#KatrinaAnniversary "The Logic of Genocide"

Alan Chin 84-year old Milvertha Hendricks wrapped in an American flag blanket after spending five days on the street at the Convention Center. New Orleans ...

Today's Must Read by Glenn Ford

The best thing that could happen to poor Black people is for a Katrina-like catastrophe to hit their city, scattering them to the four corners of the country. So says an article in a leading “liberal” magazine, which maintains that “the forced exodus of Katrina should be replicated as public policy, for the good of both the purposely displaced and society as a whole.” In the real world, white supremacy and capitalism created the ghettos.

Katrina was a human rights disaster 

The human rights dimension of the disaster became clear immediately after Katrina struck, when the media struggled to find the right words to describe the estimated 1.3 million people uprooted from their homes and scattered around the country. Some called them "refugees" — a term met with outrage by Gulf residents, since it officially applies to citizens of another country crossing borders. "Evacuees" was also inaccurate, since tens of thousands of people — largely due to a flawed and scandal-ridden emergency response — were never "evacuated" after the storm hit.

Every Kid is Money  

This week commemorates a grim anniversary. Ten years ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. It wiped out the entire public school system and cleared the way for what has become the nation's first fully charterized district. In the New Orleans Recovery School District, traditional neighborhood public schools are gone, replaced by privately run charter schools.

B-but President Obama says New Orleans is moving forward after Katrina.... 

"Not long ago, our gathering here in the Lower 9th might have seemed unlikely," Obama says in speech excerpts released by the White House. "But today, this new community center stands as a symbol of the extraordinary resilience of this city and its people, of the entire Gulf Coast, indeed, of the United States of America. You are an example of what's possible when, in the face of tragedy and hardship, good people come together to lend a hand, and to build a better future."

EYE guess it depends on what the definition of moving forward IS.... 

“Plan and simple, the recovery efforts of the last ten years in New Orleans mostly benefited White residents,” said Ernest Johnson, FFLIC’s Statewide Juvenile Justice Reform Campaign and Policy Director. “America’s comeback city is one where the Black median income remains less than one half of the White median income. It is a city where the Black unemployment rate is nearly three times the rate of White unemployment rate. It is a city where only 30% of residents in the predominately Black Lower 9th Ward have been able to return to their homes. It is evident that recovery was out of reach and unavailable to African Americans.”

The more things change..... the more they don't.