What's going down in the Big Easy?

Aside from promoting Tom DiLorenzo’s recent post on FEMA and adding Scott Bieser’s “U.S. Out of New Orleans!” bumper-sticker to the sidebar, I’ve been pretty quiet about Katrina and the Big Easy. New Orleans has long been one of my favorite spots, and the news and photos have been heartrending. So I’ve kept kinda quiet. But I can’t resist pointing you toward James Leroy Wilson’s recent speculations about what’s really going on there. Even if you normally pooh-pooh conspiracy theories, James’ are worth thinking about.

First, he suspects that reports of violence and chaos in New Orleans were exaggerated by government officials as part of “a plan to make poor blacks seem as savage and inhuman as possible.” Then, he questions the forced evacuation of the city. In a September 6 post, he wrote:

“Something very ugly is afoot. The Feds want civilians to get out, to not watch whatever it is the feds have planned for the place. I suspect they deliberately facilitated a hellish situation so that those who did leave would never want to go back and rebuild. It makes me want to go down and live there myself.”

Yesterday, James added this:

“There are unconfirmed reports that many people near the levee break heard an explosion right before the flood. There is speculation that the break was a form of ‘damage control’; it was going to break anyway, so make sure the richest parts of town didn’t get the brunt of it.

“Last June’s Supreme Court decision Kelo vs. New London officially validated the on-going practice of governments taking from private property owners and giving it to richer people in the name of commercial development and greater tax revenue.

“Expect in New Orleans this to take place. Evacuated homeowners who want to come back and rebuild on their own land will be prevented from doing so. The city (or the state, or even the feds) will take the land from them and give it to developers. The poor and modest homeowners, even after receiving decent-sized insurance checks and government checks, will be priced out of the city. A category-5-proof levee will be built making the city an attractive destination, but land values and rents will be too high for most people. Yet the French Quarter will return in all its glory, and the Saints will be given the most plush stadium in America. Americans will be proud of how the city ‘came back.’ And now it won’t have all those poor and fearsome black people!”

Is Wilson just another conspiracy nut? Hmm. He’s always seemed extremely rational to me. And if you’d told me years ago that FDR had prior knowledge of Pearl Harbor and had done nothing to stop it, I’d have thought you were loony. Today’s conspiracy theories are often tomorrow’s accepted historical truths. We’ll have to wait and see about New Orleans. But keep Wilson’s ideas in mind as the evacuation and rebuilding of the city unfold. If the pieces seem to fall into place...

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