bOING-bOING has a piece up entitled "Katrina: Authorities bar Red Cross from NOLA; Blackwater gets carte blanche", that tries to ask why all these insane policies are in place - no red cross, forced evacuation (of the poor), forced disarmament of residents but not of mercs 'protecting' the wealthy, why there are even the creepy mercs of blackwell in the fucking city at all - and reader Richard Steven Hack sums it all up in one ugly paragraph:
The reason the Red Cross is not allowed in, according to the Red Cross Web site, is that the authorities believe their presence would invite people to return to the city. Since it would seem the goal of this project is to demolish the city, then dun the former inhabitants for the demolition costs, then seize the property for nonpayment, then auction it off for pennies to Bush cronies and then give Halliburton billions to rebuild it for corporations and whites only, I'd say that policy fits right in.fuck, it's ugly to read that all in one place innit?
and they also link to naomi klein's piece in the nation, "let the people rebuild new orleans", which mentions "the second tsumami" faced by southeast asian displaced peoples:
It's a radical concept: the $10.5bn released by Congress and the $500m raised by private charities doesn't actually belong to the relief agencies or the government - it belongs to the victims. The agencies entrusted with the money should be accountable to them. Put another way, the people Barbara Bush tactfully described as "underprivileged anyway" just got very rich.god damnit, it's too fucking early for this bile. i'm going to go back to reading the people who own themselves: aboriginal ethnogenesis in a canadian family, 1660-1900. at least then the atrocities and sufferings are happening three hundred years ago and i can't say my current, "elected" government is responsible for it. (yes, i know it says it's about canadia, but really all of new france is covered so the US government is heavily and directly involved and many were citizens.)Except relief and reconstruction never seem to work like that. When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimising them all over again. A council of the country's most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to tourist developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies for food and water. They called reconstruction "the second tsunami".
There are already signs that New Orleans evacuees could face a similarly brutal second storm. Jimmy Reiss, chairman of the New Orleans Business Council, told Newsweek that he has been brainstorming about how "to use this catastrophe as a once-in-an-eon opportunity to change the dynamic". The council's wish list is well-known: low wages, low taxes, more luxury condos and hotels.
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