Project Katrina

Obama’s statement on how you can help residents in the path of Hurricane Gustav:

As Hurricane Gustav approaches and Gulf Coast residents evacuate their communities, our thoughts and prayers go out to those who are affected by this situation.

Mayor Ray Nagin has announced a mandatory evacuation for the City of New Orleans today, Sunday, August 31st. If you are in the New Orleans area, please contact the state emergency hotline at 1-866-288-2484 if you need more information or go to the State of Louisiana site for an updated list of evacuations by parish.

If you are a Mississippi resident, please click here for information.

State and local government officials are working hard to ensure the safety and well-being of the people of the region, and many of you have asked how you can help too.

Please find out how you can help by visiting the American Red Cross or Save The Children today.

If disaster strikes, your support will be vital to those organizations that work to help our communities get back to their feet.

Stay tuned for updates and more information on how you can help.

From the Saturday, January 5th edition of the Washington Post.

The headline on a Dec. 20 editorial, A Better Life in New Orleans; Failed Public Housing Must Be Demolished, was misguided. You wouldn’t bulldoze your house to build a nicer one if you would be homeless during construction. Nor would you bulldoze your home if someone else might be moving into the new one. The editorial relied on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s claim that it would cost more to make public housing habitable than to replace these units.

But William Quigley, the Loyola University law professor who is litigating the New Orleans housing issue, states that HUD figures show that it would cost only $20 million to repair the Lafitte complex while it would cost more than five times that amount for the demolition and rebuilding. Quigley also points out that under HUD’s plan, about 80 percent of low-income units are slated to be permanently removed.

Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine has a must read post at the Huffington Post. She writes in part:

Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that one of the most shameless examples of disaster capitalism has been the attempt to exploit the disastrous flooding of New Orleans to close down that city’s public housing projects, some of the only affordable units in the city. Most of the buildings sustained minimal flood damage, but they happen to occupy valuable land that make for perfect condo developments and hotels.

The final showdown over New Orleans public housing is playing out in dramatic fashion right now. The conflict is a classic example of the "triple shock" formula at the core of the doctrine.

• First came the shock of the original disaster: the flood and the traumatic evacuation.
• Next came the "economic shock therapy": using the window of opportunity opened up by the first shock to push through a rapid-fire attack on the city’s public services and spaces, most notably it’s homes, schools and hospitals.
• Now we see that as residents of New Orleans try to resist these attacks, they are being met with a third shock: the shock of the police baton and the Taser gun, used on the bodies of protestors outside New Orleans City Hall yesterday.

Democracy Now! has been covering this fight all week, with amazing reports from filmmakers Jacquie Soohen and Rick Rowley (Rick was arrested in the crackdown). Watch residents react to the bulldozing of their homes here. And footage from yesterday’s police crackdown and Tasering of protestors inside and outside city hall here.

So there you have it. I don’t have any words to express my anger.

The data below reminds me of the polls that showed before the Iraq War most of the population thought Saddam was directly involved in 9/11. The University of New Orleans recent study found:

Roughly one-fourth believed parts of New Orleans remain under water; one-third believed the tourist-oriented French Quarter was one of the hardest-hit areas when, in fact, the Quarter was largely unharmed. The floodwaters, too, are long gone.

"It’s amazing," (UNO Survey Research Center director Bob) Sims said of those responses. "But it just goes to show how little people really know."

Our country is become more and more of a joke as each day passes. According to the Associated Press:

With large swaths of the Gulf Coast still in ruins from Hurricane Katrina, rich federal tax breaks designed to spur rebuilding are flowing hundreds of miles inland to investors who are buying up luxury condos near the University of Alabama’s football stadium.

About 10 condominium projects are going up in and around Tuscaloosa, and builders are asking up to $1 million for units with granite countertops, king-size bathtubs and ‘Bama decor, including crimson couches and Bear Bryant wall art.

