So try to imagine for a second that you are George W. Bush. You are a moron…in the last couple weeks you have fucked up, fucked up bad. You showed the nation that you dont care about anything but making war, and vacation. You lack of concern about global warming, poverty, and how the two cause terrorism has led you to have the lowest approval numbers of your time as president. Now you let FEMA propose the creation of the worlds largest ghetto.
Soon after the hurricane struck, FEMA officials said they ordered 125,000 mobile homes and travel trailers in a rush, and manufacturers starting shipping off those they had already made.
That’s right, bush wants to gather some 125 thousand trailers and put them together. As a person from the Midwest i can tell you nothing attracts tornados better than a bunch of trailers. But aside from the shoddy living conditions, imagine what kind of effect this will have. With almost a million poor people in one spot you are going to have one of the largest collection of poverty in America. With no property taxes, you will get bad schools, with no city services, no sewer, no police, no fire, you will have people dieing. What the fuck is the matter with people, don’t take people who have lost everything and combine them all together so they can amplify their misery. Is this a plan by the government to move the poor out so that they can more easily use imminent domain laws to steal the poor’s land and rebuild the city better for the rich? Who knows? But it stinks. It took days for FEMA to get to New Orleans but they were ordering these trailers the day after the storm struck? Fishy, you bet. It is my firm opinion that George Bush will go down in history as one of THE WORST president in our entire history. The man infuriates me, his government so lately he is channeling FDR and Lyndon Johnson, because it makes good sound bytes. What the fuck, for the last 25 years (my entire life) we have been dominated by right wing politics. Stand up people, take the wool off your eyes, these problems facing the poor of our nation are not old problems. Slavery did not cause these problems; these problems are caused by things that are happening every single day in modern 2005 America. You and I have idly stood by while our country is being run down the shit hole by a pack of money hungry assholes. STAND UP, FIGHT BACK, we have to get so angry, so active, so mobilized, that we change the whole world. We need to vote, to boycott, vote with our dollars, make choices that will change the world.
It is astonishing that this issue – the possibility of creating “one of the largest collection of poverty in America†– is not getting more attention. (The NY Times mentioned the risks on 9/25 in “An Uprooted Underclass, Under the Microscope,” but I’ve seen no other mentions.)
Social scientists and low-income housing experts have long said that poverty’s outcomes – crime, lack of educational opportunities, joblessness and underemployment, and drug use – perpetuate themselves when poor individuals are forced to live with large numbers of other poor people. This should not be surprising – people follow the norms of the societies in which they live, and when it is normal to drink to excess, steal from one’s neighbors, and disrespect public spaces, it’s easy to justify and to adopt such behaviors.
Given the public’s (and the Bush administration’s) concern with spending relief funds well, we must pressure our officials to put limits on the federal housing vouchers are being issued to the displaced, so that New Orleans’ poor do not merely recreate microcosms of poverty in new locations. We need to tell our officials that we’re quesy at the thought of resettling New Orleans’ recently traumatized, economically disadvantaged people in trailer-park slums. We have a chance to break up one of the most grotesque centers of poverty in this country and to give hundreds of thousands of formally invisible people opportunities for a fresh start.
We have a civic duty to create opportunities for the displaced to escape the cycles of crime, poverty, lack joblessness, and illiteracy that we’ve let them get into. We can do this by insisting that the displaced be dispersed and resettled around the country into more affluent areas, where they will have opportunities to develop new values and sets of norms.
while i agree with you that we should try to break these cycles, i dont like the idea of scattering these people to the wind. i dont want to destroy neighborhoods, i would instead be in favor of rebuilding the areas of new orleans differently. instead of having a “poor” area, and a “rich” area, i proposed the city be rebuild with low income housing mixed in with high income housing. make new zoneing laws that say you cant have more than X amount of low income or high income houseing in any one spot. i see a major problem with simply shipping mostly poor black people all over the country. these people have a history and a culture in new orleans. by basicly forcing a diaspera of poor new orleans blacks we in essence crush that culture out of existance by diluting it into oblivion. i would rather the government spend all that money they are spending on trailers to hire these people to fix up their own homes. give the people money to work on their neighborhoods. this has the benifit of cleaning up new orleans and putting money into the local economy. instead the stupid fuckers are giving huge no-bid contracts to hr-root, and halliburton. gah!