Trouble the Water

There is an excellent new documentary out: filmed by two residents of the 9th ward who survived Katrina and the levee breach, it includes footage of the incoming storm, the flooding aftermath... followed by weeks, months and then years of government neglect.

"Katrina is still going on."

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The Bush Shock Doctrine at work in New Orleans

This is a must-read for anyone confused by the slow response to Katrina.

If I were Amy, I might change the title; because I've come to the conclusion that the real mission was accomplished. Make no mistake... this wasn't simply bumbling incompetence on the part of our Federal Government.

"From the Bayou to Baghdad: Mission Not Accomplished," by Amy Goodman:

Tracie Washington is the president of The Louisiana Justice Institute and a lifelong resident of New Orleans. She says only a quarter of the more than 5,000 affordable housing units in New Orleans are filled. "There is a feeling by our government that public housing of old needs to be dismantled, buildings shut. We have litigation going right now to change that, but it's horribly slow, and it's tragic."

She describes the plan by which public housing will be converted to "mixed-income" developments: "Some of these developments that are closed down took in no water. But the decision was made to take advantage of an opportunity. Hurricane Katrina came. 'Look what we can do. We can keep these people away from here, bring in the bulldozers, tear down this housing.'"

It is not just renters. Private housing is being demolished as well. Washington described how the city instituted a stunning policy to allow the legal demolition of homes. Whereas once homeowners would have at least 120 days and several layers of appeals to prevent their homes from being demolished, Nagin instituted an "Imminent Health Threat Demolition" ordinance. He now gives residents only 30 days to stop demolition.

To the tens of thousands of New Orleanians scattered across the country, the city's scant notice -- a sticker attached to the property plus mentions on a city website and in The Times-Picayune newspaper -- is clearly insufficient. According to The Times-Picayune, in addition to homes being destroyed, liens are placed on properties for the cost of the demolition, setting the stage for the displaced owners to lose their property to the city.

Read the entire story...

Vive NOLA!

Washington Post: In the Big Empty, a Calm After The Storm

"It was a good strange"

It was so quiet. Where there was power, the street lights dutifully blinked green and red for no one. The interstate was an elevated curving channel of void. The toll barrier on the bridge over the Mississippi River was untended, offering a $1 break to no takers. New Orleans after Gustav was like a post-apocalyptic thought experiment without the apocalypse. Does a city exist if no one is there to experience it?

Gustav music

New Orleans Rain (Doug Duffey)

(I couldn't get this song out of my head this morning.)

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Never forget

Hurricane Katrina Tribute

We are all New Orleans

Three years since New Orleans drowned, while our government stood by and watched.

Three years and counting.

It is hard to imagine that anyone is still asleep and unaware post-Katrina. It is hard to imagine that Dennis Kucinich needed to yell 'wake up!' to anyone in this country after the horrors we witnessed three years ago.

New Orleans is still in pain. The difference between today and three years ago, other than rising flood waters? The pain has now spread all across the country.

Never mind Georgia. We are all New Orleans.

Tancredo to New Orleans: you aren't worth the money

GOP presidential hopeful Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.) said Friday it is “time the taxpayer gravy train left the New Orleans station” and urged an end to the federal aid to the region that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina two years ago.

“The amount of money that has been wasted on these so-called ‘recovery’ efforts has been mind-boggling,” said Tancredo, who is running a long-shot presidential campaign. “Enough is enough.”

Citing administration figures, the lawmaker said that $114 billion has been spent on the effort to rebuild a large stretch of the Gulf Coast after the storm hit New Orleans in August 2005 and claimed more than 1,600 lives.

“At some point, state and local officials and individuals have got to step up to the plate and take some initiative,” said Tancredo. “The mentality that people can wait around indefinitely for the federal taxpayer to solve all their worldly problems has got to come to an end.”

The lawmaker criticized in particular the amount that has been wasted through fraud and abuse, estimated at $1 billion.

