In solidarity with the people of New Orleans …
March 1st, 2007 by 
Morgan J. Locke
Katrina survivors rebuke President Bush, who is going to New Orleans for a series of photo ops.
Mr. President: Katrina Survivors Do Not Welcome You, We Rebuke You!
We live in a devastated city and you are a big part of the reason why it sill sits in ruins. Your administration has abandoned our children by savaging their public schools. Your administration has tortured our working class people by refusing to reopen the city’s public housing developments. And your administration is fully complicit in placing our uninsured in harms way by ruthlessly pursuing the privatization of local public healthcare in the aftermath of Katrina. And, finally your administration is guilty of sending our sons and daughters of to war for oil and empire just when we need them most to help us rebuild our community.
Mr. President, we, Katrina Survivors all, do not welcome you to our city, we rebuke you!
Sponsored by Survivors Village, United Front For Affordable Housing.
(504) 587-0080
If you have a blog please consider posting this today.
It’s been eighteen months. Friends who have assisted with reconstruction tell me the level of devastation is simply unbelievable—and it’s the poorest who have been hurt the most, and helped the least. We are the wealthiest nation in the world. There is simply no excuse.
via Spocko’s Brain and Humid City.
Posted in Morgan | 
6 Comments »
March 2nd, 2007 at 3:56 am
See, this smells so political that my sense of tragedy is completely suppressed. That’s a bad thing – I’ll have to go read something from a less spin-laden source to compensate.
I have no direct or second-hand connection to New Orleans. What I DO have is a sense of scale. A destroyed is not amenable to drop-in replacements. Shifting the millions of tons of ruined housing and commercial property is not the work of days – or even single years. And where to put them?
I think the largest lesson of Katrina is simply that those who put their trust in government have never seen how slow it can move, even in a terrible crisis.
I know that there are people who think Mr. Bush goes home at night and wears a glue-on moustache, so he can twirl its tips as he chuckles evilly. I think this is perhaps overboard. Even if it is true of him and his neocon squad of evil, however, they are largely figureheads. The work gets done by echelons below him, and when disaster strikes, people find a way to do the job. That’s less the case in government, where people cling to to their jobs at the expense of getting them done. These are folks who were hired in Regan or Bush 1 or Clinton years – they’ll outlast this administration as well. Lay it to the administration’s charge if the efforts fail – but it’s unnecessary to posit a conspiracy, or make ridiculous statements about how this administration hates New Orleans.
My impression of NO public housing wasn’t all that good, but perhaps I’m conflating Chicago or NYC projects with it. I’d have to hear some good arguments before I’d accept the idea of rebuilding such things automatically.
If they needed to fill space, surely there are more things to complain about than public housing, healthcare privatization and wanton destruction of the schools. Was the gratuitious Iraq stab anything but manipulative?
The loss of property is listed as $85.2 billion. This is a serious pricetag. We’re the world’s richest nation, by far. Why is it not fixed?
Money’s not the issue. Let’s postulate a 2x overhead to replace the property, clear out the old, and keep people housed and well during the repair (which is a wild overstatement of the cost). The government spends that in 2.5 years in Iraq, for scale (remember how the Iraq war is killing us?)
http://www.democrats.org/a/p/the_real_cost_of_the_iraq_war_to_american_taxpayers.html
This page from democrats.org shows how the cash we’re spending in Iraq could be redistributed to feed all the starving children in the world four times over, along with any number of other worthy and heartrending goals. This is meant to demonstrate to me how immoral it is to be spending this cash on a war for oil (gimme a break). What I take from it, however, is that these are not simply cashflow-related problems – otherwise they would be solved, either privately or governmentally.
Private donations to Katrina reconstruction are already over $5 billion. The problem afflicting that area is the same that has blocked reconstruction of the WTC site for the last half-decade – government inefficiency and bickering. Cash and will are not the key issues. Getting the beast to lumber forward, and in the right direction, is what’s taking so long. This is just too hard a thing to fix fast.
As for the poorest being the hardest hit – well, that’s always true. They’re also the ones getting the direct federal help – richer folks rely on their own resources, simply because federal help is the slowest and least convenient. Here’s an illustration for why that’s the case, courtesy of Sen. Lott (R-LA), who seems to exemplify the (bipartisan) nature of government for the Congress, by the Congress.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/kstrasselpw/?id=110009706
March 2nd, 2007 at 4:02 am
Errata:
A destroyed CITY (missed a spot)
“gimme a break” should be more clearly directed at the idea of a “war for oil”, not the morality question. The cheapest way to get oil was to buy it through Benon Sevan, back in the day.
March 2nd, 2007 at 8:31 am
Since we apparently unable to rebuild one city on our own soil in peacetime, is it any wonder we can’t rebuild an entire country in the throes of civil war?
Goddamn. Goddamn Bush. Goddamn.
March 2nd, 2007 at 11:29 am
Alden — Sorry — Your multiple links in your first comment got it hung in Moderation. I just now freed it….
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Thanks, Rory.
Alden, I can understand your aversion to polemic. I do agree with you that a significant portion of the problem is attributable to the fact that central national systems don’t respond well to local conditions. But it is indisputable that this administration has:
(a) Treated high-level civil administrative positions as rewards for political appointees, whose experience and backgrounds don’t suit them for the role.
(b) Fought against oversight of companies performing remediation and repair.
(c) Neglected any serious push to deal with Katrina’s aftermath — or really, to do anything but push its Iraq (and Iran) agenda.
If saying so, and condemning them for it, is political, then so be it. Characterizing that legitimate outrage as thinking that Bush twirls a mustache at night is in my view unfair. I don’t care if he loves puppies and shares his candy with visiting babies. The results are what matter to me.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:33 pm
We are in the middle of watching Spike Lee’s miniseries, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.” It’s tough to watch, but a powerful reminder of what happened to one part of the country, here in the U.S.A., a look at what all the national security preparation in the most powerful country in the world means: If it happens to your city, count on nothing and no one in “authority”. You are on your own.
We know that part of the Bush legacy to the next President will be war in the middle east, a military strained and near worn out, higher fuel prices,Guantanamo and secret CIA prisons. Who would have thought that a disaster from the summer of 2005 would also be left for the next in office to deal with?
Where are the billions Bush claims he sent to Louisiana? Probably a good chunk of it is in the same place the missing billions sent to Iraq are.
Hmm…it’s 12:37 PM. Do you know where your tax dollars are?