Depressing

A really disturbing question popped into my head recently and I've really been struggling to find a satisfactory answer.

Given the sober outlook for many of the poorer, lower lying areas of the city over the medium term (10-15 years) in regard to societal basics (economic opportunity, education, housing, health, safety) and fundamental life sustainability (flood protection, subsidence, rising seas), at what point to rational organizations working in the public interest determine that it is more in the interest of disadvantaged New Orleanians to work on subsidizing rescue relocation instead of rebuilding?

Everything I've tried to do in New Orleans from a political standpoint has been predicated on my unwavering belief that it was humanity's moral imperative to rebuild this city while wholly recreating the conservative state institutions and instruments that systemically perpetuate for generational poverty, structural racism, and their associated societal ills.

It was also predicated on my belief that this region is uniquely positioned to capitalize on macro trends that will undoubtedly create economic opportunity around different aspects of the sustainability movement.

But so much and so little has changed.

On the national level, the economic crisis has pushed the obligation to New Orleans further and further away from priority status. Additional infusions of federal capital to the Gulf seem increasingly unlikely given the ideological opposition to federal spending by 90% of our Congressional delegations. The realization of the right of return seems like a pipe dream given the confluence of these and other national and international factors.

On the local level, political discourse in general terms remains largely monopolized by supremacist robber barons and short-sighted machine widgets. The public has little faith in municipal institutions nor is there enough working trust between citizens of different backgrounds to appreciably alter those institutions in the short term. On this front, I have sensed some hard-fought incremental progress.

In other cities, or if this city hadn't experienced such devastating trauma, the incremental change that has occurred over the last 2-3 years would seem monumental.

But the time window New Orleans has in which to make fundamental, perhaps radical change is much much smaller than anywhere else's. We live in a state of political emergency. It may not be right that we should have to prove our right to exist given absolute federal culpability in the disaster that has brought us to this point but unfortunately that's the situation we find ourselves in, isn't it? Especially now after recovery resources have been squandered, stalled, or have otherwise failed to substantially put this city on the road toward short, medium, or long term recovery. Especially now after the national economy has created emergency situations throughout the sunbelt. Especially now as the region's political clout has waned.

I'm sorry that this post is so depressing, especially on such a beautiful sunny day just hours before the Krewe of Muses rolls down St. Charles Avenue. And certainly the morose outlook here is somewhat colored by my personal frustration as a young man searching for stable, fulfilling employment in this time of economic contraction. But I don't think I'm exactly going overboard here.

The fact is that the preconditions for a robust and equitable recovery still remain. But time is running short. Really, really short. Joseph Cao short.

There will be a new Mayor elected one year from now. It's the last best chance to save this city. We have until then to reach out, educate, and organize. The events of this week - the Mayor's politicking and Council's pandering - demonstrate very clearly the uphill climb that remains before honest conversation and evaluation of the city's health can occur in the public domain.

It's too early to pick a Mayoral candidate, but I'm looking for someone that can articulate an optimistic vision for how to maximize the region's advantages without sugarcoating the extremely dire forecast that New Orleans faces if we make no change or only small change.

There's something romantic and courageous about the sinking ship imagery and the unwavering commitment that people have to go down with it, so to speak. But I worry about the people that don't really get a choice in the matter. And I worry about my own transformation from energetic wide-eyed young man to perpetually exhausted and disillusioned curmudgeon.

A Bad Day Gets Worse For Ray Nagin

Nagin proclaims in Details

“To me, some of those blogs have become the new sheets for racist people,” Nagin explains when asked why he worked an anti-blog rant into a Katrina memorial. “They’re not marching around with white sheets. They’re on the blogs and in the comments sections.”

It's interesting. He could make the claim that he's not talking about progressive and liberal bloggers critical of his administration but of the racist and incendiary anonymous comments routinely left at nola.com, but consider the context. He made these remarks during his speech on the third anniversary of Katrina:

"The most important work we need to do this third anniversary, in spite of the challenges we face this hurricane season, is to learn, ladies and gentlemen, to respect and honor each other -- our diverse culture that is unique to New Orleans. I don't know exactly who is in those coffins, you don't know who is in those coffins, but I will bet you they represent every aspect of this great city. . . .

