Tuskegee Experiment started in 1932 in Macon County, Alabama with 400 African-American men and injected them with syphilis:

“The only medication the men received was aspirin. Spinal tabs (lumbar punctures) were done on the men to test their fluids in their spinal cord area. This is a very painful procedure. Men were told that this was part of the treatment. By 1943, penic
illin was widely used to treat syphilis, except among the men in the Tuskegee study.”

Is this your idea of rationality? Continuing the experiment until 1972, 29 years after a cure was found? If the mainstream press told you the sky was pink with purple polka dots would you believe them too? Think for yourself, Eewll. I know you did not believe the experiment was rational even after a cure was found, I hope not. Eewwll, know what you are talking about before you spew your verbose and vile opinions. Eewll, your comments have a tone of arrogance like this one:

“Again, you are going and listing all types of theories that don't support YOUR claim. I already know about the mentioned one. I can probably go right off the top of my head and name more than you can list with doing searches..and not just with the U.S. government.”

I did not state one theory about the research I’ve done. Is the Malcolm X excerpt from a speech a theory? Is an article concerning the Tuskegee Experiment a theory? Is the CointelPro information a theory? Eewwll, do you know what a theory is? It’s apparent you are overreaching in areas you did not fully understand in trying to besmirch me. What claims did I make? This is the only thing I have said:

“I am inclined to believe due to the evidence the levees were breached for certain economic and social intentions, however I am still researching the subject.”

Personally, I did say I am still researching the subject. I’ve not come to any firm conclusions, I am still on the path of getting to truth of the matter. As quiet as it’s kept Eewwll, I don’t have to prove anything to you and I was not trying to prove anything to you in this thread. Again, I just posted an article for Orange Roughy. Then I added the other article pieces and excerpts to just say: OPEN YOUR CLOSED MIND.

In conclusion, your writing speaks for itself, the words in bold are some of your misspellings:


1 By your very defination it can't be contrived.
2 However, for you to group this Hurrican situation
3 However, for you to group this Hurrican situation
4 natural disaster that occured within several days time.
5 I already stated a legimate example of conspiracy theory
6 we discovered antarctica, put satellites in space (capitalize)
7 A butterfly is just that, a butterfly, it ceases to be a caterpillar
8 a basketball teams commits a conspricy because it
9 Facts, evidence, analysis, that would logically lead an invididual
to conclude
10 by its very natures often enters into the dilussional
11 Alot of times, if people actually knew anything about
what they were talking about alot of these conspiracy theories
wouldn't be spouted.
12Furthmore, the Tuskegee Experiment ceases to operate


I don’t have time to list your grammatical mistakes, there are too many to list, however if anyone insists I do I will begrudgingly. I don’t get paid to be Eewwll’s english teacher. Eewwll, your writing is anemic, improve your writing and then respond to me.[/
QUOTE]

[orange roughy]

thanks...

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>Floodwall Overtopping May Not Be to Blame</font size>
<font size="4">Focus Now on New Orleans's Shifting Soil</font size></center>

By Peter Whoriskey and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 8, 2005; Page A11

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 7 -- The system of levees and concrete walls that was supposed to protect the New Orleans area from flooding was breached in dozens of places, investigators said Friday, a finding that indicates that the failures were far more widespread than originally thought.

Engineers probing the failures said they are increasingly convinced that floodwaters did not overtop two key floodwalls that collapsed on Aug. 29, swamping large portions of the city. Instead, evidence suggests that the floodwalls were weakened by the shifting soil beneath the structures, according to a team of experts from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

In the early days after the storm, accounts offered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and others focused attention on a few of the most prominent breaches. But the team of engineers working with the Corps said the places where water broke through were much more numerous.

"This place was ripped to shreds. I was amazed," said Peter Nicholson, a University of Hawaii professor of civil engineering who is part of the investigating team. "There were dozens and dozens of breaches."

Engineers from ASCE and an NSF-funded group at the University of California at Berkeley have been poking through the wreckage of the levees to determine what went wrong.

Many miles of earthen berms and concrete walls are supposed to prevent the low-lying city from being inundated by the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain and other nearby waters. The engineers said Friday that the system failed in a number of ways.

At two key breaches where huge volumes of water inundated the city -- at the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal -- the quality of the soil supporting the flood walls appears to have been a problem.

At the 17th Street Canal, they said, a section of the levee embankment moved back 35 feet. There is evidence of a similar "soil mass movement" at one of two London Avenue sites. The engineers speculate that either the pressure on the walls pushed them back against the soft soil or water seeping beneath the walls softened the soil, weakening the wall's support. "The soil moved," said Paul Mlakar of the Army Corps of Engineers. "The exact mechanism is not known at this time."

The soil in the area, composed of sand, silt, clay and peat is "compressible and not very strong," said Raymond Seed, a professor of civil engineering at UC-Berkeley.

An extensive analysis at the two canal locations has virtually ruled out overtopping as the cause of the failures, the engineers said. Overtopping occurs when rising waters spill over the top of a floodwall. The analysis shows that the water levels in both the London Avenue and 17th Street canals missed the top of the floodwalls by at least two feet, Nicholson said.

Many levees and flood walls did overtop. In some cases, catastrophic failures followed the overtoppings because the rushing floodwaters wore away the ground supporting the walls and the walls fell over.

"Some were simply overwhelmed and largely destroyed," Nicholson said. "However, many miles of levees performed satisfactorily, even many that were overtopped."

Concern about the inferior quality of the soil beneath the floodwalls is not new. In the early 1990s, a New Orleans-based contractor filed a legal claim against the Corps alleging that the soil beneath the floodwall on the 17th Street Canal was poor. A judge dismissed the contractor's complaint in 1996.

The teams investigating the floodwall failures say that a thin band of soft, peatlike soil lay more than 20 feet below the walls at both the 17th Street and London Avenue canals. But because the layer was deep and narrow, the crews that initially built the walls did not discover it, the engineers said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/07/AR2005100701878.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>Studies Confirm New Orleans Levees' Flaws</font size>
<font size="4">the levee design ensured failure under the type of water
pressure exerted by Katrina's storm surge</font size></center>

Dec 1, 9:23 AM (ET)
Associated Press
By BRETT MARTEL

(AP) Work continues, Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, at the 17th Street Canal floodwall that was breached...
Full Image



NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Government engineers performing sonar tests at the site of a major levee failure confirmed that steel reinforcements barely went more than half as deep as they were supposed to, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official said Wednesday.

"We've come up with similar results" to those from earlier tests performed by Louisiana State University engineers, said Walter Baumy, the Corps' chief engineer for the New Orleans District.

Baumy said the Corps intends to pull out pieces of the remaining wall along each edge of the breach at the 17th Street Canal to verify the sonar test results. The canal itself is now mostly dry at the breach site, with temporary walls holding back water from each side.

Baumy said the Corps cannot explain the disparity between what its 1993 design documents show was supposed to be there and what they've found.

The documents indicated that the steel reinforcements in the levee, known as sheet piling, went to a depth of 17.5 feet below sea level. Sonar tests indicated the pilings went only to 10 feet below sea level, meaning the flood wall would have been much weaker than intended.

The LSU team is working on a report for the state that will say there were serious, fundamental design and construction flaws at both the 17th Street and London Avenue canals. Both broke during Hurricane Katrina, flooding much of the city.

The team's leader, Ivor van Heerden, said Wednesday that the levee design ensured failure under the type of water pressure exerted by Katrina's storm surge.

The team's computer modeling showed that the designs failed to account for loose, porous soils such as sand and peat that were prone to allowing water to seep from the canal through to the dry side of the levee.

Much deeper steel pilings driven well below the canal bottoms likely would have stopped seepage to the dry side, engineers have said. The bottom tip of the pilings, at 10 feet below sea level, did not reach the canal bottoms.

But LSU computer models showed that even if the pilings had gone to 17.5 feet below sea level at 17th Street as design documents said they should have, they still would have failed.

Engineering studies prior to construction of the flood wall were performed by Eustis Engineering, Modjeski and Masters Inc. and the Corps. Members of the LSU team have expressed shock that all three could have missed what they characterized as fundamental flaws.

Calls to Eustis and Modjeski and Masters were not returned Wednesday. Van Heerden said the federal government bears ultimate responsibility.

http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20051201/D8E7GEQG0.html

[RunawaySlave]

You can always count on the government to come up with a
plausible explanation for everything shady....that's their job
and it's much easier to accomplish when you control every
facet of media in the country (including the internet)...

and the ones you don't control, you quash or discredit

[RunawaySlave]

Not meaning to hijack the post, but speaking of so-called
"conspiracies", I am home today, sick as a dog, with "Flu-like
symptoms" (my own diagnosis), just one week after brotha
Huey Freeman WARNED us about this "Bird Flu" shit and how
sick we would get from Thanksgiving turkey


I get alot of colds, but I NEVER catch the flu...
should I be worried??


http://images.ucomics.com/comics/bo/2005/bo051127.gif

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>Army Corps Is Faulted on New Orleans Levees</font size>
<font size="4">Panel Says Studies Foresaw Failure, Urges New Scrutiny</font size></center>

Washington Post
By Joby Warrick and Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 25, 2006; Page A06

An organization of civil engineers yesterday questioned the soundness of large portions of New Orleans's levee system, warning that the city's federally designed flood walls were not built to standards stringent enough to protect a large city.

The group faulted the agency responsible for the levees, the Army Corps of Engineers, for adopting safety standards that were "too close to the margin" to protect human life. It also called for an urgent reexamination of the entire levee system, saying there are no assurances that the miles of concrete "I-walls" in New Orleans will hold up against even a moderate hurricane.

The ability of any I-wall in New Orleans to withstand . . . is unknown," said the American Society of Civil Engineers' External Review Panel, which was appointed to oversee the Corps investigation of the levee system's collapse during Hurricane Katrina.

The civil engineers group also rejected the explanation given by the Corps that the system had failed because Katrina had unleashed "unforeseeable" physical forces that weakened the flood walls. In a letter to Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the Corps' commander, the civil engineers cited three previous Corps studies that predicted precisely the chain of events that caused the city's 17th Street Canal flood wall to fail. The breach left much of central and downtown New Orleans underwater.

"It appears that this information never triggered an assessment . . . neither at the time of the design of the 17th Street Canal flood wall, nor following its construction," the letter said.

Corps officials said they had already taken steps to address problems identified in the letter, starting with an effort to replace miles of I-walls with sturdier structures. But agency officials insisted the Corps was not solely to blame for weaknesses in the system.

"We have done the best things we could have done. We live here," spokeswoman Susan J. Jackson said. During four decades of levee-building in New Orleans, Jackson said, the agency frequently found its hands tied because of restrictions imposed by budgets, by Congress or by local governments that often failed to meet financial responsibilities to help build and maintain the levees. Jackson added: "It was a question of who was going to pay, and how much."

The American Society of Civil Engineers panel is one of three independent teams investigating the failure of the New Orleans levees, and until now it has been the most cautious in its public criticisms. The other investigating teams quickly endorsed its findings.

"We agree that every single foot of the I-walls is suspect," said Ivor van Heerden, leader of a Louisiana-appointed team of engineers. "When asked, we have constantly urged anyone returning to New Orleans to exercise caution, because the system now in place could fail in a Category 2 storm. It has already failed during a fast-moving Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans by 30 miles."

Two weeks ago, the Corps proposed a new theory for why the 17th Street Canal flood wall collapsed on Aug. 29, despite never being overtopped by Katrina's floodwaters. Whereas previous investigations had pointed to weak soils beneath the flood wall, new data suggested a combination of factors: First, the force of rising floodwaters inside the canal bent the walls outward, creating a small gap between the walls and their earthen foundation. Then, water surged into the gap, pressing the walls further until they broke through a layer of weak soil piled up against the sides. In effect, the levee was sliced in half along its ridge.

Corps officials initially said they had never known a levee to fail this way, and they suggested that no one could have predicted it. But the civil engineers panel said yesterday that the failure was foreseen by the Corps' own studies, dating to the mid-1980s. It said the Corps' failure to anticipate the problem reflected an "overall pattern of engineering judgment inconsistent with that required for critical structures."

Throughout the design process, the civil engineers said, the Corps consistently failed to make the kinds of conservative judgments necessary when working in an environment where the soils are notoriously unstable and the stakes, as measured in human lives, are high.

"These findings present significant implications for current and future safety offered by levees, flood walls and control structures in New Orleans, and perhaps elsewhere," the letter to Strock said.

The civil engineers panel is due to release a formal report on its findings in two weeks, but its members chose to send the letter to Strock separately, citing the "gravity and potential impact" of their findings.

Whoriskey reported from New Orleans.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032401819.html

[GET YOU HOT]

Seriously, there doesn't need to be a conspiracy for this land grab to occur.

As it is, people will effectively be able to snatch up property that people don't come back to claim, or sell at low prices because they no longer have any property there, or people who default to the bank because they have no job, and no insurance money to pay for the house.

What's going to happen is rapid gentrification, because people that moved away, if they find it easier to get on their feet where they are now, will likely stay. A lot of people died, and a lot of people have nothing to return to. Everything will have to be rebuilt, and thus more expensive to live in, which will financially drive people out, and with all new buildings, I'm sure a bunch of luxury condos, there will be an influx of affluent people who want to live in N.O. now that it's new and clean.

Same thing that would happen in any city if all of a sudden, the broke neighborhood was demolished. This is probably why the Mayor wants people to return as quickly as possible, the longer they stay away, the less likely they will return.


I hear you on all that,
Black ops or not..we need to look at what is actually occuring there now. People and their homes were swept away, and in the undertow there is alot of foot dragging going on to slow the process of rebuilding and providing adequate housing for people to reestablish themselves in the area. New Orleans will never be the same.

[Thought@Work]

Smells like.......A CROCK OF SHIT


Stick to what you know, porn pages and before you "drown" in all that ass you download tell us, where should we post your obituary? :lol: :lol:

[Thought@Work]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRL2khYEqmQ&search=levee%20breach

[QueEx]

Earwitness tells ABC explosives blew Industrial Canal levee
<font size="4">The witness didn't <u>see</u> anything; and doesn't know <u>what</u> he heard. There may have been an explosion; it could have been a fuel tank, natural gas, something colliding with something, could have been a transformer. To some people, however, it was someone blowing a whole in the levee - with or without an iota of proof. :smh:

QueEx

[Greed]

que, do you consider your battle on this board a losing one?

[Thought@Work]

:confused: <font size="4">The witness didn't <u>see</u> anything; and doesn't know <u>what</u> he heard. There may have been an explosion; it could have been a fuel tank, natural gas, something colliding with something, could have been a transformer. To some people, however, it was someone blowing a whole in the levee - with or without an iota of proof. :smh:

QueEx


Its probably the barge that hit the wall; adrift and with the force of the waves, etcetera :yes:

[Thought@Work]

:confused: <font size="4">The witness didn't <u>see</u> anything; and doesn't know <u>what</u> he heard. There may have been an explosion; it could have been a fuel tank, natural gas, something colliding with something, could have been a transformer. To some people, however, it was someone blowing a whole in the levee - with or without an iota of proof. :smh:

QueEx


Its probably the barge that hit the wall; adrift and with the force of the waves, etcetera :yes: We need to look at what is not going on down there rignt now, it's as if time stood still. A large part of our Black History has been wiped out! I even read that Nagin and the Lady Govenor been threatened with abandonment if they continue to speak out about their discontent. Nagin even stating that he is afraid to be "taken out" by the CIA. All the government do is Lies, lies & more lies.

[QueEx]

:confused:

[B]We need to look at what is not going on down there rignt now, it's as if time stood still ... I even read that Nagin and the Lady Govenor been threatened with abandonment if they continue to speak out about their discontent.
Bro, I hate to criticize Black mayors; they usually have enough problems to begin with. But Nagin needs to spend less time waffling between what the feds didn't do; whether NOLA will be a chocolate city at the end of the day; and otherwise coming up with shit-for-brains reconstruction plans. I can't blame the people for being angry with Nagin and deer-in-the-headlights Blanco too because too often it appears she doesn't have a real clue.

When Katrina struck and those levees broke, New Orleans was a changed city. The politics of the past no longer held water - water was every damn where. The name of the game for NOLA at this point is PLAN. Somebody has got to come up with some damn plans, yesterday. Is it safe to rebuild the 9th Ward (one of the lowest places in NOLA, some 8 to 10 feet below sea level)??? Can the coastal erosion be stopped - because the coastal wetlands stand somewhat as a barrier to hurricanes and they've been damn near eaten away??? What will be the new building standards???

If Nagin keeps bumbling around about whether NOLA will be chocolate at the end of the day, instead of taking the LEADERSHIP to get NOLA towards reconstruction (of that which realistically can be rebuilt), his ass will be at home trying to self-install new sheet rock - still casting blame.

