Tag: Hurricane Katrina

New Orleans: A Tale of Two Cities

It is 10 years since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast causing $108 billion in damages, killing over 1300 people and completely changing the city of New Orleans and the coastline.

Today New Orleans has changed in many ways, it is whiter, richer and the poor are poorer:

Ten years later, it is not exactly right to say that New Orleans is back. The city did not return, not as it was.

It is, first of all, without the more than 1,400 people who died here, and the thousands who are now making their lives someplace else. As of 2013, there were nearly 100,000 fewer black residents than in 2000, their absences falling equally across income levels. The white population decreased by about 11,000, but it is wealthier.

The city that exists in 2015 has been altered, by both a decade of institutional re-engineering and the artless rearrangement that occurs when people are left to fend for themselves.

Empowered by billions of federal dollars and the big ideas of eager policy planners, the school system underwent an extensive overhaul; the old Art Deco Charity Hospital was supplanted by a state-of-the-art medical complex; and big public housing projects, at once beloved and notorious, were razed and replaced by mixed-income communities with housing vouchers.

In a city long marinated in fatalism, optimists are now in ascendance. They promise that an influx of bright newcomers, a burst of entrepreneurial verve and a new spirit of civic engagement have primed the city for an era of greatness, or, at least, reversed a long-running civic-disaster narrative.

“Nobody can refute the fact that we have completely turned this story around,” said Mayor Mitch Landrieu, talking of streamlined government and year-over-year economic growth. “For the first time in 50 years, the city is on a trajectory that it has not been on, organizationally, functionally, economically, almost in every way.”

The word “trajectory” is no accident. It is the mayor’s case that the city is in a position to address the many problems that years of government failures had allowed to fester. He did not argue that those problems had been solved.

The Week in Editorial Cartoons – Misremembering George W. Bush

Crossposted at Daily Kos and The Stars Hollow Gazette



Bush Memoir by Rob Rogers, see reader comments in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Buy this cartoon

George W. Bush is on a book tour with his new autobiography.  According to critics, there isn’t a lot of new or revealing material here.  W still believes the war in Iraq, tax cuts for the rich and torture were all good ideas.  He didn’t really need to publish a non-reflective memoir to tell us that.

Still Missing New Orleans

I posted the following on September 4, 2005 at The Dream Antilles and I cross-posted it in various places.  Five years later, there’s really very little I can add to this, so I am re-posting it:

New Orleans is not Haiti

Ever since the Haiti earthquake happened, it has invited quite a few comparisons to the disaster brought about in New Orleans by the federal flood. There are even those in the mainstream media who have asked if this quake is going to turn out to be Obama’s “Katrina.”

This is not surprising because there are some similarities in the situations–for example, the slowness in rescuing and getting aid to the survivors–which reminds casual observers of the way New Orleanians had to wait a week for food, water and rescue after her levees failed. Also, these catastrophes are manmade–Haiti’s because of shoddily-constructed buildings, New Orleans’ because of poorly-built and maintained levees–both of which had been disasters waiting to happen.

Haiti: A Well-Regulated Relief Effort Being Necessary for Everyone’s Security

Earlier today, I was returning from meeting by bus.  After having boarded and taken my seat, I settled in for what I anticipated would be a relatively short ten minute ride.  Instead, the traffic on Massachusetts Avenue over by Embassy Row snarled to a complete halt.  The weather today in Washington, DC, had been dreary …

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“Big Easy to Big Empty”

by Greg Palast is a documentary that must be seen if one is to understand what’s going on in New Orleans after Katrina and the Federal Flood. Palast’s tough, gutsy journalism reminds me of what “60 Minutes” was, back in the day when that program had cojones. Palast, investigating what really happened in New Orleans on 8/29/2005, interviews then-LSU professor Ivor Van Heerden. Van Heerden says speaking to Palast could endanger his job due to the political connections of higher-ups–and we all know what happened to Van Heerden.

Palast also interviews flood victims discouraged in one way or another from returning home and the nefarious machinations behind attempts to discourage their return.

Here, then is “Big Easy to Big Empty.”

