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Two Years After Katrina: ‘Our National Shame’ |
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In the two years since Hurricane Katrina came ashore on the Gulf Coast, the Bush administration has failed miserably to deliver on the president’s promise to rebuild the area, especially New Orleans.
Instead of acting quickly to provide the aid needed to bring the Crescent City back, the administration is using the rebuilding effort to promote its conservative agenda and to push poor people out of New Orleans, according to several experts.
Consider that two years after Katrina, 213,000 people evacuated from the city still have not been able to return home because there are no places for them to live.
The Times Picayune reported yesterday that compared with two years ago in New Orleans:
- There are 42 percent fewer hospital beds available;
- There are only 50 percent as many schools open; and
- A shocking 80 percent of the levee system is still not meeting its original authorized height.
Today, thousands of people, including leaders of the New Orleans AFL-CIO and the United Teachers of New Orleans/AFT, will march through the streets of New Orleans to demand that the federal government provide the necessary funding and leadership to bring the city back.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says the problem, which extends into the entire Gulf Coast region, is:
a lack of federal commitment at the top. In March when he visited the city, President Bush claimed $110 billion in federal funds had been sent to New Orleans. Actually, less than $59 billion had been allocated to the entire state of Louisiana, and as of this week, according to The New York Times, only $6.7 billion has been spent in the state, just $3.39 billion of that in New Orleans.
A new report by the Campaign for America’s Future says ultraconservatives tried to use the hurricane disaster to prove their theories and consolidate their power:
Any policies that might have put money in the pockets of the working class were turned aside—in favor of ones that lined the pockets of the rich. Davis-Bacon, the law requiring federal construction projects to pay the locally prevailing wage, was suspended. Affirmative action rules were suspended, too—as Republicans worked on legislation that would limit victims’ right to sue, offer private school vouchers for displaced school children, lift environment restrictions on new refineries, and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction. The same combination that crippled the reconstruction in Iraq—lack of planning, crony capitalism, no-bid contracts, scorn for public infrastructure—undermined reconstruction in New Orleans.
Digby reports on Common Sense that former Bush adviser Karl Rove was given the leadership role over the rebuilding of New Orleans. That suggested that White House decisions and pronouncements regarding the recovery from the storm were made for political reasons, mainly to increase the likelihood of Republican political victories in the future by lowering the population of the mainly Democratic, African American voters in New Orleans and pushing conservative goals.
The government’s neglect of New Orleans goes so far as to disconnect the toll-free number Bush urged survivors to use to get federal help.
Click here to watch a Campaign for America’s Future video, Disconnected, which shows how few of the administration’s promises have been kept.
In another video by WhenTheSaints.org (play video), one of the Katrina survivors says:
My big joke is that when your house is 30 feet under water, it’s nice to know the government is there to hang you out to dry.
In his Point of View column on the AFL-CIO website, author Michael Eric Dyson calls what has happened in New Orleans a scandal.
The federal government has scandalously neglected its obligation to help the most vulnerable citizens in this nation. It is a mark of our national shame that we have not lifted those human beings who suffered.
But New Orleans and the Gulf Coast have not been abandoned by the American people, particularly union members. Sweeney points out:
Over the past two years, thousands of volunteers have streamed into New Orleans. Hundreds of thousands of individuals have donated money, food and clothing. More have opened up their homes and communities to evacuees. Nonprofit organizations have taken on projects ranging from emergency housing to tourism development. Our own AFL-CIO Gulf Coast Revitalization Program is deep into $1 billion worth of strategies to produce new housing, fund economic development projects, create thousands of new jobs, train workers to fill those jobs and guarantee the right of return for all former public housing tenants.
We described how some 80 teachers and school personnel from across the country are spending part of their summer break in New Orleans—painting high schools, tutoring students and doing other community projects. And Union Summer interns spent their summers working to rebuild the city.
But residents know that without adequate levees, they still are at risk when another hurricane hits. Last month, activists formed a human levee to protest the actions by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state of Louisiana to protect affluent communities in New Orleans’ Jefferson Parish that border the flood-prone Monticello Canal while ignoring the working-class neighborhoods on the other side of the canal in Orleans Parish.
Members of Congress also are planning to investigate what happened in New Orleans and write legislation to correct the mess there. In a conference call yesterday, Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said they will investigate the sole-source contracts the government has awarded for the Gulf Coast.
Waters says the administration has created a “housing disaster” in New Orleans by deliberately trying to tear down public housing “because they don’t want to deal with poor people.”
Michele Baker, an organizer for AFSCME who now lives in Houston after her home in New Orleans was destroyed by Katrina, sums it up in the video by the Campaign for America’s Future.
We may not be stuck on rooftops any more. But at times we feel just as stranded and just as neglected by this administration as we did then.
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Good points, all … would you agree that a comparable amount of devastation to the greater New Orleans area had not been seen since the Civil War ? Was New Orleans, Louisiana, the South, the United States, all that … was the infrastructure rebuilt, the healing of the social damage done to the communities and to the individual man, woman, child from young to old, the repopulation of the males who perished, all that … were these various and diverse and intimate components of the fabric of our nation completed in one year, two years, one generation, two? yet? Need and Greed are get things done in this old world. Appeal to one or both, you’ll see progress. It won’t bring profit and benefit to every one, but to those who can get the job done, riches will accrue. I wish just once I could get rich rich rich off a tragedy. My Edward Jones man says I would not want that money. To that I might reply, and may God slap me, “ya think?”
If the public housing is on the flood plain then it should be torn down and relocated elsewhere, not rebuilt where it was. When you build on the flood plain, sooner or later you’re going to get wet.
The Bush administration is not the only one to blame here, the blame goes all the way down through the state and local governments to the city that had no emergency plan or even a boat despite being on the Gulf Coast and below sea level. The burden of blame starts with the city and work it’s way up to the Feds, not the other way around as it is so often portrayed.
There’s not a lot of public sympathy for New Orleans since the image most of us have from the news is of two uniformed police officers looting a Walmart and a culpable mayor blaming everyone else for his failures. What a shame.
[…] The following is the first in a series of articles on the second anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Future installments will deal with housing conditions, the state of the levee system, profiteering in the Gulf Opportunity Zone and other issues. See also here. […]
Oh dear, kind of makes you want to cry. I had been to New Orleans several years ago, and the charm, friendliness and beauty of the city was overwhelming. However, as I stood down in the basin and looked UP at the ocean, I was immediately unsettled. It did not make sense to look up at the water; sooner or later that water is going to flow down.
But New Orleans is what it is, and the people there have suffered tremendously because of poor engineering and city planning, as well as poor evacuation procedures. No one, BUT NO ONE, should have had to deal with this kind of tragedy without immediate aid and assistance from the highest levels of our government. The task at hand is so incredibly huge, far greater than the local government or any one organization can handle. Unfortunately, it is as though the federal government wishes that New Orleans will simply disappear, and in some way believes that it already has.
Our job, as citizens of this country, is to constantly remind our government that the people of this country must come first, and rebuilding our cities is absolutely necessary. We have to continue to draw attention to New Orleans and Mississippi so our government can’t deny its presence.
Our country can only be as strong as the people in it, and when people are displaced and struggling, their focus becomes one of survival. When you have a community that is struggling to merely survive, it strains surrounding communities and the nation as a whole. Why doesn’t our government get that. Perhaps when we elect leaders that do understand that America and her people must come first and must first be strong from within, we may see some progress toward our quality of life, which has dramatically been reduced to one of survival for virtually all of us.