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Meanwhile, Back at the Government-Sanctioned Ethnic Cleansing…
Hey, kids, remember New Orleans? Hit by a storm a couple of years ago? Flooded? Riots, fires, mass drownings, all while Our Preznit strummed a guitar and told the agency directly responsible for making the disaster immeasurably worse that they were doin’ a heckuva job? That New Orleans? Ringing a bell, folks?
Remember how we wondered when/how/if the city could ever be fixed so that the hundreds of thousands of displaced residents could return home?
Wellsir, turns out that the city federal government had a fantastic plan for helping its displaced residents: just knock down their houses so they can’t come back!
The fight against these demolitions isn’t really about pushing people back into “housing gulags” as some have charged. But it is about pushing back against a government agency that is clearly acting in bad faith. Otherwise E’s series of “Why not”s in the above quote would not be met with such silence. Public housing obviously needs to be improved. What we are being sold here, however, is not an improvement so much as it is an abandonment. Whatever replaces these buildings is not going to come close to serving the needs of as many people as the public housing system has served in the past… however inadequately.And serving fewer people is clearly the purpose of this policy just as it is with nearly every aspect of planning the “New” NOLA. All over town institutions are “re-inventing” themselves with an eye toward smaller and less centralized services that cannot and will not meet the needs of a living, growing city. This is the case with health care, with public education, public transit…etc.
Go ahead and read the whole thing. It’s written by someone who (unlike 99.9% of the commentators who spout the brainless “smaller, leaner, Free Market” blather in favor of killing off an entire American city) actually lives in New Orleans.
