NEW ORLEANS - "Reality Check" Essays

muckraker10021 · May 4, 2006

Guys, as you know, the recent vote in New Orleans was a complete fraud. The vote fraud was all part of the “deblacking” of New Orleans.

The Bush Administration allowed Iraqi expatriates around the entire world to vote easily (computer ballot with a paper trail) in the so-called Iraq elections, but Black US citizens from New Orleans who were displaced by Katrina, are not given the same instant vote access.

I don’t have to tell you why this double standard ensued!

Here are the comments that baby bush ”Lawn Jockey” Alphonso regurgitated to the media.
<img src="http://www.lawnjockey.com/mini_cav.jpg" width="200" height="275"><img src="http://www.whcoa.gov/images/bio-jackson2.jpg" width="175" height="224"> <img src="http://espanol.hud.gov/images/photos/download/hud-picw-2003-0012a.jpg">

In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson predicted New Orleans would slowly bring back as many as 375,000 people, but that only 35 to 40 percent of the population would be black. Prior to Hurricane Katrina the city had nearly 500,000 residents, more than two-thirds of whom were African-American.

“Whether we like it or not, New Orleans is not going to be 500,000 people for a long time,” Jackson said. “New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.”

Jackson, who was appointed by Bush to aid in the reconstruction of the city, made it clear that such an outcome was not simply the product of the hurricane and flooding, but the desired policy of the Bush administration and the city’s white political and financial elite.

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Peter King
Peter King, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, joined the magazine in 1989 after spending nearly a decade as an award-winning newspaper journalist. He is one of the country's premier pro football
writers.


The Truth About New Orleans

May 3rd 2006
I know you come to this column to read about football, sports and other things. I'll get to the regular
Tuesday fare, your e-mails, in a few paragraphs. First, there's something a little more significant to discuss.

I sense that we in this country have Katrina fatigue. The New York Times reported as much recently, saying that people in some of the areas that welcomed Katrina evacuees last September are sick of hearing about the hurricane, the flooding and the aftermath.

Well, my wife and I were in a car last Wednesday that toured the hardest-hit area of New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward. ...

What I saw was a national disgrace. An inexcusable, irresponsible, borderline criminal national disgrace. I am ashamed of this country for the inaction I saw everywhere.

I mentioned my outrage to the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, on Thursday. He shook his head and said, "Tell me about it." Disgust dripped from his voice.

What are we doing in this country?

"It's been eight months since Katrina," said Jack Bowers, my New Jersey friend and Habitat for Humanity guide through the Lower Ninth Ward, as he took us through deserted streets wherenothing, absolutely nothing, was being done about the wasteland that this place is.

"Eight months!" he said. "And look at it. When people talk to me about New Orleans, they say, 'Well, things are getting back to normal down there, aren't they?' I tell them things are a long, long way from normal, and it's going to be a long time before it's ever normal. And I tell them they've never seen anything like this."

Our Mississippi guide, Josh Norman of the Biloxi Sun-Herald, put it this way: "People outside of here are tired of hearing about it. They've moved on to the next news cycle."

How can we let an area like the Lower Ninth Ward sit there, on the eve of another hurricane season, with nothing being done to either bulldoze the place and start over, or rebuild? How can Congress sit on billions of looming aid and not release it for this area?

I can't help but think that if this were Los Angeles or New York, that 500 percent more money-and concern-would have flooded into this place. And I can't help but think that if the idiots who let the levees down here go to seed had simply been doing their jobs, we'd never have been in this mess in the first place-in New Orleans, at least. Other than former FEMA director Michael Brown, are you telling me that no others are paying for this with their jobs?

Whatever happened to responsibility?

Am I ticked off? Damn right I'm ticked off. If you're breathing, you should be morally outraged.

Katrina fatigue? Hah! More Katrina news! Give me more! Give it to me every day on the front page! Every day until Washington realizes there's a disaster here every bit as urgent as anything happening in this world today-fighting terrorism, combating the nuclear threat in Iran. I'm not in any way a political animal, but all you have to be is an occasionally thinking American to be sickened by the conditions I saw.

The Lower Ninth Ward is a 1.5-by-2-mile area a couple of miles from the center of New Orleans. It is a poor area. I should say it was a poor area. Before the storm, 20,000 people lived there. Fats Domino lived there. So, formerly, did Marshall Faulk. And now you drive through it and see nothing being done to fix it or tear it down, or to do anything.

In Mississippi, we drove through one formerly thriving beach town that has two structures left.

We drove past concrete pads with litter and shards of wood around them. Former houses. The houses, quite literally, have been eviscerated. Hundreds of them. This is what nuclear winter must look like, I thought.

I'm a sportswriter. It's not my job to figure how to fix what ails the Gulf Coast. But the leaders of this society are responsible. And they're not doing their jobs. I could ignore everything I saw and go back to my nice New Jersey cocoon, forgetting I saw it. And I know you don't read me to hear my worldviews. But I couldn't sleep at night if I didn't say something.

On Saturday, at the Saints' headquarters for the draft, I watched the day unfold with a friend of the team, New Orleans businessman and president Michael Whelan. I told him what I'd seen, and asked him what he thought.

"We spend all this money on the war in Iraq and we can't take care of our own cities?" he said.

"You get out of downtown, and it's like a war zone in a lot of neighborhoods still. The government has been a huge letdown. I've heard billions of dollars are going to be sent here. Where are they?

Nothing is taking place. I certainly think that now it's back-page news; the government is sweeping it under the rug." ...............................the end...


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Who Is Killing New Orleans?

 
By Mike Davis,
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April 10th 2006
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060410&s=davis 

A few blocks from the badly flooded and still-closed campus of Dillard University, a wind-bent street sign announces the intersection of Humanity and New Orleans. In the nighttime distance, the downtown skyscrapers on Poydras and Canal Streets are already ablaze with light, but a vast northern and eastern swath of the city, including the Gentilly neighborhood around Dillard, remains shrouded in darkness.

The lights have been out for six months now, and no one seems to know when, if ever, they will be turned back on. In greater New Orleans about 125,000 homes remain damaged and unoccupied, a vast ghost city that rots in darkness while les bon temps return to a guilty strip of unflooded and mostly affluent neighborhoods near the river. Such a large portion of the black population is gone that some radio stations are now switching their formats from funk and rap to soft rock.

Mayor Ray Nagin likes to boast that "New Orleans is back," pointing to the tourists who again prowl the French Quarter and the Tulane students who crowd Magazine Street bistros; but the current population of New Orleans on the west bank of the Mississippi is about the same as that of Disney World on a normal day. More than 60 percent of Nagin's constituents -- including an estimated 80 percent of the African-Americans -- are still scattered in exile with no obvious way home.

In their absence, local business elites, advised by conservative think tanks, "New Urbanists" and neo-Democrats, have usurped almost every function of elected government. With the City Council largely shut out of their deliberations, mayor-appointed commissions and outside experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city.

Without any mandate from local voters, the public-school system has already been virtually abolished, along with the jobs of unionized teachers and school employees. Thousands of other unionized jobs have been lost with the closure of Charity Hospital, formerly the flagship of public medicine in Louisiana. And a proposed oversight board, dominated by appointees of President Bush and Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, would end local control over city finances.

Meanwhile, Bush's pledge to "get the work done quickly" and mount "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen" has proved to be the same fool's gold as his earlier guarantee to rebuild Iraq's bombed-out infrastructure. Instead, the Administration has left the residents of neighborhoods like Gentilly in limbo: largely without jobs, emergency housing, flood protection, mortgage relief, small-business loans or a coordinated plan for reconstruction.

With each passing week of neglect -- what Representative Barney Frank has labeled "a policy of ethnic cleansing by inaction" -- the likelihood increases that most black Orleanians will never be able to return.

Lie and Stall

After his bungling initial response to Katrina, Bush impersonated FDR and Lyndon Johnson when he reassured the nation in his September 15 Jackson Square speech that "we have a duty to confront [New Orleans's] poverty with bold action… We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives."

In the event, the White House sat on its pledges all autumn, mumbling homilies about the limits of government, while its conservative attack dogs in Congress offset Gulf relief with $40 billion worth of cutbacks in Medicaid, food stamps and student loans. Republicans also rebelled against aid for a state that was depicted as a venal Third World society, a failed state like Haiti, out of step with national values. "Louisiana and New Orleans," according to Idaho Senator Larry Craig, "are the most corrupt governments in our country and they always have been… Fraud is in the culture of Iraqis. I believe that is true in the state of Louisiana as well."

Democrats, apart from the Congressional Black Caucus, did pathetically little to counter this backlash or to hold Bush's feet to the fire over his Jackson Square pledge. The promised national debate about urban poverty never took place; instead, New Orleans, like a great derelict ship, drifted helplessly in the treacherous currents of White House hypocrisy and conservative contempt.

An early, deadly blow was Treasury Secretary John Snow's refusal to guarantee New Orleans municipal bonds, forcing Mayor Nagin to lay off 3,000 city employees on top of the thousands of education and medical workers already jobless. The Bush Administration also blocked bipartisan measures to increase Medicaid coverage for Katrina evacuees and to give the State of Louisiana -- facing an estimated $8 billion in lost revenues over the next few years -- a share of the income generated by its offshore oil and gas leases.

Even more egregious was the flagrant redlining of black neighborhoods by the Small Business Administration (SBA), which rejected a majority of loan applications by local businesses and homeowners. At the same time, a bipartisan Senate bill to save small businesses with emergency bridge loans was sabotaged by Bush officials, leaving thousands to face bankruptcy and foreclosure.

As a result, the economic foundations of the city's African-American middle class (public-sector jobs and small businesses) have been swept away by deliberate decisions made in the White House. Meanwhile, in the absence of federal or state initiatives to employ locals, low-income blacks are losing their niches in the construction and service sectors to more mobile outsiders.

In stark contrast to its neglect of neighborhood relief, the White House has made herculean efforts to reward its own base of large corporations and political insiders. Representative Nydia Velazquez, who sits on the House Small Business Committee, pointed out that the SBA has allowed large corporations to get $2 billion in federal contracts while excluding local minority contractors.

The paramount beneficiaries of Katrina relief aid have been the giant engineering firms KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) and the Shaw Group, which enjoy the services of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh (a former FEMA director and Bush's 2000 campaign manager). FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, while unable to explain to Governor Blanco last fall exactly how they were spending money in Louisiana, have tolerated levels of profiteering that would raise eyebrows even on the war-torn Euphrates. (Some of this largesse, of course, is guaranteed to be recycled as GOP campaign contributions.)

