Buzzflash interview w/Greg Palast: New Orleans-Still Under Water

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkpg=http://www.gregpalast.com/new-orleans-still-under-water-a-buzzflash-interview&linkid=28067

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BuzzFlash: Why do you think the rebuilding effort and relief effort in New Orleans has just come to a complete halt?

Greg Palast: It’s not stalled. This is the plan. This is another White House gimmick to hide their evil intent in the clothing of incompetence.

The same with Iraq — oh, we screwed up? We didn’t get all the cheap oil that Wolfowitz promised in his congressional testimony, when he said the price of oil would decline. Well, it’s gone up. Golly gee, who funds the Bush Administration but the oil companies and Saudi Arabia? Who profits when the price of oil goes up? That’s “Mission Accomplished.”

Look to New Orleans. Golly gee, the black folks haven’t come back. There are no labor unions anymore in New Orleans. There are no public schools. It’s all vouchers. Worker wages have gone down. It’s “Mission Accomplished.” This is the plan. This is the program.

The idea that this is just a screw-up, or a delay, or a stall is wrong. This is the plan. You’re seeing it in effect. They don’t ever want those people back. You still have 73,000 POWs - prisoners of “W.”

New Orleans residents are locked in these “aluminum Guantanamos,” also known as FEMA trailers, as you’ll see in the film. There are a thousand mobile homes next to the Mobil Oil refinery. These trailers are in the middle of nowhere, and there’s no way those people can get any jobs. It’s a cycle. Some businesses and homeowners would like to rebuild New Orleans, but they can’t get workers, and those who would like to work live too far away to get any jobs.

Families are not even allowed to move their trailer to their own home property. It’s a deliberate program of ethnic and class cleansing in the City of New Orleans.

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New Republican PAC seeks GOP majority in Legislature
BATON ROUGE, La. -- With term-limits kicking in for many Louisiana lawmakers, some big-money Republicans see a chance to increase their party's presence in the Legislature.


They organized a new political action this year to raise money for the 2007 legislative elections.

The Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority is headed by New Orleans developer Joseph Canizaro. It already has more than $600,000 in the bank, with a goal of raising $2.5 million by the time candidates qualify for the fall elections.

Term limits are fueling much of the activity to make GOP inroads aimed at political control, said the committee's executive director, John Diez Jr.

The committee will be active in 27 to 30 Louisiana House districts and five to seven Senate districts in the fall elections, Diez said.

http://www.katc.com/Global/story.asp?S=5858084

I guess since they successfully kept the poor black people from returning to their homes, the Greedy Old Perverts have decided the time is right for a fascist takeover of Louisana. They've even put a "developer" in charge of the committee. Can you say CASINOS!

happen; the poor people would be driven out so the rich ones could take over. It sure does look like it's happening.

they would never let the black residents come back...but I never even thought about casinos! DOH, follow the money people.

What a national disgrace. NO should be rebuilt to the extent possible to accommodate FIRST the native sons and daughters, and get them out of those FEMA trailers that are the size of rvs. No one can live in those full time and retain sanity. F%* the developers.

under the grandiose name of the "Recovery School District". In the process, as Palast correctly notes, the teachers' union has effectively been busted. A number of other schools have reopened as charters, but it's not, as Palast says, "all vouchers" -- not yet, anyway.

More on the Common Ground evictions mentioned in the article:

In fact, I show an example of a group called “Common Ground” which is rebuilding homes with the residents with their own sweat equity and a few bucks for materials. And this week, they’re being evicted.

You have a group which has already put 115 families into homes that they’ve built themselves, and now they’re being evicted this week. And by the way, all the money — the million dollars of material and the hundred thousands of hours of sweat equity — are all being stolen away from them by developers who are saying “Oh, you didn’t have the right to rebuild those houses, we own them.” And they’re literally stealing their houses. That’s what’s happening.

Common Ground tells the rest of the story:

http://www.commongroundrelief.org/taxonomy/term/48

On December 14 City Council member James Carter committed to facilitate the scheduling of a meeting between Common Ground and HANO representatives. The purpose of the meeting was to secure housing vouchers for Woodlands families facing eviction.

HANO set a meeting with Common Ground for today, December 19. However, since making the initial arrangements for this meeting, HANO has not been willing to return Common Ground’s phone calls, nor send a representative for a meeting....

Since then Common Ground has provided approximately one million dollars in labor and material improvements to the complex. While rents across the city have skyrocketed, Common Ground management froze the rents at the Woodlands to pre-Katrina levels, fostered a strong tenants union and ran a workers' cooperative with paid skills training.

It was our goal to make The Woodlands an environmentally sustainable, attractive, safe and affordable home for hard working New Orleanians. The families now face a January 4th eviction deadline after the owner, Anthony "Reggie" Regginelli, sold the complex to Johnson Properties, a Baton Rouge-based group that is unwilling to house the tenants while renovations take place in sections of the complex.

This is a MUST READ!!!

In January 2006, Congress must tackle this debacle.

In letting this happen, we are all at risk.

This is New Orleans, but it also San Francisco after the Big One, or New York after a tsunami.

It is your place in nebraska after a twister takes out Omaha, and my place in California when the Sacramento levees break