Ethnic Self-Cleansing?

Rush Limbaugh made reference to a Naomi Klein piece in the left-wing rag The Nation today that jogged my memory about something I read about ten days ago.

Klein, is trademark Marxian fashion, accuses New Orleans' "white elites" (or Louisiana's or America's - I guess they all look alike to Ms. Klein) of plotting the "ethnic cleasning" of the Big Easy:

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% white; the Garden District, 89%; Audubon, 86%; neighboring Jefferson Parish, where people were also allowed to return, 65%). 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.

Klien's prooffered "solution" to this imagined problem is also trademark left-wing thinking: impose "mixed income" living arrangements:

As for the hundreds of thousands of residents whose low-lying homes and housing projects were destroyed by the flood, ["New Orleans' top corporate lobbyist" Mark] 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.

There's only one slight problem with this urban planning scheme: many of its purported "beneficiaries" aren't interested:

Fewer than half of all New Orleans evacuees living in emergency shelters here said they will move back home, while two-thirds of those who want to relocate planned to settle permanently in the Houston area, according to a survey by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health....

Forty-three percent of these evacuees planned to return to New Orleans, the survey found. But just as many - 44% - said they will settle somewhere else, while the remainder were unsure. Many of those who were planning to return said they will be looking to buy or rent somewhere other than where they lived. Overall, only one in four said they plan to move back into their old homes, the poll found.

These are without doubt the poor of which Ms. Klein writes; "60% earned less than $20K, 12% had no job when Katrina hit, 70% had no insurance for their property, half had no health insurance, and almost half have a significant health problem unrelated to the evacuation." Yet half of those who have made up their minds aren't going back to New Orleans.

Ed Morrissey suggests a likely reason why:

What does that tell us? It tells us that the poor in New Orleans have little stake in returning to their city. Given that the Big Easy had one of the higher poverty rates in the nation, that will result in the largest migration of the poor out of an area since the Dust Bowl sent refugees to the West Coast in the 1930s. Most of them will stay in Houston and the state of Texas, but some will strike out farther in an attempt to rebuild their lives. [emphasis added]

And why shouldn't they? The fact that Louisiana has remained stubbornly "old South" (if not quite "antebellum"...) while all the Dixie states around it have reformed and modernized and de-regulated and Republicanized, creating a corrupt welfare island in a sea of booming capitalism, is no longer a hidden oddity or a quaint anachronism. "The poor in New Orleans" were never helped by the entrenched, crooked Dem establishment and were never going to be. They were the twenty-first-century extension of the nineteenth-century Jim Crow South, not technically owned by their white liberal "benefactors" but politically indentured to them nonetheless.

Then along came an almost literally proverbial storm that cast "the poor in New Orleans" to the four winds, and with the losses and heartbreak came also the opportunity to make a fresh start of it someplace else where greater opportunities await them than could ever be found back home even before Katrina. Is it any wonder that so many are choosing to resettle elsewhere?

Note the emphasis on the word "choosing." That's what people like Naomi Klein truly fear - that Louisiana Donks will lose their built-in electoral meal ticket:

Politically, an exodus of the poor will change the face of Louisiana. Like most urban areas, New Orleans provides Democrats with their power base, and the poor comprise a major portion of that voting bloc. Thanks to a poor initial response from state and local officials - all Democrats - to Katrina, they already will find themselves on the defensive in the next statewide elections. If their allies do not return to New Orleans, they may lose the state to the GOP. Expect that possibility to fuel the Farrakhanish rumors that the Republicans bombed the levees on purpose to gentrify New Orleans, and the Democrats to continue their descent into Howard Dean nuttiness.

Such as shieking stories about the "ethnic cleansing" of New Orleans.