"So when people talk about their love for this great city, and then you go to a blog, or you read something and it is divisive, it is hateful, it is mean-spirited, my question to you is: How you can you love New Orleans if you don't love all of us?"

Recall that he made these remarks in the same week his administration came under FBI investigation for their degree of culpability in the NOAH scandal. This was also the same week bloggers protested his "Excellence in Recovery Award."

So it is likely that at this point, Mayor Nagin is capable of distinguishing between the bloggers investigating fraud within his administration and the bubbas and bubbettes spewing anonymous hate at the embarrassing nola.com website. He just chooses not to make that distinction because it serves him well to lump all of his critics into one metaphoric white-hooded rider.

It's sort of like accusing Councilwoman Stacy Head of "race-baiting" after she dared to question the Sanitation Director about the city's bloated trash pickup contracts.

But the most devastating indictment of this man, our Mayor is at the end of the Details article.

The writer Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, describes actions like those as “disaster capitalism”: profiteering and privatization in the wake of shocks such as 9/11 or Katrina. So when I spot Alan Greenspan’s memoir, The Age of Turbulence, on Nagin’s desk and ask him about it, I’m surprised to learn that he’s not reading it but The Shock Doctrine, which he pulls from his briefcase.

"I understand exactly the premise that they're presenting," Nagin says, holding the book aloft, "that's for sure. Look, man, after this disaster there is big money! The shock-and-awe piece of what they're talking about is absolutely correct." I ask if he's read the chapter in which Klein laments that the public sphere in New Orleans is "being erased, with the storm used as the excuse." Nagin replies cheerily, "I haven't gotten that far! I just picked it up."

Shock Doctrine has a whole chapter about Ray Nagin's post-Katrina New Orleans. You can find some excerpts of that section at one of Ms. Klein's Huffington Post pieces. Essentially, Klein argues that business forces use the shock of disaster to ram through all kinds of goodies for themselves while the actual victims of the disaster are left waiting on their rooftops. It is a scathing denunciation of neoliberalism. It is one of the most strident criticisms of Ray Nagin's recovery philosophy that exists today.

And Ray Nagin is in the middle of reading it, just not the part about him. He's interested in the part where she explains how business forces exploit people, the part he can interpret as a manual that can instruct the rest of his disastrous reign of terror on this great American city.

"Look, man, after this disaster there is big money!"

But he doesn't and didn't need Naomi Klein to tell him how to do it.

He was a natural:

"It is a smorgasbord in New Orleans! It is a buffet, an economic buffet! All you can eat!" he told the crowd. "If you have a lawnmower and an edger, you can make money in New Orleans."

You must be lonely. And that crown must be heavy.

Be well.

In Defense of Mayor Nagin

The American Zombie on Monday:

I just got an angry email in my AZ account from someone claiming that Nagin is being attacked because he's black and that I and "all the other bloggers" in the New Orleans blogosphere are racist....I guess the person wasn't including the African-American bloggers in this city who have been critical of Nagin as well.

By the way...is there a pro-Nagin blog out there?

Anywhere.....where.....where.....where....

Gambit contributor Kevin Allman in the comments section of that AZ post:

Just a note: I've got keys to the Gambit blog and I will GLADLY run a pro-Nagin essay by a New Orleans blogger as long as it's original and not a press release.

I've looked for pro-Nagin blogs so I can invite the authors to contribute. I can't find any.

Anyone: get in touch with me.

Yes, this will be a "pro" Nagin blog post.

--

There is an appropriate time to 'defend' Ray Nagin. It occurs just about once a year, around the anniversary time when conservative pundits can't avoid discussing Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf's recovery process.

Conservatives hate Hurricane Katrina because, perhaps more than any other singular Bush Administration failure, as the federal response to the disaster most irreparably battered the President's highly cultivated image.

Look at what happened to his approval ratings in late 2005 and early 2006.

Bush fluffers would prefer to ignore that painful episode as much as possible. It provides evidence of the fallacy of the neoconservative model of governance blatant enough that it doesn't take an effete Wall Street Journal liberal to point it out. (Cons: "Gov't=Bad" :: Cons manage Gov't badly :: Cons: "See how bad Gov't is?") The Katrina tragedy also brought the issue of poverty back into the national discourse. Conservatives don't like talking about poverty because the policies they advocate so often exacerbate it - and pretty much everyone knows that.

