Let's Stop Enabling Bush & GOP, New Orleans Response is ETHNIC CLEANSING

[Dems Will Win]

The New Orleans Response is Kinder and Gentler Ethnic Cleansing, Plain and Simple


Katrina Refugees Were Sent All the Way to Houston

Bush is not incompetent. That's just an act. Everything this Administration has done has been planned and very deliberate. The Response to New Orleans is no different.

First of all, Bush did not spend the $250 million needed to fix the levees before the storm, probably in the hope that a Katrina would hit and the disaster could be used as a cover to cleanse NOLA of African Americans--especially their voting power in the swing state of Louisiana. And we all know the pathetic response by FEMA during and directly after the disaster. And for no reason at all they shipped all those black people out of Louisiana and stranded them there.

Mary Landrieu was on Bloomberg today complaining that out of 34,000 applications for SBA loans, only 7,000 were granted and thousands were rejected! Yet by talking about the small size of the SBA team in NOLA and the small effort by FEMA, Landrieu merely ended up ENABLING Bush and the GOP for she never uttered the real truth.

The NOLA response is neo-fascist ethnic cleansing. Nothing less. 80% of the African American population is now gone--even though most want to return.

We need to stop being like Landrieu and the GOP and not go along with the line that Bush and FEMA and the SBA and all the bureaucratic moves Bush has pulled on NOLA are NOT INCOMPETENCE or BUNGLING.

It is deliberate ethnic cleansing, right here in America. It can happen here, and it did.

Here is a story from The Nation in April:

Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances.

...

With each passing week of neglect -- what Representative Barney Frank has labeled "a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction" -- the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return.

...

An early, deadly blow was Treasury Secretary John Snow's refusal to guarantee New Orleans municipal bonds, forcing Mayor Nagin to lay off 3,000 city employees on top of the thousands of education and medical workers already jobless. The Bush Administration also blocked bipartisan measures to increase Medicaid coverage for Katrina evacuees and to give the State of Louisiana -- facing an estimated $8 billion in lost revenues over the next few years -- a share of the income generated by its offshore oil and gas leases.

Even more egregious was the flagrant redlining of black neighborhoods by the Small Business Administration (SBA), which rejected a majority of loan applications by local businesses and homeowners. At the same time, a bipartisan Senate bill to save small businesses with emergency bridge loans was sabotaged by Bush officials, leaving thousands to face bankruptcy and foreclosure.

...

The paramount beneficiaries of Katrina relief aid have been the giant engineering firms KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) and the Shaw Group, which enjoy the services of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh (a former FEMA director and Bush's 2000 campaign manager). FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, while unable to explain to Governor Blanco last fall exactly how they were spending money in Louisiana, have tolerated levels of profiteering that would raise eyebrows even on the war-torn Euphrates. (Some of this largesse, of course, is guaranteed to be recycled as GOP campaign contributions.)

...

The Pentagon won approval for a whopping $4.4 billion in base repairs and other professed Katrina-related needs, but Congress cut out the $250 million allocated to combat coastal erosion. Meanwhile, Mississippi's powerful Republican troika -- Governor Haley Barbour and Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran -- persuaded fellow Republicans to support $6.2 billion in discretionary housing aid for Louisiana and $5.3 billion for Mississippi, with red-state Mississippi getting five times as much aid per distressed household as pink-state Louisiana.

...

Upon these suspect premises, the outside "experts" (including representatives of some of the country's largest property firms and corporate architects) proposed an unprecedented triage of an American city, in which low-lying neighborhoods would be targeted for mass buyouts and future conversion into a greenbelt to protect New Orleans from flooding. As a visiting developer told BNOB: "Your housing is now a public resource. You can't think of it as private property anymore."

...

Thanks to the Army Corps's defective levees, the Republicans stand to gain another Senate seat, two Congressional seats and probably the governorship. The Democrats would also find it impossible to reproduce Bill Clinton's 1992 feat, when he carried Louisiana by almost exactly his margin of victory in New Orleans. With a ruthless psephologist like Karl Rove in the White House, it is inconceivable that such considerations haven't influenced the shameless Bush response to the city's distress.

http://www.alternet.org/katrina/34119/

For comparison to the original fascism, here is how similar the GOP cleansing of NOLA is to Generalplan Ost, the Nazi strategy to cleanse Poland. From Wikipedia:

Generalplan Ost (GPO) was a Nazi plan to realize Hitler's "new order of ethnographical relations" in the territories occupied in Eastern Europe during World War II. It was prepared in 1941 and confirmed in 1942. No copies of the actual document have survived, and as such the plan can only be reconstructed from memos, abstracts and other ancillary documents. The plan was part of Hitler's own Lebensraum plan and a fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten.