It helps to understand what is going on in N.O. if you have lived through at least one major hurricane. I've gone through a few and I can tell you that hurricanes <u>make</u> time stand still, especially in areas that have not been hit by even a moderate cane in recent years. My experience tells me that to endure a hurricane requires good preparedness, before one strikes; and good post hurricane preparedness, BEFORE one strikes. I think its fairly plain that N.O. (as much as I love it and its people), did neither.

Now, they have one more chance. Get a solid post destruction plan and start kicking some ass to make it work. The feds have promised billions. Get a solid plan to spend it and put foot up Bush's ass until it arrives. With all thats happened, I honestly don't believe that Washington wants to run the risk of fucking up, again. But Washington doesn't have to worry about it, if the locals can't get their shit in one sock.

QueEx

[Thought@Work]

You a fine example of how Black people can't get along to move along. Stick to what you know

assholes and elbows :lol:

[QueEx]

You a fine example of how Black people can't get along to move along. Stick to what you know

assholes and elbows
Which is it: you can't handle the truth; or, you wouldn't know it if it bit you ?
What part of what I said equates in your mind to disunity ?

Please be sure to read the rules before you reply.

QueEx

[QueEx]

<font size="4">While some debate "Black-Ops" ... White-Ops
may be well underway. While Nagin flaunders
along -- others may be PLANNING the future.

Try reading through and weeding out the political
biases in the article below and see if you can get
an understanding of what the future may soon behold
and how it can be manipulated to our advantage.

This is not a time for emotionalism, but a time for
well rounded Black thinkers/politicians to show
their mettle. Black people: Think; Be smart; and,
stop crying over spilled milk. The past is done;
wrest control over tomorrow.

QueEx
______________________________________</font size>



<font size="7"><center>Who Is Killing New Orleans? </font size></center><font size="4">

The Nation
Mike Davis
posted March 23, 2006 (April 10, 2006 issue)

Afew blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back on. In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the river. Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that "New Orleans is back," pointing to the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 percent of Nagin's constituents--including an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans--are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home.

In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, "New Urbanists" and neo-Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances.

Meanwhile, Bush's pledge to "get the work done quickly" and mount "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen" has proved to be the same fool's gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq's bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.

With each passing week of neglect--what Representative Barney Frank has labeled "a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction"--the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return.

Lie and Stall

After his bungling initial response to Katrina, Bush impersonated FDR and Lyndon Johnson when he reassured the nation in his September 15 Jackson Square speech that "we have a duty to confront [New Orleans's] poverty with bold action.... We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives."

In the event, the White House sat on its pledges all autumn, mumbling homilies about the limits of government, while its conservative attack dogs in Congress offset Gulf relief with $40 billion worth of cutbacks in Medicaid, food stamps and student loans. Republicans also rebelled against aid for a state that was depicted as a venal Third World society, a failed state like Haiti, out of step with national values. "Louisiana and New Orleans," according to Idaho Senator Larry Craig, "are the most corrupt governments in our country and they always have been.... Fraud is in the culture of Iraqis. I believe that is true in the state of Louisiana as well."

Democrats, apart from the Congressional Black Caucus, did pathetically little to counter this backlash or to hold Bush's feet to the fire over his Jackson Square pledge. The promised national debate about urban poverty never took place; instead, New Orleans, like a great derelict ship, drifted helplessly in the treacherous currents of White House hypocrisy and conservative contempt.

An early, deadly blow was Treasury Secretary John Snow's refusal to guarantee New Orleans municipal bonds, forcing Mayor Nagin to lay off 3,000 city employees on top of the thousands of education and medical workers already jobless. The Bush Administration also blocked bipartisan measures to increase Medicaid coverage for Katrina evacuees and to give the State of Louisiana--facing an estimated $8 billion in lost revenues over the next few years--a share of the income generated by its offshore oil and gas leases.

Even more egregious was the flagrant redlining of black neighborhoods by the Small Business Administration (SBA), which rejected a majority of loan applications by local businesses and homeowners. At the same time, a bipartisan Senate bill to save small businesses with emergency bridge loans was sabotaged by Bush officials, leaving thousands to face bankruptcy and foreclosure. As a result, the economic foundations of the city's African-American middle class (public-sector jobs and small businesses) have been swept away by deliberate decisions made in the White House. Meanwhile, in the absence of federal or state initiatives to employ locals, low-income blacks are losing their niches in the construction and service sectors to more mobile outsiders.

In stark contrast to its neglect of neighborhood relief, the White House has made herculean efforts to reward its own base of large corporations and political insiders. Representative Nydia Velazquez, who sits on the House Small Business Committee, pointed out that the SBA has allowed large corporations to get $2 billion in federal contracts while excluding local minority contractors.

The paramount beneficiaries of Katrina relief aid have been the giant engineering firms KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) and the Shaw Group, which enjoy the services of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh (a former FEMA director and Bush's 2000 campaign manager). FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, while unable to explain to Governor Blanco last fall exactly how they were spending money in Louisiana, have tolerated levels of profiteering that would raise eyebrows even on the war-torn Euphrates. (Some of this largesse, of course, is guaranteed to be recycled as GOP campaign contributions.) FEMA, for example, has paid the Shaw Group $175 per square (100 square feet) to install tarps on storm-damaged roofs in New Orleans. Yet the actual installers earn as little as $2 per square, and the tarps are provided by FEMA. Similarly, the Army Corps pays prime contractors about $20 per cubic yard of storm debris removed, yet some bulldozer operators receive only $1. Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung, where the actual work is carried out. While the Friends of Bush mine gold from the wreckage of New Orleans, many disappointed recovery workers--often Mexican or Salvadoran immigrants camped out in city parks and derelict shopping centers--can barely make ends meet.

The Big Kiss-Off

In the fractious, take-no-prisoners world of Louisiana politics, broad solidarity of interest is normally as rare as a boulder in a bayou. Yet Katrina created an unprecedented bipartisan consensus around twin demands for Category 5 hurricane protection and mortgage relief for damaged homes. From conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats, there has been unanimity that the region's recovery depends on federal investment in new levees and coastal restoration, as well as financial rescue of the estimated 200,000 homeowners whose insurance coverage has failed to cover their actual damage. (There has been no equivalent consensus and little concern for the right of renters--who constituted 53 percent of the population before Katrina--and of public-housing tenants to return to their city.)

Yet by early November it was clear that saving New Orleans was no longer high on the Bush agenda, if it had ever been. As Congress headed toward its Christmas adjournment, the Louisiana delegation was in panic mode: A Category 5 plan had disappeared from serious discussion, and there were doubts about whether the damaged levees would be repaired before hurricane season returned. (In early March engineers monitoring the progress of the Army Corps's work complained that the use of weak, sandy soils and the lack of concrete "armoring" insured that the levees would again fail in a major storm.)

Congress ultimately voted to provide $29 billion for Gulf Coast relief. Yet as the Washington Post reported, "All but $6 billion of the measure merely reshuffled some of the $62 billion in previously approved Hurricane Katrina aid. The rest was funded by a 1 percent across-the-board cut of non-emergency, discretionary programs." The Pentagon won approval for a whopping $4.4 billion in base repairs and other professed Katrina-related needs, but Congress cut out the $250 million allocated to combat coastal erosion. Meanwhile, Mississippi's powerful Republican troika--Governor Haley Barbour and Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran--persuaded fellow Republicans to support $6.2 billion in discretionary housing aid for Louisiana and $5.3 billion for Mississippi, with red-state Mississippi getting five times as much aid per distressed household as pink-state Louisiana.

Louisiana received another blow on January 23, when Bush rejected GOP Representative Richard Baker's plan calling for a federally guaranteed Louisiana Reconstruction Corporation, which would bail out homeowners by buying distressed properties and packaging them in larger parcels for resale to developers. Local Republicans as well as Democrats howled in rage, and the future of southern Louisiana was again thrown into chaos. Although the Administration eventually promised an additional $4.2 billion in housing aid, the appropriation continues to be fought over by Texas and other jealous states.

The Republican hostility to New Orleans, of course, runs deeper and is nastier than mere concern with civic probity (America's most corrupt city, after all, is located on the Potomac, not the Mississippi). Underlying all the circumlocutions are the same antediluvian prejudices and stereotypes that were used to justify the violent overthrow of Reconstruction 130 years ago. Usually it is the poor who are invisible in the aftermath of urban disasters, but in the case of New Orleans it has been the African-American professional middle class and skilled working class. In the confusion and suffering of Katrina--a Rorschach test of the American racial unconscious--most white politicians and media pundits have chosen to see only the demons of their prejudices. The city's complex history and social geography have been reduced to a cartoon of a vast slum inhabited by an alternately criminal or helpless underclass, whose salvation is the kindness of strangers in other, whiter cities. Inconvenient realities like Gentilly's red-brick normalcy--or, for that matter, the pride of homeownership and the exuberance of civic activism in the blue-collar Lower Ninth Ward--have not been allowed to interfere with the belief, embraced by New Democrats as well as old Republicans, that black urban culture is inherently pathological.

Such calumnies reproduce ancient caricatures--blacks running amok, incapable of honest self-government--that were evoked by the murderous White League when it plotted against Reconstruction in New Orleans in the 1870s. Indeed, some civil rights veterans fear that the 1874 Battle of Canal Street, a bloody League-organized insurrection against a Republican administration elected by black suffrage, is being refought--perhaps without pikes and guns, but with the same fundamental aim of dispossessing black New Orleans of economic and political power. Certainly, a sweeping transformation of the racial balance-of-power within the city has been on some people's agenda for a long time.

The Krewe of Canizaro

Power and status in New Orleans have always been defined by membership in secretive Mardi Gras "krewes" and social clubs. In the early 1990s civil rights activists, led by feisty Councilmember Dorothy Mae Taylor, forced the token desegregation of Mardi Gras, and some of the clubs reluctantly admitted a few African-American millionaires. Despite some old-guard holdouts, Uptown seemed to be adjusting, however grudgingly, to the reality of black political clout.

But as post-Katrina events have brutally clarified, if the oligarchy is dead, then long live the oligarchy. While elected black officials protest impotently from the sidelines, <u>a largely white elite has wrested control over the debate</U> about how to rebuild the city. This de facto ruling krewe includes Jim Amoss, editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Pres Kabacoff, developer-gentrifier and local patron of the New Urbanism; Donald Bollinger, shipyard owner and prominent Bushite; James Reiss, real estate investor and chair of the Regional Transit Authority (i.e., the man responsible for the buses that didn't evacuate people); Alden McDonald Jr., CEO of one of the largest black-owned banks; Janet Howard of the Bureau of Government Research (originally established by Uptown elites to oppose the populism of Huey Long); and Scott Cowen, the aggressively ambitious president of Tulane University.

But the dominating figure and kingpin is Joseph Canizaro, a wealthy property developer who is a leading Bush supporter with close personal ties to the White House inner circle. He is also the power behind the throne of Mayor Nagin, a nominal Democrat (he supported Bush in 2000) who was elected in 2002 with 85 percent of the white vote. Finally, as the former president of the Urban Land Institute, Canizaro mobilizes the support of some of the nation's most powerful developers and prestigious master planners.

In a city where old money is often as reclusive as Anne Rice's vampires, Canizaro poses as a brave civic leader unafraid to speak bitter but necessary truths. As he told the Associated Press about the Katrina diaspora last October: "As a practical matter, these poor folks don't have the resources to go back to our city just like they didn't have the resources to get out of our city. So we won't get all those folks back. That's just a fact."

Indeed, it is a "fact" that Canizaro has helped shape into reigning dogma. The number of displaced residents returning to the city is obviously a highly variable function of the resources and opportunities provided for them, yet the rebuilding debate has been premised on suspicious projections--provided by the RAND Corporation and endlessly repeated by Nagin and Canizaro--that in three years the city would recover only half of its August 2005 population. Many Orleanians cynically wonder whether such projections aren't actually goals. For years Reiss, Kabacoff and others have complained that New Orleans has too many poor people. Faced with the dire fiscal consequences of white flight to the suburbs, as well as three decades of deindustrialization (which has given New Orleans an economic profile closer to Newark than to Houston or Atlanta), they argue that the city has become a soul-destroying warehouse for underemployed and poorly educated African-Americans, whose real interests--it is claimed--might be better served by a Greyhound ticket to another town.

Kabacoff's 2003 redevelopment of the St. Thomas public housing project as River Garden, a largely market-rate faux Creole subdivision, has become the prototype for the smaller, wealthier, whiter city that Mayor Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back commission (with Canizaro as head of the crucial urban planning committee) proposes to build. BNOB is perhaps the most important elite initiative in New Orleans since the famous "Cold Water Committee" (which included Kabacoff's father) mobilized in 1946 to overthrow the "Old Regulars" and elect reformer deLesseps Morrison as mayor. BNOB grew out of a notorious meeting between Mayor Nagin and New Orleans business leaders (dubbed by some "the forty thieves") that Reiss organized in Dallas twelve days after Katrina devastated the city. The summit excluded most of New Orleans's elected black representatives and, according to Reiss as characterized in the Wall Street Journal, focused on the opportunity to rebuild the city "with better services and fewer poor people."

Fears that a municipal coup d'etat was in progress were scarcely mollified when at the end of September the mayor charged BNOB with preparing a master plan to rebuild the city. Although the seventeen-member commission was racially balanced and included City Council president Oliver Thomas as well as jazz musician Wynton Marsalis (telecommuting from Manhattan), the real clout was exercised by committee chairs, especially Canizaro (urban planning), Cowen (education) and Howard (finance), who lunched privately with the mayor before the group's weekly meeting. This inner sanctum was reportedly necessary because the full-panel meetings did not allow a frank discussion of "tough issues of race and class."

BNOB might have quickly imploded but for a shrewd outflanking movement by Canizaro, who persuaded Nagin to invite the Urban Land Institute to work with the commission. Although the ULI is the self-interested national voice of corporate land developers, Nagin and Canizaro welcomed the delegation of developers, architects and ex-mayors as a heroic cavalry of expertise riding to the city's rescue. In a nutshell, the ULI's recommendations reframed the historic elite desire to shrink the city's socioeconomic footprint of black poverty (and black political power) as a crusade to reduce its physical footprint to contours commensurate with public safety and a fiscally viable urban infrastructure.

Upon these suspect premises, the outside "experts" (including representatives of some of the country's largest property firms and corporate architects) proposed an unprecedented triage of an American city, in which low-lying neighborhoods would be targeted for mass buyouts and future conversion into a greenbelt to protect New Orleans from flooding. As a visiting developer told BNOB: "Your housing is now a public resource. You can't think of it as private property anymore."

Keenly aware of inevitable popular resistance, the ULI also proposed a Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation, armed with eminent domain, that would bypass the City Council, as well as an oversight board with power over the city's finances. With control of New Orleans schools already usurped by the state, the ULI's proposed dictatorship of experts and elite appointees would effectively overthrow representative democracy and annul the right of local people to make decisions about their lives. For veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement, especially, it reeked of disenfranchisement pure and simple, a return to the paternalism of plantation days.

The City Council, supported by a surprising number of white homeowners and their representatives, angrily rejected the ULI plan. Mayor Nagin--truly a cat on a hot tin roof--danced anxiously back and forth between the two camps, disavowing abandonment of any area while at the same time warning that the city could not afford to service every neighborhood. But state and national officials, including HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, applauded the ULI scheme, as did the editorial page of the Times-Picayune and the influential Bureau of Government Research.

The BNOB recommendations presented by Canizaro in January faithfully hewed to the ULI framework: They included an appointed redevelopment corporation, outside the control of the City Council, that would act as a land bank to buy out heavily damaged homes and neighborhoods with federal funds, wielding eminent domain as needed to retire low-lying areas to greenbelt ("black people's neighborhoods into white people's parks," someone commented) or to assemble "in-fill" tracts for mixed-income development a la River Garden. Other committees recommended a radical diminution of the power of elected government.

On the crucial question of how to decide which neighborhoods would be allowed to rebuild and which would be bulldozed, BNOB endorsed the concept of forced buyouts but equivocated over process. Instead of the ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research wanted, Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube Goldberg-like temporary building moratorium in tandem with neighborhood planning meetings that would poll homeowners about their intentions. Only those neighborhoods where at least half of the pre-Katrina residents had made a committment to return would be considered serious candidates for Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) and other financial aid.