Thus, when discussion of Hurricane Katrina is unavoidable, like it will be next week, drowning conservatives have little flotsam to which they can cling.

There are only a few things they can try.

One is to blame the citizens of New Orleans for their 'refusal' to evacuate. This one is usually only parroted by uber-insulated conservatives like Rush Limbaugh that are not accountable to the mainstream public and never have to justify their statements with demonstrable fact. There are a few reasons why this argument isn't really attempted outside of ignorant talk radio. First, the rebuttal to this fabricated refusal myth is a discussion of poverty that conservatives don't want to have. Second, the language associated with the refusal myth, which touches on some expectation of government handouts, laziness, and stupidly is so racially loaded that any media personality that faces a mainstream audience knows better than to indulge.

What mainstream conservative pundits can do to is deflect criticism of the Bush administration and avoid substantive conversations about America's responsibility to the Gulf, the human rights of displaced New Orleanians, and poverty is to drop the hammer on C. Ray Nagin.

Last week, I did my first ever radio interview for an extremely obscure talk show based out of New York. Though the program was billed for political independents, I was greeted with the following question, which I will paraphrase:

The Hurricane was awful, we all remember the tragedy as it came into our living rooms, yada, yada, yada... In the days after Katrina, there was a fleet of school buses ready to go and Ray Nagin told them they weren't needed. Wasn't Ray Nagin terrible? Isn't it all Ray Nagin's fault? Isn't he an idiot and the worst guy ever?

Now certainly Ray Nagin deserves a great deal of blame for our failed hurricane preparation but to get a question like that three years after the fact demonstrates the lengths the conservative message machine has gone to put forth a revisionist history of the storm. This effort has been buttressed by more competent federal responses to the wildfires in California and the flooding in Iowa. It has given conservative voices an opening with which to carry out the Rove disaster response plan: blame the Democrats. (Never mind the fact that Mr. Nagin was instrumental in originally implementing the very Rove-hatched media response plan which Nagin himself is now the most direct target - I'm trying my best to make this 'pro' Nagin.)

It's funny because conservatives don't want to talk about Nagin's failures as a mayor post-Katrina because Nagin's most glaring failure has been his implementation of a generally conservative recovery ideology: outsourcing to private developers, dismantling public assets, stalling investment in the most devastated neighborhoods, and refusing to address low wages, high rents, and nonexistent health care. Instead, the focus is on Nagin's failures as an agent of FEMA during a 3 week period 3 years ago.

Beyond that, conservatives bring on local guests willing to talk about how far our tourism industry has come since Katrina and how you could walk the French Quarter and not even know a Hurricane had ever hit.

Ray Nagin is an unfair victim of conservative racism and attempts to paint the mayor of New Orleans as indicative lazy do-nothingness on the part of New Orleanians during the storm. Neoconservatives don't want to place the blame for the Katrina response where it really belongs, at the feet of their own ideology that implements broken government on purpose.

So:

Sometimes I feel like defending Nagin when he is used as a punching bag or used as a symbol for black people in general by neoconservative Bush administration brown-noses.

That's the best I can do for him.
--

There is a great irony here and it's not 'e doesn't actually like Nagin.'

All of the apologists out there that rail against Nagin critics by levying charges of racism are themselves ignoring what Nagin's policies are actually doing to the African American community of New Orleans.

The reality is that the biggest Nagin apologists out there aren't those that think attacks on Mr. Nagin are racist, they're the racist Republicans that themselves profit from Mr. Nagin's implementation of a bastardized free market disaster "recovery" policy slate that disproportionately hurts poor African Americans.

Recall that Ray Nagin himself contributed to George Bush's campaign in 2000 and nearly maxed out to the evil Billy Tauzin.

Also recall that campaign donations of members of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, hand picked by Mayor Nagin, went to GOP candidates a whopping 94% of the time.

It is Nagin and the policies of his administration that are propping up and perpetuating the economic and racial injustice.

Those that call critics of Mayor Nagin's recovery policy racist should look in the mirror. They should think about who's really holding up Ray Nagin. They should look at who's really behind the Mayor's Excellence in Recovery Award (i.e. excluding those that were tricked into membership). They ain't exactly the victims of Katrina - they're the profiteers of false recovery.

