Common Ground relief workers in New Orleans arrested, threatened by NOPD

We don't want you to help them colored people. We like that they are leaving, and you are helping them stay. Can't be having any of that, the big money wants their property for redevelopment. Besides, thems useless eaters, they aint no jobs fer the likes of them and we only want producers, lots of taxpayers! God sent that storm to help us white folk take back our city, it washed them slothful greedy coloreds away and I aint gonna see His work undone! Damn hippies always messin around things they don't unnserstand!

I think you've hit the nail on the head.

It's kind of..a darkly comedic, apocalyptic and ultra-modern scene isn't it? One can imagine a sinister plot by top capitalists, the military, and private sector opportunists to use New Orleans as a 'test case' in domestic counter-insurgency. No doubt they're analyzing the situation, and having disarmed the public through federal, local, and 'civilian contractors' efforts, can decide how the business climate will be, post-disaster. Meanwhile, the cops are much more volatile almost as if they're practicing psychological warfare--which, of course they are anyway.
But one doesn't need to imagine a sinister plot as such; rather, these events are just commonplace occurences given the modern social context's priorities. Restoring order and protecting property allowed what amounted to a casual conspiracy of psy-ops in the flesh to those forced to cling to survival in the face of desperate odds. Criminalized for seeking survival, the people of New Orleans who have died, been arrested or beaten or otherwise swindled by business as usual are an example of the human and environmental cost of a modern disaster, wrapped like a motive around the race and class coercions which underlie capitalism and hierarchies. The context is super-exploited land falling into the hands of those with the real power to shape a future business and security climate, to keep us all safe from mythic terror groups active as the foil for the will of the overall stage show...

look how they allowed all those black citizens to drown and die for days before they even started trying to help those people. And now with the fedral minimum wage repealed, they can work them like scum to rebuild their city. THIER city. New Orleans belongs, and always has belonged to afro-americans. If that was a white community, they would have gone in immidately to save thier lives.