“This whole fiasco has been a perfect storm of corruption and incompetence at all levels,” he added.

Gee Mr. Tancredo. How very neighborly of you. How very Christian.

You are of course referring to that tiny bit of Federal aid that was actually allotted to New Orleans; and of course, almost none of it has reached the city or the people. And this of course because it has been plundered by your people - your GOP robber barons.

And of course you're just fine with the BILLIONS being wasted by contractors in Iraq; money that comes out of our taxes, and against our will. You see, we'd actually prefer it go to New Orleans.

It's just fine and ducky to you that contractors are leaving trucks by the side of the road abandoned, if they get a flat tire, because they know the United States of Corruption will by them a new truck.

Abandon the American city and continue plundering Iraq and the American treasury. Great campaign platform. Terrific party philosophy. We're supposed to vote for this? No wonder you're trying to fix the election process. Of course we won't vote for this, and you people know it.

So I guess the GOP has already made their financial killing in New Orleans and is ready to move on -- right Mr. Tancredo? NOLA gravy train is over, now the insurance companies are getting nervous that someone might actually expect them to pay...

From Mother Jones:

In those first emotional days after Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast, widespread predictions of a political sea change arrived from liberal and even some conservative commentators. "Americans are ready to fix their restless gaze on enduring problems of poverty, race, and class that have escaped their attention," Newsweek's Jonathan Alter wrote in a September 2005 cover story. Some went so far as to forecast the dawn of a new America, one stunned out of both complacency and conservatism by the images of suffering on the Gulf Coast. Katrina, one commentator suggested, would permanently "redefine the political landscape."

But within just a few weeks of the hurricane, something had changed in the press coverage and the public response: As the floodwaters receded, so, too, did the powerful images—the portraits of racially segregated suffering, of death by poverty. America's—even liberal America's—focus appeared to be moving away from the experiences of Katrina victims and the deep, systemic problems they revealed. In the end, the leap from pathos to policy was never made. Instead, a narrower lens was focused on the foibles of the Bush administration—for instance, its hiring of a political crony, Michael Brown, to head FEMA (and, later, Brown's infamous emails about wardrobe choices and dinner plans as New Orleans residents were literally drowning in their homes). Democrats were quick to attack President Bush, but when it came to advancing meaningful policy changes, they came up short on momentum.

It quickly became clear that the public "meaning" of Katrina, which had initially seemed so obvious to so many, was actually up for grabs—and so, too, was its impact on U.S. politics.

In the coming weeks and months, conservatives hit their stride. The Bush administration, with the help of its friends in the Washington establishment and elsewhere, turned the disaster in New Orleans from a crisis into an opportunity—a chance to extend, rather than repeal, the conservative revolution that had begun 25 years earlier. The campaign to accomplish this apparent political paradox would operate on many levels and with astonishing success. While the country was absorbed by watching the president try to stuff an uncooperative political rabbit back into his hat, the real tricks were taking place offstage.

• The PR campaign. This began with a carefully constructed plan—engineered, to no one's surprise, by Karl Rove—to shift blame away from the White House, accompanied by promises of "investigations," and followed by a highly stage-managed expression of conservative compassion by Bush.
• The advancement of conservative social policies, including an overhaul of the federal budget. Despite some haggling among conservatives, Bush's pledge to help the victims from Katrina would be used to justify a series of cuts that had always been favored by the right—robbing the poor to give (for a little while) to the poor.
• The remaking of New Orleans. A variety of carefully planned "rebuilding" strategies, along with a selective apportionment of resources, would effectively clear out many of the city's poor African Americans to make way for a richer, whiter simulacrum of the Big Easy.
• A free-for-all for corporate contractors. There were billions of dollars to be made on the reconstruction of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, a good share of it awarded to companies with political connections, and a fair portion of that lost to greed, waste, incompetence, and fraud.

Mission Accomplished.

