Instead of Rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan, We Should Have Rebuilt the 9th Ward

It’s been 6 years since the city of New Orleans was deluged by Katrina and the poor neighborhoods are STILL in shambles.  And rather than rebuilding our own decimated cities, our dimwitted politicians are pouring money into foreign lands where we’re hated.  It’s so bizarrely idiotic as to defy explanation.

In New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, the grasses grow taller than people and street after street is scarred by empty decaying houses, the lives that once played out inside their walls hardly imaginable now.   St. Claude Avenue, the once moderately busy commercial thoroughfare, looks like the main street of a railroad town bypassed long ago by the interstate. Most buildings are shuttered, “For Sale” signs stuck on their sides. There aren’t many buyers. And the businesses that are open are mostly corner stores where folks buy pricey cigarettes, liquor and packaged food.  Six years after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the New Orleans neighborhood that was hardest hit still looks like a ghost town. Redevelopment has been slow in coming, and the neighborhood has just 5,500 residents – one-third its pre-Katrina population.

America’s politicians will one day stand in the presence of Almighty God and answer for their blatant greed and the cruelty they exhibited towards their own people.  And then they’ll be carted off by the demons they serve to the lowest hell where they will justly serve their eternal sentence.

Related articles

• 6 years after Katrina, Lower 9th Ward still bleak (sfgate.com)
• 6 years after Katrina, Lower 9th Ward still bleak (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• 6 years later, Lower 9th Ward still bleak (thegrio.com)

The Police are Worse than the Criminals…

In New Orleans, according to the Department of Justice, after a lengthy investigation.

Long before Hurricane Katrina laid bare New Orleans’ deep social wounds, the relationship between the city’s police force and its black citizens had been deeply troubled.

The city’s African American residents have long complained of frequent abuses at the hands of police. Katrina only intensified the sense of grievance, given the prosecution of several police officers that shot unarmed civilians, sometimes fatally.

This week, the seething anger directed at the police and an enduring sense of injustice gained a powerful surge of affirmation, with the release of a scathing report from the Justice Department [PDF]. The 115-page document, which details the findings of a 10-month-long investigation, reads like an indictment of nearly every area of the department’s operation, from the recruiting, training and supervision of its officers to its tactics of policing.

The findings describe a pattern of unconstitutional conduct and violations of federal law, rampant use of excessive force and unwarranted stops and searches, as well as discrimination based on race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The wide range of abuses also includes gender-biased policing and a systematic failure to investigate sexual assaults and domestic violence.

Who polices the police when the police are the thugs?   Power corrupts.  Police power often corrupts absolutely.  Which is why a police state (like Mubarak’s Egypt) or a police city (like New Orleans) isn’t the kind of place where justice can thrive.

Related Articles

• Report on NOPD cites ‘clear pattern’ of excessive force (kaystreet.wordpress.com)

Mardis Gras: Just Another Excuse to Act Wickedly

Want to expose yourself for little plastic beads?  No problem.  Want to stumble the streets in a drunken stupor?  Have at.  Want to do it with mobs of other like minded people?  There’s a place for you!  It’s New Orleans Mardis Gras… ostensibly the last ‘big party day’ before the season of ‘Lent’ commences.

So go an act as wickedly as you like… you can ‘repent’ during ‘Lent’ and then you can do it all over again next year.

[Which fact shows beyond doubt that neither repentance nor Lent are meaningful in any truly spiritual sense for the massa perditionis].