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a public audience on January 11. The mayor said, "I like the plan," and he complimented the commissioners for "a job well done." But most locals found little charm in the Canizaro report. "I will sit in my front door with my shotgun," one resident warned at a jammed meeting in the Council chambers on January 14, while another demanded, "Are we going to allow some developers, some hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab our homes, to make this a Disney World version of our homes, our lives?" Predictably, Nagin panicked and eventually disavowed the building moratorium. Soon afterward the White House torpedoed the Baker plan and left BNOB with only the state-controlled CDBG appropriation to finance its ambitious vision of New Orleans regrouped around a dozen new River Gardens linked by a high-speed light-rail line.

But Canizaro doesn't seem unduly worried. He has reassured supporters that the ULI/BNOB plan can go forward with CDBGs alone if necessary; in addition, he knows that independent of the local political weather, there are powerful external forces--lack of insurance coverage, new FEMA flood maps, refusal of lenders to refinance mortgages and so on--that can make permanent the exodus from redlined neighborhoods. Moreover, as anyone versed in the realpolitik of modern Louisiana knows, nothing is finally decided in New Orleans until some good ol' boys (and girls) in Baton Rouge have their say.


On the crucial question of how to decide which neighborhoods would be allowed to rebuild and which would be bulldozed, BNOB endorsed the concept of forced buyouts but equivocated over process. Instead of the ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research wanted, Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube Goldberg-like temporary building moratorium in tandem with neighborhood planning meetings that would poll homeowners about their intentions. Only those neighborhoods where at least half of the pre-Katrina residents had made a committment to return would be considered serious candidates for Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) and other financial aid.

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a public audience on January 11. The mayor said, "I like the plan," and he complimented the commissioners for "a job well done." But most locals found little charm in the Canizaro report. "I will sit in my front door with my shotgun," one resident warned at a jammed meeting in the Council chambers on January 14, while another demanded, "Are we going to allow some developers, some hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab our homes, to make this a Disney World version of our homes, our lives?" Predictably, Nagin panicked and eventually disavowed the building moratorium. Soon afterward the White House torpedoed the Baker plan and left BNOB with only the state-controlled CDBG appropriation to finance its ambitious vision of New Orleans regrouped around a dozen new River Gardens linked by a high-speed light-rail line.

But Canizaro doesn't seem unduly worried. He has reassured supporters that the ULI/BNOB plan can go forward with CDBGs alone if necessary; in addition, he knows that independent of the local political weather, there are powerful external forces--lack of insurance coverage, new FEMA flood maps, refusal of lenders to refinance mortgages and so on--that can make permanent the exodus from redlined neighborhoods. Moreover, as anyone versed in the realpolitik of modern Louisiana knows, nothing is finally decided in New Orleans until some good ol' boys (and girls) in Baton Rouge have their say.





Power Shift

Even before the last bloated body had been fished out of the fetid waters, conservative political analysts were writing gleeful obituaries for black Democratic power in Louisiana. "The Democrats' margin of victory," said Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation, is "living in the Astrodome in Houston." Thanks to the Army Corps's defective levees, the Republicans stand to gain another Senate seat, two Congressional seats and probably the governorship. The Democrats would also find it impossible to reproduce Bill Clinton's 1992 feat, when he carried Louisiana by almost exactly his margin of victory in New Orleans. With a ruthless psephologist like Karl Rove in the White House, it is inconceivable that such considerations haven't influenced the shameless Bush response to the city's distress.


New Orleans has always vied with Detroit when it comes to the violent antipathy of white-flight suburbs toward its black central city, so it is not surprising that representatives from Jefferson Parish (which elected Klan leader David Duke to the state legislature in 1989) and St. Tammany Parish have particularly relished the post-Katrina shift in metropolitan population and electoral power. Both parishes are in the midst of housing booms that may consolidate the hollowing out and decline of New Orleans.

For her part, Governor Blanco, a Democrat, has expressed little concern about this fundamental reconfiguration of Louisiana's major metropolitan area. Indeed, her immediate, Bush-like responses to Katrina were to help engineer a state takeover of New Orleans schools and to slash $500 million in state spending while sponsoring tax breaks (in the name of economic recovery) for oil companies awash in profits. The Legislative Black Caucus was outraged at Blanco's "complete lack of vision and leadership" and went to court to challenge her right to make cuts without consulting lawmakers. But Blanco, supported by rural conservatives and corporate lobbyists, remained intransigent, even openly hostile, to black Democrats whose support she had previously courted.

Poor people have no voice inside the Louisiana Recovery Authority, whose gaggle of university presidents and corporate types appointed by Blanco is even less beholden to black New Orleans voters and their representatives than the Canizaro krewe. The twenty-nine-member LRA board, dominated by representatives of big business, has only one trade unionist and not a single grassroots black representative. Moreover, in contrast to Nagin's commission, the LRA has the power to decide, not merely advise: It controls the allocation of the FEMA funds and CDBGs that Congress has provided for reconstruction.

According to interviews in the Times-Picayune, leading members of the LRA believe that the sheer force of economic disincentives will shrink the city around the contours proposed by the Urban Land Institute. The authority has thus refused to disburse any of its hazard mitigation funds to areas considered unsafe, and presumably will be equally hardheaded in the allocation of CDBG spending. At a special session of the legislature Governor Blanco emphasized that the state, not local government or neighborhood planning committees, will retain control over where grants and loans go.

But Blanco and the elites may have overlooked the Fats Domino factor.

'No Bulldozing!'

Like hundreds of other flood-damaged but structurally sound homes, Fats Domino's house wears a defiant sign: Save Our Neighborhood: No Bulldozing! The r&b icon, who has always stayed close to his roots in working-class Holy Cross, knows his riverside neighborhood and the rest of the Lower Ninth Ward are prime targets of the city-shrinkers. Indeed, on Christmas Day the Times-Picayune--declaring that "before a community can rebuild, it must dream"--published a vision of what a smaller-but-better New Orleans might look like: "Tourists and schoolchildren tour a living museum that includes the former home of Fats Domino and Holy Cross High School, a multiblock memorial to Katrina that spans the devastated neighborhood."

"Living museum" (or "holocaust museum," as a black friend bitterly observed) sounds like a bad joke, but it is the elite view of what African-American New Orleans should become. In the brave New Urbanist world of Canizaro and Kabacoff, blacks (along with that other colorful minority group, Cajuns) will reign only as entertainers and self-caricatures. The high-voltage energy that once rocked juke joints, housing projects and second-line parades will now be safely embalmed for tourists in a proposed Louisiana Music Experience in the Central Business District.

But this minstrel-show version of the future must first defeat a remarkable local history of grassroots organization. The Crescent City's best-kept secret--in the mainstream press, at least--has been the resurgence of trade-union and community organizing since the mid-1990s. Indeed, New Orleans, the only Southern city in which labor was ever powerful enough to call a general strike, has become an important crucible of new social movements. In particular, it has become the home base of ACORN, a national organization of working-class homeowners and tenants that counts more than 9,000 New Orleans member-families, mostly in triage-threatened black neighborhoods. ACORN's membership has been the engine behind the tumultuous, decade-long struggle to unionize downtown hotels as well as the successful 2002 referendum to legislate the nation's first municipal minimum wage (later overthrown by a right-wing state Supreme Court). Since Katrina, ACORN has emerged as the major opponent of the ULI/BNOB plan for shrinking the city. Its members find themselves again fighting many of the same elite figures who were opponents of hotel unionization and a living wage.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke scoffs at the RAND Corporation projections that portray most blacks abandoning the city. "Don't believe those phony figures," he told me over beignets at Cafe du Monde in January. "We have polled our displaced members in Houston and Atlanta. Folks overwhelmingly want to return. But they realize that this is a tough struggle, since we have to fight simultaneously on two fronts: to restore people's homes and to bring back their jobs. It is also a race against time. The challenge is, You make it, you take it. So our members are voting with their feet."

Not waiting for CDBGs, FEMA flood maps or permission from Canizaro, ACORN crews and volunteers from across the country are working night and day to repair the homes of 1,000 member-families in some of the most threatened areas. The strategy is to confront the city-shrinkers with the incontestable fact of reoccupied, viable neighborhood cores.

ACORN has allied with the AFL-CIO and the NAACP to defend worker rights and press for the hiring of locals in the recovery effort. Rathke points out that Katrina has become the pretext for the most vicious government-supported attack on unions since President Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers in 1981. "First, suspension of Davis-Bacon [federal prevailing wage law], then the state takeover of the schools and the destruction of the teachers' union, and now this." He points to a beat-up green garbage truck rattling by Jackson Square. "Trash collection in the French Quarter used to be a unionized city job, SEIU members. Now FEMA has contracted the work to a scab company from out of state. Is this what Bring New Orleans Back means?"

ACORN also went to court to insure that New Orleans's displaced, largely black population would have access to out-of-state polling places, especially in Atlanta and Houston, for the scheduled April 22 city elections. When a federal judge rejected the demand, ACORN organizer Stephen Bradberry said it's "so obvious that there's a concerted plan to make this a whiter city." The NAACP agrees, but the Justice Department denied its request to block an election that is likely to transfer power to the artificial white majority created by Katrina.

It would be inspiring to see in this latest battle of New Orleans the birth pangs of a new or renewed civil rights movement, but gritty local activism has yet to be echoed in meaningful solidarity by the labor movement, so-called progressive Democrats or even the Congressional Black Caucus. Pledges, press statements and occasional delegations, yes; but not the unfaltering national outrage and sense of urgency that should attend the attempted murder of New Orleans on the fortieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. In 1874, as historian Ted Tunnell has pointed out, the failure of Northern Radicals to launch a militant, armed riposte to the white insurrection in New Orleans helped to doom the first Reconstruction. Will our feeble response to Hurricane Katrina now lead to the rollback of the second?</font size>

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/davis

[Makeherhappy]

http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/v3c15-1.htm

[BUMBAY DA DOGG]

With whitey at the wheel we are surely headed for a crash and possible distruction!

[GET YOU HOT]

Cronyism

May 9, 2006

Through a partnership with a smaller, minority-owned company, a multinational firm with ties to the Federal Emergency Management Agency has landed four rebid deals that could be worth $400 million, federal records show. The Times-Picayune reports that the contracts were awarded to PRI/DJI, a joint venture between Del-Jen Industries and the Asian-American-owned PRI Inc., therefore qualifying under the terms of a federal program for disadvantaged businesses. However, Del-Jen is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fluor Corp., which held a mammoth FEMA disaster relief work contract that was up for rebidding when Katrina hit. FEMA then broke that contract up and awarded four $500 million deals for temporary housing work, but later agreed under pressure to rebid them. PRI/DJI’s success has angered competitors who say it’s outrageous that one partnership — especially one linked to the disaster relief giant — would win four of the 36 contracts awarded when no other company appears to have landed two. FEMA insists the process has been aboveboard.

SOURCE: http://www.publicintegrity.org/katrina/filter.aspx?cat=4

[GET YOU HOT]

OWNING THE WEATHER
45 MIN

<embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8262483364410309502" quality="best" bgcolor="#ffffff" scale="noScale" salign="TL" FlashVars="playerMode=embedded"> </embed>

[Makeherhappy]

I've made statements about weather control before, you should go back and research the clueless comments.

[Fuckallyall]

I've made statements about weather control before, you should go back and research the clueless comments.

We cannot own what we cannot even accurately predict. Cloud seeding is old and can only be done on a very small scale, the amount of microwaves we can put up is an infinitessimal amout compared to what the earth is exposed to from the sun, etc, etc.
But like I said over on the main board, have fn with your rantings.

[Makeherhappy]

We cannot own what we cannot even accurately predict. Cloud seeding is old and can only be done on a very small scale, the amount of microwaves we can put up is an infinitessimal amout compared to what the earth is exposed to from the sun, etc, etc.
But like I said over on the main board, have fn with your rantings.


:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Small scale, interesting. Have you seen the chem trails that blankett the sky. Any given day you can have a web pattern in the sky. Small scale, I doubt it. I just came back from ATL, sat next to an US Army Airborne dude. I ask him about that question of the chemtrails, since we were passing some in the air. Trust me, they are not small scale.

Again, you are thinking with a mind of what you have been taught by others. Again I say, you have no idea what type of power we have, so to say what you continue to say about the sun and the power is very irresponsible. Now, if you do have that Above Top Secret clearance to get that information, that's a different story. But since you are talking on this board like the rest of us, I doubt you do.

Think bigger than this small planet we are on. :smh:

[GET YOU HOT]

Were U.S. Government Saboteurs Involved In A Fatal Shootout With New Orleans Police Officers On Sept. 4 At The Danziger Bridge?

Conflicting news and police reports leave a host of questions to be answered about what really happened between police and suspected U.S. government agents.

11 Jan 2006
By Greg Szymanski


The Sept. 4 gun battle, first killing five and now two on the Danziger Bridge between what was first reported as New Orleans police and U.S. military agents, has turned into a hodge-podge of conflicting reports, misstatements or outright official lies.

An initial report by the Associated Press (AP) claimed five Department of Defense (DOD) personnel were killed by officers at the bridge located on the 5800 block of Chef Menteur Highway near Downman Rd.

The original AP report, however, has since been sanitized with the only copies of the original story kept for posterity at a United Kingdom paper at http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlate and a foreign internet service, La Voz de Aztlan, at http://www.aztlan.net/police_kill_f .

**But a quick check of both sites reveals The Guardian link has been deleted and Lo Voz had to provide through email today the original AP story after their link was also inaccessible.

The original AP story since taken down reads in part:

"NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge Sunday, killing five or six, a deputy chief said. A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims were contractors on their way to repair a canal.

"The contractors were walking across a bridge on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain to fix the 17th Street Canal, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Corps.

"Earlier Sunday, New Orleans Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said police shot at eight people, killing five or six.

"The shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge, which spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River."

But what now exists from AP is a changed version of the story, either indicating reporter error or more likely an intentional switch since no reference to the original story or even a correction remains.

Notice the huge difference of how the sanitized version of the AP story now reads, saying none of the contractors were killed:

"NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Police shot and killed at least five people Sunday after gunmen opened fire on a group of contractors traveling across a bridge on their way to make repairs, authorities said.

"Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said police shot at eight people carrying guns, killing five or six.

"Fourteen contractors were traveling across the Danziger Bridge under police escort when they came under fire, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers.

"They were on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain to help plug the breech in the 17th Street Canal, Hall said.

"None of the contractors was injured, Mike Rogers, a disaster relief coordinator with the Army Corps of Engineers, told reporters in Baton Rouge."

And before looking at the official New Orleans police report and public release of the incident, released Tuesday to the Arctic Beacon, serious questions have to be asked regarding what has turned out to be huge discrepancies in all the existing reports or fabrications of the incident.

First, who were the "military agents" originally reported killed while making their way to the 17th Street Canal levee break? What were they doing there and why did police open fire on federal personnel, as originally reported?

And even more sinister questions have been asked by La Voz after covering the story last September:

"No one is saying anything and it appears that the news story has now been swept under the rug. Were these US Department of Defense personnel a Special Forces group or Navy Seals with top secret orders to sabotaged the levee? There are verifiable reports that at least 100 New Orleans police officers have disappeared from the face of the earth and that two have committed suicide. Could these be policemen that died defending the levee against sabotage by "federal contractors?"

Further, why was it reported that it was necessary to shoot and kill five or six DOD personnel when now the following official report released by the New Orleans police indicates only two civilians were killed and no defense contractors injured.


What makes this even stranger is that for at least two months after the story was released no one was talking about the incident, as it was swept under the rug by AP and not followed up by any major news outlets.


Although reporters make errors, i is hard to believe professionals can make this big an error, as they first report five to six government personnel killed, which has now been reduced to only two civilians.

The following is the most up-to-date release by the New Orleans Police Department's Public Affairs Office, telling a completely different story than reported in the initial days of the shoot-out:

"New Orleans, La. --This morning members of the New Orleans Police Department issued an update regarding the attempted murder of a Deputy Sheriff with the St. Landry Parish Sheriff's Office, as well is seven members of the New Orleans Police Dept. The incident culminated into the shooting of six people, two of which were fatal. The ordeal occurred September 4, 2001, at approximately 9:00 a.m., on the Danziger Bridge, located in the 5800 block of Chef Menteur Highway near Downman Road.

"New Orleans Police Officers, Sergeant Robert Gisevius and Kenneth Bowen, along with Officers Robert Faulcon, Robert Barrios, AnthonyVillavaso, Michael Hunter and Ignatius Hills, all responded to a call for assistance, two officers 'down" under the Danziger Bridge.

"Simultaneously, Deputy Sheriff David Ryder of the St. I.andry Parish Sheriff's Office requested immediate help from the New Orleans Police Department because he and volunteer rescue personnel (with boats) were receiving gunfire from several persons on the same bridge.

"As the officers drove into the area they were met with gunfire from, at least four suspects at the base of the bridge. The officers positioned themselves and began an exchange of gunfire. The gunmen, along with three other persons, totaling seven, jumped over the side of the concrete barrier onto a walkway, approximately three feet high, and continued the exchange of gunfire, when five persons were shot by officers.

