In 1830 under Andrew Jackson, Congress passed laws calling for Indian Removal from the eastern United States to reservations in the west. The laws called for negotiation of land swaps and authorized payments for the transition. Jackson proceeded to negotiate treaties which many tribes accepted, albeit reluctantly.

The Cherokee tribe through their elected government, rejected their deal, the Treaty of New Echota, however the feds found a faction of tribe members and obtained their signatures. The Senate ratified the treaty and so it sat until 1838 when Martin van Buren sent Gen.Winfield Scott to enforce the treaty.  The resulting incident known as the "Trail of Tears" resulted in the deaths of 4,000 Cherokee Indians, primarily in interment camps while they awaited transport west.

This quote from the Wikipedia article on Indian Removal seems relevant to New Orleanians today: "The suffering which resulted from Indian Removal was aggravated by poor administration, inadequate measures taken to provide for the emigrants, and failure to protect Indian legal rights before and after emigration. Most American Indians reluctantly but peacefully complied with the terms of the removal treaties, often with bitter resignation." Do you think some early version of FEMA was active in the 1830's?

Digging into the matter a little more shows that Andrew Jackson was a fairly benign influence. Although he aggressively negotiated the removal treaties, he did not force the Indians to move. It wasn't until his successor Martin van Buren decided he had to enforce the letter of the law that the greatest number of deaths occurred.

Once again the relevance to New Orleans and the rest of the country  is apparent as we see the federal bureaucracy today continue to grind us down with unthinking adherence to laws and regulations. The actions of the US Army Corps of Engineers being the chief case in point with FEMA and the SBA running closely behind.

However the lesson could well be extended to the attacks on civil liberties being made in the name of national security. Although the current administration may be quite benign in its use of extended powers of surveillance over domestic affairs there is no guarantee that future administrations will be so inclined.

Just as RICO provisions written to prosecute organized criminals are applied to other types of cases today, we should expect that government will extend its use of domestic surveillance over time. Today they use it to look for terrorists. Tommorrow they may be looking for social misfits, ordinary criminals, drug kingpins, tax evaders and communists. In the future they could well be looking for Democrats.