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.

Aaron Neville singing (Louisiana 1927) after Katrina

Harry Connick Jr. in New Orleans September, 2005

"The Red Cross Has Basically Stolen Money from Victims in New Orleans"

Amazing segment on Democracy Now about a five-day International Tribunal on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It is comprised of hurricane survivors, international delegations, expert witnesses, a team of human rights and civil rights prosecutors, and a panel of US-based and international judges, and it opened last night in New Orleans:

MALCOLM SUBER: Well, we believe that the Red Cross has basically stolen money from the victims here in New Orleans. They collected, by their own accounting, $2.1 billion. They claim that they spent $1.9 billion, and they had $200 million left. But we have never had any public accounting of the funds actually spent, and this last $200 million, they have decided to establish a Means to Recovery program, which works through a case management system. And basically the only people who knew about the program were their partners, the other nonprofits, and they would give the money to selective survivors. And we just don't believe that that's a very fair and democratic way. We don't think that the donors who gave the money to the Red Cross intended that the money be set aside and decided by the Red Cross what to do with the money.

And so, we have just been challenging their veracity on this whole program, and witness to that is every time we've confronted them they’ve changed the figures. When we first started this campaign, they said they had $80 million left. A week later, they said they had $40 million left. And then the national president came down here, and he said they had $171 million left. So you don’t know what the story really is, so they haven't gotten their story together.

And, of course, they've been attacking the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, saying that we are spreading lies and stuff against them. But we confronted them directly, and we took our -- their application to the local news media. And they were forced to admit that the program existed, because when people first called about the program, the Red Cross would say, “What are you talking about? We’ve never heard of a Means to Recovery program.” So we want to know why such secrecy, and why did you decide that it was up to you, the Red Cross, to decide what to do?

The other important factor is they got $50 million from Kuwait, and instead of giving that money to people, they built new office buildings in New York City.

Anderson Cooper: Where is the Federal Government?

Al Gore and the Charity Hospital Airlift

While George W. Bush was making grand media appearances 'on the scene' (weeks later,) and making promises he never intended to keep, Al Gore was quietly working behind the scenes to help alleviate the suffering on the Gulf Coast.

Many don't know this story, because Al steadfastly refused to speak to the media or give any interviews about his response in the aftermath of Katrina - and he has never mentioned it in any of his speeches.

What he did, he did because he cared.

Gore privately commissioned two planes to evacuate elderly and ill citizens out of New Orleans - and as you can see from the photo - he was there overseeing the effort.

Greg Simon of Fastercures tells of his experience, and the many obstacles thrown in the way, as the 'Charity Hospital Airlift' come to evacuate seriously ill patients from New Orleans:

Around 8 pm this was the situation: We had planes for two flights at least. We had hospitals in Tennessee and Chicago for 290 and 200 patients respectively. We had two doctors for the plane. We needed landing slots at the airport and patients for the planes. We needed a contact on the ground.

Gore called Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta and obtained two landing slots for Saturday. All we needed now was a medical contact at the airport. I contacted Casey Decker at the HHS Command Center, a highly advanced, high tech center for tracking and dealing with public health crises of all kinds. I asked Decker for help contacting TRANSCOM, which was running operations at the airport, as well as a medical coordinator on the ground. Decker explained they had not been able to maintain communications with TRANSCOM on the ground or the medical staff. That was troubling.

It was now after midnight early Saturday September 4th. I was home with my laptop and phone and blackberry spread out around me on my bed. My wife, wisely, chose to sleep in the guest bedroom to avoid the phone calls. And then it began.

Starting right after midnight I began receiving calls from FEMA, HHS, TRANSCOM and other groups whose acronyms I still cannot explain. LCDR Kennedy from FEMA called to understand what I was trying to do. I told him. Fifteen minutes later Mimi Riley, Deputy Director from NDMS called to beg me in a plaintive and exhausted voice not to carry out this mission. She had many reasons – you need doctors on the plane, Chicago is too far from their home, how will we track the patients, this is a military operation and we were not military.

