Outside the 2,000-bed temporary shelter in Baton Rouge’s River Center, a Church of Scientology band is performing a version of Bill Withers’s classic “Use Me”–a refreshingly honest choice. “If it feels this good getting used,” the Scientology singer belts out, “just keep on using me until you use me up.”

Ten-year-old Nyler, lying face down on a massage table, has pretty much the same attitude. She is not quite sure why the nice lady in the yellow SCIENTOLOGY VOLUNTEER MINISTER T-shirt wants to rub her back, but “it feels so good,” she tells me, so who really cares? I ask Nyler if this is her first massage. “Assist!” hisses the volunteer minister, correcting my Scientology lingo. Nyler shakes her head no; since fleeing New Orleans after a tree fell on her house, she has visited this tent many times, becoming something of an assist-aholic. “I have nerves,” she explains in a blissed-out massage voice. “I have what you call nervousness.”

Wearing a donated pink T-shirt with an age-inappropriate slogan (“It’s the hidden little Tiki spot where the island boys are hot, hot, hot”), Nyler tells me what she is nervous about. “I think New Orleans might not ever get fixed back.” “Why not?” I ask, a little surprised to be discussing reconstruction politics with a preteen in pigtails. “Because the people who know how to fix broken houses are all gone.”

I don’t have the heart to tell Nyler that I suspect she is on to something; that many of the African-American workers from her neighborhood may never be welcomed back to rebuild their city. An hour earlier I had interviewed New Orleans’ top corporate lobbyist, Mark Drennen. As president and CEO of Greater New Orleans Inc., Drennen was in an expansive mood, pumped up by signs from Washington that the corporations he represents–everything from Chevron to Liberty Bank to Coca-Cola–were about to receive a package of tax breaks, subsidies and relaxed regulations so generous it would make the job of a lobbyist virtually obsolete.

Listening to Drennen enthuse about the opportunities opened up by the storm, I was struck by his reference to African-Americans in New Orleans as “the minority community.” At 67 percent of the population, they are in fact the clear majority, while whites like Drennen make up just 27 percent. It was no doubt a simple verbal slip, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was also a glimpse into the desired demographics of the new-and-improved city being imagined by its white elite, one that won’t have much room for Nyler or her neighbors who know how to fix houses. “I honestly don’t know and I don’t think anyone knows how they are going to fit in,” Drennen said of the city’s unemployed.

New Orleans is already displaying signs of a demographic shift so dramatic that some evacuees describe it as “ethnic cleansing.” Before Mayor Ray Nagin called for a second evacuation, the people streaming back into dry areas were mostly white, while those with no homes to return to are overwhelmingly black. This, we are assured, is not a conspiracy; it’s simple geography–a reflection of the fact that wealth in New Orleans buys altitude. That means that the driest areas are the whitest (the French Quarter is 90 percent white; the Garden District, 89 percent; Audubon, 86 percent; neighboring Jefferson Parish, where people were also allowed to return, 65 percent). Some dry areas, like Algiers, did have large low-income African-American populations before the storm, but in all the billions for reconstruction, there is no budget for transportation back from the far-flung shelters where those residents ended up. So even when resettlement is permitted, many may not be able to return.

As for the hundreds of thousands of residents whose low-lying homes and housing projects were destroyed by the flood, Drennen points out that many of those neighborhoods were dysfunctional to begin with. He says the city now has an opportunity for “twenty-first-century thinking”: Rather than rebuild ghettos, New Orleans should be resettled with “mixed income” housing, with rich and poor, black and white living side by side.

What Drennen doesn’t say is that this kind of urban integration could happen tomorrow, on a massive scale. Roughly 70,000 of New Orleans’ poorest homeless evacuees could move back to the city alongside returning white homeowners, without a single new structure being built. Take the Lower Garden District, where Drennen himself lives. It has a surprisingly high vacancy rate–17.4 percent, according to the 2000 Census. At that time 702 housing units stood vacant, and since the market hasn’t improved and the district was barely flooded, they are presumably still there and still vacant. It’s much the same in the other dry areas: With landlords preferring to board up apartments rather than lower rents, the French Quarter has been half-empty for years, with a vacancy rate of 37 percent.