FEMA, for example, has paid the Shaw Group $175 per square (100 square feet) to install tarps on storm-damaged roofs in New Orleans. Yet the actual installers earn as little as $2 per square, and the tarps are provided by FEMA. Similarly, the Army Corps pays prime contractors about $20 per cubic yard of storm debris removed, yet some bulldozer operators receive only $1.

Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung, where the actual work is carried out. While the Friends of Bush mine gold from the wreckage of New Orleans, many disappointed recovery workers -- often Mexican or Salvadoran immigrants camped out in city parks and derelict shopping centers -- can barely make ends meet.

The Big Kiss-Off

In the fractious, take-no-prisoners world of Louisiana politics, broad solidarity of interest is normally as rare as a boulder in a bayou. Yet Katrina created an unprecedented bipartisan consensus around twin demands for Category five hurricane protection and mortgage relief for damaged homes.

From conservative Republicans to liberal Democrats, there has been unanimity that the region's recovery depends on federal investment in new levees and coastal restoration, as well as financial rescue of the estimated 200,000 homeowners whose insurance coverage has failed to cover their actual damage. (There has been no equivalent consensus and little concern for the right of renters -- who constituted 53 percent of the population before Katrina -- and of public-housing tenants to return to their city.)

Yet by early November it was clear that saving New Orleans was no longer high on the Bush agenda, if it had ever been. As Congress headed toward its Christmas adjournment, the Louisiana delegation was in panic mode: A Category 5 plan had disappeared from serious discussion, and there were doubts about whether the damaged levees would be repaired before hurricane season returned. (In early March engineers monitoring the progress of the Army Corps's work complained that the use of weak, sandy soils and the lack of concrete "armoring" insured that the levees would again fail in a major storm.)

Congress ultimately voted to provide $29 billion for Gulf Coast relief. Yet as the Washington Post reported, "All but $6 billion of the measure merely reshuffled some of the $62 billion in previously approved Hurricane Katrina aid. The rest was funded by a one percent across-the-board cut of non-emergency, discretionary programs."

The Pentagon won approval for a whopping $4.4 billion in base repairs and other professed Katrina-related needs, but Congress cut out the $250 million allocated to combat coastal erosion. Meanwhile, Mississippi's powerful Republican troika -- Governor Haley Barbour and Senators Trent Lott and Thad Cochran -- persuaded fellow Republicans to support $6.2 billion in discretionary housing aid for Louisiana and $5.3 billion for Mississippi, with red-state Mississippi getting five times as much aid per distressed household as pink-state Louisiana.

Louisiana received another blow on January 23, when Bush rejected GOP Representative Richard Baker's plan calling for a federally guaranteed Louisiana Reconstruction Corporation, which would bail out homeowners by buying distressed properties and packaging them in larger parcels for resale to developers. Local Republicans as well as Democrats howled in rage, and the future of southern Louisiana was again thrown into chaos. Although the Administration eventually promised an additional $4.2 billion in housing aid, the appropriation continues to be fought over by Texas and other jealous states.

The Republican hostility to New Orleans, of course, runs deeper and is nastier than mere concern with civic probity (America's most corrupt city, after all, is located on the Potomac, not the Mississippi). Underlying all the circumlocutions are the same antediluvian prejudices and stereotypes that were used to justify the violent overthrow of Reconstruction 130 years ago.

Usually it is the poor who are invisible in the aftermath of urban disasters, but in the case of New Orleans it has been the African-American professional middle class and skilled working class. In the confusion and suffering of Katrina -- a Rorschach test of the American racial unconscious -- most white politicians and media pundits have chosen to see only the demons of their prejudices.

The city's complex history and social geography have been reduced to a cartoon of a vast slum inhabited by an alternately criminal or helpless underclass, whose salvation is the kindness of strangers in other, whiter cities. Inconvenient realities like Gentilly's red-brick normalcy -- or, for that matter, the pride of homeownership and the exuberance of civic activism in the blue-collar Lower Ninth Ward -- have not been allowed to interfere with the belief, embraced by New Democrats as well as old Republicans, that black urban culture is inherently pathological.

Such calumnies reproduce ancient caricatures -- blacks running amok, incapable of honest self-government -- that were evoked by the murderous White League when it plotted against Reconstruction in New Orleans in the 1870s. Indeed, some civil rights veterans fear that the 1874 Battle of Canal Street, a bloody League-organized insurrection against a Republican administration elected by black suffrage, is being refought -- perhaps without pikes and guns, but with the same fundamental aim of dispossessing black New Orleans of economic and political power. Certainly, a sweeping transformation of the racial balance-of-power within the city has been on some people's agenda for a long time.

The Krewe of Canizaro

Power and status in New Orleans have always been defined by membership in secretive Mardi Gras "krewes" and social clubs. In the early 1990s civil rights activists, led by feisty Councilmember Dorothy Mae Taylor, forced the token desegregation of Mardi Gras, and some of the clubs reluctantly admitted a few African-American millionaires. Despite some old-guard holdouts, Uptown seemed to be adjusting, however grudgingly, to the reality of black political clout.

But as post-Katrina events have brutally clarified, if the oligarchy is dead, then long live the oligarchy. While elected black officials protest impotently from the sidelines, a largely white elite has wrested control over the debate about how to rebuild the city. This de facto ruling krewe includes Jim Amoss, editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Pres Kabacoff, developer-gentrifier and local patron of the New Urbanism; Donald Bollinger, shipyard owner and prominent Bushite; James Reiss, real estate investor and chair of the Regional Transit Authority (i.e., the man responsible for the buses that didn't evacuate people); Alden McDonald Jr., CEO of one of the largest black-owned banks; Janet Howard of the Bureau of Government Research (originally established by Uptown elites to oppose the populism of Huey Long); and Scott Cowen, the aggressively ambitious president of Tulane University.

But the dominating figure and kingpin is Joseph Canizaro, a wealthy property developer who is a leading Bush supporter with close personal ties to the White House inner circle. He is also the power behind the throne of Mayor Nagin, a nominal Democrat (he supported Bush in 2000) who was elected in 2002 with 85 percent of the white vote. Finally, as the former president of the Urban Land Institute, Canizaro mobilizes the support of some of the nation's most powerful developers and prestigious master planners.

In a city where old money is often as reclusive as Anne Rice's vampires, Canizaro poses as a brave civic leader unafraid to speak bitter but necessary truths. As he told the Associated Press about the Katrina diaspora last October: "As a practical matter, these poor folks don't have the resources to go back to our city just like they didn't have the resources to get out of our city. So we won't get all those folks back. That's just a fact."

Indeed, it is a "fact" that Canizaro has helped shape into reigning dogma. The number of displaced residents returning to the city is obviously a highly variable function of the resources and opportunities provided for them, yet the rebuilding debate has been premised on suspicious projections -- provided by the RAND Corporation and endlessly repeated by Nagin and Canizaro -- that in three years the city would recover only half of its August 2005 population.

Many Orleanians cynically wonder whether such projections aren't actually goals. For years Reiss, Kabacoff and others have complained that New Orleans has too many poor people. Faced with the dire fiscal consequences of white flight to the suburbs, as well as three decades of deindustrialization (which has given New Orleans an economic profile closer to Newark than to Houston or Atlanta), they argue that the city has become a soul-destroying warehouse for underemployed and poorly educated African-Americans, whose real interests -- it is claimed -- might be better served by a Greyhound ticket to another town.

Kabacoff's 2003 redevelopment of the St. Thomas public housing project as River Garden, a largely market-rate faux Creole subdivision, has become the prototype for the smaller, wealthier, whiter city that Mayor Nagin's Bring New Orleans Back commission (with Canizaro as head of the crucial urban planning committee) proposes to build.

BNOB is perhaps the most important elite initiative in New Orleans since the famous "Cold Water Committee" (which included Kabacoff's father) mobilized in 1946 to overthrow the "Old Regulars" and elect reformer deLesseps Morrison as mayor. BNOB grew out of a notorious meeting between Mayor Nagin and New Orleans business leaders (dubbed by some "the forty thieves") that Reiss organized in Dallas twelve days after Katrina devastated the city. The summit excluded most of New Orleans's elected black representatives and, according to Reiss as characterized in the Wall Street Journal, focused on the opportunity to rebuild the city "with better services and fewer poor people."

Fears that a municipal coup d'etat was in progress were scarcely mollified when at the end of September the mayor charged BNOB with preparing a master plan to rebuild the city. Although the seventeen-member commission was racially balanced and included City Council president Oliver Thomas as well as jazz musician Wynton Marsalis (telecommuting from Manhattan), the real clout was exercised by committee chairs, especially Canizaro (urban planning), Cowen (education) and Howard (finance), who lunched privately with the mayor before the group's weekly meeting. This inner sanctum was reportedly necessary because the full-panel meetings did not allow a frank discussion of "tough issues of race and class."

BNOB might have quickly imploded but for a shrewd outflanking movement by Canizaro, who persuaded Nagin to invite the Urban Land Institute to work with the commission. Although the ULI is the self-interested national voice of corporate land developers, Nagin and Canizaro welcomed the delegation of developers, architects and ex-mayors as a heroic cavalry of expertise riding to the city's rescue.

In a nutshell, the ULI's recommendations reframed the historic elite desire to shrink the city's socioeconomic footprint of black poverty (and black political power) as a crusade to reduce its physical footprint to contours commensurate with public safety and a fiscally viable urban infrastructure.

Upon these suspect premises, the outside "experts" (including representatives of some of the country's largest property firms and corporate architects) proposed an unprecedented triage of an American city, in which low-lying neighborhoods would be targeted for mass buyouts and future conversion into a greenbelt to protect New Orleans from flooding. As a visiting developer told BNOB: "Your housing is now a public resource. You can't think of it as private property anymore."

Keenly aware of inevitable popular resistance, the ULI also proposed a Crescent City Rebuilding Corporation, armed with eminent domain, that would bypass the City Council, as well as an oversight board with power over the city's finances. With control of New Orleans schools already usurped by the state, the ULI's proposed dictatorship of experts and elite appointees would effectively overthrow representative democracy and annul the right of local people to make decisions about their lives. For veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement, especially, it reeked of disenfranchisement pure and simple, a return to the paternalism of plantation days.