"They are believed to be New Orleans residents and identified as: an unidentified gunman who sustained a gunshot wound to his body and died cm die scene; 19 year-old gunman Jose Holmes who sustained gunshot wounds to his body and is listed in stable condition at nearby hospital; 44-year-old Leonard Bartholomew sustained gunshot wounds to his heel and head and has been released from the hospital; 39-year-old Susan Bartholomew sustained * gunshot wound to her right arm and leg and has been released from the hospital; 17- year-old Leisha Bartholomew was wounded in the abdomen and leg and was treated and released from the hospital.

"Forty-nine-year-old Lance Madison was one of the suspects who ran across the Danziger Bridge along with a second unidentified gunman Madison was seen discarding his handgun into the Industrial Canal. The second suspect continued running to a neaiby mote and was confronted by a New Orleans Police Officer. The suspect reached into his waist and turned toward the officer who fired one shot fatally wounding him. Lance Madison was apprehended a short time later in the same area by the Louisiana State Police.

"When Jose Holmes is released from the hospital, he will be arrested on eight counts of attempted murder of police officers, along with Lance Madison, Leonard Bartholomew, Susan Bartholomew and Leisha Bartholomew were not arrested pending further review as to their involvement; however, the District Attorney is being consulted.

"There is no confirmation that the families of the two decreased suspects were notified. Orleans Parish Coroner's chief investigator John Gagliano will release their names once the families are notified.

"There were separate reports to the police department of sniper fire in the same area. Members of the Louisiana State Police were assisting and were in the process of responding to those reports when the exchange of gunfire began."

For more informative articles, go to www.arcticbeacon.com

Editor's Note: CORRECTION. In the Jan 9, 2006, article about the possibility of the levees being blown, we inadvertently put in the 17th St. Canal levee when we meant the Industrial Canal. The change has been made an we apologize for the error.

Greg Szymanski

[GET YOU HOT]

INDICATIONS THE HURRICANE KATRINA DISASTER WAS PURPOSELY ALLOWED TO HAPPEN
Monday, January 30, 2006

http://fpidocument.blogspot.com/2006/01/indications-hurricane-katrina-disaster.html

[Fuckallyall]

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Small scale, interesting. Have you seen the chem trails that blankett the sky. Any given day you can have a web pattern in the sky. Small scale, I doubt it. I just came back from ATL, sat next to an US Army Airborne dude. I ask him about that question of the chemtrails, since we were passing some in the air. Trust me, they are not small scale.

Again, you are thinking with a mind of what you have been taught by others. Again I say, you have no idea what type of power we have, so to say what you continue to say about the sun and the power is very irresponsible. Now, if you do have that Above Top Secret clearance to get that information, that's a different story. But since you are talking on this board like the rest of us, I doubt you do.

Think bigger than this small planet we are on. :smh:

The opinion you express is totally illogical, but so is the thinking of most conspiricy theorists.

The "chemtrails" you talk of are no more than exhaust from airplanes. The reason they have become a problem is that air in the Stratosphere moves at a much more stable speed (which makes it take longer to dissapate) & that Stratosheric air does not mingle that much with air from the lower levels of the atmosphere (which make it take longer to come out of the sky). What you are talking about once again is cloud seeding, which is old old news. And speaking to an airborne ranger is not by itself anything. Because if he has his Super-Duper clearance, he aint telling you shit.

And where is your Super-dee-dupper clearance that makes you sooooooo sure your rantings have merit ? I actually do have a Top Secret clearance (SCI) with a few endorsements. That is one of the reasons I don't believe the bullshit you and the other fanticy folks spit from keyboards.

And to call me irresponsible is sheer lunacy when you so often go off on tangents with nothing but your mistrust and paranoia to fuel you !

Also, where are your "original" thoughts. You are doing the exact same thing I and most others do. You observe the research you have done and drawn your own conclusions. To criticize me for what you do as well makes you emotional at best and hypocritical at worst.

Anyway, exhaust has nothing to do with radiation, so unlike you and the Aluminum-Foil-Around-The-Baseball helmet crew, I'm going to go back on topic. Try to follow:

According to what you posted, the microwave arrays that make up HAARP put out 3600 kW. In comparison, the amount of energy the sun puts out is 41,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 kW. The amount the energy the earth gets hit with is 6 THOUSAND TIMES ALL OF THE ENERGY MANKIND HAS PRODUCED !!!. I have read the works of several authors who propose to control the weather. And while I admire thier thinking, we are several quantum leaps away from even trying this bullshit.

Holla back when you get some facts. I don't often disprove negatives.

[GET YOU HOT]

Weather control/chem trails have been used and documentation of its use is available...since the 70s and maybe before. It's when things go awray and "they" can't fully contol their manipulation of mother nature that we see enormous amounts of disasters, like last year.

HAARP PATENT OWNER SAYS THEY HAVE ABILITY TO CONTROL THE WEATHER...http://fpiarticle.blogspot.com/2006/01/haarp-patent-owner-says-haarp-has.html

Blacked out area close to HAARP area map
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3642/353/400/haarp-blackout.jpg

http://freepressinternational.com/gallery/nfpicturepro/albums/userpics/10001/normal_storm4.jpg

http://freepressinternational.com/gallery/nfpicturepro/albums/userpics/10001/weather-1.jpg

[GET YOU HOT]

<IFRAME SRC="http://en.chinabroadcast.cn/811/2006/05/07/421@85556.htm" WIDTH=780 HEIGHT=1500>
<A HREF="http://en.chinabroadcast.cn/811/2006/05/07/421@85556.htm">link</A>

</IFRAME>

[GET YOU HOT]

http://freepressinternational.com/gallery/nfpicturepro/albums/userpics/10001/normal_clouds_aguirre.jpg

[GET YOU HOT]

The "chemtrails" you talk of are no more than exhaust from airplanes. The reason they have become a problem is that air in the Stratosphere moves at a much more stable speed (which makes it take longer to dissapate) & that Stratosheric air does not mingle that much with air from the lower levels of the atmosphere (which make it take longer to come out of the sky). What you are talking about once again is cloud seeding, which is old old news. And speaking to an airborne ranger is not by itself anything. Because if he has his Super-Duper clearance, he aint telling you shit.


http://www.freepressinternational.com/wc.html

[Makeherhappy]

The opinion you express is totally illogical, but so is the thinking of most conspiricy theorists.

The "chemtrails" you talk of are no more than exhaust from airplanes. The reason they have become a problem is that air in the Stratosphere moves at a much more stable speed (which makes it take longer to dissapate) & that Stratosheric air does not mingle that much with air from the lower levels of the atmosphere (which make it take longer to come out of the sky). What you are talking about once again is cloud seeding, which is old old news. And speaking to an airborne ranger is not by itself anything. Because if he has his Super-Duper clearance, he aint telling you shit.

And where is your Super-dee-dupper clearance that makes you sooooooo sure your rantings have merit ? I actually do have a Top Secret clearance (SCI) with a few endorsements. That is one of the reasons I don't believe the bullshit you and the other fanticy folks spit from keyboards.

And to call me irresponsible is sheer lunacy when you so often go off on tangents with nothing but your mistrust and paranoia to fuel you !

Also, where are your "original" thoughts. You are doing the exact same thing I and most others do. You observe the research you have done and drawn your own conclusions. To criticize me for what you do as well makes you emotional at best and hypocritical at worst.

Anyway, exhaust has nothing to do with radiation, so unlike you and the Aluminum-Foil-Around-The-Baseball helmet crew, I'm going to go back on topic. Try to follow:

According to what you posted, the microwave arrays that make up HAARP put out 3600 kW. In comparison, the amount of energy the sun puts out is 41,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 kW. The amount the energy the earth gets hit with is 6 THOUSAND TIMES ALL OF THE ENERGY MANKIND HAS PRODUCED !!!. I have read the works of several authors who propose to control the weather. And while I admire thier thinking, we are several quantum leaps away from even trying this bullshit.

Holla back when you get some facts. I don't often disprove negatives.

It has been researched over and over, but you still say they don't have the technology. YOU ARE IN A SMALL WORLD. A person with a supposed Top Secret clearance, would think a lot larger, than you are thinking.

So I understand, we also designed stealth technology?


:smh: :smh: :smh:

[Fuckallyall]

It has been researched over and over, but you still say they don't have the technology. YOU ARE IN A SMALL WORLD. A person with a supposed Top Secret clearance, would think a lot larger, than you are thinking.

So I understand, we also designed stealth technology?


:smh: :smh: :smh:
By this (il)logic, we also have:
Faster than light transport,
A perpetual motion machine,
The ability to stop aging, cure all cancer, etc.

Research does not always translate into new technology. Shit, sometimes it shows us how far away we actually are from solving a problem.

And as for stealth technology;

A: the concept and some ability, has been around since the early 50's (a russian aerospace engineer wrote the first paper on it)

B: the first sealthy airplane was actually the SR-71 Blackbird in 1963 (I think). And that was a byproduct of it's design, not a desire of design

C: All stealth does is evade a piece of equipment, not alter nature. Don't confuse the two.

And stop with the bullshit pseudo-psychoanalysis. Just because I don't go along with your crackpot theories, doesn't mean I don't think. I was the first person to post shit about bio-diesel on this board, as well as mention that the diesel engine was meant to run on non-petroleum fuels. That was couple of sites ago. You make the very common and mainstream mistake by equating a lack of agreement with a lack of understanding. Especially when I base my opinions on verifiable fact and you base yours on half truths, theory and advertizing.

[Makeherhappy]

By this (il)logic, we also have:
Faster than light transport,
A perpetual motion machine,
The ability to stop aging, cure all cancer, etc.

Research does not always translate into new technology. Shit, sometimes it shows us how far away we actually are from solving a problem.

And as for stealth technology;

A: the concept and some ability, has been around since the early 50's (a russian aerospace engineer wrote the first paper on it)

B: the first sealthy airplane was actually the SR-71 Blackbird in 1963 (I think). And that was a byproduct of it's design, not a desire of design

C: All stealth does is evade a piece of equipment, not alter nature. Don't confuse the two.

And stop with the bullshit pseudo-psychoanalysis. Just because I don't go along with your crackpot theories, doesn't mean I don't think. I was the first person to post shit about bio-diesel on this board, as well as mention that the diesel engine was meant to run on non-petroleum fuels. That was couple of sites ago. You make the very common and mainstream mistake by equating a lack of agreement with a lack of understanding. Especially when I base my opinions on verifiable fact and you base yours on half truths, theory and advertizing.


Your answer has summed up everything. I posed the question about stealth technology to see your answer.

YOU ARE A DISINFORMER!!!

[Fuckallyall]

Your answer has summed up everything. I posed the question about stealth technology to see your answer.

YOU ARE A DISINFORMER!!!
Actually I try to be a dis-disinformer. Don't get mad, get educated.

[Makeherhappy]

Actually I try to be a dis-disinformer. Don't get mad, get educated.

:smh: :smh: :smh: :smh: :smh:

[GET YOU HOT]

F.Y.I. THE LAST LINE OF THE BILL'S STATUS:

Status: Unfavorable Executive Comment Received from DOD. (DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE)

DOCUMENT:

Space Preservation Act of 2001 (Introduced in House)

HR 2977 IH


107th CONGRESS

1st Session

H. R. 2977
To preserve the cooperative, peaceful uses of space for the benefit of all humankind by permanently prohibiting the basing of weapons in space by the United States, and to require the President to take action to adopt and implement a world treaty banning space-based weapons.


IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

October 2, 2001


(III) by expelling chemical or biological agents in the vicinity of a person.

(B) Such terms include exotic weapons systems such as--

(i) electronic, psychotronic, or information weapons;

(ii) chemtrails;

(iii) high altitude ultra low frequency weapons systems;

(iv) plasma, electromagnetic, sonic, or ultrasonic weapons;

(v) laser weapons systems;

(vi) strategic, theater, tactical, or extraterrestrial weapons; and

(vii) chemical, biological, environmental, climate, or tectonic weapons.

(C) The term `exotic weapons systems' includes weapons designed to damage space or natural ecosystems (such as the ionosphere and upper atmosphere) or climate, weather, and tectonic systems with the purpose of inducing damage or destruction upon a target population or region on earth or in space.


STATUS:
H.R.2977
Title: To preserve the cooperative, peaceful uses of space for the benefit of all humankind by permanently prohibiting the basing of weapons in space by the United States, and to require the President to take action to adopt and implement a world treaty banning space-based weapons.

Sponsor: Rep Kucinich, Dennis J. [OH-10] (introduced 10/2/2001) Cosponsors (None)

Latest Major Action: 4/19/2002 House committee/subcommittee actions.

Status: Unfavorable Executive Comment Received from DOD.



SOURCE: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?c107:chemtrails

[GET YOU HOT]

9th Ward

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[GET YOU HOT]

Ok, now i have read the thread fuckyou tried to associate me with, Chinese Marfia cause Hurricane Katrina, so funny i had never read it or seen it before today, ill stick to my theory :hmm:

[the_ghost917]

w o w

[QueEx]

Bumped on 2nd Anniversary

[orange roughy]

Bumped on 2nd Anniversary
man, I forgot about this post. I think it went awry from the original intent, but lots of good discussions since.

I spoke with a firend here in Detroit, which is under the federal order regarding the DEtroit Police, and there was a similar order in NOLA at the time. I don't think the gov't necessarily had something to do with the Hurricane, but used it as a cover to "clean up" some of what they perceived as corrupt folks. Unfortunately the NOLA police might ahve been better prepared and ready for 'em.

Hae not looked into this for a while, will try to beat this drum again soon...

OR :hmm:

[GET YOU HOT]

Blackwater Operations in New Orleans...:hmm:

[Crank_It_Up]

Katakana must be right, he uses the largest fonts

After I retired from the FBI, I've been having trouble with my guilty conscious. Now I realize I shouldn't have helped the CIA smuggle all that coke into the country to destroy all non-whites. I guess I shouldn't have blown up the towers to get the insurance money, or rigged the computers to elect Bush, or bribed all those state officials to use blacktop instead of concrete (it's a white thing, we just love to walk on blacktop), but you probably never heard of that conspiracy, but now you have. If you don't believe me I'll just keep posting it in a larger font until you do.

It all started back in elementary school, we were given mind altering drugs that had been slipped into the cafeteria food. It made us hate blacks. Later, we were recruited by the government to help them implement their schemes to keep the black man down.

But after reading Katakana's posts, I just can't keep silent any longer. Forgive me Katakana, the devil made me do it.

[GET YOU HOT]

^^ENGORGED^^

we all make mistakes, yet not all learn from them,
everyone lies, everyone makes bad disicions,
you have to learn from them, and deal with your decisions,
thats such an important skill you have to have in life,
because people who don't have that all ways make the same mistake over, and over again,
it's for the worlds own good.
and the ones who always falter,
are the ones looked down upon by the rest,
the ones who make nothing of themselves,
the ones who will never prevail and live life to the fullest.

I wish we would all learn from the past,
everything about it, maybe then life would be more filling,
everyone would deal with shit,
learn from it and become bigger stronger independent people.

lets start a chain.
ready, go.

Posted by mowwy at 7:00 PM

[orange roughy]

what's been going on with the new governor and how's the reconstruction going for black folks?

[Imhotep]

damn.............

[Duece]

what's been going on with the new governor and how's the reconstruction going for black folks?

Jindal is a bitch and the recovery is still at a slow pace.

[QueEx]

Jindal is a bitch and the recovery is still at a slow pace.

Both reasons should be motivation enough for Black New Orleanians to beat down the doors to the polling places, at the very next election.

[Duece]

Both reasons should be motivation enough for Black New Orleanians to beat down the doors to the polling places, at the very next election.


Damn Right!
Right now in the race for District Attorney we have 4 whites and 1 black, which shows a sign of change.

The 2010 is probably gonna bring about change in New Orleans that hasn't been seen since the Feds forced the city to Americanize in the mid 1800s. Oliver Thomas is in jail, I can't see anybody black running and having a good chance of winning besides maybe Cynthia Willard-Lewis but she went head to head with old ass Jackie Clarkson and lost the race for the City Council at Large seat...Only white man I might vote for is Mitch Landrieu and as I've been reminded multiple times Mitch and Mary ain't Moon. The shit is gonna pick up next summer. We are still 3 years away.

[QueEx]

Deuce,

Before you can get decent "Black" candidates in New Orleans, don't you somehow have to come to grips with the fact that, before Katrina, Black officeholders were largely inadequate ??? I knew many of them; some I would call friends or distant friends -- but if you look at N.O., before Katrina it was apparent: the problems were huge; poverty serious as hell, Blacks occupied the low ground; it was NO SECRET that the levees were problematic; and, that Black politicians in power before the storm did little but maintain the status quo.

