Last month’s scenes from New Orleans caught on video and posted on the Internet were racially horrifying: Police using electric tasers and tear gas to suppress protesters who were trying to enter a City Council meeting to block a federal plan to demolish thousands of homes in low-income housing projects. There was a SWAT team standing between the protesters and the City Council members who pretended not to notice as people were tasered, gassed, handcuffed and arrested.

People were screaming amid the chaos and disturbing unity of city officials and predatory capitalists held bent on permanently ridding the Hurricane Katrina devastated city of as many of its low income Black residents as possible.

And make no mistake about it. Despite the reassuring words of some City Council members to build a new and better city for everybody, the true purpose of demolishing what is left of those low-income housing projects was to rid the city of low-income Blacks. The demolition plan is an act of class war supported by both Black and white middle class members of the City Council who have united with predatory capitalists determined to remake New Orleans into a whiter and wealthier city.

There was talk of how crime ridden the housing projects had been. But there was no pledge to build other housing for the poor. At best, the poor would be scattered to other low-income areas and at worst they would be permanently driven from the city.

And who supported the demolition plan? First, there was the Bush administration whose housing department devised the fiendish plan because it wants Blacks scattered and not concentrated for political power. Second, middle class Black and white city officials who want to rid the city of as much of its poor as possible. Third, there is the unseen hand of predatory capitalists who have long seen nothing but profit from driving out the poor and building upscale housing and business developments.

Hurricane Katrina of August 2005 has done nothing but given the forces lined up against the poor an opportunity to implement their fiendish desire: Use a disaster to remake a once predominantly Black and disproportionately poor city into one that is whiter and wealthier – the Black poor be damned.

There is nothing but class and race war taking place in New Orleans. And there is currently little that can be done to counter the war. The Rev. Jesse Jackson has put forth some good points about what is taking place but there is little that he or others who support the poor have been able to do. There are simply limits to the politics of protest.

Even more sad is that what is taking place in New Orleans is going to be repeated (at different speeds) in major cities around the nation. For example, one of the greatest untold stories of the last ten years has been the gradual elimination of Blacks from America’s major cities. With just five or six exception, every major city in America has lost Black population over the last decade. The only difference in New Orleans is that a natural disaster enabled the process to take place faster.

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