The citywide numbers are staggering: In the areas that sustained only minor damage and are on the mayor’s repopulation list, there are at least 11,600 empty apartments and houses. If Jefferson Parish is included, that number soars to 23,270. With three people in each unit, that means homes could be found for roughly 70,000 evacuees. With the number of permanently homeless city residents estimated at 200,000, that’s a significant dent in the housing crisis. And it’s doable. Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, whose Houston district includes some 150,000 Katrina evacuees, says there are ways to convert vacant apartments into affordable or free housing. After passing an ordinance, cities could issue Section 8 certificates, covering rent until evacuees find jobs. Jackson Lee says she plans to introduce legislation that will call for federal funds to be spent on precisely such rental vouchers. “If opportunity exists to create viable housing options,” she says, “they should be explored.”

Malcolm Suber, a longtime New Orleans community activist, was shocked to learn that thousands of livable homes were sitting empty. “If there are empty houses in the city,” he says, “then working-class and poor people should be able to live in them.” According to Suber, taking over vacant units would do more than provide much-needed immediate shelter: It would move the poor back into the city, preventing the key decisions about its future–like whether to turn the Ninth Ward into marshland or how to rebuild Charity Hospital–from being made exclusively by those who can afford land on high ground. “We have the right to fully participate in the reconstruction of our city,” Suber says. “And that can only happen if we are back inside.” But he concedes that it will be a fight: The old-line families in Audubon and the Garden District may pay lip service to “mixed income” housing, “but the Bourbons uptown would have a conniption if a Section 8 tenant moved in next door. It will certainly be interesting.”

Equally interesting will be the response from the Bush Administration. So far, the only plan for homeless residents to move back to New Orleans is Bush’s bizarre Urban Homesteading Act. In his speech from the French Quarter, Bush made no mention of the neighborhood’s roughly 1,700 unrented apartments and instead proposed holding a lottery to hand out plots of federal land to flood victims, who could build homes on them. But it will take months (at least) before new houses are built, and many of the poorest residents won’t be able to carry the mortgage, no matter how subsidized. Besides, it barely touches the need: The Administration estimates that in New Orleans there is land for only 1,000 “homesteaders.”

The truth is that the White House’s determination to turn renters into mortgage payers is less about solving Louisiana’s housing crisis than indulging an ideological obsession with building a radically privatized “ownership society.” It’s an obsession that has already come to grip the entire disaster zone, with emergency relief provided by the Red Cross and Wal-Mart and reconstruction contracts handed out to Bechtel, Fluor, Halliburton and Shaw–the same gang that spent the past three years getting paid billions while failing to bring Iraq’s essential services to prewar levels [see Klein, “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” May 2]. “Reconstruction,” whether in Baghdad or New Orleans, has become shorthand for a massive uninterrupted transfer of wealth from public to private hands, whether in the form of direct “cost plus” government contracts or by auctioning off new sectors of the state to corporations.

This vision was laid out in uniquely undisguised form during a meeting at the Heritage Foundation’s Washington headquarters on September 13. Present were members of the House Republican Study Committee, a caucus of more than 100 conservative lawmakers headed by Indiana Congressman Mike Pence. The group compiled a list of thirty-two “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices,” including school vouchers, repealing environmental regulations and “drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Admittedly, it seems farfetched that these would be adopted as relief for the needy victims of an eviscerated public sector. Until you read the first three items: “Automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas”; “Make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone”; and “Make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations).” All are poised to become law or have already been adopted by presidential decree.

In their own way the list-makers at Heritage are not unlike the 500 Scientology volunteer ministers currently deployed to shelters across Louisiana. “We literally followed the hurricane,” David Holt, a church supervisor, told me. When I asked him why, he pointed to a yellow banner that read, SOMETHING CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT. I asked him what “it” was and he said “everything.”

So it is with the neocon true believers: Their “Katrina relief” policies are the same ones trotted out for every problem, but nothing energizes them like a good disaster. As Bush says, lands swept clean are “opportunity zones,” a chance to do some recruiting, advance the faith, even rewrite the rules from scratch. But that, of course, will take some massaging–I mean assisting.
commondreams.org

PARIS, Sept. 20 – The French news media were captivated by Hurricane Katrina, pointing out how the American government’s faltering response brought into plain view the sad lot of black Americans. But this time the French, who have long criticized America’s racism, could not overlook the parallels at home.

