Who Is Killing New Orleans?

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.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0324-34.htm

Coming to your hometown soon, courtesy of the President Bush and the GOP.

Desolation and Destruction of Your Nation, Your Town, and Your Life.

They don't want the "new" New Orleans to resemble the "old" New Orleans. In some respects, I think they're correct. They should make it a better New Orleans, but not a lily white New Orleans which is what their plans are now. Oh, they'd have room for a few minorities, someone has to clean their houses and do the menial work they wouldn't dream of doing themselves. But they can "hide" them somewhere, out of sight and certainly out of mind.
I toured New Orleans a few weeks ago. What I saw was the rebuilding of white New Orleans leaving black New Orleans untouched. Some of these areas affected by Katrina will never be rebuilt, by Federal decree. The government intends to buy the land and not allow residential dwellings to be rebuilt there ever again.
The rich will get their way, as they always do. As Ray Nagin says, New Orleans may be open for business but it's "white" business. The diversity that once made New Orleans a special, wonderful place will be lost forever and replaced by a "Disney-fied" New Orleans. The tourists may like it but any native New Orleanian isn't going to recognize the city when they're finished.

to the areas they want to get rid of. It's on purpose. It's very hard to live or do any work on your property without electric.

Getting electric to every neighborhood should be a top priority. Then people can being to rebuild.

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