-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 30, 2007 1:16:38 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Fwd: “They wanted them poor niggers out of there.”
Among the miles and miles of devastated houses, rubble still there
today in New Orleans, we found dry, beautiful homes. But their
residents were told by guys dressed like Ninjas wearing
"Blackwater" badges: "Try to go into your home and we'll arrest you."
These aren't just any homes. They are the public housing projects
of the city; the Lafitte Houses and others. But unlike the cinder
block monsters in the Bronx, these public units are beautiful
townhouses, with wrought-iron porches and gardens right next to the
tony French Quarter.
Raised up on high ground, with floors and walls of concrete, they
were some of the only houses left salvageable after the Katrina flood.
Yet, two years later, there's still bars on the windows, the doors
are welded shut and the residents banned from returning.
I had a good idea what this scam was all about: 89,000 poor and
working class families stuck in Homeland Security's trailer park
gulag while their good homes were guarded against their return by
mercenaries. Two decades ago, I worked for the Housing Authority
of New Orleans. Even then, the plan was to evict poor folk out of
this very valuable real estate.
Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com.
From: Greg Palast <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: August 30, 2007 12:28:52 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: “They wanted them poor niggers out of there.”
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
“They wanted them poor niggers out of there.”
New Orleans two years after
by Greg Palast
[Thurs August 30] "They wanted them poor niggers out of there and
they ain't had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor
niggers, you know? And that's just the bottom line."
It wasn't a pretty statement. But I wasn't looking for pretty.
I'd taken my investigative team to New Orleans to meet with Malik
Rahim. Pretty isn't Malik's concern.
We needed an answer to a weird, puzzling and horrific discovery.
Among the miles and miles of devastated houses, rubble still there
today in New Orleans, we found dry, beautiful homes. But their
residents were told by guys dressed like Ninjas wearing
"Blackwater" badges: "Try to go into your home and we'll arrest you."
These aren't just any homes. They are the public housing projects
of the city; the Lafitte Houses and others. But unlike the cinder
block monsters in the Bronx, these public units are beautiful
townhouses, with wrought-iron porches and gardens right next to the
tony French Quarter.
Raised up on high ground, with floors and walls of concrete, they
were some of the only houses left salvageable after the Katrina flood.
Yet, two years later, there's still bars on the windows, the doors
are welded shut and the residents banned from returning. On the
first anniversary of the flood, we were filming this odd scene when
I saw a woman on the sidewalk, sobbing. Night was falling. What
was wrong?
"They just messing all over us. Putting me out our own house. We
come to go back to our own home and when we get there they got the
police there putting us out. Oh, no, this is not right. I'm
coming here from Texas seeing if I can get my house back. But they
said they ain't letting nobody in. But where we gonna go at?"
Idiot me, I asked, "Where are you going to go tonight?"
"That's what I want to know, Mister. Where I'm going to go - me
and my kids?"
With the help of Patricia Thomas, a Lafitte resident, we broke into
an apartment. The place was gorgeous. The cereal boxes still
dry. This was Patricia's home. But we decided to get out before
we got busted.
I wasn't naïve. I had a good idea what this scam was all about:
89,000 poor and working class families stuck in Homeland Security's
trailer park gulag while their good homes were guarded against
their return by mercenaries. Two decades ago, I worked for the
Housing Authority of New Orleans. Even then, the plan was to evict
poor folk out of this very valuable real estate. But it took the
cover of a hurricane to do it.
Malik's organization, Common Ground, wouldn't wait for permission
from the federal and local commissars to help folks return. They
organized takeovers of public housing by the residents. And, in
the face of threats and official displeasure, restored 350
apartments in a destroyed private development on the high ground
across the Mississippi in the ward called, "Algiers." The tenants
rebuilt their own homes with their own sweat and their own scraps
of cash based on a promise of the landlords to sell Common Ground
the property in return for restoring it.
Why, I asked Malik, was there this strange lock-out from public
housing?
Malik shook his dreds. "They didn't want to open it up. They
wanted them closed. They wanted them poor niggers out of there."
For Malik, the emphasis is on "poor." The racial politics of the
Deep South is as ugly as it is in Philadelphia, Pa. But the New
Orleans city establishment has no problem with Black folk per se.
After all, Mayor Ray Nagin's parents are African-American.
It's the Black survivors without the cash that are a problem. So
where New Orleans once stood, Mayor Nagin, in connivance with a
Bush regime more than happy to keep a quarter million poor folk
(i.e. Democrats) out of this swing state, is creating a new city:
a tourist town with a French Quarter, loose-spending drunks, hot-
sheets hotels and a few Black people to perform the modern version
of minstrel shows.
Malik explained, "It's two cities. You know? There's the city for
the white and the rich. And there's another city for the poor and
Blacks. You know, the city that's for the white and rich has
recovered. They had a Jazz Fest. They had a Mardi Gras. They're
going to have the Saints playing for those who have recovered. But
for those who haven't recovered, there's nothing."
So where are they now? The sobbing woman and her kids are gone:
back to Texas, or wherever. But they will not be allowed back into
Lafitte. Ever.
And Patricia Thomas? The middle-aged woman, worked sweeping up the
vomit and beer each morning at a French Quarter karioke joint. Not
much pay, no health insurance, of course. She died since we filmed
her - in a city bereft of health care. New Orleans has closed all
its public hospitals but for one "charity" make-shift emergency
ward in an abandoned department store.
And the one bright star, Malik's housing project? The tenants'
work was done this past December. By Christmastime, they received
their eviction notices - and all were carried out of their rebuilt
homes by marshals right after the New Year, including a paraplegic
resident who'd lived in the Algiers building for decades.
Hurricane recovery is class war by other means. And in this war of
the powerful against the powerless, Mr. Bush can rightly land his
fighter plane in Louisiana and declare that, unlike the war in
Iraq, it is, indeed, "Mission Accomplished."
***************
This report is based on Greg Palast’s film, Big Easy to Big Empty:
The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans. You may purchase
a copy of the DVD, watch an excerpt or read the new chapter on New
Orleans in Palast’s New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: From
Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a
White House Gone Wild.
Sign up for Palast’s investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com
To Unsubscribe, please click here.
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