-------- Original Message --------
Subject: “They wanted them poor niggers out of there.”
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 03:49:19 -0400
From: Greg Palast <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
â??They wanted them poor niggers out of there.â?�
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 Palastâ??s film, Big Easy to Big Empty: The
Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans. You may purchase a copy of
the DVD (http://www.palastinvestigativefund.org/19), watch an excerpt
(http://bigeasytobigempty.wordpress.com/view-the-trailer/) or read the
new chapter on New Orleans in Palastâ??s New York Times bestseller,
Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange
Tales of a White House Gone Wild.(http://www.gregpalast.com/order-the-book/)
Sign up for Palastâ??s investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com
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