Amnesty International have put, not a period, but an exclamation mark on ongoing horrors in New Orleans post Katrina. The analysis is devastating and humiliating. Is New Orleans a city in the United States of America? If so, why is it still being treated like a third-world country?
The U.S. government and Gulf Coast states have consistently violated the human rights of hurricane victims since Hurricane Katrina killed about 1,800 people and caused widespread devastation after striking in August 2005, Amnesty International said Friday.
The report, “Un-Natural Disaster,” said the treatment of hurricane victims and government actions in housing, health care and policing have prevented poor minority communities from rebuilding and returning to their homes on the Gulf Coast.
In sum, government actions have amounted to human rights violations and “as a result, the demographics of the region are being permanently altered,” the report said.
Here are some of the key findings in the Amnesty report:
Will New Orleans ever recover its true identity?
Or was Katrina a convenient gentrification project use by politicians to clean out the hardscrabble and the poor and replace them with — nothing — but leaving behind the hardy and the rich?
It’s rough, David. I think instead of going to tropical islands for holiday / honeymoon, people should think about volunteering time into helping rebuild.
I wanted to do it but the honeymoon was already booked for me as a wedding present. Alas.
The poor will ultimately find their homes back in New Orleans. The wealthy can only hold them down for so long.
I think the Feds need to step up and do their job. The mail is being selectively delivered. Houses are being condemned and torn down without a “one-for-one” build scheme. If there’s no mail and no home left — and nothing is being planned or built to replace the lost — how can the people ever return? They’re being conveniently squeezed out of the city.
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