Joseph Williams attempts to leave New Orleans on Interstate 10. He has two flat tires on his trailer that is carrying half of everything he owns. [caption from Newsday dated September 5]

If tons of money end up going to restore New Orleans and protect it from floods in the future, I think we can be pretty certain they're not going to let those people come back. It's very interesting that the very best start for such a policy would be to force the poor out now, and that's exactly what they're doing. This is true regardless of the merits of arguments about the uninhabitability of the entire city.

In an email he sent to me today James W. Bailey used the familiar phrase, "right of return," in a context I had not found it before. I immediately Googled it and found it prominently placed within a piece by Lloyd Hart, the last part of which I'm excerpting here from the North Carolina Independent Media Center site.

There are several reasons why New Orleans should not be totally controlled by the federal government and completely evacuated. The first and foremost is that local population should be the ones hired into the cleanup and reconstruction process as it is their jobs in the City of New Orleans that have been destroyed. Local contractors and local construction personnel should be given the contracts that are dispersed and specifically in the City of New Orleans the Mayor's Office should be the office handling the dispersal of those contracts. As someone who worked on the Big dig in Boston I can tell you straight up you don't want Bechtel Corp. building your dikes and levees after the leaky tunnels they built for us in Boston.

If there are dry homes that have not been flooded and there are people living in them, they should not be evacuated and people who wish to return to those dry homes should be allowed to. A civil society can not repair and redevelop if there are no citizens with a long history of the community to do so. And because of the varying degrees of flooding many homes are less damaged than others and therefore repairable.

Everyone must be for warned that there are greedy developers already rubbing their hands together hoping to use the recent corrupt Supreme Court ruling of imminent domain which allows for transferring private property into the hands of private developers to turn the city into some bizarre Disneyland version of New Orleans that existed before the hurricane but without the middle, working class, and poor folks that created the wonderful expression of culture that turned the pain and suffering caused by slavery into the healing power of the music New Orleans has become as famous for. The music born in Africa, raised on the plantation fields of America by black slaves and through the 20 century, the music that has become the road to our collective salvation.

If any of those folks that have been evacuated and not just the homeowners but the tenants as well lose their right to return to where they lived before Hurricane Katrina because of some nefarious claim that the market must be allowed to shake out the unproductive population in the reconstruction process then you can be sure the music will truly die. Assassinated by white gentrification.

The gentrification that was already taking place in New Orleans must not be allowed to accelerate or restart at all simply because the white guys in White House have decided to take complete charge of the disaster because of the Reagan and Bush regimes deliberate undermining of all Federal departments that deal directly with the civil society in America creating the "Fuck You Government."

Just so you think about this a little. Another reason the white guys in the white house may want complete control of New Orleans may be to control and prevent the body count in the city from becoming the next stage of Bush Regime's worst P.R. nightmare. You know, just like in Iraq "We don't count the Civilian casualties."

FEMA accused of censorship

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When U.S. officials asked the media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free speech watchdogs said on Wednesday.

The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] is in line with the Bush administration's ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors said in separate telephone interviews.

"It's impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story," said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors' group that defends free expression. [excerpt]

[image by J. Conrad Williams Jr. from Newsday]