The City Council, supported by a surprising number of white homeowners and their representatives, angrily rejected the ULI plan. Mayor Nagin -- truly a cat on a hot tin roof -- danced anxiously back and forth between the two camps, disavowing abandonment of any area while at the same time warning that the city could not afford to service every neighborhood. But state and national officials, including HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, applauded the ULI scheme, as did the editorial page of the Times-Picayune and the influential Bureau of Government Research.

The BNOB recommendations presented by Canizaro in January faithfully hewed to the ULI framework: They included an appointed redevelopment corporation, outside the control of the City Council, that would act as a land bank to buy out heavily damaged homes and neighborhoods with federal funds, wielding eminent domain as needed to retire low-lying areas to greenbelt ("black people's neighborhoods into white people's parks," someone commented) or to assemble "in-fill" tracts for mixed-income development a la River Garden. Other committees recommended a radical diminution of the power of elected government.

On the crucial question of how to decide which neighborhoods would be allowed to rebuild and which would be bulldozed, BNOB endorsed the concept of forced buyouts but equivocated over process. Instead of the ruthless map that the Bureau of Government Research wanted, Canizaro and colleagues proposed a Rube Goldberg-like temporary building moratorium in tandem with neighborhood planning meetings that would poll homeowners about their intentions. Only those neighborhoods where at least half of the pre-Katrina residents had made a committment to return would be considered serious candidates for Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) and other financial aid.

Canizaro presented the report to Nagin in front of a public audience on January 11. The mayor said, "I like the plan," and he complimented the commissioners for "a job well done." But most locals found little charm in the Canizaro report. "I will sit in my front door with my shotgun," one resident warned at a jammed meeting in the Council chambers on January 14, while another demanded, "Are we going to allow some developers, some hustlers, some land thieves to grab our land, grab our homes, to make this a Disney World version of our homes, our lives?"

Predictably, Nagin panicked and eventually disavowed the building moratorium. Soon afterward the White House torpedoed the Baker plan and left BNOB with only the state-controlled CDBG appropriation to finance its ambitious vision of New Orleans regrouped around a dozen new River Gardens linked by a high-speed light-rail line.

But Canizaro doesn't seem unduly worried. He has reassured supporters that the ULI/BNOB plan can go forward with CDBGs alone if necessary; in addition, he knows that independent of the local political weather, there are powerful external forces -- lack of insurance coverage, new FEMA flood maps, refusal of lenders to refinance mortgages and so on -- that can make permanent the exodus from redlined neighborhoods. Moreover, as anyone versed in the realpolitik of modern Louisiana knows, nothing is finally decided in New Orleans until some good ol' boys (and girls) in Baton Rouge have their say.

Power Shift

Even before the last bloated body had been fished out of the fetid waters, conservative political analysts were writing gleeful obituaries for black Democratic power in Louisiana. "The Democrats' margin of victory," said Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation, is "living in the Astrodome in Houston."

Thanks to the Army Corps's defective levees, the Republicans stand to gain another Senate seat, two Congressional seats and probably the governorship. The Democrats would also find it impossible to reproduce Bill Clinton's 1992 feat, when he carried Louisiana by almost exactly his margin of victory in New Orleans. With a ruthless psephologist like Karl Rove in the White House, it is inconceivable that such considerations haven't influenced the shameless Bush response to the city's distress.

New Orleans has always vied with Detroit when it comes to the violent antipathy of white-flight suburbs toward its black central city, so it is not surprising that representatives from Jefferson Parish (which elected Klan leader David Duke to the state legislature in 1989) and St. Tammany Parish have particularly relished the post-Katrina shift in metropolitan population and electoral power. Both parishes are in the midst of housing booms that may consolidate the hollowing out and decline of New Orleans.

For her part, Governor Blanco, a Democrat, has expressed little concern about this fundamental reconfiguration of Louisiana's major metropolitan area. Indeed, her immediate, Bush-like responses to Katrina were to help engineer a state takeover of New Orleans schools and to slash $500 million in state spending while sponsoring tax breaks (in the name of economic recovery) for oil companies awash in profits.

The Legislative Black Caucus was outraged at Blanco's "complete lack of vision and leadership" and went to court to challenge her right to make cuts without consulting lawmakers. But Blanco, supported by rural conservatives and corporate lobbyists, remained intransigent, even openly hostile, to black Democrats whose support she had previously courted.

Poor people have no voice inside the Louisiana Recovery Authority, whose gaggle of university presidents and corporate types appointed by Blanco is even less beholden to black New Orleans voters and their representatives than the Canizaro krewe. The twenty-nine-member LRA board, dominated by representatives of big business, has only one trade unionist and not a single grassroots black representative. Moreover, in contrast to Nagin's commission, the LRA has the power to decide, not merely advise: It controls the allocation of the FEMA funds and CDBGs that Congress has provided for reconstruction.

According to interviews in the Times-Picayune, leading members of the LRA believe that the sheer force of economic disincentives will shrink the city around the contours proposed by the Urban Land Institute. The authority has thus refused to disburse any of its hazard mitigation funds to areas considered unsafe, and presumably will be equally hardheaded in the allocation of CDBG spending.

At a special session of the legislature Governor Blanco emphasized that the state, not local government or neighborhood planning committees, will retain control over where grants and loans go. But Blanco and the elites may have overlooked the Fats Domino factor.

'No Bulldozing!'

Like hundreds of other flood-damaged but structurally sound homes, Fats Domino's house wears a defiant sign: Save Our Neighborhood: No Bulldozing! The r&b icon, who has always stayed close to his roots in working-class Holy Cross, knows his riverside neighborhood and the rest of the Lower Ninth Ward are prime targets of the city-shrinkers.

Indeed, on Christmas Day the Times-Picayune -- declaring that "before a community can rebuild, it must dream" -- published a vision of what a smaller-but-better New Orleans might look like: "Tourists and schoolchildren tour a living museum that includes the former home of Fats Domino and Holy Cross High School, a multiblock memorial to Katrina that spans the devastated neighborhood."

"Living museum" (or "holocaust museum," as a black friend bitterly observed) sounds like a bad joke, but it is the elite view of what African-American New Orleans should become. In the brave New Urbanist world of Canizaro and Kabacoff, blacks (along with that other colorful minority group, Cajuns) will reign only as entertainers and self-caricatures. The high-voltage energy that once rocked juke joints, housing projects and second-line parades will now be safely embalmed for tourists in a proposed Louisiana Music Experience in the Central Business District.

But this minstrel-show version of the future must first defeat a remarkable local history of grassroots organization. The Crescent City's best-kept secret -- in the mainstream press, at least -- has been the resurgence of trade-union and community organizing since the mid-1990s.

Indeed, New Orleans, the only Southern city in which labor was ever powerful enough to call a general strike, has become an important crucible of new social movements. In particular, it has become the home base of ACORN, a national organization of working-class homeowners and tenants that counts more than 9,000 New Orleans member-families, mostly in triage-threatened black neighborhoods.

ACORN's membership has been the engine behind the tumultuous, decade-long struggle to unionize downtown hotels as well as the successful 2002 referendum to legislate the nation's first municipal minimum wage (later overthrown by a right-wing state Supreme Court). Since Katrina, ACORN has emerged as the major opponent of the ULI/BNOB plan for shrinking the city. Its members find themselves again fighting many of the same elite figures who were opponents of hotel unionization and a living wage.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke scoffs at the RAND Corporation projections that portray most blacks abandoning the city. "Don't believe those phony figures," he told me over beignets at Cafe du Monde in January. "We have polled our displaced members in Houston and Atlanta. Folks overwhelmingly want to return. But they realize that this is a tough struggle, since we have to fight simultaneously on two fronts: to restore people's homes and to bring back their jobs. It is also a race against time. The challenge is, You make it, you take it. So our members are voting with their feet."

Not waiting for CDBGs, FEMA flood maps or permission from Canizaro, ACORN crews and volunteers from across the country are working night and day to repair the homes of 1,000 member-families in some of the most threatened areas. The strategy is to confront the city-shrinkers with the incontestable fact of reoccupied, viable neighborhood cores.

ACORN has allied with the AFL-CIO and the NAACP to defend worker rights and press for the hiring of locals in the recovery effort. Rathke points out that Katrina has become the pretext for the most vicious government-supported attack on unions since President Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers in 1981.

"First, suspension of Davis-Bacon [federal prevailing wage law], then the state takeover of the schools and the destruction of the teachers' union, and now this." He points to a beat-up green garbage truck rattling by Jackson Square. "Trash collection in the French Quarter used to be a unionized city job, SEIU members. Now FEMA has contracted the work to a scab company from out of state. Is this what Bring New Orleans Back means?"

ACORN also went to court to insure that New Orleans's displaced, largely black population would have access to out-of-state polling places, especially in Atlanta and Houston, for the scheduled April 22 city elections. When a federal judge rejected the demand, ACORN organizer Stephen Bradberry said it's "so obvious that there's a concerted plan to make this a whiter city." The NAACP agrees, but the Justice Department denied its request to block an election that is likely to transfer power to the artificial white majority created by Katrina.

It would be inspiring to see in this latest battle of New Orleans the birth pangs of a new or renewed civil rights movement, but gritty local activism has yet to be echoed in meaningful solidarity by the labor movement, so-called progressive Democrats or even the Congressional Black Caucus. Pledges, press statements and occasional delegations, yes; but not the unfaltering national outrage and sense of urgency that should attend the attempted murder of New Orleans on the fortieth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.

In 1874, as historian Ted Tunnell has pointed out, the failure of Northern Radicals to launch a militant, armed riposte to the white insurrection in New Orleans helped to doom the first Reconstruction. Will our feeble response to Hurricane Katrina now lead to the rollback of the second? ....................the end.........

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Excellent essay below from the October 2005 Harpers about how the Katrina disaster exposed the willful ignorance, racism and hypocrisy of too many of American’s white citizens.

In particular the - “I got my mine $$$$, so Fuck-You!!!”-
ideology of the RepubiKlans is thoroughly exposed.
Read it!!

