in New Orleans


I just got this in an e-mail. It's a little lengthy but I think worth the read.




Say a hurricane is about to destroy the city you live in. Two questions:

1. What would you do?
2. What would you do if you were black?

Sadly, the two questions don't have the same answer.

To the first: Most of us would take our families out of that city quickly to protect them from danger. Then, able-bodied men would return to help others in need, as wives and others cared for children, elderly, infirm and the like.

For better or worse, Hurricane Katrina has told us the answer to the second question. If you're black and a hurricane is about to destroy your city, then you'll probably wait for the government to save you.

This was not always the case. Prior to 40 years ago, such a pathetic performance by the black community in a time of crisis would have been inconceivable. The first response would have come from black men. They would take care of their families, bring them to safety, and then help the rest of the community. Then local government would come in.

No longer. When 75 percent of New Orleans residents had left the city, it was primarily immoral, welfare-pampered blacks that stayed behind and waited for the government to bail them out. This, as we know, did not turn out good results.

Enter Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan. Jackson and Farrakhan laid blame on "racist" President Bush. Farrakhan actually proposed the idea that the government blew up a levee so as to kill blacks and save whites. The two demanded massive governmental spending to rebuild New Orleans, above and beyond the federal government's proposed $60 billion. Not only that, these two were positioning themselves as the gatekeepers to supervise the dispersion of funds. Perfect: Two of the most dishonest elite blacks in America, "overseeing" billions of dollars. I wonder where that money will end up.

Of course, if these two were really serious about laying blame on government, they should blame the local one. Responsibility to perform – legally and practically – fell first on the mayor of New Orleans. We are now all familiar with Mayor Ray Nagin – the black Democrat who likes to yell at President Bush for failing to do Nagin's job. The facts, unfortunately, do not support Nagin's wailing. As the Washington Times puts it, "recent reports show [Nagin] failed to follow through on his own city's emergency-response plan, which acknowledged that thousands of the city's poorest residents would have no way to evacuate the city."

One wonders how there was "no way" for these people to evacuate the city. We have photographic evidence telling us otherwise. You've probably seen it by now – the photo showing 200 parked school buses, unused and underwater. How much planning does it require to put people on a bus and leave town, Mayor Nagin?

Instead of doing the obvious, Mayor Nagin (with no positive contribution from Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco, the other major leader vested with responsibility to address the hurricane disaster) loaded remaining New Orleans residents into the Superdome and the city's convention center. We know how that plan turned out.

About five years ago, in a debate before the National Association of Black Journalists, I stated that if whites were to just leave the United States and let blacks run the country, they would turn America into a ghetto within 10 years. The audience, shall we say, disagreed with me strongly. Now I have to disagree with me. I gave blacks too much credit. It took a mere three days for blacks to turn the Superdome and the convention center into ghettos, rampant with theft, rape and murder.

President Bush is not to blame for the rampant immorality of blacks. Had New Orleans' black community taken action, most would have been out of harm's way. But most were too lazy, immoral and trifling to do anything productive for themselves.

All Americans must tell blacks this truth. It was blacks' moral poverty – not their material poverty – that cost them dearly in New Orleans. Farrakhan, Jackson, and other race hustlers are to be repudiated – they will only perpetuate this problem by stirring up hatred and applauding moral corruption. New Orleans, to the extent it is to be rebuilt, should be remade into a dependency-free, morally strong city where corruption is opposed and success is applauded. Blacks are obligated to help themselves and not depend on the government to care for them. We are all obligated to tell them so.

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Who wrote this piece of crap?

Long read...but way more educational and correct that the racist drivel in the earlier post.

"In New Orleans, Once Again, the Irony of Southern History"

By Christopher Morris

Mr. Morris is a historian at the University of Texas at Arlington, and the author of books and articles on the history of the South. He is completing a book on the environmental and social history of the Lower Mississippi Valley, including New Orleans.

Once again the entire country is confronted with the legacy of Reconstruction.

It is too simple to chalk the tragedy that continues to unfold in New Orleans to the force of nature, or to an unfathomable God. Hurricanes, like earthquakes, tornadoes, eruptions, and tsunamis, do come, but who or what sends them is only half the story. Such disasters whatever their origin smash into worlds of our making. What they do when they make landfall, what they meet when they reach the coast, is largely up to us. In the case of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina hit a city of intractable poverty, in which the most desperately poor are African American. It also hit a city that was largely defenseless precisely because it is black and poor. And because its once powerful white citizenry has largely vanished.

