23 June 2006

Uncle Sam's Race War against Katrina Victims Continues

Here at Savage Justice, we have written about how Uncle Sam has used the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina as a pretext to further intensify its ongoing Race War against Black people living on the plantation. More evidence of such an attack emerged this week.

The New York Times reported on the latest episode in FEMA's never-ending psychological attack on those displaced by the hurricane:
In yet another change of housing plans for Hurricane Katrina evacuees, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has suspended the eviction of 3,000 families who are living in government trailers in Mississippi.

The move is the latest in a series of announcements and reversals that have caused confusion and occasionally panic among families unable to live in their ruined homes in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast. For several months, FEMA has repeatedly changed deadlines, sent conflicting letters to applicants, and declared people ineligible for housing assistance for the lack of signatures or failures to appear in person for property inspections.
From its domed concentration camps to the home bulldozings to its broken promises of aid to its deliberate reversals on housing questions, FEMA has played an unceasing PsyOp against Mind Game the internally displaced people of the Gulf Coast.

FEMA is hardly alone in fighting the Race War. While it has carried out Uncle Sam's genocidal campaign with efficiency, at important points in its campaign other of Uncle Sam's instruments have helped to provide it with the elbow room vital to cleanse the Gulf Coast of its Black population. One such assist came recently from one of Uncle Sam's Court Jesters - District Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. - who:
Denied claims for increased aid and notices of benefits, found FEMA did not discriminate on economic or other grounds, and said delays were "inevitable," given the consequences of the storm.
And on Tuesday, Democracy Now! featured a segment that reported on the Uncle Sam's announcement "that more than 5,000 public housing units for the poor were to be demolished even though tens of thousands of low-income residents remain displaced." The report continued:
We take a look at the situation with public housing in New Orleans. Last week, Federal housing officials announced that more than 5,000 public housing units for the poor were to be demolished even though tens of thousands of low-income residents remain displaced. On Saturday, public housing residents and advocates protested the decision by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and vowed to use any means necessary to stop the bulldozing of their apartments. The HUD decision means that at least 3,000 families who lived in the units before the storm will have to find someplace else to go. If the federal government's plan goes forward, New Orleans will have lost 85 percent of its public housing over the past decade.
As these stories reveal, the unceasing institutional effort by Uncle Sam to ethnically cleanse New Orleans will continue at every level - federal, state, and local. But, since it's dead broke, Uncle Sam's plan for New Orleans is hardly a fait accompli. To expel the Black population and gentrify the city requires an enormous amount of corporate welfare, which, thanks to its other commitments, Uncle Sam cannot afford to do so.

Its weakness and impotence to fully implement this scheme offers an opportunity for the revolutionary forces here on the Plantation to make New Orleans our own Ground Zero - the new Jerusalem - of class struggle.