Hurricane recovery becomes 'class war'

Ah the things you don't hear in the corporate media these days:

We needed an answer to a weird, puzzling and horrific discovery. Among the miles and miles of devastated houses, rubble still there today in New Orleans, we found dry, beautiful homes.

But their residents were told by guys dressed like Ninjas wearing “Blackwater” badges: “Try to go into your home and we’ll arrest you.”

These aren’t just any homes. They are the public housing projects of the city; the Lafitte Houses and others.

But unlike the cinder block monsters in the Bronx, these public units are beautiful townhouses, with wrought-iron porches and gardens right next to the tony French Quarter.

Raised up on high ground, with floors and walls of concrete, they were some of the only houses left salvageable after the Katrina flood.

Harry Connick Jr. in New Orleans September, 2005

Anderson Cooper reads the riot act to Sen. Landrieu

Message from the Gulf Coast

When the saints go marching in

Sign the petition urging your Senators to support Senator Dodd's Gulf Coast Recovery Bill of 2007 (S1668) to assist the Gulf Coast region in rebuilding the infrastructure lost after the Katrina and Rita disasters.

From Glen Greenwald and Brave New Films:

Tomorrow marks the two year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and still there are tens of thousands of families without homes. 30,000 families are scattered across the country in FEMA apartments, 13,000 are in trailers, and hardly any of the 77,000 rental units destroyed in New Orleans have been rebuilt. To share some of these people?s stories, we have put together a short film, "When the Saints Go Marching In."

During the making of this video, we heard the heartbreaking stories of good people unable to return home. We have heard the story of the Aguilar family who lost their home to the storm and only received $4,000 in payments from their insurance company. We have met Mr. Washington, an 87-year-old man and former carpenter, who owned three homes prior to the storm. He is still living in a FEMA trailer today. And we?ve met Julie, who could have returned to her job and normal life, if the government had opened up the public housing units that she had lived in prior to the storm.

Jack Cafferty: Hurricane Katrina Outrage

Looking back...

Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans
And miss it each night and day
I know I'm not wrong
This feelings gettin stronger
The longer, I stay away
Miss them moss covered vines...the tall sugar pines
Where mockin birds used to sing
And I'd like to see that lazy Mississippi
Hurryin into spring
The moonlight on the bayou
A creole tune that fills the air
I dream about magnolias in bloom
And I'm wishin I was there

Two years this week since Katrina made landfall, spared New Orleans... only so it could drown by governmental neglect. Two years and I'm still not over it - and I don't even live there, although a piece of my heart drowned with the city.

This week I will be writing about New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and the continuing neglect. I once had an entire blog devoted to Katrina and the aftermath. I tried to move on, but the pain is - today - as raw as it was two years ago. Betrayal is like that.



And where is our government? Absent. Uncaring. AWOL.

As the Washington Post so scathingly put it:

Two full years after the hurricane, the Big Easy is barely limping along, unable to make truly meaningful reconstruction progress. The most important issues concerning the city's long-term survival are still up in the air. Why is no Herculean clean-up effort underway? Why hasn't President Bush named a high-profile czar such as Colin Powell or James Baker to oversee the ongoing disaster? Where is the U.S. government's participation in the rebuilding?

And why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes in communities that may never again have sewage service, garbage collection or electricity?

Eventually, the volunteers' altruism turns to bewilderment and finally to outrage. They've been hoodwinked. The stalled recovery can't be blamed on bureaucratic inertia or red tape alone. Many volunteers come to understand what I've concluded is the heartless reality: The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine.

In the end, that is what keeps me here; keeps me in the blogging trenches day after day. New Orleans. My anger, pain, bewilderment, sadness and outrage. And I won't rest until there is justice for that beloved city.