“The Old Man and the Storm”

(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Last night, 1-02-009, on the PBS News Hour they held a discussion with “Frontline” correspondent and filmmaker June Cross who describes her documentary “The Old Man and the Storm” which will air on PBS’s “Frontline” on Jan. 6th, New Orleans: Three Years After Katrina.

This is a timely documentary more than three years after Katrina and especially as to the way the Government has been handling that compared to the extremely quick bailouts of the financial institutions in the present economic collapse and at other times when the corporate elite demanded their political friends come to their aid. There are three short video’s at the ‘Frontline’ site that I’m embedding below, the third one touches on just that, especially as to the promises made by the President bush and other Government Officials and to the rapidly failing ‘free market’ ‘trickle down’ economic policy of the GOP.

It is also timely in these times that are rapidly coming down to hopefully not total destruction. The subject of the documentary, 82 year old Mr Herbert Gettridge, belongs to the generation of skilled tradespeople, extremely skilled, that built the economy we once had, where through hard work, knowledge, skills, an always thirst to improve, pride and much more, not only the businessmen benefited but so did the worker and their families. He’s of a skilled trade, an artist, of many trades that are now dead or dying because few are left who used to work in them and the young haven’t developed the knowledge to even attempt them. Trades in the construction of the country, trades in the manufacturing of our own needs especially with being able to quickly transform those skills if needed for our National Security, not having others build what we need. A whole host of trades or other descriptive jobs that no longer exist or only exist in small pockets sans the numbers if needed quickly.

You can listen to the discussion in mp3 with this link, the transcript hasn’t been posted as yet at the News Hour site.

This is a cut of her documentary that they showed on the PBS News Hour show last night:

Slide Show: View images of New Orleans three years after Hurricane Katrina.

Six months after Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, producer June Cross came across 82-year-old Herbert Gettridge working alone on his home in the lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood devastated when the levees broke in August 2005. Over the next two years, Cross would document the story of the extended Gettridge clan–an African-American family with deep roots in New Orleans–as they struggled to rebuild their homes and their lives. Their efforts would be deeply impacted by larger decisions about urban planning, public health, and the insurance industry, by the decisions of policymakers about federal funding for rebuilding the Gulf, and state and city plans for dispersing those monies. The moving personal story of Mr. Gettridge and his family reveals the human cost of this tragedy, the continued inadequacies of government’s response in the aftermath of Katrina, and how race, class, and politics have affected the attempts to rebuild this American city.

Below is the opening video at the Frontline site

The third video, at the PBS Frontline site, is the one I mentioned above that touches on the who gets what, rapidly or even at all, and the failure of the bush administration to not only keep the promises made, in front of the camera’s, in photo ops and when needed to propagandize politically, but the total lack of feeling any need to come to the aid of the citizen of the country but quickly aid the corporate elite, the politically elite’s base as bush called them.

You can find some Related Features at this News Hour link about Katrina and the rebuilding.

Tune into PBS Frontline, or watch it online after, for “The Old Man and the Storm” on Tuesday, January 6th ’09 at 9PM ET to watch this documentary.

The book Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City, shown when the author talks about Katrina in the Documentary