From Salon
By Heather Havrilesky

“Why am I back here? Man, I’m back here trying to clear my place up. It took me too long and I worked too hard to build what I have here to just pick up and leave like that.” — Herbert Gettridge

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August of 2005, all 82-year-old Herbert Gettridge could think about was returning home again. He watched the devastation from the safety of his daughter Cheryl’s house in Madison, Wis., straining his eyes for a glimpse of his own house all the while.

“He was outta his mind, worried about when he was gonna be able to get back to the house,” Cheryl told the filmmakers behind Frontline’s “The Old Man and the Storm” (premieres at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 6, on PBS; check local listings). At first glance, the documentary looks like another uplifting, ultimately hopeful story about how Hurricane Katrina laid bare one man’s will to persevere against all odds.

Sadly, though, Gettridge’s experience is anything but positive. First there’s the heart-wrenching discovery that his house has been all but destroyed by floodwaters. Even so, Gettridge gets to work, living without electricity, drinkable water or a bed. His wife is still in Wisconsin and longs to be home with him, but the house isn’t ready for her yet, and since she’s in poor health, it makes more sense for her to stay with her daughter.

Read more Katrina

From Tom Dispatch
By Rebecca Solnit

What do you do when you notice that there seems to have been a killing spree? While the national and international media were working themselves and much of the public into a frenzy about imaginary hordes of murderers, rapists, snipers, marauders, and general rampagers among the stranded crowds of mostly poor, mostly black people in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a group of white men went on a shooting spree across the river.

Their criminal acts were no secret but they never became part of the official story. The media demonized the city’s black population for crimes that turned out not to have happened, and the retractions were, as always, too little too late. At one point FEMA sent a refrigerated 18-wheeler to pick up what a colonel in the National Guard expected to be 200 bodies in New Orleans’s Superdome, only to find six, including four who died naturally and a suicide. Meanwhile, the media never paid attention to the real rampage that took place openly across the river, even though there were corpses lying in unflooded streets and testimony everywhere you looked — or I looked, anyway.

The widely reported violent crimes in the Superdome turned out to be little more than hysterical rumor, but they painted African-Americans as out-of-control savages at a critical moment. The result was to shift institutional responses from disaster relief to law enforcement, a decision that resulted in further deaths among the thirsty, hot, stranded multitude. Governor Kathleen Blanco announced, “I have one message for these hoodlums: These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.” So would the white vigilantes, and though their exact body count remains unknown, at least 11 black men were apparently shot, some fatally.

Read more Murder

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From uExpress
By Ted Rall

Yes, the election results are notable. But they don’t mean as much as people think.

First, the important stuff: The first black president has been elected. And not just elected by a majority of voters, many of whom were black and/or first-time voters, but by nearly half of white voters. Twenty-eight years after the Reagan Revolution, the electorate has repudiated Republican inaction-on Iraq, in New Orleans, most of all on the economy-to an extent not seen since Watergate. Americans delivered a proxy impeachment of George W. Bush, holding McCain less to account for his policies than his association with a (cough) leader they blamed for their troubles.

It isn’t quite fair. George W. Bush, lest we forget, had a 90 percent approval rating during the fall of 2001. Now that Bush’s support is down to a Carrot Top-like 22 percent, it’s only fair to remember that he’s the same guy in 2008 that he was in 2001. And, for that matter, when a majority of Americans thought he was doing such a good job that they voted for another four years in 2004

Nothing much has changed. The economy sucks, but that’s been true since 2000. It’s been one continuous meltdown since the dot-com crash. We lost Afghanistan the day we invaded it; ditto Iraq. Doing nothing to help New Orleans during Katrina-well, that was just Republicans being Republicans. The difference now? There is no difference.

Don’t be fooled by the electoral college rout. The popular vote reveals that United States remains a deeply divided country. Bush got 51 percent of the vote in 2004; Kerry drew 48 percent. Obama defeated McCain 51-48. A surge of newly registered voters, including many African-Americans energized by Obama’s candidacy, accounts for the three percent difference.

Read more No We Didn’t

From True Blue Liberal
By Elizabeth Walters

Would you come back?

This is the question that dogs me every morning as I drive through the streets of New Orleans. Past the rebuilt homes and ramshackle shells, past the fresh trim jobs and spray-painted search crosses, past the cleared concrete slabs and the piles of debris that still litter every block, I travel and interrogate my own strength.

I had never visited this area before Hurricane Katrina devastated it three years ago, so I am spared the firsthand comparisons of before and after that can make life here untenable for longtime residents who try to return. While I love the lessened, wounded city I currently call home, I often doubt that I could live here with the memory of what it used to be. And so every morning on my way to work, I ask myself this question, to remind myself of the strength of the people I meet, and to remind myself of the strength of the students I teach—children who had no choice in their destiny.

My morning ritual took on more urgency about 10 days ago, when it became apparent that another hurricane, Gustav, was taking aim at south Louisiana. Suddenly, everyone worried that we would get hit again. The grocery stores ran out of gallons of water. The gas pump lines were three cars deep.

