Cue the revolution

From MoJo's Gentrifying Disaster - In New Orleans: Ethnic Cleansing, GOP-Style

New barriers, meanwhile, are being erected against the return of evacuees. In Mississippi’s ruined coastal cities, as well as in metro New Orleans, Landlords—galvanized by rumors of gentrification and soaring land values—are beginning to institute mass evictions. (Although the oft-cited Lower Ninth Ward is actually a bastion of blue-collar homeownership, most poor New Orleanians are renters.)

Civil-rights lawyer Bill Quigley has described how renters have returned “to find furniture on the street and strangers living in their apartments at higher rents, despite an order by the Governor that no one can be evicted before October 25. Rents in the dry areas have doubled and tripled.”

Secretary of Housing Alfonso Jackson, meanwhile, seems to be working to fulfill his notorious prediction that New Orleans is “not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.” Public-housing and Section 8 residents recently protested that “the agencies in charge of these housing complexes [including HUD] are using allegations of storm damage to these complexes as a pretext for expelling working-class African-Americans, in a very blatant attempt to co-opt our homes and sell them to developers to build high-priced housing.”

More, much more hideousness, at link.

Memo to a Democratic party that has hitherto had a fairly ... (looking for a kind word here)... lackluster response to the ongoing raping and pillaging: Please, for the sake of all you hold dear, wherever the Katrina evacuees have washed up, get those people registered to vote and mobilized to actually do so. Particularly those in Texas. It wouldn't take very many black voters to completely undo DeLay's careful gerrymandering. And wouldn't that be a consummation devotely to be wished?