“It is true that the devastations of Katrina have cruelly shed light on the wounds of America, ghettoization, poverty, criminality, racial and territorial tensions,” Le Figaro, the conservative daily, said in an editorial on Sept. 8. “In France, those in disagreement ran to pelt the ‘American model’ and the neoconservative president. But have they just looked at the state of their own country?”

Only four days before, a fire had swept an apartment in south Paris, killing 12 people, most of them black. And just days before that, 17 black people died in a single blaze. Since April, 48 people, most of them children and all of them black, have died in four separate fires in Paris.

In neighborhoods like Château Rouge, filled with the hundreds of thousands of nonwhite immigrants, some Arabs but mainly blacks, whom France has absorbed over the years from former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, you feel the anger.
nytimes.com

NEW YORK – Gold is hovering near 17-year-highs. What that means depends on who’s doing the interpreting.

According to one school, demand from China and India is pushing the price higher, but another school insists gold is up because Western investors are convinced inflation is much higher than their governments admit.

Gold has always been the investment of choice for bomb-shelter-building doom-and-gloomers, those accumulators of canned goods whom everyone avoids at family gatherings. As an asset, gold usually behaves according to its own set of rules. Gold rises with oil prices, falls when the dollar rises and increases when inflation fears intensify.

It’s considered a “safe haven investment” — should your currency become worthless, your gold will retain value.
news.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON – As a military jury in Texas considers the fate of Lynndie England, the low-ranking reservist pictured in the notorious photos of the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in late 2003, two sergeants and a captain in one of the U.S. Army’s most decorated combat units have come forward with accounts of routine, systematic and often severe beatings committed against detainees at a base near Fallujah from 2003 through 2004.

According to their testimony, featured in a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), beatings and other forms of torture were often either ordered or approved by superior officers and took place on virtually a daily basis. The soldiers, all of whom had also been deployed to Afghanistan before coming to Iraq, testified that the same techniques were used in both countries.

The beatings were so severe that they resulted in broken bones “every other week” at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Mercury, where detainees would ordinarily be held for three or four days before being transferred to Abu Ghraib. In one case, an Army cook broke the leg of a detainee with a metal baseball bat, according to one of the sergeants quoted in the report, entitled “Leadership Failure”.

Residents of Fallujah, an insurgent stronghold since the 2003 invasion, referred to the unit as “The Murderous Maniacs”, because of their treatment of detainees, according to the report.
Full: commondrams.org

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) – Israel ordered ground forces to the Gaza border Saturday and threatened a “crushing” response after Israeli towns were hit by the first major Hamas rocket barrage from the coastal territory since Israel’s pullout two weeks earlier.
Israel also resumed airstrikes against Hamas targets, hitting several suspected weapons workshops, and imposed a blanket closure that bars all Palestinians from its territory.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called his Security Cabinet for a meeting later Saturday to approve the military’s response, expected to last several days. A large-scale operation appeared unlikely but the timing of the Cabinet meeting suggested a sense of urgency.
The Cabinet session comes as Sharon faces a major leadership challenge in his Likud Party this week over the Gaza pullout. Sharon’s challenger, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has warned the withdrawal will endanger Israel. The barrage of 39 rockets, with five Israelis hurt, could give him a boost against Sharon.
apnews.myway.com

Gosh kids, ya think Hamas might be working for Netanyahu?

…But if the streets were vacant, so were the voting booths. In one polling station after another, voters dribbled through the doors. At a primary school in western Kabul, I found just one voter – a 70-year-old woman hobbling into the polling station, supported at the elbow by her son.
And at the Habiba high school, there were none. My footsteps echoed loudly in the empty corridors as election officials fidgeted beside vacant booths.

It seemed bizarre – Afghanistan was hosting a great party for democracy, yet it looked as though nobody had bothered to turn up. Figures released yesterday confirmed those suspicions.

Turnout was just 36% in the capital and around 53% across the country, the chief electoral officer, Peter Erben, said – a sharp dip on the 70% seen in last year’s presidential poll.

Officials are pedalling hard to find comforting explanations. Mr Erben said the drop was normal in comparison with other post-conflict countries – even though, days earlier, he had handed me a factsheet predicting a sharp rise in turnout.