Nowhere was the stress more apparent than among my students. “Ms. Walters, where will we have class if the school floods again?” one of them asked me as I was taking roll.

“I don’t want it to flood. If it floods again, we are not coming back,” another wrote in his class journal.
A land destroyed Read the rest of this entry »

From True Blue Liberal
By Stephen Lendman

Renamed and back, but first a personal note. Post-Katrina, writing about “The New Orleans Aftermath and (its) Ugly Glimpse of the Future” turned this retiree into a writer and radio host.

Now three years later, Gustav threatened and, on August 30, got New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to hype the risk, scare the public, and order a dusk-to-dawn curfew and evacuation of the city’s 239,000 residents ahead of what he called “the mother of all storms.” Many hundreds of thousands more along the Gulf coast. “Nearly two million people from Texas to Alabama,” according to an August 31 New York Times report. Thankfully without cause as “the storm of the century” made landfall as a Category 2, weakened to a tropical depression on September 2, and Louisianans were spared the worst of their fears.

According to The New York Times, New Orleans’ levees “were tested by a heavy storm surge but held, even though the repair and reconstruction work from Hurricane Katrina, is far from finished….waves pounded against a floodwall on the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, considered a particularly weak link. Though water lapped over the wall for hours, (it) was only ankle-to-knee deep….on the edge of the (Katrina-hit) Ninth Ward.” Overall, no serious flooding or major damage occurred, and the Army Corps of Engineers expected no levee breaks. No thanks to its shoddy work as discussed below.

Over the weekend, nonetheless, Mayor Nagin was insistent and suspiciously over-eager to evacuate the city. Those staying behind, he said, were making “one of the biggest mistakes” of their lives because no emergency services were offered and no “last resort” shelters arranged like for Katrina – inadequate though they were. Case in point – residents weren’t allowed near the heavily guarded Superdome and Convention Center. Read the rest of this entry »

From AlterNet
By Brad Reed

With another enormous hurricane bearing down upon the Gulf Coast, John McCain and prominent Republican leaders have decided that this could be the perfect time to rebuild their image.

Think I’m being too cynical? Consider that McCain decided yesterday to gin up publicity for his campaign by touring the Gulf region with newly-minted vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. While down in Mississippi, McCain announced that the Republican National Convention this week would be transformed from “a party event to the call to the nation for action, action to help our fellow citizens in this time of tragedy and disaster, action in the form of volunteering, donations, reaching out our hands and our hearts and our wallets to the people who are under such great threat.” What this means is anybody’s guess, although GOP officials have been floating trial balloons about the idea of transforming the entire RNC into a giant telethon to help the hurricane victims. Not to be outdone, Senator Norm Coleman blatantly made the case that McCain would be the best president to defend the country from both terrorism and natural disasters. The hurricane also gave Bush a convenient opportunity to skip out of town and without weighing down the party with his sub-zero approval ratings. As one anonymous Republican strategist told the Washington Post, “Now the Republican brand out there is not so bad… the does-Bush-help-or-hurt question doesn’t need to be asked or answered.”

To understand why the GOP has been so quick to cover all its bases on the current hurricane, we should consider the tremendous fallout that Hurricane Katrina had on the Bush presidency. The 2005 storm had a devastating political impact on George W. Bush and the Republican brand because it showed the American public what happens when a political party believes at its core that government should not be taken seriously.

Sound extreme? Consider Michael Brown, the woefully unqualified former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who became the public face of the disaster when Bush praised him against all evidence for doing a “heck of a job.” Prior to becoming head of the nation’s largest disaster relief agency, Brown worked for 11 years as “the chief rules enforcer of the Arabian Horse Association.” His only supposed experience in emergency management had been working for the emergency services division in the city of Edmond, Oklahoma for three years in the 1970s.

Read more Image Makeover

From Salon
By Mike Madden

John McCain may not be George Bush’s twin on everything, but when it comes to hurricanes, the rivals turned friends are inextricably linked.

Three years ago this week, Bush was in Arizona, celebrating McCain’s 69th birthday, when Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast and nearly destroyed New Orleans. Now Gustav threatens to finish the job, just as McCain’s Republican convention gets under way. But Republicans appear to have learned their lessons from 2005. First Bush’s appearance in the convention hall Monday, and then the entire Monday program, was canceled Sunday afternoon. Some legally required business will be conducted, but there won’t be the kind of fire-breathing speeches that were expected to open the week. McCain aides are taking the rest of the week one day at a time, depending on how hard the storm hits. Both the White House and the rest of the GOP are taking pains to show the kind of concern for the people in the storm’s path that the Bush administration couldn’t be bothered with the last time around.

The federal response to Katrina was a tipping point for many people around the country. Bush, and the Republican Party, saw their approval ratings slide with each day FEMA dithered in the face of the disaster. The state and local governments (both controlled by Democrats at the time) didn’t cover themselves with glory in 2005 either, but what voters from coast to coast remember is the “heckuva job” the Bush administration did. Federal officials seemed to be oblivious to the situation, and that is still hurting McCain now.

