More political rantery (yes, I know rantery isn't a real word)
Here's an interesting statistic, the racial breakdown of neighbourhoods in New Orleans that were beginning to be repopulated before Rita: the French Quarter: 90% white, the Garden District: 89% white, Audubon: 86% white. What's even more interesting is that these areas which were deemed fit for habitation, large sections are vacant, for example, in the French Quarter according to the latest census, 37% of the homes were unoccupied. They're vacant because there aren't enough well-to-do people in the area to fill them up, and the landlords would rather board them up and continue to make money off of the high-rent commercial tenents (bars, restaurants, etc) than have low-income people and families move into the area and reduce property value.
What's truly disgusting about this is that this statistic means that there was room for thousands of (primarily poor, black) refugees in New Orleans, in areas deemed safe, yet they were still sent away, first to Texas, and then all over the nation. When you look at this fact and then look at what else is being done, the government's refusal to give money to schools taking children from the Gulf Coast, the dismissal of the Davis-Beacon prevailing wage laws (which guarantee that workers are paid local prevailing wages, effectively ensuring that they are making enough to keep up with the cost of living no matter where they are, and Bush's gradiose (if not megalomaniacal) plans to rebuild New Orleans as a sinless, free market, upper class heaven for corporations and the wealthy, you start to see a scary picture.
For more information, see Naomi Klein's article, Purging the Poor and her interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.
In other news, armed attack dolphins, trained by the US military may have escaped into the Gulf of Mexico, posing a unique danger to divers in the area.
What's truly disgusting about this is that this statistic means that there was room for thousands of (primarily poor, black) refugees in New Orleans, in areas deemed safe, yet they were still sent away, first to Texas, and then all over the nation. When you look at this fact and then look at what else is being done, the government's refusal to give money to schools taking children from the Gulf Coast, the dismissal of the Davis-Beacon prevailing wage laws (which guarantee that workers are paid local prevailing wages, effectively ensuring that they are making enough to keep up with the cost of living no matter where they are, and Bush's gradiose (if not megalomaniacal) plans to rebuild New Orleans as a sinless, free market, upper class heaven for corporations and the wealthy, you start to see a scary picture.
For more information, see Naomi Klein's article, Purging the Poor and her interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez.
In other news, armed attack dolphins, trained by the US military may have escaped into the Gulf of Mexico, posing a unique danger to divers in the area.