Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Locked Outside the Gates

H/T Bill Quigley and the Black Agenda Report for the post: Locked Outside the Gates. There is a flow of progress in New Orleans. It's called "Katrina Gentrification." The question is, will anybody be held accountable?


Locked Outside the Gates - Tasers, Pepper Spray and Arrests in the Struggle for Affordable Housing in New Orleans

by Bill Quigley

NOLAbestPoliceFight

Caste out, drowned out, and all but chased out of New Orleans more than two years ago, the city's poor and their allies found themselves tasered, beaten, arrested and locked out of a city council meeting on affordable housing. In a spectacle of brutality orchestrated by developers, their servants on the council, and Bush's implacably hostile federal housing authorities, the powers-that-be of the shrunken, whitening metropolis dispensed with even the formalities of democracy and civil discourse in their determination to get rid of public housing once and for all. Brute force and raw intimidation ruled. "Residents were warned by phone that if they publicly opposed the demolitions they would lose all housing assistance." Most of what remains of established Black electoral structures in New Orleans shamelessly betrayed their poor fellow citizens, whom they seem to detest as much as do the white rich. More HERE


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