While many of the buyers are Crimson Tide alumni or ardent football fans not entitled to any special Katrina-related tax breaks, many others are real estate investors who are purchasing the condos with plans to rent them out.

And they intend to take full advantage of the generous tax benefits available to investors under the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, or GO Zone, according to Associated Press interviews with buyers and real estate officials.

Ok, I am no lawyer and I understand writing laws without loopholes isn’t the easiest thing in to the world to achieve. What about "intent?" This was not the intent of GO Zone. And the real estate firms are well aware of this. Why can’t the government just say, "look, you are trying to take advantage of a situation. You know it. We know it. Sorry, no tax break for you." I just don’t get why our government can’t use some common sense for once.

CorpWatch has a wonderful new report on Katrina. Written by Eliza Strickland and Azibuike Akaba,  Casualties of Katrina: Gulf Coast Reconstruction Two Years after the Hurricane
tells the story of corporate malfeasance and government incompetence.
This is CorpWatch’s second report, the first being, Big, Easy Money.

Casualties of Katrina can be read as a PDF (download here) or online by chapters. The report
is broken into three parts: the struggle by ordinary residents to
return home, the major effort to fix the broken Gulf Coast
infrastructure, and finally–what the future looks like for a regional
revival. The report also has a fact sheet that accompanies it, which is also worth a read for some quick bullet points on the state of affairs post Katrina.

The Washington Post is reporting that the huge, federally funded program created to help rebuild Louisiana homes is short close to $3 billion. Currently "only 16,000 of 130,000 applicants have received money." The Post takes it from there:

The report represented the latest crisis for the aid effort initially created to distribute $6.9 billion in federal money to the owners of homes destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Katrina who lacked enough insurance money to rebuild.

More than 20 months after the Katrina catastrophe, tens of thousands of houses remain vacant, in part because of administrative delays in the aid program, the largest single source of direct federal help for homeowners. To date, only 16,000 of 130,000 applicants have received money.

I really wish I could get a copy of this report, but can’t seem to locate anything, even a single mention of it on Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s site. It just blows my mind that a $7 billion program can be $3 billion short. Where did the money go?

The House on Tuesday approved a two-year extension [through 2010] of a program offering tax credits for construction of low-income housing in areas hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

An effort to total and take down more than 9,000 rotting houses still standing after Hurricane Katrina has slowed almost to a total stop this year, prolonging the city’s attempts to rebuild. USA Today reports:

The homes—some almost untouched since Katrina struck a year and a half ago—are a lingering icon of the storm’s devastation and one of the biggest obstacles to New Orleans’ rebirth. More than half of the houses ruined during Katrina haven’t been razed, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that the debris from them would fill several times the volume of the Empire State Building.

New Orleans issued 330 permits to demolish houses in February, down from 458 in September, a USA TODAY analysis of permit records shows. The corps knocked down 118 last month, compared with 612 in December, according to an agency report.

This is just sad on some many levels. You don’t need to be an engineer to gather if you don’t take bulldoze these homes nothing can be built in their place.

The House today is debating the Gulf Coast Hurricane Housing Recovery Act of 2007. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) introduced an amendment that would require victims of Hurricane Katrina to perform 20 hours/week of approved "work activities" to receive financial aid for housing.

In an impassioned speech, Rep. David Scott (D-GA) addressed Hensarling on the House floor:

This amendment is cruel, it is cold, it is calculating, and it is pandering to the schizophrenic dichotomy that has plagued this nation since they first brought Africans on these shores from Africa. And that is the issue of race and poverty. Let me tell you something, gentleman. Where were you, where was your amendment when the Twin Towers were hit and the people in New york suffered that catastrophe? There was no cry before we gave them help. "They got to go get a job." Everybody was there and poured in help, as they should, the American way. Where was your amendment down in Florida when the hurricanes hit down there? Nobody said, "Make ‘em work before we help them."

Later in the evening, the House defeated the amendment 266-162.