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, also put on a happy face for a positive spin. He was “more than happy”, he said during a roundtable press conference at his fortified Kabul palace a few days later.
guardian.co.uk

VIENNA, Sept. 22 — The European Union and United States backpedaled Thursday in their drive to have Iran referred to the U.N. Security Council for nuclear treaty violations, following strong opposition from other countries on the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear monitoring group.

Russia, China and members of the 115-nation Non-Aligned Movement said during a closed board meeting that they opposed a draft E.U. resolution backed by the United States to escalate pressure on Iran through a Security Council referral.
washingtonpost.com

The Iraqi official was visibly flustered and embarrassed when questioned in Baghdad about the storming of the police station in Basra by British troops.

“It is a very unfortunate development that the British forces should try to release their soldiers the way it happened,” said Haydar al-Abadi, the Prime Minister’s press secretary.

He defended the way the local police had acted. He said: “For two guys to collect information in civilian clothes, in the current tense security situation, I believe that the reaction of the Iraqi security is totally understandable.”

It was not a good day for the Iraqi government. It wanted to publicise the capture of the northern city of Tal Afar by the Iraqi army backed by US forces at the weekend. Instead it had to answer question after question about why Iraqi sovereignty had been treated with such contempt at the other end of the country.

At the weekend an Iraqi minister said to me in frustration: “We must try to eliminate the grey areas where our authority conflicts with the coalition. We must try to reach some understanding about what to do when our jurisdictions clash.”

Ordinary Iraqis were drawing their own conclusion about what had happened in Basra. Abdul Hamid, a goldsmith, said over the phone from the city: “People here have seen that our government has no authority inIraq. The British did not respect them when they smashed into the jail, so why should we respect our own leaders?”
counterpunch.org

British soldiers in terrorist attack? What is going on in Iraq?

That nothing would surprise anyone now, two and a half years into the incredible act of mass butchery called the war in Iraq, in which a sovereign nation was attacked, its infrastructures destroyed and tens of thousands of its civilians slaughtered in an unprovoked and unfounded casus belli, is nothing new. But day-by-day, new chasms of incredulity are opened with revelations which would have appeared absurd only a few years ago.

After Abu Ghraib, little else remains to shock and few stones are unturned in terms of the depths of evil and sheer depravity to which the soldiers of the USA and its allies are prepared to sink to, in a never-ending war which sees the occupation forces losing control on a daily basis.

Now it transpires that two British soldiers were dressed as Arabs and attacking the Iraqi security forces in Basra? And the British authorities have admitted they were members of the SAS? They were caught after shooting at and murdering an Iraqi police official and their car was found to be packed with explosives and a C4 detonator?

Or is it that the two troops were in fact undercover agents dressed as Sadrists, Al-Sadr’s Mahdi army, trying to stir up a war in Iraq between rival anti-occupation forces to help the beleaguered Iraqi security forces to stay in control as events spiral ever downwards? Is it that they were planning a massive bomb attack against Shia targets, to blame on the Sunni?

Is it true that many of the killings in Iraq are not in fact perpetrated by Sunni extremists or foreign insurgents, but indeed by British and American security forces, trying to take the strain off their troops in their realization that the war in Iraq was a monumental mistake from day one, witness to freedom and democracy George Bush style and that followed by his sickening bunch of sycophants eager to make an easy buck on the international stage by breaking an international law or six?

At the end of the day, who are the terrorists in Iraq?
pravda.ru

The U.S. military is bracing for future attacks in space, and the Air Force has deployed an electronic-warfare unit capable of jamming enemy satellites, the general in charge of space defenses says.
“You can’t go to war and win without space,” said Gen. Lance Lord, the four-star general in charge of the Colorado-based Air Force Space Command.
Gen. Lord said in an interview with The Washington Times that his command plays a key role in monitoring space, protecting satellites from attack or disruption and preparing to carry out strikes on enemy spacecraft.
Gen. Lord said the United States has a major strategic advantage over other nations’ militaries because of its satellite communications and intelligence capabilities. “So we’ve got to protect that advantage,” he said.
“We’re not talking about weaponizing space. We’re not talking about massive satellite attacks coming over the horizon or anything like that. This is really a way to understand space situational awareness, who’s out there, who’s operating. We understand that,” Gen. Lord said.
The top priorities of the space command are monitoring space and knowing the threats. Two other missions are defending satellites and conducting offensive operations against enemy spacecraft or ground signals that threaten U.S. satellites.
washtimes.com