Now, I love New Orleans like no other city in the U.S., but it didn't take rocket scientist to look around and see, beneath the history, beneath the near 24 hour frivolity of the Vue Carre, N.O., was crumbling. Some of the worse streets I've seen were in New Orleans - the front-end alignment shops should have all made a killing; Blacks were too heavily concentrated in low-end service jobs; and with so much poverty, you just had to know that trying to get people to safety in an impending emergency was going to be disastrous.

I started to say these things earlier, but I scratched about 10 replies. I know and understand your pain. What has happened in New Orleans is shameful. But, Bush's debacle and the National government's response aside, looking back 3 years in the aftermath, the absence of aforethought by those in power BEFORE Katrina, is atrocious -- and a great deal of those IN POWER before Katrina, wuz us.

QueEx

P.S.

Please accept my apologies if I sounded insulting. I didn't mean it. Angry, perhaps.
You brought up the issue of white people changing; I just thought, hell, many of
the problems I saw had to do with Black people not handling Black people's business.

[Duece]

Deuce,

Before you can get decent "Black" candidates in New Orleans, don't you somehow have to come to grips with the fact that, before Katrina, Black officeholders were largely inadequate ??? I knew many of them; some I would call friends or distant friends -- but if you look at N.O., before Katrina it was apparent: the problems were huge; poverty serious as hell, Blacks occupied the low ground; it was NO SECRET that the levees were problematic; and, that Black politicians in power before the storm did little but maintain the status quo.

Now, I love New Orleans like no other city in the U.S., but it didn't take rocket scientist to look around and see, beneath the history, beneath the near 24 hour frivolity of the Vue Carre, N.O., was crumbling. Some of the worse streets I've seen were in New Orleans - the front-end alignment shops should have all made a killing; Blacks were too heavily concentrated in low-end service jobs; and with so much poverty, you just had to know that trying to get people to safety in an impending emergency was going to be disastrous.

I started to say these things earlier, but I scratched about 10 replies. I know and understand your pain. What has happened in New Orleans is shameful. But, Bush's debacle and the National government's response aside, looking back 3 years in the aftermath, the absence of aforethought by those in power BEFORE Katrina, is atrocious -- and a great deal of those IN POWER before Katrina, wuz us.

QueEx

P.S.

Please accept my apologies if I sounded insulting. I didn't mean it. Angry, perhaps.
You brought up the issue of white people changing; I just thought, hell, many of
the problems I saw had to do with Black people not handling Black people's business.


There is no reason to apologize because what you say echos what black New Orleans talk about and feel on a daily basis. Our leadership is fucked up, we really can't trust our black elected officials to have our best interests in mind, unless their conscience takes over or enough people make a fuss, the flip side is white people in New Orleans who don't understand that so goes the black community in New Orleans, so goes the entire city.

Stacy Head took offense to Jerome Smith's allegations that an incident would've been handled differently had it happened near the Jewish Community Center as opposed to the Treme Community Center and then in a form of revenge she sends an email to her fellow city council members (excluding Cynthia Willard-Lewis) urging them to cut off funding to the Treme Community Center which in the end hurts the children black children at that.

That right there is an example of why despite all of the bullshit, we stick with our black elected officials....there are no Moon Landrieu's around but likewise there are no Dutch Morial's or Dorothy Mae Taylor's and others.

The status quo thing is right, I mean after Katrina, Atlanta and Houston exposed the hell out of our kids, if we had better educated kids then it wouldn't be this testy feeling around town wondering that if in 2010 that all the powers would shift. Educated kids would be know to get involved in the electoral processs. Then when it comes to our children, so many of them don't have fathers, that they don't listen to anybody they confuse respect for fear and that keeps a cycle of violence in the city. Most of the crime is committed by young people that live the life. We have no street gangs because young people don't listen.

One person said you want to train a young boy (who has no father figure) in how to be atleast a productive man you damn near have to start mentoring him as soon as he stops breast feeding. Our daughters have piss-poor images of men and love and then they do things that make them become lost. You add that with a very subpar educational system that turns out people only qualified to move furniture, clean toilets and make babies who repeat the cycle.

This goes back to elected officals who have failed us and thats black and white.

I've come grips that our black elected officals have no balls, or ovaries. New Orleans is nothing without it's black community, but like everything else in the city, it gets whored out.
Yes alot of white people in New Orleans are racists
Yes the rest of Louisiana hates New Orleans despite the fact that we are the state's economic engine.
Yes the governer acts like blacks don't exist.

But still there is power in numbers, that same numbers that 30 years earlier put Dutch Morial in office, if people would stop worrying about themselves then New Orleans would stop bleeding. But the mindset is I'ma get mine and then we all have a red face, when New Orleans is butt of jokes by everybody from Claudia Jordan to Aaron MrGruder.

All these factors is why people love the city but leave the city. New Orleans was sending Blacks to Atlanta long before the ATL became the "it" spot for upwardly mobile blacks and blacks seeking an easier less expensive lifestyle. It wouldn't suprise me if atleast 20% of ATL's pop has New Orleans roots. (not including evacuees)....

It's alot of work that needs to be done and I'm willing to stand behind anybody that has best interests of city and its people in mind black or white. But I'm if its a choice of poison I'm gonna pick the black candiate and hope his or her conscience will atleast come into play at some point.

sorry about the longwindedness. But today in New Orleans it's been a hot day and I dont mean temperature wise. But in essence it was just more of the same, whites and blacks scratching at each other..


Also Que check out this radio station www.wbok1230am.com and check out Paul Beaulieu and John Slade between 3 and 6cst Monday thru Friday. Beaulieu is straight forward is very deep, Slade is too but Beaulieu is a powerhouse very respected person around New Orleans.

[QueEx]

There is no reason to apologize because what you say echos what black New Orleans talk about and feel on a daily basis. Our leadership is fucked up, we really can't trust our black elected officials to have our best interests in mind, unless their conscience takes over or enough people make a fuss,
Tell you what Bro, I'm convinced that a good 70% (if not more) of the ineffectiveness of Black politicians is directly related to the Black Electorate (the people who elect them). I don't know about up nawth, but here in the south it seems to me that once our community votes a brother or sister into office; that person is virtually assured of staying there unless he/she is convicted of a crime, decides to run for a different office, or dies -- because Black voters tend to return Black incumbents to office, without regard to what, if anything, the candidate has actually done. That, in my opinion, is a major cause of ineffectiveness because we tend not to hold them accountable.

I have also to mention that the Black Electorate also tends to be uneducated (not necessarily a lack of schooling, but of awareness) of what issues are really affecting them and which issues people tell them are affecting them. If we knew the difference, a lot of candidates probably wouldn't get elected or at least a lot more would start paying attention because they know the electorate knows the damn difference.

. . . the flip side is white people in New Orleans who don't understand that so goes the black community in New Orleans, so goes the entire city.
I agree with you that the Black community is important to New Orleans and in a lot of ways determines "how goes" New Orleans. But, therein lies one of the biggest problems I have with Nawlins. White people understand Black & New Orleans a helluva lot better. White people market the hell out of our history in N.O., and make big ass money in the process. On the other hand, I see brothers and sisters in N.O., not owning or operating those engines of commerce but just being the spokes in the wheel. That is, I see us steppin, fetchin and playin great jazz (and I am not using steppin and fetchin in a derogatory manner) and we do all sorts of service oriented jobs -- but I rarely see ownership. Some might say, so what; its like that damn near everywhere. Maybe; but Black New Orleanians owns the damn history; and it is within their power to market it and benefit from it.

Stacy Head took offense to Jerome Smith's allegations that an incident would've been handled differently had it happened near the Jewish Community Center as opposed to the Treme Community Center and then in a form of revenge she sends an email to her fellow city council members (excluding Cynthia Willard-Lewis) urging them to cut off funding to the Treme Community Center which in the end hurts the children black children at that.
Hell, LOL, we do a lot of cutting off our noses to spite our face.

One person said you want to train a young boy (who has no father figure) in how to be atleast a productive man you damn near have to start mentoring him as soon as he stops breast feeding. Our daughters have piss-poor images of men and love and then they do things that make them become lost. You add that with a very subpar educational system that turns out people only qualified to move furniture, clean toilets and make babies who repeat the cycle.
Yeah. sad. But as you said:

This goes back to elected officals who have failed us and thats black and white.

Yes alot of white people in New Orleans are racists
Yeah, but if we ever admitted it, a lot of us are racist, as well. Now that we've established equality of hate, who really gives a shit? We don't need their love; we just need to be treated fairly and we need to be fairly ready and prepared to take advantage of every opportunity. The better we do the more love (opportunity) that we can provide and give to us. So, instead of worrying about whether 'they' love us, I'm really concerned about how much love we have, for each other.

I think when we worry about if 'they' love us; its like we want them to give us something. I'm like James Brown on this one: I don't want nobody to give me shit, just open up the damn door, I'll take it myself. R.I.P.

So, just treat us fairly (because even if fairness ain't really fair; we can take less than fair and do wonders) and let us stay on the ready to move on it every time.

Yes the rest of Louisiana hates New Orleans despite the fact that we are the state's economic engine.
Of course it does; it doesn't share history in the same way that N.O. does.

Yes the governer acts like blacks don't exist.
I didn't follow Jindal's election that closely. I was then and I am now surprised that someone with his 'Indian' background was elected. I'm not mad at Jindal, but I am disappointed that Black people are not having the success in that manner. Maybe we need to study his example ???

All these factors is why people love the city but leave the city. New Orleans was sending Blacks to Atlanta long before the ATL became the "it" spot for upwardly mobile blacks and blacks seeking an easier less expensive lifestyle. It wouldn't suprise me if atleast 20% of ATL's pop has New Orleans roots. (not including evacuees)....
Bro, I started a thread on this board shortly after Katrina wherein I stated that Black New Orleanians would return to N.O. because of their love for the City. Another poster (Greed) stated that would probably not be the case because once a lot of the evacuees got to experience a little better life outside of N.O., they probably wouldn't be returning. It seems, he was right.

It's alot of work that needs to be done and I'm willing to stand behind anybody that has best interests of city and its people in mind black or white. But I'm if its a choice of poison I'm gonna pick the black candiate and hope his or her conscience will atleast come into play at some point.
and, I endorse those comments.

sorry about the longwindedness. But today in New Orleans it's been a hot day and I dont mean temperature wise. But in essence it was just more of the same, whites and blacks scratching at each other..
I keep telling people: Colin does not exist on this board. As you can probably tell, I read it all. LOL


Also Que check out this radio station www.wbok1230am.com and check out Paul Beaulieu and John Slade between 3 and 6cst Monday thru Friday. Beaulieu is straight forward is very deep, Slade is too but Beaulieu is a powerhouse very respected person around New Orleans.

Thanks, I will. Many times when I'm on the road I tune in to WWL to get an interesting, though different, view of New Orleans.


Peace,

QueEx

[Duece]

Tell you what Bro, I'm convinced that a good 70% (if not more) of the ineffectiveness of Black politicians is directly related to the Black Electorate (the people who elect them). I don't know about up nawth, but here in the south it seems to me that once our community votes a brother or sister into office; that person is virtually assured of staying there unless he/she is convicted of a crime, decides to run for a different office, or dies -- because Black voters tend to return Black incumbents to office, without regard to what, if anything, the candidate has actually done. That, in my opinion, is a major cause of ineffectiveness because we tend not to hold them accountable.

I have also to mention that the Black Electorate also tends to be uneducated (not necessarily a lack of schooling, but of awareness) of what issues are really affecting them and which issues people tell them are affecting them. If we knew the difference, a lot of candidates probably wouldn't get elected or at least a lot more would start paying attention because they know the electorate knows the damn difference.

Everything you said is exactly right and yes people in New Orleans do get stuck on familiar politicans, which fucks the Black community in the ass because when we constantly support ineffective politicians and corrupt politicians it give people like Jim Letten reason to go after damn near every black politician.

Whites are still trynna whiten this city up. After the storm they wanted to turn black neighborhoods into greenspace, take Dutch Morial's name of the Convention Center, close public housing leaving the poor with no place to go (the BGOL "Trynna sound smart crowd" flipped this as "nigga fighting to stay in the projects" ), forcing people out of FEMA trailors when they have no Road Home grant money yet. The list goes on. Now while we can't do shit about how the Stacy Heads, Shelly Miduras and Bobby Jindalls of the world think, but we can go and make our message heard. Hell only 26% of Blacks voted in the last Gubernatoral election, so Bobby Jindal takes office and basically it's like we are not even here. But another situation that black voters run into is the face that alot of times it feels like we are voting for the lessor of 2 evils.


Take a look at this example, Bill Jefferson is the current Congressman of Lousiana's 2nd Congressional district which is 66% black... People may not want to vote for Jefferson in light of his personal problems but then again the rest of the candidates are people who'll swing the vote to Jefferson for the simple fact that, they don't wont those people in office. Basically its like what Harry Lee said getting pissed at what Karen Carter said in When the Levees Broke. "I'm not supporting Jefferson, I just don't want Carter to win". Alot of people black and white have that attitude.


Cedric Richmond is young (34), but his youth works against him because people feel we need Jefferson's seniority in these times. He also a decent bit of expirence being that he has been in Baton Rouge since age 25. I feel like I could vote for him.

James Carter is a current New Orleans City council member who like Richmond is young (39). But this dude just got elected in 2006, he aint ready for Congress. To me it seems like he's in this for himself. Plus he's backed by Stacy Head (the same person who threatened to cut off funding to Tambourine and Fan to spite Jermone Smith.) and people have accused him of being weak .

Byron Lee is from Jefferson Parish, people well not vote for him because of that. I dont know much about him, except he's endorsed by Sheriff Newell Norman (Harry Lee's successor and probably his doppelganger)

Troy Carter is a former New Orleans city council member and candiate in the 2002 Mayoral election, alot of people feels he flip flops too much and has too much personal ambition, people said that in 2002

Helena Moreno is a former WDSU anchor at 30 she is the youngest and she also Latina, being born in Mexico. People will not vote for her for that above all. Me personally, a 30 year old former anchor is not ready for congress and honestly I since I live in the 2nd District and is apart of the 66% I'm not supporting her at all.

It goes back to that pick your poison thing, We need Jefferson's seniority because you don't put a 17 year old rookie on the mound against David Ortiz in the last inning of the World Series and that's what this whole post-Katrina situation is.


I agree with you that the Black community is important to New Orleans and in a lot of ways determines "how goes" New Orleans. But, therein lies one of the biggest problems I have with Nawlins. White people understand Black & New Orleans a helluva lot better. White people market the hell out of our history in N.O., and make big ass money in the process. On the other hand, I see brothers and sisters in N.O., not owning or operating those engines of commerce but just being the spokes in the wheel. That is, I see us steppin, fetchin and playin great jazz (and I am not using steppin and fetchin in a derogatory manner) and we do all sorts of service oriented jobs -- but I rarely see ownership. Some might say, so what; its like that damn near everywhere. Maybe; but Black New Orleanians owns the damn history; and it is within their power to market it and benefit from it.

It's alot of things that mixed up to cause that, in years past even during the Seperate but Equal era New Orleans had integrated neighborhoods, now obviously the Black community of New Orleans from reconstruction to the early 1950s was alot lighter (pun intended) than it is today and that probably made life for a Black New Orleanian alittle bit easier than our fellow southern bretheren and thus made white folks more tolerant of us than they'd normally be.

I've heard alot of old Creoles actually praise segregation and have disdain for integration because during those times it seemed Black New Orleanians were better. I'm sure you've driven down Claiborne Ave. from St. Bernard Ave. to Orleans Av. and then to Canal st. Before they put the I-10 down Claiborne Ave. that was the Black business district of New Orleans. Funeral homes, nightclubs, schools, Circle food store and there were trees where I-10 is now. Basically it was a beautiful place to be and money flowed thru the black community.

Hit the 1940s and 1950s things began to change, New Orleans was an attractive place to be, so alot of Blacks from the country and other southern cities started to come and needless to say they were held in every low regard, they were thought of as dumb, they took lower wages, so they took away jobs that working class black creoles and non-creole blacks had and survived off, they spoke with country accept as opposed to the Yat speak and yes they were darker hued and that worked against them in a variety of ways.

This caused a divide that had exist to be come more apparent it also caused a surge in Black New Orleanians (creoles and non-creoles) and heading to Los Angeles (and eventually Atlanta) where many remain to this day especially if they didn't have the means to go to Xavier or Dillard or Southern and get more education began to buck the system and work towards gaining black political power which didn't come till the 70s.