Even before Barack Obama arrived at Mile High Stadium to accept his party’s nomination last week, the early five-day tracks had turned Gustav into a problematic metaphor for McCain. Having the unpopular Bush show up at the convention at all was going to be dicey anyway; having him speak literally at the moment another hurricane tore through New Orleans was inconceivable. (You might as well just cancel the election and have Obama take the oath of office now.) Small wonder that the first change to the schedule in response to the storm was to scrub Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney from the speakers’ roster. Even if the storm weren’t forecast to be a monster, they might have felt called to supervise the response if it meant getting away from McCain’s show for the night.

Read more Katrina 2.0

From The Boston Globe
Editorial

Hurrican Gustav has yet to make landfall, but the storm was already reshaping the presidential campaign yesterday. The storm arrives at a choke point in a tight race; the Republican National Convention is scheduled to begin today. But the party’s candidate, Senator John McCain, will be putting on an event much different from what he intended.

President Bush canceled his planned appearance, and today’s session will be stripped own considerably. Organizers, understandably, don’t want Republicans to seem to be reveling if another national tragedy unfolds.

For residents of the Gulf Coast, of course, there are more pressing concerns than politics. Gustav’s approach in recent days was more than a post-traumatic-stress-inducing reminder of the ordeal brought on three years ago by Hurricane Katrina. The new storm also presented more than a million people in southeast Louisiana alone with the immediate dilemma of when and how to leave. Imagine the difficulties if every household in Boston and its inner suburbs had to clear out in a weekend.

Fortunately, the hard lessons of the incomplete evacuation before Katrina and the inept governmental response afterward have clearly sunk in. Many residents who stayed home to ride out Katrina have opted to leave before Gustav. While any community would be hard-pressed to arrange transport and accommodation for all of its poorest, most fragile residents, well-planned bus and train service has carried thousands of New Orleanians to safer points northward.

Read more Hurricane Politics

From Wired
By Noah Shachtman

New Orleans is being evacuated once again, as Hurricane Gustav lumbers toward the Gulf Coast. Everyone from the U.S. military to the British Royal Navy to Blackwater is gearing up to respond.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin tells The New York Times that “with 1,500 to 2,000 National Guard troops coming to New Orleans, the city would have twice as much law enforcement protection as it had in the days after Hurricane Katrina. In all, 7,000 members of the Louisiana National Guard were mobilized Friday.” Coast Guard Air Force units based in Florida are on standby. U.S. Northern Command has set up a command post for the military response at England Airpark, in Alexandria, Louisiana. And they’ve begun airlifting up to 16,000 people from New Orleans to Nashville, Tennessee; San Antonio, Texas; Louisville, Kentucky; and Ft. Smith, Arkansas. Additional staging areas have been set up at Fort Rucker, Alabama; Fort Benning, Georgia; Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama; Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi; and Naval Air Station Meridian, Mississippi.

U.S. Navy ships like the USS Bataan have been told to stand by for possible disaster relief missions. Canada has sent one of its four enormous transport planes, Boeing C-17 Globemasters, “to the region to assist with medical evacuations,” according to Canwest News Service. And Canadian Forces medical personnel [are headed to Louisiana to] conduct a mass evacuation and assist U.S. medical personnel with any medical issues over there.” Even the British military’s “Royal Navy Warship HMS Iron Duke and Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel Wave Ruler have now arrived in the vicinity of the Cayman Islands, ready to render assistance if required in the wake of Hurricane Gustav,” according to Cayman Net News.

But perhaps the most startling call for forces comes from Blackwater, the controversial prviate security contractor. The firm — which famously patrolled New Orleans after Katrina — is “compiling a list of qualified security personnel for possible deployment into areas affected by Hurricane Gustav,” according to an e-mail obtained by R.J. Hillhouse.

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From TruthOut
By Bill Quigley

Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast three years ago this week. The president promised to do whatever it took to rebuild. But the nation is trying to fight wars in several countries and is dealing with economic crisis. The attention of the president wandered away. As a result, this is what New Orleans looks like today.

0. Number of renters in Louisiana who have received financial assistance from the $10 billion federal post-Katrina rebuilding program Road Home Community Development Block Grant – compared to 116,708 homeowners.

0. Number of apartments currently being built to replace the 963 public housing apartments formerly occupied and now demolished at the St. Bernard Housing Development.

0. Amount of data available to evaluate performance of publicly financed, privately run charter schools in New Orleans in 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school years.

.008. Percentage of rental homes that were supposed to be repaired and occupied by August 2008 which were actually completed and occupied – a total of 82 finished out of 10,000 projected.

1. Rank of New Orleans among US cities in percentage of housing vacant or ruined.

1. Rank of New Orleans among US cities in murders per capita for 2006 and 2007.

Read more Pain Index