Quote from the article

"To the readers of the Wall Street Journal on September 9, Congressman Richard Baker (RepubliKlan from LA.), brought the good news of a divinely inspired slum-clearance project. "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans," he said. "We couldn't do it, but God did." "

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SLUM CLEARENCE


By Lewis H. Lapham

http://harpers.org/


The comfort of the rich rests upon an abundance of the poor.
-Voltaire -



October 2005
On Monday, August 29, a category 4 hurricane slammed into New Orleans with winds reaching 140 miles an hour, and by Thursday, September 1, the city looked just about the way a doomed city is supposed to look according to the Book of Revelation. Which, given the faith-based political theory currently in office in Washington, should have surprised nobody.

For the last thirty years the scribes and Pharisees allied with the several congregations of both the radical and the reactionary right have been preaching the lesson that government is a sink of iniquity-by definition inefficient, unjust, wasteful, and corrupt, a mess of lies deserving neither the trust nor the affection of true Americans. True Americans place their faith in individual initiative, moral virtue, and personal responsibility, knowing in their hearts that government is the enemy of the people, likely to do more harm than good.

So it proved in New Orleans during the first week of September. At every level of officialdom-city, parish, state, and federal-the tribunes of the people met the standard of bureaucratic futility and criminal negligence imputed to them by two generations of Republican publicists, and within the few days before, during, and after the hurricane's arrival, they managed to facilitate the loss of life, liberty, and property for several hundred thousand of their fellow citizens. The devastation fell somewhat short of the biblical prophecy-no blood in the sea, the floodwaters unsmitten with the bloom of Wormwood, no angels overhead armed with the trumpets of Woe; even so, despite the absence of giant locusts wearing breastplates of iron, about as satisfactory a result as could be hoped for from a government public-works program-the storm warnings ignored or discredited, the levees in a reliably shoddy state of repair, 1 million people left homeless in the mostly uninsured wreckage scattered across 90,000 square miles in four states, dead animals drifting in the New Orleans sewage and rotting on the beaches of Biloxi, the sick and elderly dying of thirst in the stench and heat of the Superdome, poisonous snakes making the rounds of hospital emergency rooms, rats gnawing at the corpses of the drowned.

Even more impressive than the scale of the calamity was the laissez-faire response of the government officials who understood that it was not their place to question, much less attempt to interfere with, an act of God. When confronted with scenes of anguish that might have tempted overly emotional public servants to ill-considered activisms, the Department of Homeland. Security held fast to the policy of principled restraint. Spendthrift liberals rush to help people who refuse to help themselves; prudent conservatives know that such efforts smack of socialism. The residents of New Orleans had been told to evacuate the city before the hurricane came ashore, and if they didn't do so, well, whose fault was that? Government cannot be held responsible for the behavior of people who don't follow instructions, aren't mature enough to carry an American Express card or drive an SUV.

Every now and then, of course, government must show concern for the country's less fortunate citizens-the gesture is deemed polite in societies nominally democratic-and two days after the flooding submerged most of New Orleans under as much as fifteen feet of foul and stagnant water, President George W. Bush graciously cut short his Texas vacation to gaze upon the mined city from the height of 2,500 feet. Air Force One remained overhead for thirty-five whole minutes, which was long enough to impress upon the President the comparison to a big-budget Hollywood disaster movie. To the White House aides-de-camp aboard the plane he was reported to have said, "It's devastating, it's got to be doubly devastating on the ground." A sensitive observation, indicating that he had noticed something seriously amiss-small houses floating in the water, big boats moored in trees. A president crippled by too active an imagination might have made the mistake of wanting to see for himself the devastation on the ground, possibly even going so far as to say a few words to the evacuees in the Superdome. But the newscasts were loud with rumors of armed gangs of unattractive black people looting convenience stores and raping infant girls, and if one or more of the mobs happened to incite a riot, the liberal news media would publish unpleasant photographs and draw unpatriotic conclusions. Better to wait until the army had set up a secure perimeter.

By Friday, September 2, four days after the hurricane made landfall, enough military units were in place to allow the President to upgrade the demonstration of his concern with the staging of resolute drop-bys in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. But if it was clear from his manner that he wished to convey sympathy and offer encouragement, it was also clear that he was at a loss to relate the words in the air to the "doubly devastating" death and destruction on the ground. Standing tall in shirtsleeves in front of the cameras in Mobile, he acknowledged the misfortune that had befallen his good friend Senator Trent Lott (R., Miss.): "The good news is, and it's hard for some to see it now-that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house-he's lost his entire house-there's going to be a fantastic house, and I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." Later that same day, departing from the airport in New Orleans, the President hit the note of solemnly conservative compassion appropriate to an HBO production of the decline and fall of Rome: "You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute, but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen."

Most of the other government spokespersons within range of a microphone during the first week in September might as well have been relaying their remarks by satellite from a map room in Bermuda. By Thursday, September 1, reports from the scene at the New Orleans Convention Center had been repeatedly broadcast on every network in the country-several thousand people without food or water, all of them desperate, quite a few of them dying. The news hadn't reached Michael Chertoff, director of the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, who had waited a judicious thirty-six hours after the storm's arrival before declaring it "an incident of national significance." To an interviewer from National Public Radio, Chertoff said, "I've not heard a report of thousands of people in the Convention Center who don't have food and water." The people in question presumably hadn't filled out the necessary forms. Nor had they informed Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who also hadn't heard of any trouble at the Convention Center and who told Wolf Blitzer on September 1, "Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well." Which was the preferred tone of voice throughout the rest of the week on the part of the Washington gentry doing their best to take an interest in people they neither knew nor wished to know.

Former First Lady Barbara Bush on September 5, reviewing the condition of the hurricane flood evacuees in the Houston Astrodome: "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this (chuckle) is working very well for them."

GOP strategist Jack Burkman, September 7: "I understand there are 10,000 people dead. It's terrible. It's tragic. But in a democracy of 300 million people, over years and years and years, these things happen."

September 8, First Lady Laura Bush: "I also want to encourage anybody who was affected by hurricane Corrina [sic] to make sure their children are in school."
House Majority Leader Tom De-Lay, September 9, bucking up the spirits of three young hurricane evacuees from New Orleans at the Astrodome: "Now tell me the truth, boys, is this kind of fun?"

Earlier in the week Mrs. Bush might have been pardoned for mistaking the name of the hurricane-hurricanes come and go in the same way that summer disaster movies come and go, and only a bleeding-heart leftist would expect the theatergoers in a Washington screening room to remember which is which-but by September 8 the news reports from New Orleans and points east were indicating an even more feckless government response than previously had been supposed-the USS Bataan, fully supplied with medical facilities, held at a safe distance offshore for reasons unexplained, National Guard units delayed in the confusions of bureaucratic move and countermove, the dysfunction of FEMA understood as the result of the nepotistic hiring of its senior management, trucks bringing ice and water rerouted to South Carolina, dent evacuees herded onto planes without being told where the planes were bound, the order to evacuate New Orleans made impractical by the simultaneous disappearance of the city's public transportation systems.

As it became increasingly evident that the storm had inflicted its heaviest damage on people who were poor, illiterate, and predominantly black, what emerged from the Mississippi mud was the ugly recognition of the United States as a society divided against itself across the frontiers of race and class. Not "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" but two nations, divisible by bank account, with liberty and justice for those able to pay the going rate for a government pimp.

The unwelcome sight evoked angry shouts of Woe from all the trumpets of the news media-outraged editorials, harsh questions from television anchorpersons ordinarily as mild as milk, a rising tide of bitter reproach from politicians both Democratic and Republican. The abrupt decline in the President's approval ratings prompted his press agents to send him on a frenzied round of image refurbishment-Mr. Bush holding a press conference to accept responsibility for the federal government's storm-related failures, Mr. Bush at the National Cathedral in Washington, declaring a "National Day of Prayer and Remembrance," Mr. Bush back again on the Gulf Coast, posed in front of the stage-lit St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, promising to do and spend "what it takes" ($100 billion, maybe $200 billion) to restore "the passionate soul" of the dead city.

If the performances weren't as uplifting as the President might have hoped, the fault possibly was to be found in his inability to hide the fact of his genuine and irritated surprise. What was everybody complaining about, for God's sake? Who didn't know that America was divided into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor? What else had every self-respecting Republican politician been doing for the last thirty years if not bending his or her best efforts to achieve that very purpose? Didn't anybody remember the words of the immortal Ronald Reagan's first inaugural address: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem"? Had everybody forgotten the noble question asked and answered in 1987 by Margaret Thatcher, that great and good. British prime minister: "Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women; there are families"? Some families make it to higher ground; others don't. Such is the way of the world and the natural order of things, visible every day in the pictures from Africa on CNN. Why else was the Republican Party so popular-elected to the White House, put in charge of the Congress and the Supreme Court-if not to give to the haves and take from the have-nots? It wasn't as if anybody, least of all President Bush, had made any secret of the project. All the major legislation passed by Congress over the last five years-the transportation bill, the Medicare prescription bill, the tax bills favoring corporations and wealthy individuals, the bankruptcy bill, etc.-strengthens the power of money to limit and control the freedom of individuals. During the early weeks of September, when countless thousands of people on the Gulf Coast were sorely in need of rescue, Senator Bill Frist (R., Tenn.), the Republican majority leader in the Senate, never once lost sight of the more urgent rescue mission, which was to press forward the legislation intended to privatize Social Security and eliminate the estate tax. Senator Frist is a doctor but first and foremost a loyal Republican and a man who knows how to order his priorities-before the hand on the heart, the thumb on the coin.

As surprised as the President by the grumbling noises in the suddenly and uncharacteristically conscience-stricken media, a heavenly host of Republican preachers and politicians was quick to shift the story into the True American context of individual initiative, moral virtue, and personal responsibility. Thus Senator Rick Santorum (R., Pa.): "I mean, you have people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings.
There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and, understand that there are consequences to not leaving."

Consequences also for not leading one's life in accordance with the instructions given in the Bible, the point made in the seconding of Senator Santorum's motion by numerous spokesmen for Christ. Thus the pastor of the New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans: "New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence, the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion-it's free of all these things now." Or again, more subtly, by the Columbia Christians for Life. The organization correlates storm tracks with cities harboring abortion clinics and supplemented its press release referring to the five such establishments in New Orleans with a satellite photograph that "looks like a fetus facing to the left (west) in the womb, in the early weeks of gestation."
Not a natural disaster, the hurricane, but a blessing in disguise, so seen and much appreciated by the forward-thinking parties of enlightened Republicanism. To the readers of the Wall Street Journal on September 9, Congressman Richard Baker (R., La.), brought the good news of a divinely inspired slum-clearance project. "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans," he said. "We couldn't do it, but God did."