So to Kevin and the American Zombie, if we're looking for a real pro-Nagin blog, maybe we should be contacting the exclusive class of boosters profiting from our city's unrecovery. They'll be above the Ritz on Friday.

Our Version of Katrina

Don't you dare, Iowa.

Look, my heart goes out to you. I hate that this is happening to your community. It shouldn't happen anywhere.

Just don't say it's anything like what happened here in New Orleans.

When the President lets people drown and starve in Des Moines, call me.
Three years later if you're still struggling to restore basic social services, let's talk.

I hope damages are minimal, my thoughts are with you. But don't say it's the same as what happened here.

UPDATE: On second thought, I should have taken a deep breath and let the Katrina comment slide. Just one man making a foolish comparison in the face of tragedy. I should be filling sandbags like Barack Obama.

UPDATE II: Still feel like a jerk.

Bush's Brain Without a Conscience

This is a must-read story from Salon.com about Karl Rove's manipulation of Ray Nagin and the media to deflect culpability from the Bush administration for the response to Hurricane Katrina.

That fact was proven precisely by what Vitter had done and said at the press conference. "As soon as Vitter said he had just gotten off the phone with Rove and other Republican officials," Landrieu says, "he started in on the first talking point to come out of the ordeal. I said to myself, 'Oh my God, I can't believe the White House has already given David Vitter talking points to talk about this.' We weren't going to blame anyone. We weren't going to blame the president. I mean, is there a Republican talking point for how to get people water? But that was Karl Rove."

Instead of supplying relief to the city, Rove had devised a scheme whereby he could blame the failure of government to take action on someone besides Bush. "They looked around," Landrieu says, "and they found a Democratic governor and an African American Democratic mayor who had never held office before in his life before he was mayor of New Orleans -- someone they knew they could manipulate. Ray Nagin had never held public office and here he was the mayor of New Orleans and it was going underwater."

In short, Rove was going to blame Blanco for the failure of the response in Louisiana, and to do that he was going to use Nagin. He had already set the plan in motion on Tuesday with Nagin, who, even though he was a Democrat, was so close to the Republican Party that some members of the African American community in New Orleans called him "Ray Reagan." In 2000, Nagin had actually contributed $2,000 to Bush's campaign when he ran for president.

Rove knew of Nagin's ties to the Republican Party, so more than likely Nagin could be convinced to level his criticism at Blanco and to support Bush when he could. Here was Rove's strategy: Praise Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi; praise Michael Brown and FEMA; blame Blanco, the Democrat. It was not a stretch for Nagin. He and Blanco so disliked each other that in Blanco's last race Nagin had endorsed her opponent.

Rove and Nagin were communicating through e-mail. "I heard Nagin was bragging about being in touch with The Man," Blanco says. "Nagin took the position that they were the people who could help the most to do what he wanted. People get highly complimented when they have contact with the White House." In this case the trade-off for Nagin was his willingness to cooperate with Rove. "I knew Ray Nagin could be easily manipulated," Landrieu says. "I could feel it. We were all working together in a relatively small building. We were in close proximity. But I could see where Rove was going. Blame Blanco. Blame the levee board. Blame the corruption in New Orleans. 'The reason the city is going underwater is because the city is corrupt,' Rove was saying. 'But don't blame the Republicans or George W. Bush or David Vitter. We are the white guys in shining armor, and we are going to come in and save the city from years of corruption.' That was their story and they sold it very well."

Rove sold the story, as he had in the past, through the media. On Wednesday, while Blanco was trying to get help from the White House, her staff began receiving calls from reporters questioning her handling of the disaster, almost all of them citing as their sources unnamed senior White House officials.

"One story," Blanco aide Mann recalls, "would say the governor was so incompetent she had not even gotten around to declaring a state of emergency when she had actually done so three days before the storm. It was obvious to us who was behind this attack based on inaccurate information that was being shoveled to Washington reporters who were identifying their sources as senior Bush administration officials." Blanco adds, "People at Newsweek told me the White House called them to say I had delayed signing the disaster declaration. The assumption was that their source was the political director -- Karl Rove." Not only was the attack on Blanco in print, it was also on television. "All of a sudden," Blanco says, "a whole lot of talking heads showed up on television repeating the misinformation over and over, making it the truth."