When we got political power in the 1970s. Some of the good points of the pre-modern New Orleans black community had died off because people became disillusioned with bullshit. Plus on top of that when schools integrated, white folks fled to Jefferson parish. Because the creoles (the ones whites could partly tolerate) were still primarily going to St. Aug, McD#35, Xavier Prep, St. Mary's, while very few were bratching out and going to Warren Easton and John F. Kennedy and other newly integrated schools, white folk saw this and then fled to Jefferson, St. Bernard the North Shore, Slidell and other once rural places and left the New Orleans public school sytem in shambles and without much adequate funding. Plus if you really wanna talk about funding, how much of that funding in then then all white schools got kicked over to the Italian Mafia which had a hand in this city's pockets since 1935 but that's not in the history books.

By the time the NOPS took the shape that it pretty much has now, it was in sorta kinda shitty condition and these substandard schools turned out people who are only educated enough to fuck and clean toilets add the 1980s Oil boom, the crack era, the violence of the 90s and you have a bad bad bad mix.

Brain drain sent educated blacks to Atlanta, which means people had nobody to look up to, young men couldn't learn trades (expect the drug trade). Girls had terrible or no father figures so they looked for a mans love and love to a 17 year old boy love is in his penis. Penis plus vagina equals babies and the culture of not enough. Not enough money, not enough hours for work, not enough of nothing. You got so many people on the bottom, that everybody is fighting to get up. Thats why streetgangs don't exist here, nobody never had anybody to guide them as a child, by the time their balls drop or they start getting hips, ass and breasts, they dont listen to anybody, because they're "Grown", when infact they are immature as hell. Que when you look at that, its completely understandable why the fuck Blacks don't own shit.

We should own every-damn-thing in that French Quarter. From the resturaunts, to the night clubs, to the strip clubs and hotels. They come to see us, not Emeril. Our culture is homegrown and its for us above all we just invite people to come enjoy it with us.

Shit white folks get more excited for Bayou Classic and Essence than we do. But both of us have said, The blacks have got to wisen up to our Elected officals, because if all they are only concerned with lining their pockets or just collecting a check and phoning it in, we all lose. But it goes alittle to that history lesson I just gave. Key work: Divisions. it's too many divisions that still exist. Religion, Location, skin tone, heritage and other things and very few times it comes down to oppinion because basicly the upper class creole boy in New Orleans East, the working class dude in the 9th Ward and the Walgreen's service clerk from the Iberville Projects really wants the samething most of the time. We can't afford to divide but we do it and we fuck ourselves.

Hell, LOL, we do a lot of cutting off our noses to spite our face.Co-sign, Whites like her and Shelly Midura talk about bringing this city together but they do more to divide it themselves. Thats more reason for blacks to not divide. Shelly Midura is the one who called for Eddie Jordan to resign, but in the 90s when I had to jump on the floor because of gun shots or come inside at 4pm, or when New Orleans had a murder percapita rate of 88/100,00 nobody called for Harry Connick to resign then. I shouldn't being pointing this out to you, a black Politician should've pointed that out to Midura when she wrote that letter asking him to resign.

Yeah, but if we ever admitted it, a lot of us are racist, as well. Now that we've established equality of hate, who really gives a shit? We don't need their love; we just need to be treated fairly and we need to be fairly ready and prepared to take advantage of every opportunity. The better we do the more love (opportunity) that we can provide and give to us. So, instead of worrying about whether 'they' love us, I'm really concerned about how much love we have, for each other.

I think when we worry about if 'they' love us; its like we want them to give us something. I'm like James Brown on this one: I don't want nobody to give me shit, just open up the damn door, I'll take it myself. R.I.P.

So, just treat us fairly (because even if fairness ain't really fair; we can take less than fair and do wonders) and let us stay on the ready to move on it every time.Alot of us don't ever believe that we'll run across fair white politicians again, the few we've had. Personally thats a reason I believe that now is a time where Black New Orleanians need to come together. Because the situation is ripe for a demographic flip gentrification and a growing Hispanic community many of whom have opinions of blacks which are fairly low and who are ready to back damn near any white politician that comes along. Black New Orleans need to just drop the bullshit and give each other a unity hug or else will be kissing each other goodbye.

I didn't follow Jindal's election that closely. I was then and I am now surprised that someone with his 'Indian' background was elected. I'm not mad at Jindal, but I am disappointed that Black people are not having the success in that manner. Maybe we need to study his example ???

The saddest part about us is, is that we got to the top, for a minute and then slid the fuck down. Louisiana be right with New York (Patterson) and Massachusetts (Patrick) in having a black governor, there is no reason for us not to or if not a black govenor, atleast a White one with better attitude towards New Orleans. Jindal is vetoing funding left and right at a time where money needs to be spent on the state's economic engine. But how many of the brothas who are sitting outside listening to Q93 will know that that goes back to poor education and brothas tuning shit out that doesn't concern thier immediate life.



Bro, I started a thread on this board shortly after Katrina wherein I stated that Black New Orleanians would return to N.O. because of their love for the City. Another poster (Greed) stated that would probably not be the case because once a lot of the evacuees got to experience a little better life outside of N.O., they probably wouldn't be returning. It seems, he was right.

They are returning its most because they've worn out their welcomes and funding is running dry. Plus the attitude that Houston had in the first 2 years turned off a good bit of people and they evenutally came back. Right now as we near the 3 year anniversary people who didn't expirience that "better life" are now trying to go back home. In Texas the section 8 system wont release them for what ever reason and those people can't come home. Now there are still 100,000 people still in Houston and from what I've heard a good bit want to come back.

Now in my personal life, I have friends who have kids, they are mostly staying put as to not uproot their kids, so situations like that exist where people just can't come back or just choose not to so their kids can have a better shot at life than they did.



Basically Que it's a fight for survival, Either take up and fight, or get rolled over by whites, surpassed by Hispanics and kicked to the curb and only called upon when you are needed like hired help (or a slave)

[orange roughy]

New thread on this regarding Cynthia McKinney's investigation in the main board forums...

OR

http://www.bgol.us/board/showthread.php?t=309673

[GET YOU HOT]

Confirmation...

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v16014769dymAzCHC

[World B Free]

NOW WE KNOW MORE OF THE TRUTH OF NEW ORLEANS


IT WAS A LAND GRAB

LIKE

KATAKANA SAID

[orange roughy]

Updates:

http://www.bgol.us/board/showthread.php?p=6812152&posted=1#post6812152

http://www.bgol.us/board/showthread.php?t=409041&highlight=blackwater

OR

[harlem1nyc]

Blah, Blah, Blah. This is such bullshit. For one, the reason the government could not fix the levees earlier is because the water pressure from the break was too high. They actually tried before it was advisable, and the 6,000 ponud sandbags got washed away. Where is that AP report. I have a Lexis account and had all NO articles flagged, and never recieved that one. Please post something more substantial than this. If they wanted to gentrify, they would.

Apparently, you watch a lot of news....by the way, I agree....Lee Harvey shot JFK al by himself...yup..sure did.....:lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::l ol::smh::smh::smh::smh::smh::smh::smh::puke::puke: :puke::puke::eek::eek::eek::hmm::hmm::hmm::lol::da nce:

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>
Army Corps of Engineers blamed for
Hurricane Katrina levee breaches</font size><font size="4">

A federal judge says the agency showed 'gross negligence'
in the years before Katrina. The ruling could leave
the government open to billions in claims.</font size></center>



Los Angeles Times
By Richard Fausset
November 19, 2009


Reporting from Atlanta - In a ruling that could leave the government open to billions of dollars in claims from Hurricane Katrina victims, a federal judge said late Wednesday that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had displayed "gross negligence" in failing to maintain a navigation channel -- resulting in levee breaches that flooded large swaths of greater New Orleans.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood R. Duval peppered his 156-page decision, issued in New Orleans, with harsh criticism of the Army corps, at one point citing its "insouciance, myopia and shortsightedness" in failing to maintain the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, known locally as MRGO.

For more than 40 years, the judge said, the corps had known that a crucial levee protecting suburban St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood would be compromised by the deterioration of the channel. The corps had "myriad" ways to address the problem, he wrote, but failed to do so.

<SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">Duval awarded a total of $719,000 to a small group of flood victims that sued the government in April 2006</span>.

But according to Pierce O'Donnell, the lead plaintiff's counsel, roughly 100,000 New Orleans-area residents and businesses who have filed flood-damage claims with the Army corps were now potentially eligible for payment.

In a phone interview, O'Donnell hailed what he called a historic ruling, one that backed the widely held contention in New Orleans that the 2005 catastrophe was not just the fault of Mother Nature.

<SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">"The judge agreed with us that Katrina was not a natural disaster," O'Donnell said. "Katrina was a man-made disaster caused by the Army Corps of Engineers."</span>

In a statement Wednesday, the Army corps said only that the opinion was being reviewed by lawyers from the Army and Justice Department. "We have no further comment at this time as the issues involved in the case are still subject to further litigation," the corps said.

At the heart of the case was maintenance and operation of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet.

The channel, which was decommissioned after Katrina, was completed in the 1960s as a shipping shortcut between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. Over the years, the marshy banks of the channel had widened significantly in spots -- and long before Katrina hit, experts had warned that the destruction of wetlands could create a funnel effect that would intensify storm surges.

During the trial, attorneys for the government argued that the Army Corps of Engineers was not liable for the post-hurricane flooding because it was immune from civil lawsuits questioning federal flood policy decisions.

But Duval found that such "gross negligence" overrode any immunity claim. His opinion, however, does not apply to residents of New Orleans East, another badly flooded part of the region where O'Donnell had hoped to score a victory. Duval ruled that the Army corps was not negligent for failing to build a surge protection barrier there.

The overall ruling could create problems for the Obama administration, which has promised to bring more attention and care to New Orleans than was evident during President George W. Bush's administration.

Katrina, one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, caused more than 1,800 deaths in the Gulf Coast states and wreaked billions of dollars in property damage. In New Orleans, the storm surge breached levees in several places, flooding about 80% of the city. Many residents were left trapped on roofs or in attics for days.

The federal government has promised tens of billions of dollars in post-storm rebuilding aid to Louisiana. The Justice Department has estimated that the total outstanding civil claims could amount to billions more.

But those claimants, O'Donnell said, might not be paid until the appeals process is exhausted, which could last years. He called upon the Obama administration and Congress to agree to a universal settlement -- something he said the Bush administration had pledged not to do.

O'Donnell said his team had filed a separate legal action that seeks to cover those thousands of victims in a class-action suit. He noted that the federal government had agreed to universal settlements in past cases in which it had erred, including after a 1976 failure of the Teton Dam in Idaho and the 2000 Cerro Grande fire in New Mexico, which started as a federal controlled burn.

richard.fausset@latimes.com
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-katrina-flooding19-2009nov19,0,3370102.story

[Acur]

Looks at title didn't believe it at first. Still don't believe it.

[World B Free]

The original AP article has not disappeared, it, along with a corresponding original article by MSNBC are on this board at: http://64.255.174.200/board/showthread.php?t=57892

There are several incongruities in the article, but the quote above is interesting, especially since the author notes that the occurrences there mentioned are "Among the most telling anomalies ..."

1. The article describes those involved in the shooting on the bridge near the levee as "Military Agents". The actual articles described them as "Federal Contractors" -- that is, personnel/companies contracted by the federal government -- because the levees are under the auspices of the Corps of Engineers, a federal agency. Of course, Federal Contractors sounds suspicious enough for the conspiracy inclined, but the article takes a quantum leap to call them "Military Agents" which apparently sounds even more vile for those needing a sinister boost.

2. "Were these US Department of Defense personnel a Special Forces group or Navy Seals with top secret orders to sabotaged the levy? Please be reminded that the shootiing incident took place on SEPTEMBER 4, 2005. The levee had broken four days earlier on AUGUST 30, 2005 and by August 31, 2005, NOLA was inuandate with flood water.
http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2005/WEATHER/08/30/katrina.neworleans/story.new.orleans.3.ap.jpg
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/30/katrina.neworleans/index.html

So, on September 4, 2005 with N.O. and surrounding area under water, what was there to sabotage ??? The levee had given way 5 days before (whether by nature or man). Maybe those "Military Agents" were there to cause "New Breaks" or "Sabotage the Repairs" ??? Even if that were so (and there is abolutely NO evidence to suggest it), didn't the near complete flooding of N.O. from the initial levee breaks do all the damage necessary for the so called "Great Land Grab" ???

3. While there are reports of a large defection in the N.O.P.D., isn't it strange that the N.O.P.D. has never suggested they were lost in a gun battle with saboteurs ??? Of course, the Black mayor and Black police chief could be complicit in the Great Land Grab. Hell, most of Black America could be just as involved. In fact, all comments to the contrary in this thread are part of a grand coverup.

QueEx

....interesting years later...

[Lucky7s]

I did a lil research....peep it







The Great New Orleans Land Grab





The 17th Street Canal levy was breeched on purpose
by
Ernesto Cienfuegos
La Voz de Aztlan

Los Angeles, Alta California - September 7, 2005 - (ACN) There were numerous incidents that occurred during and immediately after Katrina struck that point to the "unthinkable". It now appears that a sophisticated plan was implemented that utilized the "cover of a hurricane" to first destroy and than take over the City of New Orleans? As the world watched the events unfolding, one could not help think that something was terribly afoot concerning the rescue by FEMA of the city's poor and predominate Black population. It seems that a well laid out plan was put into effect to grab valuable real estate from well established but poverty stricken Black families of New Orleans? What is being implemented now is nothing less than a sophisticated scheme to purge and ethnically cleanse what Whites have termed "Black and 'welfare bloated' New Orleans".

Among the most telling anomalies pointing to something terribly afoot is the gun battle, killing 5, that occurred at the breeched levy between the New Orleans Police Department and, what have now been identified as US military agents. An Associated Press report, which has now disappeared, stated that at least five USA Defense Department personnel where shot dead by New Orleans police officers in the proximity of the breeched levy. A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said later that those killed were "federal contractors" on their way to "repair" a canal. The "contractors" were on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain, in an operation to "fix" the 17th Street Canal, according to the Army Corps of Engineers spokesman. Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley of New Orleans later reported that his policemen had shot at eight suspicious people near the breeched levy, killing five or six.

Who were these "military agents" that were killed by the police near the 17th Street Canal breeched levy and what were they doing there? Why did the New Orleans police find it necessary to shoot and kill 5 or 6 of them? No one is saying anything and it appears that the news story has now been swept under the rug. Were these US Department of Defense personnel a Special Forces group or Navy Seals with top secret orders to sabotaged the levy? There are verifiable reports that at least 100 New Orleans police officers have disappeared from the face of the earth and that two have committed suicide. Could these be policemen that died defending the levy against sabotage by "federal contractors"?
Another telling incident that points to a "nefarious plan" is what New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said at the height of the crisis. He said publicly, "I fear the CIA may take me out!" Mayor Nagin, a Black, said this twice. He told a reporter for the Associated Press: "If the CIA slips me something and next week you don't see me, you'll all know what happened." Later he told interviewers for CNN on a live broadcast that he feared the "CIA might take me out." What does Mayor Ray Nagin know and why does he fear the CIA?

In an interview by WWL TV, Mayor Nagin complained vociferously that Louisiana National Guard Blackhawk helicopters were being stopped from dropping sandbags to plug the levy soon after it breeched. There is evidence that no repairs were allowed on the levy until after New Orleans was totally flooded!

Many civilian groups who were attempting to aid people trapped in their attics, on their roofs and at the Superdome are reporting that FEMA, other federal agents and the US military essentially "stopped" them from doing so. Convoys that were organized by truckers and carrying "food and water" were blocked by agents of the federal government on the highways and roads leading to New Orleans. The American Red Cross, in addition, encountered numerous incidents and has made formal complaints.

A private ham radio network that deployed throughout the hurricane ravished region reported that the airwaves were being "jammed" making it impossible to communicate emergency information. Churches, hospitals and other essential community groups reported that the first thing that the US military did, when they arrived, was to cut their telephone lines and confiscate communications devices. We all witnessed news reports and heard statements by flood victims concerning the behavior of the US military. Many Black families complained that military vehicles did not stop to assist them but just drove by. One news report showed military personnel playing cards inside a barrack while Black citizens were dying of thirst and hunger.

Today, it is very revealing how the federal government is handling the disaster. They want every Black out of New Orleans and those who insist on staying in their homes will be removed by force. The government, through some media, is utilizing scare tactics to cleanse New Orleans of all Blacks. They want no witnesses and this will make the "land grab" a lot easier to undertake. One scare tactic is calling the flood water "a horrid toxic soup of feces a rotting flesh of corpses". The military thugs are now getting tough with Black families that have owned their old but beloved homes for many generations. Mr. Rufus Johnson, a family patriarch who lives in the French Quarter, said in an interview, "The army has given me an ultimatum to leave or suffer the consequences of a forced eviction. I do not understand . My entire family and I survived Katrina and now they want to throw me out of the home we have had for generations". Mr. Johnson lives in a neighborhood where the flood has subsided and his home is not heavily damaged yet FEMA wants him out!