As is well known and understood in the elevated circles of Republican political thought, God helps those who help themselves, and on September 13 Time magazine quoted an unnamed White House source confirming the miracle of the loaves and fishes soon to be visited upon the well-connected servants of the Lord in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. "Nothing can salve the wounds like money ... you'll see a much more aggressively engaged President, traveling to the Gulf Coast a lot and sending a lot of people down there."

By the time it comes to writing next month's Notebook, I expect that we'll have had the chance to count the ways in which the master chefs of our indolent but nevertheless ravenous government can carve the body of Christ into the sweetmeats of swindle and the drumsticks of fraud.



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<img src="http://www.quibbles-n-bits.com/archives/bomber/kkk.gif" border="0" height="49" width="50"> The RepubliKlan Party is. 

• Unapologetically Racist
• Homophobic
• Anti-Sex Education
• Anti- Immigrant
• Anti- Minimum Wage
• Anti-Abortion Rights
• Anti-Consumer Protection (pro-tort reform)
• Anti-Social Security Insurance
• Anti- Environmental Conservation Laws
• Anti-Progressive Taxation
• Anti-Banning the Death Penalty
• Anti-Feminism
• Anti-Affirmative Action
• Anti-Small Business Administration
• Anti-Substantially Increasing Foreign Aid
• Anti-Government Student College Tuition Grants
• Anti-ANY Gun Control
• Anti- Non-Christian Religion Tolerance 

Do the RepubliKlan <img src="http://www.quibbles-n-bits.com/archives/bomber/kkk.gif" border="0" height="49" width="50"> Party Policies equal fascism???
OF COURSE THEY DO!!!!

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muckraker10021 · Aug 24, 2006

It is now August 2006, One Year after Katrina.
What's really going on in New Orleans, one year later???
This long article spells it out chapter & verse.
Check it out, especially the part about who got all the relief money. Its a worthwhile read!!!!

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Trying to Make It Home
 New Orleans One Year After Katrina

August 22, 2006
<img src="http://law.loyno.edu/~quigley/quigleypicture.jpg">
by Bill Quigley

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0822-31.htm

Bernice Mosely is 82 and lives alone in New Orleans in a shotgun double. On August 29, 2005, as Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the levees constructed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers failed in five places and New Orleans filled with water.

One year ago Ms. Mosely was on the second floor of her neighborhood church. Days later, she was helicoptered out. She was so dehydrated she spent eight days in a hospital. Her next door neighbor, 89 years old, stayed behind to care for his dog. He drowned in the eight feet of floodwaters that covered their neighborhood.

Ms. Mosely now lives in her half-gutted house. She has no stove, no refrigerator, and no air-conditioning. The bottom half of her walls have been stripped of sheetrock and are bare wooden slats from the floor halfway up the wall. Her food is stored in a styrofoam cooler. Two small fans push the hot air around.

Two plaster Madonnas are in her tiny well-kept front yard. On a blazing hot summer day, Ms. Mosely used her crutches to gingerly come down off her porch to open the padlock on her fence. She has had hip and knee replacement surgery. Ms. Mosely worked in a New Orleans factory for over thirty years sewing uniforms.

When she retired she was making less than $4 an hour. "Retirement benefits?" she laughs. She lives off social security. Her house had never flooded before. Because of her tight budget tight, Ms. Mosely did not have flood insurance.

Thousands of people like Ms. Mosely are back in their houses on the Gulf Coast. They are living in houses that most people would consider, at best, still under construction, or, at worst, uninhabitable. Like Ms. Mosely, they are trying to make their damaged houses into homes.

New Orleans is still in intensive care. If you have seen recent television footage of New Orleans, you probably have a picture of how bad our housing situation is. What you cannot see is that the rest of our institutions, our water, our electricity, our healthcare, our jobs, our educational system, our criminal justice systems - are all just as broken as our housing. We remain in serious trouble. Like us, you probably wonder where has the promised money gone?

Ms. Mosely, who lives in the upper ninth ward, does not feel sorry for herself at all. "Lots of people have it worse," she says. "You should see those people in the Lower Ninth and in St. Bernard and in the East. I am one of the lucky ones."

Housing

Hard as it is to believe, Ms. Mosely is right. Lots of people do have it worse. Hundreds of thousands of people from the Gulf Coast remain displaced. In New Orleans alone over two hundred thousand people have not been able to make it home.

Homeowners in Louisiana, like Ms. Mosely, have not yet received a single dollar of federal housing rebuilding assistance to rebuild their severely damaged houses back into homes. Over 100,000 homeowners in Louisiana are on a waiting list for billions in federal rebuilding assistance through the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program.

So far, no money has been distributed.

Renters, who comprised most of the people of New Orleans before Katrina, are much worse off than homeowners. New Orleans lost more than 43,000 rental units to the storm. Rents have skyrocketed in the undamaged parts of the area, pricing regular working people out of the market. The official rate of increase in rents is 39%. In lower income neighborhoods, working people and the elderly report rents are up much higher than that. Amy Liu of the Brookings Institute said "Even people who are working temporarily for the rebuilding effort are having trouble finding housing."

Renters in Louisiana are not even scheduled to receive assistance through the Louisiana CDBG program. Some developers will receive assistance at some point, and when they do, some apartments will be made available, but that is years away.

In the face of the worst affordable housing shortage since the end of the Civil War, the federal government announced that it refused to allow thousands of families to return to their public housing units and was going to bulldoze 5000 apartments. Before Katrina, over 5000 families lived in public housing - 88 percent women-headed households, nearly all African American.

These policies end up with hundreds of thousands of people still displaced from their homes. Though all ages, incomes and races are displaced, some groups are impacted much more than others. The working poor, renters, moms with kids, African-Americans, the elderly and disabled - all are suffering disproportionately from displacement. Race, poverty, age and physical ability are great indicators of who has and who has made it home.

The statistics tell some of the story. The City of New Orleans says it is half its pre-Katrina size - around 225,000 people. But the U.S. Post Office estimates that only about 170,000 people have returned to the city and 400,000 people have not returned to the metropolitan area. The local electricity company reports only about 80,000 of its previous 190,000 customers have returned.

Texas also tells part of the story. It is difficult to understand the impact of Katrina without understanding the role of Texas - home to many of our displaced. Houston officials say their city is still home to about 150,000 storm evacuees - 90,000 in FEMA assisted housing. Texas recently surveyed the displaced and reported that over 250,000 displaced people live in the state and 41 percent of these households report income of less than $500 per month. Eighty-one percent are black, 59 percent are still jobless, most have at least one child at home, and many have serious health issues.

Another 100,000 people displaced by Katrina are in Georgia, more than 80,000 in metro Atlanta - most of whom also need long-term housing and mental health services.

In Louisiana, there are 73,000 families in FEMA trailers. Most of these trailers are 240 square feet of living space. More than 1600 families are still waiting for trailers in St. Bernard Parish. FEMA trailers did not arrive in the lower ninth ward until June - while the displaced waited for water and electricity to resume. Aloyd Edinburgh, 75, lives in the lower ninth ward and just moved into a FEMA trailer. His home flooded as did the homes of all five of his children. "Everybody lost their homes," he told the Times-Picayune, "They just got trailers. All are rebuilding. They all have mortgages. What else are they going to do?"

Until challenged, FEMA barred reporters from talking with people in FEMA trailer parks without prior permission - forcing a reporter out of a trailer in one park and residents back into their trailer in another in order to stop interviews.

One person displaced into a FEMA village in Baton Rouge has been organizing with her new neighbors. Air conditioners in two trailers for the elderly have been out for over two weeks, yet no one will fix them. The contractor who ran the village has been terminated and another one is coming - no one knows who. She tells me, "My neighbors are dismayed that no one in the city has stepped forward to speak for us. We are "gone." Who will speak for us? Does anyone care?"

Trailers are visible signs of the displaced. Tens of thousands of other displaced families are living in apartments across the country month to month under continuous threats of FEMA cutoffs.

Numbers say something. But please remember behind every number, there is a Ms. Mosely. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people each with a personal story like Ms. Mosely are struggling to return, trying to make it home.

Water and Electricity

New Orleans continues to lose more water than it uses. The Times-Picayune discovered that the local water system has to pump over 130 million gallons a day so that 50 million gallons will come out. The rest runs away in thousands of leaks in broken water lines, costing the water system $2000,000 a day. The lack of water pressure, half that of other cities, creates significant problems in consumption, sanitation, air-conditioning, and fire prevention.

In the lower 9th ward, the water has still not been certified as safe to drink - one year later.

Only half the homes in New Orleans have electricity. Power outages are common as hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs have not been made because Entergy New Orleans is in bankruptcy. Entergy is asking for a 25 percent increase in rates to help it become solvent.

Yet Entergy New Orleans' parent company, Entergy Corporation reported earnings of $282 million last year on revenue of $2.6 billion.

Health and Healthcare

Early this month, on August 1, 2006, another Katrina victim was found in her home in New Orleans, buried under debris. The woman was the 28th person found dead since March 2006. A total of 1577 died in Louisiana as a result of Katrina.

A friend of mine, a lawyer with health insurance and a family physician, went for an appointment recently at 11am. The office was so crowded he had to sit out in the hall on the floor to wait his turn for a seat in the waiting room. Three hours later he met his doctor. The doctor thought might have a gall stone. The doctor tried to set up an ultrasound. None were available. He ordered my friend to the emergency room for an ultrasound. At 4pm my friend went to the hospital emergency room, which was jammed with people: stroke victims, young kids with injuries, people brought in by the police. At 5am the next morning, my friend finished his ultrasound and went home. If it takes a lawyer with health insurance that long to get medical attention, consider what poor people without health insurance are up against.

Half the hospitals open before Katrina are still closed. The state's biggest public healthcare provider, Charity Hospital, remains closed and there are no current plans to reopen it anytime soon. Healthcare could actually get worse. Dr. Mark Peters, board chair of the Metropolitan Hospital Council of New Orleans said within the next two to three months, "all the hospitals" will be looking seriously at cutbacks. Why? Doctors and healthcare workers have left and there is surging demand from the uninsured who before Katrina went through now non-existent public healthcare. There is a shortage of nurses. Blue Cross Blue Shield officials reported "About three-quarters of the physicians who had been practicing in New Orleans are no longer submitting claims."