Generalplan Ost, essentially a grand plan for ethnic cleansing, was divided into two parts, the Kleine Planung ("Small Plan"), which covered actions which were to be taken during the war, and the Große Planung ("Big Plan"), which covered actions to be undertaken after the war was won. The plan envisaged differing percentages of the various conquered nations undergoing Germanisation, expulsion into the depths of Russia, and other gruesome fates, the net effect of which would be to ensure that the conquered territories would take on an irrevocably German character.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost


As part of a wider effort to destroy Polish culture, the Germans closed or destroyed universities, schools, museums, libraries, and scientific laboratories. They demolished hundreds of monuments to national heroes. To prevent the birth of a new generation of educated Poles, German officials decreed that the schooling of Polish children should end after a few years of elementary education. "The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one's name; and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans. I do not think that reading is desirable," Himmler wrote in a May 1940 memorandum. In the same document, he promises to deport all Poles to the east.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_ethnic_Poles

Let's tell the truth. The GOP Rubberstampers have approved the deliberate ethnic cleansing of New Orleans through bureaucracy. It is not incompetence, it is not bureacracy moving slow (look at Mississippi's recovery), it is ETHNIC CLEANSING.

African Americans should vote in 2006 like never before. And the rest of America should be told the truth. Stop enabling the Republican neo-fascists.

Because the next group they come after could include you.

Please recommend if you think the New Orleans Response is ethnic cleansing and not incompetence or bureaucracy. Let's get this message OUT THERE.

[Dems Will Win]

1. Ethnic Cleansing is a War Crime. From Wikipedia:

There is no formal legal definition of ethnic cleansing. However, ethnic cleansing in the broad sense - the forcible deportation of a population - is defined as a crime against humanity under the statutes of both International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The gross human-rights violations integral to stricter definitions of ethnic cleansing are treated as separate crimes falling under the definitions for genocide or crimes against humanity of the statutes.

The UN Commission of Experts (established pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780) held that the practices associated with ethnic cleansing "constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore ... such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention." The UN General Assembly condemned "ethnic cleansing" and racial hatred in a 1992 resolution.<10>

[liberaldemocrat7]

9. I sympathize but when Democrats begin to use similar leveraging of money

you will get even more sympathy from me. Begin boycotting Rush Limbaugh's advertisers and make the demands you have always wanted, of them and don't buy from them until they get you what you want.

[Dems Will Win]

2. Oh and let's not forget the dead in NOLA

and thousands still unaccounted for--primarily African American deaths.

Another item--they're going to destroy 5,000 public housing apartments EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE NEVER FLOODED!

[Green Mountain Dem]

3. I agree but please......

advise me what media to use to get this message out!! I am old and not very healthy but I WILL take to the streets or shout from the rooftops...let me know where and when. Until the media is no longer owned by the corporate interests, there will never be a New Orleans as we knew it...and loved it!

[Dems Will Win]

6. Letters to the editor!

[me b zola]

4. There was even one rethug who admitted to it

...of course he didn't use the term ethnic cleansing, but his statement said just that. I don't recall his name, but speaking about how most of the African American population had been displaced he said (very loose quote) Katrina did what we've have been trying to do for many years. There were still dead bodies lying in the streets when this and other rethugs began showing their agenda.



Thanks for posting this. We must call it by it's rightful name. We must never forget.






recommended

[EFerrari]

8. The bigot was Baker. Raw Story link:

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Congressman_Hurricane_finally_cleaned_out__public_housing_in_N_0909.html

[Dems Will Win]

11. kick

[leesa]

5. Couple other things too though. They wanted to PROVE that the

federal government can't be responsible for taking care of people. They wanted to drown federal emergency services.

They also wanted to try to get the State militia under Presidential control. They want the National Guard at THEIR beck and call.

[Dems Will Win]

7. You May Be A Neo-Fascist If You....

[Dems Will Win]

10. kick