Thought Patterns
by Emanuel
November 12, 2007 at 00:19
filed under rant
We shall not forget New Orleans. We can not forget. I was reading this latest newsletter from GregPalast.com, and although it has already been a little while since the California fires, it still is worth relating. Here’s a excerpt and you can find the complete post on Greg Palast’s site:
What color is your disaster? It makes a difference. A life and death difference.
Dig:
Population of San Diego fire evacuation zone: 500,000
White folk as a % of evacuees, San Diego: 66%
Black folk as % of evacuees, New Orleans: 67%
Size counts, too. Size of your wallet, that is:
Evacuees in San Diego, in poverty: 9%
Evacuees in New Orleans, in poverty: 27%
The numbers would be even uglier, though more revealing, if I included evacuees of the celebrity fire in Malibu.
[...]
In 2005, while the bodies were still being fished out of flooded homes in New Orleans, Republican Congressman Richard Baker praised The Lord for his mercy. “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did,” he said about the removal of the poor from the project near the French Quarter much coveted by speculators.
But as this week’s flames spread, no Republican Congressman cried, “Burn baby burn!” to praise the Lord for cleaning up the ‘Boo, the sin-and-surf playground of Hollywood luvvies.
In New Orleans, God’s covenant with real estate developers has been very profitable. Over 70,000 families remain, two years after the waters receded, in mobile home concentration centers far away from the N.O. re-building boom.
[...]
Mr. Bush never mentioned – and the media would never give away his secret – that 15 hours before the levees broke, the White House and FEMA knew the flood barriers were cracking, yet failed to inform the Governor and state police. Nor did Mr. Bush mention that his Department of Homeland Security’s FEMA trolls took away evacuation planning from the state and gave it to a crew of crony contractors who, for a million bucks, came up with a plan that came down to, “If a hurricane comes, get in your car and drive like hell.”
In California, plans were in place, money poured down with the flame retardant, and no one is suggesting that Mel Gibson move his swastika collection to a FEMA trailer.
[...]
So let me not forget to report the war’s body count:
New Orleans flood deaths: 1,577
California celebrity fire deaths: 5
If you still haven’t had the chance to watch Spike Lee’s ‘When the Levees Broke: a requiem in 4 acts’, you should make sure you get around to it as it is a very moving documentary. On a side note, my peeps at BRKNHOME were inspired by the documentary and did a Tee for this past summer’s collection:
Spike Lee made a documentary to comment on the lack of support given by the US government to the people and city of New Orleans so we flipped his commentary into a graphic by taking the cover art from Don Mclean’s “American Pie” and turned it upside down. To make a further connection to that record and the idea, we flipped a line out of that song “drove my Chevy to the levee and the levee was dry”……to the levee was BRKN (broken)
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