I promise that there's much, much more. Please read the article and send it to your friends. That Karl Rove still avoids testifying in front of Congress is a joke because he should already be in jail. My hatred of this man is unprecedented. I've never felt such disdain for the character of a fellow human being. The utter disregard for human life - this man is pure evil.

Our Nation in a Nutshell

A nutshell provided by our own government fully loaded with dangerously high levels of formaldehyde.

Today's long story in the Washington Post has been a long time coming. It's rage-inducing.

This is a picture provided with the article:


A photograph of a beautiful child. Now, a victim of the "accident" at the intersection of incompetence and not-giving-a-fuck.

Today, industry and government experts depict the rushed procurement and construction as key failures that may have triggered a public health catastrophe among the more than 300,000 people, many of them children, who lived in FEMA homes.

What kind of country is this?

1. The federal government built a faulty levee system that was undermined during Hurricane Katrina, nearly destroying the city of New Orleans.

So to make it up to us, they build us a new levee system more blatantly suspect than the one that preceded it. They build us leaking levees stuffed with newspaper.

2. The federal governments deficient emergency response procedures were a national embarrassment played out on international television. Thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands lost their homes.

So to make it up to the Gulf Coast, the federal government provided trailers contaminated by dangerously high levels of formaldehyde. When people started getting sick, FEMA refused to test. When Sierra Club tested and sounded the alarms, FEMA refused to test.

3. FEMA admitted formaldehyde was poisoning people in the trailers that they provided.

So to make it up to the citizens of the Gulf Coast, they reduced the sale price of the trailers so that citizens could own their own contaminated trailer. They do not have procedures in place to determine whether trailers being sold are still contaminated.


And some people criticize the Obamas and other Democrats for their American pride.

Those people ought to come down here. I'd like to ask them what they're so proud of exactly.

I see an awful lot to be ashamed of.

I thank the Bush administration from the bottom of my heart for all the help they've provided.

I Feel For California, But I'm Still Bitter

With over one million people displaced, the wildfires in the San Diego area represent a heartbreaking tragedy.

Many people are losing their homes. It's awful. I'm not religious but I pray for rain and the firefighters battling the inferno.

I expect decisive and comprehensive relief for all human beings affected by the fires. I want nothing less for them. Humans should always take care of each other.

Yet, when I read this.....: (h/t: Karen)

A good 9,000 people ended up here, at Qualcomm Stadium, and if this was the endgame of a disaster, it would be a disaster that seemed possible only in the idyll of California.

There was a banh mi picnic in the parking lot, beef empanadas on the chow line, Caesar salads, cartons of fresh Starbucks House Blend, free magazines, toys for the kids, cots for grandma, pizza by the slice or, if you wished, the box. There was a man playing jazz guitar, a blues band, massages and acupuncture.

.....well I grow angry.... and you'll have to excuse me....

Because I live in a place that didn't get acupuncture for its evacuees. I live in a place that didn't have enough water for its refugees instead. My neighbors were evacuated to the Superdome. And I live in a place still struggling to recover from the "treatment." People are still displaced. People still live their lives in FEMA trailers. There aren't enough cops, not enough hospitals, our roads are in terrible condition, the criminal justice system is overloaded, the murder rate resembles Rio de Janeiro, the schools are in tremendous disrepair, the mental health system is nonexistent, our mayor thinks its more important to replace 4 year old trash cans purchased at $700 a piece with new trash cans purchased at $650 a piece because the old cans were too short, we have no large-scale agreed-upon recovery plan, the supposedly fixed pumping system still doesn't work, nobody has any faith that the army corps of engineers is repairing the levees to an adequate level of protection, an embarrassing number of public officials are under corruption investigation, a suffocating bureaucratic hate triangle between the city the state and the national governments prevents allocated money from being spent on anything constructive....

...and people around America ask if our hometown is worth being rebuilt at all....


The evacuees of the San Diego area deserve everything they seem to be getting from the government to help them cope with the tragedy they face.

I guess I just wish people around the country believed the people of New Orleans deserved the same care.