Black Ops in New Orleans?

[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.....

 

[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://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!

 

[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.

 

[World B Free]

bump for 10 year mark

 

[World B Free]

It was a Land Grab, Katakana was right...