"Accusations of chicken-hoarding are an insult to white invidiousness everywhere"

Matt Taibbi went back to New Orleans, but this time left Sean Penn and his dingy behind. What he found was (surprise) not pretty :

I had meetings with black activists and storm victims in which agencies like FEMA and the Red Cross were described as being involved in a sweeping conspiracy to turn the Katrina disaster area into a sort of secret Club Med resort for white people, complete with shuffleboard, back rubs and fancy dinners. "Bags of chicken," says Ruby Campbell, an East Biloxi native. "They was giving out bags of chicken in the white neighborhoods."
. . .

It struck me suddenly that being an effete, overeducated, basketball-playing New Yorker who read Soul on Ice six times in college did not require me to endorse any of this paranoid bullshit. The next hurricane, I knew, could touch ground in my bedroom and nobody from the government is going to give me anything, much less a bag of fucking chicken.
. . .

My own feeling is that accusations of chicken-hoarding are an insult to white invidiousness everywhere. Institutional racism has always aimed a lot higher than chicken. And the Katrina reconstruction effort has been one of the all-time masterpieces of bloodless institutional racism, a resounding tribute to America's unparalleled ability to fuck the poor under pressure.
. . .

"Latino workers are being invited to New Orleans and the South without the proper conditions to protect them," Cintra says.
Forget bags of chicken. This is the kind of thing that made white people famous around the world -- charging the government sixty-five bucks an hour for labor, then hiring illegals to do the same work for free.

The Katrina story is just the same old story of all Earth's history, only in concentrated form. Big fish eating little fish. Little fish eating smaller fish. And the smallest fish being told they have to build plank houses on fucking stilts. And wait to be eaten.

The story here will probably end with East Biloxi slowly disappearing against a steady advance of condo developments and curio shops; sometime around 2010, the last black resident, a poor grandmother...will finally sell after her property-tax bill, reflecting a new assessment, shoots past her annual Social Security disbursement.

By then, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour will be running for president, and his Gulf Coast will be a showpiece microcosm of an ideal America -- plenty of condo space, casinos on every block, no abortions and no darkies. Thank you, Hurricane Katrina!