Never forget, never forgive

Nearly four and a half years ago this nation experienced the two worst disasters of this past decade: Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans’ federal flood. Today many consider them old news, if not history, but they still are present in the lives of those who survived them.

Obama’s “Tinkle-Stop Tour” of NOLA

Today Obama will be making an extremely short stop in New Orleans. Or what my favorite NOLA blogger calls a “tinkle-stop tour.” In New Orleans, he’ll be visiting a charter school and participating in a town hall meeting in the Lower 9th Ward.

(In contrast, his next stop will be San Francisco, where he’ll be spending four times as much time–16 hours. This has caused Harry Shearer to say,

Total elapsed time in SF: sixteen hours.  They must have experienced a hell of a federal disaster there.  Four times worse, you figure?

Katrina Shorthand vs. the Federal Flood: Why This Matters

Often when people including those in government and the mainstream media who should know better refer to the events of 8/29, it is merely as “Katrina” or “Hurricane Katrina”.

There were actually two catastrophes that happened that day: the storm, which passed to the east of New Orleans, devastating the Mississippi and eastern Louisiana Gulf Coasts, which was a NATURAL disaster, and the falling apart of New Orleans’ federally-built and maintained levees, which was a MANMADE disaster due to poor engineering.

While the use of Katrina as shorthand to cover the two events is easy (I’ve even done that at times) it’s misleading because of the implication that the flooding of New Orleans was a natural disaster. And this matters–more below the fold.

I’m Depressed on This Anniversary…

I should be feeling better–after all, Obama did commemorate Katrina and the flood in his radio address this morning. To his credit he also brought up levees and coastal restoration. But only time will tell if these words will be backed up by action or be mere empty words.

I have been upset and feel as if I’m almost physically ill. I cannot help but flash back, see the scenes of rescues and of the afflicted at the Superdome and the Convention Center and think of how so many suffered during Katrina and the federal flood and are still suffering. And I can’t help but wonder if Obama really cares about New Orleans. Because when I remember what happened during the flood and Katrina which turned the lives of so many upside down and think about the fact that Obama won’t be going there (which he wasn’t going to do anyway even if Ted Kennedy hadn’t passed) I’m depressed.

And others are also turned off by the fact that Obama has paid so little attention to Louisiana and her problems and those of her neighbors in the Gulf Region–a wound which Obama’s absence from Katrina observances has rubbed salt into. More below the fold…

NOLA Looks As If McCain Were President

Where are the hope and change in New Orleans? When Barack Obama was a presidential candidate, he promised that

he would “keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast” and take steps to prevent failures in emergency planning and response seen during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Specifically, Obama would ensure New Orleans has a levee and pumping system to protect the city against a 100-year storm by 2011, free up rebuilding funds that had been allocated but not released and to rebuild hospitals and schools.

Naked Soul Plea

8-29-05 Remember

katrina art tree

We are not ok

katrina art

Photobucket

NOLA BLOGGERS ANNUAL RISING TIDE 4 CONFERENCE ART FOR 2009 (t-shirts available):

Rising Tide 4

NAKED SOUL PLEA

Show us you got some soul and come to New Orleans for the Katrina Anniversary, show us you understand and know how to gain strength from us so that everyone else will know they can also gain strength from us we are a part of America.

Not just to remember but to remember in the way New Orleans should be remembered, deserves to be remembered, deserves to be remembered, deserves to be remembered, as you would remember someone you loved being wronged and because you loved them you’d need to help them heal, help them heal, and it would heal you too

America’s soul is locked up by some big ogre, like fairy tale princess chained to rocks with big orcs and one eyed monsters and she cries out so the hero must break those chains, America’s soul cries out and we are the heroes who will break those chains if you only remember us, remember us as we deserve to be remembered, as a loved one, as part of your family.

Remember the dead, remember the living, remember the kindness and the cruelty, the joy and pain, remember the great city of New Orleans and care as she rises up again with every fiber of her being, not just a geography of land and water but a people and a culture and not let her be invisible from the rest of her neighbors, remember the family crying around the world for the great city of New Orleans, remember her as she deserves to be remembered.

That’s what an anniversary is for.  Come to New Orleans, please.  It would be good for all our souls.

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