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New Orleans: Big Easy to Big Empty

Greg Palast does an investigative piece for Democracy Now! concerning the rebuilding of New Orleans. He visits the city a year after Hurricane Katrina has struck to see how the construction is going. It is not a pretty picture.

While the more important tourist and business districts have seen a lot of renovation, the areas previously occupied by the city's poorer residents still lay in waste. According to Palast, this is no accident. Rather it is part of a plan by the government and businesses to discourage those people from returning so that their very valuable property can be bought cheap. The true story of Hurricane Katrina was not one of race but one of poverty. Rather than letting the people of New Orleans rebuild their homes and their city, the government has instead contracted out the work to the likes of Halliburton.
The Bush administration has failed to deliver on its promises and ignored many of the constructive suggestions put forward by others.

The clip is followed by an interview of Greg Palast by Amy Goodman. What I find really interesting is the difference in the reporting you see here compared to the much rosier picture presented by mainstream media outlets like CNN. Also worth mentioning is that Palast was charged with violating infrastructure security for filming the FEMA camps, though the charges were eventually dropped.

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