The ethnic cleansing of New Orleans
Archy desctibes the added bonus Katrina brought the Republicans:
Without knowing the content of his speech, I can predict what his vision includes. Iraq 2. The reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf will look a lot like the reconstruction of Iraq. Bush will throw truck-loads of money at the problem, but willl make no effort to pay for it all. There will be no-bid contracts to well connected companies, at least one of which begins with the letters H-A-L-I-B-U-R-T… There will be a wholesale exemption from federal regulation. There will be widespread experimentation with wingnut economic and social theories. There will be a shameless land-grab by the white and privileged and an attempt to prevent the poor and dark from returning. There will be no financial oversight. Tens of billions of dollars will vanish. The Democrats won’t make a peep.
All of this has been predicted by my blogging and punditocratic superiors. Yet there is one element of the destruction/reconstruction that has been ignored. At this point, many tens of thousands of the citizens of New Orleans have been moved out of the state as refugees. A significant number of these will not return. Some will be kept out by land-grabs by the privileged classes. Many will voluntarily choose to stay in their temporary new homes. The electoral effect of this will be to have moved thousands of Democratic voters out of a state where elections are usually very tightly contested. Most of these voters have been moved to very Republican states, where a few thousand Democrats are not enough to swing the elections.
Don’t let anybody believe that this opportunity wasn’t in the back of the GOP’s minds from the start. They always think about these things, long before any other considerations come to the fore. The slow response to the disaster, the way New Orleans was bottled up with no help going in and no people going out, the way all those inconvenient Black voters were left on their own, it all fits.
New Orleans has been a festering sore to these people for a long time and Katrina gave them a chance to tackle NO’s problems at the root: by removing all those inconvenient poor Blacks who live in it. the plan will be to restore New Orleans as a tourist decoration, keeping all that interesting Black stuff like Jazz but without the inconvenience of having to deal with real life Black people not sufficiently picturesque for the tourists. At the same time the port of Louisiana needs to be reubild, for as far as that is not yet being done, but again no poor Black folk are needed for that.
So instead of a largely Democratic voting, poor New Orleans, you get a yuppified, gentrified, cleaned up Disney version, safe for Republicans. The displaced people will end up all over the American south and further, with a little bit of luck aggrievating the locals enough to keep them voting Republican as well…. Long live Bush’s America.