I explained to her that we had two doctors on the plane one of whom was a retired Air Force Doctor who had run the military hospital in Baghdad after the invasion. I thought we could trust him to run an airplane of people from New Orleans to Knoxville. We were working with NDMS hospitals in Tennessee and Chicago so they would have a good tracking system. (I guess Mimi never heard of the Great Migration of African Americans from New Orleans and the south to Chicago after the flood of 1927 and during the Depression. Many people from New Orleans are more at home in Chicago than Houston. )

Mimi was unmovable. We were not military and that was that. She tried to sound grateful for our intentions but she was not going to have outsiders help. I even offered to GIVE her the planes and the crews and the hospitals and let her run it through her NDMS system but she would have none of it. She asked me at least to delay until noon the next day and I said I would try.

I called Steve and told him to delay the planes. I called Al. It was 2 a.m. in Nashville. He was planning to leave for Dallas at 4 a.m. to meet the plane. I told Tipper what was going on. She said, “Greg, you can’t delay it now. It’s too late, the doctors are flying in here to fly with Al to Dallas.” Al got on the phone and said we could not delay. I tried to scare him. What if something went wrong with a patient on the plane? What if the military did not cooperate on the ground and no patients got on the plane? He refused to budge. Col. LaFon could handle the patients and Al would trust that when they landed they would break through the resistance and succeed.

I called Mimi back and said we could not delay but we would agree not to fly to Chicago. I called Steve back to re-start the planes.

Over the next three hours (from 2a.m. to 5 a.m.) I was called by an array of Majors and Lieutenant Commanders telling me to stop. (“I don’t mean to be rude, sir, but you must not do this. You must stop this now.”) Major Webb from GPMRC (don’t ask), Grant Meade from ESF. Major Lindquist from TRANSCOM (at last!) all telling me they would not cooperate and they did not know how we had gotten permission to land. I never mentioned Gore’s name because no one ever asked me who was paying for the flights or how we had come so far.

Finally at 5 a.m. Major Lindquist said if we landed he would not put any patients on the plane and we should expect no cooperation and there was no place to store the plane so we would have to leave.

Through the night there was one voice supporting me. Julie Soutuyo from FEMA had called around midnight when she came on shift and asked what we were doing because she had seen some report from our earlier calls. I explained the whole thing to her. She tried to put us in touch with TRANSCOM in New Orleans and she checked on me all through the night to see how we were doing. When I told her of the calls from the military to stop us, she mentioned that she had confronted the NDMS people on our behalf and made the case that they should accept our help under these circumstances but had been rebuffed. (The next day she called me from home to see if we had succeeded.)

(Casey Decker at the HHS Command Center also tried to help but he was unable to reach most of the people we needed to speak to despite his best efforts.)

At 7 a.m. on Saturday September 3rd, the American Airlines plane with Gore and the doctors and Gore’s son Albert left Dallas for New Orleans. They landed at 8:30, got off the plane and Col LaFon immediately established contact with the Colonels running the operation on the ground, most of whom he had served with. He had trained many of the doctors on the scene. He explained why they were there and the doctors began a triage process to fill the plane. Two hours later the plane was loaded and headed to Knoxville.

After speaking with Gore, I called ahead to Donna Tidwell of TEMA who was running the operations there and told her what to expect – about 20 patients needing dialysis, many more needing insulin, a burn victim and many people needing to be back on their medications – and one boy with his dog. Forty of the people on the plane were evacuees mistakenly put on the plane by TSA but who might need medical attention nonetheless. Knoxville was prepared to provide shelters for them.

The plane’s arrival in Knoxville was described by the local paper as the “Mercy Plane” and the mayor and many of the citizens turned out to help.

