Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The site is a sister to Atlantic Free Press and Brick Ogden an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Nagin's Never Land: Bulldozers on the Mississippi
by C. L. Cook
The mayor didn't attend the meeting, but later held a press conference, where he congratulated city council for its unanimous decision on a difficult problem.
It's a story of a rare political consensus, agreed in the limelight cast by city, state, national, and international media; everyone wanted to know what the stricken city of New Orleans' leaders would do to address the masses of displaced citizens, locked out of their homes since the disastrous hurricane and flood suffered more than two years ago.
And the council's decision?
New Orleans will allow HUD, (an agency only slightly better
thought of by those who have experienced its strangling bureaucracy and
ineptitude on the ground than that famous author of the Katrina
preparation and response, FEMA) to pull down 4500 public housing units,
ensuring their former occupants remain displaced.
Despite winning the
mayor's thumbs up to rid his jurisdiction of some untold thousands of
the city's mainly poor, mainly black inhabitants, the decision didn't
sit well with citizens, activists, and advocate organizations, who
surrounded council chambers in strength.
Police actions
guaranteed violence; "pepper spraying" and tasing the assembled,
declaring on pain of the riot act, (a handy provisional device to
criminalize almost everything done, or not done in timely enough
fashion to suit the shock squads apparent everywhere there is a
resident population unhappy with what they perceive to be injustice and
official corruption) that the rabble be dispersed.
Then, the shit hit
the fan, as they say.
When asked by the press about police
"tasering" of demonstrators and the reported fifteen arrests made, a
testy New Orleans Police Superintendant Warren Riley offered;
"You know why people were arrested, stunned with Tasers and pepper sprayed. You have it on videotape."
The
video I saw from the New Orleans "riot" was of some clown shaking a
gated fence violently, as the crowds chanted, "Let us in...[presumably
to council's chambers] let us in." There was some pepper spraying going
on after that, but I haven't found taser pictures yet.
Superintendent
Riley is wrong though; no video of 'the boys' spraying and stunning the
hoi polloi can explain the "why" of the matter. Why these housing units
are being destroyed, and why 4500 families are now not wanted on the
new New Orleans voyage is more complicated than the blunt instrument of
state thuggery employed today against the marginalized.
To
better understand what culminated in the police violence in New
Orleans, this video may give
you some idea of what the spray and electric stun gun shock recipients
are angry about, and how what witnessed today was simply another battle
in an ongoing war being waged against the poor by the city and a
coterie of real estate speculators, holy roller social engineers, and a
posse of racist out-riders. They beg the nation return to another time,
where a more "black and white" view of things like race and privilege
prevailed.
Alongside the unmistakable reek of perfidy permeating
post-Katrina New Orleans and the Gulf region beyond, there is the more
difficult to dismiss determined optimism to remake the city, as
reflected in the city council's consensus; yes, tear down the towering
public projects; and yes, maintain a public housing program, but not as
a concentration of exclusively "poor" residents, but a "mixed"
community; mixed racially, mixed financially, mixed politically.
Finally, the line goes, after more than forty years of universally
failed social policy across the United States, New Orleans, led by
mayor Nagin and his unanimous-council backers, will get civic planning
right; the new New Orleans will have a public housing reborn; it will
engender a new era of justice in a city too long known for the excesses
of the southern caste system.
Or so the optimists would have it.
The
truth is the council has been sucked in, as city councillors are wont
to be when promised the moon by hucksters, shysters, and real estate
tycoons. These liars provide themselves as the first to be blamed, for
a cut, when promises made to the poor are broken, as they necessarily
are. They say all the things city hall wants said, and provide
"plausible" deniablilty later. In return, their purloining schemes
against the public purse is guaranteed, should local tongues click, left alone to spin cash uninterrupted.
So what accomplishes the interests of city hall in the demolition (with a theoretical proviso from HUD to pony up for partial
rebuilding of public housing) of 4500 units of shelter from the calamitous housing climate of Louisiana in late 2007?
For
a "mixed" public housing Shangri La down the road, the teeming
thousands are decreed today to remain so; homeless now, in the dead of
winter in a city where thousands of perfectly sound accommodations are
available, if the city were to allow power and water service be
restored, and (preferably) abandoned, never to inhabit New Orleans
again.
HUD says about 3,000
families who once lived in New Orleans public housing remain scattered
across the country, and social workers say the number of homeless
people in the area has doubled to about 12,000.
There is no
consensus on what's best for New Orleans' poor, even among public
housing residents. Redevelopment would diminish the public housing
stock and drive many into less stable voucher programs. Repair of brick
and barracks-style projects badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina would
keep intact poor but close-knit neighborhoods.
Mayor Ray Nagin said
the resolution approved by the council includes language that will
assure that public housing residents have a voice in the redevelopment
plans.
Opponents were not immediately available for comment on the decision. Thursday's
vote was required before demolition work could begin, but several legal
challenges to the plan have not been resolved.
Just today,
here in my little tourist town, citizens announced plans to march
tomorrow, on the darkest night of the year, to mark the deaths in our
city of our very own "street people." Here too the city and a coterie
of hucksters, shysters and real estate tycoons wage war on the poor,
and accomodation is hard to find and getting harder every day.
Condominium towers are sprouting across the city, and the forests are
being mulched at a tremendous rate to literally pave the way for a
vision of the future that's seen through a rear view mirror half a
century old.
Unlike any old days in Victoria I know, more than
1,200 people live, if not "on the streets," then not always knowing
exactly where they'll sleep next. A paltry number of desperate lives
when marked against the 12,000 in similar circumstance currently
calling New Orleans home, I suppose.
While they are the living
aftermath of the famous storm, those dispossessed of New Orleans are
too signifier of things soon to come for all we the little people.
Barred by law to return to their homes by a government corrupted,
assailed by the armed force of that corrupted regime, and cut adrift
from the culture they were born into, the progressing fate of the
Katrina unfortunates is a charting of the devolution of society's heart
and soul.
Writings 
The mayor didn't attend the meeting, but later held a press conference, where he congratulated city council for its unanimous decision on a difficult problem. 
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