In the decade following the Civil War, the white business and political leaders of New Orleans and Louisiana begged the federal government to take the lead in sealing the city off from the waters that surrounded and all too often inundated it. These same men had just fought a war against the United States government, they liked to tell themselves, to protect states’ rights, and they could not wait for the occupying army to pack up and leave. The irony in asking for federal money, expertise, and leadership in controlling the Mississippi, and in admitting that the state of Louisiana was simply not up to the task, was probably not lost on them. But the war over state’s rights, if that’s what it was, was behind them. What they and the nation needed in 1866 was to get the cotton and sugar plantations up and running, and to safeguard their region’s largest port. To accomplish that white leaders in New Orleans and surrounding plantations needed safety from flooding and they needed certain control over their predominantly black laborers. The first required federal assistance, the second required the federal government to back off efforts to assist the former slaves.

Over the next two decades they succeeded in getting both. In 1877 the new Republican administration of Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the army from the Southern states and abandoned the former slaves to white “redeemers,” as they were called, because they redeemed the South for the Democratic Party and for white supremacy. But in the bargain that settled the disputed election of 1876, Louisiana demanded and got a promise of federal leadership in flood control. Over the next half century, the federal government worked to protect the land and businesses of whites, who in turn used their control over the land to control black laborers. The great flood of 1927 momentarily made visible the descendants of the former slaves. But when Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, visited the scene and empathized with victims—an act that helped put him into the White House the next year—he reached out to whites. Black folks were disfranchised.

The black population of New Orleans in slavery and freedom has largely been poor and powerless. Their city was protected from flooding, however, so long as white leaders had clout, which they had back when cotton and sugar mattered, and when the Solid South of white Democrats ruled Congress. Louisiana did not vote for Hoover, but that did not matter. Southern Democrats ruled Congress. Hoover needed them more than they needed him.

Civil Rights destroyed the Democratic Party in the South, as whites fled to the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The demise of cotton and sugar, and the end of seniority privileges in Congress, meant that white political flight in Louisiana brought little to the Republican Party. The Southern states that matter most are those filled with migrants from the North, namely, Texas and Florida. Louisiana, and within that state New Orleans most of all, is a place of poor blacks abandoned since Reconstruction to powerful plantation interests who protected them by default when protecting the plantations. But Louisiana’s whites no longer have any clout.

Civil Rights, it turns out, did little to give power to New Orleans’s black population. In the early 1990s the Clinton Administration overhauled welfare. It was part of a Democratic political strategy to ward off conservative Republicans whose campaigns played on latent fears of vicious black rapists and welfare moms, an angry politics energized by outright white supremacist populists, such as Metairie’s David Duke. At the same time Louisiana’s leaders began to express concerns about New Orleans’s vulnerability to flooding. Fears grew with the 1993 floods in the central Mississippi Valley, though the lower valley was spared that year, and following a series of devastating hurricanes that collided with the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.

The Clinton strategy failed to secure the Democrats against the Republicans. As in 1876, Louisiana in the contested election of 2000 helped to put another Republican in the White House, a man who, like Hayes, promised drastic reduction of federal intrusion into state affairs. Just as in 1876, Louisiana once again sought an exception to the states’ rights philosophy it otherwise espoused: massive federal funding for flood control. What changed between then and now was what Louisiana politicians could not see clearly. They no longer mattered. In 1876 Louisiana was a player, one of the states (along with Florida and South Carolina) that delayed the election of Hayes. New Orleans, in addition to federally administered flood control, held out for a transcontinental railroad, which it eventually got.

Louisiana did not put George W. Bush in the White House, nor did it later hand his party control of Congress. Florida did. Texas did. When Louisiana’s leaders asked George W. Bush for funds to shore up New Orleans’s defenses against the waters that surround the city, the president turned them down. There was nothing they could do. They had, after all, signed on to a political philosophy and Republican agenda of tax cuts and minimal federal intervention in state affairs. They had agreed with the Republican and Democratic Parties when they cried out against the special privileges of affirmative action, welfare, and aid to families with dependent children. They agreed, too, with a Republican Party that measures worth in terms of market value. No corporation came forward with a plan to build better levees around New Orleans, and by the logic of the Bush administration, therefore they couldn’t be worth building.