There is no hospital at all in the city for psychiatric patients. While the metropolitan area had about 450 psychiatric beds before the storm, 80 are now available. The police are the first to encounter those with mental illness. One recent Friday afternoon, police dealt with two mental patients - one was throwing bricks through a bar window, the other was found wandering naked on the interstate.

The elderly are particularly vulnerable. Over 70 percent of the deaths from Katrina were people over 60 years old. No one knows how many seniors have not made it back home. Esther Bass, 69, told the New York Times, after months of searching for a place to come home to New Orleans, "If there are apartments, I can't afford them. And they say there will be senior centers, but they're still being built. They can't even tell you what year they'll be finished." As of late July 2006, most nursing homes in the 12 parish Gulf Coast area of Louisiana are still not fully prepared to evacuate residents in the face of a hurricane.

The healthcare community has been rocked by the arrest of a doctor and two nurses after the Louisiana Attorney General accused them of intentionally ending the lives of four patients trapped in a now-closed local hospital. The accusations now go before a local grand jury which is not expected to make a decision on charges for several more months. The case is complicated for several reasons. Most important is that the doctor and nurses are regarded as some of the most patient-oriented and caring people of the entire hospital staff. It is undisputed that they worked day and night to save hundreds of patients from the hospital during the days it was without water, electricity or food. Others say that entire hospital and many others were abandoned by the government and that is what the attorney general should be investigating. The gravity of the charges, though, is giving everyone in the community pause. This, like so much else, will go on for years before there is any resolution.

Jobs

Before Katrina, there were over 630,000 workers in the metropolitan New Orleans area - now there are slightly over 400,000. Over 18,000 businesses suffered "catastrophic" damage in Louisiana. Nearly one in four of the displaced workers is still unemployed. Education and healthcare have lost the most employees. Most cannot return because there is little affordable housing, child care, public transportation and public health care.

Women workers, especially African American women workers, continue to bear the heaviest burden of harm from the storm. The Institute for Women's Policy Research reports that the percentage of women in the New Orleans workforce has dropped. The number of single mother families in New Orleans has dropped from 51,000 to 17,000. Low-income women remain displaced because of the lack of affordable housing and traditional discrimination against women in the construction industry.

Tens of thousands of migrant workers, roughly half undocumented, have come to the Gulf Coast to work in the recovery. Many were recruited. Most workers tell of being promised good wages and working conditions and plenty of work. Some paid money up front for the chance to come to the area to work. Most of these promises were broken. A tour of the area reveals many Latino workers live in houses without electricity, other live out of cars.

At various places in the city whole families are living in tents. Two recently released human rights reports document the problems of these workers. Immigrant workers are doing the dirtiest, most dangerous work, in the worst working conditions. Toxic mold, lead paint, fiberglass, and who knows what other chemicals are part of daily work. Safety equipment is not always provided. Day laborers, a new category of workers in New Orleans, are harassed by the police and periodic immigration raids. Wage theft is widespread as employers often do not pay living wages, and sometimes do not pay at all. Some of the powers try to pit local workers against new arrivals - despite the fact that our broken Gulf Coast clearly needs all the workers we can get.

Public transportation to and from low-wage jobs is more difficult. Over 200 more public transit employees have been terminated - cutting employment from over 1300 people pre-Katrina to about 700 now.

Single working parents seeking childcare are in trouble. Before Katrina, New Orleans had 266 licensed day care centers. Mississippi State University surveyed the city in July 2006 and found 80 percent of the day care centers and over 75 percent of the 1912 day care spots are gone. Only one-third of the Head Start centers that were open pre-Katrina survived.

Public Education

Before Katrina, 56,000 students were enrolled in over 100 public schools in New Orleans. At the end of the school year there were only 12,500. Right after the storm, the local school board gave many of the best public schools to charter groups. The State took over almost all the rest. By the end of the school year, four schools were operated by the pre-Katrina school board, three by the State, and eighteen were new charter schools.

After thirty-two years of collective bargaining, the union contract with the New Orleans public school teachers elapsed and was not renewed and 7500 employees were terminated.

For this academic year, no one knows for certain how many students will enroll in New Orleans public schools. Official estimates vary between a low of 22,000 and a high of 34,000. There will be five traditional locally supervised public schools, eighteen schools operated by the State, and thirty-four charter schools. As of July 1, not a single teacher had been hired for fifteen of the state-run schools. As of August 9, 2006, the Times-Picayune reported there are no staff at all identified to educate students with discipline problems or other educational issues that require special attention.

Whatever the enrollment in the new public school system is in the fall, it will not give an accurate indication of how many children have returned. Why? Many students in the public charter schools were in private schools before the hurricane.

Criminal Legal System

Consider also our criminal legal system. Chaka Davis was arrested on misdemeanor charges in October 2005 and jailed at the Greyhound station in New Orleans in October of 2005. Under Louisiana law, he was required to be formally charged within 30 days of arrest or released from custody. Because of a filing error he was lost in the system. He was never charged, never went to court, and never saw a lawyer in over 8 months - even though the maximum penalty for conviction for one of his misdemeanors was only 6 months. His mother found him in an out of town jail and brought his situation to the attention of the public defenders. He was released the next day.

Crime is increasingly a problem. In July, New Orleans lost almost as many people to murder as in July of 2005, with only 40 percent of the population back. There are many young people back in town while their parents have not returned. State and local officials called in the National Guard to patrol lightly populated areas so local police could concentrate on high-crime, low-income neighborhoods. Arrests have soared, but the number of murders remain high. Unfortunately, several of the National Guard have been arrested for criminal behavior as well - two for looting liquor from a home, two others for armed robbery at a traffic stop.

Criminal Court District Judge Arthur Hunter has declared the current criminal justice system shameful and unconstitutional and promises to start releasing inmates awaiting trial on recognizance bonds on the one year anniversary of Katrina. The system is nearly paralyzed by a backlog of over 6000 cases. There are serious evidence problems because of resigned police officers, displaced victims, displaced witnesses, and flooded evidence rooms. The public defender system, which was down to 4 trial attorneys for months, is starting to rebuild.

"After 11 months of waiting, 11 months of meetings, 11 months of idle talk, 11 months without a sensible recovery plan and 11 months tolerating those who have the authority to solve, correct and fix the problem but either refuse, fail or are just inept, then necessary action must be taken to protect the constitutional rights of people,' said Hunter.

In the suburbs across the lake, Sheriff Jack Strain told the media on TV that he was going to protect his jurisdiction from "thugs" and "trash" migrating from closed public housing projects in New Orleans. He went on to promise that every person who wore "dreadlocks or che-wee hairstyles" could expect to be stopped by law enforcement. The NAACP and the ACLU called in the U.S. Justice Department and held a revival-like rally at a small church just down the road from the jail. Though the area is over 80 percent white, the small group promised to continue to challenge injustice no matter how powerful the person committing the injustice. Recently, the same law enforcement people set up a roadblock and were stopping only Latino people to check IDs and insurance. I guess to prove they were not only harassing black people?

Finally, a grand jury has started looking into actions by other suburban police officers who blocked a group of people, mostly black, from escaping the floodwaters of New Orleans by walking across the Mississippi River bridge. The suburban police forced the crowd to flee back across the two mile bridge by firing weapons into the air.

This is the criminal legal system in the New Orleans area in 2006. None dare call it criminal justice.

International Human Rights

The Gulf Coast has gained new respect for international human rights because they provide a more appropriate way to look at what should be happening. The fact that there is an international human right of internally displaced people to return to their homes and a responsibility on government to help is heartening even though yet unfulfilled.

The United Nations has blasted the poor U.S. response to Katrina. The UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva accepted a report from Special Reporter Arjun Sengupta who visited New Orleans in fall of 2005 and concluded: "The Committee.remains concerned about information that poor people, and in particular African-Americans, were disadvantaged by the rescue and evacuation plans implemented when Hurricane Katrina hit the United States of America, and continue to be disadvantaged under the reconstruction plans."

Asian tsunami relief workers who visited New Orleans over the summer were shocked at the lack of recovery. Somsook Boonyabancha, director of the Community Organisations Development Institute in Thailand, told Reuters she was shocked at the lack of progress in New Orleans. "I'm surprised to see why the reconstruction work is so slow, because this is supposed to be one of the most rich and efficient countries in the world. It is starting at such a slow speed, incredibly slow speed."

Warnings to the Displaced

Local United Way officials see the lack of housing, healthcare and jobs and conclude that low-income people should seriously consider not returning to New Orleans anytime soon.

United Way wrote:

"Most of these people want to come home, but if they do not have a recovery plan they need to stay where they are. Some of these evacuees think that they can come back and stay with families and in a few weeks have a place of their own. But the reality is that they may end up living with those relatives for years. Sending people back without a realistic plan may have serious consequences: the crowding of families into small apartments/homes/FEMA trailers is causing mental health problems - stress, abuse, violence, and even death - and this problem is going to get worse, not better. Also, when the elderly (and others) are those returning and living in these conditions, their health is impacted and then the lack of medical facilities and hospital beds is a problem. Again the result may be death.

Basically if an evacuee says they have a place to stay - like with relatives - those communities will give them bus fare back or pay for U-hauls. If an evacuee was a renter here and they want to return they should be told to plan on returning in 3-7 years, and in the meantime stay there, get a job, and be much better off."

FEMA officials in Austin are also warning people about returning to New Orleans.

They wrote:

"Before you return...New Orleans is a changing place. You should consider the conditions you may be returning to. Many neighborhood schools will not be open by August. Your children may have to travel some distance to get to school.Grocery and supermarkets have been slow to return to many neighborhoods. Sometimes there aren't enough residents back in your neighborhood for a store to open and be profitable. You may have to travel a large distance to groceries. Walking to the store might not be an option.

If you or your family members require regular medical attention, or if you are pregnant or nursing, the services you received before the storm may be scattered and in very different and distant locations. Depending on your medical needs, you may have to drive across the river or even as far away as Baton Rouge.If you or your family members have allergies, remember that there is lots of dust and mold still in the city. While you may have suffered from allergies before the storm, please consider that being in the city will only worsen your allergies. If you have asthma, other respiratory or cardiac conditions, or immune system problems, you would be safer staying out of flooded areas due to the mold, particles and dust in the air. If you must return to the city, wear an approved respirator when working in moldy or dusty areas.