The fact that Vice President Dick Cheney is heavily involved in the FEMA operations from behind the scenes is very troublesome. Cheney and his cronies at Halliburton are in line for the lucrative contracts to "reconstruct a New Orleans".



Deals are already being made with a Las Vegas business group to construct multi-million dollar casinos in the Big Easy on prime real estate that was owned by Black families. Whites throughout history have been notorious "land grabbers". In the USA they first confiscated land that belonged to American Indians. Most of the Indians ended up in worthless tracts of land called "reservations". The largest "land grab", however, was the theft of Aztlan. This occurred soon after the Mexican-American War. In Alta California , vast "Ranchos" were stolen from the Californios through a variety of scams. A favorite ploy was to impose extremely heavy land taxes on the Mexicans and then foreclosing on the properties. The land was then given or sold at very low prices to the Forty Niners who came in large hordes to Alta California during the so called "Gold Rush" of 1849

http://www.dickgregory.com/index2.html

WTF? Never heard of this shit before! :smh:

[hussla's paradice]

Jindal is a bitch and the recovery is still at a slow pace.

bump

[Lucky7s]

Damn good read...no confirmation of those black ops?
While some debate "Black-Ops" ... White-Ops
may be well underway. While Nagin flaunders
along -- others may be PLANNING the future.

Try reading through and weeding out the political
biases in the article below and see if you can get
an understanding of what the future may soon behold
and how it can be manipulated to our advantage.

This is not a time for emotionalism, but a time for
well rounded Black thinkers/politicians to show
their mettle. Black people: Think; Be smart; and,
stop crying over spilled milk. The past is done;
wrest control over tomorrow.

QueEx
______________________________________



<center>Who Is Killing New Orleans? </center>

The Nation
Mike Davis
posted March 23, 2006 (April 10, 2006 issue)

Afew blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back on. In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the river. Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that "New Orleans is back," pointing to the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 percent of Nagin's constituents--including an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans--are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home.

In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, "New Urbanists" and neo-Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city. Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances.

Meanwhile, Bush's pledge to "get the work done quickly" and mount "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen" has proved to be the same fool's gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq's bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.

With each passing week of neglect--what Representative Barney Frank has labeled "a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction"--the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return.

Lie and Stall

After his bungling initial response to Katrina, Bush impersonated FDR and Lyndon Johnson when he reassured the nation in his September 15 Jackson Square speech that "we have a duty to confront [New Orleans's] poverty with bold action.... We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives."

In the event, the White House sat on its pledges all autumn, mumbling homilies about the limits of government, while its conservative attack dogs in Congress offset Gulf relief with $40 billion worth of cutbacks in Medicaid, food stamps and student loans. Republicans also rebelled against aid for a state that was depicted as a venal Third World society, a failed state like Haiti, out of step with national values. "Louisiana and New Orleans," according to Idaho Senator Larry Craig, "are the most corrupt governments in our country and they always have been.... Fraud is in the culture of Iraqis. I believe that is true in the state of Louisiana as well."

Democrats, apart from the Congressional Black Caucus, did pathetically little to counter this backlash or to hold Bush's feet to the fire over his Jackson Square pledge. The promised national debate about urban poverty never took place; instead, New Orleans, like a great derelict ship, drifted helplessly in the treacherous currents of White House hypocrisy and conservative contempt.

An early, deadly blow was Treasury Secretary John Snow's refusal to guarantee New Orleans municipal bonds, forcing Mayor Nagin to lay off 3,000 city employees on top of the thousands of education and medical workers already jobless. The Bush Administration also blocked bipartisan measures to increase Medicaid coverage for Katrina evacuees and to give the State of Louisiana--facing an estimated $8 billion in lost revenues over the next few years--a share of the income generated by its offshore oil and gas leases.

Even more egregious was the flagrant redlining of black neighborhoods by the Small Business Administration (SBA), which rejected a majority of loan applications by local businesses and homeowners. At the same time, a bipartisan Senate bill to save small businesses with emergency bridge loans was sabotaged by Bush officials, leaving thousands to face bankruptcy and foreclosure. As a result, the economic foundations of the city's African-American middle class (public-sector jobs and small businesses) have been swept away by deliberate decisions made in the White House. Meanwhile, in the absence of federal or state initiatives to employ locals, low-income blacks are losing their niches in the construction and service sectors to more mobile outsiders.

In stark contrast to its neglect of neighborhood relief, the White House has made herculean efforts to reward its own base of large corporations and political insiders. Representative Nydia Velazquez, who sits on the House Small Business Committee, pointed out that the SBA has allowed large corporations to get $2 billion in federal contracts while excluding local minority contractors.

The paramount beneficiaries of Katrina relief aid have been the giant engineering firms KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) and the Shaw Group, which enjoy the services of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh (a former FEMA director and Bush's 2000 campaign manager). FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, while unable to explain to Governor Blanco last fall exactly how they were spending money in Louisiana, have tolerated levels of profiteering that would raise eyebrows even on the war-torn Euphrates. (Some of this largesse, of course, is guaranteed to be recycled as GOP campaign contributions.) FEMA, for example, has paid the Shaw Group $175 per square (100 square feet) to install tarps on storm-damaged roofs in New Orleans. Yet the actual installers earn as little as $2 per square, and the tarps are provided by FEMA. Similarly, the Army Corps pays prime contractors about $20 per cubic yard of storm debris removed, yet some bulldozer operators receive only $1. Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung, where the actual work is carried out. While the Friends of Bush mine gold from the wreckage of New Orleans, many disappointed recovery workers--often Mexican or Salvadoran immigrants camped out in city parks and derelict shopping centers--can barely make ends meet.

The Big Kiss-Off

In the fractious, take-no-prisoners world of Louisiana politics, broad solidarity of interest is normally as rare as a boulder in a bayou. Yet Katrina created an unprecedented bipartisan consensus around twin demands for Category 5 hurricane protection and mortgage relief for damaged homes. From conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats, there has been unanimity that the region's recovery depends on federal investment in new levees and coastal restoration, as well as financial rescue of the estimated 200,000 homeowners whose insurance coverage has failed to cover their actual damage. (There has been no equivalent consensus and little concern for the right of renters--who constituted 53 percent of the population before Katrina--and of public-housing tenants to return to their city.)

Yet by early November it was clear that saving New Orleans was no longer high on the Bush agenda, if it had ever been. As Congress headed toward its Christmas adjournment, the Louisiana delegation was in panic mode: A Category 5 plan had disappeared from serious discussion, and there were doubts about whether the damaged levees would be repaired before hurricane season returned. (In early March engineers monitoring the progress of the Army Corps's work complained that the use of weak, sandy soils and the lack of concrete "armoring" insured that the levees would again fail in a major storm.)

Congress ultimately voted to provide $29 billion for Gulf Coast relief. Yet as the Washington Post reported, "All but $6 billion of the measure merely reshuffled some of the $62 billion in previously approved Hurricane Katrina aid. The rest was funded by a 1 percent across-the-board cut of non-emergency, discretionary programs." The Pentagon won approval for a whopping $4.4 billion in base repairs and other professed Katrina-related needs, but Congress cut out the $250 million allocated to combat coastal erosion. Meanwhile, Mississippi's powerful Republican troika--Governor Haley Barbour and Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran--persuaded fellow Republicans to support $6.2 billion in discretionary housing aid for Louisiana and $5.3 billion for Mississippi, with red-state Mississippi getting five times as much aid per distressed household as pink-state Louisiana.

Louisiana received another blow on January 23, when Bush rejected GOP Representative Richard Baker's plan calling for a federally guaranteed Louisiana Reconstruction Corporation, which would bail out homeowners by buying distressed properties and packaging them in larger parcels for resale to developers. Local Republicans as well as Democrats howled in rage, and the future of southern Louisiana was again thrown into chaos. Although the Administration eventually promised an additional $4.2 billion in housing aid, the appropriation continues to be fought over by Texas and other jealous states.

The Republican hostility to New Orleans, of course, runs deeper and is nastier than mere concern with civic probity (America's most corrupt city, after all, is located on the Potomac, not the Mississippi). Underlying all the circumlocutions are the same antediluvian prejudices and stereotypes that were used to justify the violent overthrow of Reconstruction 130 years ago. Usually it is the poor who are invisible in the aftermath of urban disasters, but in the case of New Orleans it has been the African-American professional middle class and skilled working class. In the confusion and suffering of Katrina--a Rorschach test of the American racial unconscious--most white politicians and media pundits have chosen to see only the demons of their prejudices. The city's complex history and social geography have been reduced to a cartoon of a vast slum inhabited by an alternately criminal or helpless underclass, whose salvation is the kindness of strangers in other, whiter cities. Inconvenient realities like Gentilly's red-brick normalcy--or, for that matter, the pride of homeownership and the exuberance of civic activism in the blue-collar Lower Ninth Ward--have not been allowed to interfere with the belief, embraced by New Democrats as well as old Republicans, that black urban culture is inherently pathological.

Such calumnies reproduce ancient caricatures--blacks running amok, incapable of honest self-government--that were evoked by the murderous White League when it plotted against Reconstruction in New Orleans in the 1870s. Indeed, some civil rights veterans fear that the 1874 Battle of Canal Street, a bloody League-organized insurrection against a Republican administration elected by black suffrage, is being refought--perhaps without pikes and guns, but with the same fundamental aim of dispossessing black New Orleans of economic and political power. Certainly, a sweeping transformation of the racial balance-of-power within the city has been on some people's agenda for a long time.

The Krewe of Canizaro

Power and status in New Orleans have always been defined by membership in secretive Mardi Gras "krewes" and social clubs. In the early 1990s civil rights activists, led by feisty Councilmember Dorothy Mae Taylor, forced the token desegregation of Mardi Gras, and some of the clubs reluctantly admitted a few African-American millionaires. Despite some old-guard holdouts, Uptown seemed to be adjusting, however grudgingly, to the reality of black political clout.

But as post-Katrina events have brutally clarified, if the oligarchy is dead, then long live the oligarchy. While elected black officials protest impotently from the sidelines, a largely white elite has wrested control over the debate about how to rebuild the city. This de facto ruling krewe includes Jim Amoss, editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Pres Kabacoff, developer-gentrifier and local patron of the New Urbanism; Donald Bollinger, shipyard owner and prominent Bushite; James Reiss, real estate investor and chair of the Regional Transit Authority (i.e., the man responsible for the buses that didn't evacuate people); Alden McDonald Jr., CEO of one of the largest black-owned banks; Janet Howard of the Bureau of Government Research (originally established by Uptown elites to oppose the populism of Huey Long); and Scott Cowen, the aggressively ambitious president of Tulane University.

But the dominating figure and kingpin is Joseph Canizaro, a wealthy property developer who is a leading Bush supporter with close personal ties to the White House inner circle. He is also the power behind the throne of Mayor Nagin, a nominal Democrat (he supported Bush in 2000) who was elected in 2002 with 85 percent of the white vote. Finally, as the former president of the Urban Land Institute, Canizaro mobilizes the support of some of the nation's most powerful developers and prestigious master planners.

In a city where old money is often as reclusive as Anne Rice's vampires, Canizaro poses as a brave civic leader unafraid to speak bitter but necessary truths. As he told the Associated Press about the Katrina diaspora last October: "As a practical matter, these poor folks don't have the resources to go back to our city just like they didn't have the resources to get out of our city. So we won't get all those folks back. That's just a fact."

Indeed, it is a "fact" that Canizaro has helped shape into reigning dogma. The number of displaced residents returning to the city is obviously a highly variable function of the resources and opportunities provided for them, yet the rebuilding debate has been premised on suspicious projections--provided by the RAND Corporation and endlessly repeated by Nagin and Canizaro--that in three years the city would recover only half of its August 2005 population. Many Orleanians cynically wonder whether such projections aren't actually goals. For years Reiss, Kabacoff and others have complained that New Orleans has too many poor people. Faced with the dire fiscal consequences of white flight to the suburbs, as well as three decades of deindustrialization (which has given New Orleans an economic profile closer to Newark than to Houston or Atlanta), they argue that the city has become a soul-destroying warehouse for underemployed and poorly educated African-Americans, whose real interests--it is claimed--might be better served by a Greyhound ticket to another town.

Kabacoff's 2003 redevelopment of the St. Thomas public housing project as River Garden, a largely market-rate faux Creole subdivision, has become the prototype for the smaller, wealthier, whiter city that Mayor Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back commission (with Canizaro as head of the crucial urban planning committee) proposes to build. BNOB is perhaps the most important elite initiative in New Orleans since the famous "Cold Water Committee" (which included Kabacoff's father) mobilized in 1946 to overthrow the "Old Regulars" and elect reformer deLesseps Morrison as mayor. BNOB grew out of a notorious meeting between Mayor Nagin and New Orleans business leaders (dubbed by some "the forty thieves") that Reiss organized in Dallas twelve days after Katrina devastated the city. The summit excluded most of New Orleans's elected black representatives and, according to Reiss as characterized in the Wall Street Journal, focused on the opportunity to rebuild the city "with better services and fewer poor people."

Fears that a municipal coup d'etat was in progress were scarcely mollified when at the end of September the mayor charged BNOB with preparing a master plan to rebuild the city. Although the seventeen-member commission was racially balanced and included City Council president Oliver Thomas as well as jazz musician Wynton Marsalis (telecommuting from Manhattan), the real clout was exercised by committee chairs, especially Canizaro (urban planning), Cowen (education) and Howard (finance), who lunched privately with the mayor before the group's weekly meeting. This inner sanctum was reportedly necessary because the full-panel meetings did not allow a frank discussion of "tough issues of race and class."

BNOB might have quickly imploded but for a shrewd outflanking movement by Canizaro, who persuaded Nagin to invite the Urban Land Institute to work with the commission. Although the ULI is the self-interested national voice of corporate land developers, Nagin and Canizaro welcomed the delegation of developers, architects and ex-mayors as a heroic cavalry of expertise riding to the city's rescue. In a nutshell, the ULI's recommendations reframed the historic elite desire to shrink the city's socioeconomic footprint of black poverty (and black political power) as a crusade to reduce its physical footprint to contours commensurate with public safety and a fiscally viable urban infrastructure.

Upon these suspect premises, the outside "experts" (including representatives of some of the country's largest property firms and corporate architects) proposed an unprecedented triage of an American city, in which low-lying neighborhoods would be targeted for mass buyouts and future conversion into a greenbelt to protect New Orleans from flooding. As a visiting developer told BNOB: "Your housing is now a public resource. You can't think of it as private property anymore."

Keenly aware of inevitable popular resistance, the ULI also proposed a Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation, armed with eminent domain, that would bypass the City Council, as well as an oversight board with power over the city's finances. With control of New Orleans schools already usurped by the state, the ULI's proposed dictatorship of experts and elite appointees would effectively overthrow representative democracy and annul the right of local people to make decisions about their lives. For veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement, especially, it reeked of disenfranchisement pure and simple, a return to the paternalism of plantation days.

The City Council, supported by a surprising number of white homeowners and their representatives, angrily rejected the ULI plan. Mayor Nagin--truly a cat on a hot tin roof--danced anxiously back and forth between the two camps, disavowing abandonment of any area while at the same time warning that the city could not afford to service every neighborhood. But state and national officials, including HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, applauded the ULI scheme, as did the editorial page of the Times-Picayune and the influential Bureau of Government Research.

The BNOB recommendations presented by Canizaro in January faithfully hewed to the ULI framework: They included an appointed redevelopment corporation, outside the control of the City Council, that would act as a land bank to buy out heavily damaged homes and neighborhoods with federal funds, wielding eminent domain as needed to retire low-lying areas to greenbelt ("black people's neighborhoods into white people's parks," someone commented) or to assemble "in-fill" tracts for mixed-income development a la River Garden. Other committees recommended a radical diminution of the power of elected government.

On the crucial question of how to decide which neighborhoods would be allowed to rebuild and which would be bulldozed, BNOB endorsed the concept of forced buyouts but equivocated over process. Instead of the ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research wanted, Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube Goldberg-like temporary building moratorium in tandem with neighborhood planning meetings that would poll homeowners about their intentions. Only those neighborhoods where at least half of the pre-Katrina residents had made a committment to return would be considered serious candidates for Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) and other financial aid.

