The mostly African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there have scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white and more affluent areas, streets are dry and passable. Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators. Wednesday, officials reiterated that all residents must leave New Orleans, but it’s still unclear how far they will go to enforce the order.

You can bet this guy didn’t show up in the "white and more affluent areas" because if he had he would now be zipped up in a body bag at the temporary morgue set up in nearby St. Gabriel. Naturally, the eviction of "recalcitrant citizens" does not include New Orleans’ rich elite, who have hired "security" firms such as Blackwater. As the New York Times reported earlier in the week, the eviction "order apparently does not apply to the hundreds of security guards whom businesses and some wealthy individuals have hired to protect their property. The guards, who are civilians working for private security firms like Blackwater, are openly carrying M-16s and other assault rifles." Of course, if "civilians" were "carrying M-16s and other assault rifles" downtown, they would be shot on site by cops and National Guard soldiers.

The green expanse of Audubon Park, in the city’s Uptown area, has doubled in recent days as a heliport for the city’s rich—and a terminus for the small armies of private security guards who have been dispatched to keep the homes there safe and habitable. Mr. [Ashton] O’Dwyer has cellphone service and ice cubes to cool off his highballs in the evening. By Wednesday, the city water service even sprang to life, making the daily trips to his neighbor’s pool unnecessary. A pair of oil-company engineers, dispatched by his son-in-law, delivered four cases of water, a box of delicacies including herring with mustard sauce and 15 gallons of generator gasoline.

I wonder if Mr. O’Dwyer heard the screams of drowning babies as he lofted one of his highballs. I wonder if he thought about the desperate poor folk trapped in their attics in 120 heat as he munched on his herring with mustard sauce. Naw, he was too busy on his cellphone, ordering up "delicacies" as the "little people" died horrible deaths a few blocks away. He was too busy planning the future of the new New Orleans.

Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city’s monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let’s start right here," says Mr. O’Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.

In other words, O’Dwyer has a damn good reason to stick around—and there is a damn good reason the cops will not throw him out at gunpoint: he is "hanging on" so he can "play a role" in the "recovery" of New Orleans while the "underclass" has died (were deliberately killed through neglect) in large numbers and the remainder shipped out to FEMA "re-location" (i.e., concentration) camps.

I’m not sure how Christopher Cooper wrote this article without vomiting—but then maybe he did… or more likely didn’t. I mean, after all, he works for the War Street Journal, the preeminent newspaper of the business class where the most disgusting warmongering appeared on the editorial pages in the lead-up to Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Of course, both war and forced re-location of undesirables—think Native Americans clutching blankets infected with small pox—are good for business, especially for the latest generation of robber barons and carpet-baggers who inevitably stream in to turn a fat profit on human .

More than a few people in Uptown, the fashionable district surrounding St. Charles Ave., have ancestors who arrived here in the 1700s. High society is still dominated by these old-line families, represented today by prominent figures such as former New Orleans Board of Trade President Thomas Westfeldt; Richard Freeman, scion of the family that long owned the city’s Coca-Cola bottling plant; and William Boatner Reily, owner of a Louisiana coffee company. Their social pecking order is dictated by the mysterious hierarchy of "krewes," groups with hereditary membership that participate in the annual carnival leading up to Mardi Gras. In recent years, the city’s most powerful business circles have expanded to include some newcomers and non-whites, such as Mayor Ray Nagin, the former Cox Communications executive elected in 2002.

Imagine my surprise—rich parasites so inured to human suffering and so focused on turning a profit on misery are involved in secret societies. Sort of reminds you of the fact Bush and his rigged election opponent John Forbes Kerry were members of Skull and Bones (otherwise appropriately known as the Order of Death).

A few blocks from Mr. O’Dwyer, in an exclusive gated community known as Audubon Place, is the home of James Reiss, descendent of an old-line Uptown family. He fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and returned soon afterward by private helicopter. Mr. Reiss became wealthy as a supplier of electronic systems to shipbuilders, and he serves in Mayor Nagin’s administration as chairman of the city’s Regional Transit Authority. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.

Obviously, if you’re going to hire ruthless killers to protect your property from people driven insane by hunger and thirst, you may as well hire the best—and for killing people, the Israelis are right up at the top of the list, having spent the last fifty years or so killing desperately poor Palestinians.

The power elite of New Orleans—whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo.—insist the remade city won’t simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I’m not just speaking for myself here. The way we’ve been living is not going to happen again, or we’re out."

In short, rich sociopaths such as Mr. Reiss are fed up with poor people, even though they profitably exploit them as janitors and food servers and cashiers at Wal-Marts. Reiss believes there should be a manageable number of poor minimum wage workers in the new New Orleans—just enough to clean the toilets and sweep the floors at the new casinos and luxury hotels he envisions. Incidentally, Bush has set the tone by suspending the minimum pay scale requirements for federal contractors in New Orleans under the Davis-Bacon Act. It appears Reiss and the "business elite" would like to set up isolated Bantustans of impoverished workers and have them shipped in to serve tourists and middle class fun seekers. Sort of reminds you of South Africa under apartheid.

Is it possible the "business elite" in New Orleans deliberately sabotaged the levees, thus flooding poor areas of the city and ethnically cleansing thousands of poor people, most of them African-American? It wouldn’t be the first time.

In 1927, the so-called Great Mississippi Flood was used to ethnically cleanse African-Americans. "As the flood approached New Orleans, Louisiana 30 tons of dynamite were set off on the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana," explains Wikipedia. "This prevented New Orleans from experiencing serious damage but destroyed much of the marsh below the city and flooded all of St. Bernard Parish… During the disaster 700,000 people were displaced, including 330,000 African-Americans who were moved to 154 relief camps. Over 13,000 refugees near Greenville, Mississippi were gathered from area farms and evacuated to the crest of an unbroken levee, and stranded there for days without food or clean water, while boats arrived to evacuate white women and children. Many African-Americans were detained and forced to labor at gunpoint during flood relief efforts… The aftermath of the flood was one factor in the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities." (Emphasis added.)

Is it possible the "business elite" in New Orleans engineered a new "Great Migration of African-Americans" because the city is to become a Las Vegas on the Mississippi? If so, as history demonstrates, it wouldn’t be the first time.