By now, it was too late to return to New Orleans, load up and leave before dark and American Airlines refused to have its personnel stay in New Orleans after dark. Gore and the team headed to Dallas for the night. Around midnight Saturday night, the FAA called American airlines and pulled their landing slots for Sunday saying only FEMA planes could fly in. Gore called Mineta again who promised to honor our initial agreement for two landing slots.

On Sunday morning Gore and the team landed in New Orleans to a much improved scene. Many more patients had been airlifted out after our flight and there were only ten ambulatory patients for our plane so we took 120 evacuees with us to Chattanooga. The welcoming reception in Chattanooga was so large that Gore said it looked like there was an ambulance for everybody on the plane.

We decided not to return to New Orleans because the medical patients we could take had been helped. (We could not take bedridden patients on stretchers on this plane.) Gore said that on the second trip to New Orleans, the doctors at the airport told him that the evacuation of the first 90 ambulatory patients had been the tipping point in their ability to adequately care for the other bedridden patients. They also noted that the military evacuations did not really pick up steam until after we “motivated” them with our private effort.

Of note:
Throughout the entire operation in Tennessee, EMS operations in Chicago had stayed prepared to handle patients or evacuees. None ever arrived because the military did not want us to use Chicago. The volunteers in Chicago were amazing in their desire to help. Mayor Daly had been rebuffed earlier when he offered a complete mobile hospital unit for the airport and a tent city as well. Sen. Barack Obama called Gore and asked how had Gore managed to land in New Orleans when the Senator had been refused landing rights to help.

None of the airlines involved required a contract or any written guarantee of payment before sending their planes and volunteer crews – the first time Steve Davison had ever witnessed that in 15 years of chartering planes for political campaigns and other events. One official said if Gore promised to pay, that was good enough for them.

In the aftermath of Katrina I heard countless stories of obstruction: by both FEMA and the military. Firemen were sent home from the scene after traveling across the country on their own dime to help; or were kept waiting for a week outside the city while residents were dying. Animal rescue workers were kept out, presumably on the pretense that 'humans should be evacuated first;' only it turned out that the humans weren't being evacuated at all, so animal rescue volunteers entered the city anyway, in boats, and rescued both people and their animals.

Even news crews helped with the rescue; they were there, and the need was so severe that they helped in any way they could. Sean Penn went out in a boat, pulling people out of the water himself. Anyone who could get past the government roadblocks, or who simply went around them... helped the residents while the Federal government obstructed and dicked around.

And people were dying.

This I cannot forgive. It is for the residents of New Orleans, both living and dead, to forgive this betrayal -- for I cannot.

Thank you President-elect Gore, for making a difference.

I try not to think of how different things would be for New Orleans... how different they would have been for New Orleans after the storm, had the Supreme Court not demanded a halt to the Florida recount in 2000.

The betrayals are seemingly endless.

Disconnected

Drowned in their homes

In memory and in still-raw grief for all of those who lost their lives two years ago on this day.

Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin to wash us away
They're tryin to wash us away
Oh Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin to wash us away
They're tryin to wash us away

Randy Newman (Louisiana 1927)

Anderson Cooper reads the riot act to Sen. Landrieu

Another time, another hurricane... a different president

"This is your President!" Johnson announced. "I'm here to help you!"

In September of 1965, Hurricane Betsy slammed into New Orleans. Winds gusted up to 165 miles per hour and the levees failed, flooding much of New Orleans. Somewhere around 250,000 people were forced from their homes in what was, to date, the worst disaster to hit NOLA since the turn of the century.