Additionally, police, fire and emergency personnel are stretched to their limits.If you own a car, gas and service stations are limited in many areas. You may need to purchase a gas can in the event you cannot get gas near your home.Public transportation (busses) are also limited and do not operate in all areas.

Available and affordable housing is extremely rare. Waiting lists for apartments are as large as 300 on the list, depending on how many bedrooms you need. Living inside your home could be dangerous if mold has set in of if your utilities are not in top working condition.Living in New Orleans may be easier said than done until we have fully recovered from the storm."

This is New Orleans, one year after Katrina.

Where Did the Money Go?

Everyone who visits New Orleans asks the same question that locals ask - where is the money? Congress reportedly appropriated over $100 billion to rebuild the Gulf Coast. Over $50 billion was allocated to temporary and long-term housing. Just under $30 billion was for emergency response and Department of Defense spending. Over $18 billion was for State and local response and the rebuilding of infrastructure. $3.6 billion was for health, social services and job training and $3.2 for non-housing cash assistance. $1.9 billion was allocated for education and $1.2 billion for agriculture.

One hour in New Orleans shows the check must still be in the mail.

Not a single dollar in federal housing rehab money has made it into a hand in Louisiana. Though Congress has allocated nearly $10 billion in Community Development Block Grants, the State of Louisiana is still testing the program and has not yet distributed dollar number one.

A lot of media attention has gone to the prosecution of people who wrongfully claimed benefits of $2000 or more after the storm. Their fraud is despicable. It harms those who are still waiting for assistance from FEMA.

But, be clear - these little $2000 thieves are minnows swimming on the surface. There are many big savage sharks below. Congress and the national media have so far been frustrated in their quest to get real answers to where the millions and billions went. How much was actually spent on FEMA trailers? How much did the big contractors take off the top and then subcontract out the work? Who were the subcontractors for the multi-million dollar debris removal and reconstruction contracts?

As Corpwatch says in their recent report, "Many of the same 'disaster profiteers' and government agencies that mishandled the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq are responsible for the failure of 'reconstruction' of the Gulf Coast region. The Army Corps, Bechtel and Halliburton are using the very same 'contract vehicles' in the Gulf Coast as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are 'indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity' open-ended 'contingency' contracts that are being abused by the contractors on the Gulf Coast to squeeze out local companies. These are also 'cost-plus' contracts that allow them to collect a profit on everything they spend, which is an incentive to overspend."

We do know billions of dollars in no-bid FEMA contracts went to Bechtel Corporation, the Shaw Group, CH2M Hill, and Fluor immediately after Katrina hit. Riley Bechtel, CEO of Bechtel Corporation, served on President Bush's Export Council during 2003-2004. A lobbyist for the Shaw Group, Joe Allbaugh, is a former FEMA Director and friend of President Bush. The President and Group Chief Executive of the International Group at CH2MHill is Robert Card, appointed by President Bush as undersecretary to the US Department of Energy until 2004. Card also worked at CH2M Hill before signing up with President Bush. Fluor, whose work in Iraq was slowing down, is one of the big winners of FEMA work and its stock is up 65 percent since it started Katrina work.

Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota has raised many protests and questions over inflated prices. "It is hard to overstate the incompetence involved in all of these contracts - we have repeatedly asked them for information and you get nothing." Republican U.S. Representative Charles Bustany, who represents an area heavily damaged by Hurricane Rita, asked FEMA for reasons why the decision was made to stop funding 100 percent of the cost of debris removal in his district. FEMA refused to tell him. He then filed a Freedom of Information request to get the information, and was again refused. When he asked to appeal their denial, he was told that there were many appeals ahead of his and he would have to wait.

If a US Senator and a local U.S. Republican Representative cannot get answers from FEMA, how much accountability can the people of the Gulf Coast expect? There are many other examples of fraud, waste and patronage.

How did a company that did not own a truck get a contract for debris removal worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The Miami Herald reported that the single biggest receiver of early Katrina federal contracts was Ashbritt, Inc. of Pompano Beach, FL, which received over $579 million in contracts for debris removal in Mississippi from Army Corps of Engineers. The paper reported that the company does not own a single dumptruck! All they do is subcontract out the work. Ashbritt, however, had recently dumped $40,000 into the lobbying firm of Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, which had been run by Mississippi Governor and former National GOP Chair Haley Barbour.

The owners of Ashbritt also trucked $50,000 over to the Republican National Committee in 2004.

How did a company that filed for bankruptcy the year before and was not licensed to build trailers get a $200 million contract for trailers? Circle B Enterprises of Georgia was awarded $287 million in contracts by FEMA for temporary housing. At the time, that was the seventh highest award of Katrina money in the country. According to the Washington Post, Circle B was not even being licensed to build homes in its own state of Georgia and filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

The company does not even have a website.

FEMA spent $7 million to build a park for 198 trailers in Morgan City Louisiana - almost 2 hours away from New Orleans. Construction was completed in April. Three months later only 20 of the trailers were occupied. One displaced New Orleans resident who lives there has to walk three miles to the nearest grocery.

Hurricanes are now a booming billion dollar business. No wonder there is a National Hurricane Conference for private companies to show off their wares - from RVs to portable cell phone towers to port-a-potties. One long time provider was quoted by the Miami Herald at the conference that there are all kinds of new people in the field - 'Some folks here said, `Man, this is huge business; this is my new business. I'm not in the landscaping business anymore, I'm going to be a hurricane debris contractor.' "

On the local level, we are not any better. One year after Katrina the City of New Orleans still does not have a comprehensive rebuilding plan. The first plan by advisors to the Mayor was shelved before the election. A city council plan was then started and the state and federal government mandated yet another process that may or may not include some of the recommendations of the prior two processes. One of the early advisors from the Urban Land Institute, John McIlwain, blasted the delays in late July. "It's virtually a city with a city administration and its worse than ever.You need a politician, a leader that is willing to make tough decisions and articulate to people why these decisions are made, which means everyone is not going to be happy." Without major changes at City Hall the City will have miles of neglected neighborhoods for decades. "We're talking Dresden after World War II."

Signs of Hope

Despite the tragedies that continue to plague our Gulf Coast, there is hope. Between the rocks of hardship, green life continues to sprout defiantly.

Fifteen feet of water washed through Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School for Science and Technology in the lower 9th Ward. When people were finally able to get into the building, the bodies of fish were found on the second floor. Parents and over 90% of the teachers organized a grass-roots effort to put their school back together. Their first attempts to gut and repair the school by locals and volunteers from Common Ground were temporarily stopped by local school officials and the police. Even after the gutting was allowed to resume, the community was told that the school could not reopen due to insufficient water pressure in the neighborhood. But the teachers and parents are pressing ahead anyway in a temporary location until they can get back in their school. Assistant Principal Joseph Recasner told the Times-Picayune: "Rebuilding our school says this is a very special community, tied together by more than location, but by spirituality, by bloodlines, and by a desire to come back."

New Orleans is fortunate to have a working newspaper again. The Times-Picayune won a well-deserved Pulitzer for its Katrina coverage. Its staff continues to provide quality documentation of the Gulf Coast region's efforts to repair and rebuild.

The New Orleans Vietnamese people continue to inspire us. They were among the very first group back and they have joined forces to care for their elders, rebuild their community church, and work together in a most cooperative manner to resurrect their community. Recently they took legal and direct action to successfully stop the placement of a gigantic landfill right next to their community. Their determination and sense of community-building is a good model for us all.

The only Republican running for Congress in New Orleans is blasting President Bush over failed Katrina promises. Joe Lavigne is running radio ads saying, "Sadly, George Bush has forgotten us. He's spending too much time and money on Iraq and not enough living up to his promise to rebuild New Orleans. His priorities are wrong. I'm running for Congress to hold President Bush accountable." Maybe other Republicans will join in.

Tens of thousands of volunteers from every walk of life have joined with the people of the Gulf Coast to help repair and rebuild. Lawyers are giving free help to Katrina victims who need legal help to rebuild their homes. Medical personnel staff free clinics. Thousands of college, high school and even some grade school students have traveled to the area to help families gut their devastated homes. Churches, temples, and mosques from across the world have joined with sisters and brothers in New Orleans to repair and rebuild.

Despite open attempts to divide them, black and brown and white and yellow workers have started to talk to each other. Small groups have started to work together to fight for living wages and safe jobs for all workers. Thousands came together for a rally for respectful treatment for Latino and immigrant workers. Seasoned civil rights activists welcomed the new movement and pledged to work together.

Ultimately, the people of the Gulf Coast are the greatest sign of hope. Despite setbacks that people in the US rarely suffer, people continue to help each other and fight for their right to return home and the right to live in the city they love.

On Sunday morning, a 70 year old woman told a friend where her children are. "They are all scattered," she sighed. "One is in Connecticut, one in Rhode Island, one in Austin." When he asked about her, she said, "Me? I am in Texas right now. I am back here to visit my 93 year old mother and go to the second line of Black Men of Labor on Labor Day. But I'm coming back. Yes indeed. I will return. I'm coming back."

Bill is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. You can reach him at Quigley@loyno.edu. For more information see www.justiceforneworleans.org

muckraker10021 · Aug 29, 2006

Trapped in New Orleans
First By the Floods,Then By Martial Law

<img src="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Video/050912/n_hardball_escape_050912.300w.jpg">
Lorrie Beth Slonsky & Larry Bradshaw

by Lorrie Beth Slonsky and Larry Bradshaw
http://www.metamute.com/look/articl...ation=1&NrIssue=24&NrSection=5&NrArticle=1523

ONE YEAR AGO, September 6, 2005. Two paramedics stranded in New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina give their account of self-organisation and abandonment in the disaster zone

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreens store at the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the city's historic French Quarter remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing, and the milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat.

The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers and prescriptions, and fled the city. Outside Walgreens' windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry. The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized, and the windows at Walgreens gave way to the looters.

There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices and bottled water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead, they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home on Saturday. We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreens in the French Quarter.

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and police struggling to help the "victims" of the hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans.

The maintenance workers who used a forklift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hotwire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the city. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens, improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their homes and had not heard from members of their families. Yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20 percent of New Orleans that was not under water.

* * *

ON DAY Two, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina.

Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources, including the National Guard and scores of buses, were pouring into the city. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible, because none of us had seen them.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the city. Those who didn't have the requisite $45 each were subsidized by those who did have extra money.

We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and newborn babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute they arrived at the city limits, they were commandeered by the military.

By Day Four, our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously bad. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that "officials" had told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the city, we finally encountered the National Guard.

The guard members told us we wouldn't be allowed into the Superdome, as the city's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. They further told us that the city's only other shelter--the convention center--was also descending into chaos and squalor, and that the police weren't allowing anyone else in.

Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only two shelters in the city, what was our alternative?" The guards told us that this was our problem--and no, they didn't have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement."

* * *

WE WALKED to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing--that we were on our own, and no, they didn't have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred.

We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and constitute a highly visible embarrassment to city officials. The police told us that we couldn't stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp.

In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge to the south side of the Mississippi, where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the city.

The crowd cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation, so was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there."

We organized ourselves, and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched past the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group, and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news.

Families immediately grabbed their few belongings, and quickly, our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, as did people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and other people in wheelchairs. We marched the two to three miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it didn't dampen our enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armed sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions.

As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us that there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city. These were code words for: if you are poor and Black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River, and you are not getting out of New Orleans.

* * *

OUR SMALL group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and, in the end, decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway--on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned that we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway, and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet-to-be-seen buses.

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away--some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the city on foot.

Meanwhile, the only two city shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery that New Orleans had become.

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an Army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts.

Now--secure with these two necessities, food and water--cooperation, community and creativity flowered. We organized a clean-up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom, and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas and other scraps. We even organized a food-recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

This was something we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. But when these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturated the city with food and water in the first two or three days, the desperation, frustration and ugliness would not have set in.

Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery-powered radio, we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the city. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway. The officials responded that they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking city) was accurate. Just as dusk set in, a sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces and screamed, "Get off the fucking freeway." A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims," they saw "mob" or "riot." We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" attitude was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of eight people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements, but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

The next day, our group of eight walked most of the day, made contact with the New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search-and-rescue team.

We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.

* * *

WE ARRIVED at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We eight were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a Coast Guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.

There, the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses didn't have air conditioners. In the dark, hundreds of us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.

Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport--because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly and disabled, as we sat for hours waiting to be "medically screened" to make sure we weren't carrying any communicable diseases.

This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heartfelt reception given to us by ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome.

Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

LARRY BRADSHAW and LORRIE BETH SLONSKY are emergency medical services (EMS) workers from San Francisco.They were attending an EMS conference in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck. They spent most of the next week trapped by the flooding--and the martial law cordon around the city.

QueEx · Aug 29, 2007

Bumped on 2nd Anniversary

wutdadeal3 · May 15, 2009

Bump...

muckraker10021 · May 17, 2009

Read the article below and try to reconcile how “WE” - (the-US-taxpayers) can via our elected representatives authorize 12.8 TRILLION $$$$$ dollars to bail-out the corrupt corporatist financial system –and- at the same time, cut-off financial aid for still struggling Katrina victims, as they quickly slide downward toward their death. Guess what, you can’t reconcile it.

READ: Financial Rescue Nears GDP as Pledges Top $12.8 Trillion
......The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s......

<hr noshade size="12" color="#333333"></hr>

Ready or Not, Katrina Victims Lose Temporary Housing
Leaving the Trailers

Earnest Hammond, 70, with cans he collects to pay for repairs to his hurricane-damaged home

May 8, 2009

By SHAILA DEWAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/us/08trailer.html#

NEW ORLEANS — Earnest Hammond, a retired truck driver, did not get any of the money that went to aid property owners after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

He failed to qualify for one federal program and was told he missed the deadline on another. But he did get a trailer to live in while he carries out his own recovery plan: collecting cans in a pushcart to pay for the renovations to his storm-damaged apartment, storing them by the roomful in the gutted building he owns.

It is a slow yet steady process. Before the price of aluminum fell to 30 cents a pound, from 85 cents, he had accumulated more than $10,000, he said, almost enough to pay the electrician. But despite such progress, last Friday a worker from the Federal Emergency Management Agency delivered a letter informing him that it would soon repossess the trailer that is, for now, his only home.

“I need the trailer,” said Mr. Hammond, 70. “I ain’t got nowhere to go if they take the trailer.”

Though more than 4,000 Louisiana homeowners have received rebuilding money only in the last six months, or are struggling with inadequate grants or no money at all, FEMA is intent on taking away their trailers by the end of May. The deadline, which ends temporary housing before permanent housing has replaced it, has become a stark example of recovery programs that seem almost to be working against one another.

Thousands of rental units have yet to be restored, and not a single one of 500 planned “Katrina cottages” has been completed and occupied. The Road Home program for single-family homeowners, which has cost federal taxpayers $7.9 billion, has a new contractor who is struggling to review a host of appeals, and workers who assist the homeless are finding more elderly people squatting in abandoned buildings.

Nonetheless, FEMA wants its trailers back, even though it plans to scrap or sell them for a fraction of what it paid for them.

“All I can say is that this is a temporary program, it was always intended as a temporary program, and at a certain point all temporary programs must end,” said Brent Colburn, the agency’s director of external affairs. He said there would be no extensions.

As of last week, there were two groups still in the agency’s temporary housing program: more than 3,000 in trailers and nearly 80 who have been in hotels paid for by FEMA since last May, when it shut down group trailer sites. Most are elderly, disabled or both, including double amputees, diabetes patients, the mentally ill, people prone to seizures and others dependent on oxygen tanks.

Of those in trailers, more than 2,000 are homeowners who fear that the progress they are making in rebuilding will come to a halt if their trailers are taken.

“They had helped me out up until this point, and I couldn’t believe that they suddenly decided, no, we’re not going to let you finish the house, we’re just going to take the trailer, and you can sit here on an empty lot,” said Philipp Seelig, 70, a retired handyman. He said he was about two months from being able to move back into his duplex in the Broadmoor neighborhood. A grant to elevate his house to the required height did not come until December.

Progress on renovations has been slow for many reasons: contractors who did shoddy work or simply absconded with money, baffling red tape and rule changes, and inadequate grants. The opening of new rental units began to accelerate this year, but many projects have been stymied by the recession.

FEMA says it has done everything it can to help those in temporary housing. But, as is so often the case when it comes to Katrina issues, the agency’s clients give a different account. Agency officials insist, for example, that they have been working “extensively” to help families in trailers and hotels find permanent solutions.

“A lot of people are involved in the process of making sure that no one falls through the cracks,” said Manuel Broussard, an agency spokesman in Louisiana. “Everyone’s been offered housing up to this point several times. And for various reasons, they have not accepted it.”

But the dozen temporary housing occupants interviewed for this story said they had received little if any attention from FEMA workers and were lucky to get a list of landlords, much less an offer of permanent housing.

In Baton Rouge, Troy Porter, 47, had been staying in virtual isolation at a $100-a-night Courtyard Inn by Marriott since last June. There, his normally manageable depression deepened until, he said, he would go for weeks without leaving his room.

“The only time I’ve seen FEMA workers was in the last couple of weeks, where they come and give you the paper saying this month is your last month,” Mr. Porter said. “They handed you the paper, and they turned around and walked off.”

Mr. Porter perked up last week when he was visited by Sister Judith Brun, who has been working with Katrina evacuees. In her view, the type of case management endorsed by FEMA — which primarily involves handing someone a list of phone numbers for other overtaxed agencies and, according to numerous Katrina victims, declining to return phone calls — lacks the type of personal engagement that someone like Mr. Porter needs to become self-sufficient.

“Because nobody comes in at a personal level to help him recover,” Sister Judith said, “it costs us tons of money.”

Last year, the Louisiana Recovery Authority was supposed to unveil a more intensive caseworker system for people in temporary housing, but it never materialized. The authority has now asked homeless service organizations like Unity of Greater New Orleans and the Capital Area Alliance for the Homeless in Baton Rouge to help find stable housing for the hotel occupants.

FEMA officials also say that residents can buy their trailers, sometimes for as little as $300. But virtually all of the residents interviewed said they had offered to do so and been told they could not.

Residents said FEMA workers had started visiting them in the past two months, advising them not to move out and saying extensions would be available to those who showed hardship or progress in rebuilding. But agency officials said that was not the case.

Jane Batty, Mr. Seelig’s longtime tenant, who has her own trailer next to his, was not surprised. “There is only one way to categorize this kind of behavior: it’s crazy making,” she said. “They’ve always had a different answer or had a different ploy to get us out of trailers that we had already agreed to buy.”

muckraker10021 · Aug 29, 2009

Neal Boortz says : If New Orleans Is Rebuilt, The ‘Debris That Katrina Chased Out’ Will Return 

Yesterday, hate-radio talk show host Neal Boortz mocked President Obama’s pledge to rebuild New Orleans, calling the victims of Hurricane Katrina human trash. This weekend, President Barack Obama told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that he “remains focused on rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” and anything less “<a href="http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/08/post_1.html">would be a betrayal of who we are</a> as a country.” Boortz responded on Twitter by attacking the “<a href="http://twitter.com/Talkmaster/status/3537276200">debris that Katrina chased out</a>“

Boortz, who <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/200708100005">regularly mocks Latinos</a>, <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/200808200005">women</a> and the <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/200608030007">poor</a> — even calling Rep. Cynthia McKinney a “<a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/200603310005">ghetto slut</a>” — made an expansive case that the combined natural and human disaster of Hurricane Katrina actually helped the city of New Orleans on his June 24, 2009 radio show. Although Katrina’s devastation cost this nation $80 billion, killed thousands, and displaced a million people, Boortz believes “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GrgOgmp2MY">Katrina cleansed New Orleans</a>“::

Boortz has also called the overwhelmingly black and poor victims of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans “<a href="http://boortz.com/nealz_nuze/2009/02/beyond-belief.html">human parasites</a>” and “<a href="http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200606070003">deadbeats</a>,” even suggesting that a victim of Hurricane Katrina consider prostitution instead of “<a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/200510240014">sucking off taxpayers</a>.”


http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/08/26/boortz-katrina-debris/

[FLASH]http://www.youtube.com/v/79akSw4vmk4&hl=en&fs=1&[/FLASH]

QueEx · Aug 21, 2010

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QueEx · Aug 28, 2015

Bump

QueEx · Aug 28, 2015

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