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a public audience on January 11. The mayor said, "I like the plan," and he complimented the commissioners for "a job well done." But most locals found little charm in the Canizaro report. "I will sit in my front door with my shotgun," one resident warned at a jammed meeting in the Council chambers on January 14, while another demanded, "Are we going to allow some developers, some hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab our homes, to make this a Disney World version of our homes, our lives?" Predictably, Nagin panicked and eventually disavowed the building moratorium. Soon afterward the White House torpedoed the Baker plan and left BNOB with only the state-controlled CDBG appropriation to finance its ambitious vision of New Orleans regrouped around a dozen new River Gardens linked by a high-speed light-rail line.

But Canizaro doesn't seem unduly worried. He has reassured supporters that the ULI/BNOB plan can go forward with CDBGs alone if necessary; in addition, he knows that independent of the local political weather, there are powerful external forces--lack of insurance coverage, new FEMA flood maps, refusal of lenders to refinance mortgages and so on--that can make permanent the exodus from redlined neighborhoods. Moreover, as anyone versed in the realpolitik of modern Louisiana knows, nothing is finally decided in New Orleans until some good ol' boys (and girls) in Baton Rouge have their say.


On the crucial question of how to decide which neighborhoods would be allowed to rebuild and which would be bulldozed, BNOB endorsed the concept of forced buyouts but equivocated over process. Instead of the ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research wanted, Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube Goldberg-like temporary building moratorium in tandem with neighborhood planning meetings that would poll homeowners about their intentions. Only those neighborhoods where at least half of the pre-Katrina residents had made a committment to return would be considered serious candidates for Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) and other financial aid.

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a public audience on January 11. The mayor said, "I like the plan," and he complimented the commissioners for "a job well done." But most locals found little charm in the Canizaro report. "I will sit in my front door with my shotgun," one resident warned at a jammed meeting in the Council chambers on January 14, while another demanded, "Are we going to allow some developers, some hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab our homes, to make this a Disney World version of our homes, our lives?" Predictably, Nagin panicked and eventually disavowed the building moratorium. Soon afterward the White House torpedoed the Baker plan and left BNOB with only the state-controlled CDBG appropriation to finance its ambitious vision of New Orleans regrouped around a dozen new River Gardens linked by a high-speed light-rail line.

But Canizaro doesn't seem unduly worried. He has reassured supporters that the ULI/BNOB plan can go forward with CDBGs alone if necessary; in addition, he knows that independent of the local political weather, there are powerful external forces--lack of insurance coverage, new FEMA flood maps, refusal of lenders to refinance mortgages and so on--that can make permanent the exodus from redlined neighborhoods. Moreover, as anyone versed in the realpolitik of modern Louisiana knows, nothing is finally decided in New Orleans until some good ol' boys (and girls) in Baton Rouge have their say.





Power Shift

Even before the last bloated body had been fished out of the fetid waters, conservative political analysts were writing gleeful obituaries for black Democratic power in Louisiana. "The Democrats' margin of victory," said Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation, is "living in the Astrodome in Houston." Thanks to the Army Corps's defective levees, the Republicans stand to gain another Senate seat, two Congressional seats and probably the governorship. The Democrats would also find it impossible to reproduce Bill Clinton's 1992 feat, when he carried Louisiana by almost exactly his margin of victory in New Orleans. With a ruthless psephologist like Karl Rove in the White House, it is inconceivable that such considerations haven't influenced the shameless Bush response to the city's distress.


New Orleans has always vied with Detroit when it comes to the violent antipathy of white-flight suburbs toward its black central city, so it is not surprising that representatives from Jefferson Parish (which elected Klan leader David Duke to the state legislature in 1989) and St. Tammany Parish have particularly relished the post-Katrina shift in metropolitan population and electoral power. Both parishes are in the midst of housing booms that may consolidate the hollowing out and decline of New Orleans.

For her part, Governor Blanco, a Democrat, has expressed little concern about this fundamental reconfiguration of Louisiana's major metropolitan area. Indeed, her immediate, Bush-like responses to Katrina were to help engineer a state takeover of New Orleans schools and to slash $500 million in state spending while sponsoring tax breaks (in the name of economic recovery) for oil companies awash in profits. The Legislative Black Caucus was outraged at Blanco's "complete lack of vision and leadership" and went to court to challenge her right to make cuts without consulting lawmakers. But Blanco, supported by rural conservatives and corporate lobbyists, remained intransigent, even openly hostile, to black Democrats whose support she had previously courted.

Poor people have no voice inside the Louisiana Recovery Authority, whose gaggle of university presidents and corporate types appointed by Blanco is even less beholden to black New Orleans voters and their representatives than the Canizaro krewe. The twenty-nine-member LRA board, dominated by representatives of big business, has only one trade unionist and not a single grassroots black representative. Moreover, in contrast to Nagin's commission, the LRA has the power to decide, not merely advise: It controls the allocation of the FEMA funds and CDBGs that Congress has provided for reconstruction.

According to interviews in the Times-Picayune, leading members of the LRA believe that the sheer force of economic disincentives will shrink the city around the contours proposed by the Urban Land Institute. The authority has thus refused to disburse any of its hazard mitigation funds to areas considered unsafe, and presumably will be equally hardheaded in the allocation of CDBG spending. At a special session of the legislature Governor Blanco emphasized that the state, not local government or neighborhood planning committees, will retain control over where grants and loans go.

But Blanco and the elites may have overlooked the Fats Domino factor.

'No Bulldozing!'

Like hundreds of other flood-damaged but structurally sound homes, Fats Domino's house wears a defiant sign: Save Our Neighborhood: No Bulldozing! The r&b icon, who has always stayed close to his roots in working-class Holy Cross, knows his riverside neighborhood and the rest of the Lower Ninth Ward are prime targets of the city-shrinkers. Indeed, on Christmas Day the Times-Picayune--declaring that "before a community can rebuild, it must dream"--published a vision of what a smaller-but-better New Orleans might look like: "Tourists and schoolchildren tour a living museum that includes the former home of Fats Domino and Holy Cross High School, a multiblock memorial to Katrina that spans the devastated neighborhood."

"Living museum" (or "holocaust museum," as a black friend bitterly observed) sounds like a bad joke, but it is the elite view of what African-American New Orleans should become. In the brave New Urbanist world of Canizaro and Kabacoff, blacks (along with that other colorful minority group, Cajuns) will reign only as entertainers and self-caricatures. The high-voltage energy that once rocked juke joints, housing projects and second-line parades will now be safely embalmed for tourists in a proposed Louisiana Music Experience in the Central Business District.

But this minstrel-show version of the future must first defeat a remarkable local history of grassroots organization. The Crescent City's best-kept secret--in the mainstream press, at least--has been the resurgence of trade-union and community organizing since the mid-1990s. Indeed, New Orleans, the only Southern city in which labor was ever powerful enough to call a general strike, has become an important crucible of new social movements. In particular, it has become the home base of ACORN, a national organization of working-class homeowners and tenants that counts more than 9,000 New Orleans member-families, mostly in triage-threatened black neighborhoods. ACORN's membership has been the engine behind the tumultuous, decade-long struggle to unionize downtown hotels as well as the successful 2002 referendum to legislate the nation's first municipal minimum wage (later overthrown by a right-wing state Supreme Court). Since Katrina, ACORN has emerged as the major opponent of the ULI/BNOB plan for shrinking the city. Its members find themselves again fighting many of the same elite figures who were opponents of hotel unionization and a living wage.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke scoffs at the RAND Corporation projections that portray most blacks abandoning the city. "Don't believe those phony figures," he told me over beignets at Cafe du Monde in January. "We have polled our displaced members in Houston and Atlanta. Folks overwhelmingly want to return. But they realize that this is a tough struggle, since we have to fight simultaneously on two fronts: to restore people's homes and to bring back their jobs. It is also a race against time. The challenge is, You make it, you take it. So our members are voting with their feet."

Not waiting for CDBGs, FEMA flood maps or permission from Canizaro, ACORN crews and volunteers from across the country are working night and day to repair the homes of 1,000 member-families in some of the most threatened areas. The strategy is to confront the city-shrinkers with the incontestable fact of reoccupied, viable neighborhood cores.

ACORN has allied with the AFL-CIO and the NAACP to defend worker rights and press for the hiring of locals in the recovery effort. Rathke points out that Katrina has become the pretext for the most vicious government-supported attack on unions since President Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers in 1981. "First, suspension of Davis-Bacon [federal prevailing wage law], then the state takeover of the schools and the destruction of the teachers' union, and now this." He points to a beat-up green garbage truck rattling by Jackson Square. "Trash collection in the French Quarter used to be a unionized city job, SEIU members. Now FEMA has contracted the work to a scab company from out of state. Is this what Bring New Orleans Back means?"

ACORN also went to court to insure that New Orleans's displaced, largely black population would have access to out-of-state polling places, especially in Atlanta and Houston, for the scheduled April 22 city elections. When a federal judge rejected the demand, ACORN organizer Stephen Bradberry said it's "so obvious that there's a concerted plan to make this a whiter city." The NAACP agrees, but the Justice Department denied its request to block an election that is likely to transfer power to the artificial white majority created by Katrina.

It would be inspiring to see in this latest battle of New Orleans the birth pangs of a new or renewed civil rights movement, but gritty local activism has yet to be echoed in meaningful solidarity by the labor movement, so-called progressive Democrats or even the Congressional Black Caucus. Pledges, press statements and occasional delegations, yes; but not the unfaltering national outrage and sense of urgency that should attend the attempted murder of New Orleans on the fortieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. In 1874, as historian Ted Tunnell has pointed out, the failure of Northern Radicals to launch a militant, armed riposte to the white insurrection in New Orleans helped to doom the first Reconstruction. Will our feeble response to Hurricane Katrina now lead to the rollback of the second?

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060410/davis

[GET YOU HOT]

Confirmation or confomation
__________________________________________________ _______________

THE TRA!NSFORMING OF
CIVILIAN POLICE AGENCIES INTO
PARAMILITARY ORGANIZATIONS
By Jim R. Schwiesow
May 8, 2007
I truly value the mail that I receive from the old timers of law enforcement; they are a
unique group of individuals. I used to love the profession and the people in it. When I
entered into the profession 48 years ago it was a long suffering and put upon
fraternity. The pay was rotten, the benefits nil, and appreciation seemed to be
non-existent. Yet the people who filled the ranks were more dedicated and professional
at that time than any other group of people in this nation.
Unfortunately I was a witness to a steady and progressive decline in the profession
during the years that I was active in the law enforcement community.

Ironically as the
pay, benefits and other perks increased the professionalism seemed to decrease
proportionally. And it seemed that every individual overblown local politician wanted a
piece of the control over the internal affairs of the law enforcement agencies within
their districts. And, as if that wasn't bad enough, civilian review boards and civil
service boards came into being, and somewhat later there were unions to contend with.

Then the government with its LEAA grants came upon the scene and law enforcement
administrators gave away what little remained of their control of their agencies to the
feds in exchange for the funds that tight fisted local politicos had, through the years,
consistently and steadfastly refused to adequately provide.

Next, police professionals with law enforcement savvy who had progressed through the
ranks were being passed over for administrative jobs, and agency or department heads
were being selected by search committees, city councils and city administrators from
college graduates with business or administration degrees. These over-educated and
experience deficient administrators had no feel for the profession and not an ounce of
the common sense and wisdom that police regulars acquire through long-time service.
They were simply bean counters that ingratiated themselves with the local politicians by
kissing their behinds. These new honchos hired grant writers and other civilians to go
after more federal money, and thereby assured that their agencies would be forever bound
to a dictatorial federal control. What they could and could not do in regard to hiring
and firing, setting internal policies, and a host of other heretofore-autonomous
prerogatives was now regulated by the fine print in the federal contracts that had been
accepted in order to receive federal funding. The contracts were long term and binding,
there was no backing out unless local governments were willing to pay back huge sums of
money, and they were not so disposed or inclined.

Whereas a job well done by competent professionals used to be the best public relations
tool that the law enforcement fraternity possessed, the new yuppie commanders now felt
the need to implement public relations programs to sell their agencies to the public.


Soon we had Officer Friendlys, McGruffs and Crime Pups everywhere. Community relation's
officers met with various civic and social groups to establish a warm and fuzzy feeling
between law enforcement and the community. There were also programs to stroke the media.
News conferences were regularly scheduled to share sensitive information on departmental
activities.

Soon it was necessary to satiate a newfound public desire for a blow-by-blow
account of agency investigations and other activities.
Ingratiating the agency with the media seemed to be more important than acquiring public
backing by dedicated professional work. It used to be that actions spoke louder than
words, but that seems to be no longer the case. And of course this was also another way
to tap into federal money, and get back some of the taxes that had been forcibly
extracted from local taxpayers.

The feds were more than willing to pony up more of the
taxpayers' own money to support these public relations programs and to firm up their
takeover of the heretofore exclusive rights of local law enforcement agencies.
The local politicians, who had control over law enforcement agency budgets, were
becoming aware of these so called new found revenues and began salivating like Pavlov's
dogs at the thought of tapping into the federal largesse of taxpayer monies. Soon law
enforcement agencies, large and small, were crowding around the federal trough like hogs
on a feeding frenzy.

Local politicians made the acquisition of law enforcement grant
monies a quest. Sheriff's and chiefs were pressured to bring in more and more federal
dollars. If they were reluctant the politicians put the pressure on them by campaigning
against them in local elections by suggesting that they were responsible for heavy local
taxation by not bellying up to the federal trough. The people who are always, it seems,
gullible when it come to taxes, ate it up.

I doubt that they ever gave a thought to the
fact that the money came from their own pockets whether it was funneled through thfeds
or through the local government. The prevalent thought was hallelujah; we're getting
free money!
Since true police professionals were in many cases no longer in charge of law
enforcement agencies, and given the fact that police administrators had been frozen out
of the hiring and firing process by restrictive civil service statutes, civilian boards,
union grievance policies, and the continual meddling of county boards, city councils,
and city administrators there began to be a noticeable decline in the quality of many of
the rank and file.

Professionalism slipped perceptively. To many it was now simply a job
and little thought was given to the principles that had been so important to the
officers of the past. Officers punched in and punched out of their shifts like factory
workers. Many others were disgusted with the change in the profession and simply left
the ranks and found their way to other vocations.

The pursuit of benefits, wages and
early retirement programs occupied the minds of those who stayed. They were being
converted to alue-collar worker's mentality, and they saw the old ethics and the
dedication of their predecessors as being tantamount to slavery to the profession.

To be
absolutely fair I have to concede that some of the slippage was tied to the general
deterioration of society itself and to the newfound commitment to moral relevancy in the
nation.

Whatever the case, law enforcement officers were now ripe for an indoctrination
that would transform them into tools of the federal bureaucracy.
The truth is that peace officers in the old days did not need fancy public relations
programs to gain the confidence of the people who they served.

The people understood
that they were there to help them and to stand for them against those who would do them
harm. They instinctively knew by the demeanor of their peace officers that their sole
desire was to ensure that others would not violate the person, the property or the
families of those for whom they were responsible. Peace officers in those days wanted
the people of their communities to be free from tyranny. The last thing on their mind
was to enforce tyranny upon the people whose interests they represented. They were of
the people and for the people.

We have come a million miles from those days and all of
it in the wrong direction.
Rather than acting as servants of the people too many law enforcement officers in this
day and age have become willing tools of a system that despotically oppresses freedom,
and forces upon the people thousands of dictatorial decrees. The government bureaucracy
that has seized absolute power in the country has also seized control of the law
enforcement agencies of the land. And the rank and file thereof is used as soldier
enforcers much in the way that the mafia used its soldiers to enforce the tyrannies of
that order, coldly, cruelly, without conscience and with an iron fist. Law enforcement
agencies all too often now employ brutal tactics in their service to the state.

Please
notice that I said service to the state, law enforcement officers no longer serve the
people. Read on for an example of the corruption of a once fine fraternity.
In November a medically discharged United States Marine, Sergeant Derek Hale, was cold
bloodedly murdered by a police undercover squad in Wilmington Delaware. The decorated
veteran had traveled to Wilmington to participate in a Toys For Tots event, and while in
the city he was also doing a favor for a friend by house sitting. He was thus involved
and sitting on the front stoop minding his own business when a police death squad
screeched up and in proper Gestapo fashion first tortured him mercilessly with multiple
hits from a taser gun as he tried desperately to comply with shouted commands to put up
his hands, and then executed him by pumping three .40 caliber bullets point blank into
his chest. In a matter of minutes an unarmed man, who had committed no crime and who had
served his country honorably in wartime, lay dead. Killed not by an enemy combatant but
by a domestic death squad comprised of law enforcement officers who were carrying o the
dictates of a totally depraved system. In order to understand the absolute viciousness
and inhumanity of these police agents I urge readers to use the link provided for the
full story. Death <http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w10.html> Squad in Delaware.