The day after Betsy's landfall, President Lyndon Johnson got a phone call from Louisiana Senator Russell Long, asking if LBJ would come to the city. Within hours, LBJ was on on a plane:

Even at the airport, Johnson began to get a sense of the damage wrought by Betsy. "Parts of the roofing of the terminal were torn away and several of the large windows were broken," the diary reads. "The members of the Presidential party had seen from the air a preview of the city — water over 3/4 of the city up to the eaves of the homes, etc." At the urging of the mayor of New Orleans — a diminutive conservative Democrat named Victor Hugo Schiro, whom Johnson referred to as "Little Mayor" — the President decided to tour the flooded areas. His motorcade stopped on a bridge spanning the Industrial Canal, in the eastern part of the city, and from there the Presidential party saw whole neighborhoods engulfed by floods. They could see, according to the diary, that "people were walking along the bridge where they had disembarked from the boats that had brought them to dry land. Many of them were carrying the barest of their possessions and many of them had been sitting on top of their houses waiting for rescue squads to retrieve the families and carry them to dry land." Johnson talked with a seventy-four-year-old black man named William Marshall and asked about what had happened and how he was getting along. As the conversation ended, Marshall said, "God bless you, Mr. President. God ever bless you."

In the Ninth Ward, Johnson visited the George Washington Elementary School, on St. Claude Avenue, which was being used as a shelter. "Most of the people inside and outside of the building were Negro," the diary reads. "At first, they did not believe that it was actually the President." Johnson entered the crowded shelter in near-total darkness; there were only a couple of flashlights to lead the way.

"This is your President!" Johnson announced. "I'm here to help you!"

The diary describes the shelter as a "mass of human suffering," with people calling out for help "in terribly emotional wails from voices of all ages. . . . It was a most pitiful sight of human and material destruction." According to an article by the historian Edward F. Haas, published fifteen years ago in the Gulf Coast Historical Review, Johnson was deeply moved as people approached and asked him for food and water; one woman asked Johnson for a boat so that she could look for her two sons, who had been lost in the flood.

"Little Mayor, this is horrible," Johnson said to Schiro. "I've never seen anything like this in my life." Johnson assured Schiro that the resources of the federal government were at his disposal and that "all red tape [will] be cut."

The President flew back to Washington and the next day sent Schiro a sixteen-page telegram outlining plans for aid and the revival of New Orleans. "Please know," Johnson wrote, "that my thoughts and prayers are with you and the thousands of Louisiana citizens who have suffered so heavily."

Australian paper cites 'Third World response' to Katrina

News from Australia, with striking comment about US Federal response:

Two years on, New Orleans seething over Katrina

By North America correspondent Kim Landers

Posted August 30, 2007 08:42:00
Updated August 30, 2007 10:20:00

Two years on, the residents of New Orleans are still angry about the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Two years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, people in New Orleans are still frustrated with the slow place of recovery.

At the time the wild storm left thousands of residents stranded on rooftops, while others made do in sub-standard shelters.

America was criticised for initially mounting a Third World response to a massive domestic crisis.

Katrina's second anniversary is an opportunity for New Orleans to recapture the national spotlight and to show the rest of the country how it has rebuilt itself and what still needs to be done.

In New Orleans two-thirds of the residents are back - the French Quarter survived Katrina and the music and restaurant scenes are recovering.

But few neighbourhoods are thriving, much of the city looks like a wasteland and businesses and homes are still abandoned.

Guess the 'Third World response' hasn't really changed much in two years.

Promises unkept

New Orleans 2 Years After Katrina

Two years later: grief, anger

Today is the two year anniversary of the day the levees broke.

The two year anniversary of Day One.

Not day one of the storm, which had already passed the city by. Today is the anniversary of Day One of Federal abandonment. Day One of 'you're doing a heckofajob Brownie.' Day One of people trapped in their attics until they finally drowned or succumbed to the heat. Day One of the endless Coast Guard rescues... the very Coast Guard that can't even get new, updated boats from our government today. Day One of what would turn out to be months of desperate attempts to save the people and the thousands of abandoned animals that struggled to survive in the searing heat and black, stinking flood water of New Orleans.

Day One of America's awakening... to the epic betrayal of George Bush.