New Orleans and Louisiana might have gone a different route over a century ago. White leaders might have linked the future prosperity of their city and state to the prosperity of the former slaves. Had they done so then, black and white might stand today united, as a real political force to be reckoned with. Together, they might have demanded and received the protection they so desperately needed. Over much of the last century, whites in New Orleans gambled that they could build a society of white privilege and black disfranchisement, and do so with the help of the rest of the nation. Tragically, that is exactly what happened. But they did not see the day when black powerlessness would drag them down too. Sure, the white folks of St. Charles Avenue were able to drive their BMWs out of the city as Katrina approached. We will hear a lot over the coming weeks about how whites survived the storm just fine, while blacks lost everything. But that isn’t quite true. More whites than blacks will have homes to return to. But their city will be gone, unlikely to return. As major industries announce divestment and departure—petroleum companies have begun to say they will not return to New Orleans—affluent whites will lose too.

We will also hear a lot about the natural environment of New Orleans, how it is to blame for the disaster, and people to the extent that they live there. A good case can be made that New Orleans ought never to have been built, or rebuilt after the fires, floods, and hurricanes that have devastated it in the past. The environment around New Orleans is probably no more unsuitable for urban development than south Florida. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert questioned the wisdom and worth of rebuilding New Orleans. No doubt many around the nation share his sentiments. It is hard to imagine he or anyone else would make similar remarks about San Francisco or Los Angeles, were they devastated by earthquake and fire.

New Orleans wasn’t built just on a swamp. It was built, too, on the backs of black laborers. White supremacy helped make New Orleans an important place. In recent decades it has become a curiosity of little real import. If the city never recovers, it won’t be just because of the natural environment. It will be because long ago the whites of New Orleans, and whites in Washington and around the nation, made a bargain with the devil of white supremacy, and now they, we, will have now lost it all.

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So I put this in the political section and now no one will comment?

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"welfare-pampered blacks" heh interesting propaganda.

A friend of mine relocated to Louisiana last November. It wasn't a pleasant relocation - she was getting away from her crappy boyfriend. She lives about a half hour south west of new orleans, in a rented house in the WORST neighborhood possible. (shootings, crackheads, hookers in her front yard) She is a single mom, 3 kids, and used "section 8" for her housing. Meaning, the state of NH paid a portion of her rent, which was adjusted with her income. The more $ she makes, the more rent she pays. She worked at the same place as I do. Her section 8 transferred to louisiana, so she intended on working down there, as she did up here in the north. She found a job - and in the big scheme of "income" down there, it paid $8.50/hr. Comparatively, would be about 10-11/hr up here. Not so bad eh? Right. So, what happened was with her "big income," her section 8 was maxed out, and she ended up paying full rent, which was like 600$ per month.

8.50/hr x 40 hours per week = $340 before taxes. ($1360/month)
Electric bill during summer = $200-250/ month. (no assistance available for that at the time)
Food for 4 people = cant get food stamps - make too much money. say... $100/week ($400/month)
We can omit a "cable" bill cuz she cant afford that.
Internet access? Hahaha
Gas for her car? Wait, she cant afford a car so she doesnt HAVE one...

So lets do the math here.
Food and Electricity = about $650/month
Rent = $600/month
Total= $1250/month.
Income reminder...$1360 - BEFORE taxes.
That leaves her "negative" every month.

Her remedy? Quit her job, go on welfare where she at least will have a few $$ left over to buy the kids a friggin' icecream or something, gee, maybe even a pair of (gasp) shoes!

I love that term "welfare-pampered blacks", undoubtedly spoken by someone who has never known anyone who is struggling to get by. Someone who wants to work, but discovers that it is a complete waste of time to. My friend is a white girl.

FYI, she will be coming back to NH to WORK, and SURVIVE as soon as her lease is up in November. She stuck out BOTH hurricane Katrina and Rita, which both affected her area, she had NO car to get out, and the family that she has down there abandoned her. She is better off dealing with her butt hole boyfriend up here, than the "system," the weather, and state of Louisiana combined!

The moral of this story is:
Life is like a sh!t sandwich.
The more bread you have
the less sh!t you gotta eat.

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re: Oh and what? Your friend wasn't black was she? *sarcasm* Heaven forbid that someone who's not black use the system! Geez.

Ha! imagine that eh? Damn lazy white peeps. LoLoLoL

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