More than one year after Hurricane Katrina, residents of New Orleans have been forgotten. That’s the conclusion of rampaging investigative journalist Greg Palast in his documentary, Big Easy to Big Empty:
It’s unbelievably ugly. You will see in the film mile after mile of destroyed houses. The 9th Ward looks worse than Berlin after the war because there’s hardly a building standing. And this was just filmed a couple months ago! This was filmed one year after the flood. In Indonesia, they have rebuilt after the tsunami. The only thing they are rebuilding here is a Disneyland on the Mississippi to recreate a new, white, conservative city.
And don’t forget, keeping African-Americans from coming back into New Orleans is amazing political gerrymandering. This is going to be crucial to keeping Louisiana in the Republican column in 2008. That’s really part of the story”¦
The same with Iraq — oh, we screwed up? We didn’t get all the cheap oil that Wolfowitz promised in his congressional testimony, when he said the price of oil would decline. Well, it’s gone up. Golly gee, who funds the Bush Administration but the oil companies and Saudi Arabia? Who profits when the price of oil goes up? That’s “Mission Accomplished.”
Look to New Orleans. Golly gee, the black folks haven’t come back. There are no labor unions anymore in New Orleans. There are no public schools. It’s all vouchers. Worker wages have gone down. It’s “Mission Accomplished.” This is the plan. This is the program.
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