From yesterday's commentary in the New York Times:

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 29 — This city remembered Hurricane Katrina’s second anniversary Wednesday with sadness, hurt and flashes of anger over a recovery that has returned it to only a portion of its former self.

President Bush stopped in, dining at a famous Creole restaurant and visiting a restored school in the Lower Ninth Ward. But his brief visit appeared to mean little to citizens still focused on day-to-day struggles and mourning the storm’s continuing losses.

There were ceremonies — marches, Masses and speeches — all over town Wednesday. But the city hardly needs an anniversary to help it recall a disaster that upended the life of virtually every resident here. The still-ruined neighborhoods and, beneath the surface, the mental scars, are merely exclamation points for what Hurricane Katrina has become for people in New Orleans: a fixed point of reference around which conversations and lives continue to revolve.

At a memorial ceremony at the Charity Hospital Cemetery, Mayor C. Ray Nagin choked up, evoking “the young who cry every time there’s a hard thunderstorm, because they’re afraid another storm is coming.” Mr. Nagin rang a bell at the precise moment a major levee broke two years ago, and the musician Irvin Mayfield, who lost his father in the storm, played a raucous and angry dirge on his trumpet in the sweltering heat.

None of us has healed. The people of New Orleans haven't healed. I haven't healed. I'm sure most Americans who watched the horrific coverage from New Orleans, for weeks, haven't healed. Maybe someday... if anyone in our government ever develops a heart and decides to really rebuild New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, we can all finally heal from this.

But not this way. Not while it still looks, in some places, as though the storm ripped through there yesterday. Unlike 9/11, we've never had a chance to heal from this; we're expected to 'stuff it,' and somehow forget about it, while the damage is all over the place. This is our country; our city, our people, our pets. Insane.

The wound festers inside of us, and we are continually reminded - as New Orleans languishes, completely neglected while billions of dollars are lost and mismanaged in Iraq - that our government doesn't care about Americans. Not only black people (although surely the Bush Administration has proven to have a particular mean streak when it comes to attending the needs of the African Americans.)

No; the fact is that the Bush regime doesn't like or care about any of us. We aren't George's base. If you can't afford to shop at Neiman Marcus -- you can't afford George Bush. It's as simple as that.

“It’s one thing to come and give a speech in Jackson Square,” Mr. Bush said, referring to his visit immediately after the hurricane that has been derided as simply an orchestrated photo opportunity. “It’s another thing to keep paying attention to whether or not progress is being made. And I hope people understand we do; we’re still paying attention.”

Still, as the modest protest march from the Lower Ninth Ward made clear, Mr. Bush remains the favored target of the fervent activist community that has blossomed here in the wake of the storm. “George Bush, you can’t hide!” the marchers shouted, though Mr. Bush had already left town by then. Onlookers peered curiously from a fried-chicken restaurant as the protesters, led by a clownish figure on stilts, made their way up St. Claude Avenue; some along the route hung back.

“This is a purposeful noise we’re making here,” said one of the marchers, Levon Leban. “If nothing else, I hope people around the country will understand it’s not over, just because the water has receded.” A man held a sign out of a car window that read, “The Right of Return for Everyone,” and anti-Bush slogans resounded.

“Nothing’s changed in two years,” said Robert Goodman. “Everything the mayor and president do, that’s just for show.”

At the Industrial Canal, which obliterated the Lower Ninth Ward two years ago when its levees failed, political figures and religious leaders dropped flowers into the murky waters from the Claiborne Avenue Bridge.

“It’s still a struggle,” said Reynard Green, who showed up to be a part of it. “I’ve got a job, but my family’s not back yet,” said Mr. Green, a waiter in the French Quarter who lost his house in the upper Ninth Ward. “It’s hurting. They want to come back, but there’s no place for them to stay.”

Mr Bush: If there is one thing people do understand, it is that you are 'paying attention.' Because no one could do so little, for so many suffering people, and for so long... by accident.