New Orleans two years after

Greg Palast with today's 'must read':

"They wanted them poor n*ggers out of there and they ain't had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor n*ggers, you know? And that's just the bottom line."

We needed an answer to a weird, puzzling and horrific discovery. Among the miles and miles of devastated houses, rubble still there today in New Orleans, we found dry, beautiful homes. But their residents were told by guys dressed like Ninjas wearing "Blackwater" badges: "Try to go into your home and we'll arrest you."

These aren't just any homes. They are the public housing projects of the city; the Lafitte Houses and others. But unlike the cinder block monsters in the Bronx, these public units are beautiful townhouses, with wrought-iron porches and gardens right next to the tony French Quarter.

If you get the idea that I'm a little down on Blackwater today, you're right. I just read No True Glory by Bing West. It's an account of the first and second battles of Fallujah, which were started because of Blackwater employees who blundered into that city. They were killed, roasted, and hung from a bridge because of their own stupidity, but a lot of Marines died because of it.

They might think doing their mercenary 'security' thuggery inside the U.S. is easier, but there's going to be sad times ahead for them.

I wasn't naïve. I had a good idea what this scam was all about: 89,000 poor and working class families stuck in Homeland Security's trailer park gulag while their good homes were guarded against their return by mercenaries. Two decades ago, I worked for the Housing Authority of New Orleans. Even then, the plan was to evict poor folk out of this very valuable real estate. But it took the cover of a hurricane to do it.

Hurricane recovery is class war by other means. And in this war of the powerful against the powerless, Mr. Bush can rightly land his fighter plane in Louisiana and declare that, unlike the war in Iraq, it is, indeed, "Mission Accomplished."

Rotten motherfuckers, Bush and his enablers and cronies, every last one of them. They're going to get theirs, somehow, some way, some day.