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New Orleans

From NYPD Spying to Trayvon Martin

Tue, 03/27/2012 - 22:31 — Jordan Flaherty

 

by Jordan Flaherty

Police and their prey are locked in a dance – with the cops leading the morbid shuffle. In New Orleans, where the author hails from, a white officer who just this month shot a young Black man to death was found to have recorded a racist rant against Trayvon Martin, calling for the Florida teenager to “go to hell.” Meanwhile, New York cops travel to New Orleans to record the author’s speech at a film festival.

From Heroes to Villains: NOPD Verdict Reveals Post-Katrina History

Wed, 08/10/2011 - 09:36 — Jordan Flaherty

by Jordan Flaherty

Guilty verdicts against New Orleans cops in the infamous Danziger Bridge murders of innocent Black citizens may lead to far reaching changes in law enforcement – and not just in New Orleans. “The Justice Department is looking at federal oversight of the NOPD, a process by which they can dictate vast changes from hiring and firing to training and policy writing.” Other cities may soon come in for similar attention. The NOPD was long known as the most violent and corrupt big city police force in the country. “For years every check and balance in the city’s criminal justice system failed to find any fault in this or other officer-involved shootings from the days after the storm.”

New Orleans Black Activists Denounce Obama and Shame Misleadership Class

Tue, 08/31/2010 - 22:27 — Glen Ford

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford


When it comes to making President Obama accountable for his own wars, his own corporate pandering, his own trillion-dollar bank bailouts, the Black misleadership class becomes mute. But poor people's activists in New Orleans had no problem denouncing the president's housing policies, which ensure that "fat cats like Warren Buffett and huge private banking institutions will inherit the nation's public housing properties."


 

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Obama Sec'y of Education Says Katrina "the Best Thing to Happen" to Education in New Orleans

Tue, 02/02/2010 - 21:21 — Glen Ford
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
If obscene utterances were a crime, education secretary Arne Duncan would be jailed for life. Like all disaster capitalists, he views poor people's catastrophes as his own golden opportunities. In Haiti and New Orleans, Black lives were a small price for (someone else) to pay for the chance to create a new order “more advantageous to the rich.”

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Has Change Come to Post-Katrina New Orleans?

Wed, 04/29/2009 - 10:05 — Jay Arena

If you want to measure the distance between George Bush and Barack Obama on domestic political issues, Katrina provides the best test. What emerges is a startling continuity of policy toward New Orleans between the Republican and Democratic White Houses – especially regarding the fate of public housing. This continuity of policy “is particularly the case in New Orleans where public services have been or are on their way to being privatized or eliminated, and where, primarily due to this disaster capitalist agenda, almost half the population has been unable to return home, disproportionately female, black and, poor.”

Katrina Suit is Institutional Racism Lesson For Obama

Sun, 11/16/2008 - 18:00 — Glen Ford

Institutional racism is "the mechanism by which the present and future are shaped by racist practices of the past." New Orleans African Americans seeking to rebuild their lives found that government pays more to replace white people's homes, than Blacks. Obama, take note.

 

New Orleans’ Failed Education Experiment: Privatization Runs Amok

Tue, 08/28/2007 - 18:00 — Ralph Adama

by Ralph Adamo  

Almost as soon as the levees were breached, the predators that infest American business and government structures smelled a new opportunity: to reshape the educational system of New Orleans according to their own diabolical, profit-oriented, non-union, sink or swim vision. They have visited yet another horror on the city, putting the poor and unorganized beyond the reach of quality education. New Orleans has become the laboratory for privatization of education - an obscene experiment by the mad social scientists of Big Capital. That the experiment has failed is no problem for the privatizers, since massive failure is an expectation of the hellish system. Only the profitable survive.

Fighting for the Right to Learn: The Public Education Experiment in New Orleans

Tue, 08/07/2007 - 18:00 — Bill Quigley

NOLASchoolsKidsby Bill Quigley

Corporate America saw opportunity in the death of 1,000 or more people in New Orleans, and the exile of hundreds of thousands. Entrenched in the Bush administration was a private school lobby that was itching to find an urban environment to try out their experiment. It was New Orleans, cleansed of its Black majority by the storm. State and federal authorities are determined to prove that charter schools are a better idea than public schools, because they can keep out the "bad" students who don't need educating. The city will be rebuilt with a trash bin of schools to contain the unwanted students who don't fit into the new design. Charter schools are private schools with public financing. That will be the face of the "new city."

How to Destroy an African-American City in Thirty-Three Steps – Lessons from Katrina

Tue, 07/03/2007 - 18:00 — Bill Quigley

by Bill Quigley

How can we destroy a Black city? -  let us count the ways. Federal, state and local officials appear to have compiled a comprehensive list of destructive acts of commission and omission -  and pursued every possible tactic to permanently de-Blacken New Orleans.  The author is just as thorough in compiling a 33-count indictment of the city-killers, with the Bush Gang as chief conspirators.  The crimes against Black New Orleans are so malevolent, so unremitting, and on such a grand scale, they cannot have been the result of mere incompetence. The crime is premeditated attempted murder, motivated by pure racism and greed.

Letter from New Orleans: Unstable Foundations

Tue, 03/20/2007 - 18:00 — Rebecca Solnit

by Rebecca Solnit

New Orleans represents what Republicans promise when they call for shrinking down government. Residents struggling to remain in the stricken city or return home find little assistance - but rather, great resistance - from government at all levels. Still, the author sees hope among people who "are doing it for themselves" with assistance from thousands of volunteers from all across the nation. Katrina, writes the author, "is not even half over."

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Dr. Radut