Tens of thousands of Lower Ninth Ward residents of New Orleans, La., face eviction, but they don’t know it, because National Guard troops refuse to allow them access to their homes to find the eviction notices on their front doors.

On Halloween night, New Orleans was very, very dark. Well over half the homes on the east bank of New Orleans sit vacant because they still do not have electricity. More do not have natural gas or running water. Most stoplights still do not work. Most street lights remain out.

Fully armed National Guard troops refuse to allow over ten thousand people to even physically visit their property in the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood. Despite the fact that people cannot come back, tens of thousands of people face eviction from their homes. A local judge told me that their court expects to process a thousand evictions a day for weeks.

Renters still in shelters or temporary homes across the country will never see the court notice taped to the door of their home. Because they will not show up for the eviction hearing that they do not know about, their possessions will be tossed out in the street. In the street their possessions will sit alongside an estimated 3 million truck loads of downed trees, piles of mud, fiberglass insulation, crushed sheetrock, abandoned cars, spoiled mattresses, wet rugs, and horrifyingly smelly refrigerators full of food from August.

There are also New Orleans renters facing evictions from landlords who want to renovate and charge higher rents to the out of town workers who populate the city. Some renters have offered to pay their rent and are still being evicted. Others question why they should have to pay rent for September when they were not allowed to return to New Orleans. — Bill Quigley

What’s going on here? Could it be that New Orleans is trying to displace the black people and move in white people?

Alternet captures the human impact of these evictions by presenting Giselle Smith, “a single mom with three children” who returned to a damaged but intact house that she meticulously cleaned up and restored. Her problem? She rents. “The very day that the governor lifted the moratorium on evictions, her landlord presented her with an eviction notice. The reason? Failure to pay September’s rent. The Smiths, like everyone else in the city, had been forced to evacuate, and her home had no electricity or water or sewage. She also had to pay rent in Houston for September, and didn’t have money to pay rent in two places. Ms. Smith is determined to fight the eviction, and local lawyers have come to her aid. But the real reason for the eviction notice is that houses that didn’t flood are at a premium and her landlord, like many others, is eager to cash in. Ms. Smith’s neighbors down the block were paying $800 rent until they came home to find their rent jacked up to $1,300. By end of the week her long-time neighbors, a black family, had packed up and a white family took their place.” — Wendy McElroy (Via Hit and Run)

Wow, it sure looks like it. Recall Rep. Richard Baker, R-La., who said, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

In other stupid news, it seems that FEMA has been paying about ten times the going rate for those blue roofs. The “government is paying $2,980 to $3,500 for the blue plastic tarps — when the usual going rate is only $300,” according to House Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member, Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., and Congressman Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Science and Technology.

And former FEMA head Michael Brown was apparently more concerned about his department’s image and finding someone to babysit his dog in the first few days of the disaster.