New Orleans is still destroyed and local elites are scheming with their national brethren to rebuild it without the people who lived there and made it New Orleans. Fighting for a humane, fair, or even merely competent restoration of this city, and other doubly-stricken areas (by poverty and flood-storm) is the last chance, best chance for Democrats in many areas of the country to ride to power on a popular issue-- even Democrats still wedded to an imperial foreign policy.
It's dropped out of the establishment media's tiny viewscreen, but the raw human needs of many and inhuman greed of a few continue to be a gripping look into what's wrong with inequality. New Orleans’ Displaced Struggle for Housing, Jobs, Neighborhoods by Michelle Chen of The NewStandard tells another piece of that story.
Concerned New Orleans homeowners are anxious to return to the city, fearful that developers or government authorities will steal their land. Many are alarmed by reports that the government is planning to bulldoze swaths of low-income communities, including many properties in the heavily damaged Lower Ninth Ward.
New Orleans homeowner and ACORN activist Derwin Hill said, "They’re picking homes that really could be, you know, put back together. And they want to just wipe out the whole area."
Read the whole thing from the independent, progressive, hard-news NewStandard, which is looking for more supporters to reach sustainability.
Aside from the fact that it is the biggest showcase of Republican cruelty, incompetence, and corruption outside of Iraq, rebuilding Louisiana and Mississippi after Katrina and Rita and whatever global-warming-fueled storm comes next should be the top priority of Democrats as a matter of simple political debt. Black people are the most solid Democratic voting demographic, but they need some reason to show up and vote (passing heavy police presence, standing in lines, and facing threats and legal hassles to try to do so). The importance of this issue to the Black community can hardly be overstated. Heck, if your exposure is limited to the comics pages the Boondocks and Candorville can give you some sense of this. (I haven't looked over there recently, but I bet there's a piece at Black Commentator making these points better than I am.)
Then there's that other huge demographic of natural Democrats who are not so committed to the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Latinos and latinas are far more politically savvy than us so-called white people, if their home-country kin are any indication. What can they think, when the Democrats as a national party abandon a majority-black city to Bush's mercenaries (in suits or combat gear)?
And of course the whole country witnessed the debacle and remains more immediately aware of the importance of a caring, competent government, an awareness that can easily be widened to the importance of public works of all kinds-- an ambitious transportation plan to battle global warming and a threatening economic depression would be a good positive to put forth right now, especially if it's still too soon to go back to that other overwhelmingly popular piece of communism, universal health care.
So why isn't the intelligent Democratic blogosphere, the wired grassroots, forcing the issue of the rights and needs of Katrina's and Rita's displaced and dispossessed? Why aren't we even talking about New Orleans much anymore?
It is, I suggest, in part because we still largely get our news from corporate sources. We may not believe one third of what they say, but we still let the establishment news sources establish what is news. Much to my own surprise, the independent alternative has been with us for a couple years now. Allow me to introduce you to The NewStandard. Let its one or two major stories a day also influence your political thinking and typing. Then maybe we'll be one step closer to forging the cohesive poor-progressive-liberal majority that we need to salvage our political system, before it savages us and the world.
(This rant was brought to you by the intellect-fueling hard news stories published five days a week by The NewStandard. Now seeking 450 more dues-paying members to reach a nice big round-sounding 1,000 and ad-free financial stability.)
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