Links For The Day
I’m red-eyed and exhausted from obsessive, incessant checking for Plame indictments, but that’s nothing; many of the US blogs are squirming themselves into paroxysms of excitement waiting for Fitzmas, as it’s now known; I veer from wild optimism that this crew are going down, suckas to gloom that they’ll just walk away and my children will live to inhabit an industrial, fascist dystopia or a massive climate event will solve all our petty concerns, permanently. Which would really not be good for the bulbs I just planted.
I keep trying to tell myself not to get my hopes up, but fuck it, I’m enjoying this. Schadenfreude is entirely insufficient to describe it, it’s more like bloodlust. I want to see this gang of crooks get what’s coming to them, and even if my worst fears are fulfilled and they don’t, I’ll at least have had the pleasure of the anticipation. But they know it’s coming too, and George is not a happy bunny. You wouldn’t like Georgie when he’s not happy, oh no.
Picture credit, firedoglake
And how very odd of Norm Coleman to accuse George Galloway of perjury at this, of all times, when the Republican party is desperately arguing in all available media outlets that perjury is a mere technicality. I doubt he did this of his own volition – wasn’t he humiliated enough last time? – but they’re getting desperate. Galloway was very clear on Today a few minutes ago (link to media clip) that he looks forward to a trial for perjury in the US courts. Oops, Sen. Coleman, don’t you know that they only prosecute for perjury when their case is weak? If you must shill for the WH at least try and stay on-message.
“I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn?t indict on the crime so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation were not a waste of time and dollars.”
But, while we avidly consume all Plame news ( with a side-order of Miers) an act of blatant racist social engineering, landgrabbing and profiteering is taking place, and it’s orchestrated by the same neo-conservatives cheap fraudsters excoriated in the blogs. Long after they’re gone, the scars of what they’re doing will remain. And the Bush family will still be rich.
Another southern Black diaspora has been created under the guise of reconstruction – “Hurricane Katrina [may] prove to be the biggest, most brutal urban-renewal project Black America has ever seen? says Mike Davis in Mother Jones.
New barriers, meanwhile, are being erected against the return of evacuees. In Mississippi?s ruined coastal cities, as well as in metro New Orleans, Landlords?galvanized by rumors of gentrification and soaring land values?are beginning to institute mass evictions. (Although the oft-cited Lower Ninth Ward is actually a bastion of blue-collar homeownership, most poor New Orleanians are renters.)
Civil-rights lawyer Bill Quigley has described how renters have returned ?to find furniture on the street and strangers living in their apartments at higher rents, despite an order by the Governor that no one can be evicted before October 25. Rents in the dry areas have doubled and tripled.?
Secretary of Housing Alfonso Jackson, meanwhile, seems to be working to fulfill his notorious prediction that New Orleans is ?not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.? Public-housing and Section 8 residents recently protested that ?the agencies in charge of these housing complexes [including HUD] are using allegations of storm damage to these complexes as a pretext for expelling working-class African-Americans, in a very blatant attempt to co-opt our homes and sell them to developers to build high-priced housing.?
Minority homeowners also face relentless pressures not to return. Insurance compensation, for example, is typically too small to allow homeowners in the eastern wards of New Orleans to rebuild if and when authorities re-open their neighborhoods.
Rosa Parks died today aged 92. Sometimes it seems that nothing changes.
