1525 Where will the Conference be in 2006?

The ever-liberal and sensitive-to-diversity American Library Association had planned to have its Conference in New Orleans in 2006. The listserv is providing a variety of views on whether it is appropriate to be worrying about that during this time of disaster and great need. Considering that many organizations in the past have opted to boycott cities that are not friendly to women or gays or labor unions, I'm wondering why ALA ever considered New Orleans in the first place. By anyone's standards it was a mess before Katrina--a tourist mecca served by the working class hovering above the poor, living in project housing. New Orleans not only had the French Quarter, great hotels and jazz, it had a huge poverty rate among black Americans with enormous racial divisions and income gaps among whites, blacks and mixed race. Crime was at crisis levels (endangering locals more than tourists), with bars on the windows of even modest homes. The state and local governments have historically picked the pockets of the poor and used them to build a political base by doling the money back to them. It was an environmental disaster waiting to happen, with layers of bureacracy, red tape and regulations that paralyzed everyone trying to fix it.

Just the poverty alone should have been a red flag to the conference planners, but they never noticed the problem until it showed up on Fox and CNN.