by Yusef Raahman Sudah

Created on: June 13, 2010   Last Updated: July 06, 2010

Hurricane Karina and now the  Gulf  of Mexico oil spill has demonstrated that Americans are not only naive about the relationship between corporate influence and government control but also has shown they truly do not care about their environment until there is "personal loss. But once they are victimized Americans seem to express regional concern. Let us be clear, for more than two years the citizens of New Orleans have been suffering and Americans left them hanging . Before Katrina, America expressed little or no concern about New Orleans. Before Katrina, New Orleans was a cesspool of corruption, murder, voodoo, and was known as a decadent city that found comfort in its unique style of “southern living". The FBI had performed mor than one investigation of New Orleans finest, the police department.

Concerning the safety of the city's citizens, both government agencies and corporations like BP knew that there was not simply a “likelihood” of the levee failing but an “inevitability”! Yet in spite of the engineering surveys and years of knowing that the levee posed a “potential” danger, nothing was done by local, state, federal or corporate interest to prevent its occurrence.

New Orleans retains a reputation as a cesspool of poverty and graft. The prison population is loaded with African Americans and expendable white criminals. The New Orleans police had a reputation more as a death squad as well as an enforcement arm for criminals. Rarely if at all were the department viewed by its citizens as a preserver of peace and justice. During the immediate aftermath of Katrina, charges of police violence and murder was a popular news subject.

When Katrina hit, President George W. Bush used the disaster as a political “photo op”, while several thousand mobile home units failed to get delivered to the poor and displaced people of New Orleans. These mobile homes fail into disrepair due to sitting await delivery! This information is not conjecture it is common knowledge and verifiable by any citizen by simply clicking a computer mouse.

Since many of New Orleans population are both poor Euro-Americans and African American, their welfare and the city's fate does not matter. Consider this, just as ”Desert Storm” provided a unique opportunity for Wall Street oil stock holders, hurricane Katrina provided an unique opportunity for land speculators  to benefit from the

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